Mark W Tiedemann

Author: Mark Tiedemann

  • Debate the Last

    Again, I didn’t watch.  We had a movie from the library to finish and some reading to do and I was beat.

    Nevertheless, I’ve been listening to recaps and doing a little post-debate viewing and I have a couple of comments, if only to round out the trend here.

    “Syria is Iran’s route to the sea.”

    Romney has been saying this from time to time and it is somewhat baffling.  A look at a map shows the problem—a slice of northern Iraq separates the borders of Iran and Syria, not to mention that Iran already has considerable access to the Arabian Sea.  But this is Romney’s explanation for Iran’s pumping of support into Assad’s regime, that they want to use Syria for new bases and an extension of terrorist support.  But in that case, his phrasing is a bit…strange.

    So, sure, we have a fleet in the Gulf, so Iran doesn’t actually have such easy access.  But in the other direction, from Syria, it’s the Mediterranean Sea and there are lots of fleets from Europe as well as our own presence, so how exactly would that help?

    Ah, it would put them closer to striking Israel!

    But it would also put them closer to getting struck by Israel, and the one thing you can say about Israel is, they don’t respond tepidly.

    Plus, Assad is about to be ousted.  True, we have no idea what will replace him, but since Iran doesn’t seem to be backing any of the rebel groups, we can assume they don’t see any good successors waiting in the wings, so what exactly is Romney talking about?

    Possibly he’s trying to spin this as the new geopolitical threat, that Iran has the long term goal of being the dominant player in the entire Middle East.  Tie this in with Romney’s assertion that the greatest threat we face is not Iran but Russia, and we can see a Machiavellian grasp of realpolitick in action, projecting a dominant Iran tied to an emergent Russian bear.

    Except Iran isn’t that fond of Russia and Russia is having fits with politicized Islam.  It is not a clear what exactly Romney sees changing—unless he’s assuming Russian support for Syria will transfer to Iran once Iran has secured Syrian bases…

    But there are all those European and American elements sitting there…

    Which may be why he made the statement that we don’t have enough ships!  He sees a military gap in strength should all this come to pass!

    Reagan built the famous 600 ship navy in the 1980s, which was a huge (and hugely expensive) increase in our seagoing military imprint.  Since Gorbachev was removed and the Soviet monolith collapsed, we’ve been mothballing a lot of that.

    But Reagan was also funding Star Wars and ground force build-up and all manner of technomilitary development, all aimed at supposedly facing down Russia.  What often gets lost about this, though, is that this build-up was not intended to actually be deployed against the Soviet Union other than in the way it played out.

    We spent the Soviet Union into penury.  Russia always—always—responded to build-ups in other countries by increasing their own, generally to their own detriment.  (The first world disarmament conference was called by Russia, through the minister and advisor Sergei Witte, in response to all the new spending in Europe.  They did this because Witte, as former Finance Minister of Russia, realized that Russia simply could not afford to compete.)  The Soviet Union was vulnerable to paranoia and economically incapable of matching our spending.  Reagan spent the Soviet Union into collapse.

    (Of course, by so doing, he doubled the deficit and increased the debt, something we have yet to get a handle on, but that’s another issue.)

    For all I know, Mitt Romney may have a century-long perspective of global realignment in mind in his pronouncements, but if so he’s not backed up by anyone reliable in such matters, only his own campaign staff.  Russia may well be a threat, but it will be economic, not military, and even that is a bit of a stretch as they’re still trying to figure out how to turn potential into power.

    Iran is actually contained.  This gets lost on a lot of people.  Their currency just collapsed.  The sanctions (which I normally detest) are working and overtures have been made to sit down and negotiate.  The architect of all this nonsense, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is about to lose his office under a cloud of no confidence, and there is a latent revolution just under the surface in Iran.  The Iranian people are generally not thrilled to be ruled by a theocracy and it won’t take much to unseat the clerics.  If we let this happen, if we hold back on overt action, then the Arab Spring may well bloom there and the transition will be organic.

    (This is something we seem impatient with.  Not going into Syria, doing the minimum in Libya, letting these things unfold on their own, this is a lesson we have come to the hard way.  The mess in the Middle East is largely the result of our machinations in the ’50s and ’60s and such interference is resented.  Stand back, let it happen, and support, if possible, whatever emerges, and we might undo a century of animosity.)

    My own view is that the two biggest threats we face in the coming decades are less centered on specific countries and more on fundamental demographic trends.  But if you wish to put a name to them, there are two axes to look at.  The first is India-China.  Two enormous populations that already have resource problems and a history of border eruptions.  Their competition will spill over into the Pacific and Indian basins and lead to all manner of global resource wars, sometimes fought with armies and navies.  The growing disputes between China and Japan (and Korea and Singapore) is over food resource.  Dress it up any way you care to, it comes down to protein.

