Month: December 2013

What Swiss Flying Cows Tell Us About the Future of the Environment

Posted on by S. Abbas Raza

Veronique Greenwood in Aeon:

ScreenHunter_464 Dec. 17 17.21From time to time, a hiker through the Swiss Alps might witness a startling sight. First, the sound of a helicopter reverberates off the valley walls. Then the chopper appears, a long cable hanging from its belly. When the burden at the end of the cable heaves into view, it is not a rescued mountaineer, en route to the hospital. Nor is it a pot of cement or a pallet of planks, on the way to a high-mountain building project.

It is a single cow, hanging gently from a harness, her dark eyes alert, her hooves high above the ground.

When the scene is breathlessly described to a Swiss person, the response seems to be incredulity — at your amazement. The cow was hurt. It probably twisted its ankle in the high meadows, and needed to get to a vet. Of course they used a helicopter! It’s the right thing to do.

Look carefully.

This could be a postcard from the future.

This is the Valais — a canton, or Swiss state, known for its milk, cheeses, wine, apricots, and beef. It is one of the largest of Switzerland’s 26 cantons, about the size of Delaware, in a country no larger than Connecticut and Massachusetts put together. In practice, much of that land area is consumed by some of the tallest mountains on the continent.

More here.

Mark Zuckerberg and Yuri Milner announced new $3 million Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics

Posted on by S. Abbas Raza

From PR Newswire:

4F07FBD3-ED5C-4D4E-9D25-234CF814A34C_w640_r1_s_cx0_cy2_cw0“Scientists should be celebrated as heroes, and we are honored to be part of today's celebration of the newest winners of the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences and the Fundamental Physics Prize,” said Anne Wojcicki and Sergey Brin.

The prize ceremony was hosted by actor Kevin Spacey, and awards were presented by the Prize sponsors and by celebrities including Conan O'Brien, Glenn Close, Rob Lowe and Michael C. Hall. The event was organized in cooperation with Vanity Fair and produced and directed by Don Mischer, the producer and director of the Academy Awards, among other television and live events. Grammy-nominated singer Lana Del Ray performed live for the guests of the ceremony.

The event will be televised by the Science Channel, one of the Discovery networks; it will be broadcast at 9pm on January 27th.

At the end of the ceremony, Mark Zuckerberg and Yuri Milner announced the launch of a new $3 million Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics. The details of the new prize will be announced at a later date.

“The Breakthrough Prize is our effort to put the spotlight on these amazing heroes. Their work in physics and genetics, cosmology, neurology and mathematics will change lives for generations and we are excited to celebrate them,” commented Mark Zuckerberg.

More here. Peter Woit hates the idea though.

Religion’s Quandary

Posted on by S. Abbas Raza

Kenan Malik in the New York Times:

Contributors-images-slide-RPHF-articleInlineThey call it the Francis effect: the impact of Pope Francis in galvanizing the Catholic faithful. Since he arrived at the Vatican, church attendance has surged across the world, while in his homeland of Argentina, the number of people defining themselves as believers has risen by a reported 12 percent.

Not just Catholics but those of other faiths, and of no faith, have fallen under Francis’ spell. “Even atheists should be praying for Pope Francis,” as the Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland put it recently.

Yet how much has really changed? Francis may be transforming the perception of the church and its mission, but not its core doctrines. He has called for a church more welcoming to gay people and women, but he will not challenge the idea that homosexual acts are sinful, refuses to embrace the possibility of same-sex marriage and insists that the ordination of women as priests is not “open to discussion.”

None of this should be surprising. Religious institutions necessarily spurn the modern and the fashionable, in favor of the traditional and the sacred. But it points up the dilemma in which religion finds itself in the modern world. If religious institutions do not change, they risk becoming obsolete. If they do change, they may imperil their authority. This quandary is faced not just by the Catholic Church but by all religious institutions today.

More here.

Breyten Breytenbach’s 2008 letter to Nelson Mandela

Posted on by Morgan Meis

12APPhoto-LynneSladky-Harpers-400Breyten Breytenbach at Harper's Magazine:

In due time there will probably be an assessment of your political career and the impact you had as president of the country — and you were nothing if not a consummate politician. Your being the historical vector for controlled compromise and change may ultimately be equated with statesmanship. Already we know you saved us from civil war. This should be remembered as your single most important legacy, and we must never forget how lucky we were. Some will say you could only do so by aborting the revolution.

