Poverty

“When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.”
- Dom Hélder Câmara

Perfect World

Here’s something I wrote back in 2004 and unearthed while doing some organizing today: I’m fairly sure it was in response to the prompt: “What would your perfect world be like?”.

---

In my perfect world, people would quit investing their time in crappy mass-media, dumbed down entertainment. They’d quit caring about who’s going to get kicked off the island, and they’d pay attention to all of the horrible things going on in this world. Genocide in Darfur, our environment getting trashed, the AIDS epidemic… These are all things affecting real people - thousand of people die every day from preventable problems, and we Americans sit here in our bubbles of banality, saying “Boy, someone should do something about that…”

Call me crazy, but as members of the human race, I think we have an obligation to do something about it.

In my perfect world, Americans would realize that being born within one set of arbitrarily drawn lines on a map does not somehow make us superior to peple living anywhere else.

In my perfect world, people would realize that corporate interests control our nation, and we’d fight back. Call me crazy, but if kids get sick, I think they should be taken care of. And perhaps hospitals should be more interested in the welfare of their patients than their bottom line. How can you possibly put a price on someone’s well-being? And how can we possibly put a price on the environment? It’s being irreversably destroyed faster than people realize.

In my perfect world, people would wake up and start spporting candidates they actually believe in, instead of voting for someone with better sound bytes and better hair. Democracy only works if people really pay attention, and right now, very few of us are.

Lately, I’ve been thinking that my perfect world might be on Mars, because I’ve about had it with this one…

Bigoted Scouts of America

To: Commissioner of the Houston Area Boy Scouts of America
From: Chris Miller

I am an Eagle Scout from Boy Scout Troop 161, and I recently recieved notice
about your search for Eagle Scouts in the Houston area. As much as I
would like to be active in the BSA, I cannot in good conscience
continue to support an organization who discriminates against both
homosexuals and atheists.

During my many years in Boy Scouts, I was taught to always strive to
be morally straight. I was not, however, taught to be a bigot.

Regretfully,

Christopher Miller
Eagle Scout
Troop 161

Lay off the Bottle

From Yahoo News:

Consumers spend a collective $100 billion every year on bottled water in the belief–often mistaken, as it happens–that this is better for us than what flows from our taps, according to environmental think tank the Earth Policy Institute (EPI).

For a fraction of that sum, everyone on the planet could have safe drinking water and proper sanitation, the Washington, D.C.-based organization said this week.

Yes, “Evian” spelled backwards is still “naive”.

DRM-free

Sign the pledge, make the message heard: I will pledge to never purchase a CD contaning any form of Digital Rights Management (DRM)

And more importantly, vote with your spending habits.

Digital Television

A bill passed by congress sets February 17, 2009 as the date for the switch from analog to digital television. This means that roughly 70 million TV sets in the US will become obsolete. Don’t worry though - Congress has its priorities straight:

To avoid a consumer revolt, Congress has set aside about $1.5 billion to smooth the transition. Owners of outmoded TV sets will be eligible for two vouchers, worth $40 each, to help buy converter boxes that will enable today’s analog TV sets to receive digital signals.

Yes, the very same federal government that is cutting back on college loans and food stamps will soon be issuing TV vouchers.

Link

As an aside, I’ve always wondered why CSPAN isn’t a broadcast station, instead of cable-only. The goal was to make government accessible to everyone. Having CSPAN on cable only makes it accessible to those who can afford to shell out 50 bucks a month.

The Inequality Taboo

Charles Murray writes a compelling article about race and gender in our society. It hits on the topics of nature vs nurture and affirmative action, but mainly seeks to explore the genetic and social differences behind all of it, with some great conclusions:

Elites throughout the West are living a lie, basing the futures of their societies on the assumption that all groups of people are equal in all respects. Lie is a strong word, but justified. It is a lie because so many elite politicians who profess to believe it in public do not believe it in private. It is a lie because so many elite scholars choose to ignore what is already known and choose not to inquire into what they suspect. We enable ourselves to continue to live the lie by establishing a taboo against discussion of group differences.

. . .

The taboo arises from an admirable idealism about human equality. If it did no harm, or if the harm it did were minor, there would be no need to write about it. But taboos have consequences.

