If You Read The Paper | Thurs Sept 2
Words Jay Ford
Thursday, September 2nd, 2010 at 10:43 am
Tonight the 2nd district congressional candidates will be taking the stage to demonstrate how strikingly similar their stances are in the second debate of the campaign season.
Go on out to Calvary Church and spend some time engaging in civicishness. With any luck Scott Rigell will be asked some questions about his decision last week to sign an “Oath” with the local Tea Party.
Tomorrow night you really ought to be on Colley Avenue singing or supporting those who are at the Unsanctioned Street Performance Mini-Festival. I will be putting together a group myself and I would love you to join. Find me on the street and there will be music. Oh yes, there will be music. I don’t want to tip my hand, but I can tell you one thing… there will be kazoos. With that here is the information that has been deemed relevant in the last 24 hours.
We may or may not have a hurricane ruin tomorrow morning
I must admit. I kind of like Hurricanes and big storms in general. There is something beautiful about the world creating such havoc and kinetic output all of its own accord. If human beings were extinct this thing would still be tearing up the coast threatening to put the region under water and that is amazing. My love for Hurricanes withstanding, our region is extremely prone to flooding. Remember to move your cars to higher ground when you come home tonight. It’s that simple. That way, should Earl come a little closer than predicted we can ride out the storm by putting on a parachute, tying it to a light post, and parasailing over the city, laughing like a maniac and challenging the storm to fisticuffs.
None of this would be possible if you were worried about your car the whole time. Also I have to thank the Scorpions for making Hurricanes so awesome. (please note the stalking panther)
Barbara Lai resigns and compassion’s stock plummets
Barbara Lai, the former head of Norfolk’s anti-gang program, has resigned. As previously noted here, Lai was caught up in a firestorm after making the mistake of trying to make a difference in the life of a Norfolk teenager who still went on to commit a crime. What should have amounted to a really tough day at the office for Lai has now ended in her resignation.
This is probably for the best, as far as Norfolk is concerned. When dealing with a public servant position, loss of confidence can be just as detrimental to your ability to do your job as, say, sever incompetence. That being said, I want to be clear that this was a bad decision and reflects poorly on our citizenry that we would react so reprehensibly to this incident.
Lai’s real issue was that our region’s culture disagreed with not having a heavy handed, ‘throw them all in jail and lock away the key,’ ‘they made their choice’ -type leader who would arrest our way out of this problem. In the ongoing coverage Lai’s lack of law enforcement credentials were often brought up as if to imply there was a gaping hole in her credentials.
However, the job was designed to keep youth out of gangs, not to arrest gang members who were already out on the streets. Barbara Lai was fulfilling these duties by mentoring youth in our city, treating those at risk to gang recruitment with the respect and trust deserved by all people, and in many cases making a real difference in the lives of those she worked with.
So what really was her mistake? She bought a cell phone for a young man that was later used in the committing of a violent felony. How dare she, you ask? She might as well as given him a gun right? (Kerry Dougherty thinks so.) Well, it turns out that the full truth of the story was left out from most of the coverage. She did not buy a phone for a youth who previously did not have one. She bought him a phone with a new number and took his old phone so gang members could no longer call him. Peer pressure is a massive component of gang recruitment and Barbara Lai was working to mitigate that factor. So what did she do wrong? She gave someone with a cell phone another cell phone. Seems to me she did nothing but make it harder for the crime that latter occurred to take place, while reaching out to a teenager of our city and for that…. we called for her resignation. We should be ashamed of ourselves.
I can change Norfolk
Sharon McDonald, the City’s commissioner of the revenue, has come out and said she can improve after being criticized for her crazy expenses from extended lobbying trips to Richmond.
A couple things strike me as odd here. One is that our city’s COMMISSIONER OF THE REVENUE needed an audit of her credit cards to realize that she was maybe making some mistakes in her spending habits. The second item is that all of this money was spent lobbying in Richmond. Let’s take a moment with the second item.
The commissioner of the revenue is an elected position and it is partisan, though I am not sure why. It also has a pretty narrow focus, namely dealing with your state taxes. They assess and enforce state and local taxes and help you out with some DMV issues. That’s all. So, why are they using our tax dollars to lobby for more of our tax dollars to collect more of our tax dollars? I say this in all seriousness- we deserve better.
A major player in the anti-mosque movement is based in Virginia beach
ACT! For America is suing a radio station on the west coast for defamation, but in other news ACT! For America is based in Virginia Beach. While browsing their website I stumbled onto their mission statement-“ Create a nationwide network of chapters in order to more effectively inform, educate and mobilize Americans regarding the multiple threats of radical Islam, and what they can and must do to protect themselves and their country against this determined enemy.”
Well that’s really all I have to say about this… fear mongering, intolerant national organization is based in Virginia Beach.
