Sarah Palin’s Race Problem

091207_r19094_p233

A review of Sarah Palin’s book Going Rouge in The New Yorker raises questions of her views on race and her discomfort with people outside of white, small-town America:

Palin, though notoriously ill-travelled outside the United States, did journey far to the first of the four colleges she attended, in Hawaii. She and a friend who went with her lasted only one semester. “Hawaii was a little too perfect,” Palin writes. “Perpetual sunshine isn’t necessarily conducive to serious academics for eighteen-year-old Alaska girls.” Perhaps not. But Palin’s father, Chuck Heath, gave a different account to Conroy and Walshe. According to him, the presence of so many Asians and Pacific Islanders made her uncomfortable: “They were a minority type thing and it wasn’t glamorous, so she came home.” In any case, Palin reports that she much preferred her last stop, the University of Idaho, “because it was much like Alaska yet still ‘Outside.’ ”

Palin’s discomfort is easy to understand. Race is often the subtext of populist campaigns; their most potent appeal is to whites who are feeling under siege by changing economic and cultural conditions. Palin’s strength with this constituency can only have grown since the last election. It’s the reason that her bus tour is passing through the small cities and towns (Fort Wayne, Indiana; Washington, Pennsylvania) where the 2008 election might have been won. Already, she has drawn thousands of fans, some pitching tents overnight in the hope of receiving an autographed book. She is avoiding major cities in the Northeast and on the West Coast, a pointed assertion of her contempt for metropolitan élites.


Posted in Sarah Palin. Tags: . 6 Comments »

Religion and Morality

This blog was named Liberal Values back when the Republicans were the dominant political party and the media spoke of how they won based upon values issues. The blog was named to point out that liberals also vote upon values when we disagree with conservatives on the issues. Two areas of research which made the news last week show that, contrary to the view of many social conservatives, morality is not necessarily based upon religion. There’s even a silver lining for conservatives here. As many of them do not believe in science, they can easily ignore these findings.

Marc Hauser, an evolutionary biologist and professor of psychology at Harvard University, discussed how biology, not religion, has formed the roots of human morality:

Recent discoveries suggest that all humans, young and old, male and female, conservative and liberal, living in Sydney, San Francisco and Seoul, growing up as atheists, Buddhists, Catholics and Jews, with high school, university or professional degrees, are endowed with a gift from nature, a biological code for living a moral life.

This code, a universal moral grammar, provides us with an unconscious suite of principles for judging what is morally right and wrong. It is an impartial, rational and unemotional capacity. It doesn’t dictate who we should help or who we are licensed to harm. Rather, it provides an abstract set of rules for how to intuitively understand when helping another is obligatory and when harming another is forbidden. And it does so dispassionately and impartially.

While biology provides the core of a common human morality, religion is often abused as people attribute their personal beliefs to God to justify their views on controversial issues:

God may have created man in his image, but it seems we return the favour. Believers subconsciously endow God with their own beliefs on controversial issues…

“People may use religious agents as a moral compass, forming impressions and making decisions based on what they presume God as the ultimate moral authority would believe or want,” the team write. “The central feature of a compass, however, is that it points north no matter what direction a person is facing. This research suggests that, unlike an actual compass, inferences about God’s beliefs may instead point people further in whatever direction they are already facing.”

“The experiments in which we manipulate people’s own beliefs are the most compelling evidence we have to show that people’s own beliefs influence what they think God believes more substantially than it influences what they think other people believe,” says Epley.

This becomes even more dangerous when politicians like George Bush and Sarah Palin use God to justify their political views and policies.

SciFi Weekend: Excellent Episodes for Dollhouse, FlashForward, Glee and Friday Night Lights

Friday’s two episodes of Dollhouse were well worth the wait. (Spoilers included here). The show  became far more political, dealing with a plot by Rossum to both control a Senator and exonerate themselves from the charges against them by those who have a little knowledge of the doll houses. It worked out particularly well to air these two episodes the same night as they presented a coherent two hour story.

The big twist of the show was that Senator Daniel Perrin was a doll to further Rossum’s goals as opposed to really trying to expose them. There were suggestions that his wife was a doll but she seemed far too much in control for me to buy that. I suspected that the twist would be that she was a human planted by Rossum instead of a doll, but in retrospect her scenes with the Senator did point to him being a doll.

Perrin ultimately faced the same type of choice as Sierra and chose to allow Rossum to reprogram him. Apparently the knowledge that his past success was a fake and his role in the death of his wife were too much for him to take.

