A Pixel-and-Inkstained Election Endorsement

Warning: Contains politics.

Today is the eve of the Presidential election here in the US. After a campaign which stretched literally two years, tomorrow we cast our ballots and patiently await the returns. This is not my usual space to talk politics, but this is not a usual election. In an election which has seen The Atlantic endorse a candidate for only the third time in its hundred fifty year history I think it reasonable to give thoughts here in my space. We'll return to our regular programming soon after.

Those paying attention will note that this is the second time this season I mentioned the election, the first being back in April when I took professional cartoonist Scott Adams to task for what, at the time, appeared to be vocal support for Donald Trump. My statement back then is that we in the tech industry - to which Adams is at least peripherally connected - can and should be better than that. AT the time, Trump had been waging a campaign focused on subtle and not-so-subtle appeals to racism, and that Adams' support gave at least tacit acceptance to this divisiveness. I'm very sorry to say that things have gotten worse (and that Adams has fallen completely down the rabbit-hole of apologizing for and enabling blatant racism).

This is also my chance to - perhaps long-windedly- address a question a Trump supporter asked on Facebook:

your candidate is probably going to win, and yet all I am seeing is negativity. Aren't you excited at all that Clinton is on track to win?

That is a fair question, and here is my long-form answer:

I AM excited by the prospect of a Clinton presidency for her commitment to education, to universal healthcare, to protections for working families, for women's rights. I also know these to be part of my political philosophy which is not universal; there are some very honorable people who believe in smaller government, lower taxes, and a "hands off" governing philosophy. The debate between Obama and Romney or McCain was Rawls vs Nozick, social justice vs libertarianism. It's a debate about which I feel strongly, but one in which both sides are respectable. This year is something different.

This year we've heard the following from the Republican nominee:

• The current President of the United States was born in a foreign country - despite ALL evidence to the contrary
• The US is "under assault" by spanish-speaking immigrants pouring across our Southern border, and that these are rapists and otherwise criminal.
• The "inner cities" are a lawless "disaster" in which African-Americans are both criminals and victims of crime.
• That Muslims are scary, and that no Muslims should be allowed ingress to the country - even those who are actual American citizens. 
• That the "Central Park Five" - a group of African-American youths wrongly imprisoned for the rape of a female jogger in Central Park are - in his mind - still guilty despite evidence to the contrary. 

Along with the slogan "Make America Great Again" (my emphasis), Trump continues to run a campaign specifically focused on  exploiting the fears of white racists reacting to shifting demographics.

We now have white supremacists vocally supporting Trump for president. We literally have the KKK endorsing him. In his weird, rambling trail of pro-Trump blog posts (some of which purported to disavow him or even endorse Clinton or Johnson), the aforementioned Adams framed the election through the lens of "persuasion" and explained that he understands it because of his training as a hypnotist. I'll do something different, and look at it as a story: in a period of changing economic times and social upheaval, the traditional majority ethnic group sees their power waning. A strong-voiced leader arises to tell them that it isn't their fault, that they've been stabbed in the back by those not like them, by invaders, by those with different faiths.  This is a story we've heard before, and it didn't go well the last time.

I don't know what Trump believes, but I DO know that everything he's done and said in his campaign has made it OK to be a white nationalist, that it's OK to be openly racist, that it's OK to be openly sexist. Every vote for Trump is a vote in favor of these ideals, whether you believe in them or not.

I can hear your objection: "But what if I don't support Clinton because of [Emails/Clinton Foundation/Iraq War Vote/Benghazi/other]?" My answer: It doesn't matter. The narrative of this election IS the narrative, with or without your approval. A vote may be your voice, but it is a voice sharply constrained in what it can say or how it can say it. A win by Trump - or even a narrow loss - helps to normalize all of what he stands for. That's just how it is. To go to our historic analogy, if you voted Hitler because of his economic plans you'd still get the gas chambers.

So why do I support Clinton? Lots of reasons specific to my political beliefs.  Why should all decent people support her this election?  To tell a story to our fellow Americans and the world as a whole about who were are and what we want to be.

On Trump, Dilbert, and Who We Are

WARNING - This post contains politics

I've been absent from these pages far too long. Later this week we'll resurrect regular flash fiction - it's something I miss writing and that I hope some of you enjoy reading. First, as we head towards the New York State presidential primaries, a word on politics. Enter at your own risk.

A couple of weeks ago, I posted this on Twitter after someone shared a baffling blog post by Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams regarding Donald Trump:

On behalf of the tech industry, I'd like to formally disavow Scott Adams. He is officially not one of us.

