Progress Slow, then Sudden

After generations of discrimination, society has become far more accepting of homosexuality. This rapid transformation offers hope for other progressive changes in attitude.



Disclaimer: the post below discusses offensive language which I do not endorse.

A buddy recently mentioned his young son had just seen the animated film Despicable Me 3, which included a scene featuring '80s rock staple "Money for Nothing" by Dire Straits. Accordingly, he later played the song for his kid, and was shocked to discover the lyrics prominently featured the word "faggot". I was similarly surprised, having never noticed that in a song I've considered an innocuous bit of "dad rock" used in movies and car commercials aplenty.

In the song's lyrics the epithet is used to insult the protagonist -- a disparagement of the lead singer and his supposedly cushy lifestyle. It is not an affirmation of the flagrant homophobia of, say, early '90s NWA or early '00s Eminem (or the Beastie Boys' 1986 debut album, originally titled Don't Be a Faggot). But its casual appearance arguably makes it more jarring -- no popular artist today goes anywhere near such language.

"I used to use that word so freely in middle school," my friend noted. "I had a hard time typing it just now." It's a sign of how far treatment of the LGBT community and consciousness about the impact of language have come in such a short time.

Family Feud

Democrats need to de-escalate the blood feud between the Clinton and Sanders factions of the party, significantly elevate new faces in the party leadership, and embrace ambitious policy goals.



On a very depressing election night, I wrote on this blog that the "struggle to explain how this happened will probably be infuriating". I anticipated the inevitable "Monday morning quarterbacking" and score-settling and post-facto smugness, but lately what's most frustrating is a Democratic Party that insists on deepening a "Hillary vs. Bernie" internecine conflict. Yes, still. I'd hoped we'd be past this by now -- I voted for Bernie Sanders in the primary and then, obviously, was strongly in favor of Hillary Clinton in the general election. I'm disappointed that so many other people still haven't come to terms with "what happened".

In this conflict, emotions run high -- even among my politically-obsessed family, where we are usually at least directionally aligned. My progressive sister and many like her are understandably defensive about the mountains of unfair criticism that smart and accomplished public servant Hillary Clinton has received, but they seem unable to accept that any criticism of Clinton is not sexism or "haters gonna hate". Sorry, she lost, and that loss involved some strategic missteps and branding blunders that should be addressed.

A More Perfect Union

The Charlottesville white supremacist march was a horrifying escalation of recent racial tensions. Confronting overt racism is necessary, but far more challenging is dismantling entrenched policies propping up racial inequities.

"in Order to form a more perfect Union..."

The first step is admitting that ours is an imperfect country, with flawed institutions, including our military, law enforcement, government, media, and more. Without acknowledging that, there is no way to move forward to account for the sins of the past and the continuing inequities of the present. But without believing, as I do, that all of these institutions are redeemable – and that with mindful striving, they can be continuously improved in pursuit of an unattainable perfection – there is no reason to try.

This is a critical point to convey to those who would retort "America, love it or leave it!" That, despite a history that includes the displacement of indigenous people, the chattel slavery of blacks, legalized segregation, and the internment of Japanese-Americans, America's professed ideals of freedom, equality, and opportunity are worth fighting for. Progress can feel slow, but over two centuries this country has vastly expanded whom it covers under the protective cloak of its ideals.

President Donald Trump

Here are some raw, in-the-moment thoughts about the surprise victory in the U.S. presidential election by Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton.



The saddest reaction to the unfolding election I've heard is from a friend who said to me "It makes me wonder if I really fit in as an American". There may be many hyperbolic opinions expressed in coming days, but hers definitely is very identifiable right now. I'm forcing myself to write down some thoughts on what has been a profoundly surprising, deeply depressing night.

The obvious: regardless of political viewpoint, it is unconscionable that a vulgar individual who has enthusiastically indulged in insults and violent threats, cons and scams, religious and racial bigotry, gross misogyny and debasing conspiracies and outright lies--that such an individual will be the leader of this country. I try to convince myself that Italy survived Silvio Berlusconi, and we too, can withstand the psychological embarrassment of a Donald Trump presidency.

