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How Not To Worry And Love The Armed Nut

Posted July 1, 2004 By Earl Green

I guess it has now been my turn to be in on the latest craze, Some Stupid Guy Going Nuts And Grabbing A Gun To Solve All His Problems. I had a doctor’s appointment on a Wednesday morning in March 2001, for which I needed to wear shorts. I planned to go back to my apartment around lunchtime and change clothes so I could go to work.

I couldn’t get into the north entrance of my apartment complex, as the driveway I have to take to get home was blocked off by lots of cars, including some police cruisers. I went the long way around to the south entrance, and found my way blocked there too. I tried to reach my apartment on foot, and met up with a police officer who told me in no uncertain terms to stay away, that there was an armed nut on the loose somewhere in the apartments.

This alarmed me. My wife was at work, but it was common for me to raise the blinds on a couple of windows in our apartment so our three cats could curl up in the window sill and catch the sights and sounds of the outside world, which we didn’t really allow them to see otherwise. If someone was looking for targets, or worse yet a hiding place to break into, that might have made an inviting sight for him. Read the remainder of this entry »

Filed in Special Order Speeches
        

On the Up and Up(grade)

Posted July 1, 2004 By Dave Thomer

I’ve been using personal finance software for years to track my expenditures and have some sense of where my money is coming from, as well as going. I tend not to use too many features beyond the electronic check register and the occasional simple report or graph, but one thing I have become quite accustomed to is the ability to download transaction information from my credit card company. It saves some typing, allows me to keep things synchronized, and is in many other ways simply nifty. So I was slightly perturbed when I learned that Intuit would stop supporting that capability in the version of the software I own, which I bought a little over four years ago. I would need to jump ahead at least to the 2002 version, and I’m sure deep down Intuit wanted me to go get the brand spankin’ new 2004 edition.

The most significant problem with that strategy is that Amazon reviews and Usenet comments achieved the almost unanimous conclusion that Quicken 2004 was best suited for use as a coaster rather than an actual piece of software. (The problems seemed to be largely felt by people upgrading from prior versions with years’ worth of accumulated data – in other words, folks like me – and so they didn’t show up as much in the professional reviews I read in the computer press.) Further research suggested that the 2002 version was probably the most stable, so I snagged a copy of that from eBay and bought myself at least another couple of years.

Truth be told, even if 2004 had been a good year for Quicken, I still would have tried to go the secondhand route. The idea that a part of the functionality I originally purchased could be turned off in order to get me to re-purchase something just rubs me a bit wrong. Yet I can’t deny that it seems to make perfect sense in an upgrade-happy culture whose economy depends on folks always going out and Getting More Stuff, a world where it’s cheaper to throw out an appliance than it is to get it fixed. To get a sense of the cultural impact this has had: the producers of Sesame Street recently turned the Fix-It Shop into a Kinko’s/post office hybrid called the Mail-It Shop, because kids today just can’t relate to the notion of getting their toaster repaired. Read the remainder of this entry »

Filed in Life in Practice
        

Reviewing an Old Curse

Posted June 1, 2004 By Dave Thomer

Once upon a time, I wrote a humor column for my college newspaper. I eventually appropriated the title of that column for this very site. As my sister graduated from high school this month, I got to thinking about one column I wrote back in March 1995. I thought I’d share it on today’s Not News as a tribute to her and as a glimpse at this site’s roots. Also, subsequent events have served to make the column funnier in retrospect than it ever was at the time.

When I was about 10 years old and, like all 10-year-old males, found the opposite gender utterly confusing (actually, this is not that different from all 20-year-old males, now that I think about it), I made a vow that I would never, ever so much as look at a female in a romantic light, let alone start a family. The onset of adolescence rendered this vow moot rather quickly; however, I recently renewed it, for vastly different reasons. I had a preview of the Parents’ Curse.

You know what I’m talking about, I’m sure. At the point where our parents’ frustration reaches the point where they’re looking like Warner Bros. cartoons, they pull out the Curse and say, “When you grow up I hope you have children just like you.�

We shrug this off as kids; we figure, hey, we’re such great individuals that raising carbon copies would be a breeze. It’s not our fault our parents are so out of touch, right?