— Leonard C Suskin (@Czhorat) March 11, 2016

Adams had made the bizarre case that comparisons of Trump to a Nazi were racist attacks on his German-American heritage. While this is quite honestly so stupid and ill-informed an opinion that I can only believe Adams to be trolling, he does have a string of oddly respectful posts in which he regards Trump as a "master persuader". It was this pattern which lead me to speak as I did; to make it clear that, as technologists, we owe it to ourselves and to the world to distance ourselves from those who are divisive, racist, and bullying. On reflection (and after discussion with Twitter's appropriately-named AV Grump who said - perhaps accurately - that tech industries are not a monolith) I realized why this is an issue for the tech industry in particular as well as for the country as a whole. I also realized that the arrogance and bigotry of someone like Trump fits into the oeuvre of someone like Scott Adams.

Adams is an ex-phone company employee who has made an entire career out of a single joke: that the brilliant engineer is tormented by the unintelligent and technologically clueless imbeciles in management. In addition to being repetative and a bit dull, it sends a message to technogically-inclined readers: that we're better than the rest of you, that those above us with more money and status (from our boss all the way up to the CEO)  got there for reasons beyond our understanding and are, in any ways that matter, our clear inferiors. It's easy to take this a step farther and see any less tech-savvy people as our inferiors. It's the same thing that Trump does: define an "us" and a "them" and convince "us" that our problems are all caused by those who aren't as smart, aren't as savvy, who don't belong.

It's something which I sadly see all the time in the technology world. In my last piece on rAVePubs I spoke of a client who referred to a hardware-based videoconference Codec as a "Kodak". I know too many in the industry who would mock them for this, but that's playing right into the  "us vs them" philosophy from which we need to extricate ourselves. Why did the client get the name of the device wrong? Because they were trying to learn, because someone who is a professional used the word without bothering to explain it or define it, and they learned it wrong. Meanwhile, the client in question is a professional with their own set of skills which I certainly don't share. I'll never learn if I decide that another human being is stupid because they're not familiar with the narrow technical knowledge base which I have curated over the years.

This, perhaps, is why seeing a professed technologist like Adams speaking well of Trump strikes a chord with me; in Trump I see reflected the worst in all of us, and that includes the technology sector. Dilbert is, sadly, who many of us are. I have, perchance, fallen into that trap myself. We need to all remember that yes, we do have specialized knowledge and that knowledge has value. We've studied, we've learned, and we can teach. I'll talk later (after some flash fiction! I promise!)  about the role of tech in public policy advocacy and when (and how) we should raise our voices - and when the rest of the population should consider our opinion. Overall, however, most of what we know is what I refer to as "stuff" - how to size a video display, formats for audio transport, how to read the spec sheet on a loudspeaker. It's useful. It's even valuable. But knowing it does not make us any better than anyone else.

Nobody gets anywhere from segmentation into "us" and "them", from a lack of respect for those not like us. It might feel good in the short term, but it's bad for society. So, as we reject the actual Trump, let us all reject our inner Trumps, in our industry and in ourselves.

Lovecraft, Defoe, and the Syrian Refugee Crisis

This contains politics again, but also discussion of fantasy fiction. Fear not, this is not becoming a political blog! Some things are important, and sometimes thoughts on fiction and the real world intersect. This is one of those times.

The HPL bust won by
Okorafor

For those not in the know, the World Fantasy Convention annuals gives the World Fantasy Award to a distinguished work of fantasy literature from the previous year. Up through this year (but no longer!) the award took the physical shape of a bust of early twentieth-century horror writer HP Lovecraft. Lovecraft is tremendously influential in the world of horror fiction but also, in both his personal life AND in his work, horrifically racist, even by the standards of his time. 

After winning the WFA, African-American writer Nnnedi Okorafor shared the following poem of Lovecraft's from 1912 as a shockingly blatant example (you should read Okorafor's words on the topic here; as both a WFA winner herself and a Nigerian-American writer she is far more qualified to speak on the topic than I):

On the Creation of Niggers  (1912)

by H. P. Lovecraft

When, long ago, the gods created Earth

In Jove’s fair image Man was shaped at birth.

The beasts for lesser parts were next designed;

Yet were they too remote from humankind.

To fill the gap, and join the rest to Man,

Th’Olympian host conceiv’d a clever plan.

A beast they wrought, in semi-human figure,

Filled it with vice, and called the thing a Nigger.

