Jeffrey Yasskin’s blog

I went to San Francisco today on the Freedom Train to attend the celebration of Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday. The celebration left something to be desired — people were not singing in the aisles, or demanding that MLK’s work be completed. At one point, a rabbi reminded us that, though we may be “Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics”, we all worship one god. *sigh* silly monotheists. And I worry about these kinds of celebrations of individual people. It’s very easy to try to co-opt the holiday by saying, this is what Martin Luther King would have done, without considering whether he actually would. Perhaps that hasn’t happened to MLK, and I hope it never does, but it happened to Jesus, so we need to stay vigilant.

However, Martin Luther King was a great man and deserves to be remembered (as Sunshine said most eloquently). And, more importantly, his work is not completed, and urgently needs to be pursued. Unfortunately, the remaining work is harder than that already completed. Racism and other prejudices of any form are no longer publicly acceptable. There are no longer officially segregated restrooms, businesses, and schools. There is no more enemy, or rather, the enemy has melted into the general population. Blacks who kill whites are far more likely to receive the death penalty, yet it’s difficult to call any single case an instance of racism. And both blacks and latinos suffer a disproportional homicide rate, yet we don’t care enough to do much besides throwing people in prison after the fact.

A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, “This is not just.” It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, “This is not just.” The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.

I don’t really care that some people are richer than others. I care that the rich use their money to get richer. And, even more importantly, the rich use their money to make sure their children are rich too. We talk a lot in this country about equality of opportunity, but the truth is, the poor just aren’t getting it. But the rich don’t have to know this. Increasingly, they can use their money to isolate themselves in walled gardens where they only have to interact with other rich people. As long as races remain segregated by their incomes, we rich whites can keep our prejudices about both other races and the poor by never meeting any counterexamples. And, we can continue to sabotage our society by defunding essential social programs, knowing that our money will keep us out of trouble. Until it is too late anyway. This is not just!

The rich have no right to be isolated from social problems they create. If they are unwilling to do it voluntarily, they must be forced to confront the real struggles of the working poor. It is time to desegregate the neighborhoods, not just the schools, by both race and class.

Comments, again, on the blog, so I see them and they survive more than 30 days on lj.

A scenario: Tom and Sally have sex. Sally gets pregnant. Assuming they don’t get married, what happens? Sally can abort the fetus or not. If not, she can give the child up for adoption or not. If not, Tom can pay child support or not. How should they decide what to do?

I think it is completely Sally’s decision whether to have an abortion. I don’t think this is obvious though. The potential child she’s carrying would be a shared child. At least after the child is born, they’d have roughly equal rights to it, so perhaps they should have equal rights to the fetus as well. Tom may see an abortion as killing his child. Nevertheless, as wicked_wish put it, she’s effectively carrying a life-threatening parasite, and nobody else has the right to force her to do it for nine months. However, her decision to abort or not may be informed by external circumstances, as I’ll discuss next.

The decision to give the child up for adoption is shared. Neither parent has the exclusive right to raise the child, and neither has the right to prevent or force the other to raise it. I think this is obvious, but I’d be happy to hear any disagreement.

I think the decision to pay child support is entirely up to Tom. If Tom didn’t want a kid, Sally has no right to force one on him. Of course, he should make this decision early, before Sally decides whether to abort, and if he decides not to help support the kid, it is simply no longer his child: he gets no parental rights. A promise to help support the kid should be legally and ethically binding even if he changes his mind later. But if Tom doesn’t want a child, and makes that known early, he is not a deadbeat dad.

I’m not sure what should happen if Sally doesn’t want to financially support the child, but Tom wants to keep it, and she wants to keep her parental rights. She bore the child for nine months, which should count for something, but a child costs a lot to raise, probably more than the worth of nine months of time, even nine pregnant months. It feels wrong to talk of buying parental rights, but it could be the right way to handle this. You pay $X, you get so much parental rights. The nine months of pregnancy should count as hazardous duty (double/triple normal salary?), but perhaps aren’t anything qualitatively different.

I don’t really know how child support is handled now, so the last two paragraphs may be totally off-base. But I’m sure someone among my readers will have an idea. Comments/flames here.

I don’t believe in accidents. We’re here for a reason. The Great Spirit took the gumbo from New Orleans and poured it all over Texas.

Cyril Neville, New Orleans percussionist

I just finished reading The Cultural Creatives (a very worthwhile book), and one of the themes it reminded me of was the lack of a story of how to live in our culture. We don’t have a shared myth, or, maybe more accurately, our shared myths haven’t been updated since we lived in small tribes. And people are getting hurt because we don’t have these stories to help guide our behavior, to help us navigate life. We need a pattern language for living.

But how do we intentionally write a new myth? A new story for people to live by? As a computer scientist, I see myths as abstractions of true stories. In order to design a new abstraction, you first have to look at a large sample of its concrete examples. My idea for myth-writing is to make it a collaborative process based on a wiki, but with a twist. People who log in will have access to a personal area whose content they control completely. Here, they can provide examples — stories from their own life — without worrying that anyone will change them. Then we will have a public area into which the community can distill and abstract individual stories into common myths intended to resonate with the entire culture. Anyone will then be free to take these stories and retell them outside of the myth-wiki in the hope that the stories can help someone live their life better.

So what do you think? The details aren’t here yet, but are there general suggestions that might make this sort of project more likely to succeed? Has someone already done this? Do you have stories that you want to tell?

As I announced a few weeks ago, I was asked to give the student speech at my graduation. Here’s what I wound up saying. You’ll notice that the punctuation and capitalization isn’t always correct. That’s because I used the grammar to give me cues on how to say it. Thank you to everyone who helped me write it, even or especially if I seemed to resist your ideas. It wouldn’t have been nearly this good without you.

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Julian Sanchez has an article in Reason called The True Spirit of Xmas: How 4/5 of the country became an oppressed minority about the people who see every attempt at tolerance as an attack on Christianity. It’s worth reading, both to see why these people are wrong and to get ammunition for arguments against them.

Mistyping the groklaw URL got me to a blog that mentioned http://www.magnatune.com/. Wow. They’re an online music store that gives you an unlimited noncommercial license to the music they sell. You can listen to a 128-kbit MP3 stream of any of their songs for free, and you can buy an album at a time to get a CD-quality download for the price you pick between $5 and $18. For some info on what other people liked, look at the best selling and highest valued albums.

If you’re using a Mac, you’re probably using iTunes to play music. As I discovered today, it doesn’t by default play Ogg Vorbis, but there’s this lovely Quicktime plugin which lets it do just that. iTunes, as usual, has some troubles importing lots of songs at once (haven’t they heard of threads?), but the songs play fine.

Also, if you’re using a unix and need to synchronize two directory trees, look at using rsync. Unlike what I thought, it doesn’t need a dedicated server. Instead it can run over a standard remote shell like SSH.