Tag: society

Brooding: Should Our Children Have a Political Party?

Most of us have loved ones whose beliefs don’t perfectly align with ours, and kids need help making sense of that beyond a binary of right and wrong. Our biases are often simultaneously irrational and grounded in experience. Understanding this is not moral relativism, it’s social intelligence. Belonging to a group feels good, but teaching your kids how to identify group dynamics can feel good too.

This was from before the election, but will continue to be relevant.

The Homebound Symphony

Perhaps [‘the history of anarchism, almost alone among modern social movements, is one of unrelieved failure.’]; but its failures are different and less shameful than the failures of Marxism. There are many ways for a social movement to fail, and I prefer those that don’t result in the murder of tens of millions of human beings.

Maybe a good question for leaders of any social movement: how will you fail? Failure is guaranteed but not all failure is equal.

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Is Facebook evil? Everything bad about Facebook is bad for the same reason — Quartz

Without question, Facebook enables brutal and immoral hatemongers. I can hear Facebook arguing that they cannot possibly take a stand on moral issues without becoming censors and losing objectivity. Facebook cannot make those decisions without messing up a lot of the time. I agree. Its scale is just too massive.

That’s just the thing: Facebook can’t admit it, but it’s possible that the most moral thing is for Facebook not to exist.

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That Sandberg and (presumably) Zuckerberg resisted investigating and disclosing everything they could about how the Russians took advantage of them says everything you need to know about them.

The power that Facebook stewards is almost unimaginable, yet goes unchecked by regulation. I realize this is new territory for humanity, but leaving our fastest growing source of power in the hands of just a couple tech moguls is profoundly short sited.

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This podcast about the internet and society really resonated with me, in particular, how each of the hosts described a time of great optimism for what the web could be, and how it’s all become pretty complicated and, um, disappointing in 2018.

So I thought about it and came up with my great (naive?) period of hope for the web. It was about 2006. I had stumbled upon a couple internet communities that were flourishing…

One was the show with zefrank, a quirky video blog that used a bunch of short, creative, and confessional segments by its creator. But notably it also encouraged, facilitated, and shared back contributions from the people who followed it. People were asked to (and did) submit little pieces of songs or sounds or pictures that Ze would put together in creative ways. The people who became the show’s community helped produce these cathartic pieces of group art. In today’s world — where groups of guys who’ve forgotten whether they are ironically or earnestly neo-nazis organize to abuse others on the internet — remembering old episodes of the show feels like remembering the internet’s Garden of Eden.

The other community was Radio Open Source, a public radio show and podcast hosted by Christopher Lydon (a name associated with the very beginnings of podcasting.) The setup of the show and the wide range of topics it covered fostered this incredible conversation on its website. Listeners shared insight from all kinds of perspectives that enhanced the context of each show and steered the direction of the next one.

Open Source has been through several incarnations through the years, and still exists, although I don’t think the community still does in the same way.

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I understand Dr. Latini’s desire to control her own story and her own identity.  And yet she has applied and accepted a position as a public face of a religious institution before being able to talk about parts of her religious life that were very public.  Public theologians, and public representatives of institutions, need to be able to take responsibility for their public record, and to explain previous writings and actions.

Context here.

I agree with Lura. There is a crucially important distinction between personal repentance and redemption and public accountability.

I expect more from the president and board of my alma mater or any institution.

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Sen. Marco Rubio, in 2014, in a bid to raise his NRA rating from a B+ to an A:

The safety of our families is not something people should hope government can provide.

Martin Luther and the Reformers, in 1530, in the Augsburg Confession:

[Government defends] not minds, but bodies and bodily things against manifest injuries, and restrain[s] men with the sword and bodily punishments in order to preserve civil justice and peace.

I’d wager more Americans would agree with the 500 year old statement than with Sen. Rubio’s.

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If your skin is white, like mine, I urge you to take the online Implicit Bias test conducted by Harvard University. They have several, but I’m specifically talking about the White-Black bias test.

You won’t like the results. Most of us white folk put a lot of energy into appearing to be unbiased based on race. Most of us get very defensive if called a racist. I admit to having a certain amount of ill-founded pride in being ‘very tolerant’ towards race — so I was very disappointed to find the test revealed that I had a certain amount of implicit bias. In other words, I automatically have a stronger positive feeling towards people of lighter skin than darker skin.

My first response (which is typical for people taking the test) was to blame the test. After all, I think racism is evil, and all prejudice based on skin color is wrong, and even dumb. But what the test measures is our ‘gut response,’ formed before the thinking part of the brain kicks in. Just take it and you’ll see what I mean.

Now that I’ve calmed down, I know it’s true. My experiences, conversations, media, and curricula have taught me to see dark skin in a more negative way. Think of a Disney villain…I’ll bet they have darker skin than the Hero. How many Bad Guys can you think of that have dark skin? How many mugshots have you seen on the news of folks with dark skin? I didn’t ask for this. But I am responsible for my response. These experiences form my automatic bias, and if I pass them on uncritically…well, I’m not one of the Good Guys.

I’m not a Bad Guy for having implicit bias, but my responsibility is to stop uncritically accepting the ways that my bias gets passed on or tolerated. I have to start with myself, so I’ve developed a list of ‘explicit biases’ that I want to train myself in. Just as our negative implicit biases take a while to learn, so will my correction to them.

When I encounter a person that is culturally, socially, economically distant from me, I run through a list. I affirm in my head that this person:

    • is different from anyone else on the planet
    • has a rich inner life that I may or may not see
    • has an education that I don’t
    • is embedded in family relationships, some of which may be complicated
    • is embedded in social relationships, some of which may be complicated
    • is a Child of God

It might seem clumsy, but I already make those assumptions about people I find very similar to me. Either way, I am convinced that my moral responsibility to change racism does not stop at passively deciding something is wrong, but includes actively changing the way it works through me. In this case, it starts with rewiring my brain.

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I have a feeling that many Americans will be going to the polls without a lot of passion for their candidate. You know, the whole ‘lesser of two evils’ idea. I have to confess that I am not exactly passionate about the candidate I’ll be voting for.

But let me offer another motivation for voting: survival. No, not mine – as a white man, the American system already has a lot of momentum towards protecting my interests. I’ll be using my vote to help preserve others.

We have a candidate who has consistently – in his life, in his campaign, and in his suggested policies – discriminated against, diminished, and endangered the lives of people of color, women, Muslims, immigrants, refugees, people with disabilities, and those he simply considers ‘losers.’ He has been endorsed by numerous white supremacist, nativist, and anti-Semitic groups that have never before endorsed a major candidate. Behind him are people who believe we would be ‘great again’ by controlling and diminishing the lives of certain classes of humans.

For the sake of those fellow humans, cast your vote accordingly. No, we aren’t there yet, but despite his bleak, autocratic vision of the country, we could actually live up to the unfulfilled promise we started with that we are stronger when we not only tolerate but embrace the tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free. That we will be a better nation because of the free contributions of those who have been previously enslaved and destroyed because of fear. That real ‘greatness’ will come not from looking back toward a time of greater domination, but forward to a time of greater love.

Even if you aren’t completely smitten with your candidate, be passionate about that when you go to the polls. And vote accordingly.