The portions with Summer Glau turned out to be far less impressive than many other portions of the episodes. Apparently Caroline was responsible for an injury to her arm in her days as an ec0-terrorist before her mind was wiped. This bit of Caroline’s back story didn’t seem very meaningful unless they are going to do more with this. Meanwhile Echo appears to be realizing that if Caroline returns her identity is gone.

Other positive aspects of the episodes included Ballard’s interaction with the real Madeline, who doesn’t seem that grateful to Ballard for her release (if she truly has been released). The best acting job was by Enver Gjokaj (Victor) who was imprinted with Topher’s memories and did an amazing imitation of him.

Unfortunately the ratings were not very impressive, and I wonder if they would have been even worse if not for the guest appearance by Summer Glau. Perhaps the show would be doing better if it was not hidden on a Friday night, and if we had similar quality from the start.

Creative interference from Fox has been blamed for the lower quality of the earlier shows.  It has been widely believed that the dispute was based upon Fox wanting more stand alone shows of Echo’s weekly adventures but in an interview in the Chicago Tribune Joss Whedon described the disputes as being more over sex:

“The problems that the show encountered weren’t standalone versus mythology [episodes],” Whedon said. “Basically, the show didn’t really get off the ground because the network pretty much wanted to back away from the concept five minutes after they bought it. And then ultimately, the show itself is also kind of odd and difficult to market. I actually think they did a good job, but it’s just not a slam-dunk concept.”

Midway through its first season, “Dollhouse” hit upon a espionage-thriller format that seemed to be a better fit than the standalone, engagement-oriented episodes that aired early in the show’s run. But Whedon said he always wanted look more closely at the desires and fantasy lives of the Dollhouse’s clients. Even into the show’s second season, however, that idea made Fox “twitchy,” according to Whedon.

Part of the show was going to be about “what we get from each other in our most intimate relationships, be they sexual” or whatever else, Whedon said. But “the interest in the client kind of moved away.”

“When you’re dealing with fantasies, particularly sexual ones, you’re going off the reservation,” Whedon said. “You’re not going to be doing things that are perfectly correct. It’s supposed to be about the sides of us that we don’t want people to see…. The idea of sexuality was a big part of the show when it started and when that fell out, when the show turned into a thriller every week, it took something out of it that was kind of basic to what we were trying to do.”

“We got the espionage that the network wants, but it’s the questions about identity that we want,” he noted. “There are other things about the show that never came back, and I didn’t really realize it until the second season — [there were] things that we were ultimately sort of dancing around…. We always found ourselves sort of moving away from what had been part of the original spark of the show and that ultimately just makes it really hard to write these stories.”

I told him I had trouble wrapping my head around the idea that Fox wanted less sex.

“This is the thing that caught me off guard,” he replied. “First of all, network television has taken great treads backwards in terms of dealing with sexuality or the body or anything. I mean, now on cable everybody is prancing about naked and whatnot. On the networks, it’s gotten different since I was last making TV.

“Fox sort of has that reputation for ‘sexy’ or ‘edgy’ or blah blah blah, but they don’t actually want that and it frustrates me,” he continued. “It’s the classic American double standard: torture — great. Sex — oh, that’s so bad!”

Whedon was careful to point out that he could understand the wariness of both the network and the viewers. After all, the dolls, including Echo (Eliza Dushku), aren’t exactly in a position to give what we think of as informed consent to specific engagements (which can range from bank heists to marriage to the kind of heartbreaking exploitation seen in the recent, wonderfully written episode “Belonging”).

“People responded to [‘Dollhouse’ by saying], ‘This is trafficking. This is sex for money.’ It wasn’t just sex,” Whedon said. Part of the problem was “the other implications of what was originally supposed to be somewhat more of a fantasy. The real-world version of [this kind of activity] was I think what made the network really twitchy and I can’t really fault them for that. I just thought when I went in and pitched it …you know, it frightened me too [but I thought] we all got that that was what we were doing.”

The article suggests dissatisfaction on Whedon’s part with the broadcast networks. I’ve suggested in the past that Dollhouse would have been a better fit for HBO or Showtime where the sexual content wouldn’t have been a problem and many of the scenes could have been more explicit.

The article includes further information on the final episodes. Alpha returns next week. Amy Acker will be returning to the January 8 and January 15 episodes. The finale, Epitaph Two: Return, airs on January 22 and returns to the apocalyptic future seen in Epitaph One.

flashforward_091203

Dollhouse had poor ratings after returning form its hiatus, and I hope that going on hiatus does not harm shows such as FlashForward and V.  The final episode of FlashForward until March at least partially answered some questions but far bigger ones were raised. We were teased about the possibility that the future was not definite by Zoey’s vision of Demetri at their wedding. Now that we know that the future is not set (and even a suggestion of multiple possible futures was raised) we found that Zoey’s vision was not of their wedding but of Demetri’s memorial service.