The Future on Autopilot

Self-driving cars are not science-fiction. This generation will grapple with the societal implications of the automation of much of personal and commercial transportation.



Many desired technology innovations—personal jetpacks, thriving moon colonies, an iPhone that doesn't need to be charged daily (ha!)—may never be realized, but one is a lot closer than most people think: self-driving cars. While interning at Google this summer, I witnessed sister company X's autonomous vehicles on Mountain View roads and attended speaker events with people on the project (with which I had zero involvement), and have become convinced this is the future. The technology, while still improving, is indeed viable—a when, not if situation—and the changes it represents could improve personal safety, relieve congestion, lower transportation costs, and reduce environmental impact.

The most salient benefit of self-driving cars is that they will eventually be able to perform inarguably more safely than human drivers, whose errors account for hundreds of thousands of deaths around the world each year. Able to "communicate" with one another, self-driving cars will also maintain speed and handle relative positioning more efficiently than human drivers, improving traffic flow and changing development patterns. But there's much more to it. Currently, the cars we own remain unused most of the time, taking up space when they are not taking us from Point A to Point B. Optimally, a (clean emissions) vehicle would be in operation as much as possible, serving the needs of many commuters, so fewer people would require vehicles exclusively their own. Among the smaller pool of total cars needed to serve a population, those in use would be far less likely to idly occupy a parking spot. Much of the urban and suburban space currently dedicated to parking lots and garages could be repurposed for more productive ends, including green space.

Make America Whole Again

Donald Trump's rise seriously challenges U.S. openness to, and engagement with, the world. The system he attacks is worth defending, but must be modified to work for people it has left behind.



For months, Donald Trump was treated by the media and non-GOP-primary-voters as a sideshow attraction -- someone to gawk at, to raise one's eyebrows at, but ultimately to be dismissed when the time came. Unfortunately, for a man who utilizes attention the way the rest of us do oxygen, that was enough to propel him past a crowded field of unappealing Republican candidates. Since his unlikely ascension to the nomination there has emerged an appropriate focus on the obvious: that a vain and crass blowhard who espouses bigoted views against ethnic groups and religions, who has a poor business track record despite that being his claimed competency and source of fame, and who hasn't demonstrated a grasp of the details of any key aspect of public policy -- such an individual is a poor choice for president.

Even so, these criticisms have always been obvious to Trump's detractors and largely irrelevant to his supporters. It may yet be that, having come this far, his competitiveness has only been sustained due to former foes, critics, and the Republican Party apparatus dutifully falling in line behind him. And it isn't a stretch to think that Trump's unforced errors, such as a spat with the parents of a U.S. soldier killed in Iraq, combined with his seeming lack of interest in actual governance (versus personal brand-building), lead to a resounding defeat this November. And yet...

Go Left, America!

Bernie Sanders' candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination should be lauded for, at a minimum, unapologetically bringing liberal/progressive social justice views to the forefront of the national dialogue.



For most of the decade-and-a-half I can claim to have followed politics in the U.S. closely, it's been the Republican Party's right-most wing that has set the terms of the debate¹ and the Democratic Party that has largely emphasized moderation rather than countering with stridently left-wing ideas. The roots of this dynamic lie in recent history.

In 1984, Ronald Reagan won re-election while carrying 49 out of 50 states, a little more than a decade after fellow Republican Richard Nixon accomplished the same feat. It cemented a rightward re-alignment in American politics that has resulted in compromised liberal politics to this day. Bill Clinton was famously a "New Democrat" and leader of the "Third Way", which was successful in winning elections but required, for better and worse, adopting numerous conservative positions: proclaiming an end to "welfare as we know it" and "the era of big government", pushing for deregulation and free trade deals, passing the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act, and harsh anti-crime stands.