But my own unease, now, is of a slightly different kind. I wish to express my deep affection for you. You are in so many ways like my late father — stubborn to the point of obstinacy, proud, upright, authoritarian, straight, but with deep resources of love and intense loyalty and probably with a sense of the absurd comedy of life as well. A cad also, when tactical considerations made it necessary. I think I’ve told you this.

more here.

Robert Bellah: In Memoriam (1927-2013)

Posted on by Morgan Meis

Bellah_15_3Richard Madsen at Hedgehog Review:

Bellah’s richly informed vision of the varieties of transcendent yearnings found brilliant expression in his final masterpiece,Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age (2011). The book culminates in long, detailed chapters on the religious civilizations of ancient Israel, Greece, China, and India. In Bellah’s telling, Hebrew monotheism, Greek philosophy, Indian Buddhism, and Chinese Confucianism are each unique, the product of many historical contingencies. What unites them is not the sharing of some common essence of “religion” but their connection to a “deep past,” to a common historical story that extends all the way back to the Big Bang.

The epigraph to that book is from the Chinese sage Mencius: “When one reads the poems and the writings of the ancients, how could it be right not to know something about them as men? Hence one should try to understand the age in which they have lived. This can be described as ‘looking for friends in history.’” For Bellah, thinkers such as Confucius and Mencius were not simply creators of systems of thought; they were friends in history, conversation partners. The same was true of Socrates and Plato, Isaiah and Jeremiah, the Buddha, and more recent thinkers like Kant and Hegel, Weber and Durkheim. Bellah did not simply study about them. He argued and searched together with them for answers to the great questions of how we ought to live and how we think about how to live.

more here.

the soviet project to create entirely new sounds

Posted on by Morgan Meis

ImageColin McSwiggen at n+1:

From roughly the mid-1910s until the end of the 1930s, a handful of Russian engineers and artists took it upon themselves to remake the practice of music in the image of a revolutionary utopia. In contrast to the better-remembered Prokofiev and Shostakovich, these inventors were mostly outsiders to formal musical traditions, and they believed that the future of music lay not in new compositional styles, but in new technologies for the production of sound.

What they created was astonishing, not only in its novelty but in its quantity and scale. Many of their more outlandish ideas never saw fruition: an organ powered by an entire factory, an electro-acoustic orchestra mounted on a fleet of airplanes. But they successfully fashioned a great number of unprecedented devices, from synthesizers to proto-samplers, with technology that predated magnetic tape let alone the integrated circuit. Many of their conceptual developments—methods for synthesizing speech, models of the physics of musical instruments, theoretical descriptions of the idiosyncrasies of live performers—would have been at home in the technological landscape of the ’80s, ’90s, and ’00s.

more here.

Made in the U.S.A: Fiction and critique of American society

Posted on by Azra Raza

Adam Kirsch in Harvard Magazine:

BookThe phrase “The Great American Novel” means something more than the sum of its parts. There are plenty of great American novels that are not Great American Novels: Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady doesn’t qualify, and neither does Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, or Willa Cather’s The Lost Lady, even though everyone acknowledges them as classics. No, the Great American Novel—always capitalized, like the United States of America itself—has to be a book that contains and explains the whole country, that makes sense of a place that remains, after 230-odd years, a mystery to itself. If other countries don’t fetishize their novels in quite this way—if the French don’t sit around waiting for someone to write the Great French Novel—it may be because no country is so much in need of explanation.

Hardly anyone talks about the Great American Novel without a tincture of irony these days. But as Lawrence Buell shows in The Dream of the Great American Novel, his comprehensive and illuminating new study, that is nothing new: American writers have always held the phrase at arm’s length, recognizing in it a kind of hubris, if not mere boosterism. Almost as soon as the concept of the Great American Novel was invented, in the nation-building years after the Civil War, Buell finds it being mocked, noting that one observer dryly put it into the same category as “other great American things such as the great American sewing-machine, the great American public school, and the great American sleeping-car.” It was enough of a cliché by 1880 for Henry James to refer to it with the acronym “GAN,” which Buell employs throughout his book. Yet Buell warns us against taking all this dismissal at face value: “critical pissiness suggests the persistence of some sort of hydrant,” as he puts it. Even today, in our endlessly self-conscious literary era, novelists are still writing candidates for the GAN. What else are Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, or Philip Roth’s American Pastoral, or Don DeLillo’s Underworld, if not attempts to capture the essence of American modernity between two covers?

