bearing blog

bear – ing n 1 the manner in which one comports oneself; 2 the act, power, or time of bringing forth offspring or fruit; 3 a machine part in which another part turns [a journal ~]; 4 pl comprehension of one’s position, environment, or situation; 5 the act of moving while supporting the weight of something [the ~ of the cross].

Why and how to question authority.
Those bumper stickers that say "Question Authority" — have you seen them?

Once I saw a bumper sticker that said, "Who are you to tell me to question authority?"

I have always liked that one, partly because it's snarky, and partly because its snark derives from pointing out that the Question Authority folks are oblivious to the fact that, in asserting a standard of behavior, they don't so much undermine the notion of authority as set themselves up as an alternative authority.

Kaydee at Engineering Ethics Blog has a good meditation on the purpose of authority structures, and how to question authorities without questioning authority.

He focuses on the authority structure of licensed architects and engineers, who receive their authority from a licensing board, who in turn receive authorization from the government… and if you are a U. S. Constitutional fan, you know that the government in turn receives its authority from the consent of the governed:

There are those who view all authority with suspicion, and for some reason they seem especially widespread in New England, where “Question Authority” bumper stickers are almost as common as license plates; at least they were when I lived there in the 1990s.  The question I’d like to ask today is, can you be a good engineer and question authority too?   That is, is it consistent to be simultaneously an ethical engineer, and to maintain a fundamentally skeptical and judgmental attitude toward all authorities?

…Normally we think of a person in authority as having power to decide important matters.  This is the facet of authority that first comes to mind when I think about authority with respect to engineering.  In an architectural firm, for example, only certain licensed architects and engineers are authorized to sign off on blueprints (or whatever the electronic equivalent is these days). But using the word “authorized” in that way brings up a second aspect of authority.

Authorities don’t just get up one day and declare themselves authorities.  They have to be authorized.  In the case of licensed engineers, the state board in charge of licensing engineers authorizes the engineer to sign off on designs.  So authorities must receive their authority from, well, other authorities.  And authorities, as Austin points out, are ultimately other persons.  Even when we cite a licensing board or a book as an authority, we really refer to the person or people behind these intermediate entities.  So you can’t have authority without speaking of authorities, that is, persons who have authority.

That raises the structural question of where authority ultimately comes from….

Authorities must be questioned from time to time, because anyone can discover a problem that must be corrected or have an insight that must travel up the chain in order to be acted upon. But we have a responsibility to do so in a way that preserves the existing authority structure — which, after all, was put in place for a reason:

[N]ow and then, you may find that your authorities, whoever they are, have made an error, ranging from a mistake in a textbook to an order to falsify test records for an engineering project.  It will then be your role to deal respectfully but truthfully with the error in a way that preserves the overall authority structure, but moves the organization toward the freedom for human flourishing that [is] the ultimate purpose of all authority.

I noted that one feature of a healthy and effective authority structure is the existence of a clear and well-accepted procedure by which information moves up the chain of command, so to speak. It's especially important that the procedure be well-defined when the information has the potential to contradict the "authorities" or even to embarrass them, and it's even more important when human life may be at stake. Think emergency rooms, combat theaters, and cockpits.

Wikipedia has an interesting article on one such system of communication: CRM, for Cockpit (or Crew) Resource Management. (Sometimes the same thing is called Bridge Resource Management or Maritime Resource Management.)
CRM aims to foster a climate or culture where the freedom to respectfully question authority is encouraged.

… It recognizes that a discrepancy between what is happening and what should be happening is often the first indicator that an error is occurring. This is a delicate subject for many organizations, especially ones with traditional hierarchies, so appropriate communication techniques must be taught to supervisors and their subordinates, so that supervisors understand that the questioning of authority need not be threatening, and subordinates understand the correct way to question orders.

Cockpit voice recordings of various air disasters tragically reveal first officers and flight engineers attempting to bring critical information to the captain's attention in an indirect and ineffective way. By the time the captain understood what was being said, it was too late to avert the disaster. A CRM expert named Todd Bishop developed a five-step assertive statement process that encompasses inquiry and advocacy steps:

Opening or attention getter - Address the individual. "Hey Chief," or "Captain Smith," or "Bob," or whatever name or title will get the person's attention.

State your concern - Express your analysis of the situation in a direct manner while owning your emotions about it. "I'm concerned that we may not have enough fuel to fly around this storm system," or "I'm worried that the roof might collapse."

State the problem as you see it - "We're only showing 40 minutes of fuel left," or "This building has a lightweight steel truss roof, and we may have fire extension into the roof structure."

State a solution - "Let's divert to another airport and refuel," or "I think we should pull some tiles and take a look with the thermal imaging camera before we commit crews inside."