Hah. Read the remainder of this entry »

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Weddings, Parties, Anything, Anyone

Posted June 1, 2004 By Earl Green

VH1 has recently been running a behind-the-scenes special on the making of Fleetwood Mac’s eagerly anticipated 2003 studio album, Say You Will. The album itself was generally well received, though that’s not much of a surprise given the veteran rock group’s enormous fan base. Many of those fans were overjoyed to see the reunion of the group with Lindsey Buckingham, the creative powerhouse whose departure after the 1987 album Tango In The Night left them wondering if there could be a Fleetwood Mac without him. What seems to have been forgotten in the interim is that there was, in fact, a Fleetwood Mac without Lindsey Buckingham. And there had been before.

Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks joined Fleetwood Mac several years into the band’s life. Stinging from the departure of moody guitar genius Peter Green, the core members – Mick Fleetwood, John McVie and Christine McVie – took on the California duo who had created something of an underground hit with their self-titled Buckingham Nicks album (and maybe that catchy combination of their surnames to create their identity found some resonance with Fleetwood and the McVies as well). Buckingham and Nicks were a couple at the time, and their addition to Fleetwood Mac propelled the band’s self-titled 1976 album to acclaim and, more importantly, airplay. But in the wake of that album, Buckingham and Nicks’ relationship deteriorated (as did the marriage between John and Christine McVie), and the resulting hard feelings informed 1977’s Rumours, still considered by many to be Fleetwood Mac’s magnum opus. And it’s the success of that album that has created, in the minds of many, the picture of the Buckingham/Nicks/McVie/Fleetwood/McVie lineup as the definitive Fleetwood Mac.

Buckingham was eager to avoid doing, as he frequently put it, “Rumours II,”and spent the group’s next two studio albums carving out an increasingly experimental niche in rock music. When Buckingham departed in 1987, the rest of the group auditioned for the best of the best, finally hiring two well-regarded sessions players who were both guitarists, vocalists and songwriters in their own right. The product of the new recruits was 1991’s Behind The Mask. Somehow, Mask – despite ample airplay and curiosity from even casual fans about how Fleetwood Mac sounded minus Buckingham – didn’t soar to the best-selling heights of its predecessors. Then Bill Clinton adopted “Don’t Stop” (from Rumours) as the theme for his 1992 Presidential campaign, and when he won the vote, asked Fleetwood Mac – with Buckingham – to perform at his Inaugural Ball. (Money, it seems, couldn’t keep the band together, but a Presidential decree could.) With Buckingham, and without Behind The Mask recruits Billy Burnette and Rick Vito, the Mac was back, and a major tour (and, consequently, a best-selling live album) ensued. Read the remainder of this entry »

Filed in Culture and Media
        

Knowing Things

Posted June 1, 2004 By Dave Thomer

One of the blessings, and curses, of the Net is the access it gives to information. Properly harnessed, it’s a great research tool, as many traditional sources of information are easily accessible while millions of everyday people record their own contributions to humanity’s collective knowledge. (Indeed, David Brin has argued in The Transparent Society that in an upcoming “Century of Aficionados,â€? the effect of “armies of individuals pursuing their own private, passionate interestsâ€? will ensure that “almost nothing of recognized value that is now known about the human past or present will ever again be lost.â€?) The trick is in using those tools effectively. I like to think I’ve learned a thing or two about that over the years, so I thought I’d discuss some of the sources I’ve found most effective. Read the remainder of this entry »

Filed in Life in Practice
        

About Those Huddled Masses

Posted May 1, 2004 By Dave Thomer

At the beginning of 2004, President Bush proposed a set of reforms to U.S. immigration policy that would have, among other things, allowed a number of workers currently inside the country illegally to attain a guest worker status for up to ten years. The proposal never really took off, as it was antithetical to the hard-line position on immigration taken by much of the President’s Republican base and other issues quickly caught the public’s attention. It’s a shame that we never had a really serious discussion of immigration policy, because it seems fairly certain that the current system isn’t working too well. The question is, how do we fix it?

