Tag: politics

The Art of the Not-Making-a-Total-Putz-of-Yourself

If nothing else of substance, the last couple days of RNC Trump Speech brouhaha have offered a pair of very important business lessons.

art by DonkeyHotey https://www.flickr.com/photos/donkeyhotey/
(art by DonkeyHotey)

My initial impression was that we were looking at this kind of fantastically gobsmacking paradox:

A candidate renowned for his wealth and business acumen is either unable to afford or incapable of selecting competent help.

But according to this article, that doesn’t seem to be the case.  Skilled workers are perfectly happy to hold their noses and accept Trump dollars, but their employer is totally unable to actually use the tools he purchases.

This puts me in the mind of a business aphorism (which I believe I first heard from Ramit Sethi):

A students hire A students; B students hire C students.

To mansplain: An A student knows what good work looks like, that good work is hard, and is confident that they can reliably produce good work through the judicious application of hard work.  A students want to see good work, and do not want to look like putzes, so they choose subordinates who are as capable as themselves (if not more so).  B students may occasionally do good work, but since they don’t know this other stuff (about how to judiciously apply hard work to reliably produce that good work), they can be pretty insecure.  They hire down the ladder to shore up their ego.

But, of course, Trump is proving to not even be a B student; the B student is insecure and frustrated because he or she knows what good, consistent work looks like—they just can’t produce it.

Trump is a C student wallowing in the depths of Dunning-Kruger Syndrome.

So, to revise:

A students hire A students; B students hire C students.  C students hire an A student, a B student, two C students, a guy on Craigslist, their cousin, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Mike Tyson, six doctors, and a personal trainer, follow none of their advice, and then scream at them when they get the C they earned.

On Allies

I’m going to level with you: the notion of “allies” doesn’t sit well with me, and I’ve always had trouble really clearly framing why. The closest I can get is this: As a Jew, I’ve had a non-negligible number of occasions where, unbidden, a Gentile has come forward to tell me about some time they went to bat for Jews (usually over an office Xmas tree or some such similar piddling bullshit).  And the message—occasionally explicitly stated, always at least implied—was “Look what I did for you and your people!”

Each of those people, no doubt, considered themselves to be my “ally.” And each of those people proved to be a total asshole—not because of the going-to-bat occasion, which were generally null to me (I mean, they were talking about some other thing they did at some other time before they knew me—often occasions where there was no Jew present to ally with; the gesture meant something between little and nothing).  They were just garden variety assholes, and happened to also be aggrandizing crusaders, or whatever.

And I don’t want to be that person, or to be party to that headspace and culture. If someone is harshing blacks or women or muslims or whoever (purposefully, or by clumsy ignorance), I want to gently intercede and work to open up and draw light into that situation—but I don’t want to do that as an “ally.”  I just want to do it as a human who is aesthetically offended by ugliness, and as a Jew engaging in right action (which is tikkun olam, which is Our Business in the World), and as a father who never wants his children to catch him being weak and letting such ugly, broken bullshit slide.

I’m not sure if that’s that Gay is getting at here (or what Coates was getting at in 2015). But reading this helped my finally find a way to encode these things I’ve long felt. Maybe it will help you, too.

This Article is About Brexit, but Shows Us Why Trump Will Be Elected

This is an enlightening read about how Brexit played out so “counter-intuitively” (from the perspective of progressive United Staters), as well as an informative glimpse into the somewhat icky complexity of the EU (for example, I previously had not appreciated the extremely pro-business and anti-labor implications of EU policy).

