Monthly Archives: October 2015

If You Have To Ask (World Travel Edition)

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If someone in your house subscribes to the National Geographic Society’s magazine and your zip code implies relative affluence, you probably received a very nice booklet in the mail entitled “National Geographic 2016/2017 Private Jet Expeditions”.

Ours came yesterday. It’s the kind of mail that has “recycling bin” all over it, but my curiosity was piqued. What the hell is a “private jet expedition”?

It turns out that National Geographic offers four such tours, each lasting about three weeks. One of them takes you around the world. You leave Orlando, Florida, and then visit places like Machu Picchu, Easter Island, Angkor Wat, the Serengeti and Marrakesh, before returning to Orlando. (They do let you off the plane to walk around and sleep in a nice bed – you’re not seeing everything from 20,000 feet.)

Another trip is advertised as “around the world”, but doesn’t quite make it. You board your private jet in Seattle, take a northern route, mostly across Asia, and are then deposited in Boston, 3,000 miles from where you started.

The other two trips are even more geographically limited. One begins and ends in London, with stops in places like Mongolia, Sri Lanka, Ethiopia and Israel. The other starts in Orlando and includes South America, the South Pacific, China and Japan, before inexplicably dropping you off in Seattle.

But how private is this jet anyway? I figured it must be one of those Gulfstream jobs that movie stars and titans of industry enjoy. They probably carry 10 or 20 people at most. 

Unfortunately, the National Geographic’s plane isn’t that private. You ride in “two-by-two VIP-style seats” that look really comfortable, but your “specially outfitted Boeing 757” has room for 75 other passengers.  

Thinking about this, I suppose I could handle the lack of exclusivity, but being on a tour with 75 other world travelers, plus the flight crew, plus the various guides and lecturers, plus the staff photographer, plus the on-call-24-hours-a-day physician, doesn’t seem exactly “private” to me.

Being familiar with that old expression “if you have to ask …”, I went ahead and asked (myself) anyway. The bad news is that the most expensive trip (the one that goes around the world and thoughtfully brings you back to where you started) costs $79,950. With sales tax, let’s call it $80,000. The cheapest trip goes for $67,950. But seriously, who would want to experience a bunch of exotic locations with a down-market group like that?

By the way, those prices are per person with double occupancy. If you don’t want company at night, it’s another $8,000 or so.

To sum up, if you and your significant other select one of these expeditions, your total bill will be around $150,000, maybe more, maybe less (hotel minibar and laundry, among other things, not included).

I don’t know why, but the booklet indicates that this is “sustainable travel”. Sadly, it doesn’t look like anything I’ll be sustaining any time soon. If you’re in the market, however, and you inadvertently recycled your booklet, you can get more information at National Geographic Expeditions. But if you’re as unimpressed by their definition of “travel by private jet” as I am, you might want to visit here instead.

So have a wonderful time, take lots of pictures, vaya con dios and don’t forget your yellow fever shot! Proof of inoculation is required.

At Least the Cop Wasn’t Thinking At the Time

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A high school student in South Carolina disrupted a class by talking on her phone. The teacher and a school administrator demanded that she leave the room. She refused. A police officer assigned to the school was summoned. He told her again to get out of her chair and leave the room. She was now sitting quietly and no longer using her phone. She said she had done nothing wrong and wanted to stay.

He reacted by flipping her and her chair upside down and dragging her across the floor. The white police officer, who is also one of the school’s assistant football coaches, did not break the black girl’s neck.

From the New York Times article, which includes a link to the video:

Witnesses to Monday’s incident said that in an Algebra 1 class, the girl, a sophomore, was on her phone, and the teacher told her to put it away. The teacher summoned an administrator, who brought in the deputy. The adults repeatedly asked the student to get up and leave the class, but she refused.

When the altercation occurred, students stood up, confused about what was happening, but the deputy told them, “Sit down, or you all will be next,” said one student, Charles Scarborough, 16. Adding to the surprise and confusion, several students said the girl was usually quiet and not a troublemaker.

The deputy also detained a second student, Niya Kenny, 18, who told a local television station that her only offense was objecting to his treatment of the other girl.

“I was crying, like literally screaming, crying like a baby,” Ms. Kenny told WLTX. “I’d never seen nothing like that in my life, a man use that much force on a little girl.”

As she protested, she said, “he said, ‘Since you’ve got so much to say, you’re coming, too.’ ”

I can almost understand the cop’s reaction. He got frustrated and gave in to his worst impulses. He didn’t de-escalate the situation. He treated the girl as if she were a dangerous criminal. He treated her worse than he’d treat a dog. But I presume he wasn’t using all his mental faculties at the time. His lizard brain, his adrenaline and his racism took over.

What I can’t understand at all is that people read the article and watched the video and then composed a comment to the Times suggesting that the girl was responsible in any way whatsoever for what happened to her. She disrupted the class. She refused to get out of her chair. She wasn’t respectful of authority. Maybe she provoked the cop’s reaction. We should wait for all the facts before passing judgment.

What total bullshit. Let’s face it. Many of our fellow citizens here in the United States would make good Nazis and there doesn’t seem to be much the rest of us can do about it. (All right, I do understand it.)

There’s more here, including how a police officer using more of his brain could have handled the situation.

New Jersey, Visually Speaking

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Some of New Jersey looks like English countryside – or what I imagine English countryside looks like:

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But some of New Jersey looks like one of my fingers:

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This sums up New Jersey pretty well.