    The other is Pakistan-Middle East.  This has been the problem for the last two decades.  Pakistan is a nuclear armed seedbed of modern terrorism with a real domestic problem, namely that moderate governments have notorious difficulty sitting on a growing radical population that is also strained for resources.  They are trapped between giants—India, China, the former Soviet Union—with the only natural egress through Afghanistan.  They see themselves as a global power but one that can’t feed itself and is impotent to settle simple local territorial disputes with its neighbors.

    That’s the end of my prognostications.  Basically, though, it tells me that Romney has identified all the wrong problems.  Doesn’t matter what his solutions might be if they’re applied in the wrong direction.

    So much for that.

    But, hey, the Cardinals lost to the Giants.  What could this possibly mean?

  • November’s Special

    I won’t be posting for a couple of days, so I thought I would take this opportunity to put up a new image that I’m offering for sale through November.

    Missouri Dawn

    The print will be (roughly) 11 X 14 on a 16 X 20 background, mounted on foamcore.  $150.00 plus shipping and handling.  Those interested, email me at info@marktiedemann.com for purchase details.

     

  • Romney’s Wimmin

    So Romney claims he asked for qualified female candidates for cabinet positions when he became governor.  He made it sound as if he was appalled that all the appointees were men.  They handed him “binders full of women” when he asked.

    Which is a lie.  Those binders already existed, put together by a group called MassGAP prior to his election as governor to address exactly this problem—the lack of women in high positions in state government—which were then handed to him by this group upon his election.  He didn’t ask for it, he was given it.

    He subsequently appointed women to close to 40% of his cabinet.  But if you go back and look, they were all heading departments he didn’t give a damn about.  All the cabinet posts he did care about went to men and over his four years there was major attrition of women from his administration.  (This trend reversed under Deval Patrick, his successor, and incidentally the one who cleaned up the mess Romney had left behind.)

    But the thing that struck me upon hearing that was this: after all his years in business, all the achievements he’s been touting, all the “experience” he claims he will bring to the job, do you mean to tell me that he didn’t already know ONE qualified woman to appoint to his cabinet?  That he had to ask for recommendations?

    He’s making this sound like he’s some kind of progressive—hey, I asked for recommendations for females to appoint!—but the reality is, he evidently didn’t know any.  There’s only one way that this could happen—he’s never paid attention.

    So what this really says is that he’s clueless, but if elected he promises to get less clueless.

    Wow.

  • Debate Part Dieux?

    I only want to say a couple of things about the debate (which I also did not watch, but have been listening to and reading highlights from all morning).  So, like…Obama won, did he?  Huh.

    Romney, however anyone feels about him as candidate of choice, apparently had to do a lot of backpedaling and saying things that he’s going to have a lot of trouble with if elected.  Particularly about women.

    Never mind the “binders full of women” remark, which is the kind of unfortunate remark anyone might make under pressure.

    Here’s the problem with Mitt Romney.  As president, he will be the head of the GOP.  The Republican Party has a number of things they put in its platform that are inimical to women’s progress toward full equity in this society.  Romney, in order to follow through on some of his disclaimers last night, will have to turn around and tell his party that, no, he won’t support those things.

    If the GOP retains its relative numbers in Congress—or gains control—just how likely does anyone think it will be that Romney will buck them?  (I’m asking here, I don’t know.  He does not strike me as the sort to go against his board of directors, though.)

    While it may well be a minority of the GOP that actually believes some of the nonsense that’s been spewing from their collective gobbit of recent days, the fact is that this same minority has been wagging the dog for some time now.  Romney will have to disavow them, fight them, and stand up and be forcefully reasonable in order to actually protect women’s rights.  Something he apparently gave little actual substance to last night.

    Yes, yes, I know, I should not pronounce on what I did not witness.  Fair enough.  But I’m not talking about last night per se, I’m talking about the last several months of campaigning.  Romney started losing women according to polls and modified his campaign rhetoric to compensate.  The problem is, the modifications run counter to the retrograde momentum of a great deal of the Republican Party, and that is where the problem lies.

    The other part of this is the simple fact that no matter what he says, if he gets elected, everything will change.  Obama pointed some of it up last night over the public land licensing for oil and coal.  These are the kinds of details and difficulties you can’t always predict before you sit in that chair.  Once actually in office, things Are Different.  (That is why every president ever elected has disappointed some segment of his supporters.)

    I’m delighted Obama got feisty.  Romney may well want to win the election, but I wonder if he actually wants the job.  He wants the job he thinks he’s running for, not the one he’ll actually have.  Obama still wants to be president after four years.

