For my money, Alien was either No. 1 or No. 2 on my list of all-time scariest movies. (The other is The Exorcist.)
The conception of the title character is key to that horror and so, looking into the mind of the artist HR Giger, is a journey you don’t want to take when the sun is down. These plates from a posthumous collection of his work are just a taste.
So, what’s the CCPC up to?
Road Trip to Standing Rock to support the Water Protectors: NextGen Ohio is organizing one. If you think you might be able to go click here. This Road Trip is considerably longer and bolder than the one’s we took in the spring. If you end up going please contact us to get a free CCPC t-shirt.
The Ancestors are with us: Last Thursday in the midst of the standoff the Standing Rock Sioux were praying for help when suddenly a herd of Wild Buffalo appeared in the distance. ” The Ancestors are with us ” said Myron Dewey who took video of the event that you can see here.
Wondering what Hillary thinks of the standoff? So far the only thing she’s said is that both sides need to come together to find a solution. Really? Our Revolution is suggesting she take a much different approach. To read the letter they are sending her and to add your name to it if you agree click here.
MoveOn’s Campaign Against Hate: Will be canvassing from 9 am to 9 pm this weekend and Monday and Tuesday at numerous locations around the county to make sure that Donald Trump Does Not Become President! To find the event nearest you click here.
Kasich sends Ohio State Troopers to help stop protests: Unbelievable but true! Wonder if this decision has anything to do with the huge campaign contributions Continue Reading »
Why isn’t the Democratic Party landsliding the worst and cruelest Republican Party in the past 162 years?
Just take a glance at their record votes and you’ll wonder why the Republican representatives don’t just incorporate themselves and be done with any pretense that they are real people.
A brief look at a compilation of Republican votes during the years 2011-2012, when the Republicans controlled the House, demonstrates that they regularly choose Wall Street over Main Street, drug and oil, banking and insurance companies over consumers. And that Republicans want tiny enforcement budgets against corporate crime to assure that hundreds of billions of your health and other consumer dollars are not recovered from the corporate criminals ($60 billion a year alone in business frauds on Medicare).
Repeatedly, these Republicans, often a unanimous 100 percent of them, in a bizarre kind of corporate-conditioned response, vote in favor of corporations shipping American jobs overseas rather than voting to protect American workers. This Republican-controlled congress was intent on defending and increasing massive tax breaks for the wealthiest at the expense of the lower income families, attacking Medicare, Continue Reading »
So, I had several long conversations over the weekend trying to make sense of the latest news out of FBI Director Steve Comey. I’ve turned the news every way I can think of and I just can’t buy into all the conspiracy theories coming from both the Republicans and the Democrats.
I think Comey is being honest and we just can’t warp our heads around that. This morning cartoonist Scott Adams made his case.
Some say Comey is a political pawn in a rigged system. By that movie script we can explain why he dropped the initial email case. But we can’t explain why he’s acting against Clinton’s interests now. What changed?
Well, some say Comey had to reopen the case against Clinton after discovering the Weiner laptop emails. If he failed to act, there might be a revolt at the FBI and maybe a whistleblower would come forward. But that leaves unexplained why Comey detailed to Congress how Clinton appeared to be guilty of crimes at the same time he said the FBI was dropping the case. If Comey had been protecting Clinton on the first round, he would have softened his description of her misdeeds, wouldn’t he? But he didn’t seem to hold back anything.
No he doesn’t. Only if you look at Comey as an honest actor, with no political axe to grind, do his actions become reasonable. Adams continues.
[N]one of those hypotheses explain why the people who know Comey have high regard for his integrity. Comey also has the security of a 10-year appointment as Director, so he has a low chance of getting fired or politically influenced. That’s exactly why the job has a 10-year term. Given what we know of Comey before any of the Clinton emails, any movie that casts Comey as an ass-covering weasel is probably making a casting mistake.
So allow me to offer an interpretation of events that casts Comey as more of a patriot and hero than an ass-covering weasel. Compare my interpretation with whatever movie you have in your head and see which one works best for explaining and predicting.
My movie says Comey had good evidence against Clinton during the initial investigation but made a judgement call to leave the decision to the American public. For reasons of conscience, and acting as a patriot, Comey explained in clear language to the public exactly what evidence the FBI found against Clinton. The evidence looked damning because it was. Under this interpretation, Comey took a bullet to his reputation for the sake of the Republic. He didn’t want the FBI to steal this important decision away from the people, but at the same time he couldn’t let the people decide blind. So he divulged the evidence and stepped away, like the action hero who doesn’t look back at the explosion.
In the second act of this movie, Comey learns that the Weiner laptop had emails that were so damning it would be a crime against the public to allow them to vote without first seeing a big red flag. And a flag was the best he could do because it was too early in the investigation to leak out bits and pieces of the evidence. That would violate Clinton’s rights.
But Comey couldn’t easily raise a red flag to warn the public because it was against FBI policy to announce a criminal investigation about a candidate so close to election day. So Comey had a choice of either taking another bullet for the Republic or screwing the very country that he has spent his career protecting.