But that’s not why I’m sharing.  I’m sharing because this article inadvertently lays out pretty clearly how Donald Trump will end up getting elected:

Democracy is premised on the idea that there’s a range of things to vote for, and you vote for the one you like. If there isn’t a range, it fails (and turnout plummets). …

A problem is that the so-called “debates” that have been going on all refer to something monolithic called “immigrants”, and in the unitary sense intended there’s no such thing; arguments like “immigrants is good” vs “immigrants is bad” just aren’t talking about the same people. What you’re talking about is the comfortable articulate middle-class world, which is a million miles away from 20 blokes forced to sleep in a damp garden shed in between picking cabbages, being charged half their pitiful wage for “rent” and “transport” and being used to undercut guys from Boston or Spalding (who would have worked, but not like this). Similar things apply across our wrecked manufacturing base (aka almost everything north of Cambridge). Everyone in this system is getting screwed except the scumbags running it. And even worse is the system which facilitates and encourages it.

There is a huge and growing disconnection between happy middle-class life in urban centres and this kind of thing down at the dirty end — they’re different planets, different universes. … The referendum was swung by a huge slab of population who are being taken for granted and ignored in precisely this “you don’t count” manner.

…

Lots of people don’t do that; they have the intuitions but can’t articulate them, so they hang the feel of it on anything they can find, eg “foreigners”. If you demonstrate to them that what they’re saying is wrong, they just look uncomfortable and shift ground, because it was never about that in the first place. Just because they can’t articulate, that doesn’t mean there isn’t a problem or that they should be ignored; they’re humans with real, immediate problems. Yes, a very few will be impossible neurotic bigots at a deep psychological level, but the majority are simply trying to say something and can’t manage it. The happy middle-class urban world tends to mock this or be sanctimonious about it in a PC way (“racists!”); I find this cruel and disgusting.

Please check out the whole thing—it reads quicker than the author warns: “I want to stop something exploitative, divisive and dishonest” — conversation with a Leaver, by Oliver Humapge and his dad

“GOING TO, HAVE TO, NEED TO, WANT TO”—The Little Things That Matter a Lot

What with the news being what it’s been this last year or so, I’ve been thinking a lot about grammatical constructions (like the one Bouie highlights here)—which abruptly reminded me of this article I read a couple years ago by Arika Okrent: “Four Changes to English So Subtle We Hardly Notice They’re Happening.”

It’s pretty noticeable that words like “shall” and “ought” are on the way out, but “will,” “should,” and “can” are doing just fine. There are other members of this helping verb club though, and they have been on a steep climb this century. “Going to,” “have to,” “need to,” and “want to” cover some of the same meaning territory as the other modal verbs. They first took hold in casual speech and have enjoyed a big increase in print in recent decades.

(FYI: Okrent also wrote a really neat book on created languages that includes a healthy section in Klingon. The whole thing is fascinating.)

I’m pretty interested in the rhetorical (and psycho-social) significance of “will/should/can” vs. “going to/have to/need to/want to.”  E.g., If I say “I will drive,” I’m both stating what will happen in the future, and implying my ownership of the act.  I’m gonna drive, and I wanna drive.  “Should” both softens the likelihood (evidenced in the fact that you can tag “—but probably won’t” onto the statement without sounding totally nuts) and softens the commitment (implying that I can do it, but likely would rather not).  “Can” is neutral with intent (I can do it, but I’m cool with letting someone else do it), and likelihood (since I’m obviously leaving it open for someone who’d rather drive to speak up).

Meanwhile, the “going/have/need/want to” forms seem to shift the question away from the likelihood of who shall do what, and more to the emotional timbre of the doing of the thing.  “I want to drive” clearly speaks to my intent to drive, and “I have to drive” clearly communicates I’d probably rather not (or, in the least, attribute the fact that I’ll do it to external factors).  “Need to drive” says that I want to do it—and shall do it—but likely for reasons I attribute to being outside myself (including, for example, a deep craving to drive, which I’ve now framed as being outside my control).  Finally, “I’m going to drive” is sorta the most fantastic of all, since it has two opposite meanings that can only be clarified through context, tone, or body language:  If I say “I’m going to drive,” either I’m super gung ho to drive, or I feel totally forced into it.