Not someone whom we should choose to honor, and racist even by the standards of the early twentieth century. What's nearly as bad to me, the main theme within Lovecraft's fiction is fear of the outsider. Not only are the most famous of his creations otherworldly creatures barely comprehensible to (and completely inimical to) us humans, Paired with the author's racism, we are left with an oevre  focused on protecting "our people" from "others". To read Lovecraft uncritically is to exercise that part of ones mind which seeks out the familiar and sees anything foreign as not only incomprehensible, but dangerous and degenerate.

Yes, Lovecraft was influential. I see his influence in much the same way I see that of Daniel Defoe; both cast long shadows, the works of both are important historical artifacts. Both stand - to one extent or another - as works of art. Both are also dreadfully problematic and contain major themes far outside the way we would like to think today. They are to be read, respected for what they added to culture, but not honored uncritically.

This brings us to recent events. Last week the city of Paris suffered several terrorist attacks, which seem to have been carried out by French and Belgian nationals with ties to the Syrian militant group ISIS. The response here in America was the same response our own Lovecraft would have made: keep the others out. In this case, it served not only as an pretext to halt our policy of accepting Syrian refugees, many of whom are fleeing the very terrorists claiming responsibility for this action, but it also escalated already high levels of rhetoric against Muslims. Much has been made of the parallel between refusing to accept Syrian refugees now and refusal to accept European refugees on the eve (and in the early days of) the second World War, including the following official statement by the United States Holocaust Museum and Memorial:

WASHINGTON, DC—Acutely aware of the consequences to Jews who were unable to flee Nazism, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum looks with concern upon the current refugee crisis. While recognizing that security concerns must be fully addressed, we should not turn our backs on the thousands of legitimate refugees.  

The Museum calls on public figures and citizens to avoid condemning today’s refugees as a group. It is important to remember that many are fleeing because they have been targeted by the Assad regime and ISIS for persecution and in some cases elimination on the basis of their identity.

I say that today's response, tragically and shamefully, is well within certain aspects of our historical character. It's the legacy of slavery, the legacy of Jim Crow and, yes, the legacy of Lovecraft. To not only accept such works unquestionably but also to honor them is to embrace this part of our legacy. There's no proof that Syrian refugees are any more dangerous than anyone else, or at all responsible for acts of terror. Yet they look different. They speak differently. They worship the same god as most of us in a slightly different way. Their culture is different.

Lovecraft knew. Different is scary. It's what he continues to teach us.

 

Are we, today in the twenty-first century, the same people we were a hundred years ago, when we saw those from other continents as half-human degenerates? Are we the same as we were two centuries before that, when we saw non-Europeans as savages over whom we needed to take our rightful dominion? Is this who we choose to be?

Part of the choices in who we are is who we choose to honor, how we choose to honor them. Yes, Lovecraft was an interesting prose sylist (once he got past his early adjective-laden career phase) and created some memorable imagery which casts a long shadow on the horror fiction genre. He was also a racist and a xenophobe. Is this a legacy we should choose to honor uncritically? 

It is not what I choose. It is shameful that it took a half-decade after Okorafor's personal essay for the World Fantasy Award for the bust to change. It's shameful that our first impulse is still to fear those other than ourselves.

It is shameful that it is 2015 and we are not yet better than this.  

On Welders and Philophers, Certification and Education

Warning: This post contains politics.

Last week I engaged in an interesting discussion across several blog posts with Mark Coxon and Gary Kayye regarding the CTS (certified technical specialist for those not in the know) certification from Infocomm, the audiovisual industry trade group. It was an interesting conversation on what certifications mean, why we seek them, how they can be better valued or made use of. I was quite ready to put this discussion to bed and move on when I saw this statement from Presidential hopeful March Rubio:

"Welders make more money than philosophers. We need more welders and less [sic] philosophers"

I'll set aside my grammatical pet peeve about allegedly educated adults not knowing the difference between "less" and "fewer"; as less and less value is given to education as an end to itself, fewer and fewer people will take the effort to make this distinction. What struck me most is that Mr. Rubio sees education as a whole as akin to a certification process; education is the process of learning how to do something which will earn one the most money. In this context, it is quite easy to measure the value of education: see what graduates earn, see what it costs to get a degree, compare. It's the same process by which one would measure ones investment in a mutual fund.

It's also a poor and reductive way to look at such things.