A Dumb, Dysfunctional Disservice

The interminable U.S. presidential election campaign's lack of seriousness devalues our democracy, co-opts the media, and makes cynics of believers in politics as an instrument of meaningful change. It needs to be shortened.



Even for a hardened cynic, election season in the U.S. can be a trying time. Worse yet, it's a long time -- while in many other countries national election campaigns last anywhere from a couple weeks to 4-5 months, in the U.S. they begin 1.5 years or more before the actual election.  During this epoch, the least pretense to rational dialogue is left by the wayside. Instead, most "serious" candidates only occasionally deviate from vague statements, devoid of substance and nuance, in order to trumpet the most irresponsible and implausible ideas. They often delve into logical incoherence as they try to make themselves broadly, impossibly palatable across a host of issues. Pointing this out, for whatever reason, is the domain not of serious journalists who confront the candidates, but of late-night comedians.

The only publicized respite we get from a non-informative discussion of issues comes in the form of trivial scandals -- verbal gaffes, email irregularities, exaggerated personal backgrounds, spats with reporters, discredited conspiracies, etc. These get funneled through the "team sports" mentality of America's stultifying two-party system, ensuring that our nightly news programs, cable TV pundits, opinion columnists, and social media memes remain fixated on an inane series of point-counterpoint to fill up our time until next November.

Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité

Deeming the fight between the Western world and ISIS terrorists a "clash of civilizations" distorts what is just a power struggle in the Middle East. Still, as this fight is waged, the West must cling stronger than ever before to its loftier values.



The predictable but nonetheless distressing reaction of many in the aftermath of the heartbreaking weekend Paris terrorist attacks has been to twist the event to fit biased viewpoints. A recurring, deeply erroneous refrain is that the incident represents a clash of civilizations (the West vs. Islam) or a battle of ideologies (freedom vs. terror). This view, undoubtedly appealing to some for drawing ostensibly tidy battle lines, is misleading and dangerous.

The truth of the matter is that the Islamic State (aka ISIS or Daesh), like any geopolitical entity, is motivated by something far simpler: the desire to gain and maintain power. Anything more is a convenient ex post facto justification of actions for a group that bombed Beirut one day before Paris, has killed thousands of Muslims, and is involved in a convoluted civil war against a repressive dictator (Syria's Bashar Assad). Russia's support for Assad is allegedly why Daesh blew up a Russian passenger plane earlier this month.

Bring the Noise

After another questionable law enforcement incident, the national dialogue has disappointingly centered on sensationalized riots instead of on how to address the root causes of poor relations between minorities and the police.



Baltimore, after the still-unexplained death of Freddie Gray, is the latest national flashpoint in the recent spate of high-profile incidents of police mistreatment of minorities. As a Maryland native who still has many friends who live, work, or study in the city, seeing a state of emergency declared and the National Guard called in to deal with riots has been particularly disheartening.

More disheartening has been the rush to simplistic moralizing pronouncements ("hot takes," in the current parlance) that focus on the easy-to-condemn rioters. As with opinions on Ferguson last year, the bulk of the dialogue on Freddie Gray addresses the small faction of criminals that looted a handful of stores. But the folks snarking about Baltimore rioters for their counter-productive behavior miss the point entirely. No one serious is advocating that burning down a corner store is constructive. Yet, perversely, it's once again taken destruction of property -- and not the loss of actual human (black) lives -- to get Americans to pay attention to the plight of struggling minority communities.

Next, Normalize Iran Relations

As has been the case with America's failed Cuba policy, decades of fighting Iran economically and via proxy wars have had a high moral, economic, and human cost for both sides and not led to any productive changes.

Last month, President Obama announced his decision to begin the normalization of U.S. relations with Cuba, an acknowledgement that this bizarre policy of the past half-century had failed to produce regime change and had only hurt the Cuban people. The president's reversal of long-standing U.S. policy in this matter was wise, overdue, and will continue to be extremely contentious -- but another decision would be bolder still: normalizing relations with Iran.

