I just wanted to quickly chime in with support for this idea.

I think it is important to stay angry about the things that matter. Not 
that we should be angry at individuals, or act irrationally, but also 
we must not become complacent. We as Americans are responsible for the 
fact, for example, that we have a government which essentially has 
rejected the Geneva convention and is circulating memos heming and 
hawing about what forms of torture are okay and which aren't. There are 
still prisoners who are being held without charge and without recourse 
merely because they are suspected terrorists. About such things we 
should not only remain angry, we should be enraged.

I'm all about working with other political groups to come to agreement 
on a path to a solution, so I do agree with forging alliances when 
possible. But why would you bother unless you remembered the things 
that you were angry enough about to try to fix? Would that alliance 
accomplish anything worthwhile if you subsumed your anger in order to 
forge it? Do you expect your opponent to subsume theirs? It's easy 
enough to get worked by the opponents political commercials right 
before an election, but then it's also too easy to then forget about 
all of the issues that matter when the election is over.

So yes, I think we should stay angry too. I think we can as a people 
all get along, while energetically fighting each other at the same 
time. I can respect and even like you as a person while being very 
angry at the (in my opinion) dumb idea you are supporting. And because 
I'm angry I might even bother to try to do something about it. :-)

Dave

On Dec 21, 2004, at 4:38 PM, Barbara Agnes Reeves wrote:

> Hi Everyone,
>
> I started writing this e-mail a while ago, then got caught up with work
> and holiday vacation preparations...Danny, your latest e-mail is so
> right on that it has inspired me to finish my thoughts on that Red-Blue
> alliance article:
>
>
> (Danny's paternal aunt Augie, for those of you who don't know me)...
> I've waited a while to respond to this article, wondering if my initial
> reaction to it would mellow a bit. Quite the contrary: I found the
> article not only incredibly naive, but downright scary. Frankly,
> "refreshing" is just about the last thing that comes to my mind as a
> comment.
>
> Expecting the intellectual secular community to attempt to forge
> alliances with fundamentalist Christians is, to me, analogous to
> moderate, critical Muslims seeking commonalities with Osama bin Laden
> and his followers. The problem is identical: it is impossible to use
> rational arguments to counter positions that are Bible- (or Koran-)
> based.
>
> How does one argue in favor of equal rights for women when the response
> is "God is head of man, and man is head of woman!"? How can you talk
> rationally about gay rights when the response is (in a RARE example of
> right-wing humor) "The Bible talks about Adam and Eve, not Adam and
> Steve!"? How can we hope to put effective sex education, family 
> planning
> and reproductive health policies into place when the fundamentalist
> Christian approach is to have teenagers sign chastity pledges? (Studies
> show, by the way, that the rate of sexual activity, teen pregnancy and
> sexually transmitted diseases is no lower among those who have signed
> the pledge.)
>
> The author (a fundamentalist Christian Harvard law professor, which is
> indeed somewhat of an oxymoron to me) suggests "changing the issue 
> menu"
> to identify Red-Blue commonalities instead of differences. What a
> dangerous notion! He says that "judging from the speeches of liberal
> Democratic politicians, what poor people need most is free abortions."
> Well, guess what? In addition to adequate education, health care and
> access to birth control, they DO need free (and safe and legal!)
> abortions so that nights of pleasure (...if they're lucky...) don't 
> turn
> into perpetuated squalor. Change the issue menu to exclude the issue of
> gay marriage? Who were the ones who worked tirelessly to get that issue
> on the ballot of 11 states, counting (correctly, as it turned out) that
> the gut-level bigotry exhibited on that issue would benefit GW and co.?
> A serious debate on "how a loving society should treat its poorest
> members? Is he seriously claiming that U.S. society is "loving"??? Oh
> please, he must be kidding - which is the only Western society with no
> national health care plan? Which is the only "civilized" society with
> the death penalty? Which is the only industrialized society with a
> welfare system that fails to meet even the most basic requirements?
> Which is the country with astronomical figures of violent crime, 
> numbers
> of prisoners, etc., etc. etc, ad nauseam? And lo and behold, where does
> one find most of those who support this state of affairs against
> communist/liberal/pacifist insurgents?
>
> The author's description of the humility of the fundamentalist 
> Christian
> movement, and that their every statement is accompanied by the
> recognition that they might be wrong (and that the intellectuals can
> learn from this), is so blatantly preposterous that it frankly leaves 
> me
> speechless. Is that how he would describe those who murder physicians
> who perform abortions or bomb abortion clinics? Is that how he would
> describe their attitude about gay rights - that they might be wrong? 