Obtain agreement (or buy-in) - "Does that sound good to you, Captain?"

These are often difficult skills to master, as they may require significant changes in personal habits, interpersonal dynamics, and organizational culture.
Maybe the bumper sticker should read: Question Authorities, Intelligently.
Aug 13, 2012

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1 comment on Why and how to question authority.
“How not to be a creeper” and assorted followup discussion.

If you are at all interested in male-female interaction culture of both the positive and negative variety, how to deal with social awkwardness of both the neurotypical and the Asperger’s varieties, how to teach social rules to young people, scifi convention or geek culture, and the like: I would like to direct your attention to a rich and engaging discussion thread at Whatever, the blog of scifi author John Scalzi. (This isn’t just about scifi conventions, so bear with me.)

The scifi/geek-con blogosphere has been buzzing somewhat about a perceived culture at conventions in which unwelcome sexual advances and other “creepiness” have perhaps been overly tolerated (I am qualifying with “perceived” and “perhaps” only because I am not a con-goer and cannot give a first-hand opinion of the scene). In response to an emailed query, “Any tips on how not to be a creeper?” Scalzi wrote a post entitled “An Incomplete Guide to Not Creeping,” in which he suggested ten rules for interacting with people — in general, not just at cons — in order not to inadvertently transgress other people’s personal boundaries. Here is a sampler from the middle of the pack:

4. Acknowledge that other people do not exist just for your amusement/interest/desire/use. Yes, I know. You know that. But oddly enough, there’s a difference between knowing it, and actually believing it — or understanding what it means in a larger social context. People go to conventions and social gatherings to meet other people, but not necessarily (or even remotely likely) for the purpose of meeting you. The woman who is wearing a steampunky corset to a convention is almost certainly wearing it in part to enjoy being seen in it and to have people enjoy seeing her in it — but she’s also almost certainly not wearing it for you. You are not the person she has been waiting for, the reason she’s there, or the purpose for her attendance. When you act like you are, or that she has (or should have) nothing else to do than be the object of your amusement/interest/desire/use, the likelihood that you will come across a complete creeper rises exponentially. It’s not an insult for someone else not to want to play that role for you. It’s not what they’re there for.

So those are some overarching things to incorporate into your thinking. Here are some practical things.

5. Don’t touch. Seriously, man. You’re not eight, with the need to run your fingers over everything, nor do you lack voluntary control of your muscles. Keep your hands, arms, legs and everything else to yourself. This is not actually difficult. Here’s an idea: That person you want to touch? Put them in charge of the whole touch experience. That is, let them initiate any physical contact and let them set the pace of that contact when or if they do — and accept that that there’s a very excellent chance no touch is forthcoming. Do that when you meet them for the first time. Do that after you’ve met them 25 times. Do it just as a general rule. Also, friendly tip: If you do touch someone and they say “don’t touch me,” or otherwise make it clear that touching was not something you should have done, the correct response is: “I apologize. I am sorry I made you uncomfortable.” Then back the hell off, possibly to the next state over.

6. Give them space. Hey: Hold your arm straight out in front of your body. Where your fingertips are? That’s a nice minimum distance for someone you’re meeting or don’t know particularly well (it’s also not a bad distance for people you do know). Getting inside that space generally makes people uncomfortable, and why make people uncomfortable? That’s creepy. Also creepy: Sneaking up behind people and getting in close to them, or otherwise getting into their personal space without them being aware of it. If you’re in a crowded room and you need to scrunch in, back up when the option becomes available; don’t take it as an opportunity to linger inside that personal zone. Speaking of which:

Go check it out, it is worth reading, and almost certainly worth showing to your teenagers.

Anyway, the post sprouted a very long and interesting discussion, which Mr. Scalzi has carefully moderated (meaning, he deleted egregious trolls and off-point material), so that pretty much the whole thread is worth reading — note, this does NOT mean that I endorse every opinion expressed in the thread, just that the remaining discussion, while heated, is mainly respectful and thoughtful. Warning: the discussion may be triggering, as a few people describe past unpleasant experiences.

One of the sub-discussions that I found particularly interesting had to do with people making excuses for individuals who, in their mind, simply lacked the social skills to avoid being “mistaken” for a sexually aggressive creepy person. (Most of these alluded to or mentioned Asperger’s syndrome, but others cited cultural differences as the cause.) There ensued a fairly lively debate about the agency of socially impaired individuals. I think the strongest voices came from people who live with and love someone who is so impaired, and who argued that in fact they still need to be held to the same standards of behavior as everyone else, because they are capable of doing so as long as they understand it is necessary.