    But who knows?  My point here is that the presidential election this time is far more about what the opposing Parties will do rather than the candidates themselves.

    I’m cutting Obama a lot of slack on the economy, because frankly he told us it would take a long time to recover.  Things are recovering.  Naturally a lot of people are unhappy and not without reason—times are difficult—but he didn’t say it would be quick, which is usually what people want.  (And people with jobs and some security will of course be more patient than those without.)  Romney claims he knows how to create jobs.  Neither man has that kind of control over what is ostensibly a free market.  So as far as I’m concerned, it’s the rest of what Obama has been about that I’m concerned with.

    And on that score, it’s a mixed bag.  But just two things: Bush left this country with one of the worst international reputations it has had since Vietnam.  Obama has been carefully rebuilding that.  We simply cannot act unilaterally in the world today and Bush thought he could (“I don’t do nuance.” Indeed) and subsequently pissed everyone off pretty much across the board (except Israel).*

    The second thing really is the women’s rights issue.  What many people seem not to get is that this is not “just” about women, but about people—because if you can treat one segment of the population “special” and curtail their rights (pay, self-determination, personal dignity and security of person) then you can do it to any segment.  The Right has more or less successfully made it appear that any time measures are taken to redress inequity for a given group that such measures are Special Treatment and “privileges.”  Gotta hand it to them, they’ve been very, very good at this kind of 1984 newspeak.  But it’s not so and until they stop letting the right wing of the party dictate their flight path I will vote against them.  I don’t want to return us to a Leave It To Beaver world.  No, I don’t think they actually can—social engineering is never so neat and precise—but the attempt to do so, even partially successful, will result in unintended consequences that will do damage to lives that should never have been so harmed.  (Yes, some of these people I do see as the moral equivalent of the thugs who shot Malala Yousafzai. I very badly want these people out of office.)

    So.  One more debate and everyone will vote the way they were likely to in the first place.  But I believe we should be clear on why we’re doing so.

    Back to work, now.  Thank you for your attention.

    _________________________________________________

    * It may seem like a fair charge that at some point we should stop beating up on what the Bush Administration did, and in principle I agree.  We should move on.  But let’s be honest—the right wing of the GOP has been carping and complaining about the Johnson Administration since Nixon took office.  Not, perhaps, in name, but their entire direction has been more or less dictated by trying to undo what LBJ did.  Well, in my view, W did one hell of a lot more damage, so forgive us if we still point that out from time to time.

  • Some Thoughts On SF, Nostalgia, Words

    This past weekend I attended our local convention,  Archon.  It’s a St. Louis convention that’s not actually in St. Louis, for many reasons too convoluted to go into here, and this one was number 36.  Which means, with a couple of exceptions, I’ve been going to it for three decades.  (Our first con was Archon 6, which featured Stephen King as GoH, and thus was something of a media circus.  I met several writers, some whose work I knew and loved, others of whom I just then became acquainted—George R.R. Martin, Robin Bailey, Charles Grant, Joe Haldeman, Warren Norwood. Some have passed away, others are still working.)

    I go now to meet up with friends of long acquaintance, in whose company we have spent relatively little actual face-time, but who by now have become touchstones in our lives.  It’s odd having people who feel so close that you see at most one weekend a year.  Granted, the internet has helped bridge those gaps, but it’s still a curious phenomenon, one which I kind of dealt with this weekend on at least one panel.

    This year, the novel that seems to have garnered the most awards was Jo Walton’s Among Others. It won both the Nebula Award and the Hugo Award, both times beating out what I considered the best science fiction novel of perhaps the last decade, China Miéville’s Embassytown.  

    Now, please don’t misunderstand—I thought Among Others was a marvelous novel.  I enjoyed it thoroughly, was, in fact, delighted by it, and certainly being delighted is one of the chief pleasures of reading.  I do not here intend any slight on the work.

    But it took two awards that are supposed to honor the best science fiction of the year, and Among Others was barely fantasy.  (One of the things I admired about it was the line Walton danced around separating the fantasy from actual occurrence and simple perception on the part of the characters.)  It is in the long tradition of English boarding school stories, written as the diary of a girl who is somewhat isolated, who has run away from her mad mother (who may be a witch) after a tragic loss of her sister and a crippling accident.  Living with her father now, she is placed in a boarding school where her love of science fiction is one of her chief methods of coping. The novel then chronicles the succession of books she reads over a year or two, many of which were exactly the books I was reading then and loving.  It is in that sense an overview of a particular period in SF, one I found myself reliving with immense pleasure.

