Not a Potted Plant

…may very well be in Arizona’s new Ninth Congressional District, which wraps around the eastern side of Phoenix like a crescent, including much of Tempe and parts of Scottsdale, Mesa, Chandler, and Paradise Valley. If I recall correctly, this area also includes Arizona State University and substantial amounts of housing for ASU students, something of an offset against what would generally be considered a conservative area. Arizona is a state where Democrats have been looking to make gains in traditionally Republican territory. Since the district is brand-new (last cycle, Arizona held only eight seats in the House) this is an open seat, and local political analysts call the seat a “toss-up,” suggesting that neither party has a significant advantage in terms of registration. Continue Reading →

I am looking at getting some more Bluetooth earpieces. I am looking for ones that fit very specific criteria. The model I have is one of the few affordable ones that can do it, but it’s hard to find because it was a free magazine give-away for Car and Driver a while back. Anyway, I found some! Only $19.95! But $12 for shipping. So, add three more, still $12 for shipping. Add one more to round it out to five, and shipping is… $600. I kid you not. Try it.

Add one more, shipping is $16.95.

Well, having shipping for five cost $600 is one way of making $17 shipping seem awfully cheap.

I have previously written about the water tower cross in Whiteville, Tennessee three times: here, here, and here. The story is pretty much over now. On August 8, 2012, the Freedom From Religion Foundation and the town of Whiteville settled the lawsuit.

The actual terms of the settlement are here. The FFRF’s press release regarding the settlement can be read here. And the mayor of Whiteville, in what has emerged as his own characteristic style, today spontaneously e-mailed me his own press release, which can be viewed here. The terms of the settlement are… Continue Reading →

Twitter users! You have been monitored! For your potty mouths, at that!

And the data is in. Scientifically analyzed and presented in easy-to-understand graphic representations. The uncontested winner of use of the word which is euphemized on these pages as “fish” is… the greater metropolitan Los Angeles area.

Congratulate yourselves, my fellow Angelenos! Even if the maps are not adjusted for population and density, we still use the f-bomb more than New Yorkers, Bostonians, Chicagoans, Houstonians, Dallasites, Atlantians, D.C.ites, Denvorians, the entire foul-mouthed state of Indiana, and most of all, those fishin’ snooty San Franciscans with their superior we’re-better-at-everything-than-you attitudes. Hard, scientific proof, obtained through impeccable methodology — turns out, we cuss way more than they do, so at least we’re better at that. That’ll show ’em.

The only real competition we’ve got out there for indiscriminate, gratuitous overuse of what was at one time the most objectionable word in the English language is… Toronto. And they’re not even in the United States. Los Angeles: home of the Stanley Cup and the cussword king of the western hemisphere. Rarely am I so proud of my region as I am today.

Northwest sockeye salmon with Washington sweet corn. Heirloom tomatoes. New-potato gnocchi. Roasted peaches with an oat-and-almond crumble. Cocktails, and then wine. No, that’s not what was served for dinner in Casa Likko last night, although I wish it was. It’s what celebrity unofficial spokesgay* Dan Savage and National Organization for Marriage (an anti-SSM advocacy organization) President Brian Brown shared for dinner as part of their symposium on August 15, 2012, in Savage’s home. The whole hour-long, post-dinner debate is on YouTube, and the reporter’s writeup was published in the Gray Lady yesterday.

I wanted to say that the menu was more interesting than the debate. I wanted to say that I heard nothing new in the discussion. But that’s not quite true. Mr. Brown entrenched me further in my advocacy for legally treating same-sex marriages the same as mixed-sex marriages. Continue Reading →

Mr. Blue and I have been having an audiobookclub over the past several months, focusing primarily on literary classics of one stripe or another. So far, the one that most gripped me was Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.

I’m a white guy. Whiter than white. My heritage is British and German, for heaven’s sake. I don’t know when my ancestors got here, but it wasn’t any time recently. Though most of my heritage is rather humble, and it comes with an accent that bespeaks ignorance to many, I nonetheless come about as far from the background of the book as one can imagine.

Yet my appreciation of the book was not on the basis of better helping me understand the African-American experience. I mean, there were ways in which it gave me some appreciation, but it was more personal than that. I related it to my own experiences and perceptions. In ways that deviated from the sociopolitical contexts of the book greatly.

If I were running for president, and this bit were to make the presses, critics on the left would probably scoff at the notion that a whitebread white guy like me could really connect to such a work and that it is indicative of some fundamental unseriousness on my part. Critics on the right would say how my appreciation relates to some misbegotten white guilt or something suchlike. I fancy myself an articulate guy, but I’m not sure how I could describe the whole thing in a way that wouldn’t seem presumptuous or silly among those predisposed not to like me.

(If I were to try, it would be something along the lines of relating to the struggle to find one’s own identity among a greater social movement with brush-filled pathways and a sense of disconnect even with those that would forge the same ultimate destination.)