> Are
> "liberals" forcing them to have abortions or be gay? Excuse me, but I
> indeed conform to the intellectual stereotype by believing that they 
> are
> fools or bigots (actually, usually both) for thinking differently than
> me on these issues.
>
>
> In my (not that humble!) opinion, the LAST thing the USA needs right 
> now
> is to forge Red-Blue alliances. Fundamentalist Christians are dangerous
> people - every single bit as dangerous as fundamentalist Muslims (or
> does anyone want to argue that the Christian church's hands are not the
> most bloodstained of any religion in human history?). Calling them
> "evangelical," as the author attempts to "upgrade" them, is nothing 
> more
> than "ein Wolf im Schafspelz" (a German expression: a wolf disguised as
> a sheep).
>
> Instead, (and of course I might be wrong - and let me say at this
> juncture that I have no problem with being wrong. I basically decided 
> to
> leave the States after Ronald Reagan was re-elected, one reason being
> that I was completely convinced that a nuclear "incident" between the
> USA and USSR was imminent. Instead, I experienced the fall of the 
> Berlin
> wall. Yes, I am very glad that I was wrong. [This should not be
> interpreted as in any way condoning or approving of the presidency of
> Ronald Reagan - if he had not f*cked up the Supreme Court 20 years ago,
> we would now be in the Gore II era.]) I believe that what the USA needs
> is a much sharper delineation of the differences between Red and Blue.
> Instead of trying to understand the fundamentalists, get it into Ralph
> Nader & co.'s head that there is at least ONE CRUCIAL DIFFERENCE 
> between
> the two parties - namely, that the Democrats are not controlled by
> religious fanatics.
>
> And for those who don't feel like sticking around to fight this
> important but oh-so-frustrating battle, I continue to advocate a 
> massive
> brain drain from the United States. Danny, how come I'm not hearing
> anything about your emigration plans? Weren't you the one who said to 
> me
> a week before the election, when you and Kapoo were driving me to the
> airport, that "if Bush gets back in, I'm outta here!"??
>
> How come everybody's all of a sudden so conciliatory? And while I'm on
> this rant, let me express my disgust that (at least from what I've seen
> & heard here in Germany) that OF ALL PEOPLE, Donald Rumsfeld was able 
> to
> keep his job with a minimum of outraged outcry. Shocking!!!
>
> Come on guys, don't get sucked in by these calls for reconciliation and
> cooperation. Stay angry!!!
>
> On that note, happy holidays and happy new year to everyone - I'm 
> flying
> to Zurich on Thursday, spending Christmas with friends in Buchs,
> Switzerland (right on the border to Lichtenstein), then taking the 
> train
> to Imst, Austria, meeting up with friends from Berlin and skiing in St.
> Leonhard im Pitztal for a week! So think of me in the Alps when you're
> skiing into the Mississippi Valley in Galena! (Danny, is emigration
> sounding any more attractive?!?!)
>
> Looking forward to hearing the responses to this rant!
>
> Love,
>
> Augie
>
> -----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
> Von: Daniel Reeves [mailto:dreeves Æ umich.edu]
> Gesendet: Donnerstag, 2. Dezember 2004 03:08
> An: improvetheworld Æ umich.edu
> Cc: Nicole Poellet
> Betreff: article on red-blue alliance
>
> Cam writes,
>
>> My goal here is to urge everyone to create a better world by trying to
>> understand each other.  In this case, it means researching the other
>> side to the same extent we research our own vs. blindly pushing for
> the
>> extreme right or left, while in reality hoping to end up with a
> slightly
>> different definition of the middle.
>
> Here's an article in that spirit that I found interesting:
>
> http://www.techcentralstation.com/112904A.html
>  [text of article follows]
>
> Faculty Clubs and Church Pews
>  By William J. Stuntz 	
>  Published	 11/29/2004
>
> The past few months have seen a lot of talk about red and blue America,
> mostly by people on one side of the partisan divide who find the other
> side a mystery.
>
> It isn't a mystery to me, because I live on both sides. For the past
> twenty years, I've belonged to evangelical Protestant churches, the 
> kind
>
> where George W. Bush rolled up huge majorities. And for the past
> eighteen
> years, I've worked in secular universities where one can hardly believe
> that Bush voters exist. Evangelical churches are red America at its
> reddest. And universities, especially the ones in New England (where I
> work now), are as blue as the bluest sky.