In this movie, Comey did the hero thing. He alerted the public to the fact that the FBI found DISQUALIFYING [Emphasis in the original, JH] information on the Weiner laptop. And he took a second bullet to his reputation.
I’m still voting for Jill Stein and the Republicans and Democrats can eat their young.
My father, a very wise man, told me that becoming an overnight success requires years and years of work. Paul Beatty, winner of this year’s Man Booker prize for The Sellout, was rejected 18 times—which pale before James Lee Burke’s 27—before a publisher took a chance.
How did Beatty become an overnight success, by doing exactly what my father said had to be done:
What do other people do? How do they write? Is there an easier way? No. I’m sorry, but there is no magic trick. You’ve just got to put your butt in the seat.
Winning the Man Booker (or any literary prize) is as easy as 1.) put your butt in the chair, 2.) write and 3.) repeat. Anyone who tells you differently is either a fool or a liar.
There is a Buddhist adage: Before enlightenment, chop wood and carry water; after enlightenment, chop wood and carry water. Now that the prize is won, what will Beatty do?
I’ve got no idea how winning the Man Booker prize is going to affect my writing life, but I’m about to find out. I’m told that I might be invited to new places, that I might have to figure out how to write while I travel. I usually need to be somewhere for a long time before I get acclimatised. I’ve done a couple of little residencies, but I just sit there looking around me for a while.
Right now, though, the prize means a lot. It’s so nice to have someone appreciate what you’re doing. So I’m figuring it out and I’m excited to see what’s going to happen, or not. It’s an insane, insane honour.
Butt, chair… write… repeat…
Often when I tell someone that I’m a writer they gets this dreamy look in their eyes and tell that they wish they could be a writer. I don’t attempt to disillusion them, but in my mind I want to say: “No you don’t. You want to have written in the same way your present self wishes that your parents had punished your former self by making you practice the piano two hours every day.”
Being a writer, someone who has written, is great. Writing sucks.
INTERVIEWER: Is there anything else you can say to beginning writers?
SIMENON: Writing is considered a profession, and I don’t think it is a profession. I think that everyone who does not need to be a writer, who thinks he can do something else, ought to do something else. Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness. I don’t think an artist can ever be happy.
INTERVIEWER: Why?
SIMENON: Because, first, I think that if a man has the urge to be an artist, it is because he needs to find himself. Every writer tries to find himself through his characters, through all his writing.
INTERVIEWER: He is writing for himself?
SIMENON: Yes. Certainly.
INTERVIEWER: Are you conscious there will be readers of the novel?
SIMENON: I know that there are many men who have more or less the same problems I have, with more or less intensity, and who will be happy to read the book to find the answer—if the answer can possibly be found.
INTERVIEWER: Even when the author can’t find the answer do the readers profit because the author is meaningfully fumbling for it?
SIMENON: That’s it. Certainly. I don’t remember whether I have ever spoken to you about the feeling I have had for several years. Because society today is without a very strong religion, without a firm hierarchy of social classes, and people are afraid of the big organization in which they are just a little part, for them reading certain novels is a little like looking through the keyhole to learn what the neighbor is doing and thinking—does he have the same inferiority complex, the same vices, the same temptations? This is what they are looking for in the work of art. I think many more people today are insecure and are in search of themselves.
There are now so few literary works of the kind Anatole France wrote, for example, you know—very quiet and elegant and reassuring. On the contrary, what people today want are the most complex books, trying to go into every corner of human nature. Do you understand what I mean?
INTERVIEWER: I think so. You mean this is not just because today we think we know more about psychology but because more readers need this kind of fiction?
SIMENON: Yes. An ordinary man fifty years ago—there are many problems today which he did not know. Fifty years ago he had the answers. He doesn’t have them anymore.
And in 2016?
I’ve been told that I’m a Johnny On The Spot kind of guy. When presented with a task that I can deal with in less than five minutes, I do the task. I even have a phrase for such tasks on my Daily Action lists: Two-Minute Drills. (No, I’m not a football fan, I just like the phrase.)
Reading Oliver Burkeman this morning I’ve discovered that there is a real term for this: precrastination. All of this sounds like a really good personality trait, but Burkeman has other thoughts. In Precrastination, he writes:
The special danger of precrastination is that, unlike procrastination, it doesn’t feel naughty. When you’re putting off revising for an exam by doing BuzzFeed quizzes, say, you’re nagged by the knowledge that you ought to be working. But clearing the decks—answering emails, tidying the living room, running a few quick errands—feels virtuous. It often isn’t, though. Partly that’s because the decks won’t ever be clear: there’s always more email to answer, more preliminary research you could do, more specks of dust you could wipe away. (Classic Onion headline: “Plan To Straighten Out Entire Life During Weeklong Vacation Yields Mixed Results”.) You’ll also be using up energy on the wrong things, postponing the most important ones to when you’re depleted.
