Repugnant

I grew up in a right-wing, Republican family. As I grew to adulthood and read about the proud history of the Republican party, beginning with Lincoln, I embraced that party, even as racism began to be embraced as a political strategy during Nixon's campaign for president. I overlooked that part, because I didn't want to see it. Besides, the Democrats were the party of racists.

However, as I heard about the crimes that President Nixon seemed to be excusing, and that people around me also seemed to excuse, I began to think long and hard about party versus principle. Within a few years, I left that party, especially as I saw the Democrats, so long the party steeped in racism, begin to attempt to repair that damage done to the country. It took me many years to admit that I had changed parties, because my beliefs have not changed that much. I just see things more clearly now, after reading a lot more history.

Today I've seen a Republican president embrace racism, support of the Confederacy, and support racists, neo-Nazis, white nationalists, and the Ku Klux Klan party -- a party his father supported in Queens, New York. Fred Trump was arrested for marching publicly in full regalia, masked, hooded and robed. I've seen no report that he was convicted, although there are pictures of the march and the arrest report in the local newspaper.

Make no mistake about it; today's statement was deliberate. Trump's entry into the political fray was as a leader of the so-called birthers, questioning Barack Obama's citizenship. His announcement of candidacy was a full-throated anti-immigrant stance, which he never moderated and has not changed.

Yes, previous American presidents have been racist, some of them proudly so. But since the Civil War we have not seen -- until today -- a president of the United States throw his political lot in with white nationalists and neo-Nazis. Good people voted for this man, hoping that he would shake things up in Washington. Good people cannot stand by statements such as Trump made today.

It is time for the Congress to censure this President. The statements made today are morally bankrupt, and are intolerable. Good people do not march with neo-Nazis, and good people cannot let statements such as those made today, stand.

Book reviews: Eleanor Roosevelt, and Bog Bodies Uncovered

Eleanor Roosevelt, Vol. 2: 1933-1938, by Blanche Wiesen Cook

What a fantastic ride this biography is, seeing the world through the eyes of ER, born in 1884 into one of the oldest New York families, niece of the President of the United States, but also daughter of an alcoholic, and orphaned by age 10.

Always insecure because of her childhood, she rose to be one of the world's most beloved and respected women, surviving almost unbelievable challenges along the way. Because of her class and mores of the time, she was able to help her husband and distant cousin Franklin Delano Roosevelt become a New York State legislator, Governor, and US President all while he battled the after-affects of polio, even as she recovered from his betrayal of her with Lucy Mercer.

She went on to build a life of her own in parallel to his, both holding "courts" of power, both having other lovers and deeply intimate friendships while supporting one another in their pursuits of what was best for the United States and the world as another world war loomed.

It is hard for me to believe after about ER's accomplishments, that we as a culture are still evidently not willing to give women direct power when they are qualified and willing to take on the difficult job of governing the US. I hope I'm wrong in my gloomy assessment of the US cultural landscape.

Now that part three of this biography has been published, I have it on hold at my local library.

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Bog Bodies Uncovered: Solving Europe's Ancient Mystery by Miranda Aldhouse-Green

I borrowed this from a friend (thanks, Christine!) after I became absorbed in it up at our cabin in the mountains. The drawings and photos are great, and the analysis is good, if a bit speculative. I see that Nova has a documentary on the bodies; I'll try to check that out. Slim book, well worth the time. We can learn so much from these ancient mummies.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/bog/iron-nf.html

Institutions in KDE?

The Randa Meetings are becoming an institution in KDE. Really? And is that a good thing, or not. When I complimented Mario Fux on the excellent on-going work he is doing on the Randa Meetings, he was surprised and maybe offended that I called it an institution.

I've been thinking about this since reading The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution by Francis Fukuyama. The basis of my comment is that in some ways, our KDE community is like a state.

Modern political order ...consists of ...[first] a modern state, with competent and honest officials, not prone to nepotism, corruption, and clientelism. Second is the rule of law, or binding constraints upon the rulers as well as the ruled. Third is accountability, usually via elections but also via a sense of responsibility towards the people, a sense of ruling for the common good.

 - from http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/1261, a review of the book.

What supports and keeps a state alive are institutions. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia, social institutions are ... sets of rules and norms that organise human activities within a society. These rules and norms aren't just written law, such as our Code of Conduct and Manifesto, but also the unwritten "way we do things here." We have our habit of collaboration, our e.V., Akademy, our infrastructure, our coding style, APIs, documentation, and so forth.

