Yesterday, evil won

EDIT: I appear to have placed too much faith in the Great State of South Carolina: contrary to statements below, it appears the Confederate flag outside the capitol building was NOT lowered to half mast when the US and SC flags were lowered. Instead, they left it at full height. So that's, you know, horrifying. http://www.postandcourier.com/article/20150618/PC16/150619374

Ok. Let's talk about Charleston.

First off, in case anyone was still puzzled about whatever could have inspired Dylann Roof to kill 9 people in Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church (Looking at you, Rudy Gulianihttp://talkingpointsmemo.com/…/rudy-giuliani-charleston-chu…), let me lay your confusion to rest: He hated black people. He wore clothing with apartheid-era flags from African nations, he told his roommate (who should be remembered for the rest of his life as a feckless imbecile who could have spoken up and didn't) repeatedly that he wanted to spark a new civil war between whites and blacks, and he told one of the survivors in the church that "You rape our women and you’re taking over our country and you have to go." This was not a jilted lover going overboard, this was not a bout of delusion or mental illness, this was racism.

The Atlantic, The Intercept, and what the story is actually about

A few days ago, I read this: http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2015/02/what-isis-really-wants/384980/. I thought it was outstanding, both as a piece of writing and as an example of journalism that can actually clarify horrifically complicated questions and help people make decisions with significant real-world impact.

Today, I read https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/02/20/atlantic-defines-real-islam-says-isis/ via the twitter account of Glenn Greenwald (which, despite my enormous respect for the work he does, I find very irritating; everything he tweets or retweets seems to start from the base assumption that American foreign policy can do no right, end of story.)

I think the author of the second piece is misreading Wood's article as badly as he or she accuses Wood of misreading Islam.

The point of the Atlantic piece is not to establish which variant of Islam is correct or 'most Islamic', and neither does it claim to do so. Wood's stated goal was to determine what ISIS wants, and he persuasively argues that what they want is based on a very strict reading of the founding texts of Islam. That hundreds of millions of Muslims, including many highly knowledgeable and deeply devout Muslims, disagree with this interpretation has little bearing on whether or not ISIS will base its actions on these beliefs, which is entirely what the article was about in the first place. And while I wish he hadn't used the phrase 'cotton-candy view of their own religion', it is true that many both in and out of the Muslim community have denied that ISIS has any connection with Islam out of disgust and embarrassment rather than scholarly and doctrinal grounds.

If you read the Atlantic article as trying to determine whether ISIS represents "true Islam" (a phrase which, despite the headline of the rebuttal, never appears in the original article), of course it is hilariously unbalanced. But *it isn't trying to do that.* What he is trying - and I think he succeeds - to do is to shed a light on the way a very particular group thinks and the reasons it thinks that way. One can have “a coherent and even learned expression of Islam" and still disagree with other members of the faith, or even be a minority. And while he does not stress of the many non-ISIS Muslims that "their version of the religion is more genuine," neither does he claim that ISIS's version is more genuine. All he's doing is describing what their version is, where it comes from, and what it means in terms of predicting the future actions of the group.

And as an American voter who needs to have an opinion about ISIS and what the U.S. should do about it, I'm very grateful that he did so.

I sympathize with the author of the second piece, Murtaza Hussain, who I assume is Muslim. It must be horrifying to see and hear about such acts perpetrated in the name of your own faith when your own understanding of that faith is so radically opposed to such acts. It's ridiculous that, like far to many Muslims, I'm sure Hussain has been called on repeatedly to defend his faith or to publicly denounce the actions of ISIS and its ilk, like a sort of loyalty test for 'the good Muslims.' I'm equally certain that many of the people already inclined to blame Islam as a whole for the actions of some adherents have misread Wood's piece just as Hussain has, and that he's already had to deal with repeated doses of idiocy from such folk.

But make no mistake: although very narrow in its scope (and http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/02/18/in-defense-of-islam/?_r=0 and http://www.unz.com/gnxp/islam-is-not-a-religion-of-the-book/ both discuss important factors to consider that fell outside the scope of Wood's article), this is journalism that we need. The fact that Wood's article will inevitably be misinterpreted by readers with a prior agenda against Islam is no reason to misinterpret it in the same way. Because ISIS is a problem, and anyone trying to grapple with that problem, whether from a doctrinal or foreign policy perspective, must be willing to confront why ISIS does and believes what it does ... no matter how uncomfortable such a study is likely to be.

EDIT: Another good article on the distinction between labeling a group Islamic on a theological level rather than a sociological level. I think it's fairly clear that the original article dealt with Islam as a sociological phenomenon, but I can see how some readers who regard Islam as a theological system could misinterpret Wood's statement that the group is 'very Islamic' as an endorsement of their interpretation of the faith.

Thoughts on the election

Well, that's over and done with. I'm mildly disgruntled about the results, on both a state and national level. It's not like the Democrats particularly deserved to win either, but the number of positions shifted to the GOP, as well as the overall strength of their victory, means the crap that won't get done over the next few years will be slightly more unpalatable than the crap that wouldn't have gotten done otherwise.

As a copy editor, I get to follow election news whether I like it or not. As such, here are a few of my takeaways from Democalypse 2014:

There's a definite downside to being a gamer these days

I realized something the other day. All my life, I have self-identified first and foremost as a reader. I took an obscure pride in being the kid from whom the teachers always had to confiscate books in class, and even after I stopped doing that, I still majored in English in large part because that's what someone who loves to read ought to do. So it was disconcerting to realize that I spend considerably more time and energy playing video games, reading about video games and thinking about video games than I do reading (even counting reading news stories online, which I do), thinking about reading or following the publishing industry.

