Why I Pay No Attention to Politics

This morning I encountered a headline in the Columbus, Dispatch blasting out, "GOP blasts mailings; Democrats blast spending."  Who can take seriously people who communicate via blasting?

Of course, the politicians in question didn't blast their opponents.  This is merely the editor's effort to drum up interest in his/her reporter's story.  Still, the story did refer to "dueling media events."  Did the politicians brandish swords or is this simply more media drivel?  More media drivel.  But the fact is that political discourse has dwelled in the muck for many years now, going back at least to the time of Nixon.

In the story in question, we get more blasting combined with the funniest thing I have seen in politics in years, a Republican complaining about "irresponsible, disrespectful untruths" from Democrats.

House Republican leaders blasted recent Democratic mailings, which Rep. Matt Huffman of Lima, the House GOP campaign chairman, called a “pattern of irresponsible, disrespectful untruths.”

Forgive me for telling the truth here but Republicans began the dirty tricks in politics with their vicious attacks on Dukakis (if not sooner)until finally the Democrats started fighting back.  Not surprisingly, it was Clinton who did so, thanks to the advice of James Carville who argued that no charge should go unanswered for even a day.

In my opinion, Obama has made a mess of his Presidency.  I beleive he may really have believed his election presaged a new day in politics where reason would replace rancor.  Silly duck.  And now his Presidency is circling the drain.  Only a huge Republican screw up can save the Democrats in November and in two years.  The Republicans are fully capable of that.  They are, after all, the party of tea parties and Sarah Palin.

As long as there are Republicans there will always be irresponsible, disrespectful untruths.

Will Twitter and SMS Messages Kill Serious Communication

I was asked the question posed in the title of this blog and was somewhat puzzled as to why one might think that communications restricted to 140 characters would somehow cause us to cease to be able to write serious communications.  I then encountered the link associated with the title of this blog wherein it is said

Those that say that text-writing is not ruining communication are not living in the real world. I have heard from many freshman writing professors at colleges who complain about their student's writing. Why hasn't this been addressed before they reached that point? Why isn't anyone telling kids that it is not acceptable to write the same way for an academic paper as it is to write to your friend.

Of course, it is inappropriate to employ the same writing style in a term paper or exam as one uses in a sms or twitter message.  But the problem is not that writing sms and twitter messages is harmful per se.  The problem is that teachers are insufficiently stressing the importance of using formal language in writing test answers, essays, job applications, and anything else meant for adults, including especially people one needs to impress.

I think many adults who are being dragged into the world of electronic, non-voice communication find these highly abbreiated messages somehow offensive in and of themselves.  The writer of hte previsiously quoted passage goes on to say

Personally, when my teenage daughter leaves me notes on the table expressing that she will "C U L8R," I cringe. I actually circle the inappropriate language and leave her a note telling her that I expect a better note than that. 

This is some ugly stuff, no doubt but it is easy to figure the meaning out.  But if the mother thought that this was too abbreviated, I wonder what she would make of a famous telegraphic exchange between Oscar Wilde and his publisher.  The former sent the message "?"  and the publisher replied "!".  Each knew what the other was saying -- "How is the book coming along?" and "It is coming along well."


I agree that the very ugly abbreviations one finds in twitter messages and text messages can be quite off-putting to novices (such as myself).  But they are, after all, abbreviations for words, not substitutes for them.  They are no different from the messages doctors write on prescriptions such as "b.i.d." or "a.u." or "cc."  I think we ought to be a great deal less happy with this sort of communication than the abbreviated texts of sms and twitter messages.  The unfortunate thing about this is that if we could understand exactly what doctors are writing on our scripts, then we could catch any errors the pharmacies or, for that matter, the doctors make.

There is a positive side to the writing of sms and twitter messages.  Anyone attempting to obey the 140 character limit (rather than simply sending one sms message right after another) will inevitably learn to craft succinct messages.  This is a good thing.  All writing is improved by developing succinctness in expressing oneself.  And writing is improved simply by writing itself and what we are seeing from our children is vastly more writing being done now than in several generations.