The answer can not help but be complex, because immigration regulations implicate, or are implicated by, a host of other policies, from free trade to the minimum wage to tax policy and beyond. To say we’re going to talk about immigration is really to choose a particular vantage point from which to discuss this whole network of policies. Like any vantage point, it will emphasize some elements over others, but them’s the breaks.

Before getting into the details of policy, it might help to focus on the different philosophical approaches one takes to immigration. Is it something to be promoted, tolerated, or even discouraged? What expectations do we have for those that come to the country? What expectations should they have of us? Generally speaking, I tend to adopt something of a “more the merrierâ€? approach in principle. Given the nation’s history, and the image that we like to promote to the world, I think it’s important that we continue to welcome new people – and the new perspectives and talents they bring with them – to the country. And I’m generally uncomfortable with the notion that Americans – most of whom are here as a result of immigration – would decide to lock the door behind them and say, “We got here, you’re out of luck.â€? At the same time, I think it’s reasonable that we have some expectation that immigrants will assimilate and become a part of the civic life of the country, even if that requires giving up some cherished traditions or practices. Read the remainder of this entry »

Filed in Public Policy
        

We Can’t Handle the Truth

Posted May 1, 2004 By Dave Thomer

Three distinct cases from April and May concerning the current military operation in Iraq have raised questions about the control and dissemination of information in wartime conditions.

Item 1: The Pentagon has had a policy of not allowing any publicity for the return of soldiers’ bodies from Iraq and Afghanistan. In two separate recent incidents, those images finally became public. In one case, a contractor on a plane carrying the coffins home took a picture of the soldiers carefully attending the flag-draped coffins; she sent the image to a friend, who then sent it to the Seattle Times, which published it. In the second case, Russ Kick – who runs a site called The Memory Hole – filed Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to get copies of photos the Pentagon had taken of the coffins and their reception at Dover Air Force base; in what the Pentagon is now calling a mistake, he received the photos and posted them to the site. Both the Seattle Times and Memory Hole images soon spread to other newspapers, online news sources, and TV networks.

Item 2: Nightline decided to devote its May 1 program to reading the names and showing the pictures of the over 700 American soldiers killed in action in Iraq. Sinclair Broadcasting Group, which owns a handful of ABC affiliates and which has donated substantial money to the Republican party, charged that Nightline was trying to make the President look bad and refused to air the program.

Item 3: American soldiers serving as prison guards in Iraq – specifically in Abu Ghraib, formerly one of Saddam Hussein’s most notorious torture camps – took photos of themselves humiliating prisoners, including stripping them naked, attaching wires to their bodies and threatening them with electrocution, and forcing them into sexually suggestive positions. These photos were passed along to military police and eventually made their way to CBS. CBS sat on the photos for two weeks at the Army’s request before airing them as part of a special report on 60 Minutes II. It has since come out that an army report completed in February has identified over 50 incidents of abuse toward prisoners, that at least two prisoners were killed by their guards, and that there are dozens of ongoing investigations into the action of American military personnel and contractors. Read the remainder of this entry »

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Getting the Continental Drift

Posted May 1, 2004 By Dave Thomer

Many, although not all, of the essays I’ve written for this section of the site can be considered part of an overall narrative, starting with the historical tradition of Western philosophy and its roots in Plato and Descartes, moving to John Dewey and other American pragmatists’ effort to rethink the fundamental premises of that tradition, and then using that response as a catalyst for a new theory of individual development and civic organization. It is worth noting, however, that American pragmatism is not the only critical response to the Platonic/Cartesian tradition. A number of thinkers, mostly in France and Germany, have developed a number of positions loosely referred to as “continental philosophy,� which often take the critique in very different directions.

