I Don't Smell Anything

If, instead of Muslim, much of the Middle East were Hindu, would there have been the attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001? Would the Crusades have happened, if Paganism had held sway in Europe, rather than Christianity? Would a Buddhist United States of America have given rise to the Ku Klux Klan? Would a Native American follower of traditional religion have shot George Tiller?

Although the basic argument surrounding Islam in America as we come closer to the anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks is one of whether or not Islam is "compatible" with "American values," there is a secondary question that many different faiths have had to answer at some point, for different reasons: "Does this faith make its followers more Evil than they otherwise would be?" (And on the other side of that coin, does a lack of faith make people more Evil than people with faith?) Even as I type it, it feels like a stupid question, perhaps because I have difficulty believing in the Mind Control Theory of Religion (or of Marketing, for that matter).

When Christopher Hitchens subtitled God is Not Great "How Religion Poisons Everything," I think that he went wide of the mark. My personal understanding has become that while we may think of our personal belief systems as being a form of detox, in fact, they simply blind us to the poisons that are already within us. Or, to be a bit more crude about it: Most of us are already assholes - we just use religion/spirituality/science/et cetera to pretend that our particular brand of assholery is the Way the Universe Intended Things.

We Control The Vertical...

I found this from Seth Godin's blog. Design With Intent is a simple enough concept - design things in such a way that it steers people towards using them in the way that you want them to be used, or that otherwise influences the users in certain ways.

While the cards might be great for designers, for everyone else, I suspect that they're a one-way ticket to paranoia. It's really easy to remember something that you came across that you didn't think much of before - that now seems like a sinister means of manipulating you. We live in a world where an increasing number of people are quick to make an assumption that others are acting in bad faith. (I spent an hour the other day in a conversation with a man who was convinced that the financial crisis was the result of deliberate attempts to loot the wealth of homeowners and buyers and deliberately cripple the economy that collapsed before the thieves could make a clean getaway.) As if Planned Obsolescence wasn't bad enough, the idea that (to pull an example from the cards): "Some Nokia phones allegedly sense when a 3rd-party battery is used and switch into a high-power mode so it runs out more quickly,*" will really get you wondering just what manufacturers are up to. Whether or not this is better than Panasonic's Lumix cameras, which, according to page 91, won't functional at all with 3rd party batteries is left up to the reader.

* I've found a couple of references to this, and it seems to trace back to Bruce Schneier's Beyond Fear.

Learning to Blame

I started listening to a radio program on the debate about teachers and teacher performance and I was struck by something that the teacher accountability crusaders said - that poor teachers blame the students for their failure to learn.

At the school where he taught, Pinder says many teachers just sat around the teachers' lounge blaming the students. They said the kids were too far behind; too messed up to be helped.

This stood out for me because my mother used to be a teacher - while she had done other things before that, I have no recollection of her being anything other than an educator. When I was in my mid-twenties, I was a childcare worker, first in a residential treatment facility for children who had been taken out of their families' homes for abuse or neglect and didn't need psychiatric hospitalization, but weren't ready for foster care, and later as a foster care case worker. This was as close as my mother and I ever came professionally, and it gave us the chance to talk shop, as it were. (There was also the time that my mother came to visit me at work - One of the children complained to her, "Your son is mean." "Sorry," Mother replied, with a slight smile. "He's your problem now.")

When Mother would complain to me about things in her classroom, she NEVER laid blame at the feet of a student, even if she would wearily recount all of the disruptions that a particular student would cause. But sometimes, she would talk about what she understood of the child's home life, and how that worked against what she was attempting to do, and her efforts to work around it. She never wanted for better students - what she wanted were more engaged and involved PARENTS.

And that seems to be missing in today's debate about teachers. I don't know that I buy into the idea, which some of the advocates for greater teacher accountability seem to put forth, that no matter what the parents might be doing, a good enough teacher will make up for that, and inspire students to rise to their full potential.