He also maintains that broader discussion of this topic doesn’t require political bickering:

For every implication that the Right might seize upon (affirmative-action quotas are ill-conceived), another gives fodder to the Left (innate group differences help rationalize compensatory redistribution by the state).81 But if we do not need to change our politics, talking about group differences obligates all of us to renew our commitment to the ideal of equality that Thomas Jefferson had in mind when he wrote as a self-evident truth that all men are created equal. Steven Pinker put that ideal in today�s language in The Blank Slate, writing that �Equality is not the empirical claim that all groups of humans are interchangeable; it is the moral principle that individuals should not be judged or constrained by the average properties of their group.

Do yourself a favor and read the whole thing.

Not-so Instant Messaging

When I first taught my grandma to use email and IM, I used a familiar analogy. Emails are like letters and IM is like a phone conversation. One is more formal, typically longer, and responses may take a while. Instant messenges are like phone conversations - a quick back-and-forth type thing.

Lately, though, I find myself craving something in-between.

I have certain friends with whom IM conversations are great. When one of us has something to say, we say it. If not, the conversation fades into the background until someone once again has something to say. It might be minutes, hours or days before the response arrives.
We respect that we’re both probably multi-tasking and reading webpages or writing emails at the same time.

No bullshit small talk to fill time, no staring at the screen waiting for someone to respond. It’s a beautiful thing.

Most people expect IMs to be like a phone conversation, though. Immediate responses and full attention and such.

I could stop using IM and switch to a medium like email that’s by nature asychronous. Emails feel overly formal, though, and I guarantee that I’d lose touch with people if I went that direction. It’s just so much easier to dash off a quick, informal hello on IM.
Seeing someone who’s logged into IM also implies a certain amount of consent - I’m here! I’m online! Talk to me! - so you generally know that you won’t be bothering them.

I suppose I should just suck it up and make more time for people - give them my full attention and such, yadda, yadda..

It’s just that doing so feels, like, soooo last century.

Traffic

Of course, we don’t talk that way: we say that we are “in traffic,” but we never admit to being traffic. Although this point was made into a German roadside ad campaign:

“You’re not stuck in a traffic jam. You are the traffic jam.

Have I mentioned how much I love taking public transportation to work ? Who cares how high gas prices go?!

Link via Kottke

Daily Show

Jon Stewart interviews the author of 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America (and rips him a new one). Not only funny, but a great discussion about America’s obsession with pop culture and disregard for real problems. The term ‘bubble of banality’ comes to mind.

Say Whaaaa?

I forget sometimes that most people don’t understand what I mean when I say ‘protein folding’ or ‘molecular biophysics’. ‘3d particle reconstruction’ doesn’t elicit much more than blank stares either.

Everyone sure seems to know lots about the Michael Jackson trial, though…

From Bree

“A guy walks up to me and asks ‘What’s Punk?’. So I kick over a garbage can and say ‘That’s punk!’. So he kicks over the garbage can and says ‘That’s Punk?’, and I say ‘No that’s trendy!’”

- Billie Joe Armstong

Lessons From The Past

I would love to write a heartfelt column about how humankind strives to serve one another in a quest for the greater good; however, I�d have to answer to a couple thousand years of history, where that wasn�t quite the case.”

(An old quote from Joel)

On Piracy

The other day, I called out someone on the Techie Forum who was advocating piracy like you wouldn’t believe. I asked:

Why is it that you’re such a rampant supporter of software piracy?

If you don’t like Microsoft, fine, don’t use their stuff - there are lots of alternatives. But how can you reasonably justify your actions, which take money out of programmer’s pockets? Don’t software engineers have the right to make a living too?

An excerpt from his reply, which attempted to justify his actions:

product piracy is actually good for companies. most of the people who pirate are people who wouldn’t buy the product anyways.

. . .
XP isn’t good enough to pay for yet. I find that the problems with XP are worth more to me then the purchase price. If microsoft ever makes a product that adds more value to my computer, then its headaches and purchase price, then i will buy it. But since they aren’t getting the money, using it won’t hurt, and actually will help them slightly.

Childish at best. My response:

This is where I disagree. If you weren’t using a pirated version of Windows XP, what would you be using? Linux? If so, why not just use linux? Win 98? If so, why didn’t you just stick with Windows 98?

I’ll answer for you here: You didn’t use an alternative because you saw value in the new software. (This could be increased stability, more features, convenience, etc.). So, when you pirated that software, you recieved the value included in that software.

If you really wouldn’t buy the software, you should have to live without that value.

I’ll agree 100% with you that data costs nothing, and that distribution costs, yadda yadda, cost almost nothing. However, the development of software has real costs (money, time, effort). Programmers shoulder the costs of writing that code. And they have the right to ask for compensation for their time and effort.