>
> Not surprisingly, each of these institutions is enemy territory to the
> other. But the enmity is needless. It may be a sign that I'm terminally
> weird, but I love them both, passionately. And I think that if my 
> church
>
> friends and my university friends got to know each other, they'd find a
> lot to like and admire. More to the point, the representatives of each
> side would learn something important and useful from the other side.
> These
> institutions may be red and blue now. But their natural color is 
> purple.
>
> You wouldn't know it from talking to the people who populate
> universities
> or fill church pews.
>
> A lot of my church friends think universities represent the forces of
> darkness.  Law schools -- my corner of the academic world -- are
> particularly suspect. A fellow singer in a church choir once asked me
> what
> I did for a living. When I told her, she said, "A Christian lawyer?
> Isn't
> that sort of like being a Christian prostitute? I mean, you can't 
> really
>
> do that, right?" She wasn't kidding. And if I had said no, you don't
> understand; I'm a law professor, not a lawyer, I'm pretty sure that
> would
> not have helped matters. ("Oh, so you train people to be prostitutes?")
>
> You hear the same kinds of comments running in the other direction. 
> Some
>
> years ago a faculty colleague and I were talking about religion and
> politics, and this colleague said "You know, I think you're the first
> Christian I've ever met who isn't stupid." My professor friend wasn't
> kidding either. I've had other conversations like these -- albeit
> usually
> a little more tactful -- on both sides, a dozen times over the years.
> Maybe two dozen. People in each of these two worlds find the other
> frightening, and appalling.
>
> All of us are appalling, I suppose, but these reactions are mostly due
> to
> ignorance. Most of my Christian friends have no clue what goes on in
> faculty clubs. And my colleagues in faculty offices cannot imagine what
> happens in those evangelical churches on Sunday morning.
>
> In both cases, the truth is surprisingly attractive. And surprisingly
> similar: Churches and universities are the two twenty-first century
> American enterprises that care most about ideas, about language, and
> about
> understanding the world we live in, with all its beauty and ugliness.
> Nearly all older universities were founded as schools of theology: a
> telling fact. Another one is this: A large part of what goes on in 
> those
>
> church buildings that dot the countryside is education -- people 
> reading
>
> hard texts, and trying to sort out what they mean.
>
> Another similarity is less obvious but no less important. Ours is an
> individualist culture; people rarely put their community's welfare 
> ahead
>
> of their own. It isn't so rare in churches and universities. Churches
> are
> mostly run by volunteer labor (not to mention volunteered money): those
> who tend nurseries and teach Sunday School classes get nothing but a 
> pat
>
> on the back for their labor. Not unlike the professors who staff
> important
> faculty committees. An economist friend once told me that economics
> departments are ungovernable, because economists understand the reward
> structure that drives universities: professors who do thankless
> institutional tasks competently must do more such tasks. Yet the trains
> run more or less on time -- maybe historians are running the economics
> departments -- because enough faculty attach enough importance to the
> welfare of their colleagues and students. Selfishness and exploitation
> are
> of course common too, in universities and churches as everywhere else.
> But
> one sees a good deal of day-to-day altruism, which is not common
> everywhere else.
>
> And each side of this divide has something to teach the other.
> Evangelicals would benefit greatly from the love of argument that
> pervades
> universities. The "scandal of the evangelical mind" -- the title of a
> wonderful book by evangelical author and professor Mark Noll -- isn't
> that
> evangelicals aren't smart or don't love ideas. They are, and they do.
> No,
> the real scandal is the lack of tough, hard questioning to test those
> ideas. Christians believe in a God-Man who called himself (among other
> things) "the Truth." Truth-seeking, testing beliefs with tough-minded
> questions and arguments, is a deeply Christian enterprise. Evangelical
> churches should be swimming in it. Too few are.
>
> For their part, universities would be better, richer places if they had
> an
> infusion of the humility that one finds in those churches. Too often,
> the
> world of top universities is defined by its arrogance: the style of
> argument is more "it's plainly true that" than "I wonder whether." We
> like
> to test our ideas, but once they've passed the relevant academic 
> hurdles
>
> (the bar is lower than we like to think), we talk and act as though
> those
> ideas are not just right but obviously right -- only a fool or a bigot
> could think otherwise.
