Month: September 2013

The Rise Of The Tech Villain? Ctd

A reader writes:

Don’t you think Steve Jobs is to blame for some of this animosity? Jobs was deified by lefty middle- and upper-class white people for his aesthetic design and streamlined interface. But his actions as head of Apple were almost exactly antithetical to the professed social/economic concerns of those same people. He cancelled all of Apple’s philanthropic programs, farmed all of their labor out to Chinese hellholes, and accumulated enormous, static piles of cash exactly when enormous, static piles of cash were a serious problem for the economy.

Meanwhile, while Gates was derided for his products, he was actually doing the things that those same lefty middle- and upper-class white people claimed that they cared about. “But, but, but … brushed aluminum!”

It’s good that the public is starting to figure out that we need to hold these guys to the same standards to that we claim to hold other wealthy entrepreneurs/businessmen. But frankly, I think this is Jobs’ fault, and the Cult of Apple was the midwife to the birth of this new obscene vortex of conspicuous consumption about which we are all now so happy to complain.

Another points to Zuckerberg:

My biggest gripe about the tech sector is their unabashed ageist mentality.

Mark Zuckerberg comes right out and says “younger people are just smarter than older people”. Forget about the virtues of wisdom and experience. Forget about modern brain science that says that the brain can expand its capabilities well into adulthood. That’s not it. Zuckerberg wants employees with no lives, who are willing to put in 80-hour weeks in hope of lucrative stock options. Top-notch programmers who have families and will only work normal hours are in unemployment lines. As an employer in a brick-and-mortar business, I have to pay my guys time-and-a-half if they work more than an 8-hour day, and double time under certain circumstances. Zuckerberg and his ilk live in a happy place where the rules that apply to most industries are off the table.

Another zooms out:

I think one of the big problems for the worsening perception of the tech industry is a general lifting of a lot of the mystique of the computers/Internet that initially blinded everyone else from the fact that so much consumer technology was utter crap. There was so much low hanging fruit, so many quick new capabilities, immediate productivity gains, that despite the fact that your computer crashed five times a day and was probably infested with eighteen types of malware that it still felt like an upgrade to your life. It was all so new, most people had grown up never seeing anything like it, and it seemed almost magical.

Today, not so much. Adults have had well over a decade of computers/Internet to get comfortable with it. People graduating from college today can’t really remember a time before they had Internet. It’s not magic anymore; it’s just everyday life.

We’re not as easily impressed anymore. So the tech industry is going to increasingly be judged by the same basic standards as everyone else. Sure, you’ve got a bunch of smart and hardworking people who would love to make people’s lives better, but so does every other profession on the planet. And the market/society/government actually punishes those fields for releasing crap onto the world. If I designed a building that was as unreliable as Twitter has been, the only articles being written about my company would be to mention how we got sued into the ground.

The tech industry isn’t any smarter or harder working than everyone else; they just lucked into being the next big thing, which is why giant piles of money have fallen into their lap, even when what they’re producing isn’t always particularly well made. People outside of the industry might be realizing that more quickly than many people within the industry.

Should Domestic Abusers Have A Right To Bear Arms?

Katie McDonough addresses that question and others:

What does a person have to do in this country to get a gun taken away? Or lose the right to a concealed carry permit? And, more specifically, what does a man [George Zimmerman] with a noted history of both domestic violence complaints and a willingness to use deadly force, who is currently in the news for what may still turn out to be another such incident, have to do? Turns out: quite a terrifying lot. Because, put mildly, the laws in Florida and elsewhere regulating gun ownership among domestic abusers and men suspected of domestic violence are, shall we say, permissive.

According to recent data, more than 60 percent of women killed by a firearm in 2010 were murdered by a current or former intimate partner.

The presence of a firearm during a domestic violence incident increases the likelihood of a homicide by an astounding 500 percent. In general, guns are very, very bad for women’s health. But in spite of all of the evidence identifying a strong and deadly correlation between gun deaths and violence against women, our policies to protect women (victims of intimate partner-related gun violence are, overwhelmingly, female) are full of holes.

For an example of this, look no further than Florida. In Zimmerman’s home state, as a result of federal law, it is illegal for a person subjected to a protective order to own or purchase firearms, and it is a crime for that person to refuse to surrender them to law enforcement. This is a good law that, when effectively enforced, can save women’s lives. … But because the law does not explicitly compel courts to authorize police to take the firearms away, many people who are subjected to domestic violence-related restraining orders are still able to keep and carry their guns, undeterred.