Yeah, this is all subtle.  In the end, we all get that someone is gonna fucking drive, so who cares about the damned shades of meaning, Dave?  Does it really matter much, or is it just word nerd trivia?

Yes, it matters.  The little things have a fantastic power to totally deflect the big ones, just like a lone shirt button can deflect a bullet.  We all agree that the difference between getting bullseyed right in the heart to meaningfully different from taking a bullet painfully—but far from fatally—into the meaty shoulder.

Likewise, the ways that small changes in language shift our inquiry are big.

For example, consider:

RAPE AND THE PASSIVE VOICE

Language activists point out that the way we as a society refer to sexual assault uses passive voice[1] to blame the victim, with devastating effect.  We say, “She was raped” instead of “He raped her” or “Someone raped her.”  By doing this, we make the recipient of the action the subject of the sentence, and thus the focus of our questions: What was she wearing? How much did she drink?  Where was she going and why was she going there?

If you make the perpetrator the subject of the sentence, then he is also the focus of our inquiry—which is sort of entirely proper, right?  Seeing as how he’s the one on trial.  This is one of the few instances where I think we can all strongly advocate for a man totally being the focus of a situation that’s 50/50 male/female.

When I raise this, folks usually fire back in one of two ways:

  1. “It’s appropriate to use the passive voice here; we do know who the victim is, and we don’t know who the perpetrator is!”
  2. “The writer chooses to do this in order to focus on the victim, who is the one most in need of our compassion!”

I call double bullshit here.  First, on any given day, if I search Google News for “rape” I’ll tend to find an article on the first page of returns that is both 1) about a crime that has already been completely litigated and guilt found (sometimes decades ago) and 2) continues to use the passive voice. As for how the writer chooses to focus our compassion: If that’s your intent, then it is not working; try something new.

I’m not saying that journos are conspiring with the patriarchy to subjected whoever; I think these tendencies—like almost every linguistic choice we make from moment to moment—are entirely unconscious.  In the case of the rapist-less rape and those magic materializing bullets from the head of this post, I imagine these tortuous grammatically constructions arise from a combination of overabundant caution (we don’t want to speak beyond what we know), and a desperate, unstated need to distance ourselves from the awfulness of this world—to, in effect, deny that any humans were involved in creating these miseries, because to do so is to begin to suspect that we, too, might play some part in this.

And, in an entirely predictable irony, in trying to avoid giving offense and making ourselves uncomfortable, we create new and potent miseries out of thin air.

Continue reading ““GOING TO, HAVE TO, NEED TO, WANT TO”—The Little Things That Matter a Lot”

Hard to Believe It’s Just 213 Days Until Disaster Time! #America

art by DonkeyHotey https://www.flickr.com/photos/donkeyhotey/
(art by DonkeyHotey)

So, about a year ago I wrote about Trump for the first time: “Listen: If We Don’t Start Taking Trump Seriously, He Will be President #FACT #NotJoking”

I still think much of what is in that post is true, but realize that I’d failed to comprehend the scope of our national fuck-up.  Back in August 2015, I was seeing this as something liberals were messing up, by not taking Trump seriously and at face value.  It never dawned on me that it was all of us—left, right, center, and nutbag—who were botching this.  Yeah, even his supporters—even the worst among them, the vicious racists, the violent thugs—have it wrong, ’cause I think Trump is probably right about himself: He isn’t racist. Yes, he’s almost certainly a White Supremacist (in that his default and unexamined worldview privileges a White perspective in the same way as the sighted privilege the visual spectrum), but he really isn’t racist, per se, because a racist really does truly believe something—albeit something gross and erroneous.

I honestly don’t think Trump believes anything: He is an absolute empty vessel, the final fantastic, horrific, awful expression of American post-modernism: A perfect surface with no substance, a mirror-less mirror.

Is he a great negotiator?  No.

Is a great businessman?  No.

Is a statesman of any stripe? No.