I’m dealing with a bit of this as I write. I have piles of empty boxes and tubs of papers, books and files that are weighing on me. Last night I assembled no less 18 packing boxes so that I can put all the items in the tubs into smaller boxes that I can deal with one at a time. Maybe that will work, but, as Burkeman suggests, when I finish the task I’ll be so depleted that I’ll just want to watch YouTube videos.
So what to do?
The best solution I’ve discovered is to stick to a simple rule: don’t clear the decks first, clear them second. If your job permits it, schedule a daily deck-clearing hour – but at 4.30pm, not 9am. Switch your weekends around so that chores get done last (but assign a specific time, otherwise they won’t get done at all). And whenever you catch yourself thinking, “Let me just get these little things out of the way first”, consider the possibility that you’d be better off not bothering. Some don’t need doing at all, while others can wait. It’s time to abandon the secret pride we precrastinators feel in having completed 25 small tasks by 10am: if they’re not the right tasks, that’s not really something to be proud of.
Fair enough Oliver. One hour—1515-1615—a day, when possible, to clearing my decks. We’ll see how this goes.
If the Cleveland Establishment forces—you know them—can’t back a $15 an hour wage then they shouldn’t tax the first $15 an hour of pay. Or even the minimum Ohio wage of $8.10. That would be the first $16,848 ineligible for the city tax.
That would be called FAIRNESS.
At $15 an hour, a 40-hour week and a 52-week year would total $31,200 in income. If you discounted the tax on the $15 an hour, most Cleveland workers wouldn’t pay a dime in income (payroll really) tax. Wealthy people, of course, have many sources of income that are NOT taxed by the city’s so-called city income tax. Nor are there any deductions. You pay the full cost.
Then with exemptions you’d have to tax the high rollers more or stop giving away public dollars to private interests.
The more you give them, the more they’ll find ways to take. It’s never ending.
In Cleveland the push is on to raise the city’s income tax 25 percent from 2 to 2.50 percent on every dollar you earn, starting with the very first buck.
Don’t be a sucker November 8th and vote to increase your own taxes. The politicians already do that to you enough.
Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump tapped into this resentment; revealing people are more than upset. They’re angry. They have the right to be.
Why do they even need these extra bucks? Reason: they’ve been giving away too damned much to sports teams, to developers and to other building owners.
Cuyahoga Count passed a sales tax increase to build a new convention center, a fake medical mart and now a sure money-losing grand 600 room hotel.
The latest figures in September show $49.2 million in receipts from the quarter percent sales tax effective January 2015.
That comes out of your pocket. Same with the Arts & Culture cigarette Continue Reading »
So, this weekend—because I’m a writer and Free Speech is not only important, the concept is vital to me— I’ll be immersed in PEN* America’s lengthy report: AND CAMPUS FOR ALL Diversity, Inclusion, and Freedom of Speech at U.S. Universities.
You’re probably not quite so deep in the weeds as I am, but Matt Taibbi has that covered in Free Speech Might Be Another Victim of This Election. Taibbi writes:
Last week, PEN America, an organization traditionally dedicated to the protection of literature and free expression, issued a sweeping, 100-page report on speech issues on American campuses.
The report’s main conclusion might be that journalists aren’t careful readers. The headlines on much of the coverage of the report’s release centered on a single passage (emphasis mine):
“PEN America’s view, as of October 2016, is that while the current controversies merit attention and there have been some troubling incidences of speech curtailed, there is not, as some accounts have suggested, a pervasive ‘crisis’ for free speech on campus.”
Many outlets seized upon this line. Some interpreted the report to mean that there was not only no speech crisis on campus, but that the mere suggestion of such was a conservative canard.
My university years are so last century. I walked away from the campus life in 1984 with my B.S. in Journalism securely in my hand. In recent years, that experience seems to have changed a great deal.
The massive amount of anecdotal detail in the report – covering everything from an incident in which an English professor was sanctioned for asking students to define the word “pornography,” to the extraordinary fact that up to a third of all students are “unaware that free speech is addressed by the First Amendment”—leave the reader without any doubt that PEN was trying to address a serious issue.
What people don’t like is being offended. They think, wrongly, that the way to curb, or even eliminate, offensive speech is to ban the practice outright.
They are monumentally wrong.
One of the markers for adulthood is the recognition that, sadly, candy-pooping unicorns aren’t real. Another is that not everyone agrees with you and that disagreement is a fact of life for adults. There are no safe-space fairies protecting us with magic dust. The correct, adult, response to offensive speech is more speech. Full stop.
Taibbi pivots on the topic and zeroes in on our current lightning rod of offensive speech: Donald Trump.
This report’s timing is important, for a perhaps unexpected reason. The aftermath of the Trump campaign will leave us facing some very thorny questions as a nation, particularly in the areas of speech and media freedoms.
Clearly, we’re entering a new era in our national attitudes toward such principles. The issue has gone beyond campuses.
The rise of Trump’s rightist/white supremacist movement in the population at large, coupled with the emergence of a young generation that sometimes sees the term “free speech” as a stalking horse for right-wing politics, may lead to a radical reversal in our posture toward certain once-cherished civil liberties.
