Category Archives: justice

No More Usury

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I had a bunch of energy this morning and decided to work on a side project that I’m calling ‘No More Usury.’

I’ve been interested in the idea of usury for a long time, essentially since I learned what it was. Usury is the practice of charging interest for loans and it’s a sin in all of the Abrahamic religions. But all of our banks charge interest on loans, otherwise they wouldn’t make any money. I wondered what happened, did usury stop being a sin? Did people just stop caring?

In the West, with Christianity, it seems they just changed the definition of usury so that it meant charging excessive interest. In the Middle East, Islamic banks don’t charge interest on loans, but they take a share of any profits made by the business or entity. These religions have figured out a way around this sin so that banks can make money.

But if the bank wasn’t trying to make a profit it wouldn’t need to find a loophole around usury. What if there was a bank that had an entirely different business model; a non-profit bank wouldn’t need to charge interest.

In light of the student loan debt I am about to take on, and this recent Bill Moyers Segment I’ve decided to take some steps towards starting such a bank. Even if nothing happens, I think it’s a fun project to work on for my computer science masters.
I think the idea will appeal to conservatives who want a moral, usury-free bank, and liberals, who want to overthrow our current banking system. I think it’s a pretty good idea. Come visit my site and sign up for my email list if you think so too.

Framing the Conversation

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I arrived in Kabul this morning. Two days ago I was in New York staying with a friend from high school. He is a highly skilled craftsman who makes, among other things, gorgeous wooden frames. He recently found a rare New York apartment that let him set up a small woodworking studio downstairs and he’s saving up for a bandsaw.

Today I visited another place that makes frames; Golestan Sabak. This school, run by a wonderful widow named Fatima Akbari, teaches women and children. The students learn not just literacy but also vocations like embroidery and carpentry. In particular we visited the workshop where disabled people learn woodcarving, calligraphy and frame-making. 3 weeks ago a big snow dump caused her tent to collapse, destroying their electric saw.

Another recent New York conversation echoes in my head. My friend and I were eating lunch at Columbia where some students were protesting the settlements in Gaza. I asked my friend how he felt about the protest and he said essentially ‘Think Globally Act Locally’ that there are plenty of problems to deal with in New York. But one of the problems is misinformation. People just don’t know about the settlements or about women’s carpentry workshops in Afghanistan. Well maybe a couple people do now.

Valentine’s Day is Wack

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Wiggity wack? No, just regular
–teen girl squad

Of all the prejudices I come up against every day the most obnoxious, lately, is the simple, pervasive assumption that as a woman, I won’t be satisfied without a husband, 2.5 kids, and a house in the suburbs. When I say I don’t want this, people make another set of assumptions;

A) I’m lying
B) I’m a lesbian
C) I’m in denial
D) I had a bad breakup
E) I don’t know what good sex is like
F) I’m cynical because I come from a broken home
G) I just haven’t found the right guy

Maybe they’re right, or perhaps I’d enjoy one of the more alternative, unmarried relationships recently described in this Atlantic article or this hairpin piece from a few years ago. A relationship with separate beds, or separate rooms, or separate wings (like Beauty and the Beast), or separate houses (like Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera who had adjacent houses joined by a walkway) or maybe even (gasp!) not a romantic relationship at all. Maybe as a child, I didn’t dream of a house with a husband and a white picket fence and a bunch of kids on the lawn, I dreamed of Ms. Honey’s cottage in Matilda (except, SPOILER ALERT; I wouldn’t have adopted Matilda at the end because I don’t like kids).

In writing all these letters for my month of letters I’ve been out shopping for cards and postcards, only to be reminded that it’s Valentine’s day next week and they’ve replaced all the good cards with red and pink hearts. I don’t hate Valentine’s day (who could hate this old school Outkast jam), but I hate the look of pity people give me when I say I’ve never had a date (this fact is true every day, not just Valentine’s day, but somehow people feel more sorry for me on Valentine’s Day). Valentine’s Day celebrates one particular type of romantic love, but as Jane Austen says in Mansfield Park:

“There are as many forms of love as there are moments in time.”

Here’s Steinbeck in a letter to his son:

“There are several kinds of love. One is a selfish, mean, grasping, egotistical thing which uses love for self-importance. This is the ugly and crippling kind. The other is an outpouring of everything good in you—of kindness and consideration and respect—not only the social respect of manners but the greater respect which is recognition of another person as unique and valuable. The first kind can make you sick and small and weak but the second can release in you strength, and courage and goodness and even wisdom you didn’t know you had.”