Is he even a politician, in any conventional sense of the word?  No.

But he is possibly the greatest salesman this country has ever known, in part because he has perfected the sales process beyond the need for any product at all.

That said, there is something I’ve begun to question about that year-old post: How do prevent this mercurial, bellicose, void human-mask from entering the Oval Office.  Last August I counseled Compassion and Reason—and while I stick with Compassion (’cause I always do), I think Reason is useless here, because his sales process is crafted to short circuit and judo-throw reason.  Reason is the obstacle that Trump’s method is custom designed to overcome (for real; go read the Sales Playbook!  Many sections are devoted to jujitsu-spinning hesitation and reasonable objection into signing on the line which is dotted).

So while I counsel Compassion for Trump supporters, I also counsel Contempt—not for the voter, but for the Skinsuit with Hair Plugs himself.  Make Trump the object of dismissal, scorn, and visceral disgust.  Take the shine off his product-less product—make it not only not worth the money, but not worth the time or attention.

He is a Ding-Dong dropped on a fresh, warm dog turd.  

He is a mouthful of maggots on a sunny day.  

He is the smear at the bottom of a commercial kitchen trash can.  

Not a president, not a candidate, not even a man; let him be the strange, nihilistic object he has made of himself, a solipsistic point in a one-dimensional Universe, convinced he is a God.

Later, on November 9, he will be deserving of our compassion; he can be a man again, and rejoin humanity.

But until then . . .

The Trump U Sales Playbook: A Marvelous Primer on the Dark Art of B2C Sales

I wanna start with an apology: Based on a very brief hot-take published in Slate, I posted this quip:

After seeing the these two Jon Oliver episodes (vol 1 and vol 2), I finally dug into the 2010 Trump University Playbook in earnest (as opposed to just re-reading the same nibblets everyone was passing around). And you know what? This playbook is special.

Since the Slate excerpts were chosen for the lulz, not the insight, all I saw was what was there: Standard-issue sales training materials, with the genre-mandated jankety English and flop-sweat sheen of Glengarry Glen Ross bravado.  If you have experience with consumer-oriented sales (i.e., “B2C”—that’s “business to consumer”, generally contrasted to “B2B,” which is “business to business”), none of this is that unusual. And so that’s what I tweeted.

But, of course, I was looking at it as someone who’s worked in sales, studied the psychology of selling, written sales copy, and slogged through a lot of terrible sales material and ethically questionable sales advice.  After digging into the playbook with my “Normal Human” eyes on, I’m seeing the ickiness much more clearly. That fantastic, revelatory ickiness.

Give these materials a gander, esp. the “Sales Playbook” section starting around pg. 96.  Read it, and get a sense of what a steep disadvantage you are at, as a normal human thrust into a professional sales situation (e.g., buying a car, sitting down with a “financial advisor,” being dragged to court, being interrogated). 

This is, in fact, a pretty tight textbook on the dark arts of high-pressure sales/persuasion situations where there is a built-in power differential that favors the seller. 

Frankly, if Trump U really wanted to give students value, then screw real estate investing; they should have handed out copies of this. “Here’s how we suckered you; go forth and sucker others!”

Maybe not worth $995, but certainly worth more than nothing. 

RECOMMENDED READING: 2010 Trump University Playbook

Listen: If We Don’t Start Taking Trump Seriously, He Will be President #FACT #NotJoking

credit: DonkeyHotey
This excellent and instructive set of posts really concisely analyzes the marketing savvy underpinning Donald Trump’s political crazy talk. Consider it mandatory reading for anyone who 1) currently lives and votes in the United States or 2) ever plans to attempt to earn any money in any manner:

This analysis aside, here’s why I’m absolutely convinced that, if we stay the course, Donald Trump will be President:

I see smart, political-aware, left-leaning progressives once again doing exactly what they did when George W. Bush ran: Bemusedly watching a desperately outclassed clown-candidate fumble every media event like a stumble drunk, and then archly snarking: “Who are all these people that are supposed to vote for this guy? I don’t know anyone who would ever vote for him!”