    Embassytown, on the other hand, is solidly SF built on a very meaty idea that plays out with intensity and provokes a great deal of thought—everything SF is supposed to do.  It is also marvelously well-written and to my mind was hands down the best of the year, if not, as I said, the last decade.

    But it lost to the Walton.

    Why?

    So I proposed a panel at Archon to discuss the power of nostalgia in a field that is presumed to deal with cutting edge, next level, philosophically stimulating ideas.  It’s supposed to take us new places.  Granted, most of it no longer does—instead it takes us to some very familiar places (after eight decades of definably “modern” SF, how many “new” places are there really to go?) and in the last couple of decades, it’s been taking us to some very old places, alá Steampunk and alternate history.  I’d never given much thought to this before as a nostalgic longing because in both cases the writers are still proposing What If? scenarios that ask questions about the nature of historical inevitability and technological destiny.  The story might well be set in 1890, but it’s not “our” 1890 and we have to come to grips with the questions of why “our” 1890 has preference in the nature of human development.

    But Among Others didn’t even do that.  It was just a recapitulation of one fan’s love of a certain era of fiction.

    Again, absolutely nothing wrong with that and I say again, Among Others is a fine novel, I unhesitatingly recommend it.

    My question in the panel had to do with the potential for exhaustion in SF.  Paul Kincaid talks about this here in an examination of two of the best Best of the Year anthologies, Dozois’ and Horton’s.  In my own reading, I’ve noticed a resurgence of old models—planetary romance, space opera, etc (Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey for instance)—where we’re seeing writers take these comfortable, familiar forms and rework them with more contemporary sensibilities, broader perspectives, certainly in many instances more skillful prose.  But the “cutting edge” seems to be occupying narrower slices of the collective SF zeitgeist.  (William Gibson, to my mind still one of the most interesting SF writers, has all but given up writing SF in any concrete fashion and is now doing contemporary thrillers from an SF perspective.  Is this cutting edge or an admission that there simply isn’t anywhere “new” to go?  Likewise with Neal Stephenson, who opted to go all the way back to the Enlightenment and rework that as SF—taking the notions of epistemology and social science and applying them to the way a period we thought we knew unfolded from a shifted perspective.)

    Kincaid’s piece talks about insularity in the field, which is not a new criticism—arguably, the recent upsurge in YA in the field is a direct response to the ingrown, jargon-laden incestuousness of the field in the 80s and 90s, where it seemed that if you hadn’t been reading SF since the early Seventies you simply would not understand what was going on—but I’m wondering if a new element has been added, that of an aging collective consciousness that unwittingly longs for the supposedly fertile fields of a previous Golden Age in publishing, an age before Star Trek and Star Wars and cyberpunk, when it was easier (supposedly) to write an almost pastoral kind of science fiction and you didn’t need a degree in physics or history or cultural anthropology to find your way.  (I suspect the tenacity of iconic worlds like the aforementioned Star Trek and Star Wars can be explained by a very common need for continuity and familiarity with a story that you can access as much through its fashions as its ideas.)

    Having just turned 58, and feeling sometimes more behind the curve both technologically and culturally, I’m wondering if, in a small way, the accolades given to a work of almost pure nostalgia is indicative of a wish for the whole magilla to just slow down.

    (The trajectory of my own work over the last 20 years is suggestive, where I can see my interests shift from cool ideas, new tech, stranger settings, into more personal fiction where the internal landscapes of my characters take more and more precedence.  And many of them are feeling a bit lost and clueless in the milieus in which I set them.  Not to mention that I have moved from space opera to alternative history, to more or less straight history and into contemporary…)

    The panel was lively and inconclusive—as I expected, because I didn’t intend answering my own question, only sparking discussion and perhaps a degree of reflection.

    SF goes through cycles, like any other art form, and we see the various subsets rise and fall in popularity.  There’s so much these days that I may be missing things and getting it all wrong.  The reason I brought it up this time is a response to the very public recognition of a given form that, this year, seems to have trumped what I always thought science fiction is about.

    I confess, there are many days I look back to when I first discovered SF, and the impact it had on my adolescent mind (and the curious fact that when I go reread some of those books I cannot for the life of me see what it was about them that did that—no doubt I was doing most of it for myself, taking cues from the works) and when I first thought about becoming a writer.  It does (falsely) seem like it would have been easier “back then” to make something in the field.  Such contemplation is a trap—you can get stuck in a retrograde What If every bit as powerful as the progressive What If that is supposed to be at the core of science fiction.

  • Yes, It Is My Birthday

    I take partial responsibility.  After all, my parents had more than a little to do with it.

