And when you’re finished listening, check out On the Media’s great description of how Dr. King went off script at the best possible moment—and what happened after. ◼
Category Archives: politics
Excuses, excuses
Separating the sheep from the goats. Original photo by Nick in exsilio.I’m not a believer, but I reserve the right to appropriate the religious literature with which I was raised for my own ends. That’s pretty much what Jesus and xkcd did, anyway. And once I thought of this one, I had to write it down.
When the Son of man shall come in his glory, with all his holy angels, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory.
And before him shall be gathered all nations, and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divides his sheep from the goats.
And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left.
Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, “Depart from me, you who are cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels.
For I was hungry, and you gave me no food; I was thirsty, and you gave me nothing to drink;
I was a stranger, and you did not invite me in; naked, and you did not clothe me; sick, and in prison, and you did not visit me.”
Then shall they answer unto him, “Lord, we did indeed see you hungry and thirsty, a stranger, naked, and sick and in prison. We’ll totally cop to that.”
And the Lord shall say, “Wait, that’s not in the script.”
And he shall look on them in great vexation and ask, “If you saw me, why in my name didn’t you help me?”
Then shall they answer, “But Lord, we had perfectly good reasons! Behold:
When you told us you were hungry, we were pretty sure you could stand to lose some weight.
We saw that you were thirsty, but we were afraid that digging a well for your village might distort your local economy and stunt its development.
Some of our best friends are strangers, and we would have been happy to invite you in, but there were other folks inside with us who have old-fashioned ideas about that kind of thing, and we didn’t want to make them uncomfortable.
We saw you needed clothes, but if we just gave you clothes, wouldn’t it undermine the profits of clothing manufacturers? And aren’t they the real job creators, after all?
And, we totally wanted to come visit you in prison, and while you were sick, but you would not believe what a lot of bureaucratic hoops you have to jump through if you want to visit someone in prison or in the hospital. There are forms you have to fill out, and you have to come at a specific time.”
And the Lord shall say unto them, “I liked it better when you pretended you didn’t even know I needed help. Go to hell, the lot of you.” ◼
Iowa hangover
So last night a tiny fraction of the population of a not-very-populous but otherwise unobjectionable Midwestern state demonstrated they’ve never Googled Rick Santorum. Or maybe that they’d rather vote for a hateful, race-baiting asshole than a Mormon. One state down, forty-nine to go.
So here’s a nice animation of imagery from my favorite movie ever, to help take the edge off. In the grand scheme of cosmic history, the Iowa caucuses are much less stressful.
2001: A Space Odyssey from Joe Donaldson on Vimeo.
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I’m sure I’m not the first to point this out, but
A surge by Santorum is a sign you’re doing something wrong, regardless of whether we’re talking about the voting booth or the bedroom. Please take note, Iowa Republican caucus-goers. ◼
#OccupyAmazon round 2: Cheap books are great, but someone’s paying the difference
Brick-and-mortar. Photo by ImaginaryGirl.Bouncing off the same NY Times op-ed that I did yesterday, Slate’s Farhad Manjoo says, screw indy booksellers. They’re not cheap or efficient enough. Here’s the core of his price argument:
A few times a year, my wife—an unreformed local-bookstore cultist—drags me into one of our supposedly sacrosanct neighborhood booksellers, and I’m always astonished by how much they want me to pay for books. At many local stores, most titles—even new releases—usually go for list price, which means $35 for hardcovers and $9 to $15 for paperbacks. That’s not slightly more than Amazon charges—at Amazon, you can usually save a staggering 30 to 50 percent. In other words, for the price you’d pay for one book at your indie, you could buy two.
And here’s efficiency:
Compared with online retailers, bookstores present a frustrating consumer experience. A physical store—whether it’s your favorite indie or the humongous Barnes & Noble at the mall—offers a relatively paltry selection, no customer reviews, no reliable way to find what you’re looking for, and a dubious recommendations engine. Amazon suggests books based on others you’ve read; your local store recommends what the employees like. If you don’t choose your movies based on what the guy at the box office recommends, why would you choose your books that way?
Manjoo also makes the point that indie bookstores aren’t really selling local products—their bread and butter is sales of the same nationally distributed books that fill up Amazon’s top sellers list. And since Amazon offers those books at a better price point, they’re available to more people who want them, and that’s all you need to sustain a literary culture, right?
Well, maybe. If you don’t mind that some portion of that discount comes at a cost to actual human beings. Cue Vanessa Veselka’s account of trying to unionize an Amazon “distribution center” over at The Atlantic.
He was the one who told me Bezos was going to close the Seattle warehouse. It was too expensive to run. Huge fulfillment centers were springing up around the country. In Nevada, they were getting $5.15 an hour and people had to work 12-hour shifts, five days a week. Mandated overtime pay didn’t start until after 40 hours of a workweek. So when production lulled people were sent home or told not to come in the following day to shave costs. These were the new models. This was the future.