More here.

Learning From the History of Vitamins

Posted on by Azra Raza

Carl Zimmer in The New York Times:

Zimmer-headshot-popup-v2Our health depends on vitamins, and to understand that dependency, it helps to understand the history of vitamins. As I wrote in an article in Science Times this week, our ancestors have probably needed vitamins for billions of years. By studying how we and other species make vitamins, scientists hope to find new ways to keep us healthy — perhaps even by using vitamins as a weapon against our enemies. There are two ways of getting those vitamins: making them or eating them. Our microbial ancestors probably made many of their vitamins, but later much of that ability was lost. Our primate ancestors lost the ability to make their own vitamin C about 60 million years ago. Those ancestors didn’t need to make vitamin C, however, because they regularly ate fruit. More recently, our hunter-gatherer ancestors got an abundant supply of vitamins from the game they killed and the plants they collected. But with the rise of agriculture, people began to eat more vitamin-poor starches like wheat and corn. And as we’ve transformed our diet even further, we’ve put ourselves at risk of vitamin-related diseases.

In the mid-1800s, for example, manufacturers began processing rice in steam-powered mills, which stripped off their vitamin-rich outer layer. As white rice became increasingly common, so did a disease called beriberi, which causes people to lose the feeling in their legs and begin to have trouble walking. Beriberi baffled scientists for decades. In the 1880s, a scientist named Christiaan Eijkman found that chickens could develop a beriberi-like condition and started studying them to find the cause of the disease. For years he was convinced some kind of bacteria was to blame. But then he discovered that a flock of sick chickens suddenly recovered from beriberi-like symptoms. It turned out that the chickens had initially been fed on leftover rice from the military hospital in the Netherlands where Dr. Eijkman did his research. “Then the cook was replaced and his successor refused to allow military rice to be taken for civilian chickens,” Dr. Eijkman later explained when he accepted the 1929 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his research.

More here.

Tuesday Poem

Posted on by Jim Culleny

at the rowing course, ghent

see how my father sets out on the water in a small boat
he rows with steady strokes and in between

is silence, he stirs the water with his oars
making waves that reach the banks later

there where I’ve left already, I’m cycling along the waterside
I call out that his speed is seven and a half knots per hour

he’s got his back to my view, he sees
where we were, I see what’s ahead, he’s wearing

a kyrgyz hat, not a real one but something made of
faded cotton, for the wind is too strong, he says

too strong for a hat, and on his feet he’s wearing
galoshes that belonged to his father-in-law

they stay in place, he says, in case he ends up
in the deep-end after all, he loved the water, the way he

loved my mother for in the middle of the sea
she was the only thing missing, he let slip

one day, and what about us, I thought and waved
goodbye, he couldn’t wave back, I called

but he couldn’t hear me, he was rowing and it looked
so effortless for him, slowly he fulfilled

his earthly duties while looking at me, on the shore,
now and then, he was moved, perhaps, but from here

I couldn’t tell, it may just as well have been
a game whose rules I didn’t know

and I thought I could leave him there, the water
understood him and carried him back to front

back to the shore

Miriam Van hee
from ook hier valt het licht
(translation by Judith Wilkinson)

Letters from a Mississippi Prison

Posted on by Katharine Blake McFarland

by Katharine Blake McFarland

Letter1Nowadays, fewer and fewer occasions require the traditional letter, sent through the postal service. This is especially true in the professional context, where time is always of the essence, or at least perceived to be. But during my second year of law school, I worked at the ACLU's National Prison Project, an organization that protects the constitutional rights of prisoners—men and women ill-positioned to defend their own rights and about whom society seems content to forget—and in addition to writing and editing motions and court communications, I also read hundreds of letters. Letters written by hand, with a pencil, on a piece of paper.

The letters I read were from men incarcerated in Mississippi prisons, clients from a case that had settled years earlier. The continuing effort was to ensure these facilities' were making the changes the Judge had ordered in the consent decree. NPP attorneys made trips to these facilities themselves, but in between trips, we relied on reports from clients on the inside. These reports, though entirely urgent, could be sent only by mail.