What Poems Are For, Ctd

Noah Berlatsky counters Meena Alexander’s thesis that “poetry is useful because of its useless essence, not because of its individual meaning”:

When poets or writers have been persecuted, it’s generally not because of some abstract contradiction between tyranny and poetry. It’s because the persecuted poets said specific things the tyrants didn’t want to hear. Anna Akhmatova faced persecution not because she was a poet, but because her poetry was explicitly anti-Stalinist. In contrast, Pound and Mussolini got along swimmingly. Vitor Jara was murdered because he took a stand with Allende, but the British Empire didn’t have a problem with Kipling.

The point here is that poetry, as poetry, is, in fact, useless. Because poetry, as poetry, is nothing. There is no essential “poetry” that has a meaning and a use absent context, any more than there is an essential “music” that can, or should, lend profundity to the sounds of Miles Davis, Miley Cyrus, and Gonzo eating a rubber tire to “The Flight of the Bumblebee.”

Meep Meep, Motherfuckers

obamasmug

“Had we rolled out something that was very smooth and disciplined and linear, they would have graded it well, even if it was a disastrous policy. We know that, because that’s exactly how they graded the Iraq war,” – president Obama.

Oh, snap!

It’s been awesome to watch today as all the jerking knees quieted a little and all the instant judgments of the past month ceded to a deeper acknowledgment (even among Republicans) of what had actually been substantively achieved: something that, if it pans out, might be truly called a breakthrough – not just in terms of Syria, but also in terms of a better international system, and in terms of Iran.

Obama has managed to insist on his red line on Syria’s chemical weapons, forcing the world to grapple with a new breach of international law, while also avoiding being dragged into Syria’s civil war. But he has also strengthened the impression that he will risk a great deal to stop the advance of WMDs (which presumably includes Iran’s nukes). After all, his announcement of an intent to strike Assad was a real risk to him and to the US. Now, there’s a chance that he can use that basic understanding of his Syria policy – and existing agreement on chemical weapons – to forge a potential grand bargain with Iran’s regime. If that is the eventual end-game, it would be historic.

To put it plainly: Syria is the proof of principle for an agreement with Iran. And an agreement with Iran – that keeps its nuclear program reliably civil and lifts sanctions – is the Holy Grail for this administration, and for American foreign policy in the 21st Century.

As for the role of Putin, I argued last week that it was the Russian leader who had blinked, the Russian leader who had agreed to enforce Washington’s policy, and that the best response was to welcome it with open arms. So it was another treat to hear the president say, in tones that are unmistakable:

“I welcome him being involved. I welcome him saying, ‘I will take responsibility for pushing my client, the Assad regime, to deal with these chemical weapons.’ ”

Meep meep.

(Photo: President Barack Obama in the Oval Office on September 13, 2013. By Dennis Brack-Pool/Getty Images.)

The Best Of The Dish This Weekend

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Two great passages stood out for me this weekend: Flannery O’Conner’s writer’s prayer and Philp K Dick’s definition of the authentic human. And one image: Seamus Heaney’s tribute to a woman with whom he once peeled spuds. He just perfectly captures an image – “our fluent dipping knives” – from my home growing up. Alice offers her appreciation of Heaney’s greatness here. I second every word.

Then: the horniness of dolphins and the appeal of spanking; how humor helped defeat Hitler; and how Chagall painted Jesus.

The most popular post of the weekend was my case for how Putin just got played by Obama, with a little help from Machiavelli; and my post on how Syria was designed to be ungovernable, except by tyrants.

See you in the morning.

“The Flowing, Not The Fixed”

Alison Nastasi runs down how a number of poets and critics have understood the meaning of poetry. William Hazlitt‘s definition:

The light of poetry is not only a direct but also a reflected light, that, while it shows us the object, throws a sparkling radiance on all around it: the flame of the passions, communicated to the imagination, reveals to us, as with a flash of lightning, the inmost recesses of thought, and penetrates our whole being. Poetry represents forms chiefly as they suggest other forms; feelings, as they suggest forms or other feelings. Poetry puts a spirit of life and motion into the universe. It describes the flowing, not the fixed. It does not define the limits of sense, or analyze the distinctions of the understanding, but signifies the excess of the imagination beyond the actual or ordinary impression of any object or feeling.