And that dumpster-fire of a President got elected twice—and put tens if not hundreds of thousands of people in their graves. So, howsabout we don’t go and do the same dumb, cynical bullshit again?

Just to be clear: I’m not suggesting you go out, insult and dogpile on pro-Trump folks—’cause that’s exactly the way we got Bush elected twice; a shrill liberal freak-out is baked into Trump’s strategy. I’m suggesting that we really set our minds to trying to understand how it is that folks who are enthusiastic about Trump got to that place, without assuming it’s because they are “dumb bigots.”

If you’re wondering, “Jeez; how the fuck do I talk to someone who is head-over-heels for Trump?” My experience: Make sure that your side of the conversation only consists of questions. And not thin-ass rhetorical questions like “Why do you love that bigot, stupid?” Real questions, like: “OK; why do believe Mexican immigrants are disproportionately criminal? Is that actually true?” ’cause 10 minutes of googling reveals this table:

Compiled be a very reliably Conservative writer, Heather Mac Donald, and based on DoJ National Crime Victimization Survey data. You’ll note that, as perpetrators, Hispanics account for 14.8% of violent crime, despite being 17.1% of the total population—in terms of violence, they’re actually underperforming [insert your own “lazy Mexican” joke here, bigot].[*]

The point here isn’t to zing anyone; it’s to compassionately invite them to join you in a place where reasonable humans will begin to properly question how reasonable this American Savior’s claims are.

Anyway, the Big Picture: Let’s maybe stop being Trump’s strawman, ok?

photo credit: DonkeyHotey

[*] Since my regular readers seem to deeply enjoy my penchant for footnoted fact-based poindexterity, here’s a fun set of tidbits:

  1.  While Hispanics lag behind in committing violent crimes, they are victims of 17.7% these crimes (as calculated from Table 5 numbers in the 2013 DoJ Criminal Victimization bulletin)—about what you’d expect, given that they’re 17.1% of the population. All that said, does my data disprove Trump’s claim? Clearly, no: “Mexicans” are a small subset of “Hispanics” and “undocumented Mexicans” an even smaller sub-set of that. Can we expect differences in behavior among these groups? Maybe, but if anything undocumented immigrants appear to commit violent and property crimes at a *lower* rate than their naturalized peers.
  2.  As part of his “We need a wall and Mexico needs to pay for it!” spiel, Trump repeats the conservative canard that: “[The Mexican government has] even published pamphlets on how to illegally immigrate to the United States.” In case you’re wondering, here’s the pamphlet in question. My Spanish isn’t superfantástico, but this comic book clearly begins by telling people that the safe way to immigrate is through official channels with appropriate paperwork, and warns that unofficial crossing is both dangerous and illegal. It goes on to describe the dangers of crossing the desert, forging rivers, being victimized by human smugglers, and then being victimized by employers once you are across the border illegally. It strongly discourages using false documents, lying to American law enforcement, fleeing law enforcement, being armed in any way, or breaking the law in any way. If you get in trouble, the pamphlet advises, you have certain rights, and should contact the consulate. The pamphlet closes with: “This [guide] does not promote crossing [the border] without legal documentation required by the United States government; its objective is to make known the risks and to inform about the rights of migrants regardless of their legal residence.” It’s a pretty run-of-the-mill government document. It was published 11 years ago and “thousands” of copies were distributed; at the time it was published, even folks of a seemingly anti-Mexico persuasion found the idea of using this as an “invasion blueprint” laughable: “But as a survival guide for Mexicans seeking a better life in el Norte, Guía del Migrante Mexicano fails miserably.” As near as I can tell, it hasn’t been in print in ages; in fact, the only place you can find it online anymore is on White Nationalist websites, as an inflammatory example of the immigrant invasion, or whatever.
    Nonetheless, this historical footnote is prominently featured in the platform of a 2015 U.S. presidential candidate, where it is characterized as a guide to “illegally immigrate to the United States.”