Without exception, the letters looked dirty and smelled unmistakably institutional. A mustiness mixed with old prison food (I have eaten prison food, so you will have to trust me). I was supposed to be skimming the letters for abuses to catalog on a spreadsheet, but I have never been good at skimming. Instead, I shut the door to my office and disappeared into the pencil-written paragraphs. I heard each man's voice; I saw his hand moving across the paper. Sometimes I looked him up based on his inmate number, to learn what he was in for. Rape, murder, burglary. I became so immersed in these letters that when someone knocked on my door or the phone rang, I would startle and shake myself back to reality. My reality, that is. Well-lit, clean and safe.

The letters told a different reality: sweltering cells rife with rats, mice, and fire ants; broken bones from run-ins with under-trained, over-worked guards, too quick to use force, pepper spray, and a host of racial epithets and vulgar sexual innuendo, even (especially) against inmates with extreme mental illness; reading materials unconstitutionally confiscated; broken plumbing (“ping-pong toilets,” as the inmates called them) and flooded cells; medications unprescribed or overprescribed, resulting in sickness and incapacitation. One man woke up with a snake in his cell. One day, I read a flurry of letters, all received on the same day, describing a prisoner screaming for help. The men in neighboring cells tried to get the guards' attention. They used metal cups to bang on the heavy doors but no one responded. They did not know if this inmate was still alive. Given the track record of these facilities, this was a legitimate question.

One night I caught a cab home from work and the cab driver, who was from Saudi Arabia, asked me what I did for a living. I told him about law school and NPP and told him about the kinds of violations the organization seeks to right. “In America?” He asked. “I didn't know that kind of stuff happened here.”

Read more »

A universe from nothing? Or: desperately seeking transcendence in a materialist world

Posted on by Fausto Ribeiro

by Fausto Ribeiro

Lasar segall dorLet us imagine for a moment the following story: a man is sitting at the edge of a cliff, marveling at the immensity below and all of its beauty – a resplendent lake, enormous mountains, a vast field covered with trees, maybe a small village with a few lovely houses whose chimneys release a white, innocent smoke. There is a notebook on the man's lap; in it, with a worn-out pencil, he registers in the form of poetry his impressions about that which he has the good fortune of witnessing. A beautiful woman then approaches from a nearby trail and sees him; upon realizing what this stranger is doing, she is immediately overcome with a great emotion, an expectation so ravishing that her hands start to tremble slightly: here is a man who writes poems about nature's enchantment, about it's mesmerizing beauty! Instantly the woman conceives in her mind a whole image of who this man is, of his values, of his rich inner universe. She passionately contemplates, above all, the possibility of a real connection between the two of them. Nervous, she walks slowly in his direction and touches him gently on the shoulder, in the hope of initiating a conversation that would confirm her expectations. When he turns to face her, however, she suffers a shocking disappointment: the man is ugly; his features clearly violate the universal principles of beauty neurologists affirm exist.

Automatically, in a snap, before any words are said, the whole mental edifice built by the woman crumbles, and while flushing awkwardly, she pronounces a few random sentences about the amazing view, about the lake, about the low probability of rain for that afternoon. The man answers with some other banalities, courteous but tense in light of the unexpected encounter with a woman so much more beautiful than him, so out of his usual reach. A brief silence imposes itself, and the woman glances furtively at the man's notebook. She reflects for a few seconds. When the silence becomes unbearably uncomfortable, she – already taking a few steps backwards – mumbles as a goodbye a prefab phrase about how nice it was to have met him, to which he responds politely, struggling in vain not to show how disappointed he is with the abrupt end of a conversation that had already provoked in him, so soon, the beginnings of an embarrassing arousal.

The woman then walks away in quick steps, unconscious that her brain is already working to set up the mechanism of defense that will prevent her from making the unfortunate meeting the object of any posterior rumination. In a few minutes, maybe a few hours, she will have forgotten about the man's existence. Nevertheless, the ruins of the hope that had illuminated those brief moments before she saw the man's face will remain dammed up in the grey area between her conscious and her unconscious self, being yet one more grain of sand in the mountain of repressed anguish to which, throughout her life, she will give many different names and prescribe many tentative solutions.