    I usually forget my birthday until the week before, when everyone starts reminding me.  This year, though, I’m paying a bit more attention because, well, I’m here to have one.  That was, for the first time ever, more than an academic question recently.  So for that I am grateful to many people, most of whom I do not know and may never see again—doctors and nurses and even some folks who thought good thoughts without my knowing—and for the love of my friends.

    I have pretty much everything one could ask for out of life.  The one thing that would make this just super cool would be to have some publisher offer me a significant amount of money to publish one of the books I have on offer.  I trust that will come eventually.

    I’m most especially pleased that I have Donna.  Still.  Always.  She’s one seriously wonderful human being.  I love her and I am still baffled that she loves me.

    So, to everyone, thank you for your birthday wishes.  You strangers out there who read this, if you want to do something more than wish me happy birthday, go buy one of my books, read it, and rave about it on your own blog or on Amazon or wherever. (If you choose REMAINS, you’ll make my publisher happy, too.) But even so, thank you, thank you, thank you.

    I’m going to a convention now.  Have a great day.

    Celebratin’

  • My World of Tomorrow

    This weekend I’ll be attending the local science fiction convention, Archon.  I’ve only missed a couple of these since 1982, when Donna and I went to out very first SF convention, Archon 6. Stephen King was guest of honor and we got to meet many of the writers we’d been reading and enjoying, some, at least in my case, for many years.  Until that year I hadn’t even known such things happened.

    Science fiction for me was part of the fundamental bedrock of my life’s ambitions.  Not just writing it or reading it, but in a very real sense living it.  It is difficult to recapture that youthful, naïve enthusiasm for all that was the future.  The vistas of spaceships, new cities, alien worlds all fed a growing æsthetic of the shapes and content of the world I wanted very much to live in.

    I’ve written before of some of the aspects of my childhood and adolescence that were not especially wonderful.  My love of SF came out of that, certainly, but it was altogether more positive than merely a flight response from the crap of a less than comfortable present.  I really thought, through a great deal of my life, that the world was heading to a better place.  I found the informing templates and ideas of that world in science fiction, in the positivist philosophy underlying so much of it.

    And I liked that world!

    It was not a world driven by bigotry or senseless competition for competition’s sake.  It was not a world where deprivation was acceptable because of innate fatalism or entrenched greed.  It was not a world that lumped people into categories according to theories of race or economics that demanded subclasses.

    True, a great many of the novels and stories were about exactly those things, showing worlds where such attitudes and trends dominated.  But they were always shown as examples of where not to go.  You could read the paranoid bureaucratic nightmares of Philip K. Dick and know that he was telling us “Be careful, or it will turn out this way.”  We could read the dystopias of a Ballard or an Aldiss and see them as warnings, as “if this goes on” parables.

    You could also read Ursula Le Guin and see the possibilities of alternative pathways.  You could read Poul Anderson and see the magnificent civilization we might build.  You could read Clarke and glean some idea of how people could become more than themselves.

    You could see the future.

    And what did that future offer?  By the time I was eighteen I knew I wanted to live in a world in which we are all taken as who we are, humans beings, and nothing offered to one group was denied another just because.  I recognized that men and women are equals, that our dreams and ambitions are not expanded or diminished by virtue of gender.  I understood that building is always more important than tearing down.  I discovered that Going There was vital and that the obstacles to it were minor, transitory things that sometimes we see as too big to surmount, but which are always surmountable.

    Sure, these are lessons that are drawn from philosophy and science and ethics.  You can get to them by many paths.  I just happened to have gotten to them through science fiction.

    I envisioned a world wherein people can engage and interact with each other fearlessly, without arbitrary barriers, and we can all be as much as we wish to be, in whatever way we wish to be it.

    So imagine my disappointment as I watch the world veer sharply in so many ways from that future.  A world where people with no imagination, avaricious or power hungry, people of truncated and stunted souls are gaining ground and closing those doors.

    There is a girl in Pakistan who may yet die.  She’s 14 years old and she was shot by the Taliban because she dared to stand against them.  She assumed her right to go to school, something the Taliban refuse to accept—females should not go to school—and rather than engage her ideas they shot her to silence her.

    In our own country we have men in places of power who think women shouldn’t have the right to control their own bodies, others who opine that maybe slavery wasn’t so bad after all, others who deny the legitimacy of science because it contradicts their wishes and prejudices.

    This is not the world I imagined.  Why would any sane person deny anyone the right to an education?  How could the community around this girl even tacitly support this idea?  This is so utterly alien to me that it is incomprehensible.  This is evil.  This is not the world of tomorrow, but some kind of limpet world, hermetically sealed inside its own seething ignorance that, like a tumor, threatens everything that I, for one, believe is worth while.