Another good sub-thread had to do with the responsibility of assertive people (particularly men) to intervene, either as a bystander or especially when the creeper is one of their friends.

Scalzi followed it up with a “Tangential Personal Note” in which he described a personal experience struggling with the temptation to be a creep:

On the flip side of this, I noted that the rules I noted yesterday are ones that I use myself when I try not to come across as a creeper to people I’m meeting. I didn’t use a specific example of a time where I was concerned about being considered a weird, creepy dude because although I did have a story that applied, I hadn’t cleared it with the other person involved. But now she’s cleared it, and now I’ll use it.

Back in 2006, at Readercon(!) I was wandering around the dealer’s room when I saw John Joseph Adams talking to a woman I didn’t know. I knew JJA very casually, so I went up to say hello. The woman he was speaking to was the art director of Shimmer Magazine and her name was Mary Robinette Kowal. JJA introduced the two of us, and Mary and I started chatting and within about five minutes I was aware that I was really intensely attracted to her, in a way that actually kind of spooked me and which I was sure was immediately and clearly obvious, and possibly immediately and obviously creepy.

So here’s what I did…

He goes into detail describing his conscious behavior intended to avoid making the woman uncomfortable, and then explains:

…I mention this for two purposes. One, to make the point that I think the guidelines I set out work (or at least work for me). Two, to make the point that saying that only certain types of men — ugly ones, aspie ones, socially sheltered ones, ones who aren’t going to pay attention to someone offering advice — have the potential to be creepers is kind of stupid. Hi there, I’m generally considered to be socialized, neurotypical and a decent guy. And oh my I had quite the potential to be a creeping assbag on Mary, among others. But I haven’t been, because I’m responsible for my own actions and I realize no one deserves to be creeped on by me even when the reptile portions of my brain are howling TAKE HER TAKE HER TAKE HER NOW. At the end of the day, as regards being a creepy assbag, it’s not about who you are, it’s about what you do.

Since Scalzi was married at the time, and says (in the comments) that he immediately came home and described the events to his wife, there’s plenty of food for thought there about marriage and trust as well as about — for want of a better term — deliberate nondouchebaggery. The comments there are highly recommended as well.

What do you think about the posts? Is Scalzi’s guide a good start? What tips would make it less “incomplete?”

Aug 11, 2012

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4 comments on “How not to be a creeper” and assorted followup discussion.
The invisible hand.

Some time ago I quit the treadmill and started running around the indoor track that circles the upper half of the basketball court at the Y.

I’m not sure why I suddenly got so tired of the treadmill. Maybe because it is impossible to escape the television completely. Maybe it was the demoralizing effect of the digits slowly ticking away the miles or time elapsed; I found myself always wishing I’d brought a sticky-note to cover up my progress. Maybe it was all the people around that I couldn’t quite tune out. Or maybe it was the view through the window — not a bad view, of a residential cross-street — but a view that rarely changed, except for the snow cover giving way to foliage and later taking over again. Or perhaps, after having a taste of running outside, around the lakes, I just couldn’t stand running in place anymore, and running around a bare room seemed like an improvement.

At first I took my iPod with me, and had five different running playlists cued up all ready to go. But after a while I stopped taking that, too. I don’t want to hear music; I want to hear my footfalls, so I can work on correcting them. I want to hear my own breathing and feel the goosebumps from the air-conditioned chill give way to warmth, flushing, sweat. I think I am tired of trying to distract myself from the running. I am trying to be fully present in it instead, to feel the aching muscles, to force my mind to deal with the urge to stop instead of just wishing it away and pretending it isn’t there.

Sometimes i have no choice but to think about running. But occasionally I get a surprising pay off.

This evening I was running laps and using my swimming lap counter — it’s a one-button, finger-ring style — to check my speed on each lap. In the previous two weeks I had swum 5 times, but not gone for a run at all, and I was feeling rusty — and the times showed it. Each lap around the gym is 1/18 of a mile, and my training pace on a treadmill is around 9:50, so I like to see times between 30 and 33 seconds. I was seeing 35–37-second laps. Not so good.

As I chugged along, endlessly circling, I thought back to the running clinic I attended in December 2010, the one where I learned forefoot running. I tried to remember what I learned from watching the before-and-after videos of myself. One of the form corrections that comes along with the switch from a heel strike to a forefoot or midfoot strike is in lean — runners with a heel strike tend to lean back as they run, while runs with a forefoot strike tend to be straight-backed or lean forward. The more you lean forward when you have a forefoot strike, the faster you tend to go. It doesn’t work that way with a heel strike.