Wearing a Burka in Public

I just saw a news story coming from the BBC describing a case in which a woman wearing a burka in Novara in north-western Italy was arrested. The wearing of a full face covering in public places that prevents identification was made illegal in Italy as part of an anti-terrorism effort. The lower house in Belgium has just passed, with no dissent, a law against the wearing of burkas in certain public places. The French moved in this direction in 2009 but no law was passed as far as I know.

Now, there is nothing specifically linguistic about this of course except that a law banning a "full-face covering" would be one thing and a law banning a "burka" using these phrases specifically, would be interpreted very differently. A law mentioning the latter would constitute religious discrimination. A law banning the former would not even though it could have the same effect.

There are huge cans of worms lying about here. What about a child wearing a ghost costume that covers the face, as well as the rest of the body? Or, more seriously, the wearing of balaclavas in very cold weather, something that I have done. Compare the image of someone wearing a balaclava (upper photo) with one of someone wearing a burka (lower photo).

It seems pretty clear to me that the person wearing the balaclava is a woman but I could be wrong.  That's less clear in the case of the burka.  However, either garment would be very effective in concealing one's identity in a store robbery.  Persons wearing burka's have committed crimes, as in a case in Bradford, England where two persons pistol-whipped a post office manager in a daylight robbery.  Of course, the balaclava is the standard covering for those wishing to commit crimes without giving away who they are.  There is a nice cartoon at cartoonstock.com in which an alien is depicted wearing a balaclava.

What we have here are items of clothing with significant symbolic meaning.  In my mind, balaclavas signify something a bit disreputable -- when I wear mine when going out to a football game in November, I do not put it on until I am on campus where there is a good chance I will not be perceived as someone about to commit a stick up.  Burkas obviously signify that the wearer is a Muslim.  The problem with them is that to many non-Muslims, it signifies a woman under the control of a man.  In the Italian case, the husband demanded that his wife not take the burka off.  This kind of marital relationship is offensive to many non-Muslims such as me.  Of course, to outlaw the burka would be a brute force way of expressing one's disfavor and wouldn't change the relationship between husband and wife.  Burka's also, thanks to the association of head coverings like this to Muslim terrorists, signfy the possibility of danger.  Two males wearing burkas covering vests packed with explosives in Afghanistan were shot dead before they could detonate the devicies.

Making it illegal to wear a burka/balaclava in the commission of a crime would not deal with the public safety issues raised by the wearing of such items of clothing.  In the case of a robber who is later caught you could stick a few more years on the ends of his sentence.  But, there is no similar punishment available to the successful suicide bomber.  The the only recourse the society has is to make the wearing of either item illegal in public.  In Quebec, when bill restricting the wearing of burkas was announced, it was said 

This bill has nothing to do with religion, and everything to do with integration and equality.

This is, of course, bullshit.  Such an argument would make sense if it applied to all wearing of all ethnically identifiable clothing. As I noted, banning burkas doesn't change marital relationships so its not clear what sort of equality is achieved by banning them.

To my mind, there is one and only one sound reason for banning wearing of burkas and, for that matter, balaclavas, in public and that is to promote public safety.  It is not often that a Muslim woman wearing a burka is going to be blowing up anything anywhere, but as in the Afghanistan case, burkas can be worn by men who wish to exploit the fact that women rarely commit crimes of violence.  Adding the balaclava to the burka in one's law makes sense for they too have been used to conceal the identities of persons committing crimes and it rids the law of any association with anti-Muslim bias.  I will find another way to protect myself from the cold in the future if such a law is passed.  And, I can still wear mine at home when snow-plowing.  However, it is not clear to me that the public safety issue is worth the trouble a law like this would create.

Toyota Apology

I have been trying to find the full text of Toyota's apology for the safety problem that has finally resulted in a massive recall of their vehicles for repair of their accelerators.  Sadly, I fear the full text  consists of this:

“I offer my apologies for the worries,“ [Akio Toyoda] said. “Many customers are wondering whether their cars are OK.“ 

This is shockingly inadequate, as so may apologies these days are.  This lays the problem entirely on  the consumer -- consumer worries and wondering whether their cars are OK, not on Toyota's manufacturing defective cars and its failure to respond immediately to the problem once it was brought to their attention.