>
> The atmosphere I've found in the churches to which my family and I have
> belonged is very different. Evangelicals like "testimonies"; it's 
> common
>
> for talks to Christian groups to begin with a little autobiography, as
> the
> speaker describes the path he has traveled on his road to faith.
> Somewhere
> in the course of that testimony, the speaker always talks about what a
> mess he is: how many things he has gotten wrong, why the people sitting
> in
> the chairs should really be teaching him, not the other way around. 
> This
>
> isn't a pose; the evangelicals I know really do believe that they -- we
> (I'm in this camp too) -- are half-blind fools, stumbling our way 
> toward
>
> truth, regularly falling off the right path and, by God's grace, 
> picking
>
> ourselves up and trying to get back on. But while humility is more a
> virtue than a tactic, it turns out to be a pretty good tactic. Ideas 
> and
>
> arguments go down a lot easier when accompanied by the admission that
> the
> speaker might, after all, be wrong.
>
> That gets to an aspect of evangelical culture that the mainstream press
> has never understood: the combination of strong faith commitments with
> uncertainty, the awareness that I don't know everything, that I have a
> lot
> more to learn than to teach. Belief that a good God has a plan does not
> imply knowledge of the plan's details. Judging from the lives and
> conversations of my Christian friends, faith in that God does not tend
> to
> produce a belief in one's infallibility. More the opposite: Christians
> believe we see "through a glass, darkly" when we see at all -- and that
> we're constantly tempted to imagine ourselves as better and smarter 
> than
>
> we really are. If that sensibility were a little more common in
> universities, faculty meetings would be a lot more pleasant. And it
> should
> be more common: Academics know better than anyone just how vast is the
> pool of human knowledge, and how little of it any of us can grasp.
> Talking
> humbly should be second nature.
>
> There is even a measure of political common ground. True, university
> faculties are heavily Democratic, and evangelical churches are thick
> with
> Republicans. But that red-blue polarization is mostly a consequence of
> which issues are on the table -- and which ones aren't. Change the 
> issue
>
> menu, and those electoral maps may look very different. Imagine a
> presidential campaign in which the two candidates seriously debated how
> a
> loving society should treat its poorest members. Helping the poor is
> supposed to be the left's central commitment, going back to the days of
> FDR and the New Deal. In practice, the commitment has all but
> disappeared
> from national politics. Judging by the speeches of liberal Democratic
> politicians, what poor people need most is free abortions. Anti-poverty
> programs tend to help middle-class government employees; the poor end 
> up
>
> with a few scraps from the table. Teachers' unions have a stranglehold
> on
> failed urban school systems, even though fixing those schools would be
> the
> best anti-poverty program imaginable.
>
> I don't think my liberal Democratic professor friends like this state 
> of
>
> affairs. And -- here's a news flash -- neither do most evangelicals, 
> who
>
> regard helping the poor as both a passion and a spiritual obligation,
> not
> just a political preference. (This may be even more true of
> theologically
> conservative Catholics.) These men and women vote Republican not 
> because
>
> they like the party's policy toward poverty -- cut taxes and hope for
> the
> best -- but because poverty isn't on the table anymore. In evangelical
> churches, elections are mostly about abortion. Neither party seems much
> concerned with giving a hand to those who most need it.
>
> That could change. I can't prove it, but I think there is a large,
> latent
> pro-redistribution evangelical vote, ready to get behind the first
> politician to tap into it. (Barack Obama, are you listening?) If 
> liberal
>
> Democratic academics believe the things they say they believe -- and I
> think they do -- there is an alliance here just waiting to happen.
>
> Humility, love of serious ideas, commitment to helping the poor -- 
> these
>
> are things my faculty friends and my church friends ought to be able to
> get together on. If they ever do, look out: American politics, and 
> maybe
>
> American life, will be turned upside down. And all those politicians 
> who
>
> can only speak in one color will be out of a job.
>
> I can hardly wait.
>
> William J. Stuntz is a Professor at Harvard Law School.
>
>
> -- 
> http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/dreeves  - -	google://"Daniel Reeves"
>
> Q. How do you tell an extrovert computer scientist?
> A. When they talk to you they look at your shoes rather than their own.
>
>
>
>
Dave Morris
University of Michigan EM PhD candidate, aka thecat Æ umich.edu, aka 
KB8PWY
home: 734-995-5525  office (2104 SPRL): 734-763-5357  fax: 734-763-5567
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