Decrepit Old Fool

***Dave noted that he has had a few comments disappear and wondered what-up.  Could be some kind of technical problem or just net traffic during the comment process. 

If you have had problems commenting, please let me know at and I’ll try to fix.  After all, the comments are what make it fun!  Otherwise, it’s just some bald guy going on about stuff…

Speaking of ***Dave, go read his post on the Seattle school system’s racism guidelines.  How did we ever get to the point where virtually anything you say, do, or think is racist?

(See also; Dispatches)

Have you ever used the ‘F’ word online?  Called someone a Nazi?  A Communist?  How about the words ‘lie’, ‘atrocity’, or any pithy comparison to what the bull left behind?  Or perhaps you never pour such vinegar through your keyboard.  Maybe you prefer the more ‘civilized’ approach.  Your missives are gentle, even scholarly.

More important, have you ever complained about someone else’s language?  Either complaining that you are mistreated by other commenters, or calling for pragmatic civility?

To paraphrase Godwin’s Law, as any online discussion grows longer, the probability someone will begin griping about civility and style approaches one.  Is an angry person necessarily wrong?  Is the calm, soft-spoken, polysyllabic, seemingly humble person more likely to be right?  Are we even looking for right and wrong, or are we looking for pleasing and displeasing?

It’s easy to sample hot rhetoric:  Bush is Hitler.  Gore is a socialist (or ‘commie’ – a word that is beginning to resurface after a long hiatus).  Hillary is Satan.  Any government action (such as gun control, or environmental regulation) is two quick steps from the gulag.  Liberals should be rounded up and shot.  Conservatives are facists.  Before long you will hear the phrase “shouting past each other” and of course the term; “bashing”.

You can’t say ‘atrocity’, let alone the ‘F’ word, without a fellow leftie saying; “Hey, you’re being too rude and you won’t persuade people that way!”  Thus the pragmatic argument for civility is born.  We should pretend, say the nannies, to be less angry than we are so people will listen to us. 

How about we stop prescribing how other people should ‘be’?  The national debate might really take all kinds.  Some people are turned off by blandness, some by spice.  Let me suggest there’s freedom in looking past style to substance.  Try to pay less attention to how someone talks and more to what they’re saying.  Being ‘nice’ is overrated but it’s hard to overstate the importance of clarity.

At the very least, you can build a rebuttal that is more on-point.  The fact that you found their language too stuffy or too profane, or you didn’t like a comparison, has nothing to do with how right they are.

As for what language you should use, I can’t advise you.  Language is like clothing – dress comfortably and let others wear what they want.  The important thing is that it covers what it’s intended to cover.

Notes and links:

Not bored yet? Here’s how the discussion started: three of my favorite blogs took up the issue of civility and online discourse, starting with Creek Running North:

“I have decided I no longer trust anyone who insists on others being civil. The bumper sticker from ten years ago said “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.” That needs updating. If you’re not outraged, then you’ve decided that the suffering that exists in the world is just fine with you, as long as you don’t feel it.”
Link

PZ Meyers predictably agreed:

“I’m all for outrage! Especially since lately there have been a few too many commenting whiners who are getting pissy because I think goose-stepping theocrats are evil, or that creationists are idiots, or that politicians who monitor our phone calls are tyrannical scumbags. If you’re complaining because I don’t compromise in damning these people, rather than complaining about what they do, the problem isn’t me: it’s your superficiality.”
link

But Alon Levy at UTI took a third way:

“Bickering about civility is about as useful as bickering about Oxford commas (by the way: everyone who omits Oxford commas is an evil fascist, I tell you!). My style is wonkish; deal with it. I don’t criticize Maryscott O’Connor for “Rage, rage against the lying of the right”; don’t criticize me for “The right is wrong because of these reasons.”
link

(Niceness is a veneer, or even a varnish over the content that it covers.  If we were a little less sensitive, both in giving and receiving, we could actually pull the issue out into the sunlight and deal with it.)

Creek Running North updates the topic with Matters of weight

I can’t remember why we ever sold F-16 jets to Venezuela, but as relations between that country and ours have become strained lately, we’ve stopped selling them spare parts.  So they’re considering selling them to Iran.

Say, what?  Iran can’t buy Russian SU-35’s?  Because that’s what Venezuela is planning to do.  Maybe Russia won’t sell advanced jets to Iran, which should be a clue to Venezuela.

And a clue to us.  When we sell advanced equipment, why don’t we have the ability to disable same by satellite?  We send out a super-duper-secret signal and zap!  Fried computers.  Good luck flying an F-16 without its computers.  The same should work with any advanced weapon. 

