The fourth episode of the Quakers Today podcast has just come out. Looking at “Faith Transformation,” it features interviews with Hayden Hobby (“Surviving Religious Trauma” in Friends Journal) and Calliope George (“My Experience as a Young Adult Quaker,” QuakerSpeak).
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Friends Journal Poking pigs?
February 6, 2019
Bucks County, Pa., Friend Norval Reece has a piece on fake and real news, with a great line from his mother:
Polls and analysts confirm a growing trend for people to tune in almost exclusively to those news sources which reinforce their own opinions and condemn the others — regardless of quality, the use of facts, opinion, bias, and misinformation. Experts call this “source bias.” My straight-talking Quaker mother referred to it as “people trying to sell you a pig in a poke” — people trying to convince you of a point of view by giving you limited or false information, trying to sell you a pig in a bag when you can’t see it or examine it. Communist countries and dictatorships are masters at this.
https://www.buckscountycouriertimes.com/news/20190203/faith-freedom-of-press-essential-to-democracy
Sin, corruption, temptation and distraction
January 2, 2019
Patricia Dallmann on the role of sin:
It is better to see the sin of the world as uniform and single rather than to view its manifestations as particular properties belonging to specific corrupted persons. That is to say, in its uniformity, the world’s sin is more like an expanse of mud than it is like separate rocks situated at intervals in a field! Seeing sin as a uniform force helps the intellect direct the incensive power toward sin itself, and away from particular offenders who have succumbed to and embody demonic power.
I like how she pulls from fourth-century spiritual texts but uses them as a way to understand our own modern-day psychological responses. Modern Friends don’t often explore the dynamics of sin and I think we sometimes lose out by simply discounting it. The language of temptation — and the Quaker interpretation by early ministers like Samuel Bownas – has helped me understand moments when the easy path of acclaim is not necessarily the right choice.
The Quakers are right. We don’t need God
May 4, 2018
Well-know British journalist (tho non-Friend) weighs in on recent headlines claiming British Friends are taking God out of their next edition of Faith and Practice: The Quakers are right. We don’t need God
The Quakers’ lack of ceremony and liturgical clutter gives them a point from which to view the no man’s land between faith and non-faith that is the “new religiosity”. A dwindling 40% of Britons claim to believe in some form of God, while a third say they are atheists
The piece is sure to get everyone’s dander up. It feels to me as if Jenkins is chasing the headline to advance his own argument without regard to how his statement might polarize Friends. But this is one of the rarer instances in which it’s worth digging through the comments on this one; some are better than the article itself.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/may/04/quakers-dropping-god?CMP=share_btn_fb
Quaker Jazz
April 12, 2018
This week’s QuakerSpeak interviews musician Colton Weatherston. I love the way he relates the communication and collaboration of jazz musicians to Quaker worship:
Especially artists and musicians, we often don’t have the same point of view or even the same background. Each of us will bring a lot of baggage into the meeting of the musicians and we have to build trust with each other and people need to feel free to express their ideas as a soloist without feeling told by the leader how exactly to play — we have to work it out as an ensemble. And I think that’s very true with meetings also.
Those with long memories might remember that I interviewed Chad Stephenson after he made a comparison between new jazz traditionalists and Convergent Friends at the 2009 Ben Lomond conference (I believe he wrote an expanded version for the Spirit Rising Quaker anthology but I can’t find a link).
Essential Mac Apps 2017
November 1, 2017
Oh dear: a few weeks ago Wess Daniels started a Twitter discussion about the new Mac app Cardhop. In the thread he asked me about other apps which apps I find essential. I thought I’d type up something in ten minutes but then the draft post kept growing. I’m sure I still missed some. I guess I didn’t realize how particular I am about my computing environment. 🙂
Bartender
Okay, maybe it’s a bit OCD but I hate cluttered Mac menubars running along the top of my screen. This app was just rebuilt for High Sierra and is an essential tool. I have most everything hidden and have set up a keyboard shortcut (the little-used right “option” key) to toggle the full menubar icon set.
Fantastical
This is my favorite calendar app. It sits in the menubar, ready to give a beautiful agenda view with just a single tap. It can open up to a full view. Manage calendars is easy and the natural language processing is suburb.
Cardhop
Just released, this is Fantastical’s newest cousin, an app for managing contacts from Flexibits. It works with whatever you have set up for contacts on your Mac (I use Google but iCloud is fine too). Given Flexibit’s track record, and Cardhop’s resemblance to the discontinued Cobook, this is likely to be a winner for me.
Favioconographer
I’ve been a Chrome user since the week it debuted but lately I’ve been trying to switch to Safari, wanting its superior battery management and syncing of bookmarks and tabs with iOS. Many of Safari’s annoyances have lessoned as Apple itinerated with each release. There are enough extensions now that I can get by. I am, though, one of those weird people whom John Gruber identified: wannabee Safari users who really like Favicons in tabs. Fortunately, Faviconographer has come along. There are occasional oddities (floating icons, icons that don’t match site) but overall it improves the Safari experience enough to make it a win over Chrome.
1Blocker for Mac
Uses the built-in content filtering system built into Mac Safari. Good syncing with the iOS app. “Content filtering” (aka blocking) has become an important security concern and let’s face it: the web runs so much better without all the crap that some sites throw in along with their content. You can whitelist sites that respect readers. Honorable mention in Chrome or as an alternative for Safari is uBlock Origin, a great blocker (and distinct from standard uBlock, which I don’t recommend).
Karabiner-Elements
Lets you remap the generally useless Caps Lock key. I have it mapped Brett-Terpstra style so that a single click opens Spotlight search and a hold and click acts as a hyper key (imagine a shift key that you can use for any keystroke).