Historically, the embrace of free speech has been understood as going hand in hand with progressive politics. In the past, the people who tested the boundaries of free speech protections were almost always countercultural heroes.
From Lenny Bruce to Dick Gregory to Richard Pryor, from Janis Joplin to Tina Turner to Ice Cube to Prince, from J.D. Salinger to Nabokov to Hunter Thompson to James Baldwin, if you were considered oversexualized, profane or a candidate for censorship, you had the automatic approval of most politically active young people.
The culture war from the dawn of the Civil Rights era onward pitted a wave of disillusioned youth against lacquered phonies like Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and Anita Bryant, who all pledged loyalty to an America that never existed.
People who don’t want to be bothered with defending free speech, people who think we should make If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all a national motto, need to grow up. Being an adult is tough. The alternative is far tougher.
Taibbi concludes:
Trump is almost certainly going to lose in a few weeks, and lose huge at that. People who believe in free speech as an absolute will see in his defeat a validation of their beliefs. The more we talked about Trump, and the more we let him run his mouth, the less appealing he became. He should be the classic example of bad speech defeated by better speech.
But not everyone will see it that way. Young people in particular will see an unacceptable near-miss that will scare them into being convinced that our highest ideals don’t work on their behalf, and are just a shield for rich bigots. Could we suck any worse at proving to the next generation that we still stand for anything?
Will we?
*Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists and Novelists
You may have noticed in the Plain Dealer and from twitchy, excitable TV anchor personalities that our hero LeBron James hinted, wouldn’t it be wonderfully generous if fans were given free ice cream. It would be to celebrate the opening of the World Series for the Cleveland Indians and the distribution of championship rings for the Cleveland Cavaliers. All happened last night.
“It’s going to be great,” James said, according to the exuberant Plain Dealer, “Like I said from a fan’s perspective, is there any better way? I don’t know, having an ice cream truck outside both arenas (I guess he means the baseball stadium) at the same time as well—the icing on the cake. It’s great.”
If you’re paying the prices being quoted for seats at the stadium I’m not sure a free ice cream is much icing.
It’s more like saying, here’s a bonus, sucker.
James, you may know, is earning $30 million this year ($33 and $35 millions subsequent years) and expecting another $44 million in endorsement money.
That buys a lot of ice cream.
Other Cavs don’t do badly either: Kevin Love $22.6 million; Kyle Irving $18.8 million; Tristan Thompson $16.4 million; and Iman Shumpert $10.3 million this year.
Who do you think provides the means to pay these sums?
You do.
(The sin tax, paid in Cuyahoga County, raised $240.5 million first 15 years, $135 million second 10 years, expected $240 million in present 20-year extension. As of end of September, the sin tax has a balance of $14,569,811. Lots of cream.)
Sports of all kinds have become a massively subsidized business—welfare clients.
Yes, give them ice cream!
If anyone truly wants to end welfare, as many politicians desire, they should start especially with major league sports. They will find the greediest of corporate Continue Reading »
I have long attended to the notion that we notice that which we pay attention to. Others see this as coincidence or perhaps some deep secret, but, as a writer, this is my normal lot. Oliver Burkeman, writing in How to think about writing for The Guardian, draws our attention to the views of Steven Pinker.
What’s the secret to writing well? As I’ve said previously here, an awful lot of people seem to think they know, yet their “rules for writers” are almost always (pardon the technical linguistics jargon) bullshit. For example, “Show, don’t tell” is frequently bad advice. In the right context, the passive voice is fine. Elmore Leonard’s most famous rule, “Never use a verb other than ‘said’ to carry dialogue”, is sheer silliness. Even the sainted Orwell’s rules are a bit rubbish: the final one is, “Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous”, which means his advice is really just “Don’t write barbarically”. So it doesn’t bode well that the psychologist Steven Pinker is to publish his own advice book, The Sense Of Style, later this year. Judging by a recent interview at edge.org, however, this one might be different. Writing, Pinker points out, is inherently a psychological phenomenon, “a way that one mind can cause ideas to happen in another mind”. So one place to begin is with actual psychology.
One of my first writing teachers was Daniel Keyes who taught short-story writing at Ohio University. Keyes was not a fine arts major, but rather studied psychology at Brooklyn College. We had a minor connection in that he had served in the Merchant Marine and I in the Navy. We had a few talks while I was an undergraduate and he showed me how understanding the way people think makes you a better writer. That lesson led me to also realize that I, and a lot of other writers, do what we do because we’re trying to figure out how we think, or, in Pinker’s case, to where we focus our attention.
Burkeman continues:
The key thing to realise, Pinker argues, is that writing is “cognitively unnatural”. For almost all human existence, nobody wrote anything; even after that, for millennia, only a tiny elite did so. And it remains an odd way to communicate. You can’t see your readers’ facial expressions. They can’t ask for clarification. Often, you don’t know who they are, or how much they know. How to make up for all this?