    So I write.  I write stories and I write this blog and I write reviews and I write and I talk and I argue.  It is disheartening to me how many people use their ignorance as a barrier to possibility, to change, to hope.  I can’t help sometimes but think that they would have benefited in their childhood from more science fiction.

    I still have hope.  It still comes from the source well of my childhood imagination, that we can build a better world.  If that’s naïve, well, so be it.  Harsh reality, unmitigated by dreams of beauty and wonder, makes brutes of us all.

    See you at Archon?

     

  • Affirmative Action Revisited (Again)

    This will be brief.  The Supreme Court is set to hear another case about affirmative action in education.  A Texas student was not accepted for the University of Texas and has claimed that the only difference between her and other students who did get in is her skin color—she’s white.

    Now, by all accounts, she is an excellent student.  According to UT, though, she wasn’t good enough.  They use two metrics to select enrollees—academic scores and what they call “personal achievement” indices, which include extracurricular activities and an essay which is supposed to reveal leadership potential and other qualities that can’t be scored on a test.  UT claimed her academics just weren’t good enough.

    I don’t know the particulars of her case, but one thing that always seems to be left out of reports about this sort of thing is any mention of the value of “higher education.”

    To put it simply, if the entire worth of a college education was about academics—what you learn in the classroom, how well you learn it, and how that fits you for life after schooling—then the critics of affirmative action are absolutely right.  The best qualified students should always have first dibs on places in good colleges and universities.  Smarts should count above all else.  If you’re a straight A student with an I.Q. through the ceiling, there should be no reason to bar you.  Racial quotas would in that case be pointless, because the only thing that would matter is a provable command of knowledge and the capacity to apply it.

    What never gets mentioned—and which I suspect everyone knows—is that the value of a college degree has almost nothing to do with that.  Maybe at one time it did, but no longer.

    What that degree gets you is entreé.  It’s the Old School Tie, the Secret Password, the Letter of Introduction, the Inside Edge, and has nothing to do with how smart or knowledgeable you may be.  That degree gets you preferred treatment in the game of life.

    At least, it used to.  Currently, not so much, although it still provides an edge in the job market.

    In that case, affirmative action is absolutely necessary, because businesses will use any basis to cull applicants, and a degree from a good college or university is an easy one.

    If you can’t get into the school in the first place, you are starting out in second or third place, and if you can’t get in because of ethnicity, well…

    Yes, it’s more complicated than that, especially today, but it is not irrelevant as the critics of affirmative action claim.  Because these schools do not admit only the best.  There are a lot of legacy enrollments, students who get in because they have an alumni card to play, and others who get bought in because their families are rich and maybe endow the school.  Academics have little to do with that and let us not even begin to talk about athletic scholarships that in many instances are even more divorced from intellectual ability.

    (I have no doubt that a significant majority of students in any college are there by virtue of ability.  We aren’t talking about the middle 70% but the people who bookend those students—the privileged and the underprivileged.)

    So.  If the game were all about what you do in the classroom, then I agree, affirmative action serves no useful purpose (after all, if it were all about the brains, skin color would be just as irrelevant as any other non-academic factor).  But since we all know—even if we won’t actually talk about it—that it is about prestige and a kind of club membership, then affirmative action is absolutely necessary.

    You might wonder how I can say these things about our wonderful higher education system.  I’m glad you asked.

    Personal experience.  I’ve worked with, worked for, and had working for me a number of college-degreed people.  I never found them to be superior, in the fields in which I worked, than someone trained on-the-job, as it were—in fact, all of them, without exception, required on-the-job training since their much-ballyhooed degrees had not taught them what they needed in order to actually work in their fields—and in several instances I found them below acceptable ability.  And arrogant about it.  (“I have a B.A. from SmartAss U!  What do you mean I don’t qualify?”)

    (What college and university provide is a place and an opportunity to learn.  For the dedicated scholar, it is one of the most ideal environments in which to expand knowledge and interact with people who can help you hone your intellect.  But to society, that seems not to be the important thing.  People who attend and take no degree are seen somehow as failures.  It’s the degree, because everyone implicitly knows that this is the magic key and what you actually know has no intrinsic value to anyone else until it manifests as positive contribution.  You don’t get to show that without the job and you all-too-often don’t get the job without the ticket.  It’s not how smart you are but how smart other people say you are.)

    Human history can be tracked in many ways, by many trends and institutions.  Club Membership has always been a preferred method of keeping the so-called Masses out of the halls of privilege.  Brains rarely had anything to do with membership.  University affiliation is just one of those ways to keep “undesirables” out.  It has been used to keep women out, keep minorities out, keep the “lower orders” out.  Heaven forbid some kid from a slum demonstrate higher intelligence and better grasp of the material than the spit-polished scion of an old money family!  Why, next you’ll be advocating (gasp) democracy!