I can’t claim to know why, but somthing about Ward Churchill struck me as being “200-proof Fake”, even aside from his contemptable assertion that the innocent victims of 9/11 had it coming.  Still, you can’t fire a tenured professor for being wrong.  On the other hand, as Orac describes, you can fire him for sloppy scholarship.

Orac also poses the question:

It’s odd that they question whether these lapses were due to inadequate historical training when Churchill doesn’t even have a Ph.D. That may very well be. I can’t speak for history and social studies, but part of the Ph.D. trainingin science is designed to teach us how to design experiments and present data in such a way as to minimize the effect of our preexisting biases on the outcome. Given that Churchill didn’t have a Ph.D., though, why did the University hire him in the first place, rapidly promote him and give him tenure, and then make him Chairman of the Department of Ethnic Studies?

The university will have to fire him now (one hopes).  But he’ll sue, charge them with bias, and try to take a few other professors down with him.  What a jerk.

Godwin’s law is invoked daily in blogworld: “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.”

It’s generally true, and by custom a “thread”, or online discussion, is closed as soon as such a comparison is made.  At that point, the one raising the analogy loses the argument and there is usually little more to say.  It works like this:

Conservative: “We should throw everyone disloyal to America in jail!”
Liberal: “You mean like Hitler did?”
Anyone: “Godwin’s law!”

Godwin’s law (as it is popularly understood) is based on the unspoken assumption that it can’t happen here.  Yes, there can be a Muslim Hitler, or a North Korean one, but not Christian, not American.  Not here.  So all such comparisons are invalid and represent overheated rhetoric.

The ‘not here’ part is never explicit, because as soon as you state it so baldly, it becomes absurd.  Of course it can happen here, as someone else will retort, “What about the Stanford Study?”  The reference is to a famous 1971 study at Stanford university that found that even very nice people can be cajoled into doing very nasty things.  Which obviously means, you see, that it can happen here.  Ipso Flatulato, or something like that.

‘Godwin’s law’.  ‘Stanford study’.  The use of such rhetorical shorthand reminds me of an old joke: a guy goes to prison, and finds himself seated at the lunch table in the cafeteria.  The old-timers are eating silently, and every once in a while one will call out a number, like; “42!” and then everyone breaks out laughing.  Mystified, the newcomer asks what’s going on.  “Oh, we’ve been here so long that we know everybody’s favorite jokes by heart.  So to save time we just gave them numbers!”

Of course, telling a joke by number isn’t funny*, any more than excluding an entire class of comparisons based on distastefulness is logically valid.  The structural flaw in Godwin’s law is that sooner or later, anything will happen, including situations that legitimately call for the Hitler comparison.

If someone invokes the spectre of Hitler inappropriately, it shouldn’t be that hard to show them wrong.  But no harm would come of pausing to consider as well if the speaker might be right.  Hitler the genocidal dictator was preceded by Hitler the popularly elected guardian of German national pride and progress.  The two images are snapshots on a continuum that makes up one person.  The comparison might be quite valid to the earlier Hitler, calling for vigilance and strong democratic action. If the comparison were valid to the later Hitler, it wouldn’t be physically safe to make it.

Part two of this discussion, on ‘civility in political discourse’, I will post on Wednesday.  If you like to read ahead, go here, here, and here.

*(Exception, anyone?)

25 April, 2006: Lightning kills 5 children praying at cross

15 May, 2006: Plane carrying sen. Kennedy struck by lightning

I don’t actually wish Sen. Ed Kennedy any harm, but I must admit to laughing when I heard the second headline.  As a liberal, I think Kennedy has hurt liberalism. 

As for the poor kids in Mexico who were killed by lightning, well God seems to be a stickler about natural law.  Tall aluminum structures aren’t the best place to hang around during storms.  On the other hand, Senator, if you want a place to make your devotions…

We went to the Historic Normal Theater this evening to watch a collection of four Oscar-winning short documentaries, on Norman Corwin, Kevin Carter, Hiroshima, and Rwanda.  The one about Rwanda was not what I expected and should be seen by everyone.  Reviews follow below the fold:

The first one is entitled A Note Of Triumph: the golden age of Norman Corwin.  It distresses me that many people do not know who Norman Corwin is.  He is a poet, writer, broadcaster and producer who is best known for an inspiring international broadcast on the occasion of V-E day when Germany surrendered at the end of WWII.  My father used to quote him and I have heard several of his broadcasts on tape.  With material like that it’s not hard to fill 40 interesting minutes, but I’d have been just as happy listening to a collection of Corwin’s broadcasts.

