the reality tunnel

I thought about this a lot when I was in Germany this summer, seeing all the monuments to the atrocities of the Nazis, and even reading the last Harry Potter book - there is an identifiable pattern to despotism. Naomi wolf says this of her recent book that talks about the rise of despotism in the current US body politic:

But I guess the book really began with a very personal story, because I was forced to write it, even though I didn’t really want to, by a dear friend who is a Holocaust survivor’s daughter. And when we spoke about news events, she kept saying, “They did this in Germany. They did this in Germany.” And I really didn’t think that made sense. I thought that was very extreme language. But finally she forced me to sit down and start reading the histories, of course, not of the later years, because she wasn’t talking about German outcomes, ’38, ’39; she was talking about the early years, 1930, ’31, ’32, when Germany was a parliamentary democracy, and there was this systematic assault using the rule of law to subvert the rule of law.

And once I saw how many parallels there were, not just in strategy and tactics that we’re seeing again today, but actually in images and sound bites and language, then I read other histories of Italy in the ’20s, Russia in the ’30s, East Germany in the ’50s, Czechoslovakia in the ’60s, Pinochet’s coup in Chile in ’73, the crushing of the democracy movement in China at the end of the ’80s. And I saw that there is a blueprint that would-be dictators always do the same ten things, whether they’re on the left or the right, and that we are seeing these ten steps taking place systematically right now in the United States.

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Update:

Today, there was a story on Morning Edition about GOP presidential candidate rhetoric which calls the war on Iraq things like “the front line on the war on terrorism”.  Romney’s website refers to the war on Iraq as ‘defeating the jihadists’.  Mike Huckabee says that we’re engaged in a  ‘world war’ and that “radical islamic fascists have declared war on our country and on our way of life.” But, as the NPR reporter indicates, these words don’t mesh with the reality of the war in Iraq:

Al Queda in Iraq has  few foreign fighters.  It’s a home-grown group.  American officers say many of them are fighting more for money  than for religious fanaticism.  Meanwhile the powerful Shiite Muslim militias in Iraq are not exporting terror, they’re vying for power in Iraq, sometimes battling each other …

The report goes on to quote a defense analyst saying that politicians prefer catch phrases to a serious discussion of the war.

This report makes me think of the language described in Wolfe’s interview and it’s even more frightening when there is so apparently little basis for this kind of fear.

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Online classes were just emerging as I left college.  There was a piece on Morning Edition this morning about the technology and trends in general and an instance of them at on University of Illinois branch.  I think this technology is inevitable and it does have some egalitarian advantages, as the president of the University of Illinois system state:

“But let’s be honest, there are hundreds of thousands of people in the world who don’t have the privilege of earning their education by leaving home, giving up their job, leaving the family and living on one of these campuses,” White said.

Still, there are also implications for a trend that is apparent even with living in a college town and meeting a lot of students on tour.  The idea of a university as a forum and a place where you might get exposed to unexpected ideas or ideas across disciplines is quickly eroding.  Technology plays a role in furthering this cultural shift.  As one professor says:

“But I can assure you that the next generation of students are ‘24/7 students’ that want stuff right now. They don’t want to come to your class and listen to a professor lecture and tell funny stories,” Mims said. “They want just what they need to succeed in that class and get a job and be successful in life.”

I did a fundraising event for Pages to Prisoners in partnership with a local multi-cultural sorority.  The sorority members made a presentation about prison and education issues, and one woman read an article about the Bard Prison Initiative, a program that allows incarcerated people in New York get a liberal arts college degree.  When one of the inmates who was participating in the program was asked why it was important for inmates to receive a liberal arts education as opposed to vocational training, the man said that while job training could teach you how to do a specific job, the Bard education that he was getting through the program was teaching him how to think.

I fear that the “I want what I think I want when I want it” collegian is going to further erode the value of knowledge and discourse in culture.

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I’ve been using the unix screen command a lot lately, and enough to want to learn more.

I used to just scroll through windows with CTRL-a n and CTRL-a p, but now I have a ton of windows in my screen session, so I want to be able to navigate easier.

• List to windows: CTRL-a w (you can also have a persistent display of windows, see http://haller.ws/logs/view.cgi/ScreenTerminal.  Thanks Patrick!)
• Go to window 2: CTRL-a 2
• Set window title: CTRL-a A

According to the manpage, you can automatically set the title of a window, but I think it’s nice to do it interactively because the general task that will identify the window’s functionality might not easily be reflected in a path or command.

You can also use screen to copy/paste text between windows:

• Enter copy mode: CTRL-a [
• Start/End selecting text to copy: SPACE
• Paste text CTRL-a ]

I’ve had this on an ATM receipt floating around my notebook since this summer.  Chiara and I ate a very good meal at a restaurant in Prague that specialized in vegetarian/organic/local foods:

Albio
Truhlarska 20
Praha 1
(accessible via the namesti republiki stop on line b)

These are songs that we came up with at our last practice.

New Disaster Song 1 (2007-11-18)

New Disaster Song 2 (2007-11-18)

Last night, I watched a movie called Saving Face. It was your traditional rom-com in the sense that it had both an interrupted wedding and an airport scene. However, the characters were Chinese-American and the primary love stories were between two young women and an older woman and a younger man.

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I heard a story on NPR this morning that talked about Dunkin’ Donuts’ rebranding campaign, but I thought there was a nice statement about the cache of products being working class and upper class people aspiring to “lower class” identities.

Dunkin’ Donuts’ advertising campaign “America Runs on Dunkin” is created out of a sentiment among customers that they wanted to buy a good, simple product. Brand guru Leslie Bielby says the campaign expands the retailer’s appeal.

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• Monday through Thursday: Noon - 2:30 p.m.
• Friday: Noon - 1:30 p.m. and 7 - 9 p.m.
• Saturday: 12:30 - 2 p.m.; 7 - 9 p.m. (Lunar Skating) and 9:15 - 11 p.m. (Night Owl Skating)
• Sunday: 3 - 5 p.m.

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I’m always interested in people doing big, helpful, transcendent things with whatever resources that they have.  I’m also interested in people’s activism or humanitarian work following from the things that are relevant in their life.  I heard a story this morning about one man’s work:

Bay Area Gardeners Foundation founder Catalino Tapia trims a tree at a client’s home in an affluent suburb of San Francisco. Tapia’s long-time clients donated money to the foundation, which gives college scholarships to students, regardless of their immigrant status.

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This is a comment to news article about efforts to confront the racist history and reputation of a town that is halfway between Bloomington and Indianapolis.  I liked that this commenter noted that a homogeneous community is fundamental to racist beliefs and that racism exists outside of the lower-class white communities (another commentor replied to the story with “It could be all the rednecks in Martinsville…..”) that are the stereotypical face of racism:

Keep in mind that there are racists everywhere, including our beloved and enlightened B-town. As far as a small Indiana town goes, M-ville is no more or less racist than the typical. Unfortunately, the “typical” is a homogenous, conservative community that can tend toward attitudes of prejudice. This, however, is true in most homogenous, conservative communities. I went to school with a bunch of folks from the North Shore suburbs of Chicago, and most of their attitudes would be considered racist. Bottomline, if we don’t experience heterogenous community, we will ALL tend toward prejudicial thought and attitude. M-ville folks are no different, and I encourage them (myself a grad from M-ville HS) to “see the world.”

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Helping out with the AMC website, I threw together a quick Drupal 4.7 module (haven’t tested it on newer version of Drupal yet) to export user profile data generated by the profile module to a CSV file suitable for import into a spreadsheet program.

UPDATE: After searching the Drupal website, I realized that someone had already invented this wheel.

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