Shared Perspectives

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Quoting myself from almost two months ago:

In writing about perspective, I’m a little concerned that I may be conflating or improperly jamming together two different kinds of perspective. But I think the two kinds have enough in common to justify discussing them at the same time. One kind of perspective is the personal or individual kind. The other is more social or abstract. 

An individual’s perspective is the place from which an individual perceives the world, where “position” includes not only the individual’s location in space and time, but also anything else that affects how the individual perceives or understands things. For example, my perspective is affected by my perceptual abilities, my history, memories, beliefs and desires, and also by external factors like whether the sun is shining or how much noise there is from passing traffic.

Usually, something like the noise from passing traffic won’t affect my perspective on an issue like global warming, and having seen An Inconvenient Truth won’t affect my perspective on whether you said “yeah” or “nah” just now, but the factors that affect my perspective can be mysterious. Since so many factors can come into play, my perspective is “where I’m coming from” in a very broad sense. Regardless of what affects my current perspective, whenever I offer an opinion or reach a conclusion about anything at all, I do so from my particular perspective or point of view.  

The other kind of perspective is, at first glance, divorced from individual perspectives. The other kind of perspective is shared. It’s a general way of thinking or perceiving. Pope Francis, for example, has his individual perspective on global warming, but he also views the issue from a Catholic perspective. Many other members of his church do so as well. When thinking about global warming, they take into account the Church’s teachings regarding the creation of the world and our relationship with nature, as well as the church’s position on science.

Yet there are many Catholics who don’t agree with the Pope about global warming. Some of them are ignorant about the science or the church’s teachings. Some of them don’t look at the issue from a Catholic perspective at all. Others think the Pope has the Catholic perspective wrong or is misapplying it in this case (even though the Pope has the authority to speak on global warming from the church’s perspective, if anyone does). 

One problem is that it’s often difficult to say what constitutes a particular perspective. What is, for example, the Catholic, scientific, French or Tea Party’s perspective on any given subject? When trying to put a shared perspective into words, the best we can do is summarize the relatively common features of the individual perspectives of the individuals in the group being considered (for example, scientists or the French).

But not all of the common features are relevant. It’s only the features that pertain specifically to the group of people we’re interested in. The French, for example, are all Europeans, so they have a European perspective. But to identify the specifically French perspective, we would have to identify the perspective shared by French people qua French people (by virtue of their being French and not, for example, Danish).

We might try to identify the French perspective or the scientific perspective on a given question by conducting a very good opinion poll. We could try to find out how the majority of French people or scientists would answer the question, but also what factors affected the answer they gave. We would want to know what considerations they thought were important, but also what unconscious assumptions or tendencies came into play when they gave their answers.

In some cases, however, we wouldn’t be interested in what the majority of our target population thought. Perhaps the majority of our population allowed unrelated factors to affect their thinking. For example, the truly scientific perspective on a difficult or controversial topic might differ from what the majority of scientists are currently thinking. From a scientific perspective, we now understand that human activity is raising the average temperature of the earth’s atmosphere and oceans. But if most scientists were employed by oil or coal companies, they might weigh the evidence differently. They would be more likely to share their employers’ perspective while supposedly viewing the evidence scientifically.

Finally, we should keep in mind that any conclusions anyone reaches about a general, shared perspective will be made from that individual’s own perspective. Every claim that a certain fact is true, or a particular course of action is correct, from a common perspective, not merely from the speaker’s perspective, is made from the speaker’s perspective, and should be evaluated on that basis. In other words, if I claim to view the issue of global warming from a scientific perspective, I may be mistaken about what the scientific perspective really is. I may even be trying to borrow the prestige of the scientific perspective for my own point of view. All judgments are made from an individual’s perspective, including judgments about shared perspectives.

Both kinds of perspective, the individual and the shared, are ways of thinking and perceiving that are affected by certain features of the world. The difference between them is that one is a mixture or summary of the other.

The Decline of the Militia

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From What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 by Daniel Walker Howe:

Jeffersonians of the founding generation had reposed great confidence in the militia as an alternative to a standing army that could be used against the liberties of the people it supposedly protected.This militia, organized in each locality, consisted of all physically fit white males of military age, who would supply their own arms and donate as much of their time as necessary to keep in training and readiness when called upon to deal with insurrection or invasion. This was the “well regulated militia” postulated in the Second Amendment of the Bill of Rights and prescribed by the federal Militia Act of 1792.

The militia had proved ineffective on many occasions in both the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812 (George Washington never put much trust in it), but its gradual disappearance in the generation after 1815 had nothing to do with its military shortcomings.

The militia gradually ceased to function because most male citizens resented it as an imposition, and hated serving in it so much that they either refused to show up for the periodic musters and drills, or if they came made a mockery of the occasion. Since the men who defied the militia laws constituted the electorate, politicians dated not to coerce service. White male democracy could successfully defy the law, as squatters defied landlords or Indian treaties…. When the war with Mexico came in 1846, the administration made little use of the militia and relied instead on its small professional army plus volunteers trained and equipped at government expense [p. 491].

Now, 170 years later, we have the most powerful military and most heavily-armed police in the world, while sad, angry men, with a death wish for themselves and others, “serve” in the “militia”.

PS – “994 mass shootings in 1,004 days”