Go read what Boston Brahmina said. And if anyone tries to argue with you about abortion rights, make them go read it too. She has perfectly nailed down the correct understanding of the right to choose, in a way that, as long as you assume that women are in fact human beings, is simply irrefutable.
More real posts coming from me, eventually — F&A is not dead! — but having the time to write only rarely coincides with having the mental energy to write, these days.
Quick, someone find a fatted calf, the prodigal blog is back!
The State Representative for my district, the 29th Middlesex, Rachel Kaprielian, was appointed recently to be the new Registrar of Motor Vehicles, and the Watertown Democratic Committee decided not to pick a successor, so a special sticker/write-in primary is being held this September. Four candidates are running for the seat, and last Monday I attended a candidate forum sponsored by the Cambridge Ward 9 committee (also part of the 29th).
The candidates running for the seat are Steve Corbett, Julia Fahey, Jon Hecht and a late entrant, Josh Weisbuch. I don’t know very much about them yet but what’s on their websites — Hecht and Corbett are current town councillors, Fahey is a lawyer who specializes in labor rights and promises to leave her job to be a fulltime state rep, and Weisbuch was an intern under Erskine Bowles in the Clinton White House and runs a computer consulting business — and what they said at the forum, but it was good to meet them in person, and hear them articulate some positions. I wish there had been more time for audience questions, and I wouldn’t necessarily mind fewer questions, with more time for answers, so the candidates could elaborate their stances.
As things stand now, it’s a tossup for me between Hecht and Fahey, with Weisbuch and Corbett close after, but it’s early yet, and I’d like to see more from all of them. I certainly hope there’ll be more forums and/or debates; sco, how about one in Watertown?
I finally got around to racking the Grove Street Honey Wheat lager this past weekend (and I’m glad it’s a lager, so I don’t feel too bad about having ended up leaving it in primary for eight weeks…). It started out at 1.050 and hit 1.009, which is excellent; honey is great for efficient fermentation. Nice light, clean taste. It’ll be time to bottle in late July and time to drink it in early August, which should be perfect weather for this kind of beer.
I also finally made myself dump out the defunct barleywine. I’ll try one again someday, but maybe not real soon; quite aside from the psychological blow of having all the expense I put into it go literally down the drain, it kept one of my carboys out of service for much too long.
As to what’s next, well, I still haven’t found the time to finish my mash tun, even though the remaining steps are relatively minor (cleaning up the burrs from making the slots will be a pain, though). I’m going to try to get it done soon, but who knows. If hop prices were lower, I’d be leaning toward an IPA, since I haven’t made one in a while, but as things stand that may not be practical. When I come up with a recipe I’ll post it here.
It’s taken me a long time to get around to writing about it, unfortunately, but there was what I think was a very important article in Scientific American back in May about “implicit bias” — unconscious prejudices we all have, no matter how enlightened we think we are, and which affect our day-to-day behavior in ways we generally don’t notice. Perhaps I’ve just missed it, but I feel like there was woefully insufficient recognition and discussion of the significance of this report (so there’s an additional mea culpa for my being so late in writing about it).
The key findings of this study, assuming I’m understanding the SciAm article correctly, are that these prejudices largely match stereotypes common in the culture; that they are generally things that, individually, seem quite small, rather than big, blatant, overtly hateful ideas; that even people who don’t consider themselves prejudiced do in fact display these biases; that denying the bias doesn’t reduce the degree to which it affects one’s behavior; and that acknowledging and being aware of the bias does.
Why does this seem so important to me? Because this is (roughly) how liberals have always said prejudice works, and it’s not how conservatives think it works. This is yet another example of reality’s well-known liberal bias, and it shows why (to take racism in particular as an example) “colorblindness,” high-dudgeon objections to “the race card” and attacks on affirmative action are not only based on a misguided understanding of the nature of prejudice, but actually work to reinforce prejudice, by silencing efforts to point it out and discuss it openly.