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The Dictionary Is Not Literature

Posted on by Tasneem Zehra Husain

by Tasneem Zehra Husain

Mural at the Time & Space Cafe of the Royal Institution in London

Science is beautiful. Or so they say. When Werner Heisenberg, one of the fathers of quantum mechanics, made his major breakthrough, he wrote “the whole area of internal relations in atomic theory is unexpectedly and clearly spread out before my eyes. What these internal relations show in all their mathematic abstraction, is an incredible degree of simplicity, a gift that we can only accept with humility. Not even Plato could have believed that it would be so beautiful. In fact these relations cannot have been invented: they have existed since the creation of the world.” Such pronouncements are not rare; the splendor of theories and the elegance of equations has been extolled by generations of scientists. Unfortunately, however, these sentiments aren’t always shared by the general public, most of whom assume that this particular form of beauty lies only in the eye of the (highly educated) beholder – a tragic misconception which precludes many from claiming the profound relationship with the universe that is their birthright.

It is true that the deeper we delve into any subject the more subtle our appreciation of it becomes, but just as we do not need a degree in Art to enjoy a painting, or a degree in Music to enjoy a song, a formal degree is not a prerequisite to experiencing the joy and wonder of science. Scientists find aesthetic pleasure in their subject, not just because they know more than the lay person, but because they have imbued what they know with meaning. They are aware of the context in which statements are made, and of the connections that exist between one idea and another; through long years of practice, they have trained their ears to hear the beautiful and passionate harmonies that lie implicit in apparently bland scientific laws.

To those of us who lack such associations, the very same statements fall flat. They do not evoke emotion, any more than a printed musical score would. But if someone plays the composition, that is another thing entirely; suddenly, the monochrome pattern of notes weaving through staff lines becomes a living entity, with a story and a soul. When non-scientists read textbook passages, or newspaper articles distilling the latest discoveries, it is only natural that they remain unmoved. Most people lack the experience, the mental images and the knowledge networks which would allow them to create meaning from a string of facts; in the absence of such connections, statements that should rightly inspire awe, dwindle into mere trivia.

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Monday Poem

Posted on by Jim Culleny

Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out
…………….. —Robert Frost

Safe

I'm safe
I've locked myself in
You're with me and safe too

Through the barred window of this box
the world has changed, grown more lovely

I savor its barred beauty more
as I recall it close at hand

Now unattainable it seems exquisite
or, I see now how exquisite it has always been

But we're safe now from its predations
bounded and safe

look, out there, the honeysuckle,
remember its scent?
.

by Jim Culleny
12/10/13

Is applied ethics applicable enough? Acting and hedging under moral uncertainty

Posted on by Grace Boey

by Grace Boey

Making-decision

A runaway train trolley is racing towards five men who are tied to the track. By pulling a lever, you could divert the train's path to an alternative track, which has only one man on it …

If you're gearing up to respond with what you'd do and why, don't bother. It doesn't matter whether you'd pull the lever: it's too late. The five were run over almost fifty years ago, because philosophers couldn't decide what to do. They have been – pun most certainly intended – debated to death.

Formulated by the late Philippa Foot in 1967, the famous “trolley problem” has since been endlessly picked apart and argued over by moral philosophers. It's even been reformulated – apart from “classic”, the trolley problem also comes in “fat man”, “loop”, “transplant” and “hammock” varieties. Yet, in spite of all the fascinating analysis, there still isn't any good consensus on what the right thing is to do. And, not only do philosophers disagree over what to do, a significant number of them just aren't sure. In a 2009 survey of mostly professional philosophers, 34.8% of the respondents indicated some degree of uncertainty over the right answer [1].

Philosopher or not, if you're in the habit of being intellectually honest, then there's a good chance you aren't completely certain about all your moral beliefs. Looking to the ethics textbooks doesn't help – you'd be lucky not to come away from that with more doubts than before. If the philosophical field of ethics is supposed to resolve our moral dilemmas, then on some level it has obviously failed. Debates over moral issues like abortion, animal rights and euthanasia rage on, between opposing parties and also within the minds of individuals. These uncertainties won't go away any time soon. Once we recognize this, then the following question naturally arises: what's the best way to act under moral uncertainty?

