Boiling every political argument down as being either conservative or liberal is a limiting critique—a binary straightjacket, so to speak. This kind of posturing has poisoned the current political well for sure.
What it’s also done very well is to create an undeserved smugness on one side, or the other. Where this smugness often gets exhibited in these heady digital days is on social media platforms—Twitter and Facebook, mainly.
Like the other day. Continue reading
Living in free agent nation is nothing, if not challenging. Sometimes your daily task becomes trying to find a way around those proverbial bumps in the road. Then, there are those stretches when the stars align and things magically slide into place. When that happens, you find it’s all too easy to get lulled into thinking that this could become the norm.
A project lasting six months, a regular monthly writing gig, or a grant to manage are all examples of the stability that I’m lacking at the moment.
Free agent puzzle-making.
We all have opinions. Most of us have strongly-held ones. The desire to share my opinions, as well as some of what I thought was foundational information behind those opinions, were reasons why I started blogging back in 2003.
I still have opinions. Many of them have evolved over time. Having an opinion and sharing it is also seems fraught with danger, 12 years later. Now, I’m less likely to add my two cents worth to whatever battle is being waged over symbols, or people’s preferences.
Being hesitant to weigh-in on the Battle Royale raging at the moment also leaves a limited amount of topics to write about at times, or so it seems. Also, that’s what Facebook and Twitter are for. Spending time wasting words via a blog seems so 2006. No one seems interested anymore in reading several hundred words. 140-character tweets are now de riguer with the cool kids holding court, ruling the turf formerly held by bloggers. Who cares if they have nothing behind their prattle except their strongly held opinions?
“La, La, La, La…”
My previous post touched down on binary thinking. I’ve mentioned the topic enough before. I won’t go there again today. I will only say that our inability to have a dialogue on a variety of tough subjects, even those deemed by our arbiters as “controversial,” doesn’t bode well for us. Screaming louder than your foes, or using your newly-found majority status doesn’t indicate rightness, either.
Perhaps I’ll just blog about the weather and puppies—no one is opposed to sun and cuteness, right?
I’ve mentioned the flaws of binary thinking before. The concept—framing things in terms of duality, or opposites—isn’t a new concept, and it tends to be the way that most issues are discussed in America and arguably, the West.
From a philosophical standpoint, the origins of this kind of thinking date back to Aristotle and Descartes. They first structured this type of logic, which consists of dividing, distinguishing and opposing items. When you see things in a binary construct, there’s no room for in-between or shades of gray; everything is black or white, good or bad, nice or ugly, good or evil, etc. It is the law of “all or nothing.”
Unfortunately, this kind of dualistic framework often leads to dead-ends, and at the very least, can divide people unnecessarily.
One of the best explanations and the one that really made me sit up and take notice, was written by John Michael Greer, and posted a few years ago at his blog, The Archdruid Report.
Greer takes the origins back even further than Aristotle and Descartes. He writes,
Most of the snap decisions our primate ancestors had to make on the African savannah are most efficiently sorted out into binary pairs: food/nonfood, predator/nonpredator, and so on. The drawbacks to this handy set of internal categories don’t seem to bother any of our primate relatives, and probably became an issue—like so much that’s part of magic—only when the rickety structure of the reasoning mind took shape over the top of the standard-issue social primate brain.
The problem with this snap-judgment way of seeing and making sense of the world is that in our current, non-hunting society, the binary framework eliminates the middle ground. In fact, we don’t even recognize a middle position. More often than not, it leads to division and conflict. Continue reading
Being an umpire, I’m always interested while watching a Major League game, when an appeal is made regarding a call. Umpires are human and humans are prone to error—but umpires may be less prone to error than many people assume.
If you’ve been living under a rock, MLB now allows certain plays to be reviewed upon request by one of the two teams. This change occurred when the powers that be initiated expanded instant replay during the 2014 season, thinking that it would improve the game. And interestingly, over the first season of reviewing a plethora of calls, the umpires made the right call almost all of the time. For all the ins and outs of instant replay and what calls can be reviewed, the Wikipedia entry on instant replay is really good and gives a great overview.
Fans and players have always had an adversarial relationship with officials. Both of them are far from being objective about whether the right call is being made. They have inherent bias built into their reaction to close calls, especially if that call goes against their teams, or them personally.
(Photo by James Brosher/AMERICAN-STATESMAN – Home base umpire Mike Lusky signals safe as Express first baseman Brian Bogusevic slides into home plate.
They’re in Vermont. No, they’ve made it across the border to Canada. No, wait; their scent’s been picked up by the dogs—they’re hiding out in the back of a sandwich shop, in nearby Cadyville. Apparently, escaped prisoners dig Subway.
What am I talking about? The prison escape, of course! Or should I say, “The Great Escape.”
We’re now entering Day 7, and the news media is sure that the “authorities” are narrowing in on the two escapees, Richard Matt and David Sweat. With hundreds (if not thousands) of law enforcement and even military personnel on the ground in upstate New York, it does seem highly improbable that these two prisoners have managed to remain on the lam as long as they have in a world rife with surveillance.
What’s possibly worse than law enforcement’s tracking skills however, are the media’s penchant for sensationalism and fear-fogging. Continue reading
I’m entering my third year as a triathlete. Most of the triathlons I’ve entered are of the sprint variety—the distances being 750-meter (0.47-mile) swim, 20-kilometer (12-mile) on the bike bike, and finishing up with a 5-kilometer (3.1-mile) run.
After competing in three sprint triathlons at Point Sebego in Naples the past three seasons, Miss Mary and I are off to the Cape and Hyannis/Craigville Beach for our first out-of-state event, and a good early season test.
My spring hasn’t been my most memorable. Thankfully, training with an eye towards this weekend’s event, and my umpiring, have kept me on an even keel most days, and allowed me to push through some adversity.
Seth Godin would be proud.
Sunrise at OOB, Rev 3, 2014
Life’s circumstances can turn on a dime. In a world where technology is exalted and worshiped, we’re less likely to remember that our seasons evolve and fluctuate.
We’ve just come through a stretch of weather spanning 3-4 weeks where May felt like mid-July, or even early August. Then, in a matter of minutes on Sunday, as a cold front passed over central Maine, the humidity and heat were switched off, replaced with a crispness that has been missing for much of the past few weeks.
This morning, I awoke to steady (and needed) rainfall. Talk of drought was replaced by reminders of “flooding in low-lying areas.” As the old-timers would say, “if you don’t like the weather, wait a minute,” offering their apt and simplified descriptor of what the meteorologists tell us about Maine’s weather.
Sunday, my sister and he who we know as “Handy,” were doing an early run-through of some recipes that may show up in the upcoming Moxie “Cook Off,” better known as the Moxie Recipe Contest, which she reminded me, would be taking place in “40 days and 40 nights.” This year’s Moxie culinary throw-down seems to be taking on something akin to biblical import in Lisbon Falls and surrounding communities.
The focus of Moxie Season.