A gun query

In the wake of last week’s shooting out in California, the father of one of the people murdered aimed some understandable vitriol at politicians who refuse to buck the NRA.

Samuel Wurzelbacher had some words of his own for the parents of people killed in shootings, whether young children as at Sandyhook or young adults as last week: “Your dead kids don’t trump my consititutional rights. … Mr. Martinez and anyone calling for more restrictions on American’s rights need to back off and stop playing into the hands of the folks who merely capitalize on these horrific events for their own political ends.” (I won't post the link; you can find it yourself if you search on that first sentence I quoted.)

Which raises a couple of questions, but it's hard to say exactly who those questions are meant for.

They’re not for gun owners in general, because there are people who own guns who also support some form of more effective rules than we currently have. Presumably their answer to the first question is “No,” and their answer to the second question is whatever form of gun rules they already support.

These questions also aren’t for people who could be considered “2nd-Amendment abolutists” (or who even consider themselves that way), since if you’re really an absolutist, your answer to the first question is “Yes,” and then the second question is moot.

So there’s a middle group, people who in some sense aren’t absolutists, but who in practice seem to be against pretty much any form of gun restriction that comes up.

The first question is, Do you agree with Mr. Wurzelbacher (aka Joe the Plumber)?

Second, If you don't agree with him, what actions would you support that would separate you from Mr. Wurzelbacher, not merely in word but in deed?

There’s actually a third question, and this one is for anyone who would like to see a change in how our laws treat guns:

What have you done, or what will you do, to try to bring about the change you support?

Perhaps you have a U.S. senator or two and/or a Representative who voted to oppose the will of about 90% of the public on a measure as simple as background checks. If that’s the case, one thing you could do is take those first two questions, put 'em in your own words if you want, and send them along to the folks who purport to represent you in Washington.

And keep asking until you get an answer.

Guest post: Obama's non-visit to Cooperstown

President Obama was in our neighborhood yesterday, promoting tourism with a speech at the Baseball Hall of Fame, which is celebrating its 75th anniversary.

A big local issue is hydraualic fracturing—or “fracking”—of shale to extract natural gas. Supporters see it as economic salvation for beleaguered farmers and upstate communities that have been stagnating or losing population for years. Opponents see it as an existential threat, likely or certain to have a drastic impact on the local environment and the health of the area’s residents; a few people will make some money, and everyone else will lose a lot, including many livelihoods.

The modern version of fracking hasn’t come to New York state yet: the last two governors have held off on finalizing the necessary regulations, thus creating a de facto moratorium. Many local groups and invidividuals have been working for years to get that de facto moratorium turned into an explicit one, or a ban.

Fracking opponents seized the opportunity of Obama’s visit to try to make him aware of sentiment in the area (Obama supports fracking). They managed to get something like 200 people there, the basic message being that fracking and tourism are incompatible. Well, you can read below to what extent people managed to get“there” ...

One of those local groups working to keep fracking out is Sustainable Otsego. Adrian Kuzminski, the moderator of that group, was at yesterday's gathering, and this morning he sent out a reflection. I thought it was worth sharing, and with his permission I’m posting it here.

Karl

Obama's non-visit to Cooperstown
Adrian Kuzminski, Moderator of Sustainable Otsego

The most fascinating thing to me about Obama's visit to Cooperstown and the Baseball Hall of Fame was the weird emptiness of it all, which I think says a lot about our current public political culture, or the lack thereof. The organizers of the anti-fracking rally I was part of anticipated (hoped for) large crowds, and worried in advance about off-street parking and other relevant contingencies.

If you picked up the special editions that day of the local papers celebrating Obama's visit, and read them at face value, you would anticipate a festive, popular occasion, with lots of local pride on display, supported by the testimony of copious open letters and commentary welcoming the president, seasoned with respectful criticism regarding fracking and other national issues. We are all in this together with you, was the story line; we live in a common community, was the presumption.

The reality was nothing like that, and a lot more bizarre.