There is a good quote from Infinite Jest that I want to share, but it’s about 6 pages long. In it David Foster Wallace writes about a paraplegic who made a choice to love without pleasure; to love a woman with no skull, who leaks spinal fluid, has a hook for hands and is in an irreversible coma. To me, this passage made the entire 1000 page book worthwhile.

There is the love between you and your best friend, the love between you and your family, the love between you and your neighbor, anon. How is this love less significant than the love you have with your lover? In a way, the childrens’ version of the holiday is better at celebrating the different forms of love since you have to give cards to everyone, not just the boy you have a crush on.

What other holidays apply only to a certain subset of the population? (Some are religious, but we all get the day off for Christmas)

P.S. Another great post by ehs dub at I’m Revolting, whose birthday is today. You win, all hail the queen.

UPDATE 2/14:
Ryan North stole my idea! JK, only love for Dinosaur Comics.

Visages

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I’ve been reading a book about provincial life set in the mid 19th century and became curious about the descriptions of peoples’ faces. To me, Byronic locks and a noble chin don’t give me a good picture of someone at all. Maybe that’s because I grew up in a world with pictures and movies and internet and I’m not used to using my imagination. Maybe words are just not the best medium to describe the human face. Maybe it’s because there is more variation in face shape in 21st century California; in 19th century England, most people looked fairly similar, so a description could easily conjure up the type of face that this person might have. But lately I’ve been toying with the idea that description says more about the describer than the described.

To a disturbing extent we see what we want to see. In college I took a class in which we talked about the Portuguese discovery of Africa and America. The most advanced maps that the Portuguese had were based on world travelers, who were fairly accurate about the places they were familiar with, and less accurate about the communities on the periphery. The borders of these maps were full of fanciful monsters (one of whom used his extra large foot as a parasol to shade himself from the African sun). The explorers were so willing to believe that Africans and Native Americans were not human because they were expecting monsters that when they found people who didn’t look like them, they assumed that they must have found these monsters.

On this week’s Culture Gabfest, Stephen Metcalf recommends a genre of poems where the narrator is a person who sees someone else and fills in what they don’t know about them with their own imagination.

What is the best way to describe someone’s face? How do we use other peoples’ faces to project our own beliefs?

“Language gives a fuller image, which is all the better for beings vague. After all, the true seeing is within; and painting stares at you with an insistent imperfection. I feel that especially about representations of women. As if a woman were a mere colored superficies! You must wait for movement and tone. There is a difference in their very breathing: they change from moment to moment.—This woman whom you have just seen, for example: how would you paint her voice, pray? But her voice is much diviner than anything you have seen of her.”
–Middlemarch, George Eliot

“You see us as you want to see us, in the simplest terms and the most convenient definitions.”-The Breakfast Club, John Hughes

Update 1/28: a great description of a face

“To superficial observers his chin had too vanishing an aspect, looking as if it were being gradually reabsorbed. And it did indeed cause him some difficulty about the fit of his satin stocks, for which chins were at that time useful.”
–Middlemarch, George Eliot

Update 2/4

more monsters

Social justice

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In my constant struggle for moral clarity and social justice, I have lately been reminded of a troubling fact; justice is as much about lifting people up, as it is about putting (or pulling) people down. It’s not all about rising tides lifting all boats, and bringing people up to the tall bridge (Hanna Rosin’s version of the glass ceiling), it’s also about yanking people down from their pedestals and reminding them what it’s like to feel pain and to be hated just for being who they are.

Obviously you don’t need to be a minority to know what it feels like to be ostracized, we all went through middle school. In adolescence, it seems like everyone’s unbalanced, and sometimes the way you are unbalanced exacerbates someone else’s imbalances. But you can’t seem to help it. Life isn’t fair, and neither is divorce, or sexual harassment, or war, or poverty, or racism, or addiction, or psychosis. It’s not fair that some people are beautiful and others are ugly, that some are born rich, and talented, when the boy you like likes your best friend better, when you’re fired due to budget cuts, when you can’t seem to find the words to say what you want to say, and everyone seems to be speaking a different language altogether.

Everyone feels this, including white people including the beautiful and talented (like Joan Didion), including the 1%. Sometimes I think the occupy movement is mostly about revenge. As much as I crave revenge, there is a certain amount of injustice we just need to accept. And acceptance takes time and patience. And some pain will never go away.