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A lot of people have been getting a kick out of the fact that one of straight-laced arch-conservative Republican Congressman Paul Ryan’s favorite bands is Rage Against the Machine. I mean, Ryan is the Machine, isn’t he? Frontman Tom Morello sure thinks so. This is a relatively superficial reading of the situation, in my view.

First, it has to be said, the overwhelming liberalness of the artistic world means that if you are a conservative, you’re going to have a hard time finding great anthems for your cause. Unless you’re willing to consign yourself to country music, or entertainment hermitdom, you’re going to be either consuming art that is apolitical (which is, of course, most of it), art by artists that oppose you, or both. If you’re a politically-minded bloke, you might actually find political things that you disagree with more worthwhile than apolitical things that are inoffensive.

Now we can say, “Yes, but Rage Against The Machine?!” Yeah, superficially it’s awkward. Maybe his appreciation is entirely superficial. I don’t know. It doesn’t take too much of a stretch of my imagination, however, to see how RATM might touch on a particular nerve even as the actual context of the art deviates enormously from his worldview. Ryan may see himself in the context of someone who is fighting against a culture that he sees as problematic and that, to him, is more important than the wild divergence between the problems with culture that he sees and the problem that RATM sees.

Given how comparatively little that conservatives have to hang their hat on as far as singers singing their anthems, it’s not hard to see how one might take a singular aspect of someone’s music, combine it with the energetic sound, and enjoy it a great deal. There is a dearth of talented musicians wanting to sing starkly political anthems of a conservative nature. You take what you can get.

He certainly has a better excuse for Rage than I do for Ellison.

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It’s partly because of the above that I see a lot of the “HAHA! Paul Ryan loves Rage Against The Machine and Tom Morello hates Paul Ryan!”

As I say, if conservatives limited their artistic appreciation to those artists who were on board with them, it’d be some country, Kid Rock, Ted Nugent, and not many others. Even Blues Traveler has given up. This strikes as perhaps indicative of a political (or political culture) problem for the GOP, but not really a substantive one. It comes across to me as pointing out how unpopular the unpopular kid is with the in-crowd.

Every four years or so we get some articles about how so-and-so has asked a Republican politician to stop using their music. It occasionally happens the other way, but not often. Truthfully, though, when Springsteen snubs Christie or (though to a lesser extent) Morello criticizes Ryan (to a ludicrous extreme, the author of a book on the history of salt seemed angered that GWB was reading his book), it speaks as much about the artist as it does about the uncoolness of the politician that likes them.

That being said, of all of the cases where this has happened, I would probably give Morello more leeway than the others since he is a far-afield political enthusiast. By and large, though, some sort of insistence that your art be consumed on your terms strikes me as short-sighted. If David Duke found something I wrote to be riveting, I’m mostly just be curious as to why.

Of all the tactics available to the Republican party to overcome the 12-point gender gap,* this would be… one of them.

UPDATE: A tweet from Ross Douthat suggests that it was supposed to be a joke, or at least retconned that way. NRO took the article offline. (Good move.)

* A Fox News poll published August 9, 2012 shows 51% of women respondents supporting Obama and 39% supporting Romney in the upcoming Presidential election. See page 14, question 2.

Last week I had a brief (considering the scope of the topic) post involving my views on immigration and more specifically “anchor babies.” This week I am going to write not so much on immigration, but the discussion of immigration.

This all came about when Paul Ryan was taken to task for using a couple of terms that were determined by some to be “dehumanizing.”

Language is important. The terminology we use often conveys where we are coming from. If, instead of “welfare recipient” someone uses the term “Shaniqua and her seven kids” (unless counterbalanced with other examples) we can kind of figure that they are referring to a specific kind of welfare recipient. The welfare discussion is steeped enough in race that it’s best not to use specifically racial imagery if you are interested in an actual discussion. Unless it really is a particular type of welfare recipient you want to condemn, then have at it I suppose.

At the same time, I don’t think it productive to continually change the terms of acceptable terminology or declare acceptable terminology so narrowly as to hinder the actual discussion.

Most of the time, I am perfectly fine using whatever terminology is preferred, so long as it’s reasonable. Sometimes, though, a problem with terminology is used (unintentionally, I should add) as cover for a problem with the concept

This happened a couple weeks ago on Facebook when I got an ugly private message responding to my usage of the term “intergenerational dependence” because it was considered to be racial code*. As it happens, we had a productive conversation about it. Especially since this person messaged me privately, I believe entirely that it was in good faith and not trying to score rhetorical points. The problem I had, though, was that intergenerational dependence was describing a thing and it’s a thing that needs to be discussed, if only to convince me that it never happens (it does) or that it is an overblown concern (it is in the aggregate, but it is a problem in concentrated areas – not just minority ones).

On the immigration front, the two terms that Ryan was being criticized for were anchor babies and catch and release. I’ll approach them one at a time, then look at other terms that have been described as unacceptable by one side or the other.