In the title I mentioned Dr. Carson. There's no question that Carson is a bright man with as impressive a set of educational and professiona, credentials as one could expect: Yale, University of Michigan,  and, finally, Johns Hopkins where he served as the head of neurosurgery. What fascinates  - and terrifies - me is that a man with such an obvious education can hold bizarre, couterfactual beliefs:

 

• President Obama was born in Africa
• The earth is 6000 years old.
• The Great Pyramids of Egypt were built for the purpose of grain storage.

The last one is truly head-scratching, and pretty much wilfully ignores literally everything we know about the pyramids except for the fact that they are large and located in Egypt. How can an educated man think this way? I know because, a long time ago, I was on the path to that sort of education.

My education wasn't to be in medicine, but electrical engineering. The school to which I went was small, selective, and very technology-heavy. We studied math. We studied science. We studied chemistry. And, each semester, we took one humanities course. One. As a freshman, it was a two-part "Western Civilization" survey. That's right, all of "Westery Civilization" in one year. History. Literature. And, yes, philosophy. One. Year. After that, there was a requirement for one elective. That was it. If one had to design an education to create the kind of stereotypically anti-social, narrowly focused technologist-nerd completely lost in the larger society one could do no better. I wasn't the greatest student and never graduated, but it was the parts of an education which I was never offered that I missed most and have, on and off, been chasing through my adult life. It's been poetry, it's been literature, it's been philosophy. Yes, I'm glad to have learned the math I did, but that is, as I say about technical ideas, just "stuff".  

What have  gained since trying to broaden my education? I feel that I can think better and more broadly. I can understand people who think differently than I do, and why. In the realm of literature, I read more mindfully and learn more from a good book and, I hope, can communicate more and better in my own writing. More to the point - and this is a harder thing for which to find a metric - it's bought an element of joy and pleasure to my life as well as some much-needed depth. I see knowing more as an end in and of itself, and one which I hope to continue to pursue throughout my life. I only wish I'd had more of the foundation sooner.

I've gained a measure of humility in seeing the very edges of the depth and rigor of thought which lie behind various worldviews. Philosophy is not just the caricature of robed figures in an ivory tower gazing into their navels; it encompasses many schools of thought which I accept that I'll never have the time to deeply understand. That doesn't stop me from reaching for, at the very least, a broader appreciation. 

My technical education, of course, is also a life-long project. The difference is that this is results-oriented as much as concept oriented; I need to know what IGMP protocols are so I can design network-based audio-video systems. I educate myself on arts so I'll be happy (and yes, I've neglected that over the past months; time gets in the way, but it's a luxury on which I should spend more time). 

People like Rubio, on the other hand,  see only the technical "certification" part of education: as a means to an end and naught else. That is valuable, but it is not the highest and best use of higher education. I'd even argue that it isn't even the best use of primary and secondary education; we've become so fixated on STEM, on economics, on winning the next big tech race that we don't pay enough attention to know the destination to which we're racing. 

The irony? Rubio is talking about how to allocate scarce resources, what skills and knowledge we should value, how one should live ones life. These questions are, at their heart, philosophical. What's more, his beloved welder is, by casting a ballot, going to be making these choices for all of us. In a democracy we don't merely need philsophers, and we don't merely need welders; we need welder-philosophers, versed in the theory and practice of how to think about such things. We need philosophers to help us learn to navigate an ever changing world, and answer the big questions of what it means to live a fulfilled life. We need artists and writers to make the journey worth living. 

We do not live on bread alone. 

This is not "The Treachery of Images"

I'll close with an anecdote: one of my very well-respected colleagues was shopping online for a present for himself: an art print. When I asked what, he gave a guarded "I'm going to have to explain this" look and told me it was a print of a painting my Magritte called "Treachery of Images". Fortunately, I was aware of it and we were able to even discuss it a bit; it's an interesting statement about what art it, what communication is. A thousand-word restating, perhaps, about the aphorism about the finger pointing at the moon. Can I draw a line between his appreciation for surrealist art and his creative and sharp thinking in technical matters? Perhaps I can, perhaps not. Either way, it is a small thing which enriches his life. 

Yes, we need welders and mechanics and brain surgeons. We also need artists, philosophers, and those who appreciate them.

Political Correctness, Body Shaming, and Breakfast Food

I'll follow up my last AV-ish related post with a writing-ish related post. This week I'll give my take on one of those discussions I can't believe we still need to have: the crazed furor of what I call the "anti-PC police" with their odd insistence that any efforts to avoid offensive and harmful language is the first step on the slippery slope to an Orwellian dystopia.