Shaving overtime by sending people home mid-shift, or giving them “the next few days off,” was the practice in Seattle too, but in Nevada there was no velvet glove, no nod to personal identity. Workers there were herded through long security lines and body searched on their way in and out before they could clock in. The ventilation was terrible and they got fired for the slightest complaint-at least these were the reports.
That was years ago. Much more recently, Amazon management made the news for working its warehouse staff to heat exhaustion rather than open some doors to let in a breeze.
During summer heat waves, Amazon arranged to have paramedics parked in ambulances outside, ready to treat any workers who dehydrated or suffered other forms of heat stress. Those who couldn’t quickly cool off and return to work were sent home or taken out in stretchers and wheelchairs and transported to area hospitals. And new applicants were ready to begin work at any time.
An emergency room doctor in June called federal regulators to report an “unsafe environment” after he treated several Amazon warehouse workers for heat-related problems. The doctor’s report was echoed by warehouse workers who also complained to regulators, including a security guard who reported seeing pregnant employees suffering in the heat.
Cheap books are great, but someone has to pay for the difference. Manjoo’s taking the side of the robots on this one: sure, you could pay a couple extra bucks so a bookstore clerk with interesting suggestions for your next purchase can feed her family, or you could let an algorithm find you more like what you’ve already read, and let that clerk break her back in a warehouse for a barely-living wage. ◼
Advertising equality
I’m with Queerty on this one: the Australians make a much better ad for marriage equality than us schlubs in the States.
Go ahead, take a moment to find a tissue.
If anyone asked my opinion, though—which they haven’t—I’d say that there’s an important point missing from this ad, and from most of the pro-equality campaigns I’ve seen. That point is that gays, lesbians, and transgendered folks are already living stories like the one so movingly depicted above, and making lifelong commitments to each other, without waiting for anyone’s permission to do it.
My ideal advert for equality would simply be a series of short clips of committed queer couples—maybe just sitting there looking back at the camera, maybe recounting bits of the joys of life together. Each couple has accompanying subtitles: Alice and Rose, together 14 years, or Rob and Michael, together 5 years.
The point being, gay marriages already exist, and in many cases have been existing longer than a lot of the straight couples in the audience have been together. And it’s long past time for the government to acknowledge them. ◼
Hey, what happened to the header?
In a word, this.
If that sounds like a bad idea to you, too, tell Congress. I have. ◼
Tell Congress to increase NIH funding
Cross-posted from Nothing in Biology Makes Sense!.
For your consideration: a Change.org petition asking the U.S. Congress to increase funding to the National Institutes of Health by 3% in next year’s Federal budget. NIH is one of the biggest sources of public research funds in the U.S., and its support goes well beyond things immediately connected to human health and medicine—I did many analyses for my dissertation research on Joshua trees and yucca moths on a supercomputing cluster supported, in large part, by NIH funds.
Some would argue that the private sector should take over some of the lost funding for academic, basic research. The sad fact is that the private sector does not support the type of basic research that the NIH does; they take the results NIH-funded research and apply it to drug development. In addition, many entities in the private sector are currently slashing their Research & Development (R&D) budgets! For example, Pfizer recently cut its R & D budget by 1.5 billion.
Consider the following numbers. For 2011 budget, U.S. spending on:
Social security was $2564 per citizen (20.8% of the budget)
Defense was $2203 per citizen (18% of the budget)
Medicare was $1569 per citizen (12.8% of the budget)
Medicaid was $1172 per citizen (7.8% of the budget)
NIH was $99 per citizen (0.8% of the budget)
The original idea, as I understand it, is for this to be an “open letter” to Congress from working scientists across the nation, but supportive non-scientists should definitely sign on, too. ◼
Not that I watch Monday Night Football, either
Slacktivist Fred Clark, as ever, draws an apt comparison:
This suggests that anyone who hopes to become an ethical person would be better off watching football on television every Monday night than attending worship at a Southern Baptist church every Sunday morning. Monday Night Football might not make you a better person, but the Southern Baptist Convention has long employed an “ethics” spokesman who seems determined to make you a worse one.
Actually, now that I think of it, much of what I like about the Slacktivist is his apparently limitless ability re-frame Christianist bigotry as a failure to behave by standards of basic human decency. Jesus said of simple courtesy, “even the pagans can do that.” Fred Clark says, “Hey, folks? The pagans are doing it better.” ◼
Good news, everyone!
The academic–history–politics–awesomeness blog The Edge of the American West is back, baby. And they’re turning the sacred words of Abraham Lincoln into Wordles.
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