Ethicists, strangely, have mostly overlooked this question. But in relatively recent years, a small group of philosophers have begun rigorous attempts at addressing the problem. In particular, attempts are being made to adapt probability and expected utility theory to decision-making under moral uncertainty.

Read more »

Clothes & Fashion, Feminism & Other -isms

Posted on by Tara* Kaushal

by Tara* Kaushal

The clothes, models and visual imagery standards set by the fashion industry leave women across the world to balance complex dynamics in their personal style choices. Conceptual image by Sahil Mane Photography.

Feminist-Fashion-Sahil-Mane-PhotographyThat clothes and, by extension, fashion, are a feminist, gender, class, financial, social, political, psychological, cultural, historical, ageist, religious, lookist, etc. issue is a given. Our ability and reasons to wear, or not, the clothes we do is charged with individual choice rooted in environmental dynamics, and is remarkably telling of our who, what, where, when and why. Though Abraham Maslow does refer to “differences in style of hair-dress, clothes” in his important hierarchy of needs theory as “superficial differences in specific desires from one culture to another”, clothes themselves would probably rate from basic needs all the way up the pyramid to self-actualization.

So I start with a few caveats: I'm not talking about the sartorial ‘choices' of women living in places of the world where religion and/or laws determine what to wear—the burka is beyond the scope of this column. I talk of socio-cultural environments where people can wear what they choose for the most part, despite traditionalists expressing varying degrees of disapproval, though even here I leave out those who, in Maslow's words, “live by bread alone”.

My premise is that this demographic of people the world over taps in to and is influenced by global fashion culture rooted in Western styles in various ways and degrees, consciously or sub—either directly on the internet or through more traditional media feeding off the internet, either fresh off the international runways or through its influence on their country's own fashion convention. And these Western styles continue to incorporate global influences, making for a hotbed dynamic with exponential possibilities.

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Two Problems for the Human Sciences, and Two Metaphors

Posted on by Bill Benzon

by Bill Benzon

For as long as I can remember such things – back to my undergraduate years in the 1960s – humanists have been defending themselves and their work against all comers: politicians, scientists of all kinds, and disgruntled letter writers. And always the defense comes down to this: we provide a holistic and integrated view of what it is to be human in a world that is, well, just what IS the world like anyhow?

It's a mug's game and I refuse to play it. I was trained in the human sciences: hermeneutics AND cognitive science, history AND social science, and I've played jazz and rhythm and blues in seedy nightclubs, ritzy weddings, and outdoors before thousands. It's all good. It's all come into play as I've investigated the human mind through music and literature.

2473In this essay I look at literature. First I consider literary form as displayed in ring form texts. Then I review a historical problem posed by Shakespeare and the rise of the European novel. My general point will be that we need all our conceptual resources to deal with these problems. But let's begin with an analogy: how do we understand, say, a cathedral?

The Cathedral Problem

Cathedrals are made of stone blocks, mortar, pieces of stained glass, lead strips, metal fittings, wooden beams and boards, and so forth. You can go through a cathedral and count and label every block and locate them on a (3D) map. You can do the same for the doors and cabinets, the plumbing, heating fixtures, and wiring, and so forth. You will now, in some sense, have described the cathedral. But you won't have captured its design. That's difficult and those how focus on it often use vague language, not because they like vagueness, but because, at the moment, that's all that's available.

And so it goes with literature and newer psychologies: cognitive science, evolutionary psychology, and neuroscience. My humanist colleagues keep hearing that they should get on board with the cognitive revolution and the decade of the brain. But it all sounds like trying to explain a cathedral by counting the building blocks, measuring the pitch of the roof, and analyzing the refractive properties of pieces of colored glass.

The advice may be well meant, but it isn't terribly useful. It takes our attention away from the problem – how the whole shebang works – and asks us to settle for a pile of things we already know. Almost.

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Black Pete, the Washington Redskins, and Modern Minstrelsy

Posted on by Akim Reinhardt

by Akim Reinhardt

Photo from Huffington PostBlack Pete. Good Lord, what a head shaker that is.

Most anyone who's not Dutch looks at Black Pete and thinks to themselves: For real? You've got Sinterklaas, the Dutch version of Santa Claus, working his Christmas season magic accompanied by an army of little Jumpin' Jim Crows? Diminutive, black face helpers who look like an unholy cross between Al Jolsen and Rhoda from the Mary Tyler Moore Show?