BetterTouchTool
Remap keys and key combinations. With Karabiner, I can use it to have Capslock‑C open a particular app, for instance.
Tunnelbear
I used to think VPNs were a luxury but with people hacking in on public Wi-Fi accounts and the loss of privacy, I’ve signed up for this easy-to-use VPN service. One account can power multiple devices so my laptop and phone are secured.
Evernote
It’s been around for years. I currently have 13,000 notes stored in Evernote, including every issue of the magazine I work for going back to the mid-1950s. There was a time a few years ago when I was worried for Evernote, as it kept chasing quirky side projects as its main app got buggier and buggier. But they’ve had a shake-up, ditched the distractions and have built the service back up. Most of my projects are organized with Evernote.
Ulysses
There are a gazillion writing apps out there that combine Markdown writing syntax with minimalist interfaces (Bear, IaWriter, Byword) but Ulysses has edged its way to being my favorite, with quick syncing and ability to post directly to WordPress.
Todoist
There are also a gazillion task managers. Todoist does a good job of keeping projects that need due dates in order.
1Password
You should be using a password manager. Repeat: you should be using a password manager. 1Password is rock solid. They’ve recently changed their economic model and strongly favor subscription accounts. While I’ve tried to limit just how many auto-pulling subscriptions I have, I understand the rationale and have switched.
Airmail
A great email app for Mac and iOS that can display and sort your Gmail accounts (and others too). Almost too many options if you’re the kind to fiddle with that sort of thing but easy to get started and great with just the defaults.
Google and Apple and clouds
The Big‑G should get a shoutout: it powers the databases for my email, calendar, contacts, and photos. All my hardware has migrated over to Apple, helped in large part by the opening up of its ecosystem to third-party apps.
What’s also useful to note is that all of the data-storing services are cloud based. If my phone or laptop disappeared, I could borrow a new one and be up to speed almost immediately. Since many of these apps run on databases run by Google, I can also switch apps or even have multiple apps accessing the same information for different purposes. There’s a real freedom to the app ecosystem these days.
Fake News and Clickbait
November 17, 2016
There’s a lot of talk online right now about fake news pages on Facebook and how they influenced both the election and how we think about the election. It’s a problem and I’m glad people are sharing links about it.
But when we share these links, let’s take that extra step and point to original sources.
Example: Someone named Melissa Zimdars has done a lot of work to compile a list of fake news sources, published as a Google Doc with a Creative Commons license that allows anyone to repost it. It’s a great public service and she’s frequently updating it, reclassifying publications as feedback comes in.
The problem is that there are a lot of web publishers whose sites exist mostly to repackage content. They’ll find a funny Reddit list and will copy and paste it as an original post or they’ll rewrite a breaking news source in their own words. The reason is obvious: they get the ad dollars that otherwise would go to the original content creators. They’re not engaging in fake news, per se, but they’re also not adding anything to the knowledge base of humanity and they’re taking the spotlight off the hard work of the original creators.
Back to our example, Zimdars’s updates on this clickbait sites don’t get updated as she refines her list. In some cases, clickbait websites rewrite and repost one another’s ever-more extreme headlines till they bear little reality to the original post (I followed the page view food chain a few years ago after reading a particularly dopey piece about vegans launching a boycott over a TV ad).
So here’s part two of avoiding fake news sites: before you share something on Facebook, take the two minutes to follow any link to the original source and share that instead. Support original content creation.
Can we count the ways that the McKinney video is messed up?
June 9, 2015
When the McKinney video started trending I wasn’t in a state to watch so I read the commentary. Now that I have, the whole thing is completely messed up but at least three parts especially unnerve me:
- The completely unnecessary commando-style dive-and-roll that introduces Corporal Eric Casebolt. Some reports describe it as a trip but to me it looks like he’s playing a Hollywood action hero stunt double. Has he just been watching too many of the police videos he’s been collecting on YouTube?
- That none of the other officers saw his derring-do and said “yo Eric, stand down.” Is this something cops just don’t do? And if not, why not? We all know what it’s like to be hopped up on too much adrenaline. I know people do weird stuff when their reptilian brain fight-or-flight mechanism cuts in. It seems that officers should be on the lookout for just this sort of overreaction and have some sort of safe word to tell one another to take a chill.
- The videographer was a “invisible” white teenager. He walked nearby – and occasionally through – the action without being questioned. At one point Casebolt seems to purposefully step around him to put down his dark-skinned friends. The videographer told news reporters that he felt his whiteness made him invisible to Casebolt.
I never quite realized all the race politics behind the switch from public pools vs private pool clubs. I grew up in a Philly suburb with two public pools and very much remember the constant worry that Philadelphia kids might sneak in (“Philadelphia” was of course code for “black”). The township did have a historically African American neighborhood so the pools were racially integrated but I’m sure every dark-skinned township resident was asked to show town ID a lot more than I was. And it’s hard to think it was entirely coincidental that both public pools were located on the opposite ends of the township from the black neighborhood.
There are no public pools in the South Jersey town where I live. A satellite view picks out thirteen private pools on my block alone. Thirteen?!? There’s one private pool club across town. There’s a lot of casual racism around here, primarily directed at the mostly-Mexican farmworkers who double the town population every summer. If there was a town pool that reflected the demographics of the local Walmart parking lot on a Friday night in July, we’d have mini-riots I’m sure — which is almost surely why we don’t have a municipal pool and why wealthy families have poured millions of dollars into backyards.
(My family has joined the Elmer Swim Club, a pool located about half an hour away. While the majority of members are super nice and I haven’t heard any dodgy racial code phrases. The pool is diverse but is mostly white, reflecting the nearby population. That said, I’ve read enough Ta-Nehisi Coates to know we can rarely take white towns for granted. So.)