To my knowledge, the liberal/progressive view of prejudice has always held that it’s a systemic problem, reinforced by social norms and inculcated unconsciously, and only enforced by overt, ugly, violent hate at the very extremes — that to think of “racism” as being epitomized by the KKK missed the point entirely. And the conservative view, by contrast, holds that prejudice is only that explicit hatred demonstrated by fringe hate groups, that bias is a characteristic of certain twisted individuals who make up those groups and not at all a trait embedded in the fabric of society. So on the conservative view, to point out perceived bias is just an attempt by “special interest groups” to garner attention and guilt-trip society into awarding them special privileges; and if everyone stopped claiming to see prejudice everywhere, and thereby making people think about it, there wouldn’t be any more prejudice, because Americans are naturally fair-minded, and all those nasty extremist hate groups would just fade away into obscurity.
But as the SciAm article makes clear, that’s just not true at all, while the liberal view is pretty close to reality; and behaving according to the conservative view — discouraging any discussion of bias in the hopes that if ignored, those nasty prejudiced people (who of course aren’t us) will just go away — actually reinforces and encourages societal prejudice.
Surely I’m not the only one who sees how important this is; it’s very strange to me that I’ve seen so little discussion of it on other liberal blogs. Many differences between conservatives and liberals are essentially matters of opinion, on which reasonable people can disagree, wherein each side seems “clearly” right if you accept their set of starting assumptions, and “clearly” wrong if you accept the other side’s (yes, of course, this “liberal vs. conservative” two-sides construction is a gross oversimplification). This issue is no longer one of them, however. One view — as it happens, the conservative one — is in fact simply, demonstrably, factually incorrect.
This will, I expect, be the first of many posts on, or related to, this topic; so here I’m not really going to do more than sketch out some ideas.I’m not a big believer in the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, at least not as I think it’s commonly understood — not in its reductive, absolutist formulation — but on the other hand it seems plain that the way we talk about things and the way we think about things are closely connected, and the one can influence the other. (more…)
Forty years ago last Friday, Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated, capping off five awful years of murdered political and civil rights leaders. I can’t imagine what it would have been like to live through those years — but I don’t need to imagine the long years of cynicism and hopelessness that followed, because I’ve lived three-quarters of them. To have the promise of real, positive change so violently cut down so many times must have felt as though some malign force beyond mortal ken were deliberately crushing all hope for a better future. It’s no wonder conspiracy theories sprung up; but the explanation I find both more plausible and more terrifying than some notion of a shadowy cabal manipulating the levers of power is this: that American society up to and in the 1960s was (and, to a greater extent than many of us would like to think, still is) so hidebound, so racist, so terrified of change, and that certain strains of conservative thought, capitalist/anti-communist ideology, violent nativism, heroic mythology and valorization of vigilantism, and anti-intellectual populism are so deeply woven into American culture, that in the face of attempts to bring about radical change in the social system — even in ways that in the short run will hurt only those who enjoy unearned privileges at others’ expense, and in the long run work to everyone’s benefit — individuals willing to commit acts of violence, murder and terrorism in the name of preserving an oppressive status quo will arise organically, and communities will be willing to tolerate or turn a blind eye to them.
(It’s true that this is not really a good explanation for RFK’s assassination, as Sirhan Sirhan is a Palestinian Christian who was angry over Kennedy’s support for Israel in the Six-Day War, or mentally disturbed, or both. He had lived in the US since the age of 12, so he very likely absorbed something of these cultural traits, but a twelve-year-old, though impressionable, is also already pretty strongly enculturated. But even if the motivations of the assassin himself do not fit the pattern of the previous five years, the assassination, and its cultural repercussions, fit all too well.)
