Category: General

More on the Search for a Nonviolent Future

More reading of The Search for a Nonviolent Future by Michael Nagel.

Overall since I started reading it I’d say the quality has held up. There are a couple details I’d quibble with.

For example, he has almost nothing good to say about the media, and he completely buys the “violent media make us (especially kids) violent” idea. However, I think that the book Killing Monsters makes a good case that this is simply not true — that what people get out of a particular kind of media is not always what you think, and that the “overwhelming evidence” that, e.g., TV and video games make kids violent, tends to evaporate when you try to nail it down to actual studies rather than proclamations by terribly concerned authorities.

That’s an example of the sort of thing that I find a little dubious in some parts of the book. But on the whole it is excellent and I would highly recommend it.

I’m going to try to start to put nonviolence into practice where I can.

Advocate the Prohibition of Torture

Well, kicking the bad guys out of office failed.

So let’s try the more positive step: insist that the so-called “bad guys” stop acting so bad.

Go here and sign a petition to ask the Senators who confirm Alberto Gonzales to ask Gonzales to unequivocally renounce torture as an instrument of American policy.

Summary Of Vote Fraud Concerns

Voting Facts. Via cdj. A fairly incendiarily written list but as far as I know it’s 100% factual.

Even if you do not believe that there has been vote fraud (and it is hard to say without a serious investigation of the possibility, which has not occurred), it should be clear from many of these facts that massive vote fraud is possible and even likely under the circumstances which currently obtain, and therefore those circumstances ought to be changed. Democracy is valuable and we need to protect it.

For more on vote fraud concerns and what can be done about it, please see Black Box Voting and similar web sites.

Without Rancour And Without Dishonour

“[Gandhi was] as much a benefactor of Britain as of his own country. He made it impossible for us to go on ruling India, but at the same time he made it possible for us to abdicate without rancour and without dishonour.â€? –Arnold Toynbee

A really nonviolent (and therefore really liberal, and really democratic) attitude towards politics would not look very much like what the political entries on this and previous incarnations of my weblog have often looked like. I have definitely engaged in demonization of the people in power who are doing bad things. It’s a difficult thing to state the truth about terrible things that people have done, are doing, or are planning to do, without taking that second step into saying that they are terrible people and turning it into a big “us against them” game. I’ve definitely taken the easy way out, moved from righteous anger to self-righteous hatred. All I can say in my defense is that halfway through my life I’m only barely starting to seriously think about politics, and I am making a beginner’s mistakes.

I’m glad a lot of other people have been in the game, and have done much better than me. I’m going to see if I can do a bit better myself, cutting back on the “rancour” and attempts to inflict “dishonour.”

So as far as politics in the blog goes — I’ll probably still be posting things which outrage or appall me, but I’ll be a lot less likely to interpret them as indications that “Dubya sucks!” or “Rethuglicans are composed of pure evil!” or whatever. It’s not about who’s to blame, it’s about what should be happening and what shouldn’t be. If I post something appalling it will be because people should know about it so they can intelligently object to it, and if there’s something in their power to do about it, do it. Not so that we can see who’s evil and who’s good. We’re all quite evil, and we’re all quite good.

Knowledge Is Disempowerment.

It can be anyway.

Years back I got the idea that it would be cool to play with “constructed languages.” I read the Language Construction Kit by Mark Rosenfelder and banged out a couple silly fragments of languages, and then I joined the CONLANG-L mailing list, and I started buying and devouring the sorts of academic linguistics books you can find at Border’s or Barnes & Noble’s. (I had been interested in linguistics anyway due to my obsession with the linguistics/philosophy/cognitive science of people like George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, Mark Turner, Ronald Langacker, and company).

I learned more and more but it was never enough. I formed strong opinions on different theories, much stronger opinions than I had any right to hold (as is my wont). But the more I learned, the less I did. I tried to actually make stuff up but I couldn’t anymore. All I had was this big head full of knowledge.

Be careful when you get into a new field of creative endeavor and decide you have to learn all the tricks of the trade, especially if you’re a book-knowledge addict like me. Knowledge is, after all, only the knowledge that other people have gained through direct investigation and experience. Doing the same investigation and having the same experiences, you might have come up with different knowledge. Learning from books is just learning what other people have said about things they have seen and experienced. Be careful not to worship it. Be careful not to overdose on it. It’s a map, not the territory, as they say.

I thought of this recently because I’ve been reading Lore Sjöberg lately and he had a piece which begins, “There’s something to be said for ignorant enthusiasm…” which shows he’s gone through some shadow of the same thing and that’s one reason why we haven’t seen any new Bandwidth Theater cartoons for like a year — he actually tried to learn how to animate “right” — that is, “right” according to the OTHER people in the industry who do it, instead of “right” meaning whatever works for him in the real world — and he’s finding that it’s making it hard for him to actually do anything.

So learn the “right” way to do things at your peril. You may actually be better off ignorant and enthusiastic.