Yeah, the working class = middle class thing is a bit bizarre, if indicative of where American society has been going for a while. If I recall, about half the people who were asked if they were among the richest 20% of the country said that they were. It's mind control through inaccurate self-esteem.
Ditto on the unions thing. Even if unions are an evil (which I don't think is reasonable), they're certainly a minor one compared to the alternative.
This just makes me sick.
I've been a member of several different UU congregations over the years, and of them all, the one that was the *least* effective at conveying a sense of social and personal responsibility, understanding, and acceptance-- the UU belief system, if you will-- was the most overtly religious.
No doubt the "you don't believe exactly what we do, therefore you are heathen dogs" test is next on the agenda.
Though I don't believe that the question of whether religion-bashing (or Christian-bashing) is or has been significantly damaging to the cause of American liberalism is one that any of us can answer definitively, I do know that it has caused strained relations between several of my best friends over the years; and this is between people who are no longer actively religious. But while I understand why my friend who groups all Christians together feels the way he does (he grew up in Dallas, Texas, and still hasn't told his father that he's gay), at various points in time his behavior has really hurt another of my friends, who was raised Christian and only abandoned her faith towards the end of college.
That said, while I deplore my first friend's insensitivity on the issue of religion, I'm hesitant to judge him too harshly, because I once nursed similar prejudices. I'm not religious myself, but I attended a religious high school, and though I attribute much of my former intolerance to my being an arrogant teenage ass, I doubt that I would have ended up being quite as asinine about it if I hadn't been subjected to inane chapels once a week and otherwise intelligent classmates acting as if their religious principles were axiomatic.
Since escaping to college, I've met many people for whom I have great respect who also happen to be religious (I know at least one of them is a reader of Teresa's blog), and while I'm a fairly skeptical agnostic, I both admire and envy them their faith. I believe that much of the new testament's advice regarding human behavior is valid and sensible, although I certainly don't follow it as often as I'd like to.
It's late, and I suspect that this post has wandered away from its original point, but I suppose I'm attempting to make a plea for compassion, understanding and decorum, as saccharine as that sounds. Lis Carey, Patrick, Teresa, and others who hold religious convictions should not be treated as if they were part of a monolithic group that is hostile to reasoned thought; not only is it unkind, it's just not true. I doubt that anyone here would actually defend Marc Maron's statements, and I get the feeling that a great deal of energy and hostility is being expended on a debate over an issue that few of us will be able to influence in any significant way except by taking care to improve our own behavior towards others and perhaps suggesting to others, as gently as possible, that they might be able to improve theirs.
And on that note, good night.
Alan-
I must confess that while I don't expect that the difficulties of translating from a private idiolect would be as difficult as those involved in translating from an unknown language, I can't imagine that 'easily cracked' means the same thing to me as to you. Then again, you're also assuming multiple messages and all kinds of context being available to the analyst.
Would you care to enlighten us with sources and references? I, for one, am curious as to how easily cracked allusive messages really are.
Re: Alan Bostick's reply to my paragraph on jargon and idiolect, Jonathan Miller got my meaning exactly. Simple word substitution is, of course, as easily cracked as Alan says.
And of course, the "Family" links are chilling. It's amazing to me that an organization whose doctrine of unity boils down to the idea that wealth and power justify themselves bother to veil its members' desire for control with religion-- but I suppose it started out that way, and probably wouldn't be half as effective at bringing in and keeping its recruits if it was more explicit about its priorities...
The general erosion of privacy and the ability to keep secrets is something that’s been in the air for a while, and while I’d certainly like to believe that optimists like Gibson and David Brin are right in suggesting that a world without effective barriers to the transfer of information will eventually empower the public, I find that I agree most strongly with the last paragraph Patrick quotes.
I’ll try to keep this succinct (I’ve been thinking about this for a while) and only bring up a few points regarding the filtering of information, context, and suchlike.
The saying goes that data drives out information, information drives out knowledge, and knowledge drives out wisdom; and in a world as saturated with misinformation and triviality as the one we live in, it’s easy to imagine that searching for significant information in the news or government disclosures could become a Sisyphean modern version of Poe's The Purloined Letter, with horrifying projects hidden in plain sight, buried beneath tons of memos about nothing in particular which are written in identical bureaucratic language. It doesn’t matter if you have the best library in the world at your disposal if it’s not sorted or indexed in a way that lets you find what you need or want, and I expect the future will become even more data- and information-saturated than the present, with a corresponding loss to our ability to keep abreast of current events. I’m not certain if we really will be able to see what’s going on more quickly, at least if people are clever enough about how the conceal what they're doing.