  • You Would Think…But No, That’s Too Hard

    I thought I might write about something other than politics this morning, but some things are just too there to ignore.  But perhaps this isn’t strictly about politics.

    Representative Paul Broun of Georgia recently said the following.  I’m pulling the quote from news sources so I don’t get it wrong.

    “God’s word is true. I’ve come to understand that. All that stuff I was taught about evolution, embryology, Big Bang theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of hell. It’s lies to try to keep me and all the folks who are taught that from understanding that they need a savior. There’s a lot of scientific data that I found out as a scientist that actually show that this is really a young Earth. I believe that the Earth is about 9,000 years old. I believe that it was created in six days as we know them. That’s what the Bible says. And what I’ve come to learn is that it’s the manufacturer’s handbook, is what I call it. It teaches us how to run our lives individually. How to run our families, how to run our churches. But it teaches us how to run all our public policy and everything in society. And that’s the reason, as your congressman, I hold the Holy Bible as being the major directions to me of how I vote in Washington, D.C., and I’ll continue to do that.”

    His spokesperson later tried to explain that this was off-the-record in a speech to a church group and the representative was discussing his personal beliefs.  What are we to make of such a statement?  That the representative really doesn’t believe what he said?  That he was lying to the church group?  Or that he’s lying to the citizens of Georgia about what he really believes when he is “on-the-record”?

    Now, aside from that, there are two things about Broun and this that trouble me.  One, he’s actually a physician.  Which means that he should know better.  (But I don’t actually know what that means in this context anymore.)  And two, he sits on the science and technology committee, along with another great light of biological science, Todd Akin, who seems unclear on how women’s reproductive anatomy works as well as apparently believing you can perform an abortion on a woman who is not pregnant.

    It’s not like the rest of the folks on that committee are particularly inspiring, either, but the others focus on environmental science to misunderstand.

    The committee’s chair,  Ralph Hall from Texas, also has a habit of invoking the deity in denying the findings of science.  (Obviously he’s a Republican, since they are the majority in the House and committee chairs are always chosen from the majority party.  I wonder how many people actually understand that.  But I digress.)

    Here is what bothers me.  We have the tool in hand to investigate and understand the world we live in.  It’s called science and its methods are nonpartisan.  Science, practiced honestly, doesn’t care what Party you belong to, where you stand on fiscal policy or trade imbalances.  It is concerned with all that precedes policy and only gets involved with policy when people start basing it either on the findings of science or for some reason wish those findings to be other than they are.

    What it has a very difficult time dealing with is entrenched stupidity that is paired with a power base.

    “All that stuff I was taught about evolution, embryology” and so forth is what gives us the medical expertise we are currently both enjoying (because it works) and having so much trouble deciding how to pay for.  Genuine lies and nonsense do not work.

    Except, apparently, in politics.

    Now, it is true, I do not believe in god.  There is a reason I don’t and it’s a long and convoluted story, but it began with people like Representative Broun basically lying to me about reality.  The reason I will rely on science rather than his nonsense is because I see that science gives me answers that, in a word, work.  What science describes is borne out by experience and more and more we see that, while sometimes (often) scientists get things wrong, the overall result is that we know why things happen and are learning more all the time.  All people like Representative Broun are saying, stripped of the holy-roller palaver, is “I don’t like what science tells me so I’m going to deny it and tell you that you don’t need it.”

    This may seem like an academic argument.  What difference does it make if Broun says it’s god and a scientist says it’s evolution?

    Normally, I’d say it doesn’t make much difference, but here is someone who has a position of power, someone whose opinion determines policy, someone whose policy decision could cost lives.  It is irresponsible of the citizens of Georgia to elect what amounts to an myopic ideologue who can hurt millions of people because he doesn’t accept reality.

    You do not have to abandon your belief’s in the supernatural in order to accept evolution—millions of believers do this every day.  But you do have to ignore what’s around you to keep voting for someone who is more concerned with convincing you that the world is some other way than it really is than in serving the people competently.

    It amazes me how often these days I encounter Republicans who shake their heads and bemoan the state of their Party, claiming that “those morons aren’t real Republicans.”  Maybe not and I’m more than a little inclined to believe them.  But they then continue to vote for these people.  Why?  Because they’re Republicans and they’re loyal to their Party.

    Maybe it’s time to rethink that?

  • One or Two Observations on Last Night’s “Debate”

    Okay, I confess, I did not watch the debate between Obama and Romney.  In my opinion, it doesn’t count for much.  I’ve been listening to both sides now since last spring and I’ve made my decision, so exactly what good would listening to the debate do me?  Or for a committed Romney supporter, for that matter?  None to speak of.