If you have never learned forefoot running (sometimes called the pose method), here is something you can try to give you an idea of how the leaning thing works. Stand up, either barefoot or in running shoes. If you are indoors face a direction that gives you enough room to take several steps without tripping over something or walking into a wall. Now start jogging gently in place. If you are a fairly normal person, you will find that you naturally choose a forefoot-strike to do this: the first part of your foot to touch the ground is somewhere in the front half of your foot. Your heel might come down and “kiss” the ground at the end of its descent, or it might not. But you are certainly not hitting the ground with your heel and using your heel to absorb the impact of your weight coming down on the floor, the way you do when you walk, or the way many people do when they run in cushiony running shoes.

Still jogging? Okay, here is the second part of the demonstration. While you’re jogging in place, lean your body slightly forward. What happened?

What happened to me, when the instructor in my running clinic taught me to do this, is that I rocketed forward — running a few steps (before hitting the wall) with a natural forefoot strike. You don’t have to work to bring your legs far forward of your body and to push against the ground; you just have to let gravity pull you down and allow your legs to prevent you from tipping all the way over. It is a very natural and instinctive motion.

Although It does take reprogramming and practice to adopt forefoot striking as a training stride, that short demonstration gets across how leaning forward is related to speed. The more you lean, the faster you go. I you lean so far that your legs can’t keep up, you fall, of course, so it isn’t a magic formula or anything. You still need to be strong and move your legs fast. But it is kind of a form check.

As I remembered this, I noticed that as I ran around the gym, I tended to focus my eyes on the wall across from me. The track is a rounded-off rectangle, so I’d be staring at the telephone pole through the window… then turn and stare at the water fountain… then turn and stare at the church steeple through the oth window… then the banner with donors’ names… then the telephone pole again.

I tried keeping my neck and back aligned and tipping my body ever so slightly forward. Now I was focusing on the floor a few yards ahead of my toes. I concentrated on that moving point, dancing away from me along the seam in the flooring, and ran one lap, and checked my lap counter: 30 seconds.

Really? I checked it again: 30. I ran another lap: 31. And another: 29. I almost couldn’t believe it. Before this, it had taken real effort to push myself to go faster, if I wanted to see lap times consistently under 34 seconds. This didn’t feel more tiring at all. I just had to remember to tip ever so slightly forward.

As I circled around and around, though, it did start to wear on me mentally. I found that if I stopped concentrating on the slight forward lean, it went away. I really had to keep it front and center in my attention, carefully hold it, so it would not slip. After a while I started to feel as if there was an invisible hand between my shoulder blades, pressing slightly but firmly, and always just at the threshold of knocking me off balance. I found that if I vividly imagined that there really was a hand pressing me, it was easier to maintain my pace.

It wasn’t that I actually had the sensation of a physical pressure on my back in that spot. It was more that I started to feel irritated by it. After awhile I wanted to turn around and snap, “WILL you STOP pushing me?!” to the owner of the invisible hand invading my personal space.

But of course there was no one but me, running all by myself in the upper half of the gym, my peripheral vision only occasionally interrupted by a lone basketball rebounding off the backboards just below the track.

I discovered something today. It is possible to make a gain in training that cannot be taken away even by weeks of inactivity. This is something I learned with my brain, you know, from information I picked up back in my running clinic. I think I will remember it: tip a little forward, gain a little efficient speed. It can be hard to keep all the different form tweaks active in mind at the same time, of course; practice can move that kind of skill out of the brain and into the muscles. But still, the understanding remains, and can’t be lost — if I take pains to write about it, that is.

____________

(disclaimer: do not switch abruptly from heel striking to forefoot running without doing some research to avoid injury, and consider working with a personal trainer. I do not think the lean-forward tip will work for runners who use a heel-striking stride instead of a forefoot-striking stride.)

Aug 9, 2012

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2 comments on The invisible hand.
Beer for beginners, part V: Fruity stuff and saison.

(part I, part II, part III, part IV)

Before I get into this, I need to tell you that my drinking has spiralled out of control. Which is to say that I am, in fact, already breaking into the cases of Belgian witbier (aka bière blanche, if you’re dealing with the Frenchy sort of Belgium), which is the next thing I want to write about, and I am even starting to attack the oatmeal stout, which is, like, three styles ahead. And I am just now sitting down to write about the Belgian fruited lambic and saison. And I still have one bottle of raspberry lambic in my basement.

Also, I recently discovered gin and tonic. Seriously losing focus here, and I am pretty sure it is not because my eyes are crossing.

So let me just knock this bit out, and then I can get on with the witbier in peace.