When the Machine Knows You’re a Jew

Yesterday I hit Amazon.com to see how steeply they were discounting my book, and was met with this home page:


Check out that row of suggested titles above; they’re all Jewish children’s books. This stopped my heart. Because I am indeed a Jew, and I do indeed have small children.

Just for comparison’s sake, I switched my browser to Incognito Mode and reloaded Amazon. Here’s what I saw:

Still got Megan Trainor and the GEICO gecko, but now my above-the-fold pitch is for a bunch of HD movies that were big blockbusters that I’d never, ever watch. I.e., pretty generic.

Maybe this seems like no biggie to you. After all, algorithmically suggested purchases are a cornerstone of Amazon’s business model. I respect your position. I know that I’ve got more than a little paranoia and clinical hypervigilance informing my thought process. So, just to break down why this greeting from Amazon was so disturbing:

    1. All the titles are Jewish kid’s books. The algorithm seems *really* confident that these would interest me (and, shit, it’s right: We own an earlier edition of one of these books, and read it often).
    2. It’s unclear how Amazon would have reached this conclusion based solely on my interactions with Amazon: I’ve never ordered much in the way of explicit Judaica via Amazon, or had Jewish-themed items on my Wishlist or in my browsing history. I’ve ordered more tools and owl pellets from Amazon than explicitly Jew-themed items. This leaves two possibilities:
      • Their conclusion is based solely on my order size and timing–because I do indeed tend to place my big holiday order earlier than most, since I’m buying for both Xanukah and Xmas. But, man, that seems pretty thin justification to dedicate a major portion of screen real-estate to Jewish children’s books–items that would have basically no interest to huge swaths of the buying public.
      • Amazon can make some wicked-awesome inductive leaps based on buying patterns, the kind of stuff that you’ll never notice with the small sample sizes normal humans experience, but become glaringly obvious when you have Big Data to crunch. Like, maybe all sorts of people buy owl pellets and read Ben H. Winters ebooks, but only bona fide child-rearing Jews buy the second-cheapest owl pellet package that includes a bone chart and wait for those Ben H. Winters ebooks to dip below $2.99 each?
    3. Since the sub-points under #2 seem pretty far-fetched, we’re left to assume that Amazon is doing some very heavy-weight, semantically deep data correlation. Yes, it’s certainly “public knowledge” that I’m a Jew–not only does Google tell you so, but I’ve donated to Jewish charities, am active in my congregation, have worked for Jewish organizations, and have published essays and columns about being a Jew–but still, that’s some pretty granular cross-correlation for a site that mostly makes money off me by offering good deals on horror and SF ebooks and being able to quickly deliver the Slinkies my children adore and destroy at regular intervals. Which is to say that I’m left fretting not only about HOW Amazon determines I’m a Jew, but also WHY they bother, and WHAT might happen if someone else suddenly realized “Hey, I bet you Amazon’s data could cough up a pretty complete list of every Jew/homosexual/trans person/woman/Asian/whatever in the US! Wouldn’t that be a handy list!”
      • ’cause, you know, there’s never ever ever been a situation where a suitably motivated group of people with a pretty complete list of all the X-TYPE PERSONS in a geographic region has set their sights on killing all of them.
    4. As the kosher-market raid coordinated with the Charlie Hebdo massacre demonstrates, sometimes any old Jew is a good enough target.

So, that’s me, that’s my paranoia and hypervigilance, my over-reaction to a perfectly innocent commercial gambit. It’s just the free hand of the market, nothing more, nothing less. No one is coming to stuff me in a boxcar; I’m just a nervous guy with my nervous, paranoid fantasies (based on my relatives’ and co-religionists actual lived experience, and my own personal experience of anti-Semitic [micro]aggression and threats).