A brief bit of history: In 1953, the CIA collaborated in the removal of Iran's prime minster, Mohammad Mosaddegh, concerned about his power struggle with the country's Western-backed monarch Shah Pahlavi and over fears Mosaddegh would align his country with the Soviet Union. An entrenched Pahlavi and his notorious secret police, the SAVAK, became so hated, Iran exploded in a violent, radical (Shia) Islamic revolution in 1979. The depressing chain of events linking the U.S. and Iran since then includes the Embassy Hostage Crisis, the Contra affair, Iran-sponsored Hezbollah bombings of American targets in Lebanon and Saudi Arabia, the U.S. shooting down Iran Air 655, arming (Sunni) Saddam Hussein for a staggeringly bloody fight against Iran (the 20th century's longest war), eventually having to fight two wars against Hussein, and ending up with Iraq today a virtual proxy state of Iran.

Millionaire Underdogs

Many sports fans blame "greedy" star athletes for chasing high-paying contracts and for high ticket prices to games, but that anger is better directed at far-wealthier owners taking advantage of players and fans.

An NFL star is a "greedy, me-first diva" if he holds out of training camp to protest being paid far below market worth, and is selfish if he doesn't emulate Tom Brady¹ by agreeing to take less money "for the good of the team". Yet in a league where contracts are not guaranteed, on the frequent occasions when teams cut players under contract it is a smart "business decision" and no one howls about "not honoring an agreement".

Professional athletes who sign big money deals based on their accomplishments are often looked at as sullied. They play a game, goes the common gripe, and being paid $100 million -- or poo-poohing that amount as too little -- to play a game is ridiculous. That's why ticket prices are too high for the average fan to attend, laments the typical ESPN talking head, newspaper "hot take" sports columnist, or pugnacious radio caller. The assumption is always that star players make too much money -- when actually, given the enormous value they generate for their franchises, the best talents often should be paid far more than they are.

The Exceptional Military

Excessively glorifying the military and holding it to different standards are detrimental to our nation's interests and hurts the troops themselves.

"Support the troops." Particularly since 9/11/2001 and the U.S.'s involvement in two major military conflicts, that mantra has been widely adopted, at least at a superficial level: yellow ribbons, preferential airline boarding for uniformed personnel, spotlighting veterans during sporting events. Those are all nice gestures of support for the thousands of hard-working men and women in the armed forces making sacrifices on behalf of our country. Even anti-war critics have largely separated their feelings about military conflict from the troops themselves, something that has not always been the case -- during the Vietnam War for example, in a conflict which featured a compulsory draft, many soldiers were unfairly maligned by protesters.

As a college student back in 2008, I spent a semester volunteering at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center helping wounded soldiers and their families. It was a humbling and deeply moving experience¹, and it first opened my eyes to the potentially harmful effects of just paying lip-service to the troops. After all, I had always found it strange that the level of societal acclaim military personnel receive is rarely bestowed upon police officers and firefighters (who also risk their lives), teachers (who also often make financial or other sacrifices to better our country), or Peace Corps volunteers and aid workers (who also represent the U.S. abroad and bolster America's reputation). I came to realize that a blanket fetishization of the military can be used as a cover for bad policy that harms our national interests and specifically hurts the very men and women in the armed forces it claims to support.

You Cannot Lose If You Do Not Play

American society has vastly differing sensitivities to treatment of different groups. But in trying to protect people's feelings by further sanitizing language, we only give bigots ammunition. A better solution is to see slurs as ridiculous, not taboo.

#CancelColbert was the Twitter protest movement that spiked last week in response to an allegedly racially insensitive tweet made by the official account of The Colbert Report. That tweet was a relay of a joke Stephen Colbert made on his show, skewering Washington Redskins owner Daniel Snyder for trying to counter criticism of the "Redskins" name--which many consider a slur--through his new Washington Redskins Original Americans Foundation. Colbert demonstrated the absurdity of using offensive language in the group's very name by comparing it to an Asian-focused group called "The Ching-Chong Ding-Dong Foundation for Sensitivity to Orientals or Whatever".