Fighting Hitler With Humor

Reviewing Propaganda: Power and Persuasion, a new exhibit on display at the British Library, Christie Davies notices that, even in the midst of war, comedy remained a part of British efforts to change hearts and minds:

A central characteristic of the British propaganda in the exhibition is its extensive and successful use of humor, often achieved by giving official employment to professional cartoonists such as Fougasse. Some of the visitors laughed out loud at the British Ministry of Propaganda film London’s New Version of the Lambeth Walk performed by the Nazi Ballet (1941). The producer, Charles A. Ridley, simply took Lenny Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda film The Triumph of the Will (1934) and edited it so that the marchers, drummers, and goose-steppers of a Nuremberg rally sometimes move too quickly and sometimes move backwards and forwards. They no longer look menacing or impressive, but idiotic. It was all done to the then popular tune “The Lambeth Walk” that accompanied a jaunty walking dance popular in Britain and later in America. The actual music used was from the 1937 musical Me and my Girl. Even Hitler and his comrades salute in time to it.

On seeing the orderly precision of a Nazi rally reduced to a dance that had earlier been condemned by them as “Jewish mischief and animalistic hopping,” Goebbels is said to have been so angry that he ran out of the projection room kicking chairs and shouting obscenities. This short film without words was distributed to newsreel theaters throughout the world. A simple but effective technique for debunking power.

Mind On Your Money

Reviewing Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir’s Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much, Cass Sunstein emphasizes their concern for “the feeling of scarcity, and the psychological and behavioral consequences of that feeling”:

[T]heir striking claim, based on careful empirical research, is that across all of those categories, the feeling of scarcity has quite similar effects. It puts people in a kind of cognitive tunnel, limiting what they are able to see. It depletes their self-control. It makes them more impulsive and sometimes a bit dumb. What we often consider a part of people’s basic character—an inability to learn, a propensity to anger or impatience—may well be a product of their feeling of scarcity. If any of us were similarly situated, we might end up with a character a lot like theirs. An insidious problem is that scarcity produces more scarcity. It creates its own trap.

Because they lack money, poor people must focus intensely on the economic consequences of expenditures that wealthy people consider trivial and not worth worrying over. Those without a lot of time have to hoard their minutes, and they may have trouble planning for the long term. The cash-poor and the time-poor have much in common with lonely people, for whom relationships with others are scarce. When people struggle with scarcity, their minds are intensely occupied, even taken over, by what they lack.

Face Of The Day

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Photographer Hiroshi Watanabe traveled to Japan to capture the monkeys of the traditional theater art of Sarumawashi:

Like the photos of cock fighting many photographers have made, Watanabe’s Sarumawashi have rustled some feathers, especially here in the United States. He’s heard people criticize the work because they feel the monkeys shouldn’t be held captive and forced to perform.

But back in Japan he says most people see Sarumawashi, and the photos, differently. It’s a cultural legacy that’s gone on so long that it’s accepted. In places like Europe, he says viewers didn’t flinch.

“The Europeans thought it was cute and funny and had a totally different attitude,” he says.

(Photo by Hiroshi Watanabe. His Sarumawashiportraits will be featured at the Kopeikin Gallery in Los Angeles through October 26.)

Death Cafés

Where people congregate to share experiences about death:

Death Cafés help repair our relationship with farewell rites, largely because they put ritual back into death and mourning. A Death Café is a ritual space, built chair by chair, cup by cup. Its ritual objects are the tea tray, pot, milk jug, tablecloth. These mundane items are essential to how it works. Guests sit around a table and commit to staying for the duration (usually two hours). The host holds the space, administers ritual objects (pen and paper) and performs any rites (pouring tea, cutting cake). …

For a long time, it never occurred to me that what brought me to my first Café — a desire to understand my fear of death — masked a deeper terror.

It took many more mugs of tea around strangers’ tables. It took hearing about a shy 19-year-old’s loss of his father, and how a car crash had subsequently killed his step-dad. It took the pretty funeral director whose kayak had overturned while she was white-water rafting, confessing that as she began drowning she felt nothing but joy. It took the white-haired hypnotherapist, draped in chunky beads, saying how only that morning she’d been bagging up her dead husband’s clothes. It took these and many more Death Café confidences before I realised that death had always been easy to be afraid of, like a bump in the night: the spooky face at the window — out there, but still far away. Life, on the other hand, was here, now, and it was far more treacherous.

I no longer see death as some looming avenger, but rather as a final change in life’s constant flux. I know that chewing it over can help us reflect decisively on our existence, whether we’re devising ‘bucket lists’, or attempting to come to terms with the ‘unfinished-ness’ of living: accepting that the knots of our lives will always remain frayed, or undone.