How Wise, This Latina?

The opening salvo in the formality known as the Sonia Sotomayor confirmation hearings was an attack on Judge Sotomayor's impartiality.In particular, a 2001 speech in which she suggested that in some situations she hoped a “wise Latina” would make a better judgment than a white man. Republicans and their media mouthpieces, being contractually obligated to bash any Obama nomination, immediately took hold of this story and put it forth as an example of Sotomayor’s potential as an “activist” judge, and even used it to accuse her of racism.

It’s not surprising that the Republicans would take hold of this issue. There is little doubt that a white male justice who said he hoped that in certain cases a “wise white man” would make a better judgment than a Puerto Rican woman would be vilified by the left. The counterargument to this, of course, is that there is no comparable situation a white man could find himself in, since by the nature of our culture, white men do not come from an oppressed class and cannot experience oppression in the same way as a minority can. I’m not sure I agree with this, but I’d rather focus on Sotomayor’s critical statements.

Here’s the lecture quote that has everyone up in arms:

“I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life.”

She was referring specifically to cases of civil rights and discrimination, and responding to a quote of Sandra Day O’Connor’s that a wise man and a wise woman should come to the same conclusions when judging. The Sotomayor apologists would contend that she was simply saying that a white male does not have the breadth of cultural experience to equip him to fully understand the damages and dangers of institutionalized racism, not that they were in any way genetically inferior.

In her response to questioning on the issue, Sotomayor stated:

"I want to state upfront, unequivocally and without doubt: I do not believe that any racial, ethnic or gender group has an advantage in sound judging. I do believe that every person has an equal opportunity to be a good and wise judge, regardless of their background or life experiences."

So there you have it. That should be the end of the story. Unfortunately, what isn’t mentioned is that Sotomayor prefaced the “wise Latina” comment with this one:

“Whether born from experience or inherent physiological or cultural differences, a possibility I abhor less or discount less than my colleague Judge Cedarbaum, our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging.”

That sure sounds like she thinks racial background makes a difference. Is she saying it makes a difference but that difference is not an advantage? Is it a disadvantage? Clearly she doesn’t think that.

Frankly I am more concerned with the double standard. I have no doubt that if any member of a “non-oppressed” class were to suggest that there are inherent physiological differences that have an effect on judgment, they would be ruthlessly attacked by the left. That doesn’t mean it’s not true. It also doesn’t mean that Sotomayor is a racist. What I think it does mean is that people should not be so quick to play the race card at the merest mention of genetic, physiological or social differences between those of different ethnicities.

Let Freedom Ring!

In celebration of its 233rd birthday, here are a few fun facts about the United States:

Over 80 percent of the United States have laws prohibiting certain American citizens from marrying the spouse of their choice.

While 13.5 percent of Americans are African-American, 41 percent of those on death row are African American.

Women on average make 78 cents for every dollar a man makes.

The FISA Amendments Act still gives the government almost unlicensed ability to surveil the international communications of private American citizens.


Even with all that, I still believe this is the greatest country in the world. Happy Independence Day!

Is Michael Jackson's Death a Tragedy?

I don't know if you guys have heard, but Michael Jackson died.

I felt bad when I heard this, but not because of who MJ was. I felt bad because when I hear that anyone dies it reminds me of my own mortality, which is depressing (and largely why I stopped reading daily AOL headlines). Frankly, my first instinct, as I'm sure is the case for many others, is to find out why a 50 year old man suddenly died, so we can assure ourselves it won't happen to us (okay, I'm not doing daily Demerol shots, phew). Also, I've lost four close family members and a beloved family pet over the last five years, so I'm not going to lose too much sleep over Michael Jackson.

But clearly, if the news outlets are to be believed anyway, this is a pretty big deal, and some say, an unspeakable tragedy. But is it really a tragedy, more so than the death of anyone else? One thing I always think about when something like this happens is how much worse it would have been to die at 50 and never to have done anything culturally relevant, which happens probably every day. But objectively, is this a particular tragedy? To answer that, I think we need to talk about what it means to say a life ends tragically.