On the way out, I guess I just want to point out that this is an excellent moment to crystalize what “privilege” really means when we talk about “White Privilege.” As I’ve written in the past, 99.999% of the time I’m as White as any other pink person, and enjoy all those privileges. But when I see a thing like this, history indicates I’d be a supreme fool not to take a moment to meditate on the ramifications. No American Xtian or Athiest has to do that when Amazon greets them with a big fistful of Xmas items.

Simply put: “Privilege” means the privilege of not having to invest cognitive cycles in wondering who might be coming to hurt you and your children. This is why, when the fan starts getting shit-hit with things like Charlie Hebdo and Ferguson and GamerGate you need to be a little patient with us hysterical Jews and Blacks and women and whatever. We get a little worked up because, now and again we’re just completely worn out waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Anyway, this isn’t just a pity party for those of us who live in a protected class. This party is for you too, for you in the majority, you who sleep easy, because it’s instructive of the Shape of Where We’re At:

There are no more secrets.

Yeah, sure, you’ll get your little bullshit secrets–that you pooped your pants a little last week, that you kissed someone you shouldn’t have in 7th grade, that you’ve got some naked pictures, whatever. But it’s not like I got paranoid yesterday; I’ve been paranoid for almost forty years. I’ve sorta made a point at keeping the word “Jew” from being associated with my name whenever I suspected it might go into structured data (in my medical records, for example). But still, Amazon found me, and they weren’t even really, really looking. They don’t have some sort of ideology that rewards flushing me out, they have no demagogue promising that their God Thing will lavish them with heavenly rewards for hurting me and mine, they have no cosmology that holds that I’ve systemically dicked them over with interest rates and business shenanigans. Amazon saw it fit to sort me out and label me “Jew” in some arcane column of some totally banal, cyclopean spreadsheet because it means an extra $5 to $10 in sales a year to them, if even. That was enough to make it worth it to Amazon. And they did it on their own, without ever violating my “rights.” And if tomorrow Amazon switches business gears, and becomes the world’s marketplaces for demographic lists of people instead of the world’s marketplace for SF ebooks and horror anthologies and owl pellets, well I just better hope that no one running a bomb lab in Yemen or Boston or Paris decides to buy a mailing list.

Here’s the thing: I was fine with being “David Erik Nelson, Jew”–because that’s what I indeed am, what I’ve been my entire life. And for most of my life, when being a Jew has caused me grief, it has done so in association with being David Erik Nelson, as a response to something I did or said. Sure, it may not have been fair–when an Xtian gripes about Xmas, it’s because everyone is stressed out; when I do so, it’s because I’m a fucking whining Jew who should just be glad America tolerates me–but at least it felt personal and specific and, in some way, intelligible. When the threats came, it was because someone specifically disliked something I wrote or said or embodied.

But in Amazon’s datacenter, I’m a row in a table. The index on that row is something like “CUSTOMER #2045674” and the cells include “kindle-owner” and “SF reader” and “owl pellet buyer” and “Jew” and my mailing address. Just another row, among millions–until that table gets resorted by the “Jew” column, and then I’m a box waiting to be ticked off by God-knows-who for God-knows-what-reason. Maybe they want to send me free Xanukah candles! Maybe they want to send me a bomb disguised as a printer cartridge! I guess I’ll have to wait for the mail man to come and find out then! Oh brave new world that has such things in’t!

All of which is to say: The data got smart faster than I did.

Dr. Martin Luther King, the Eight Commandments, and Bending the Arc of History

Little things like this are why I love and admire MLK and, by extension, humans in general. I’d like to suggest to you that the first eight items on this list would make an *excellent* daily substitute for the 10 Commandments. If you’re not natively inclined to be Of the Book, then please consider the possibility that this constitutes an acceptable non-sectarian Watchword (if you wanna strike “pray for guidance and” from Commandment #3, I’ve got no beef with that; it all amounts to the same thing as far as me and my Magic(k)al Sky Faerie are concerned).