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Belgian saison is where my opinions and the opinions of Garrett Oliver, author of The Brewmaster’s Table, part company. He is really into them. They are “one of the world’s most refreshing and enigmatic beer styles,” “light, brisk, refreshing, and sustaining,” “some of Belgium’s most exciting beers,” “truly glorious and endlessly interesting,” and “[w]ith food… beyond versatile… virtually invincible.”

The style is interesting in that they are traditional farmhouse ales, unfiltered and artisanal, and varying from bottle to bottle. As Belgian beers are wont to do, they carry flavors of spices and citrus peel. They often are sold in Champagne-style bottles complete with cork — so they might be a fun alternative to expensive French bubbly for your next celebration.

But I don’t know — our bottle of Saison Dupont failed to impress either me or Mark. Maybe I just got a bad bottle, or maybe I didn’t match it well, or maybe Mr. Oliver just set up my expectations too high. I just remember finding it kind of boring, and it wasn’t cheap either. The people at Beer Advocate like it fine, so maybe I should give it another chance. I almost feel embarrassed saying that I didn’t like the stuff, at least not at the $11 price point.

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Fortunately for my perception of Belgium, the next bottle we tried was also from Belgium and not boring in the least. It left me wondering aloud, “This? This counts as a beer? Impossible!”

What left me so incredulous was Brouwerij Lindemans Framboise. This is a sweet fruited lambic beer. Lambics are not always fruited, by the way; they are a traditional style that is fermented with wild yeast and bacteria, sort of like old-fashioned sourdough bread. I don’t know what they taste like, I still haven’t had any plain lambic yet. I have not seen any in the beer store.

But I did see the Lindemans Framboise, and carried it home along with some kriek. The fruited lambics get a secondary fermentation on cherries or raspberries — sometimes whole fruit, sometimes purée or juice. Oliver writes, “The result was a stronger, transformed beverage that sat squarely on the border between wine and beer.”

We poured the framboise into champagne flutes and admired its beautiful rosy color. It tasted jammy and sweet and tart at the same time. It tasted kind of crazy, to be frank. Soda-pop, with an alcoholic kick.

I think I would rather have it than almost any dessert wine that I can afford to buy regularly (I have had luxurious ports and eisweins and muscats and the like, sure, but I think of them as special-occasion wines, not something to keep always on hand). The book says it goes well with cheesecake, and I had managed to procure some for the occasion — indeed it did. On another occasion we tried the kriek. It was also fruity, tart and sweet.

I would recommend trying one of these to anyone. They are just so over-the-top — and they don’t taste very much like beer. They taste more like sweet bubbly fruity wine. I don’t want to think too much about whether it proves that I don’t know much about beer, that I liked this frothy sweet stuff. I bet it isn’t for everyone. But you won’t know until you try it.

I still have one bottle left to try, of an American kriek — Wisconsin brewery New Glarus’s Wisconsin Belgian Red, which proclaims that each 750 mL bottle contains one pound of Montmorency cherries. I am waiting for an evening in which we can kill a bottle without regretting it in the morning.

Aug 9, 2012

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No comments on Beer for beginners, part V: Fruity stuff and saison.
The Amish population.

Do you think of the Amish as leading an “endangered” lifestyle? Maybe it’s that we associate them with being old-fashioned, so to speak, but I confess that when I have considered them — whether when teaching my kids about the impact of Wisconsin v. Yoder or buying preserves from a farm stand — it has been with a sort of wistfulness. Surely they won’t be able to hold out forever against the encroachment of the wider world around them.

Not so: in fact the Amish are one of the fastest-growing religious groups in the country, according to an Ohio State University census:

The study, released July 27 at the annual meeting of the Rural Sociological Society, suggests a new community sprouting every three and a half weeks.

Nearly 250,000 Amish live in the U.S. and Canada, and the population is expected to exceed 1 million around 2050.

The growth may not be visible outside Amish country, but the rural settlements definitely see the boom.

“This place has grown,” said Daniel Miller, 52, who has spent his life on an Amish settlement here. “It’s because all of the kids.”

…The Amish double their population about every 22 years, said Joseph Donnermeyer, the Ohio State professor who led the census project as part of the recent 2010 U.S. Religion Census.

Interesting, no?

Aug 9, 2012

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4 comments on The Amish population.
Anosmia.

I loved this short film about anosmia — lack of a sense of smell — at the NYT website.

It almost brought me to tears, actually! What did you think, if you watched it?

Aug 8, 2012

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1 comment on Anosmia.
Entertaining Wikipedia article (unless you’re afraid to fly).

Often, when our family takes a road trip, I bring along something to read aloud to Mark — usually a nonfiction book. I like books that spur conversation between us, particularly pop-science books that we can argue about and analyze. This is fun even when the book is really bad. On the way down from Minneapolis to Ohio last week, we read The Psychopath Test, which turned out to be perfect road-trip reading — entertaining, not entirely convincing (meaning that we had a chance to argue about it) and also, in general, food for thought.