If that ain't a goddamn freak show, then I don't know what is.

Until recently, most Americans had never heard of Black Pete, or Zwarte Piet as he's known in Dutch. He only first caught my attention a couple of years ago. But this year, the little fella began reaching an international level of infamy as even the United Nations chimed in on Holland's favorite little pickaninny.

White performers dressed in black face and performing as Black Pete is pretty cut and dried for most people: it's stunningly distasteful, and an embarrassing throwback to Europe's imperial culture.

But then again, most people aren't from Holland, and that's where it starts to get interesting.

The Dutch have overwhelmingly rallied together in defense of Black Pete. Amid the hubbub following the U.N. condemnation, a Dutch Facebook page supporting Black Pete quickly garnered over two million of Likes. In a nation with fewer than 17 million people, that's quite a statement.

But rather than helping their cause, the rationale most apologists offer only compounds matters. They insist that Black Pete needs to stay because he’s good for children; that the character is a cherished part of most Dutch people’s childhood, and many of them can’t imagine depriving today’s children of that joy.

Because really, nothing’s better for helping children gain a sound sense of themselves and others than watching black face performers prance around cartoonishly.

Americans such as myself can be quick to judge and condemn. Living in a country that saw a protracted civil rights movement reach its apex half-a-century ago, the knee jerk reaction is to condescendingly nod our heads and mutter something about Europe's backwards race relations. We know our own state of race relations is far from perfect. But black face in 21st America? And directed at audiences of children no less? Incomprehensible.

But what about red face?

The Kansas City Chiefs football team. The Cleveland Indians baseball team. The Washington Redskins football team. The Atlanta Braves baseball team. The Chicago Blackhawks hockey team. And beyond professional sports teams garnering huge profits, there are also prestigious research universities like Florida State University and the University of Illinois that continue to field sports teams with Indian names and mascots, have many fans who dress up in red face, and even present sanctioned red face Indian performances for the crowd.

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Oh, the lack of humanity

Posted on by Sarah Firisen

by Sarah Firisen

DatingMaybe I’m just getting old. Having recently turned 45, I realize that what I’m about to write may very well just be an early sign that I’m about to turn into one of those older people who need a young person to help them use their phone/computer/toaster. Despite the fact that I spent almost 20 years as a techie, perhaps I’ve jumped the shark and should give up trying to keep up with technology and the changes it brings to society. Even as I shake my head in disbelief at the lack of civility that seems to have become acceptable, I realize that civility is in the eye of the beholder and that to my 13-year old, this is what society is. This is the Beatles and their long hair, Elvis and his overtly sexualize hip gyrations, dresses that showed ankles, or one of the many, many harbingers of the “end of life as we know it” that have been decried over the years by the older generations.

So if you think I’m just old and stuffy, spare me the comments telling me so. But honestly, I do think that there’s something unfortunate going on and I worry about the slippery slope it puts us on. Since my marital separation, I’ve been trying out online dating. I’ve had some good dates and some bad. Just like dating was 20 years ago. But one thing is not the way it was the last time I was single, the utter degradation of civil discourse.

I’ve been really shocked at what men (and I know that maybe women do this as well, but I only date men so that’s my experience) feel it’s okay to say to a total stranger they’ve been talking with for a few minutes or less. It’s not that I didn’t meet my fair number of boors in bars in my twenties, but that behavior was almost always fueled by alcohol. But this behavior isn’t. And it’s not even the supposed anonymity of the Internet that encourages these people to say and do things that I have to hope they wouldn’t say and do in person – many of them have no problem owning to who they actually are before they launch into their sex talk.

Clearly online dating is far from the only Internet area where vulgarity, bullying and generally boorish behavior seems to be exponentially greater than its in-person counterparts; comments sections on blogs and newspapers (including some of the comments I’ve received on this site over the years) often seem to be utterly lacking in compassion, empathy or any consideration for other people’s feelings.

Cyberbulling and the dehumanizing of the subject matter sometimes gets taken to such extremes as to be almost funny, if it wasn’t so unpleasant; the poor woman whose photo happened to be on the homepage of the health insurance enrollment website was “lambasted by cyberbullies who associated her face with the politically divisive law”. Really? Are people really that stupid and that mean?

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