Virginia is the only state to miss deadline on filing plan to reduce bay pollution
It seems Bob McDonnell is not a fan of the Obama Administration’s approach to cleaning up the bay, which focuses on actually cleaning up the bay. As a result, the governor’s office and other top state officials are dragging their feet as they need a bit more time to “digest” the plan. Included in the plan will be the banning of specific types of fertilizers, including phosphorus and certain levels of nitrogen, requiring golf courses to come up with a water management plan, and implanting stricter standards on sewage and storm water facilities. Fertilizer run is possibly the biggest contributor to the degradation of the Chesapeake Bay. It’s all about the Eutrophication folks.
Purely for sociological research… Participant interviews from the Glen Beck rally
I won’t say anything. It says most of what you need.
“Gottist tot!”…says Stephen Hawking and he’s pretty smart
The world’s most famous living physicist has announced that there is no room for god in his version of creation. Not only is god unlikely, he argues, but in fact necessarily untrue in order for our universe to be if we are to take “spontaneous creation” as our starting off point. What say ye?
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ABOUT THE WRITER
Believes the world would be a nicer place if we all made some of our own furniture and grew some of our own food. He has worked on various state and national political races around the region, before switching over to issues based campaigns, where he advocated for voting rights, universal health care, and the environment. He has taught grassroots activism, and happens to think it is pretty important. He believes passionately in environmental reverence, social equality, the power of collective action, and his ability to speak with his cat. He fancies himself a part-time philosopher and thinks that people should dance on their cars more often. Jay thinks that abolishing the hand shake and replacing it with mandatory five second hugs would go leaps and bounds in changing the world.
Other posts by Jay Ford.
Other posts by Jay Ford.
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I said it before and I will say it again: New Left Media (the creators of said Beck video) do nothing but perpetuate a binary and allow a misinformed left to continue to be angry over a self-imagined polar opposite, “determined enemy”.
Political agreement or not, videos like that disgust me, regardless of the side of the fence you’re on. Sure, it’s fun to laugh and be slightly frightened by some of the ideas people allow themselves to believe. What’s worse, though, is championing tolerance, and co-opting post-modernist ideology and “progressiveness” and then outputting total BS like that video.
It’s like sending a small film crew to Podunkville, South, interviewing all of the down syndrome residents and passing that off to the North as what the South is like. It’s easy, lazy, manipulative, agenda-filled, self-righteous intellectualism at its worst. The video, seems bent on dismissing any alternative opinion other than liberal or left or whatever by perpetuating the idea that white, Christian America is ignorant, uninformed, antiquated, and that there isn’t any real substance to their belief system.
The things you see presented in the video are conveniently the only types of things you ever see, particularly from New Left Media. It’s just as dishonest and inaccurate a representation as those who perpetuate the bullshit on the right. The videos still fascinate me, though. I am not attempting to voice concern over politics here, to clarify, I am more concerned about viewing this media with more scrutiny rather than allowing myself to let shit like this simply anger me. As sad as it is that some of these people have these ideas in their head, from a filmmaking standpoint, this video appears devoid of any objective pursuit of truth or reality. And because I don’t know these fellas personally behind this video, all I can truly say is that it SEEMS to be intent on polarizing rather than pursuing progress with integrity. Nothing changes. No one seems to want real progress. They’d rather stomp their feet and complain about the other side–or subtly snicker at their total intellectual ineptitude.
Don’t get me wrong, I laughed when that chick said, “He’s a Muslim at heart” because, well, that’s just idiotic. But, the more I continued to watch and analyze the video, the more it started to bug me. Behavior and creations like this are indicative of what’s wrong with our culture if you ask me.
The absence of academic integrity and limited factual knowledge on the part of the idiot “rednecks” is no worse than a visual representation of a/some logical fallacy(ies).
I suppose the humor I find at laughing at stupid people got overshadowed by my increasing distaste for perpetuating bullshit instead of seeking solutions. The indifferent, cynical a-hole in me didn’t win this time and was pushed aside by the remnants of the idealist I once was.
Showing one side, or trying to skew the fact of the matter with this kind of video is nothing new and you are right to think that there is something wrong with it.
However, 20% of our country thinks that Obama is a Muslim. Thats one in five…. and I am willing to bet that the number of people who say empty things like this is the last bastion of hope is much higher than 20%.
You have to be careful with videos of this type certainly because it can lead to further polarization… but that is assuming there are only two sides. There is a vast swath of american voters that don’t know how to make hide nor hair of the current political situation as misinformation runs rampant. This video is instructive to people who are questioning media reports about the mindset of our country.
To me this was not saying that, “Christian America is ignorant, uninformed, antiquated, and that there isn’t any real substance to their belief system” as you seem to. I think it says look some of this outlandish stuff is true. there is a group that beliefs Glenn Beck is right.