We, as the adults in this system, have not only the ability, but the obligation to make sure that kids overcome every single obstacle that's in front of them to ensure that they can achieve at the highest levels.
Michelle Rhee, chancellor of the Washington, D.C. public schools.

Perhaps all of the teachers that I had should have been fired, but I don't think that I would have done anywhere near as well in school as I did, if my parents had chosen to simply walk away from any involvement with my education. Of course, goes the argument, parents would never do that. From my own experience, I would beg to differ. But then, I'm not telling parents that if they just follow my line, their children will all be geniuses - so I have no real incentive to let them completely off the hook, and assume that no matter what it is they might be doing, it must be what's educationally best for their child(ren). I'm not offering an easy way out through shifting all the blame.

Me! Me! Look at ME!

More evidence that even men of the cloth can take a page from the Shock Jock Bible. The Dove World Outreach Center, a small Christian outfit in Florida has sparked international yammering with their oh-so-edgy plan to burn copies of the Koran on September 11th. It seems that when publishing a book called "Islam is of the Devil" didn't get them enough bookings on national news programs, the fifty or so genius minds at DWOC decided to up the ante. It took a bit, but now it's working - people are getting into a tizzy over a small busload of crazies. If even an armed right-wing militia group (named Right Wing Extreme, no less) can figure out that setting copies Koran on fire doesn't do anything to advance any reasonable cause of Christianity, everyone else should be able to figure out that they're being played by a bunch of attention seeking fruitnobs.

We'll see if Westboro Baptist Church decides to see that bet and raise.

Guilty All Around

Over on Slate today, William Saletan over-argues that a national backlash against Islam is brewing due to so many politicians piling onto the "Ground Zero Mosque" controversy.

Rachael Larimore, perhaps the token conservative of the XX team, poses the following question: "So, if the people complaining about the mosque are inciting isolated acts of violence, does that mean Al Gore is responsible for the gunman [at] the Discovery Channel?" It's a common question - one that we often find people asking after accusations or insinuations of incitement. The obvious answer is supposed to be "no," at which point the rebuttal comes back, "Well, if so-and-so isn't responsible for violent act X, how can my guy be responsible for violent act Y?" The idea is simple, looking for a means of getting your person off the hook by threatening to not go down alone. But let's turn that logic on its head for a moment.

Let's say the answer to Ms. Larimore's question is, "Yes. Al Gore IS responsible for James Lee taking people hostage at the Discovery Channel headquarters." Now, I suspect that in order to say that, we'll have to make a couple of assumptions, so let's go ahead and make them, even though we know that they're false (given that I'm making them up right now). The first is that sometime in his public speeches on the environment, Mr. Gore said something that could be reasonably construed as advocating violence as a means of achieving the end of environmental protection. The second is that he intended, or at least knew, that someone would take him up on that. (I'm dropping the "should have known" language that normally goes along with such things because I find it too vague to be useful.)

Okay. Where does that leave us? With Al Gore possibly having committed a crime. Given our assumptions above, if they could be proven, it's unlikely that the former vice president could make a valid First Amendment case. (Take this with a large lick of salt. I'm not, after all, a constitutional lawyer.) So, having (spuriously) established all of this, let's go back to the question that Ms. Larimore poses and pick up the train of logic. Now, her question is basically in response to Mr. Saletan's conclusion that recent violence that we're seeing against Muslims and suspected (or, more accurately, misidentified) "Muslims" in the United States can be traced back, at least indirectly, to all of the rather public calls from political figures to put an end to the Cordoba House project in New York, and the general hostility to Islam that appears to be a part of such calls.

So now we have multiple instances of political figures, from the left and the right, using the bully pulpit in ways that have lead to people being injured and killed. The correct answer is to throw the book at all of them, but the fact that no-one fingered Al Gore doesn't mean that people now should receive a pass. After all, we understand that there are people in the world, who have done very bad things and were never punished for them. But you're very unlikely to find a jury that would let someone go based on the idea that as long as other people remain unpunished, they should, too.

In other words we're back to that old saying that our parents drilled into our heads in grade school: Two wrongs don't make a right.