The Wanderer

I had the pleasure and the privilege to help organize Hartwick’s seventh annual Student Showcase, which was this past Friday. Over 300 students gave talks, presented posters, showed their art, gave short performances, did readings, …

There were the predictably interesting pieces of work: a geology student who mapped the outcroppings behind the science building, translating the layers there into a history of streams and deltas; a nursing student who had studied a more effective way of conducting prenatal education for pregnant women, studies on the chemicals used in fracking, examinations of post-war U.S. policy in Afghanistan, a consideration of fetishistic imagery in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope.

The big surprise for me was a group of five students who had worked with Prof. Lisa Darien to translate the Old English poem “The Wanderer.” And when I say “old,” I mean Saxon, sometime before 1000 AD. (Here's someone else's translation.)

The students put a piece of the poem up on the screen, the original saxon on the left (complete with those strange characters “þ” and “ð”) and their translation into modern English on the right. With the text before us, they’d read the Saxon as we followed along, then read their rendition into familiar words, words where we could understand the meaning, but where a certain music was absent. They followed up with discussion of choices in translation, and rhythms, and what was behind some of the words, and what we could learn about the mental world of the person who would write such a poem. It was fascinating stuff.

And then Prof. Peter Wallace asked what they had betrayed in their translation. He explained that another student had done an honors project in which she’d translated some Spanish poetry and then written a paper about the process, titled “Translation as betrayal,” getting at the idea that when you translate, you inevitably commit some betrayal of the original text, because of the things that you have to leave behind, the things you can’t manage to port over into the new version. What did these students feel they’d betrayed?

They had no problem answering. In the course of studying Saxon and reading numerous poems, they’d reached the point where they could understand what they were reading, they could feel both the music and the meaning in the words, without being able to to see how they would render all of that into our English.

I was struck by the glow in their eyes as they described this sensation of having reached into a foreign world and found things there they couldn’t bring back.

This was education in its purest sense.

When you allow the worldview of an exiled Saxon warrior to insinuate itself into your mind, it’s hard to imagine how you’re qualifying yourself for some particular activity in the hard-nosed “real world.” but for these students it had obviously been a profound experience. And for all the ease with which we dismiss such pursuits as “academic” or a cultural luxury, it seems to me that if a student can stretch her mind to a task as strange as this, if she can be alive to and engaged in something so foreign, it’s a fair bet she’ll bring that same creative, critical mindset to other things she does. Which would actually make her really valuable in the “real world.”

That’s what the liberal arts is supposed to be about.

Meet the new boss

The subject of this post has been percolating in the back of my head for a while—it relates to a workshop we had last spring, about managing difficult employees. I was invited to go in my role as department chair, though the people I "manage" are my three colleagues in economics, and the secretary who assists the academic departments in our building, and none of those people is the least bit difficult to deal with. So in a sense I was there as an amateur anthropologist, observing the customs of some foreign tribe.

In general, it was an interesting and valuable workshop, even for someone in my position of having no difficult management issues on the horizon. The emphasis was on responding to workplace problems by listening, finding out if there's some underlying issue, and looking for win-win solutions. I can get behind all that.

But the facilitator had an example late in the day that, uncharacteristically, got under my skin, and I found myself getting a little bit indignantly testy at her. She had a scenario where the employee wants, say, a 4% raise. Her advice was to ask if there might be something else you could provide to the employee, something that would leave them satisfied, but something that wasn't money—or at least, not a 4% raise. In other words, a win-win solution.

And it just crossed a line for me.

A "Polish fate" for Ukraine?

(Update, 3/24: Britské listy has corrected itself on the post below that was the prompt for this post of mine. Zhirinovsky has not been the vice-chair of the Duma since 2011, and he wrote in the capacity of a regular member of the Duma, not in any way on behalf of the body as a whole, as was implied in the original Britské listy and in the Polish TV report from which Britské listy took its cue. The full correction is below.)

The website Britské listy has an arresting piece, The Russian State Duma plans a Polish fate for Ukraine.