Was It a Violent End?

One situation in which we say someone died tragically is if their death was the result of violence. A car accident, a shooting, a fire. If not violent, a death that comes with great pain is considered tragic: Cancer, emphysema, ALS. Michael Jackson appears to have essentially passed away in his sleep.

Was Someone Else Responsible?

We also consider it tragic if someone causes the death of another. When someone who should have continued living but does not because someone hit them with a car or crashed their plane, this is considered a tragedy. A suicide is also considered tragic, but usually it is the circumstances that led to the suicide that are thought of as tragic, not necessarily the death itself. This one is not clear. It may be that Jackson received bad information about prescription drug use, and it may even be that drug overdose will not turn out to be the cause of death, but it seems equally likely that he took risks with drugs even after receiving precautionary advice from doctors.

Was His Life Cut Short?

This is the big one. If someone should have lived for a much longer time on average, then we consider his death a tragedy. The average life expectancy of the African American male is about 69 years. That means that Michael was cheated out of 19 years on average. Unfortunate, but it may not be tragic. Of course, MJ was not the average African American male. But we don't know if that works for him or against him. Clearly he is not subject to the life-shortening effects of poverty or gang violence, but on the other hand, there is anecdotal evidence to suggest that the lifespans of great musicians are shorter than average. Some of the greatest musicians in history did not even see their 50th birthdays (Elvis Presley, 42, John Lennon, 40, Wolfgang Mozart, 35, Jim Morrison, 28, Sam Cooke, 33, Marvin Gaye, 45, Otis Redding, 26, Jimi Hendrix, 27).

Did He Have More to Contribute?

What about Michael's contribution to society? While he was planning a new concert tour which would no doubt have been sold out, it seems that Michael's positive cultural relevance is largely on the decline. I would be surprised if most of the people who are now playing their old Michael Jackson DVDs and downloads around the clock had chosen of their own accord to play a Michael Jackson song anytime in the last ten years before June 26th. Since HIStory in the late '90s, MJ has been primarily known for his bizarre lifestyle, accusations of child molestation, and questionable treatment of his own children. This doesn't take away from his historic contributions to the music world during his lifetime, of course, it's just a question of how much more he had to give.

As I stated, there is a way in which it is a tragedy when anyone dies. But is it any more of a tragedy than the death of say, Farrah Fawcett, who lost a courageous battle with cancer at the age of 62 and who is credited for a number of movie roles inspiring women to take control of their lives, or of Stephen T. Johns, killed by a white supremacist while defending the Washington D.C. Holocaust museum? Probably not.

Some might say: why even speak of whose death is a 'greater' tragedy? When anyone dies, especially prematurely, it is equally unfortunate. If that is your attitude, good for you. In a world where certain lives are clearly valued above others, it seems that is a rare position to take.

Wormholes, Worldlines and Whatnot

In the first blog in this series, I talked about the many reasons that I felt time travel stories don’t work. I specifically mentioned the main physical, metaphysical, logical and aesthetic objections. In the second blog, I bravely took up the other side, and discussed how the Many Worlds Theory effectively rebuts the metaphysical objections, and to some extent, the logical ones. However, the physical, aesthetic, and to some extent, the logical objections remain. What’s a time travel advocate to bring up in his defense now? Answer: Wormholes.

Wormholes

A wormhole functions according the idea that spacetime is curved, and there can essentially be a situation where a bridge is created cutting right through that curve, a sort of tunnel between an earlier and later time. In other words, if time were a straight line ----, it would take you a certain amount of time to get from point A to point B. But if time were more of a “C” shape, you could get from one end of the C to the other much faster by cutting through it rather than going around the curve.

This indeed solves a lot of problems. It counters the physical objection, because you can have a wormhole where objects are not moving at the speed of light inside the tunnel, although they might appear to be to outside observers (a wormhole is not simply two black holes with a bridge between them, but rather a black hole and a white hole linked by negative energy).