The term anchor babies is crude. I would be more than happy to use another term, if there was another term I could use that other people knew what it meant. I used this term back when I was more fiercely pro-immigration than I am now. We could use the term “citizenship babies” though that isn’t entirely accurate**. We could use the term “residency babies” though, being married to a doctor, that has a different meaning for me. But it needs to be something that people will understand what I mean when I say it.

Now, the response to this is to say “Well, why say it using any term?” Well, because it’s a thing. It may be a mythical thing, but it’s a thing we think is a thing and that makes it important. You can’t even defend birthright citizenship without addressing the concern of people having children to stay in this country.

Believing that people would have a child or time the conception of a child to increase the likelihood of being able to stay in this country isn’t racist. Heck, it’s what I would consider doing if I were in their shoes. I’d love the child, I’d care for the child, but I’d have a child two years earlier than intended if it meant a greater likelihood that I could stay in a country I wanted to stay in.

Now, the laws on what an anchor baby does for you are a lot more restricted than they are in the popular imagination. This should be addressed. So, too, should any arguments that this is not actually a widespread occurence. Address these points. Don’t get bent out of shape because they used words that everybody understands. Especially if you have no substitutes.

The next term, catch and release evokes images of hunting. I can see why it’s not something that people are excited about. At the same time, it is rather thoroughly descriptive. Even if you’ve never heard the phrase, you know what it means. It’s four syllables of clarity. It’s going to be hard to replace. It also relates to a point that needs to be addressed rather than dismissing it because of the terminology.

There is also some objection to referring to people in this country illegally as illegals. I am actually rather sympathetic to this objection. I believe that critics of illegal immigration ought to heed it. There are countless phrases to use and this one isn’t a particularly accurate one. “Illegal” may be two syllables and “illegal immigrant” may be four, but the latter is more descriptive.

Of course, illegal immigrant is occasionally seen as contentious. To be honest, though, I more often see conservatives saying that liberals say it rather than liberals actually say it. More often, I see liberals using an alternate term. There’s an alternate term! Yay! By which I mean, undocumented immigrants. I use that term sometimes, but sometimes I stick with “illegal immigrant.” “Undocumented” can sometimes seen excessively euphemistic, though I will still use it if only to avoid repetition. And if referring specifically to someone who is working illegally, I find undocumented worker to actually be a great term. (I can’t quite put my finger on why I find this easier than undocumented immigrant).

Though technically accurate, it is best to avoid using the terms illegal aliens or aliens because not only is there a non-human connotation in modern usage but there are immediately available alternatives. A lot of conservatives respond to this with (as with many other things) “Yes, but the word is correct and I shouldn’t have to stop using it because they want me to.”

Well, you don’t have to, but if you want to discuss the actual issue rather than turn it into one of liberal sensitivity or acceptable terminology, it’s best to avoid terms that are going to sidetrack the debate. For your own sake as much as anyone else’s (unless, of course, you want it to be about liberal sensitivity, in which case you should own up to that rather than pretend that you’re discussing actual issues).

On the other side, I have a friend who took me to task repeatedly when I would talk about being being anti-immigrant. “We’re not anti-immigrant,” he’d say, “we’re anti-illegal-immigrant.”

To be honest, I have a hard time with this one because it’s my experience that those who are most hot-and-bothered about illegal immigration are also disinclined to support legal immigration as well (they are very likely to be critical of H1B visas, for example). Assurances that “if we only got illegal immigration under control, we would be open to more legal immigration” frankly ring hollow.

That being said, I’ve retired the term “anti-immigrant” unless I am actually referring to people who not only want to send illegal immigrants back but also want to further restrict legal immigration. Here is another case, though, where those objecting to the terminology often don’t have a good replacement. I consider the proposed one “anti-illegal-immigrant” (to the extent that it is proposed) to be often inaccurate and always clumsy.

Another word I have gotten in trouble for using is nativist. I understand that there is some undesirable historical context of the term, but I don’t consider it something that has be negative (or even racist). However, since it derails any conversation, I have dropped the term.

I heard the phrase border hawk somewhere and took to it. I use it regularly and have gotten no complaints. People know what I mean as soon as I say it.

Oddly enough, I’ve heard complaints about the term sanctuary city from border hawks and border doves alike. The former complain that it is euphemistic when they should be called something-something (no repacement suggested, just something that sounds less benign I guess). More often, though, I hear complaints from the other side. But… no substitution phrase suggested there, either. Since elements of both sides don’t like it, I’m open to hearing a better term. Or maybe since elements of both sides don’t like it, that makes it a good phrase?

* – The context was not such that I was using the concept to lambast having welfare, merely that it is something to be concerned about.

** – I do use the term for something related but not the same: babies by foreign nationals that are born on American soil where the timing was not coincidental – this may have nothing to do with parental residency, though. I try to imply or quickly define the meaning when I use the term since it is not widely used.