And what is cool is to see that we continue to adapt to a changing world. I see the Frameworks effort as leap forward in our ability to adapt. The Plasma 5 work has flexibility written into it from the beginning, especially important as new form factors come onto the market. And we seem to be doing this within our community as well as in our code.

Fukuyama spoke not only about the development of the major institutions: the state, the rule of law, and accountability, but also of political decay, which happens when institutions grow rigid, and don't change with the times. I see the opposite with KDE.

Randa Meetings are a beautiful example of how one great idea has grown into something people look forward to, plan for, and support in many ways. We've had sprints for a long time, but now the year's calendar feels empty if there is no Randa meeting planned. The teams there not only do a sprint as usual, but also feed on the energy of the other teams around them, and collaborate on the fly. The Randa Meetings, like Akademy, have become indispensable; a norm. And that's a good thing.

Thinking about thinking

Since I last wrote about this, I've done more reading and thinking about how we humans perceive, interpret, judge, learn, think and communicate about the world. Perhaps this started with Proust was a Neuroscientist, but there are loads of interesting books I've been finding. Even The Horse, The Wheel and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World was about how early culture and language shapes our modern world.

Last month I read one much more interesting than it sounds: The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Left and Right, which details the debate in Enlightenment thinking between the English Burke and the American Paine, which produced the American Left and Right, and perhaps in Europe the British versus the continent. This followed Arthur Koestler's The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe, which detailed the changes in both knowledge and philosophy at the very beginning of the Enlightenment, chiefly through short biographies of Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo. So that's the historical view; I want experiment and neuroscience!

The Articulate Mammal: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics was particularly interesting, since it covered how children learn language, as well as a survey of how linguistics as a field has thought about that. Now I'm reading two books simultaneously, and they are sparking thoughts back and forth. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt is an excellent follow-up to The Great Debate, but in an analytical way, rather than a philosophical debate. Right alongside, an older book by George Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind. This book is heavy, in every sense of the word, but so rich. I was glad I had read the psycholinguistics text first, and the analogy book last summer, so that I could make sense of this scholarly, radical, amazing tome. I must quote the top Amazon comment on the book:

Lakoff concentrates on the way people *really* think, not the way philosophers would like them to. His approach: We use cognitive models that we acquired in childhood to solve almost every problem - to estimate, to schedule, to infer. What strikes me most about the cognitive science of metaphor is the possibility to apply it to many fields like computer interface design, social sciences, linguistics, you name it. His argument is partly very sophisticated, yet understandable also for a non-philosopher, and he comes up with lots of examples and evidence. This book has become a kind of "creativity technique" to me, I find myself developing new ideas based on Lakoff's approach all the time. Among the people who have no scientific interest in the matter, I recommend this book to designers, programmers and everybody in the field of communication. It is worth every minute you read.

I guess we all know that how we think we see and make sense of the world isn't the way we actually see and justify our decisions. The implicit bias tests prove that, over and over. But these books illustrate the inside of my own head, the life I've lead with my family, my culture, my fellow humans, and how we're getting along. I hope as more is understood, more of us will learn about human nature, so we can improve our lives, our families, companies, politics and policies. It is better than accepting the thinking that got us where we are today.

The Disgrace of the United States

Ten years ago tonight, my country, my beloved USA, became the Bad Guys. We became the attackers. Sad to say, this is not commonly admitted, any more than we admit that we admit that we invaded Canada in 1812, and were thrown out, or that we stole what is now the US Southwest from Mexico, and then called the treaty the Gadsden Purchase, or that we created, in part, the situations in Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq that are now still burdening us and the world. We like to think well of ourselves, as do all people. There is no excuse for teaching lies to kids in history books, though.

There were heroes then; many people opposed the war, voted against the war, marched against the war, and many then paid for their patriotism. The lucky ones were just booed, the more unfortunate lost their jobs. There are many now who still are out telling the truth, and bringing more facts out into the light. Along with the Bush administration, the American press let us down ten years ago with their unquestioning acceptance of the administration lies. And now that same press continues to call upon those guilty of this horrible war, the architects and shills, to give their assessment of the situation now! Unbelievable. And it isn't just Fox "News" either. These "neo-cons" should pay a price for lying to the country, leading to untold thousands upon thousands of deaths and injuries, and beggaring both the US economy and the entire nation of Iraq.

History is based upon the facts, not the white-washing that is currently being attempted. We invaded Iraq for no good reasons, our occupation wrecked the country, and we left in disgrace. Lying about the past will never change the truth. The US lost the War of 1812, and we were the aggressors in the Spanish-American War, the Mexican-American War, the Second Iraq War, and many others. I love my country, and I have to tell the truth.

And now back to free software.