They cite this report from Polish TV (which also produced the map below, titled “Map showing Zhirinovsky’s proposal,” Zhirinovsky being the vice-chair a member [see update above] of the Russian Duma (the legislature)).

from http://www.tvp.info/14506221/duma-do-polskiego-msz-podzielmy-ukraine

Russia would get all of southeast Ukraine, including the entire Black Sea coast.

You've got to believe!

In the context of the unfolding nightmare in Ukraine, a British commentator laid the mess at the feet of … NATO’s withdrawal from Afghanistan. The piece is a model of the diplomatic doctrine of “credibility,” the idea that there are certain things you need to do in order for other actors on the world stage to understand that there are certain things you will do.

Each Russian soldier in Crimea is lessening the chance of a united Ukraine emerging unscathed and without a civil war. They are 'proving’ to our Eastern allies that Nato is a paper tiger and to our Western friends that this is a pointless struggle. That is President Putin’s real goal.

He has tried it in the past, first with the cyber attack on Estonia in 2007 that closed down the government. At that moment, though, Nato was clearly credible – after all, it was fighting in Afghanistan and off the Horn of Africa.

Tugendhat doesn’t claim there’s some desirable goal that could actually be achieved by staying in Afghanistan. Rather, he seems to think that we need to fight in one place so that Putin will believe we’ll fight somewhere else, which in turn would mean that Putin would think twice before invading Crimea.

But what exactly would non-withdrawal from Afghanistan be expected to prove? Does he really think that NATO would or should have sent troops into the country of Georgia in 2008? Or that that would have been a good idea? Does he think we should be sending troops to Ukraine today?

The obvious alternative explanation for NATO’s withdrawal is that we’re leaving because we realized there was no objective we could accomplish without permanent occupation, and permanent occupation was an insanely high price to pay for those objectives, so it was time to go. In this case, staying in Afghanistan wouldn’t prove we were tough; it would prove we were too stupid to know when we were engaged in a futile exertion of force.

One of the beautiful things about love is that it grows with the practice of it: when you act lovingly, you experience love in return, and become more capable of loving. Tugendhat thinks that military force works the same way: When you act militarily, you experience submission in return, making you even more capable of militariness.

It’s true, there are too many naïve people who think that when you act militarily, you don’t just inspire fear and sullen obedience, but resistance as well—covert at first but growing bolder over time. And you set people on a search for means of effective response.

Naïve people also think that military action is constrained by physical factors, and by finance, and by the realities of domestic politics, so that when you act militarily you don’t multiply your power but instead tie down some of your forces in one place, making them unavailable for military action somewhere else.

And naïve people may think that if you can see the pointlessness of continuing a particular war, then people in other countries can see the pointlessness as well. And that if they see you continuing a pointless war, they’ll see that you’re weakening yourself militarily, and they’ll understand that you’re too stupid to make good policy decisions to keep your country safe, and so they’ll be emboldened to act against your interests.

Tom Tugendhat knows better. According to the article linked above, he runs a strategy consultancy, so he must be right that when you persist in a futile war, you display your awesome credibility, and then everyone backs down in front of you because you’re so awesomely credible, and they let you run the world just the way you want.

Credibility theory: the misplaced conviction that everyone else is as stupid as you are.

The man who met Papa Masaryk

In some recent tidying up, I came across a piece of paper scribbled with some notes. It was the quick recollections of a chance conversation in Stromovka, the large park near our apartment in Prague. The notes were on the back side of a printout of items that were checked out to me from the Prague City Library on my card. As best I remember, that’s the paper I used because it’s what I could find to get down some of the details of the conversation before I forgot them.

The date on the printout was June 6, 2011, and we left Prague on July 1, so that puts a reasonably tight window on when the conversation happened.

I’m writing them down here in case they might be of interest to someone, and so I can throw out the piece of paper.

from http://theblaguefromprague.blogspot.com/2010/09/stromovka-zip-line.html

We’d gone down to Stromovka to play on the zip line and stroll around, and I don’t remember how, but I got into a conversation with an elderly gentleman who was there.

He said his grandfather had been a park warden in Stromovka.