I didn’t have a book for the way back up, so I made do by following trails of links in Wikipedia to articles about things we didn’t know. We started from an article about the Mars robot that landed earlier, and from there to previous Mars lander missions, including the one that famously failed because somebody forgot to convert newtons to pounds-force — a mistake roundly mocked by everyone EXCEPT former engineering students because deep down, we all know THERE BUT FOR THE GRACE OF GOD GO I. If my life had been only a little bit different, I too might have broken NASA.

Anyway, from there we went to a list of disasters caused by metrication errors, and that led us to what must be (since I love engineering failure stories) the most entertaining Wikipedia article I have ever read in my life: the story of the “Gimli Glider.”

It is only entertaining if you know how the story ends, so let me give you the spoiler first. EVERYBODY SURVIVED, NO MAJOR INJURIES. There you go. Now the teaser: this is the story of an airliner that ran out of gas at 41,000 feet because Canadians had just started converting to the metric system. Now you can read and enjoy.

I read this aloud to Mark, and we agreed that it could never have been made into a true-life disaster movie because no one would believe the chain of events. The aircraft was nearly uncontrollable — but by a remarkable coincidence, the captain was an experienced glider pilot. The first officer proposed landing at the nearest runway, which happened to be at a nearby closed air force base — which he knew well because he had once served there as a Canadian air force pilot. But he didn’t know that the air force base had been converted to a race track complex. Or that there was a race going on (think NASCAR, but Canadian) and the runway area was full of cars and campers. Also that there were cars racing on the runway.

Anyway, if you thought the “Sully in the river” story was gripping, I think you should try this one.

Aug 6, 2012

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No comments on Entertaining Wikipedia article (unless you’re afraid to fly).
A different image of women’s fitness.

Pausing on my long drive back from Ohio to Minneapolis to share a link: Check out this inspiring and interesting article on Olympic powerlifter Holly Mangold.

Aug 5, 2012

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2 comments on A different image of women’s fitness.
Considering the method of protest, and setting aside the cause..

I thought this was a good deconstruction of the notion of a “kiss-in” protest. It comes from Ann Althouse, who is on the record as a supporter of same-sex marriage. The title of the post is “A kiss-in should be a love-in or it shouldn’t be done at all.”

Protests express opposition and therefore usually anger. Expressing love is inconsistent with anger. So if you’re going to use a gesture of love for protest, you’ve got a special problem. Appropriating an expression of love for hostile purposes is a dangerous matter…

I’m looking at pictures from the Chick-fil-A kiss-in. These were people who wanted to demonstrate support for same-sex marriage. (I agree with them on that issue, by the way.) As their form of protest, they chose kissing — individuals of the same sex, kissing in restaurants that are associated with opposition to same-sex marriage. So the idea was, go where you think you are not loved — even though there’s no evidence that Chick-fil-A treats gay customers with less respect and friendliness than straight customers — and do something you think will upset them.

Now, restaurants generally don’t want anybody making out, so you’ve chosen behavior that would be disruptive to a restaurant’s business whether the kissing couples are same or opposite sex. The form of expression is offensive and not like the old civil rights demonstrations where black people sat at lunch counters and were not served. They simply acted like customers — good customers — and the only reason it worked as a demonstration was that the store only served food to white people, the policy the protesters very successfully demonstrated was wrong. Kissing at Chick-fil-A does nothing to show what’s wrong about anything Chick-fil-A is doing. It’s just displaying hostility to the place.

And it’s displaying hostility with kissing. So what have they done? They’ve perverted kissing, which should be an expression of love. Ironic, considering that the gay rights movement seeks to dispel the belief that homosexuality is perverted.

It’s a challenge to protest with gestures of love. It can be done, but it can’t be done with hate or love is not love.

This is a very important insight, and it is one that political and social activists of all kinds ought to take to heart. It can’t be done with hate or love is not love.

In fact, we don’t even have to be talking about outright “hate” for the principle to apply. John Paul II famously wrote that the opposite of loving a person isn’t hating him, it’s using him. So it can’t be done to use someone, either, or love is not love. Even using him for something quite small and inconsequential destroys whatever traces of love there might be in the act of use.

I am reminded a little bit of how, in an argument between a Christian and some other person, occasionally you’ll hear the Christian end the argument with something along the lines of “I’ll pray for you.” Quite possibly it’s a sincere statement, but the context leaves it tainted. To pray for someone is an act of love, true; normally to express an intention to pray for someone is an expression of love; but you get the feeling that this particular expression is primarily an attempt to score a rhetorical point. If that’s so, then this love is not love. It’s a kind of use: using the deity, invoking God’s name and the Christian’s intimate relationship with Him, as a way of saying “You are soooo wrong that only God has any hope of rescuing you from your benightedness.”

