Property Of...

I was reading about the Pope's trip to Spain, and the opposition to same, and a thought occurred to me. "You're going to have to change the message, Your Holiness."

I understand where the Pontiff is coming from. I grew up Roman Catholic, and still have a fair idea of Church dogma, theology and ideals. But I'm also an observer of people, and one of things that I've learned is that for the vast majority of people, membership in a particular religion fulfills something for them. And if it stops fulfilling that, they go on to something else (or maybe nothing else, as the case may be).

Now, I didn't listen to the Pope's sermon in Barcelona, so I'm pretty sure that I don't have the context 100% correct. (I should likely do something about that - find a translation, at least, given that I don't speak Spanish at all.) But the primary message that I understood from those of his comments that I have read was that he is dismayed that people aren't living up to their responsibilities to God and the Church. Which is fine. But if he's going to do more than preach to the choir, sooner or later, he's going to have to articulate what following the Church is going to do for the people who follow. It's fine to consider homosexual activity "intrinsically disordered." But if you're going to ask someone to either a) enter into a permanent relationship with someone that they feel no attraction to or b) remain celibate for their entire lives for something that they feel they have no control over, you're better off offering something in return outside of simply not going to Hell. (There are times when people make God/Yahweh/Allah out to be less of a loving divinity, and more of a supernatural mobster running a protection racket.) The same with things like divorce and abortion. Simply saying this is what you're supposed to do, regardless of the personal consequences, has rarely been a winning strategy.

Simply decrying people's rejection of God's "property interest" in them reduces them to pawns to moved around as befits God's purposes. For people that find this unsatisfactory, simply telling them that they have no choice is unlikely to be compelling.

Let Me Rephrase That

Ah, the dangers of the common way of doing things...

"After the jump" is common internet lingo to refer to that part of an article or blog posting that's initially hidden from the reader. You read the first part, and click on a "more" link, or something similar to get the rest of the text.

But yes, that is an unfortunate choice of words when writing about a suicidal woman on the ledge of building, as the Seattle Weekly's Daily Weekly webblog was reminded by its readers.

I Heard It Through The Grapevine

The choice to fact-check vigorously, even when a story is reported by well-funded news outlets, seems only to happen when the writers in question disagree with the story, while the decision to accept the fact-checking of any traditional media outlet, in order to be able to fast-forward to the aforementioned high dudgeon, seems to come when the weblogger likes repeating or even amplifying the claims made further upstream.
Clay Shirky

All too often the truth is often secondary to what people want to hear and what they want to enjoy getting worked up about, whether it's in a sexual or righteous way. Information finds its level and its target.
Yoz Grahame
"Banning blogging, 'Toothing, and Yoz" Many2Many, 5 April 2005

As you might suspect, when I heard about conservative politicians and media outlets uncritically repeating that the Obama administration was spending more per diem on the President's trip to India than it costs to prosecute the war in Afghanistan, and were renting out more rooms in the Taj Mahal Palace hotel than are actually in the building, this was the first thing that came to my mind.

This idea, that there is nothing too outrageous to believe and/or repeat about people you don't like, is dangerous. (On the other hand, the Obama administration isn't doing themselves any favors in treating the overall cost of the trip as a state secret.) As we become more and more caught up in the idea that politics and morality are related, we inch ever closer to the idea (although I suspect that we're already there to a degree) that there is an objectively "correct" political position to be taken on any given subject. And what follows from that is the idea that dissent from that position is an act of intentional wrongdoing. "Evil," to be blunt about it.

And fights against Evil always end in bloodshed.

Do You Believe

When someone tells me: "The media is liberal," my first thought tends to be: "Wow. Figured that out by yourself, did you?" Not because I buy into the idea that "the media" as an institution, has this deep liberal agenda that it's attempting to advance, but because for the most part, the people who go into journalism feel that they doing a service for the public and it's a line of work that doesn't pay particularly well, except at élite levels. Sounds just like the kind of career that draws young conservatives in droves.

The idea that certain careers have a given political bent more or less as a characteristic became clear to me back when I was working with children. Child care/social work, as you might have guessed, is also a very liberal line of work, perhaps even more so than journalism, given that it's very much rooted in the public and/or non-profit sectors.

As is often the case, groups of like-minded people start to fall into an orthodoxy, and woe betide you if you aren't with the program. And one of the more strident bits of orthodox thinking that everyone was expected to adhere to back in my child care worker days was "weapons are bad." This lead to more than a few disagreements about things. I made the mistake of expressing my skepticism about a television portrayal of the dangerousness of weapons, and wound up having to defend a position that television programs should value accuracy over promoting "social responsibility." Another time, I became embroiled in a particularly heated argument with a co-worker because I couldn't see the pressing need for the immediate destruction of every nuclear weapon on the planet. (She told me that I was "unfit to work with children" as a result of this position.)

Of course, children don't always buy into the groupthink, regardless of what the staff thinks about it - they have an entirely different set of concerns. (Surprising, I know.) Most of them have loss, abandonment and protection issues that rate much more highly for them than esoteric concerns about public safety or world peace. One of the children I worked with bumped into this dichotomy when we were preparing for a group outing to the park. There was a new staffer along, and she'd started quizzing him to test his commitment.

"If we're at the park," she asked, earnestly, "and someone tries to snatch me, would you shoot them?"

"I don't believe in guns," the staffer answered, seeming to (in my estimation) miss the basic point of the question.

The response was immediate and sincere. "They're real."

This, of course, triggered everyone else within earshot to crack up. There is nothing that's funny in quite the same way as a child stating the obvious. Especially when they do so in a way that cuts through some of the BS that we in the "adult" world tend to wrap everything in. Sometimes I think that we should be just as up front about things. We could all use the laugh. And, perhaps, the lesson that there are more important things in life than orthodoxy.

Service

Good customer service is the fine art of not rubbing in the fact that any single transaction is, in fact, unimportant to your business. We all know that, especially for large corporations, that if you take your business elsewhere, unless you can get a very large number of people to do the same, no one will ever notice. There's no real way that any one transaction with a single private citizen can be important.

Its the companies that allow you to forget that, that are the ones you enjoy doing business with.