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  • Bumbershoot internship/mentorship program appears racially discriminatory

    Bumbershoot internship/mentorship program appears racially discriminatory

    36th legislative district representative Julia Reed’s recent newsletter contains this section:

    OPPORTUNITIES AT BUMBERSHOOT

    The Bumbershoot Festival is a highlight for the 36th district. It provides opportunities for local artists to showcase their work to wide audience and gives us the opportunity to see our favorite artists in our backyard.

    But the festival is also an opportunity to invest in the next generation of creative professionals. That’s why I secured $150k to provide a fully-paid, tuition-free training program with internships and mentorship for students looking to enter the creative economy. This ‘festival as a classroom’ program prioritizes BIPOC students in the Puget Sound region and removes barriers to creative industry futures.” [Emphasis is mine throughout; quotes have been reformatted for consistency.]

    Of course, prioritizing BIPOC is the same as penalizing non-BIPOC, so this wording is very concerning.

    The Bumbershoot website’s description of the “festival as a classroom” uses less blatant language:

    This is a tuition-free program designed to remove barriers of entry for underserved communities while supporting the next generation of industry professionals. We are simultaneously laying the groundwork for a more equitable and inclusive arts and music scene.

    Representative Reed’s website uses neutral, non-race-based language in an earlier announcement:

    OPENING DOORS AT BUMBERSHOOT

    Celebrating Seattle’s rich musical and artistic history makes for an amazing way to provide opportunities for our students. That’s why I was excited to see the annual Bumbershoot festival return to our district, with a renewed focus on local flavor and opportunities for local creatives to show their work and to expand their audience. It also provides space for our students to get real world experience in the creative economy thanks to the $150,000 included in this year’s budget.  

    The Bumbershoot Workforce internship program provides young people interested in creative careers with paid training in festival production and technical arts. I’m glad to be able to support Bumbershoot and the next generation of creative professionals in Washington State.

    The inconsistent manner in which the program is described makes it difficult to tell just how open the opened “doors” are, and just how many “barriers” were removed, and for whom. But it would seem that Rep. Reed at least perceived that the funds allotted to Bumbershoot for the internship/mentorship program would be given preferentially to non-white applicants, and felt that it was something to brag about in her newsletter.

    Building racially discriminatory structures into our government and the programs it funds is toxic to the functioning of a liberal democracy, and should be avoided and opposed in every form. Frankly, we’ve been there, and done that, going in every possible direction, and it has only thrown fuel on the fires of racial resentments.

    This program appears well-meaning, but seems intended to distribute its $150,000 based on race rather than relevant attributes like familial income, parents’ education, and so on. Why not target based on what we actually care about as a society, which is helping those in need? Race is a blunt instrument for achieving that goal, and very likely illegal given the recent Supreme Court decision on affirmative action in college admissions.

  • Quidism: the belief that things matter

    The belief that nothing has objective or inherent meaning – commonly called nihilism – is quite popular these days. In some ways I’m sympathetic: if you come to reject or at least harbor serious skepticism of the existence of a non-material, spiritual realm, and that’s where you put ultimate meaning, then brute material reality seemingly leaves you with nothing.

    But nihilism in that bare “nothing matters” sense is almost never what people embrace. The fact they get up in the morning, or breath in any given moment, seems to continuously contradict such an assertion. Usually people prepend some modifier to “nihilism” that makes it no longer really nihilist: “optimistic nihilism”, “hopeful nihilism” or whatever. Now it’s admitting that something does matter – else why even believe things can be better (as the optimist) or dare hope that they could be? Thus the adjective that clarifies that the philosophy’s not so bleak as all that. Not so nihilist.

    I got my monism largely from Mormonism:

    There is no such thing as immaterial matter. All spirit is matter, but it is more fine or pure, and can only be discerned by purer eyes;

    We cannot see it; but when our bodies are purified we shall see that it is all matter.

    Doctrine and Covenants 131:7

    I don’t consider Joseph Smith a prophet in any spiritual sense. But he dabbled in interesting philosophies and ideas, and some of those have merit, and I’m grateful to that extent that his creativity let those ideas spread. (He also advocated and practiced some truly terrible ideas….)

    The argument for monism is basically Occam’s Razor: it’s a simpler model of reality for there to be one type of thing rather than two.

    The difficulty is that we don’t know how that could possibly be true.

    Pascal wrestled with this in the 17th century:

    But the parts of the world are all so related and linked to one another, that I believe it impossible to know one without the other and without the whole….

    And what completes our incapability of knowing things, is the fact that they are simple, and that we are composed of two opposite natures, different in kind, soul and body. For it is impossible that our rational part should be other than spiritual; and if any one maintain that we are simply corporeal, this would far more exclude us from the knowledge of things, there being nothing so inconceivable as to say that matter knows itself. It is impossible to imagine how it should know itself….

    Who would not think, seeing us compose all things of mind and body, but that this mixture would be quite intelligible to us? Yet it is the very thing we least understand. Man is to himself the most wonderful object in nature; for he cannot conceive what the body is, still less what the mind is, and least of all how a body should be united to a mind. This is the consummation of his difficulties, and yet it is his very being. Modus quo corporibus adhærent spiritus comprehendi ab hominibus non potest, et hoc tamen homo est. [The manner in which spirits adhere to bodies cannot be understood by men, and yet this is man.]

    Blaise Pascal, Pensées, 72

    To the philosopher’s assertion that “it is impossible” I say: never say never.

