Saturday, December 03, 2022

Patterns

The other night at dinner, I suggested to two of my grandchildren that pretty much everything they need to know about the world can be reduced to numbers and words.

The context was a conversation in which they were complaining about school, homework — and most specifically — math.

Maybe the greatest problem with math education for our children is its failure in real time to demonstrate math’s relevance to their lives.

The grandchildren at dinner that evening are bright, engaged kids who do well in school, including in math. But they seem to hold the opinion that most numerical topics are too abstract to spend much effort worrying about.

I’m no educational genius and I don’t actually know how to address their doubts about math but one of the silly games I often play with them at dinner revolves around each day’s date.

For example, yesterday’s date using the American style of shorthand was 12/2/22, a one followed by four straight twos. In a few weeks we will reach a Thursday on 12/22/22, a one with five straight twos.

Last month we had a date that can be expressed in both the American and European shorthand as 11/11/22. And that was only one of twelve such dates over this entire century of some 36,524 days!

Those 12, of course, are the specific dates when the month and day are identical and add up to the last two digits of the year, i.e., starting on 1/1/02, through 11/11/22, and ending up on 12/12/24 a few years from now.

It’s silly but it seems to at least elicit giggles from the kids at an old man’s strange fixation with dates.

And sometimes it also opens up musings about the beauty and synchronicity of the numerical patterns that are all around us, if we only look.

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Friday, December 02, 2022

Where Go the Outcasts? (Afghan Conversation 49)

 This is the latest in a series of conversations I have been having with an Afghan friend about conditions in his country since the Taliban took power in August 2021.

Dear David:
I have been living with my relatives in Helmand for four years now. But it is very difficult and uncomfortable to live in somebody else’s house, so I decided to look for a place of my own. I called a friend who has an empty house but he said he cannot rent it to someone who is single and lives alone. 

Next I asked a man at one of the local markets who has a house available. He said that he has, but “sorry, our houses are only for families." I visited several other places in recent days, but always faced the same answer – no houses for a single person.

These days, Afghanistan is a bad place for anyone who is different from the perceived norm, especially anyone who is from a religious or gender minority. I, of course, am Hazara, a minority despised by the Taliban. It is almost impossible for people like me to settle here unless they choose the religion and lifestyle of the local people. For example, according to the old men, in the past more than a thousand Sikh families lived in Helmand province alone, and they had many shops in Lashkargah city. 

But now not one Sikh family is found in the whole city of Lashkargah, because they got tired of the oppression they faced. They left Helmand one by one. Gurban, who is now 60 years old, says that during the first rule of the Taliban in 1996, the Sikh people were persecuted mercilessly. The Talibs believe that Sikhs are dirty, and some people did not eat food with them, and when people passed by the Sikhs, they would spit on them. 

The same problem plagues people with alternative gender identities. One day, I was walking in one of the busy streets of Kabul. In front of me, a group of eight or nine teenagers were walking behind a handsome young boy and laughing at him. It seemed that they were teasing the boy. The boy was wearing stylish men's clothes, but his behavior and movements suggested he was LGBT. After that incident, wherever I saw that boy, I greeted him in a friendly way, but people's sharp looks and nasty laughs were always surrounding him. 

In the Taliban’s Afghanistan, the bullies are in control. The rest of us are at their mercy.

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Thursday, December 01, 2022

Locking Up the Poor

Today’s top stories are reactions to New York City’s plan to round up its homeless population. “NYC Mayor Adams faces backlash for move to involuntarily hospitalize homeless people,” reports NPR.

An additional perspective comes from Alec Karakatsanis here on Substack:

“Eric Adams, the New York Times, and the Definition of Insanity.” He points out that cops will now be able to detain people who will then receive “unwanted and forcible medication in a locked setting for an indeterminate time. Police will do all of this even if the person ‘posed no threat to others’.”