The show Sliders made heavy use of wormholes and the Einstein-Rosen bridges between them. Wormholes also take care of my main logical objection, the Tourist Trap, which was that if time travel is possible at one point, it becomes possible simultaneously throughout the time stream. Scientists have postulated that time travel through a wormhole would require the “stationary end” to appear first. In other words, a wormhole couldn’t open up allowing you to travel back to someplace where there wasn’t a wormhole before. The point of this being that we may not have experienced time travel yet because the first “stop,” or the first wormhole, hasn’t been created/found yet.

Worldlines

There has been another use of time travel in fiction that I haven’t mentioned yet, but that I have found to be very effective. This is the idea of the worldline. Worldlines are essentially lines that travel through space and time at once, as opposed to a timeline that simply marks the passage of time. In other words, a person’s life, drawn on a graph, would be a worldline, as it plots their movement through space and time. Some time travel stories intimate that it is possible to travel back and forth on your own worldline, since it is simply a line that exists in the universe, not something that is being created or destroyed. Under the right circumstances you should able to walk back and forth along it like the path to your tomato garden.

Whatnot

This still does not address my aesthetic objection, which you’ll remember was that time travel stories are simply messy: Specifically, it 1. disrupts continuity and makes it difficult to invest in the characters, and 2. creates the slippery slope: You go back and change something, I go back and fix it, you go back and unfix it, ad infinitum. To close out this extended rant, I’d like to take a look at how some time travel stories handle all this and how effective I think it has been.

Star Trek

I frankly think that time travel has made Star Trek a pretty big mess. You can argue with the last movie that the Romulan time trip created a new, alternate timeline, and that the initial timeline is moving forth as it always had (albeit without a Spock). That’s okay, I guess, but I suspect we will never see our “real” timeline again, and even that timeline has been removed by so many jumps it hardly matters (for example in Star Trek, First Contact, the Borg go back in time and take over Earth, radically changing its history. The Enterprise crew goes back and fixes it. However according to the Many Worlds theory, the initial timeline was unchanged by the Borg, and the Borg’s new timeline was unchanged by the Enterprise; we simply have three different universes in effect. Yes I have a headache now too).

Quantum Leap, Watchmen, Slaughterhouse Five

I lump these together because they all make what I think is effective use of the “Worldline” theory of time travel. Dr. Sam Beckett can only travel back and forth through time within his own lifetime, while Dr. Manhattan experiences different times in his life simultaneously. Billy Pilgrim has come “unstuck” in time, and experiences his life randomly through time, jumping from one point to the next without rhyme or reason (or at least without rhyme). In each case, the universe is not offended by their time travel.

Back to the Future

Back to the Future alludes to the Many Worlds theory, but not quite effectively. Dr. Brown does explain how moving through time creates an alternate timeline. However, he creates a sticky situation when he does a test run by sending his dog three minutes into the future. The dog has clearly reappeared in the same timeline, which forces us to confront the possibility that somehow moving ahead in time does not create new timelines while moving backwards does. Marty also finds that changing the past is affecting his original present (the picture with his siblings disappearing as they are “uncreated”), which gives rise to the “grandfather paradox” anew.

Sliders

Sliders handles the wormhole idea pretty well, but its protagonists are jumping through dimensions, not moving through time and space. There are no paradoxes because they never encounter the same timeline twice, although Quinn Mallory’s quest to return to his home dimension may prove impossible.

Comic Books

Members of the Legion of Superheroes travel freely back and forth through time with little concern about the consequences. The mainstream DC universe has not created a very sophisticated look at time travel although they used to have an interesting conceit where if you went back to a time where you already existed, you would appear as a wraith, since the same person cannot “be in two places at once.”

The Terminator

Terminator time travel isn’t too unwieldy for a number of reasons. The first is that only a handful of people go back before the time travel device is destroyed, and they can’t travel the other way. There are still some paradox issues, but since time travel is used so sparingly, it doesn’t interfere with the story too much.

Okay. I’m finally done with the time travel stuff. Next week I’ll go back to ranting about traffic patterns in L.A. or bad poker beats or why some Right to Lifers are psychotic or whatever.