So when the anti-Colbert backlash arose, I paid it little attention, figuring this was another unfortunately-common-on-the-Internet incident of undue outrage being whipped up due to context unconsidered, or worse, willfully ignored in order to advance an agenda. Surely, anyone familiar with Colbert's work would not consider him a racist, and seeing the clip would no more lead a person to conclude he wished to denigrate Asians than reading "A Modest Proposal" might convince a person Jonathan Swift advocated cannibalism to keep the numbers of poor Irish in check. Further, I feared such unwarranted outrage would give ammunition to true bigots who often hide behind claims against an overzealous "P.C. (politically correct) police". A comment on one blog cheekily captured my fear: "This is why liberals can't have nice things."

For Your Eyes Only

Ephemeral-photo service Snapchat is betting that it can stick around longer than one of its trademark disappearing messages. To justify a $3 billion valuation, it has to find a way to make money and hold on to a traditionally fickle user base.

Yesterday afternoon's Wall Street Journal report that mobile photo-messaging service Snapchat apparently rejected a $3 billion acquisition offer from Facebook has come as a surprise to many in the business and tech world. The surprise is two-fold, actually -- not just that Facebook would pony up such an astronomical amount, but that Snapchat itself believes it could be worth far more. Eyebrow-raising assessments of a relatively new mobile app I first heard of only a year ago and which is most notorious for engendering media hype over the app's potential facilitation of "sexting".

As with other high-profile Internet company acquisitions, such as Facebook's $1 billion purchase in April of fellow photo-app Instagram (with its 13 employees and $0 revenue) or Yahoo's $1.1 billion purchase in May of blogging-service Tumblr (which had never turned a profit), there is again considerable general befuddlement over the economics of such a deal and whether these high-premium purchases of niche competitors are a further proof of the re-emergence of the "dot-com bubble".

So what does Facebook see in Snapchat? It's easier to first eliminate the explanations that don't make sense:

Black or White

Conversation about race in America remains hampered by a historically rigid perspective and the confusion of even well-intentioned people over how to acknowledge race.

It's taken for granted the description of Barack Obama as our country's first black president. Something about this designation has always troubled me. I wonder whether the president's white mother, and his white grandparents who helped raise him, would have considered the label a slight to their roles in his life. Sure, much of the reasoning behind celebrating the "first black president" label is a country looking to redeem itself for its history of injustice against blacks. But the underlying mindset of "if you're not fully white, you're black" is the same that fueled the Jim Crow-era "one-drop rule", whereby any Americans who had any trace of non-white ancestry were deemed "colored" and were legally discriminated against.

This is just one example where our country can even innocuously display an awkward handling of race. Take the term "African-American" itself, often used as a well-intentioned substitute for "black", regardless of whether the American being described is generations removed from Africa and despite the fact that non-recent-immigrant white Americans are never classified as "German-American" or "British-American". (Lindsey Lohan's Mean Girls character, on the other hand, is actually African-American.)

Smoking Barrels

The U.S. must address its problematic gun culture to stem out-of-control violence.  There is a clear case for implementing stronger controls such as safety training, psychological evaluations, and comprehensive background checks for gun owners.

A gunman killed 27 today at a Connecticut elementary school, most of the victims young children.  This tragedy is the latest in a sad history of high-profile massacres, which have recently included shootings at the Aurora movie theater and Oak Creek Sikh temple.  Gun violence in America is an issue where the numbers are actually even more depressing than the occasional attention-grabbing headlines.  Per the CDC there are more than 11,000 deaths from firearm homicides in the U.S. per year.  Even accounting for our large population, our ratio of firearm-related death rates (9.00 per 100,000 people) is astronomically higher than the rest of the developed world -- more than double neighboring Canada's (4.78), 40 times the United Kingdom's (0.22), and 128 times Japan's (0.07)!