Now, you may say that there is nothing illicit about praying for someone who is misguided, and therefore there can be nothing wrong with announcing your intention to do so. Perhaps there is nothing inherently wrong with making such an announcement, but you’d better be quite certain your intentions are pure as the driven snow — and consider what is the point of announcing that you’re about to take part in a charitable act, instead of just quietly going away and doing it, with the door shut.

The lessons here apply to all kinds of protests, including the kind that you or I might make. If you’re using love to make a point, tread carefully… because love is the opposite of use. So it is pretty hard to “use” it and allow it to remain real love.

Aug 4, 2012

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2 comments on Considering the method of protest, and setting aside the cause..
Exercise can make you fat. So what?
This Daily Mail article has been getting around — it’s a popular-press take on the theme “exercise can make you fat.”

I am always kind of interested in how this particular idea gets reported in the popular press, because it strikes me that the tone is very important. Too much emphasis on the difficulty of losing weight through exercise alone, and the article can come across as saying “Why even bother increasing your activity when it is going to make weight loss harder?”

And if the article suggests tips for encouraging weight loss while exercising, it runs the risk of making exercise seem even more complicated by introducing extra “rules” to worry about. The Daily Mail article, for example, suggests
- Choosing “fairly vigorous aerobic exercise, such as running or cycling,” over weight training
- Fasting for two to four hours before a workout
- Instead of energy bars or energy drinks, consume “a bowl of porridge a couple of hours before a workout” and drink a half-liter (think two glasses, folks) of water with a tiny pinch of salt an hour before and during exercise. (Well, being Brits, the Mail also suggested drinking “squash” as an alternative to water. This confused me momentarily, but Wikipedia is here to help you.)
- Choose intense, 20- to 30-minute workouts over longer, more leisurely ones.
There is not a whole lot here, but I think the article could have been a little more helpful by repackaging it to counteract some of the most-often-perceived barriers to exercise.
- You need less time than you might think for a good workout. A 20-minute, vigorous workout might be as effective as a much longer one.
- You don’t need to have eaten anything just before a workout.
- Skip the energy bars and energy drinks. Drink water.
Anyway, it seems a good enough time for me to reiterate my personal advice regarding the interaction of exercise with nutritional behavior.
- Don’t start an exercise program and a food-restriction program at the same time. Pick one and spend a few months on it before adding the other.
- I recommend starting with exercise. If you’re starting from sedentary, begin with either two 20-minute sessions a week, or 5 minutes every day — whichever makes more sense depending on what you are doing and what fits into your schedule. Work up gradually from there. “Gradually” means “slowly enough to give your life a chance to remold around the exercise sessions as a permanent feature of your schedule.”
- Evaluate your progress in the fitness program based on performance, not loss of weight or inches. You are not allowed to quit or change your fitness program because of any observations whatsoever about weight gain/loss.
- The first metric of performance is “Did I show up for my scheduled session or not?” Once you have “showing up” pretty well down pat, you can move on to the second metric, which is “Did I finish my session?” After that is established, then you can work on lengthening the sessions, up to some sustainable, schedule-able level that allows enough time to work on performance. (Say, 45 minutes twice a week, or 20 minutes 5 days a week.) Then you can start increasing intensity.
- Expect that adding exercise to your life will disrupt your appetite, but don’t worry about it — except, maybe, to repeat to yourself affirmations like “Energy bars are just expensive candy, and energy drinks are just expensive soda.”
- A few months of showing up to your sessions and finishing your sessions, maybe even having worked them up to longer sessions and started to improve your performance, will have put you in a very different frame of mind. You don’t anymore regard exercise as a bizarre anomaly of the schedule that gives you license to have a bunch of extra snacks just because you exercised today. When you get to that point — when exercising really feels normal, whether you do it every day or only a few days a week — that is a good time to add in some kind of attentive nutrition program. Hold steady on the exercise habit, and begin.
- If your exercise habit slips, back off on the food restriction. Also vice versa. Change one thing at a time.
It isn’t terribly scientific, but I can’t see how it can hurt, considering that exercise has so many known benefits going for it even without weight loss, and (unlike diet-induced weight loss) exercise-induced performance improvement is something much closer to your direct control.
Aug 3, 2012

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8 comments on Exercise can make you fat. So what?
“He answers all our needs.”