The report critiques the way the city’s leading newspaper is covering the matter: “(A) lengthy New York Times article on homelessness and mental illness is astonishing for what is missing: the article does not contain a single mention of the root causes of homelessness. It does not mention affordable housing, poverty, inequality, real estate developers, or government policies that created or that could fix homelessness. It contains not a single mention of extraordinarily effective interventions like cash transfer programs targeting people at risk of homelessness. 

“Nor does the article contain a single mention of universal access to preventative health care, of the massive divestment in our society from mental health care, or of the root causes of mental illness.  A person reading this article would leave the article entirely uninformed about either the causes of the problems or the range of effective, simple interventions that politicians who actually care about solving them could employ.”

I recommend that anyone concerned about homelessness, drug addiction, mental illness and criminal justice carefully read this analysis.

And it is also worth noting that Eric Adams is a Democrat. Elected officials from both parties will pander to the public’s fear of crime, whether justified or not, whenever it helps to consolidate their hold on power.

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Wednesday, November 30, 2022

Sharp Right Turn

(NOTE: I first published a version of this essay a year ago on 12/1/2021. The recent takeover of Twitter by Elon Musk, and his apparent intent to turn it into a right-wing propaganda channel, makes this piece newly relevant.) 

“Never’s just the echo of forever.” — Kris Kristofferson

One of the more insightful conservative writers, David Brooks, has seen the future of the Republican Party’s base and it is not a pretty picture. In his article “The Terrifying Future of the American Right” (Atlantic), he describes the scene at the recent National Conservatism Conference in Orlando.

Young conservatives — by definition the future of the party — blame the Left for basically everything they consider wrong with our society. In particular, they see left-wing control of the academy, the media including social media, and the “surveillance capitalism” tech sector, coalescing into what they view as an all-powerful cultural elite.

Without questioning their assumptions, but having been at least a marginal part of all of those sectors for decades now, it is a little bit difficult for this objective observer to perceive their apocalyptic vision of an all-powerful Left, though I realize objectivity is neither a characteristic nor a goal of the sharp edge of this country’s right flank.

It is ironic and sad that a key aim of the youthful conservative movement is to establish the dominance of Christianity as our national religion.

As Brooks notes, that simply isn’t going to be happening. In his words, “America is becoming more religiously diverse every day. Christians are in no position to impose their values—regarding same-sex marriage or anything else —on the public square.”

By contrast, social, racial, cultural, and gender diversity are all seen by the hard right as left-wing plots instead of the genuinely democratic achievements they clearly are. But again, the rising right wing in America is not concerned with truth but with power. And those are two distinct matters.

I cannot in good faith recommend Brooks’s piece to anyone who wishes to remain optimistic about the closing of the political divide in the U.S., because there is no appetite for that among the people he witnessed outside the giant theme park in Orlando.

Like Christianity as the state religion, an authentic political consensus isn’t going to be happening anytime soon in today’s America.

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Tuesday, November 29, 2022

Sorting Seaglass


 

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Clash of Truths

I first published an earlier version of this essay two years ago in December 2020.

"You're right from your side / I'm right from mine," Bob Dylan wrote in one of his more obscure songs. Similar sentiments from other artists capture the convoluted nature of mutual truth that we all seek in one way or another.

And this raises a particular dilemma for journalists as we attempt to cover corporate and civic affairs for the public. Thus our methodology. I should elaborate.

I remember an incident from our "Circle of Poison" investigation in the 1970s and 1980s. I was focused on the moral aspect of U.S. companies shipping banned pesticides to Third World countries, which exposed farmworkers and their families to health risks, and led to more pollution of the environment, which of course knows no borders.

At an international gathering of people concerned with this issue in Mexico, including many who worked at chemical companies, a representative of Dow Chemical approached me and said, "I understand your concern but what's wrong with helping a hungry world eat?"

His point was that even if the pesticides were considered too dangerous for us here in the U.S., food scarcity was such in poorer countries that such compromises made sense. After all, at least in the short term, pesticides boost food productivity.