Pinker’s answer builds on the work of two language scholars, Mark Turner and Francis-Noël Thomas, who label their approach “joint attention”. Writing is a modern twist on an ancient, species-wide behaviour: drawing someone else’s attention to something visible. Imagine stopping during a hike to point out a distant church to your hiking companion: look, over there, in the gap between those trees – that patch of yellow stone? Now can you see the spire? “When you write,” Pinker says, “you should pretend that you, the writer, see something in the world that’s interesting, and that you’re directing the attention of your reader to that thing.”
That is a great metaphor for my own goal in creating Have Coffee Will Write.
Burkeman concludes:
This isn’t a “rule for writers”; it’s a perspective shift. It’s also an answer to an old question: should you write for yourself or for an audience? The answer is “for an audience”. But not to impress them. The idea is to help them discern something you know they’d be able to see, if only they were looking in the right place. Happily, this also makes writing easier. “We never feel any difficulty when we are pointing out something directly perceptible to somebody next to us,” Turner and Thomas say. “We are built for this.” Understood this way, writing isn’t a performance, a confrontation or a matter of ramming information into someone else’s brain. It’s the writer and reader, side by side, scanning the landscape. The reader wants to see; your job is to do the pointing.
So, how’s your perspective?
The sense that our long national nightmare is only beginning is growing.
James Nevius, reporting in Could a third party with actual power be Donald Trump’s next political move? for The Guardian, writes:
Back in August, when Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump began consulting with Roger Ailes and hired Breitbart CEO Stephen Bannon to head his campaign, it was widely seen as Trump’s first move in shifting his focus away from actually running for president and instead leveraging his name into a media empire. His son-in-law Jared Kushner’s recent overtures to LionTree, a bank with a history of media investments, has only furthered that speculation.
But what if a Trump News Network is just one part of the master plan? What if, in addition to a new Trump media empire, he’s preparing his followers to coalesce into a brand-new Trump political party?
I have refrained up until now from jumping on the Trump is our Hitler bandwagon, but a Trump political party? Consider who would jump to join. Just as Hitler’s Brown Shirts were not his real power base, so too are the Trumpists tools for real power behind Trump: the One Percent and those seeking to join their ranks.
We don’t need to go to Germany in the 1930s however. We have a model closer to home. Neviusr continues:
Trump has convinced his most ardent supporters that this year’s presidential contest is rigged. Well, in 1876, the election actually was rigged, and the aftermath of that contest sheds light on what could happen in America in the next few years.
The 1876 election pitted New York’s Democratic governor, Samuel J Tilden, against Rutherford B Hayes, the former Republican governor of Ohio. On election night, some southern states, including Florida and Louisiana, tried to throw the election to Hayes, even though it was clear that Tilden was winning. Moreover, when the electoral college met in December, three states submitted fraudulent returns, which meant that neither candidate had a majority. Ultimately, a special Election Commission voted 7-6 along party lines to appoint Hayes to the presidency.
Not surprisingly, there was widespread disgust both with the election and “the seemingly endless procession of scandals emanating from the nation’s capital”. This could easily describe the mood of voters today on both sides of the aisle.
All of this should turn our attention away from 9 November 2016 and toward what we might wake up to on 7 November 2018.
Picture what could happen in 2018 if a Trump Party – its voters fueled by a 24-hour-a-day Trump News Network – makes significant inroads in the House. It will make the Tea Party’s resistance to Barack Obama seem tame by comparison. The Tea Party, at its heart, is about Constitutional originalism and has generally operated within the framework of the Republican party.
A Trump Party will have no such strictures. Since Donald Trump doesn’t seem to understand the Constitution or care about the Republican brand, it’s likely a Trump Party won’t have any qualms about simply blowing up Washington and watching it burn—while all of it is gleefully covered on Trump News.
Yesterday I listened to a podcast of Ralph Nader interviewing Noam Chomsky one a range of topics, but I was particularly taken by Chomsky’s analysis of how protest in the United States over the past 50 years has effectively shifted our political landscape for the better. Chomsky says that while the outcomes have not been what was wanted, the protest were able to bring about much less horrible results than might have been the case if no protests had happened.
A Trump party is not a certainty, but the Trumpists will rise if everyone assumes their a bunch of idiots led by an rascist—they’re not—and does nothing. Neviusr concludes:
Imagine a Trump Party that first makes significant inroads in 2018 in congress, and then runs a presidential candidate in 2020—could this third party candidate restrict Hillary Clinton to just one term? Both Rutherford Hayes and Lyndon Johnson declined to seek renomination. Could a Trump Party make it so difficult for her to govern that she simply throws in the towel?
If that’s the case, Trump will have vaulted himself from being a New York City real estate tycoon to a major figure in American political history. And while politics in Washington will grow even more polarized, Trump’s legacy will be secured, which is the only thing he truly cares about.
We can’t just imagine. We need to act.
Years ago one of my rabbis taught me that the opposite of love is not hate but rather indifference. If we can’t be loved, we’ll take someone hating us over being ignored. One of the thoughts I’ve had in recent years is that the smart phones both isolate us from attention and simultaneously bathe us in attention. Each like is someone noticing us while we are surrounded by peers ignoring us because they too have their faces in a screen jonesing for an attention hit.