Why You Love Time Travel Part I

In my last post, I complained about time travel as it appears in television, movies and fiction in general. I felt that there were a number of inconsistencies about time travel as to make it so implausible as to render any story based on it completely unenjoyable.

Clearly I’m in the minority in this opinion. Time travel stories continue to delight, generation after generation. Why should this be, if my objections are so irrefutable? Well, one reason is some people just like a good story and don’t care how unbelievable it is. As I pointed out in my last blog, Superman’s “impossible” ability to fly doesn’t deter my enjoyment of his adventures (although I prefer Batman). However, there's more to it than that.

The Objections to Time Travel

I raised four basic objections to time travel as portrayed in fiction: Physical: As one approaches the speed of light, required for going back in time, mass becomes infinite, effectively destroying the time traveler; Metaphysical: Specifically the Grandfather Paradox (you go back in time and kill your grandfather, therefore you are never born and cannot go back in time to kill your grandfather, etc.) and the Ontological Paradox (Future Craig hands me an envelope which he tells me to hold on to for five years. Five years later I go back in time and hand myself the envelope. Where did the envelope come from?). Logical: Specifically, the Tourist Objection; If time travel is possible, how come we don’t know about it yet? We should be being visited by an effectively infinite number of time travelers all the time, where are they? And Aesthetic: How can any story have internal consistency if someone can always go back in time and change what happened?

I mentioned that there are rebuttals to all of these objections (I excepted the aesthetic but I will stipulate that for most people, if the other objections are satisfied the aesthetic one should be as well, even if I personally am not comfortable with it), and hence, some time travel stories that work. So here goes:

Let’s start by addressing the Metaphysical objections. The famous grandfather paradox and the ontological paradox. There are two main ways that philosophers approach the problem of time travel paradoxes: The Many Worlds Theory and the Novikov Self-Consistency Principle.

The Novikov Self-Consistency Principle

The Novikov Self-Consistency Principle simply states that anything that cannot happen, will not happen. In other words, if you go back in time and try to kill your grandfather, you will always fail. Your gun will misfire at the last minute, you will have shot the wrong person, or the right person but it will turn out that he wasn’t your grandfather after all, etc. The television show LOST makes use of the self-consistency principle. Daniel Faraday repeatedly explains that no matter what they try to do, the future will not change, because whatever happened is immutable and has already happened, even if the time-traveling protagonists are at an earlier place in the timeline. Ben cannot be killed as a child, the Dharma Initiative cannot be saved, simply because it didn’t happen.

I do not find this theory particularly compelling. There is nothing in the universe to suggest that it actively attempts to sort out paradoxes at a macro level. If you shoot someone, they will die, and to suggest that the universe somehow “knows” to protect them seems to be so fanciful as to make the theory meaningless. This also does not explain the ontological paradox.

The Many Worlds Theory

The many worlds theory, popularized in D.C. Comics with their “multiverse,” and based on the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle which says that the states of certain particles at the quantum level are not fixed until observed, and that until they are observed they exist in multiple states at once, is much more compelling. It is referenced in Back to the Future and used in comic book literature and other works of fiction, including the television show Sliders and the Michael Crichton book “Timeline.”

The idea of the multiverse is that the universe as we know it is just one of many possible universes that exist in different dimensions, and that each choice we make represents the universe that we fix in time out of the infinite universes that are possible. As it pertains to time travel, the theory goes that when we go back in time and change something, we create an alternate timeline. Our original timeline, the one that spawned us, continues on into infinity while we exist in the new, altered timeline.

This idea seems to work pretty well. It addresses the grandfather paradox: when you kill your grandfather, you create a universe where you never existed, however you, the killer, came from a parallel universe where you did exist. It addresses the ontological paradox too. In Terminator, Kyle Reese is sent back in time to protect Sarah Connor so that John Connor will be born. He ends up becoming John Connor’s father. According to the theory, there was a “prime” universe where John Connor had some other father. In that universe, Kyle Reese was sent back in time, creating an alternate universe where Kyle Reese is John Connor’s father, as we see in the movie.