I also think that perhaps you would view it as anti-Christian white america if you were a product of said demographic…. not that you grew up in that type of household anonymous commenter with only the name Joe.
As much as you view this an misinformation campaign, many others view this as an information campaign. Faced with the stark realities of those who form the base of far right conservatism many who are leaning that direction may take a moment to reevaluate your stance. I know for me personally anytime I have seen someone utterly fail at offering a cogent stance I took a moment to revisit my reasoning.
But… in the end I appreciate your love for the middle path and your efforts to keep things civil… however civility is all a matter of perspective.
@Jay:
I certainly didn’t mean to be anonymous or attempt to hide my demography, I just had to post in this section because my response was too…well…wordy for the FB one. From a film studies standpoint, your argument seems a little more broad and much less about the video itself, as it exists. While informing the public is necessary and noble, I disagree with that premise in regards to this video. Ultimately, I don’t think you have analytical justification to make the claim that this peice is “informational”. You have every right to perceive the video that way, I just think it’s taking greater leaps than I did with it. My perception is less about my affiliation with Christianity on a personal level and more to do with the strict juxtaposition of the images and content which is, as is the purpose of any video whether artistic or journalistic, to create secondary and tertiary messages. I’d argue from a film criticism standpoint that my argument of its intent to polarize is verifiable through detailed analysis of the video itself. They intercut images of interviews with people amidst large numbers of nameless strangers in a rather blatant attempt to suggest that the people they are interviewing are the “average attendee” of this philosophical, political, and social movement–for one example of the technical application of propaganda (and I use that term without the negative connotations our society and culture have placed on it). Objectivity appears absent. I suggest this because if that 20% number you suggest is accurate, 80% of the people there don’t believe those things, yet none are interviewed. I know for a fact my father, a staunch right wing, conservative, Christian, Glenn Beck fan, and attendee of the Restoring Honor rally does NOT believe those things and can communicate intelligently and effectively about the philosophy behind both the Tea Party movement and the Restoring Honor rally (which is where this video was shot). Politics aside (because God knows I have my own issues with some of the tenets of the Tea Party movement), I think the video is, simply put, unfair, manipulative, and lazy–to reiterate.
This is something I would say in reference to ANY video, whether it is left, right, christian, atheist, or otherwise in motivation if it looked similar to New Left Media’s work. For example, around Obama’s inauguration there was a video from a christian organization, The Christian Anti-Defamation Commission to be more specific, entitled “7 Reasons Why Obama is not a Christian” or something like that (http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=7+reasons+why+obama+is+not+a+christian&aq=0). From the title alone, I am sure you can muster up some serious flaws with their video and subsequent message. I had large discussions with people about its merits, or lack thereof.
I appreciate the commendation for pursuing civility, but ultimately, that remark saddens me because my pursuit of the middle ground has very little to do with promoting civility (though I think the middle ground necessitates civility as a result). It saddens me because my pursuit of the middle ground is about finding the Truth. Yes, I believe there are some truths that are transcendent, and–uh oh–absolute, especially in terms of our moral obligation to others both in discourse (philosophical) and bodily treatment (physical). My intent to bridge the gap between modernism and post-modernism, for example, is not to allow for friendly discussions but to seek the synthesis of the two that will ideally lead to a utopia, whether literal, physical, philosophical, or otherwise.
Hegel will always be an important philosopher to me. And while he took a large portion of his dialectic from Kant, I think he hit the nail on the head. Thesis > Antithesis > Synthesis (neo-Thesis) and the cycle continues. I am sure you’re fully aware of this coming from your academic background. The reason videos like this one particularly frustrate me is that I think post-modernism has a chance to really make a difference and lead to real progress because it is okay with synthesis (at least it should be if it’s being sincere to its premises), but it seems to be failing and I think it is because of videos like this. The two sides are naturally in conflict with each other because for all intents and purposes, they are diametrically opposed to one another. But, that opposition represents a pendulum swing and the most extreme sides of it. So finding that “zero point” isn’t about having this conflict be civil, it’s about arriving at what Hegel would refer to as “the Absolute Idea” (Phenomenology of Spirit, if you haven’t read it–it’s fantastic–life changing for me). Hegel was notably NOT a believer in God (Judeo-Christian, anyway). While he potentially could have been swayed to the idea of a Creator, he was very naturalistic in his beliefs, yet he still understood that an Absolute Idea existed–meaning some form of transcendent, absolute truth.