Lloyd has confessed to his actions which might have led to the flash forwards over Simon’s objections. This confession led to Lloyd’s kidnapping. Seeing Simon’s surprise over the photographs of his design, especially as they predated his work, leads me to believe Simon that they were not really the cause.

I’m not sure what to make of Nhadra Udaya or her statement that Demitri was murdered by Mark. Do actions such as Mark getting thrown out of the FBI and Lloyd’s kidnapping totally change the future as seen in the flash forwards or are these steps which lead to the conditions shown?

heroes_091201

The other major event on genre shows this week was Nathan’s death on Heroes. I had a separate post last week on the news that John Borrowman has confirmed he will be returning to Torchwood for a full thirteen episode season. Beyond genre shows, Glee and Friday Night Lights each had one of their better episodes of the season. This week’s episode of Glee sets up the fall finale, with the show also going on a hiatus.

I don’t want to say much about Friday Night Lights as many might not be viewing it until NBC airs the season this winter. As there has already been articles on this, I will mention that the events of the episode (which I will not reveal) give a reason for Lila (Minka Kelly) to return. She did not have much contact with Tim Riggins yet but I suspect she will create further complications for Riggins, who is currently involved with both a mother and daughter. The mother is played by Alecia Witt. Somehow I have difficulty thinking that Alecia Witt is now playing the other character rather than daughter, and have visions of Zoey, her character on Cybill, mocking the Texas town and the beauty pageant scene the daughter is into.

Scrubs returned with two episodes lat week as they attempt to transition to a new cast. Zach Braff will only be appearing in six episodes and I wonder if they wouldn’t have been better off allowing the show to come to a dignified end last season. At least it wasn’t as bad as the final season of Seventh Heaven after they tried to return the show for an additional year with a reduced cast.

IPCC Stands By Science of Climate Change As Denialists Continue To Attempt To Disrupt Discussion of The Science

The consensus view of  The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has not been altered by the hacked email. The emails have been greatly distorted by denialists but fail to cast any real doubt on the scientific findings. BBC News reports:

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said it was “firmly” standing by findings that a rise in the use of greenhouse gases was a factor.

It was responding to a row over the reliability of data from East Anglia University’s Climatic Research Unit…

In a statement, Professor Thomas Stocker and Professor Qin Dahe, co-chairmen of the IPCC’s working group 1, condemned the act of posting the private e-mails on the internet, but avoided commenting on their content.

They went on to point to a key finding that states: “The warming in the climate system is unequivocal.

“[It] is based on measurements made by many independent institutions worldwide that demonstrate significant changes on land, in the atmosphere, the ocean and in the ice-covered areas of the Earth.

“Through further independent scientific work involving statistical methods and a range of different climate models, these changes have been detected as significant deviations from natural climate variability and have been attributed to the increase of greenhouse gases.”

They added: “The body of evidence is the result of the careful and painstaking work of hundreds of scientists worldwide.

“The internal consistency from multiple lines of evidence strongly supports the work of the scientific community, including those individuals singled out in these e-mail exchanges.”

The row comes ahead of the Copenhagen climate summit which starts on Monday.

Professor Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, vice-chairman of the IPCC, said it was no coincidence the information was released in the run-up to the summit.

He claimed unnamed conspirators could have paid for Russian hackers to break into the university computers to steal the e-mails.

He said the theft was a scandal and was “probably ordered” to disrupt the confidence negotiators have in the science.

Earlier, Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband told the BBC he would be “very surprised” if there had been any wrongdoing on the part of the East Anglia University scientists.

“We’re in a moment when the world is about to make some big political decisions,” he said.

“And there will be people who don’t want the world to make those big decisions and they are trying to use this in part to say somehow this is all in doubt and perhaps we should put the whole thing off.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown said the scientific evidence was “very clear” and called doubters a “flat Earth group”.

He said: “There is an anti-change group. There is an anti-reform group. There is an anti-science group, there is a flat Earth group, if I may say so, over the scientific evidence for climate change.”

These efforts to disrupt consideration of the science are no longer limited to East Anglia. The Guardian reports on an attempt to break into the offices of Andrew Weaver, a leading climate scientist from the University of Victoria.

In previous posts I have linked to multiple sources which have reviewed the exaggerated claims about the hacked email more thoroughly, including this article from Popular Mechanics.