Oliver Burkeman, writing in We mustn’t ignore attention-seekers for The Guardian, explains:
Beneath almost everything humans do, [Idries Shah] argued, lay an unacknowledged motive: the attention-factor. The theory is, we need attention almost as desperately as food and warmth, but don’t realise it, so we fail to understand that many everyday encounters “are in fact disguised attention-situations”. In a business negotiation, you might think your only motive is to win; in an argument with a spouse, you might believe your primary goal is to get the other person to change. Yet in both cases you might really be motivated by trying to satisfy your unmet need for attention.
Crucially, “attention may be ‘hostile’ or ‘friendly’ and still fulfil the appetite for attention”. A bad-tempered fight between friends is still a form of engagement: in the very act of fighting, each is acknowledging that the other matters.
Burkeman wrote this piece more than two years ago, but this end bit struck me as more than a little applicable to our current political dustup:
Our failure to understand our need for attention routinely lands us in trouble, Shah believed, because it leaves us at the mercy of anyone, however unpleasant, who’s willing to bestow some. When people feel ignored, a political leader who makes them feel acknowledged will acquire their support, even if he’s an egomaniacal tyrant with no plans to improve their lives. A controlling or otherwise abusive partner will doubtless pay you plenty of attention, even as he or she destroys you. Worse, you’ll be predisposed to believe it when you’re told it’s for your own good: when people lack the attention they require, Shah wrote, “they are vulnerable to the message which too often accompanies the exercise of attention towards them”.
So, who ignored you yesterday? Who will you ignore today?
Non-artists think that creating perfection is what artists do. They don’t understand the mistakes, the blind alleys, the concepts gone wrong that we face. If were fortunate to work in a forgiving medium like writing, we’re OK with the mistakes. We can revise, change, alter the work in ways that bring our conception into view. Hell, if we want we can throw away pages and pages in one motion.
That becomes most difficult when we have to cross out the beautiful, to murder our darlings, but slaughter them we must.
Carvel Collins, in interviewing Georges Simenon for The Art Of Fiction No. 9 in The Paris Review begins with just that theme:
Mr. Simenon’s study in his rambling white house on the edge of Lakeville, Connecticut, after lunch on a January day of bright sun. The room reflects its owner: cheerful, efficient, hospitable, controlled. On its walls are books of law and medicine, two fields in which he has made himself an expert; the telephone directories from many parts of the world to which he turns in naming his characters; the map of a town where he has just set his forty-ninth Maigret novel; and the calendar on which he has X-ed out in heavy crayon the days spent writing the Maigret—one day to a chapter—and the three days spent revising it, a labor which he has generously interrupted for this interview.
GEORGES SIMENON: Just one piece of general advice from a writer has been very useful to me. It was from Colette. I was writing short stories for Le Matin, and Colette was literary editor at that time. I remember I gave her two short stories and she returned them and I tried again and tried again. Finally she said, “Look, it is too literary, always too literary.” So I followed her advice. It’s what I do when I write, the main job when I rewrite.
INTERVIEWER: What do you mean by “too literary”? What do you cut out, certain kinds of words?
SIMENON: Adjectives, adverbs, and every word which is there just to make an effect. Every sentence which is there just for the sentence. You know, you have a beautiful sentence—cut it. Every time I find such a thing in one of my novels it is to be cut.
INTERVIEWER: Is that the nature of most of your revision?
SIMENON: Almost all of it.
That was how Bob Greene finished a piece more than 30 years ago in the 6 March 1985 issue edition of The Chicago Tribune under the headline: Portable Phone Tolls For Thee, America. That fall, in a longer piece for his American Beat column in Esquire, Greene reached another (I paraphrase here because the text is behind a paywall) conclusion: In the future we will be able to identify the truly powerful because we won’t be able to reach them.
I write that because in recent days I’ve been thinking a lot about smartphones and how they have changed education. Yesterday I sat down with the most recent edition of The Atlantic (the only magazine I still subscribe to) to read Bianca Bosker’s: The Binge Breaker—Tristan Harris believes Silicon Valley is addicting us to our phones. He’s determined to make it stop.
Here are the passages that grabbed my attention and warranted the use of my highlighter. (An interesting cultural note: One of my students saw me reading, and highlighting, the article between classes and asked what I was doing. He seem perplexed that I would read a magazine as I might a text book.)
“You could say that it’s my responsibility” to exert self-control when it comes to digital usage, he explains, “but that’s not acknowledging that there’s a thousand people on the other side of the screen whose job is to break down whatever responsibility I can maintain.” In short, we’ve lost control of our relationship with technology because technology has become better at controlling us.
[Josh Elman, a Silicon Valley veteran with the venture-capital firm Greylock Partners] compares the tech industry to Big Tobacco before the link between cigarettes and cancer was established: keen to give customers more of what they want, yet simultaneously inflicting collateral damage on their lives.