Ultimately, I think videos like the one posted above are indicative of neutral philosophical radicalism, and not a real search for truth or propagation of information as you suggest. Were it truly so, there should be some contrast with the “facts”. If they are informing a public about how people believe this sort of thing (20% or more, I’ll take your word for it), then shouldn’t they truly be trying to inform by supplying data for the public to use to combat such useless and inaccurate beliefs? Instead, it seems clear to me, religious affiliations aside, they are attempting to incite an audience that already believes that those ideas are ridiculous and unfounded (and to me, this is exactly what Glenn Beck does to secure his audience–he just has a bigger, louder, and more bombastic platform to do so–through partial truths and subtly inciting fear–my dad told me recently that he’s more scared now at the state of things than he was doing drills in middle school during the Cuban Missile Crisis–that is insanity). It seems intent on angering the choir which in turn breeds more hate and further sectarianism and less actual progress.
Along with people like Pat Robertson and the Jerry Falwells of the world (at least while their living) these sorts of things (the video) make it difficult, despite what I feel are rather open, tolerant, and intelligent communications on my part, to be taken seriously in the world around me because it perpetuates a fantasy–that Christians, real ones, not the ones on tv, are exactly the same as Pat Robertson: hateful, intolerant, misogynistic, homophobic, racists that have no concern other than their own selfish financial gain. I think, whether you see it or not, that this video most certainly continues that sentiment. Ultimately, both the left and the right appear to be doing the same thing and that is perpetuating anti-progress, stagnation, and unnecessary hatred. Most of it is rhetorical for now, but that could change soon and swiftly.
Pluralism, not polarism, because it necessitates respect for those with whom we converse and share community with. Respect for their humanity and the depth to with which they hold their beliefs and create their values, not acceptance of their behavior if in conflict with those beliefs. Fair hearings with the common hope of uncovering the Absolute Idea.
Well shit, now I am all focused on idealism. Blech. It’s so unpractical.
I have no issues with Barbara Lai trying to save a kid, although she was hired as a top level administrator and not as a front line worker. She was supposed to develop policy on how Norfolk can help all children at risk, not just a few. She was supposed to develop a program for others to follow, not just try to take on all the work herself. Lai was not meant to be a policy maker and administrator, she was meant to work the front lines. Somebody has to be the leader and set policy.
When I heard her speak a year or so ago, I honestly thought she would be murdered soon. She said she picked up gang members at 3 am in her own car. They knew her phone number and home address. I thought it would be a matter of time before her risky behavior got her killed. Thank God (pbbbt to you, Mr. Hawking) she was not murdered. However, she did not do the job she was hired to do. And for that, I think she should have resigned a long time ago.
As a city employee, I cannot afford to buy a $250 smartphone on my salary. So why should a gang member get one on my tax dollars? What was wrong with prepaid disposable cell phones? Or the pay as you go phones? The phone number was changed to prevent peer pressure, meaning that a new phone plan had to purchased as well. Are we as citizens paying for his wireless plan with data, too?
I do support efforts to keep children out of gangs. Even willing to support it with my tax dollars. But when my coworkers are struggling to pay for their health care because it doubled or struggling to keep their home because costs are rising, but salaries have not in 2 years, inappropriate spending, whether by Barbara Lai or Sharon McDonald or the next one exposed, makes me angry.
“Well that’s really all I have to say about this… fear mongering, intolerant national organization is based in Virginia Beach.”
What do you mean by this, exactly?
They are an organization dedicated to “inform, educate and mobilize Americans regarding the multiple threats of radical Islam,” they are also pushing the anti-mosque at ground zero movement and have been cited by people around the country who also come against the project.
The proposed mosque is hardly radical Islam, but their campaign to block it sure is intolerant.
Jay,
You claim that we should be ashamed of ourselves for getting rid of Lai. I don’t think so. First, a $250 phone is exorbitant. Second, apparently, that wasn’t the end of it; check out this article, which you so deftly left out of your analysis: http://www.wavy.com/dpp/news/local_news/city-official-spends-big-on-meals,-etc.
This lady was spending hundreds of dollars on food, late night meals, electronics and a host of other crap. Furthermore, the gang programs she implemented enjoyed only mild success.
I suppose we should all be ashamed for wanting an honest city worker that actually makes progress. That’s what liberal, progressive people want, right?
Oh well,
Jim
Jim-
I did not mean to leave this article out. I simply had not read the piece. I am glad you brought it to my attention.
While I am disappointed to see she was spending crazily as well I still think the crap she caught for the phone was absurd.
That being said the article also points out that 440 other city credit cards were cancelled with audits under way for each. This really seems to have been a cultural norm in the Norfolk city government. (I also noted our commissioner of Revenue of all people having insane credit card receipts)I am glad we are addressing it now but with something so ingrained, perhaps we should be asking for the records of our council and mayor too.
Someone made this recklessness seem ok.
P.S. No need for snide comments about liberal or progressive people. You could simply post the article. I like to read and discuss… I would have responded the same.