Also, with regards to context and the ability to make sense of something taken out of it, the use of jargon and private references can often encode communications and impede effective interception more thoroughly than actual cryptography, if the interceptor has no means of getting the references being made. I wouldn’t want to be an analyst trying to decode a message written in coded allusions to a childhood fantasy world, for instance, or something obscure that happened to the writer in junior high school, and deliberately constructed jargon could be just as hard to decode.
Finally, I expect that as people get wise to the security risks involved in information technologies like computers and suchlike, that sensitive information won’t be digitized or kept around in the form of memos. Trying to piece together the trail of a secret operation (or what have you) will come to resemble reverse-engineering an engine by seeing what feeds into it and what comes out of it without ever opening the black box it’s locked inside-- not impossible, but protentially hellishly difficult, especially if the person who built the black box did so with the intent to frustrate comprehension. It may take some time for things to reach this pass, but even with perfect informational transparency on an electronic level, people can still hold secrets inside their heads, and feint and otherwise mislead others into believing that they’re doing things they’re not.
Given the game-theoretic advantages to calculated deception and defection, and the fact there are probably dozens of other ways to subvert informational transparency that I haven't even thought of, I doubt that anything like a truly open society will ever come into existence, despite what the optimists might say.
MKK wrote:
"My own mother said to me perfectly sincerely that even people of Asian ancestry born in this country, who've lived here all their lives, have accents that make them difficult to understand."
Somehow this strikes me as horribly amusing as well as awful, because when I was growing up in Hawaii, several of my asian friends (I'm half Chinese, myself) spoke with accents. Several of them started out as affectations, and sounded vaguely British, but by the time they graduated from high school, they had become an inescapable part of how they spoke.
I only ever had problems understanding what one of them was saying (very rarely, I might add), and I think that was because her mother would only speak Korean to her at home.
Graydon--
While I see your legal and ethical point with regards to the prosecution and execution of the southern leaders as traitors to the Union, I’m not certain that your extension of it to include all the ‘supporters’ of the south would have been either advisable or practical.
Leaving aside the prickly issue of how ‘supporters’ would have been defined and how one could prevent that definition from being abused, none of those engaged in this conversation were alive contemporaneously with the end of the civil war, and while that (potentially, at least) gives us the advantage of perspective, it also estranges our understanding of the post-war political situation from that of the men on the ground. The best-researched history in the world cannot make up for the intuitive comprehension of a situation that someone who has been immersed in it for years possesses, nor can that kind of understanding (inevitably limited and biased) make up for the perspective given by a broad historical overview. Second-guessing the decisions of Lincoln and his advisors in the wake of the civil war strikes me as a largely futile academic exercise.
That said, being of a decidedly academic bent, I’d like to make a few points about the destruction of cultures and your theory that the victorious North did not do its best to annihilate the slaveholding culture of the South. ;)
In general (I’m afraid I don’t have any well-documented historical references at hand at the moment), most instances in which a conquering culture managed to obliterate or assimilate the culture of a conquered people involved either a willingness to destroy or co-opt the monuments and institutions of the conquered or so crushing a superiority in technology (usually, but not exclusively military) that the conquered were willing to transform their own society in an attempt to reach parity with their conquerors. In either case, the goal/end result was the transformation of the culture of the conquered into a form distinct from what it was before they were defeated. In its heyday, the Roman Empire was particularly talented at effecting this kind of transformation among conquered tribes.
There were several necessary conditions for this kind of assimilation, however, not least of which was that the culture to assimilated had to be distinct from that of their conquerors. If it wasn’t, then what was necessary wasn’t cultural assimilation, but the destruction of the political agents and forces that had turned a society against itself.
The American Civil War is problematic in that while the culture of the South was somewhat distinct from the culture of the conquering North, they were both part of the same overarching culture, so some degree of both cultural assimilation and political suppression would have been required to bring the South “in line” with the North. The war itself was a mechanism of political suppression, and like you, I believe that it was not prosecuted to its logical conclusion, in that secessionist congressmen and senators were not executed or barred from taking further part in local or national politics upon its conclusion.
As a military problem, however, the destruction of the South’s culture would have been all but impossible to effect. Most instances of militarily-inspired cultural assimilation occurred before the advent of mass literacy, freedom of speech, and the industrial age. It’s much easier to destroy a culture wholesale when the people who remember it can’t publish memoirs glorifying it or send inflammatory telegram messages across the continent or overseas. In such a situation, even if you kill everyone who actively supported the perpetuation of the culture, if there was any public support for those people or the culture at all, some portion of the ideals of that culture will linger about even under the most repressive political apparatus. Witness the revival of nationalism in the former Yugoslav republics and the USSR.
Kip Manley appears to have headed me off with regards to my point about Reconstruction being the actual critical point in the transformation of the South’s culture, so I won’t waste any more words hammering that point home, save by pointing out that a military solution is rarely the optimal means of dealing with what is fundamentally a social problem.
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