What does my breakfast have to do with this post?
Read on!

One of the latest forays into free-speech absolutism came from a freelance game-writer and blogger named James Desborough with a post charmingly titled "In Defense of Rape as a Storytelling Device". Now, let me say right of the bat that Mr. Desborough is not a sociopath; he was not defending the act of rape but arguing, for reasons which I don't comprehend, against the idea that careful consideration should be taken  in fictional portrayals of rape and sexual assault. Part of his defense was the same thing I often hear from those who I think of as the anti-PC police; it's a free country, and he has freedom of speech. This is, of course true. The counterargument, of course, is that sexual assault victims have the right to not be re-traumatized by halfwits using rape imagery as a cheap way of creating dramatic tension. (As an aside, it's also true that an inflammatory title is a good way to get attention, but only if your first-grade teacher neglected to teach you the difference between good attention and bad attention).

How far will people go with this kind of thing? As far as we'll let them. At a recent comedy show, professional comedian and amateur knuckle-dragging semi-evolved ape-creature Daniel Tosh joked about how funny it would be if a female audience member were gang-raped right there at his show for saying that rape jokes aren't funny. But hey - he has free speech, right? Need we really be such free-speech absolutists to not think there should be a consequence for someone opining that a woman should be raped because it would be funny? There have been plenty of missing-the-point defenses of Tosh, including this one here, which references George Carlin. The difference is that Carlin knew what Tosh seems to either not know or not care about; that comedy, like all other artistic expression, can communicate deeper messages than making people laugh. He used comedy to attack rape culture; Tosh used comedy to normalize it.


In fact, all of the arguments in favor of so-called "political correctness" follow a similar formula;

• Using "gay" as  a pejorative accustoms people to thinking of homosexuals as inferior
• Using "retarded" to mean stupid marginalizes the developmentally delayed and perpetuates the stereotype that they can't be productive members of society.
• Using "girly" to denigrate a man (as when baseball player Vincente Padilla recently told former teammate Mark Teixera that he should play a woman's sport) reinforces gender stereotypes of  both men and women, with men as unemotional, tough and stoic and women nurturing and gentle but weak. It tells every boy that he shouldn't display emotions and tells every girl that she shouldn't be strong and competitive.

The above, of course, are blatant, obvious examples of poorly-chosen words being hurtful. What about more subtle ones? There are scores to choose from, but today we'll take on an issue close to my heart in female body images. As fellow blogger Katje Van Loon recently pointed out, all of Disney's "princesses" are skinny. In fact, the Sea-Witch Ursula is the only overweight female character I can think of in any of Disney's stories (Van Loon has a tangential point that plus-sized women don't get to be glamorous; you should read her post after you finish mine). Recent endeavors have been better, but many of the "classics" (Cinderella, to pick the most blatant example) use physical attractiveness as shorthand for virtue and physical ugliness for evil. Does the fact that the titular character is beautiful as well as good while her antagonists are ugly subtly steer girls towards tying their sense of self-worth to their appearance? Of course it can. It also leads boys to learn that joking about ugly people is OK.

Which one here is the virtuous one? You can tell by her cute nose!

Which brings me to my last example of the day: The Oatmeal (you didn't really think I was talking about breakfast food, did you?In addition to being part of a nice breakfast, The Oatmeal is a reliably funny online comic strip. When creator Matthew Inman was faced with a spurious legal attack, he responded with this charity fundraiser. Inman deserves all the credit in the world for defending himself in a way that was funny and ended up giving over two hundred thousand dollars to charity, but check out that last bit: the "drawing of your mother seducing a Kodiak bear". 








Not only is a "your mother" joke one of the lowest forms of humor, but drawing her as an unattractive, overweight woman trying to be sexy strikes me as the same kind of "lets ridicule the fat woman" as this classic from adultery-oriented personal ad site Ashley Madison: it's the idea that a "fat" woman trying to be sexy is absurd and should be laughed at. Never mind that a growing proportion of the population actually is overweight and some of them presumably want an active, enjoyable sex life. Let's all laugh at the fat girl who thinks she's sexy. Only skinny girls get to be sexy! We see the wrongness when it's part of a message we're already primed to disagree with (you should cheat on your wife), but should recognize that packaging it with a "good" message (philanthropy > douchebaggery, to use Inman's phrasing) is, if anything, even worse as it normalizes the message of fat-shaming.






"Political Correctness" is not  a set of shackles. It's the idea that we should be cognizant of the messages we are sending and stop sending bad ones.