    It is certainly more conceivable in 2024 than it was in 1670 that matter might “know itself”, with neural network language models writing eloquently enough that some are persuaded they’re conscious.

    Of course that doesn’t come close to resolving the old mind/body split, but it brings the two putative worlds that much closer together.

    That is only one aspect of the mind-body problem. The more difficult nut to crack may be the nature of subjective experience itself.

    That problem may be formulated in various ways, but I prefer the question, “How are material reality and subjective experience actually the same phenomenon?”

    It’s not so different from so-called wave-particle duality. And the partial resolution is to accept a hybrid phenomenon, the wave-particle, which behaves as both, but is one thing.

    So the body-mind (please forgive the woo connotations) is both the thing that contains (or generates?) subjective experience, and the brain and neural structures that correlate thereto.

    Strong evidence being the change in mental abilities caused by stroke or other brain injuries.

    This tells us that, but certainly not how.

    And what does this have to do with nihilism, or quidism for that matter?

    Human beings, by having such large mental capacity relative to other animals, can get lost in their mental constructs. And in that far-removed space of thought, many philosophers, pretending to be disembodied, have thought themselves into believing that nothing matters, because their thought-forms of meaning all prove malleable, impermanent, subject to critique.

    Forgetting that their material embodiment, the substrate on which thought rests and prerequisite for their seeming deconstruction of all meaning, itself lends meaning to their existence, by way of pleasure and suffering.

    Forgetting as Pascal believed that “the parts of the world are all so related and linked to one another” that the pleasure and suffering of one individual is inextricably linked to all the world around them, nature, human society, the technological world – everything.

    The only way to be truly nihilist is to ignore one’s own existence in the present moment. Is it not “ultimate” meaning? What’s not ultimate about being the only state of existence to exist – even if it will always eventually change?

    What is not ultimate about the life that an individual lives – which is the sum totality of all that they could possibly ever experience? That it ends? If it did not end, would we not be saying that its infinity makes it non-ultimate, because it never experiences its own end?

    Not ultimate, because supposedly the universe will arrive at heat death?

    As if we even know what matter and conscious experience are, and can interpret the significance of that putative, far-far-distant event, assuming it will even happen, and that the concept stays coherent in light of what we in the future discover about reality.

    Quidism is the belief that things matter.

    Nearly everybody believes that, as revealed by their actions.

    The opposite belief seems quite fashionable these days, but seems unjustified by the nature of reality as we understand it, and quite dumb as a life philosophy.

    The belief that things matter deserves a name, so I coined the word quidism, and wrote this article.

    Spread the word.

    It’s an idea that matters.

  • Mandatory Housing Affordability does not make housing affordable

    Mandatory Housing Affordability does not make housing affordable

    Seattle has MHA zones, and yet rent is what it is. Case in point.

    But if you’d like more evidence than that brute observation, a recent study goes further, finding that housing permits declined in MHA zones in Seattle, while they increased in non-MHA zones. This is effectively a non-result, or a negative result, spitting into the supply-vs-demand wind:

    While the metro area population has grown by 30 percent over the past two decades, Seattle is building fewer new units per year than when it had 1 million fewer inhabitants. As a result, since 2000, median house prices have nearly tripled; one in seven residents is severely rent burdened.

    The core cause of unaffordable housing is there not being enough housing.

    Mandatory Housing Affordability centers on a requirement that a certain percentage of units in new residential buildings be provided at below-market rates to lower-income residents. This requirement is coupled with a relaxation on restrictions to the density of developments.

    The goal is noble, but by imposing a costly requirement on developers, MHA drives developments into non-MHA zones, and possibly prevents some developments ever getting off the ground.

    The MHA zones were presumably zoned with an affordable housing requirement out of a desire to provide affordable housing in that geographical area. Now, perversely, the MHA requirement reduces the new housing actually built in the MHA zone, likely contributing to housing costs in that area.

    Whatever makes sensible housing developments illegal to construct makes housing in general less affordable, by making there be less of it.

    If there were more housing to choose from, people wouldn’t have to pay as much – as recently happened in Austin, TX after a glut of new housing construction.

    Every restriction on housing construction is also, de facto, a restriction on the so-called “wrong type of people” moving into “our” neighborhood – which explains much of their popularity. Zoning laws were the original vehicle of redlining, and still reinforce de facto segregation by preventing different sorts of housing from coexisting in the same area.

    That same concern over “preserving the character of the neighborhood”, I expect, is behind the startling fact that 98% of developments in Seattle MHA zones chose to pay into an affordable housing fund rather than actually providing affordable units.

    In a sense, affordable housing mandates like MHA are trying to artificially reintroduce interesting heterogeneous neighborhoods, made illegal by zoning’s introduction 100 years ago, replaced by the sameness of the zones.

    Without restrictions like minimum lot sizes, a wider range of plots sizes and thus housing types and levels of affordability could possibly coexist in the same neighborhood.

    Minneapolis has pioneered such reforms, with good results, and Washington is following that lead (and Oregon’s and California’s) with HB 1110 allowing duplexes, triplexes, and quadplexes in most neighborhoods, and HB 1337 allowing more accessory dwelling units.

    HBs 1110 and 1337 tackle the root of the affordability problem by making less housing construction illegal – i.e. allowing a greater quantity of sensible housing to be built. Many more reforms of that sort can, and should be made soon.

    Increasing housing supply is the only path toward actually making housing affordable. A proper respect for material reality, rather than misguided mandates, will pave the way.