On its own, that's a little sad. While there definitely are video games of such richness and artistry to elevate the player's perception of the world in the same way that a good book will do, they are few and far between in the game industry, and the vast majority of my gaming time is spent on games with much lower culture capital to offer: MMOs, match-based multiplayer games and single player games with stories that exist to get you to the next gameplay objective. These games have their own sort of value - in particular, the social aspect of these online games is a big part of my life these days - but it's not the same value I'd be getting from intentionally seeking out and exposing myself to the best stories told by the best thinkers.

So that's a cause for regret, but a relatively small one. A bigger issue is that if there was ever a time not to want to think of oneself as a gamer, this is it.

(Unhappy words about GamerGate after the jump.)

Do I work for Facebook, or does Facebook work for me?

Here's a thought I've been having.

One of the things that Twitter does right is it allows you to customize and subdivide your news feed. If you want to make a list of only people you actually know, you can do that. If you want to have a list of just feminist film critics, you can do that. If you want to have a list of just ginsing growers in Laos, you probably can do that (assuming that there are actually ginsing growers in Laos with twitter accounts, which would not surprise me in the slightest). Google plus has something similar, allowing you to add accounts to one or more custom-made circles that you can check independently. Facebook, though, is all or nothing. There used to be an option to set a given contact to more or less frequent appearances on your wall, but those controls seem to be removed, and instead we see what the FB sorting algorithm thinks we want to see. There are no options that I can find to create specialty lists, and the only option to affect the frequency of a particular poster appearing on your wall is to block their posts entirely, in which case, you might as well not be following them. (You also can set your FB to show most recent posts rather than top posts, but I find that it seems to reset itself frequently, and that the result is flooded by even more garbage posts from pages you liked once four years ago and forgot about)

Unfortunately but unsurprisingly, Facebook's algorithm is designed to serve the dual masters of telling us what our friends are doing and making money for Facebook, to the detriment of the former. In particular, the feed prioritizes high-engagement content with lots of likes and shares. Among a group of friends, this might lead to more people seeing important posts like engagement announcements and the like. When a user follows both friends and other pages, however, the balance seems to become badly skewed toward pages. It's hard for anyone I know in real life to compete with Cracked and The Lion King and Al Jazeera English for post engagement, meaning that the people I actually know and care about are buried beneath posts from national and international pages. Furthermore, even posts from popular pages are filtered by their engagement. Felicia Day has blogged about the problems this causes for her - that it incentivizes her to post things tailored for higher traffic (read: pictures of her being attractive) and makes it harder for views - artistic, social, intellectual - to compete with 'mainstream' views; in effect, Facebook becomes an enforcer of the societal status quo. And that's a problem.

I got a speeding ticket from the thought police

First, some housekeeping: in the last 6 months, I have completed courses for a digital photo and video certificate through my local tech school, which should improve employment prospects; unfortunately, it also put a moratorium on job searching while I've been stuck in place. But done now: woo! I've also been promoted to full-time as a newspaper copy editor, which is a welcome development, and spent several months as a freelance writer on Elance before gradually backing out due to coursework and increased work hours; I may return now that classes are done.

I've not been posting much, obviously, in part because for a while I took a break from following much of the news (as much as one can while working as a copy editor). I think I was a little burned out after the high-grain focus of the govt. shutdown and Healthcare.gov rollout (I think I intended to write a blog post about that; at any rate, I had a draft with no text but the title 'who left the three stooges in charge' when I opened blogger after my long hiatus), and I've also been much more engaged in following local politics; our city government in general and mayor in particular have been up to shenanigans, most of which have been exposed and reported by us. In any case, I've lately been getting back on the horse, as it were, and resuming my regular perusal of national and international news, and once again am starting to encounter thorny issues about which I need to ponder. And as always, one of the best ways to test my own thinking is to write about it and see if my thinking holds up.

There are three recent incidents that I've been pondering: the brief and tumultuous tenure of Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich; the racist spurging and subsequent ostracization of LA Clippers owner Donald Sterling, and the homophobic tweeting and shunning of Miami Dolphins player Don Jones. The third will undoubtably be a flash in the pan, and I'll not be surprised if the Wikipedia section I linked to is gone in short order, but it was big enough news to make it onto Google, and it ties into the other two.

The questions I'm puzzling over are to what extent, if any, the consequences these three gentlemen have faced for their positions are just, and whether or if at all their rights (moral, rather than legal) have been abrogated. I'm certainly far from the only one who is connecting these dots and asking these questions, but I've yet to see anyone come up with a result I'm fully satisfied with, so let's see if I can do better.

Why beat up the middleman?

So a few days ago at work, while I was pulling state wire stories, I came across one about an administrative ruling approving Enbridge to expand a pipeline across Northern MN and into Wisconsin. This MJS story is not the exact story I was looking at, but is on the same approximate topic and will serve to give readers an idea what's going on.

These WI/MN pipelines have been at a low burn for months or years; they make regular if unspectacular appearances on the AP wire, and I'm sure they are widely ignored by all readers save those already emotionally invested in the issue of pipelines. And even those readers likely give the issue short shrift when compared with the granddaddy of all pipeline issues: Keystone XL.

Keystone XL, of course, has been all over the news for years, and is hotly opposed by environmentalists and conservationalists across the country. Here is just one of the many articles, op-eds and treatises written to express that opposition. And I will admit that for a long time, I reflexively agreed with them, on the general assumption that oil is bad, oil companies are bad, we should fight them on the beaches, on the landing grounds, in the fields and in the streets. I've been thinking more about it, a process catalyzed by the AP story I came across at work, and I'm no longer sure that's the case.