Last Sunday, to accompany the story of the feeding of the five thousand, we heard Psalm 145. The antiphon was

The hand of the Lord feeds us; he answers all our needs.

Isn’t that a remarkable thing to say? He answers all our needs. How, exactly, are we to understand this to be true?

Because — I am sure there are a lot of people in the pews who could say, honestly, “No — I am not getting all my needs addressed. I don’t get what I need. Or I haven’t got it yet, and don’t see a way to expect it.”

Accepting this strongly probable assertion makes the antiphon more than a little disturbing — stained by association, maybe, with the heresy of the prosperity gospel. The hand of the Lord feeds us and he answers all our needs — so if you remain hungry, needy, you aren’t one of us. Something’s wrong with you. Or else, it opens the singer to mockery: some Lord, eh? He didn’t answer when your needs came knocking, did He now?

So let’s consider some plausible alternative interpretations of the line, other than “we never perceive a need because God favors us.” Because there’s some serious issues with certain attitudes that go with that interpretation.

I’ll restrict myself to the English antiphon as it appeared in Sunday’s psalm, and not fiddle with translation issues here. In other words, I am just going to assume good faith and accuracy on the part of the translator.

Possibility #1: the psalmist is confined to a particular community at a particular time of spiritual fruitfulness and material prosperity. When it was written, it could truly be said “He answers all our needs,” even if it is not so here and now.

This might make the reader wonder, “If that’s so, then why sing it here and now?” but I think this possibility seems stronger the more experience one has praying the psalms in regular rotation as one does with the Liturgy of the Hours (or, indeed, with the Mass). It is said that whatever your situation, there is a psalm to fit it, but the corollary to this is that at any given time there are many psalms that don’t fit at all. You may be feeling on top of the world and wanting to express gratefulness to God for His abundant blessings, but if it’s Friday of Week III, you’re stuck with “Let my eyes stream with tears day and night, without rest, over the great destruction,” and so on. At first it is jarring, but eventually you figure out how to go with the flow, remembering always that this is the prayer of the Church, not the prayer of me, and someone’s life somewhere is intimately fed by this psalm, and we can all join in it whatever our situation.

So we can understand this as: God answers someone’s needs somewhere, and we can join in acknowledging it.

Possibility #2: We are to understand “needs” more restrictively here; not everything we might think is a “need” really is.

In this case, the antiphon could even be turned around: it isn’t really a need unless God meets it. I am not particularly fond of this interpretation because I fear that it could be abused to minimize others’ real suffering. But there is some precedent for this, if you allow (first of all) that securing our salvation is the sole true goal in life, and (second) that the people of God who sing this song are aware of, and accept, the primacy of that salvation. Food, clothing, shelter, security, human kindness, can certainly help us along the path to salvation, but the Christian knows that they are not actually prerequisites. The martyrs had none of these at the point of the blade. You could say that the antiphon, interpreted this way, reminds us that the only true need is grace, and that God grants it abundantly.

Caution, though: we should never assume that other people have no true need for food, clothing, shelter, security. The song says God answers all “our” needs. Quite possibly we can serve as the channel of grace to others in need of compassion, by helping to meet others’ physical needs. It is much easier to realize that salvation is more important than food when you are not hungry all the time.

Possibility #3: The emphasis is on the word “He.” “It’s the hand of the Lord who feeds us; it’s He who answers all our needs.”

I think this is the strongest candidate of all the interpretation. When our needs are met, it is God to whom we owe our thanks and praise. Whatever food we eat, our clothing, our homes, the people who care for us, the powers of our own and others that keep us safe — all of that is ultimately a gift from God. Sometimes it comes with the cooperation of others, other times without it; sometimes we ought to thank other people, too; but ultimately we owe God thanks for every good gift in our lives.

Aug 1, 2012

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1 comment on “He answers all our needs.”
Twitblegging.

Jennifer Fulwiler wants people to explain their blogs to her — in fact to plug them! — in 140 characters or less. I thought it might be fun to turn it around. Plugs are rationales for reading, and I figure I could use about five of them, so tell me — why do you read bearing blog, in 28 characters or less?

___________________________

P.S. I am just going to ignore the little voice in my head that suggests such a question is too narcissistic to be entertaining.

P.P.S. When I typed the last sentence my iPad autocorrected “voice” to “VCR.” That’s my internal dialogue for you: rapidly declining into obsolescence, repetitive, and prone to glitches when moved rapidly between environments of different temperature and humidity.

P.P.P.S. Link fixed: now when you click on Jen’s name, it goes to her post instead of to the Amazon page of the book The Psychopath Test. I am sure Jen will approve this change.

So, cough, anyway. 28 characters. Go!

Jul 31, 2012

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18 comments on Twitblegging.