How this is handled can get complicated. In Back to the Future, Marty and his siblings start to disappear when it seems that Marty may have prevented his parents from ever falling in love. If this is an alternate universe, that shouldn’t be an issue. In “Timeline” Crichton addresses this problem by suggesting that events in an alternate timeline have a “ripple effect.” That over the course of time, minor changes happen in the original timeline so that it will “catch up,” and become consistent with that timeline. In other words, events in one timeline can have an effect on others.

I feel that the many worlds theory is pretty effective in addressing the metaphysical objection, and as I stated in my first post, the metaphysical objection doesn't trouble me that much. The many worlds theory does also address the logical objection to some extent. If travelers going back in time are always creating alternate timelines, we shouldn’t expect to ever meet one in our “prime” universe. However I don’t find this entirely compelling. Somehow it seems that we still might receive a visitor from an alternate future, so that our prime timeline is their alternate one, or that the ripple effect should still produce premature time travel in our universe. I feel that there are stronger rebuttals to the “Time Tourist” objection, which is tied in with the rebuttal to the physical objection (hint: Wormholes), and I’ll discuss those in Part II.

Why I Hate Time Travel

The summer blockbuster season has arrived and it seems that the words of the day are “time travel.” Time travel is all the rage, and appears prominently in the latest “Star Trek” installment, as well as being a key element of Terminator: Salvation. Time travel was also a frequent theme of the Terminator television series, and of course is crucial to ABC’s ever popular LOST.

Time Travel in Science Fiction

While the latest Star Trek movie installment was hailed as “original” and “groundbreaking,” time travel is actually an extremely common element of the Star Trek series. It was the theme of four Star Trek Movies (“The Voyage Home,” “Generations” and “First Contact,” in addition to the latest installment), and has appeared multiple times in every Star Trek series (TOS: City on the Edge of Forever, Assignment: Earth, TNG: Yesterday’s Enterprise, Time’s Arrow, DS9: Little Green Men, Trials and Tribble-ations, VOY: Future’s End, Relativity, ST:E: Cold Front, Zero Hour).

The Terminator series is completely reliant on time travel to tell its story. Clearly time travel is a popular device for purveyors of science fiction. So why do I hate it so much?

Problems with Time Travel

My problems with time travel, like time travel itself, span multiple dimensions. These dimensions are Physical, Metaphysical, Logical and Aesthetic. To address each of these in turn:

Physical:

Time travel the way it is depicted in most fiction is impossible. This, frankly, is the least of my concerns with time travel, as science fiction is generally predicated on the impossible. However, I just thought I’d put it out there. The whole idea of time travel is usually designed around Einstein’s Relativity theories, which essentially state that how fast time moves depends on your perspective, and that space and time exist together along a continuum. The faster you are moving and the farther away you are from an object, the slower time appears to you relative to the object that isn’t moving as fast or that you are far away from. The theory continues to suggest that if you could move fast enough, you could theoretically move backwards through the time stream, and there are in fact particles that do this, called tachyons.

The problem with all of this for say, Ambassador Spock, is that as one approaches the speed of light, one’s mass becomes infinite, and the human (or Vulcan) body is not really equipped for infinite mass, so anyone traveling through a black hole or some kind of particle accelerator might reappear back in time, but they would do so as so much mush.

Metaphysical:




Again, the physical objection is no big deal. Superman shouldn’t be able to fly either and I’m fine with that. I’m also not too caught up in the metaphysical problems, but I should address them as well.

The metaphysical problems are the paradoxes. There is the classic “Grandfather Paradox;” if you go back in time and kill your grandfather, you will never be born, and therefore you can never go back in time to kill your grandfather. There is the equally troubling “Ontological Paradox,” which comes up much more often. For example in Terminator, John Connor sends Kyle Reese back to protect his mother. Reese ends up in a relationship with Connor’s mother and becomes his father. But who was there to send Reese back the “first time?” That is to say, before the events of Judgment Day happened, who fathered John Connor?

Another example occurs in Star Trek. Scotty needs to transport the heroes onto a moving spaceship, but the technology hasn’t been invented yet. Future Spock assures Scotty that he will one day invent such technology, and in fact provides New Scotty with the required information. The question now becomes, where did this information come from in the first place?