The title of this post, then, is meant to suggest not that we have been in mourning specifically for RFK for forty years — but for the radical hope of the ’60s, to which the final deathblow seemed to have been delivered on June 5th, 1968. (more…)
Darcy Burner is running for Dave Reichert’s congressional seat. That seat is in Washington State, so it’s a bit out of my normal purview, but Burner has been one of the leading figures in promoting the Responsible Plan — I learned about her via Orcinus a while back. She put up a very good post at OpenLeft last week, on the genuine threat to American democracy posed by mercenary armies like Blackwater, DynCorp, Triple Canopy, etc., which are paid (and paid very well) by our government, ostensibly, to perform supporting duties for American troops. In actual fact, these “contractors” are carrying out combat operations, and are frequently committing crimes — up to and including rape, murder, and torture — both against Iraqis and against other Americans, including their own coworkers. On our dime, and in our names. And because they’re not military personnel, and the US demanded, and the Iraqis had little choice but to accept, that “contractors” not be considered under the jurisdiction of Iraqi law, they operate in a legal vacuum. They can’t be held to account for crimes they commit.
I’ve called the offices of my Representative and Senators, and asked them to cosponsor (respectively) H.R. 4102 and S. 2398, the House and Senate versions of the Stop Outsourcing Security Act, which would prevent further funding of mercenary armies. I respectfully ask that the readers I optimistically imagine I might have read the OpenLeft post and the bills, and call or write your Congresspeople, and ask that they consider signing on as cosponsors.
The Grove Street Pilsener has turned out much darker than it ought to be (I incline to attribute this to the mistake with the malt extracts), so I think I’ll have to put the word “Pilsener” in scare quotes when referring to it, from now on. It’s pretty tasty, though, and the Grove Street Brown Ale is coming along very well at a week from bottling.
Next weekend I plan to brew Grove Street Honey Wheat Lager:
and a couple of weeks after that, if I have my mash tun finished (it’s been on hold in the “nearly-done” state for quite a while now), I’ll be trying my first all-grain batch, with the use of a friend’s burner and brewpot.
Sadly, I think it’s past time to give up on the Big 10/20 Barley Wine. It started acquiring that awful, cidery-sour taste some time ago, and the fermentation’s been excruciatingly slow for months. I just haven’t had the heart to pour it out, but I think I don’t have a choice. Barleywines, like pilseners, are probably something I’m going to wait a while, and read up on some different techniques, before trying again.
I will endeavor to ensure my next post is about something other than beer.
I haven’t written about beer (or, indeed, about anything else) in quite a while; real life has interfered with my blogging time to an alarming degree, as health, career and living space issues of various sorts have been abundant. In the immortal words of Harrison Ford, however, “we’re all fine … here … now. How are you?”
The Grove Street Amber was a huge success, so I brewed another batch (with slightly different ingredients; two cans of light malt syrup instead of one light and one extra-light, and WLP002 instead of 005), which also came out very good. I finally bottled the Grove Street Pilsener last weekend. And on March 17th I brewed the following recipe, which in keeping with my extremely clever naming system, I call Grove Street Brown Ale.
Two cans (6.6lbs) light malt extract syrup, 1lb Crystal 60, 0.5lb chocolate malt, 0.25lb roasted barley and 0.25lb black patent malt, for an estimated final color of about 31° and OG of 1.055. 1oz of Cascade plugs for 60 minutes, 1oz of Vanguard plugs for 10 minutes and 1oz of Vanguard plugs for 2 minutes, for an expected 33 IBUs. WLP001 yeast.
I expect to bottle that today, so shortly I’ll find out how it turned out.
[Supplemental, 2008-04-14: One week after bottling the Grove Street Pilsener, I’m trying a glass to see how it’s doing. It’s absolutely not pilsener-colored — much too dark, more like a pale ale or even an amber in color; I expect that’s largely because of the mixup with the extracts. But it tastes pretty all right, though it’s not quite possessed of the near-Platonic crispness I associate with Urquell et al. I think before I attempt any more lagers I really need to set up a lagering mini-fridge, because the basement just didn’t ever get cold enough for long enough, it was mostly above 50°F.]