His comment got me thinking and we started investigating what crops the hazardous pesticides were being applied to. That research led to a breakthrough in our analysis, as almost all of the crops sprayed in Third World countries did not go to local people but were "export crops" destined to end up right back here in the U.S. with you and me.

This completed the "circle" in our analysis and guaranteed the book would cause more waves than it would have had we solely focused on the impacts overseas.

Thus did an industry representative help us complete a major piece of our investigation. My guess is that he didn't know himself what the pesticides were used for; he just assumed they were part of an effort to boost local food production.

This example is why we always counsel students and young journalists to probe all sides of the issues they investigate. Environmentalists and worker safety activists may have one perspective; manufacturers and farmers may have another; regulatory agencies may reflect yet another point of view.

In the interest of achieving the highest quotient of truth possible, journalists have to consider whether everybody might be right at the same time. In my example, the guy from Dow was right -- there’s nothing wrong with helping hungry people get food. The environmentalists are right -- pesticides harm the environment. And the regulators that push for more sustainable methods of agricultural production are right about what's best for the long term.

Maybe that is one of the keys to good journalism, or an honest inquiry of any type. Maybe we should always be searching for the ways everybody can be right in one way or another. Maybe then we will get to the Venn diagram of the matter.

Of course, inevitably, this approach has its limits. We have to make choices. Some things we do because they are the right thing to do. 

Morality has to trump the profit motive when it comes to sustaining life on earth.

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Monday, November 28, 2022

Life Without Borders.2

 I first published this essay a year ago, late in 2021.

“Not so different.” 

That is the way to describe any of our lives in the end. But the specific details differ at some moments and so do our perceptions of each other’s lives.

For months I have been serving as the English-language outlet for the voice of a young man trapped in Afghanistan. To date, I have published 18 of what I’ve variously described as letters from — or conversations with — him.

As for the specific details, his life must seem quite different from the lives of my readers. He is a member of the Hazara minority, which has long been despised and discriminated against by the dominant groups in Afghanistan, particularly the Pashtuns, who make up the bulk of the Taliban now in control of his country.

Most Hazara are Shia, not Sunni Moslems, whereas the Pashtuns are overwhelmingly Sunni. The internal Islamic conflict is similar to the Catholic-Protestant conflict of centuries past.

Over the years that the Taliban built up and finally seized control of the country, they recruited alienated members of other ethnic groups, especially the Tajiks, Uzbeks and Turkmen to join their ranks. 

But most Hazara stubbornly remained resistant to Taliban control.

Therefore, since late August when the Taliban seized power in Kabul, life has been especially difficult for the Hazaras. Some have been summarily executed by Taliban fighters now in control of the roads and checkpoints simply for being Hazara, or for being openly critical of Taliban rule.

Many others live in fear of suffering a similar fate if they venture out or speak their minds.

No single group currently lives under that kind of blatant threat in the U.S., although the widespread racism, homophobia, misogamy, anti-Semitism, anti-Islamic and other hateful ideologies just below the surface of American society require our constant vigilance lest they burst out into the open again at any point.

Here at least anyone can speak his or her mind, for now.

But my Afghan friend also is educated, thoughtful and skeptical of organized religion, centralized power, capitalism — all of the major forces that shape our lives here and around the world.

The majority of humanity lives under the control of despotic rulers — not democratically elected leaders — though few are subject to as harsh extremes as the Hazards face from the Taliban.

So those of us in the (relatively) free world need to remember how despotism can rise and overwhelm the peaceful, thoughtful, skeptical, educated minority by exploiting the ignorance, prejudice, fear and misperceptions of the masses — overseas but here as well.

The would-be despots among us would have you believe that our differences in age, race, gender, religion or lack thereof, class, occupation, status, orientation, belief system, education, location, appearance are actual threats.

But we are not all that different, really. The great majority of people want peace and freedom and to live with dignity. 

And it is never too late to remember that.

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