The documentary ended with Studs Terkel quoting the closing prayer of Corwin’s most famous broadcast:

“Lord God of test-tube and blueprint
Who jointed molecules of dust and shook them till their name was Adam,
Who taught worms and stars how they could live together,
Appear now among the parliaments of conquerors and give instruction to their schemes:
Measure out new liberties so none shall suffer for his father’s color or the credo of his choice:
Post proofs that brotherhood is not so wild a dream as those who profit by postponing it pretend:
Sit at the treaty table and convoy the hopes of the little peoples through expected straits,
And press into the final seal a sign that peace will come for longer than posterities can see ahead,
That man unto his fellow man shall be a friend forever.”
- Norman Corwin, from “A Note Of Triumph”

“Every schoolchild should know this”, said Terkel.

The second film was about the life and death of Kevin Carter, the Pulitzer-winning photographer whose suicide followed years of torment.  Carter was a war photographer who stared into the cruel face of man’s darkest inhumanity.  Most people will remember his photo of a vulture awaiting the death of an emaciated Sudanese child.  Many cruel and thoughtless people blamed him for the child’s situation.  In fact, Carter was so sick when he took the picture he could barely stand, and the child was in such a condition that even if he could have summoned a jet and flown her directly to the best hospital in Houston, the outcome would still have been in doubt. 

I remember Carter’s suicide and probably wouldn’t have gone to the theater if I’d known this piece was in the show.  But then I would have missed the fourth film…

The third film was The Mushroom Club, a capable but not exceptional documentary about ten survivors of the Hiroshima bombing.  But I would rather have just seen the entirety of Keji Nakazawa’s incredible, amazing animation about the bomb than this documentary which showed a few seconds of it.  Alternatively one could read John Hersey’s Hiroshima, first published in 1946.

The fourth film, God Sleeps In Rwanda, I expected to be the ultimate downer.  But instead it was inspiring and uplifting.  Rwanda suffered an inconceivable genocide that left the devastated country 70% female, even though Rwandan culture had traditionally denied women significant roles in society. 

The women profiled in this documentary – some as young as 12, having been brutalized, raped, and seen the slaughter of their entire families, took roles of responsibility.  One became a policewoman (new to Rwanda) and is studying to become a lawyer so she can help HIV positive people – like herself.  One began raising her siblings and says; “One day I will be a wonderful mother.  I know this because I am doing it now.”  One became a mayor – no education – and organized the whole community of mostly women to rebuild houses and actually build a road, by hand, to the capital so commerce could reach her community.  There were others.

I would like to make everyone whining about how rough they have it in America, watch this film.

Then we walked home in a cool, light rain, which was refreshing after sitting in the theater.  A well-spent evening.

I enjoy science publications, and I’m a regular ScienceBlogs reader, so I had to have a look at SEED, their glossy new science mag.  On actual paper.

Not so impressive.  Think obvious homage to Wired magazine’s golly-whiz school of graphic design, coupled with writing that could compete in the Bulwer-Lytton fiction contest.  An example:

“Science and secrecy don’t exactly go hand in glove, but when they do, the hand is prosthetic and the glove is leather and both are at the end of Dr. Strangelove’s upraised arm.”

Which is sad, because the subject matter isn’t fictional; they just make it sound like it is.  I was able to get past that to some interesting content on carbon-balance in the rainforest, robotic deep-sea exploration technology and the postwar adventures of an elite group of physicists, but having been accustomed to mature publications I couldn’t recommend SEED. 

If you want science reporting, try Scientific American – sometimes glitzy but generally good.  Or if you prefer a humorous, gonzo-science reporting approach, try New Scientist from the UK.  For technology reporting, try MIT Technology Review.  For technology history, try American Heritage Invention and Technology. 

  Maybe the next issue of SEED will be fantastically better.  Or maybe I really am out of touch with what constitutes good print publication now.  But those are my preferences.

The pencil says; “Friends In Christ” and bears the familiar ICHTHUS logo which means “Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior”).  On closer examination, it also says; “Made In China”.  You know, that communist nation where you can get arrested and basically just disappear for having unapproved religious literature?

For some reason it just struck me as funny. Wonder if they had to get a special license to manufacture these pencils in the land of persecution?  Were they required to ship them out in sealed boxes?  I would imagine most of the God-promo stuff in religious bookstores now is made in China, like everything else.

I love to drive at night in the rain in my old VW.  This evening I pulled away from the gym enjoying reflections on the wet pavement, the sound of the tires, rhythm of the boxer engine, and the radio. 

In the cozy isolation of my car, in the rain, I just soaked up the melancholy of Fleetwood Mac’s Landslide down to the last notes and the cheering audience.  And right there is when I made the mistake.

Because, seriously, what are the chances you’ll like the next song half as much, or even at all?  It breaks the mood.  I should have shut the radio off and just driven on with the song in memory.  (Substitute one of your favorite songs if my example does not serve).