Remember: The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice—provided that we get up every morning and put our weight towards bending that mutherfucker. It ain’t gonna bend on its own.

The 8 Commandments might read:

  1. Not all people in power are opposed to Justice. Accept goodwill on the part of many.
  2. All resources are for the use of all people. Take a vacant seat.
  3. Pray for guidance and commit yourself to complete non-violence in word and action.
  4. Demonstrate the calm dignity of our people in your actions.
  5. In all things observe ordinary rules of courtesy and good behavior.
  6. Remember that this is not a victory for us alone, but for all humanity. Do not boast! Do not brag!
  7. Be quiet but friendly; proud, but not arrogant; joyous, but not boisterous.
  8. Be loving enough to absorb evil and understanding enough to turn an enemy into a friend.

These are our commandments now. Keep them in your hearts, teach them to your children, talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you rise up. Bind them as symbols on your arm. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates. Hear, and be careful to obey, so that it may go well with us and that we may increase greatly in a land flowing with milk and honey, just as the Lord, the God of our ancestors, promised us.

Amen

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.s Eight Commandments

(document via Slate)

Continue reading “Dr. Martin Luther King, the Eight Commandments, and Bending the Arc of History”

On Micro-agression and Macro-depression and Xmas/Xanukah (with bonus tracks!!!)

Hey All,
I continue to write a monthly column for the Ann Arbor Chronicle. This time around it’s on math and Jews and *The Holidays* and microagression and Thoth and Ganeesh and Hobby Lobby and so on. Somewhere in the later half I say something like this:

The Ann Arbor Chronicle | In It For The Money: Happy Holidays!

. . .
This is incredibly frustrating – because the equivalence, driven by a well-intentioned desire to be inclusive – is so needless. Xanukah isn’t a “Jewish Xmas.” It’s Xanukah – a relatively minor religious holiday celebrating a military victory. If anything, it’s sort of a Jewish Fourth of July – which is more apt, but just as nonsensical. Similarly, Ramadan isn’t a “Muslim Lent,” Diwali isn’t “Hindu Halloween” – or even a “Hindu Xanukah,” despite the fact that Diwali is also the “Festival of Lights.”
Inclusion is nice, but you do it by including others in the stuff you are doing, not by arguing that their things are sub-functions of yours. We’re not idiots; we haven’t failed to notice that the entirely secular “Holiday Break” from school conveniently centers around Xmas and the Gregorian calendar roll-over date, and that “Spring Break” is aimed to coincide with Easter – not Passover.
One of the principal privileges of being in the Majority is that you get to be, by definition, “normal.” You don’t find yourself constantly contradicted by outsiders – well-meaning television shows and well-wishers and folks planning office parties – as to what your holy days mean. You don’t have to wrestle with autocorrect about the spelling of your holidays and well wishes. You don’t have to disclose a lot of personal details to explain why this or that day is no good for a meeting, because no one schedules a meeting for December 25th.
. . .

BONUS GIFT! Back in the day I used to record Holiday Music of my Own Devising, because it was fun, and because when push comes to shove, from a strumming-and-singing-and-programming-sequencers perspective, there are *a lot* of great Xmas songs. Here are my offerings, in reverse chronological order. Enjoy!

(FUN FACT: I wrote this while hanging out with my infant son all day, and have played it annually ever since; my son believes it is an accepted part of the general Xmas Music Canon.)

  • Dreidel Bells (FUN FACT: The beat here is an original GameBoy running an early German Nanoloop cartridge. Both voices are obviously me, but the filters for the robot voice badly overburdened my iBook, causing significant lag–which is why Mr. Roboto struggles so badly to hit his marks.)
  • DreidelDreidelDreidel (FUN FACT: The beat here is a vintage analog Boss DR-55 once owned by POE, crammed through a heavy-metal distortion stompbox.)