It’s worth noting that just as there are a number of pragmatists, many of whom disagree with each other often on significant details, continental philosophy is no monolith. Any generalization one tries to offer would have exceptions. For the most part, however, it is safe to say that continental philosophy embraces relativism and is skeptical of arguments that try to logically prove a universal truth. (Many continentals do believe in some kind of eternal absolute, but that such eternity is unknowable to human minds.) Continental thinkers often appear to heavily blend philosophy with other disciplines, which sometimes have the effect of making their prose more forbidding to those trying to pull out a straightforward set of premises and conclusions. Jacques Derrida, for example, has a very heavy element of literary criticism in his work; language structures and shapes thinking, and can thus become a filter that hides the truth from us, so one should try as much as possible to take apart the language and get past the structures it imposes on us.
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Filed in Philosophy
        

Thinking About Learning

Posted April 1, 2004 By Dave Thomer

Education was a paramount concern for John Dewey during his career, as can be seen from some of his book titles: The Child and the Curriculum, The School and Society, Democracy and Education, and Experience and Education all concerned themselves chiefly with the topic. At the University of Chicago, he taught not only in the Philosophy department, but in Pedagogy as well. With his wife, he ran a model school at the university in which he could implement and test his theories; it was the removal of his wife from her position that led Dewey to leave Chicago for Columbia. Today, Dewey’s theories are still debated in professional academic literature, discussed in education programs, and even occasionally remarked on outside purely academic circles. Unfortunately, both in Dewey’s time and now, those positions are frequently mischaracterized and set up as straw men.

Dewey’s education theory was not merely focused on technical questions of curriculum and formal schooling. In Democracy and Education, he uses education in its broadest sense, as the fundamental activity of individual and social life. To understand this, it is necessary to explore the manner in which Dewey defines life. That which is living engages in an active effort to sustain and perpetuate itself, making use of its surroundings in a continuing attempt to achieve this goal. Nonliving objects are passive – they do not respond to changes in their environment with an expenditure of energies designed for self-preservation. If a force is bearing down on a rock, and the force is great enough to break the rock, the rock simply breaks; it does not attempt to shift or redirect the force so that its continued coherence is no longer at risk. Plants will send out roots to seek for water and move their leaves toward light sources; animals will seek out and even store food. Dewey describes growth as the restructuring of experience and the use of available resources in a process of self-perpetuation and self-renewal. Life strives to grow; it changes itself to overcome obstacles and take advantage of available opportunities. When growth stops completely, life ends. For human beings, growth is not merely a question of physical survival, but of intellectual and emotional flourishing – we grow in our ability to understand our surroundings, in our capability to act on and alter our environment; in doing so we develop and fulfill new potential not just for ourselves, but for the community to which we belong. For the individual, preparing for and experiencing these opportunities for growth is education.
Read the remainder of this entry »

Filed in Philosophy
        

Not the Brightest Bulb

Posted April 1, 2004 By Dave Thomer

If you, for some reason, have found yourself wondering about the state of my gardening skills, let me try and sum it up for you:

I am such a rotten gardener that the plants I try and kill end up thriving.

A little stage setting is perhaps in order. When we moved into this house last year, the front walk had a small garden to the side of it, in which numerous plants were converting carbon dioxide to oxygen and generally having a merry old time. These plants didn’t totally appeal to Pattie and me, and quite frankly we weren’t sure exactly how each one was supposed to be maintained, but as new homeowners we had many, many other fish to fry – not least of which was that the back yard contained some truly tenacious plant forms that I am still unconvinced did not originate from another planet. (I’ve been checking the Mars Rover pictures very closely to see if I can find any of these things’ forebears, let me tell you.) So we neglected that front yard for a month or two.

This was exactly the opportunity a battalion of weeds had been waiting for. They started sprouting, and pretty soon they were starting to crowd us off that front walk. Another week or two, I think they would have evolved legs, crawled out of the dirt, and body-blocked us from getting into the house. So one morning I dutifully went out and yanked every piece of greenery I could find. I pulled, I dug, I yanked, and when I was done I sprayed that dirt repeatedly with Super Duper Weed and Plant Killer. Then, and only then, I replanted the ground with grass seed.

And not any grass seed, mind you. No, I consulted experts like my parents. Now, the house I grew up in had, and I am being totally honest here, one of the nicest back yards on my block. It damned well better, since my mom kicked us out of the nice air-conditioned house on many a summer day to cut grass or pull weeds or prune hedges or whatever the heck one does in a garden. So I thought I was on pretty safe ground getting a recommendation from them. “Get ryegrass,â€? they said. What the heck, I said, if the lawn doesn’t work out, I can toss the leftover seed in my bread machine. Read the remainder of this entry »

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