Now, does MS overcharge for windows? Most definitely. But as owners of that proprietary code, that’s their right. You also have the right to find an alternative. But you didn’t - instead you stole it. It’s theft, plain and simple.

If you’re really all about free software, join the free software movement, and use code that people offer up for free. But remember - Just because they’re benevolent doesn’t mean everyone has to be.

Email Forwards

Chris: i never get any forwarded emails anymore
Joel: pity
Joel: neither do i.
Chris: probably because I always respond intelligently and rip their arguments apart
Chris: and send it back to everyone on the list
Joel: lol
Joel: make lots of friends that way
Chris: real friends don’t send friends bullshit forwards

The Face Of War

This picture is of an Iraqi girl whose parents and brother were mistakenly killed by American soldiers at a checkpoint.

The bullets ripped through their vehicle, shattering windows, bones, and this girl’s life.

“It was dark. Perhaps her father did not see the uniforms, and only saw the guns. Perhaps she and her brothers and sisters were playing too loudly in the back seat, and why couldn’t they be quiet (don’t make me come back there, I told you before) and he couldn’t hear the shouting outside the car, and then it was loud. . .And now it is quiet.”

Are we really bringing the hope and freedom that our leaders promoted? All I see is terror and pain.

I can’t get this picure out of my head. The anguish, the despair. . . there just aren’t words.

Imagine for a moment that this was your family. That this type of incident was happening almost daily. That you personally knew widows, orphans, and amputees whose lives were crushed in a hail of US gunfire. That 101,000 of your fellow citizens had died as a result of this war over the past year and a half. (That’s over 33 world trade centers).

Now can you understand why many of them grieve and rage and take up arms against us? It’s not because they “hate freedom”. It’s because war has real consequences.

This war isn’t about a CNN bulletin or a three-line obit for an American soldier. It’s about the United States soldiers that have lost their lives to this occupation. It’s about people like this girl. It’s about their families.

It’s about the look on her face that will haunt my dreams for days.

“Nobody knows what winning a war looks like, because it has never happened.”

Nothing Is Inarguable

Liz, from the comments:

There is no middle ground here- there’s not a “half life” it�s murder or a medical procedure.

So what I�m saying I suppose, is that logically- the pro-birth movement works out for people that hold a certain set of inarguable beliefs

You’ve hit the crux of the matter when you use the phrase “set of inarguable beliefs”. Claiming that *anything* is above reason flies in the face of every scientific advancement and rational thinker ever to exist.

Someone should tell these people that their own stupidity and complacency do not define the limits of human understanding.

I Like It

I, along with many others, have long seen the humor and hypocrisy in the application of the term “pro-life”. The problem with this term is that it implies basic respect for all living things, a quality that the people who wear this badge often don’t display. After all, they’re pro-death penalty, anti-environmental regulation, proponents of war… you get the idea.

So, what to do about this apparent contradiction? Coin a new term to describe these people. A Benedictine nun on Bill Moyers’ PBS show recently used the term “pro-birth” in reference to these one-issue zealots.

It’s accurate, succinct, and I like it.

Just to Clarify

1) The founding fathers of the United States were not conservatives. They were progressive radicals.

2) Education is by nature progressive. As we educate ourselves, and make new discoveries, we discover that our old views were wrong. That is why we don’t conserve those views. Instead, we progress on to the next, more accurate idea.

3) University professors, who are the most educated and brilliant people on this planet, are overwhelmingly liberal. This is not indicative of some vast conspiracy. The fact that our best and brightest are liberals does, however, tell you something about the mental capacities of those who cling to conservative viewpoints.

“Although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid, it is true that most stupid people are conservative.”
– John Stuart Mill

Screw Santa

If I ever have children, I don’t think that I’ll let them believe in Santa Claus. I mean, let’s recognize the tradition for what it really is:

In order to encourage behavior modification, parents tell their children the following story: A omniscient being will keep track of their every action, and judge it against an arbitrary set of standards to determine whether each child has been “good” or “bad”. Then, this fictional fatherly figure will either reward them with fabulous gifts, or punish them by witholding everything good.

(Wait a minute, was I talking about Christmas or religion here…)

Seriously, though - Is this Santa myth more than just a way for parents to keep their kids under control and avoid being the bad guy? (”Well, I’m not going to punish you - but Santa will!”) Wouldn’t it be much better to explain the holiday as a time when people gather to enjoy each other’s company and to exchange small tokens of their love and respect? Why isn’t that enough?