Category: JustThinkin

Paradox

OK, something just hit me tonight. I was thinking about a post at Talking Points Memo, which I was reading because it was linked to from somewhere I read regularly…

At first the evidence was scattered and anecdotal. But now it’s pretty clear that a key aim of the Bush administration’s takeover of the NOLA situation is to cut off press access to report the story […]

Take a moment to note what’s happening here: these are the marks of repressive government, which mixes inefficiency with authoritarianism. The crew that couldn’t get key aid on the scene in time last week is coming in in force now. And one of the key missions appears to be cutting off public information about what’s happening in the city.

As it happens things have changed since that post — see here…”I talked to Bob a few minutes ago. And he said that there seemed to be a sea change in the treatment of reporters trying to get access to the city from yesterday to today. Today he reported that he and his colleagues were able to get through without any problem.”

So that problem is fixed for now, for reasons unclear. But I was thinking about the idea of “becoming a repressive authoritarian government.” And it occurred to me that people generally behave in an authoritarian, violent manner out of fear. They’re afraid of someone.

People who attack each other generally fear each other, and each believes they have good reason. And it’s irrelevant, in terms of ending the violence, who is right and who is wrong. Both sides are human. That’s what matters.

I’ve heard it said that rebellion and submission equally reinforce authoritarianism, because they are the two responses which authoritarianism foresees, and is prepared to handle. They don’t break the cycle, call the whole structure into question, wake people up. That’s why revolutions against tyranny have a sad tendency to turn into new tyrannies. Rebellion as such changes nothing fundamental.

And I was thinking about this “authoritarian crackdown on the media” thing and was thinking about how that is fueled by fear; how despite the fact that the people calling bullshit on the Bush administration are right, they are feeding the system by playing its own game even as they rebel. If they’re cracking down on the media, that’s because they’re afraid of it. They may be afraid of it because they’re afraid of the consequences of their own hurtful actions coming to light, because they’re afraid of being punished for them.

And I think about how you don’t move past a terrible situation by punishing the guilty; but you do move past it by speaking the truth. In South Africa, after apartheid, you had the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, whose mission was not to punish the guilty but to prevent the recurrence of the abuses and to heal the injuries and restore the losses. I don’t know how that all worked out but I’ll bet it worked out a damn sight better than acts of revenge.

It occurs to me that that kind of transcendence, that kind of unheard-of humanity, is what would be needed to break a cycle of degenerating authority structures. It is the natural result of nonviolent action as opposed to ordinary rebellion. Ordinary, violent rebellion makes the degeneration worse in the long run. Its victories are Pyrrhic.

If it is true that Bush and company essentially killed thousands in New Orleans through willful negligence and mismanagement of the nation, then they are horribly wounded by that as well. Killing destroys the soul of the killer as it does the body of the victim. If they did these things they are victims too. Nobody ever victimizes another person without victimizing themselves as well. Healing has to take place on both sides.

And I sure wish I knew better how to live these highfalutin’ ideas I have.

Paul Graham: Professionalism Just A Fad

Paul Graham’s stuff often annoys me, but I enjoyed this article a lot. He points out that one of the worst places to get work done is at work, and that professionalism is inferior to amateurism in most important ways, and other good paradoxical stuff.

He also spouts some ideological nonsense, but I’m sure my intelligent readers will be able to sort that stuff out. :)

Bad Is Good

One of the ideas I’ve been interested in lately is the idea that you don’t necessarily need to worry about becoming “competent” before you do things, because “incompetence” can be advantageous as well as disadvantageous.

Competence as an unqualified, universal advantage is part of the mythology of our culture. But competence is only ever competence according to a particular standard of measurement, or competence in a particular way of doing things, and sometimes competence itself can get in the way of innovation. You know the “right” and “wrong” ways to do things and you don’t think of doing them the “wrong” way.

Part of the mythology is “you have to learn the rules before you can break them!” That old saw is a bulwark supporting the myth of competence. You see, even if you point out that some great artist or engineer or something doesn’t follow the rules, you can say that he is only allowed to break them because he knew them perfectly first, and therefore knew how to break them.

Except it isn’t true. Some people learn the rules and follow them, some people learn the rules and break them, and some people never learn the rules, they are always making up their own rules all the time, and never necessarily staying with any given set.

I want to start keeping track of instances of “bad is good” — incompetence as an advantage — when I see it. It doesn’t even have to be a matter of competence — I’m interested in situations where something we might think was a disadvantage turned out to be an advantage.

Here’s today’s post on that topic — David Anez apparently created the subgenre of “sprite” webcomics inadvertently.. He wanted to do a traditional drawn webcomic, but did not own a scanner, so he did some temporary filler comics using video game images until he could afford a scanner. Turns out that people liked those comics a lot better than his “real” comics, and there are now many imitators.

I don’t follow any sprite comics, but the large number of people who do suggests to me that there is something to them. Sometimes….. bad is good.

Blogging vs. Being Hired

Via PJ and many others, “Bloggers Need Not Apply,” an article about how an academic hiring team kept finding reasons on candidates’ blogs not to hire them.

This has caused a lot of appalled reaction among bloggers, who seem to ignore a couple of points in it —

Don’t get me wrong: Our initial thoughts about blogs were, if anything, positive. It was easy to imagine creative academics carrying their scholarly activity outside the classroom and the narrow audience of print publications into a new venue, one more widely available to the public and a tech-savvy student audience.

and:

…And in truth, we did not disqualify any applicants based purely on their blogs. If the blog was a negative factor, it was one of many that killed a candidate’s chances. More often that not, however, the blog was a negative, and job seekers need to eliminate as many negatives as possible.

So they didn’t consider blogging inherently problematic, it’s just that every time they looked at somebody’s blog there was something that made them want to hire them less. But of course it’s still rather chilling to suggest that bloggers shouldn’t try to get academic jobs, and academic hopefuls shouldn’t have blogs.

I read this and I can’t help thinking of this insightful blog entry — about the difference between “public,” “private,” and “secret,” and about how on the Web there is no “private,” only “public” and “secret.” Go read it now. Really. It’s a must read.

That is the central problem, I think. The elimination of the private register, and the shunting of private conversation into the public sphere.

This “blogging being poisonous to hiring” thing is just a symptom of the problem.

UPDATE: Dan Gillmor’s remarks on this are pretty on target.