Run by the experimental psychologist B. J. Fogg, [the Persuasive Technology Lab] has earned a cultlike following among entrepreneurs hoping to master Fogg’s principles of “behavior design”—a euphemism for what sometimes amounts to building software that nudges us toward the habits a company seeks to instill.
When LinkedIn [a particularly annoying and worthless service I’ve noticed, JH] launched, for instance, it created a hub-and-spoke icon to visually represent the size of each user’s network. That triggered people’s innate craving for social approval and, in turn, got them scrambling to connect. “Even though at the time there was nothing useful you could do with LinkedIn, that simple icon had a powerful effect in tapping into people’s desire not to look like losers,” Fogg told me.
Harris began to see that technology is not, as so many engineers claim, a neutral tool; rather, it’s capable of coaxing us to act in certain ways.
Though Harris insists he steered clear of persuasive tactics, he grew more familiar with how they were applied. He came to conceive of them as “hijacking techniques”—the digital version of pumping sugar, salt, and fat into junk food in order to induce bingeing.
Checking that Facebook friend request will take only a few seconds, we reason, though research shows that when interrupted, people take an average of 25 minutes to return to their original task.
In the end, [Harris] says, companies “stand back watching as a billion people run around like chickens with their heads cut off, responding to each other and feeling indebted to each other.”
Even so, a niche group of consultants has emerged to teach companies how to make their services irresistible. One such guru is Nir Eyal, the author of Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, who has lectured or consulted for firms such as LinkedIn and Instagram. A blog post he wrote touting the value of variable rewards is titled Want to Hook Your Users? Drive Them Crazy. While asserting that companies are morally obligated to help those genuinely addicted to their services, Eyal contends that social media merely satisfies our appetite for entertainment in the same way TV or novels do, and that the latest technology tends to get vilified simply because it’s new, but eventually people find balance.
Six months after attending Burning Man in the Nevada desert, a trip Harris says helped him with “waking up and questioning my own beliefs,” he quietly released “A Call to Minimize Distraction & Respect Users’ Attention,” [I can’t find a copy online, JH] a 144-page Google Slides presentation. In it, he declared, “Never before in history have the decisions of a handful of designers (mostly men, white, living in SF, aged 25–35) working at 3 companies”—Google, Apple, and Facebook—“had so much impact on how millions of people around the world spend their attention … We should feel an enormous responsibility to get this right.”
Through Time Well Spent, his advocacy group, Harris hopes to mobilize support for what he likens to an organic-food movement, but for software: an alternative built around core values, chief of which is helping us spend our time well, instead of demanding more of it.
An accordion player and tango dancer in his spare time who pairs plaid shirts with a bracelet that has presence stamped into a silver charm, Harris gives off a preppy-hippie vibe that allows him to move comfortably between Palo Alto boardrooms and device-free retreats. In that sense, he had a great deal in common with the other Unplug SF attendees, many of whom belong to a new class of tech elites “waking up” to their industry’s unwelcome side effects [Emphasis mine, JH]. For many entrepreneurs, this epiphany has come with age, children, and the peace of mind of having several million in the bank, says Soren Gordhamer, the creator of Wisdom 2.0, a conference series about maintaining “presence and purpose” in the digital age. “They feel guilty,” Gordhamer says. “They are realizing they built this thing that’s so addictive.”
Currently, though, the trend is toward deeper manipulation in ever more sophisticated forms. Harris fears that Snapchat’s tactics for hooking users make Facebook’s look quaint. Facebook automatically tells a message’s sender when the recipient reads the note—a design choice that, per Fogg’s logic, activates our hardwired sense of social reciprocity and encourages the recipient to respond. Snapchat ups the ante: Unless the default settings are changed, users are informed the instant a friend begins typing a message to them—which effectively makes it a faux pas not to finish a message you start. Harris worries that the app’s Snapstreak feature, which displays how many days in a row two friends have snapped each other and rewards their loyalty with an emoji, seems to have been pulled straight from Fogg’s inventory of persuasive tactics.
There is arguably an element of hypocrisy to the enlightened image that Silicon Valley projects, especially with its recent embrace of “mindfulness.” Companies like Google and Facebook, which have offered mindfulness training and meditation spaces for their employees, position themselves as corporate leaders in this movement. Yet this emphasis on mindfulness and consciousness, which has extended far beyond the tech world, puts the burden on users to train their focus, without acknowledging that the devices in their hands are engineered to chip away at their concentration. It’s like telling people to get healthy by exercising more, then offering the choice between a Big Mac and a Quarter Pounder when they sit down for a meal.
I passed copies of the article to several colleagues (including the school psychologist) under the note: scary, scary stuff… Harris’ observations are way scarier than any Hollywood horror movie.
So, John Oliver (a comedian I really like) took a shot at Jill Stein and I’ve received two response emails this week from the Jill Stein and Ajamu Baraka campaign. The emails are summarized in this news item from the campaign’s website:
We were pleasantly surprised when John Oliver’s research team reached out to us regarding several statements that have been frequently taken out of context to ask if we felt they were missing any context, which we promptly provided. It was beyond disappointing to see that our responses were completely ignored. The same tired, misleading attack lines were trotted out, and Oliver chose to misrepresent our campaign on the lone substantive issue that he addressed: our plan to cancel student debt.