Yet no major national-level political leaders (NYC's billionaire mayor Michael Bloomberg comes closest) have asked Americans to challenge the gun lobby's sick fetish for unfettered gun access, more guns, more powerful guns, and carrying guns in more locations.¹  In increasingly vocal terms, the American public is fed up with inaction.  Highlighting the absurd is a post I saw on Facebook: "ONE jackass tries to light his shoe on fire, and every air traveler has to remove their shoes at airport. A gunman, like many before him, shoots up a ton of innocent people and there's nothing that can be done?"  (For all the hype that terrorism gets, keep in mind that in the 10 years after 9/11, only 16 Americans were killed from terrorist attacks in the U.S.)

XX = ?

Heated political rhetoric about abortion and a "war on women" obscure the dismal reality that is gender inequality in America

We've heard ad nauseum for months that women¹ will decide this election, and both Republicans and Democrats are trying hard to court their votes.  And yet the most memorable episodes in recent weeks relating to women have been Senate candidate Richard Mourdock (R) describing pregnancies from rape as "something God intended", Rep. Joe Walsh (R) stating that "modern technology and science" have eliminated threats to pregnant women's health, and Rep. Todd Akin (R) -- who sits on the House Science Committee! -- positing that the female body can terminate pregnancies from "legitimate rape".

Despite what the debased and disgraceful dialogue of this election season would have us believe, gender issues go far beyond rape, abortion, and reproductive rights.  Although there's a tendency to think we're set because women now outnumber men in the workforce and in the ranks of college graduates, proclaiming "The End of Men" remains hyperbolic.

We live in a society where women earn less than men even in the same field, where they are shut out or opt out of leadership roles in the workplace, where they are considered unprofessional if they do not paint their faces and wear health-ruining shoes, where the normal and routine biological process of menstruation is treated as taboo, where the custom is to take their respective husband's last name at marriage, and where pointing out these incongruities is considered radical (the word "feminism" having somehow taken on negative connotations).²

Stings & The Police

Sting operations by law enforcement have identified individuals who hate America, but using undercover agents to help aid these aspiring terrorists until the point of arrest artificially creates a bigger threat than would otherwise exist.

This week, 21-year-old immigrant college student Quazi Mohammad Nafis was arrested for "allegedly trying to detonate what he thought was a bomb from a hotel room near the Fed in Manhattan's Financial District".  The Nafis case, like the aspiring Portland Christmas bomber, Dallas skyscraper bomber, and others in recent years, involved a would-be terrorist caught by an undercover FBI or NYPD operation, and whose plot was from start to finish created by the law enforcement agency.

My initial reaction, like many Americans, is relief that one of these nutjobs has been stopped before they hurt someone.  But upon further reflection, I've wondered why these "sting" operations seem to always catch a resourceless loner immigrant who has turned radical, but whose every step toward executing an attack is only possible thanks to his handlers.  I worry that these wannabe terrorists have been pushed into committing acts they never had the capacity for -- having previously lacked the knowledge, resources, and connections to carry out a serious attack against America.

Secretary of Explaining Things

The first presidential debate between Messrs. Romney and Obama affected the media's election narrative but did little to provide the average voter with a substantive understanding of key issues.

The widespread and bipartisan media consensus is that Mitt Romney won Wednesday's first presidential debate.  A somnolent President Obama spent most of his time on stage looking down at his podium, handing an easy victory on appearances to the guy who dissed Big Bird. What was reinforced to me, though, is that these debates -- barring the emergence of a popular caricature of one of the candidates -- are aimed at influencing the media's election narrative, not at voters.

These debates are supposed to elucidate a candidate's positions and to help voters distinguish between their choices.  But in practice, we're not given much to work with.  The candidates present what seem like "Mad Libs", random numbers without context or explanation ("4 million jobs" from energy independence; "2 million more slots in our community colleges"; a "$5 trillion tax cut"; "$2 trillion in additional military spending"; a "$4 trillion deficit reduction plan").  The result is empty speechifying, not debating.  And in a generally polite encounter without memorable "zingers" from either man, my eyes were glazing over.