This is like the ubiquitous, "If I have offended you by [my saying that you are a fat cow], I am sorry."  This sort of aplogy does not apologize for calling the person a fat cow but for offending him or her, which is entirely different and is consistent with the idea that the listener's being offended is his or her problem, not the speaker's problem.  Mr. Toyoda could have said, "I am sorry that we made defective cars and put your lives in jeopardy," but he didn't.  What is worse, we have here a classic example of "too little; too late."  State Farm reported the problem to the NHTSA in 2007.  Even more disturbing is the fact that NHTSA was getting complaints about acceleration problems in Toyotas in 2003. I have to believe Toyota was the first to know about it but chose to put its head in the sand.  The recall is going to cost $900 million by one estimate.  And they are losing something like $1.55 million per week in sales.  No wonder putting their heads in the sand seemed attractive.

I own a 12-13 year old Toyota pick up that has served me well.  And my wife has a Rav4.  She is a little concerned that she will have accelerator problems.  Her fears are due entirely to the fact that Toyota has been totally unforthcoming about exactly what cars, made when are vulnerable to the problem.

What Was Alan Alda Thinking?

My wife and I just finished watching Alan Alda's PBS thing on the "human spark."  He's a smart guy and funny but what was he thinking when he endorsed the notion that there is a "human spark?"  And what were these Harvard and Oxford and other scientists thinking?

I have had some experience with media sorts and they are very fond of "hooks" that one can use to snag an audience and keep it.  The hook this time is the notion of a "human spark" -- something we have but that chimps and no other species (on this planet) have.  This is a terrible metaphor.  We know that it takes a spark to ignite gasoline fumes in an automobile cylinder and that this is the most proximate cause of the piston's moving downward thereby assisting the engine in its effort to ...  I don't want to get into automobile stuff.  I would be way out of my depth.  However, I am inclined to think that the evolution of those human qualities that distinguish us from chimps and other life forms might be just a bit more complicated than this metaphor makes it out to be.

The terrible thing about this metaphor is that it works better for "sophisticated" intelligent design people than for Darwinists.  If intelligent design people are willing to concede that we and the chimps have a common origin, they need only then say, "Aha, Alda is with us.  We are the life forms god sparked into humanhood by causing us to be capable of forming complex intentions, recognizing complex intentions in others, and imagining future actions."  Unsophisticated intelligent design people need only say that God dropped us on the planet pre-sparked.

The show actually admitted that chimps are capable of forming intentions and recognizing intentions in others (but not as well as we do).  About the future, they don't seem to think too much but to suppose they can't think about the immediate future is absurd.  Indeed the show proved otherwise as when it was argued that alpha males may choose to share with females based on attempting to curry favor with them.  Back in the day when I followed research on chimp linguistic development, I formed the view that the researchers who did this work were not always the sharpest academic tacks.  In my view, they tended to be so empathetic with their research subjects that they were willing to think things that just might not be true.

In the show, the human spark seemed to be whatever "sparked" the conjoint abilities to "read other's minds and travel in time," as Alda put it.  Let me show you a picture they showed of the areas of the brain that light up when these two abilities are activated.  Notice that these two parts of the brain are not adjacent.  Two questions arise in my mind: how did a single spark ignite abilities requiring two different parts of the brain to be be realized and how is it that so much of one part of the brain manage to be recruited for this realization.

Perhaps I am being a bit too simplistic here but I am not at all sure that these two abilities are so different.  If a crucial feature of humans, one shared by chimps, is our socialization then thinking about the future -- making plans for the future -- must crucially have involved making plans in connection with others.  And making plans in connection with others would seem to require an ability to form views as to others' intentions.  A Harvard professor did note that both abilities involve escaping one's present point of view.  I can imagine that being able to escape one's present point of view could have been a precursor to the gradual evolving of these abilities over a very long time.