    So, observation number one:  I’ve never known anyone who changed their vote because of something in the debates.

    That doesn’t mean people haven’t, it’s just that, in the 40 + years I’ve been paying attention, I’ve never met anyone who changed positions because of anything said during one of these.  In my opinion, these are just 90 minute infomercials, a restating of positions, and a jockeying for Gotcha Points.  They will doubtless be relevant to historians at some future date.

    Listening to the reactions today, however, has been both entertaining and enlightening.

    For instance, one conservative (self-identified) commentator I heard said that “Well, the fact checkers were on Obama’s side even if the facts weren’t.”

    Hmm.  This is close thinking?  Even grading on the curve, a lie is a lie, a misstatement a misstatement, a misrepresentation just as misleading, and there are a number of fact checking organizations today that do a very good job at tracking this stuff.

    For instance, here’s one that tracked Romney’s misleading statements.  The worst of the bunch was his continued claim that he hasn’t proposed a five trillion dollar tax cut.  The numbers do not support him.

    Also, there’s a bit of fast-talking sleight-of-hand even in what he said.  He claimed he intends to provide a 20% tax cut across the board.  Then he claimed that his number one principle is “no tax cut that adds to the deficit.”  Five trillion or not, those two things are utterly incompatible.  Right now, any tax cut will add to the deficit.  People who think he did well because he presented well may have missed that.

    (I know, I know, this is more of that trickle-down nonsense, that if people have more of “their own money” the economy will grow.  it still doesn’t address the people who have no money or the fact that people who have a great deal are not redistributing it effectively in this country.)

    But even this is beside the point.  If you’re a Romney supporter going into last night, likely you still are.

    Observation two:  Hardly anyone remembers the first debate.  Those wondering why Obama didn’t unload on Romney (there’s plenty there in his ammunition box) should just be patient.  Why give the opposition anything to fuel new ads with?  Obama laid back, played a bit of rope-a-dope, and (my prediction) will lay into Romney in the last debate.  Meanwhile, he just has to stick to his record.

    But in any case, people remember the last debate, which is the one that provides the final snapshot they will all take with them into the voting booth.  So to say Obama blew it is missing the point.

    Observation three:  Rarely are these things actual debates.  You want a debate, you sit the candidates down in a room with a camera and microphone, allot them three hours, and let them go at it.  These formalized Q & A sessions give both candidates too much wiggle room to simply campaign a little more.  It’s not an honest debate.  It’s an airing of positions and demonstration of how well each can duck hard questions or zing the other with a punchy one-liner.

    (The next one is supposed to be a town hall format, which might yield some more relevant and honest responses, but even these are so heavily vetted that I don’t expect any surprise questions that flatfoot both of the candidates.)

    Observation four:  If people think they can “catch up” with all this by tuning in the debates, they’re wrong.  You don’t even keep abreast by watching the ads or listening to stump speeches.  You have to read, you have to look things up, you have to pay attention to what the Parties are doing.  And if anyone believes they have caught up by watching the debates, well…

    One small ancillary observation.  A critic this morning pointed out that Romney kept accusing Obama of “wasting” 90 billion dollars on alternative energy programs, an accusation Obama simply refused to answer.  The conclusion of one pundit was that he couldn’t, because it’s true.

    Two things.  Research costs money.  This is why private firms are continually cutting their R & D departments, because they are seen as sinkholes that add nothing to dividends.  (They are also doing it because they have more and more relied on government to pay for basic research.  When the government signs a contract with a big firm for a new whattayacallit that requires development, the company doesn’t pay those costs, the government does, and more and more the government funds basic R & D at all levels.  No one seems to know this.)  Investment in research and development, however, is absolutely crucial and the funding that has supposedly been “wasted” has paid to advance basic knowledge, keep teams of scientists and engineers afloat, preserve a basic substrate of intellectual reserve that without such funding would be lost.  The “waste” is a misnomer because it assumes that the end result, the goal, is profit.  This is a serious mistake.

    But the other thing is that when the government pumps money into things like this, they are pumping money into our economy.  Waste?  Ninety billion dollars just got reinvested within our borders.  Out of that paychecks were made, communities kept together a bit better, dollars were distributed to Americans.

    None of which matters to people who think that if your dividends don’t go up next quarter then the project is a failure.

    Anyway, I thought I’d explain why I tend not to watch the debates.*

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    *I did watch the GOP debates last year.  I wanted to get some idea about the candidates with whom I was less familiar.  But once the front runner was sorted out, further debates don’t matter that much. In my humble opinion.