When Oliver’s fact-checkers asked if canceling student debt via quantitative easing was the campaign’s current position, we replied that we are considering a range of options in consultation with our economic advisors. Regardless, Oliver singled out canceling student debt via the Federal Reserve, implying both that this was our only option and that it would be technically impossible. In reality, experts say that it is technically possible, even if politically difficult, for the Fed to play a role in student debt forgiveness. And Oliver simply ignored the fact that we had other proposals to cancel student debt on the table. Coming from someone who made a stunt of buying and canceling medical debt on his show, and who claims to want alternatives to the failed two-party system, this disingenuous attack on the idea of cancelling student debt is both puzzling and hypocritical.
Canceling $1.3 trillion in predatory student debt is a top priority for the Stein/Baraka campaign. If we could bail out the crooks on Wall Street, we can bail out their victims – the students who are struggling with an insecure, part-time, low-wage economy. The US government has consistently bailed out big banks and financial industry elites, often when they’ve engaged in abusive and illegal activity with disastrous consequences for regular people. Our society has the resources to provide world-class free higher education to all, and whether we find the resources by canceling the F-35 fighter jet program, reinstating Wall Street transaction taxes, or some other way, all that’s missing to free 43 million Americans from crushing debt is the political will.
In Iceland, the bankers who destroyed their economy are in jail. In the USA, they are laughing at us from country clubs and yachts. Why the difference? Because in Iceland an alternative political party was swept into power, and cleaned house in much the way Stein/Baraka and the Green Party would do. But in the USA the two-party system continues politics as usual, where the leadership of both corrupt corporate political parties collude and conspire against ordinary people on behalf of the economic elite. And that will continue until we the people reject the lesser evil argument and fight for the greater good. That’s why we say—don’t waste your vote on this failed two-party system, invest your vote in building a movement for deep systemic change.
I’m still voting for Jill Stein and Ajamu Baraka.
You can read the latest version of the emails after the jump. Continue Reading »
Muckraking is a proud and storied tradition for Journalists in America. Perhaps my favorite example is Ida Minerva Tarbell, the woman who singlehandedly brought down the giant that was Standard Oil. In my lifetime I have followed the journalistic careers of I.F. Stone and Roldo Bartimole.
Judge John Grinsteiner threw out rioting charges related to the Dakota Access Pipeline protests against well-known journalist Amy Goodman. Not well-known journalist Deia Schlosberg may not be so fortunate.
Deirdre Fulton, writing in ‘I Was Doing My Job’: Climate Reporter Facing 45 Years Speaks Out for Common Dreams, explains:
Schlosberg, an independent filmmaker and climate reporter, was arrested last week in Walhalla, North Dakota for filming the unprecedented #ShutItDown protest held in solidarity with the Dakota Access Pipeline protests.
“When I was arrested, I was doing my job,” Schlosberg said in a statement released Tuesday. “I was reporting. I was documenting. Journalism needs to be passionately and ethically pursued and defended if we are to remain a free democratic country. Freedom of the press, guaranteed by the First Amendment, is absolutely critical to maintaining an informed citizenry, without which, democracy is impossible.”
That is absolutely true. Full stop. Tarbell understood that. Stone knew that. Roldo knows that.
Thieves and despoilers cannot easily operate in the bright light of journalism. Schlosberg told Fulton:
I am a climate reporter; my specialty is following the story of how humankind is creating a grave problem for civilization by continuing to flood the atmosphere with greenhouse gases through the burning of fossil fuels and other industrial processes. I don’t think there is nearly enough reporting on climate change nor the movement of people around the world working to lessen the impacts of climate change.
It is the responsibility of journalists and reporters to document newsworthy events, and it is particularly important for independent media to tell the stories that mainstream media is not covering. The mainstream did not break the story on fracking nor did it break the story about what is happening at the Standing Rock reservation in North Dakota, nor the stories told in my most recent film with Josh Fox, How to Let Go of the World and Love All the Things Climate Can’t Change. Accordingly, I felt I had a duty to document the unprecedented #ShutItDown climate action, which stopped all Canadian oil sands from entering the United States. Canadian oil sands importation is a controversial issue that is not getting the coverage it warrants, especially considering that the extraction and use of oil sands has a profound impact on every person on this planet.
Schlosberg is not alone. In addition to Goodman, others are feeling the corporate wrath of those who wish to exploit and despoil with impunity.
Schlosberg concluded by drawing attention to fellow videographers Lindsey Grayzel and Carl Davis, who were arrested in Washington state last week for filming the same action and also face preliminary felony charges. Grayzel told Reuters that her footage was also confiscated. “For reporters who are simply doing their job, which is their constitutionally protected right, to be facing such charges is an outrage,” she said.
The whole world is watching must continue to be as true today as it was in 1968.
Powered by Wordpress | Design by Ash Haque
XHTML Strict | RSS Entries