It also appears in LOST. Richard Alpert in the past gives Locke a compass. Locke later gives this compass to Alpert with instructions to give it to him in the past. So what is the compass’ origin? Again, there is a rebuttal to these paradoxes, and these issues don’t concern me overmuch, although they are annoying.

Logical:

The logical objection IS one that concerns me. Although there is a rebuttal, it is NEVER used in fiction to my knowledge, certainly not in Star Trek movies. Here goes. The premise of this objection is that time travel isn’t possible because it doesn’t exist right now. You can’t say “it hasn’t been invented yet” because there is no “yet,” since time travel is involved. If it is discovered anywhere in the timestream, then it must exist everywhere. Some might argue that this is okay because whoever travelled back kept it a secret, or met people who could not understand or evaluate the technology. But that assumes that time travel works like so:

One person travels from point A to Point B, and possibly back, no harm no foul. But if time travel is possible, there are an infinite number of travels, like so:

For as long as human beings exist in time, people will be going back, making anachronistic holes in the time line like so much swiss cheese. With an infinite number of travelers, eventually one will make time travel technology possible at an earlier time, which will then lead to infinitely more travelers between that earlier time and other times, until time travelers are EVERYWHERE. And as far as I can tell, they are not.

Aesthetic:

There are even rebuttals to the logical argument, but there is no rebuttal to the aesthetic argument, which is that time travel is just messy. In Star Trek, the 2009 movie, The Romulans go back in time and wipe out Vulcan. This causes the hundreds of years of fictional history and the decades of real Star Trek history to be wiped out. All the great Star Trek mythology you thrilled to as a child, well, most of it just never happened, cause the Romulans went back in time. How then, can I be expected to invest myself in this new group of characters, when I know that someday, the Romulans could go back in time and destroy the escape ship that contained the unborn Captain Kirk, or destroy the Earth in 1776, or take over the Federation in 2214 with advanced 25th century technology?

Furthermore, there is the Slippery Slope issue which I find so grating that the story is nearly impossible for me to enjoy. In Star Trek, the Romulan mining ship goes back in time and destroys Vulcan. Now that Starfleet is aware of this, why not send a Starfleet force back to where the Romulans will someday pop into the sky and destroy them before they do it? Why not send an espionage force to kill Captain Nero’s mother, a la Terminator? It seems to me that if you can go back and change things, you can always send someone somewhere else in the timeline to change things back. And that’s why I hate time travel stories.

Note: There are some valid rebuttals to all but the aesthetic argument, and hence some time travel concepts/stories that work. I’ll address those in my next post.

The Right to Life

One of the current hot button issues concerns Daniel Hauser, a young Minnesotan suffering from Hodgkin's Lymphoma. The issue is that Hauser is refusing chemotherapy, which studies show have an excellent chance of curing him completely, in favor of untested homeopathic remedies that will almost surely result in his death.

This brings into contrast a classic debate over whether or not the government has a right to interfere in our lives, even when our lives are at stake. Since suicide and euthanasia are against the law in most states, clearly the general consensus is yes. In many cases, such as the right to make informed medical decisions, the situation is not so cut and dried. (By the way if you claim to be "pro-life" and favor banning abortions but think that Colleen Hauser should be free to roll the dice with the health of her child, you are a raging hypocrite.)

What I think is cut and dried is that in the case of children, the medical establishment should prevail. It might be better for society if it didn't, Darwinism in action and all that, but the fact is that the 13 year old Daniel Hauser, who is operating under the warped belief that he is some kind of "medicine man" is simply not old enough to know any better. When he is in his final moments screaming in the throes of cancer-driven agony, he cannot "take it back" and ask for the medicine. It will be too late. For the parents and libertarian advocates to turn this child into a political issue is self-serving and pathetic.

This is also why I hate Jehovah's Witnesses, by the way. Not letting your kids have birthday parties is merely cruel, but refusing them life-saving blood transfusions is just sadistic.