Beyond the Hashtag

Rather than a series of tweet-like posts on separate subjects--which I know is the proper way to do it these days--I'm going to catch up on non-climate crisis topics from the past week or so, all right here.

Brian Williams:  Evidence is starting to mount up, however dubious, in the same direction.  One thing seems pretty clear: he doesn't have a lot of defenders.  But my point about the wired lynch mob (by which of course I mean the spirit and function of it, not equating the outcome) remains valid.  So I don't know what the now-former governor of Oregon is guilty of, but these sentences from his resignation statement (as quoted by Reuters) seem apt:

"It is deeply troubling to me to realize that we have come to a place in the history of this great state of ours where a person can be charged, tried, convicted and sentenced by the media with no due process and no independent verification of the allegations involved," Kitzhaber said.

"But even more troubling – and on a very personal level as someone who has given 35 years of public service to Oregon – is that so many of my former allies in common cause have been willing to simply accept this judgment at its face value," he said.

Digital domination: In line with my accidental series on digital domination earlier this year, concern has been expressed that an entire generation or even century of data may be lost because it's all been digital or digitized and the paper thrown away (or never existed), but the programs to read this material are gone or certainly going.

 He was talking most specifically about emails and photos, but I've heard this about company records and even books, and probably have said it before myself. But what's remarkable about the warning is that it comes from the head honcho of Google, himself kind of implicated in the digital domain (Google was sued for digitizing copyrighted text but recently won the case.)  So maybe that gives it the extra weight it may take to wake up some people from their digital swoon.

I might also mention my tantrum on the subject of keyless car ignitions, which got some detailed rebuttals on another blog from someone who sounds like he's in the car business.  He talked about security but didn't mention what I didn't know about then, which is the vulnerability to car theft etc. by electronics via the keyless system.  Apparently a growing problem.

The President of Projection:  I wasn't going to dignify the rabid right freakout over President Obama's comments at a prayer breakfast by even mentioning it, but I've now got two reasons.  First, the two pieces (here and here) by Ta-Nehisi Coates on the subject.  In addition to providing actual history that rabid rightists ignore (big surprise) he led off the second piece with this great ascerbic comment: "People who wonder why the president does not talk more about race would do well to examine the recent blow-up over his speech at the National Prayer Breakfast."

Second is something that immediately occurred to me but I haven't seen mentioned.  Here's what President Obama said that offended these folks: "Lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ."

Coates provides the history to back this up, my interest is in the "high horse" part of it.  It is precisely the high horse perspective that allows and fuels the kind of hysterical "patriotism" that the Bushites inflamed after 9/11 that resulted in inanities like "freedom fries" but also the emotional push behind the self-righteous invading of Iraq, which even then was obviously irrelevant to 9/11.

So while we revile the extreme inhumanity of ISIL, only riders on the "high horse" (which likely include the rabid right critics of this comment) can justify mirror-image atrocities like torture, or expand the targets to Muslims in general, or anybody different in any way--different that is from right wing Christian fundamentalists.   And this precisely is the effective reason for President Obama's remark.  He wants action against ISIL, but for us to keep our heads, and perspective.