Colorado snow job

A Colorado snow job

Few arguing techniques are so annoying, maddening, and widespread as the either/or logical fallacy, which finds perhaps its consummate expression in the "love it or leave it" charge.

A recent letter to the editor of the Denver Post that I wrote, and which the Post published (12/27/06), elicited a hand-written, home-delivered letter oozing anger. The letter plugged into the oh-so-common either/or logical fallacy, probably the most prevalent of all logical fallacies.

In my letter to the Post, I criticized the snow and ice removal efforts in Colorado. The Post had shown in an article published a few days beforehand that these efforts simply don't stack up to efforts in cities like Chicago, New York, etc.

In fact, a few weeks earlier, I had sent an e-mail to several Denver Post reporters suggesting that the Post do such a comparison. It's possible that my e-mail inspired the original story, which showed that Denver trails Chicago, Pittsburgh, New York, etc. by a wide margin in terms of the number of plows per highway lane mile.

In any case, here is my original letter, followed by the angry response, followed by my response to the response:

Dear Denver Post:
Mayor John Hickenlooper and Gov. Bill Owens act as if Denver's clear shortcomings in snow removal, as compared to cities such as New York and Chicago, are only a liability during a massive storm.

In fact, beefing up metro Denver's snow-removal fleet would improve road conditions and increase safety during smaller snowfalls. A former East Coaster, I dread even the tiniest of storms here because of a totally inadequate approach to snow removal.

In eastern Massachusetts, after 4 inches of snow and in 25 degree temperatures, major highways would immediately be down to bare pavement. Here, given exactly the same conditions, drivers typically face an ice-skating rink.

The bottom line: Too few snowplows and too little money spent on keeping roads clear means snow gets packed down to ice before plows can get there, even with small snowfalls.

The response, from the angry individual who went so far as to track down my address and pop for a 39-cent stamp:

"Hi,
I'm from Massachusetts. If you like Massachusetts so well, move back there! PLEASE!!!!

If you won't move back, then stop complaining!!!

Either enjoy what Colorado has to offer or move. Whining is not an option."

Of course, there are multiple alternatives to the either/or options I'm given. The most obvious of these is to lobby for better snow and ice removal efforts that will make Colorado a better, and safer place to live.

Casting me as a "whiner" is also a classic, and simplistic, rhetorical maneuver -- an attempt to put the critic on the defensive simply for being critical (see my "Criticizing critics of the critic" blog entry for more on this).

Notice the implied violence in the statement, "Whining is not an option." It's as if the letter writer is making my decision for me in terms of what my options allegedly are, or not -- or else!

In the end, employing either/or logical fallacies and ad hominem attacks are an attempt to shout down an argument rather than to engage an argument in a thinking manner. They are the non-thinking person's easy way out. Sadly, this is pretty much the standard approach to argumentation for a sizeable number of Americans, with the Bill O'Reilly, conservative talk radio crowd the prime exemplars.

Colorado snow myths

I love Colorado (I could go on and on about what I love about it -- but I won't. At least not in this blog entry). I don't want to move back to Massachusetts. But some things are better back east. Clearly, one of these is snow and ice removal.

The difference is particularly apparent during "piddly" snowfalls, say between 2 to 5 inches. Road crews dump a lot of chemicals on the roads in Massachusetts -- and there are simply more plows on major highways there.

Yes, your car rusts more quickly, and more salt flows into the environment in Massachusetts. On the other hand, I suspect your chances of totaling your car during a relatively minor snowfall are dramatically lower in Massachusetts than in Colorado.

I'm an experienced and very good winter driver. But it's just plain ridiculous that a non-storm here in Colorado, at least along the Front Range, turns driving into a white-knuckle affair. It doesn't have to be this way, and life would be better, and safer, for all Coloradoans if more effort and money were invested in keeping roads free of ice and snow here.

The typical response to such charges -- other than "love it or leave it," is that, well, it's sunny here in Colorado, and the sun melts the snow more quickly than back east. In fact, one hears this claim so often here, one might be forgiven if one actually began to believe that, miraculously, the flakes fly in Colorado under cloud-free, blue-sky conditions!

Yes, there is more sun here. However, the last time I checked, the following things significantly mitigate the impact of the sun on snow along the Front Range, which receives more annual snowfall than much of Eastern Massachusetts:

1) Extremely short days in: November, December and January.
2) Very low sun angles during the same months.
3) Snow that, unbelievably, falls in: a) cloudy conditions; b) during the night.
4) Too few plows and de-icing chemicals placed on the roads too late, which means the snow is quickly packed into hard ice; ice doesn't melt quickly, even in sunny conditions!

These basic realities are glossed over by the simplistic "it's sunny in Colorado" crowd. It just isn't that simple, though, of course, the world's black-and-white crowd wants us to think it is.

Those poor unhappy rich people

How many times do we have to hear that "money doesn't/can't buy happiness" -- a grand statement almost inevitably uttered by:

a) some dude who makes a pretty/very/or very very comfortable living

b) and/or some dude who's bought into this religious ideology or that one wholesale

c) and/or some psychologist, or pseudo-psychologist (who also happens to make a very good living)

"Money can't buy you happiness" is WAY too simple. It fails to acknowledge that those with more money have more choices, in many cases, many more choices than those with less money.

It just grates when I read something like the following, from The Wall Street Journal's Jonathan Clements (jonathan.clements@waj.com) from a recent "Getting Going" column, a syndicated column that runs weekly in The Denver Post Business Section:

"Money may not make you happy. But it could make you desperately unhappy. Lots of folks stagger through life, buffeted by credit-card debt, unpaid bills and gnawing fears about their financial future.

"Sure, these worries are more likely to hit those with lower incomes..."

Say what!?

OK, in the first paragraph Clements is probably referring to yuppies who make $100k plus, who are still running up the credit card bills, when they don't "need" to ("need" is a thorny, difficult-to-define term, to say the least).

Trouble is, he collapses everyone into this paragraph, including the folks who Barabra Ehrenreich has clearly shown have been "Nickeled and Dimed" to death.

While I can't claim to be being nickeled and dimed, life can be plenty stressful for those of us well below the $100k mark.

People like us might have no choice other than use credit cards to pay for the replacement of a leaky roof. We had no other (better) choice (cash is the best choice), and we're hardly living the high life. (We live in a modest 3-bedroom, 1600-foot house that eats up 50 percent of our monthly income, and which we bought for $40k less than the median house sells for in metro Denver).

To be fair, with outstanding credit, we were able to use a check from a credit card company that gave us 3.9% interest -- and we were well-versed enough in credit card-ese to know that we had to pay off our entire balance before using the check, and that we can't use that credit card again until we have that $4k debt paid off, or face paying 20% interest on anything we now charge on that card.

In fact, it's Clements' second paragraph that's most patronizing: "Sure, these (credit card, debt) worries are more likely to hit those with lower incomes."

It's hard not to chalk this breezy sentence up to anything but sheer dismissiveness -- and ignorance. It's a good bet that the closest Clements' ever come to "those with lower incomes" is the janitor working the night shift -- and his second job -- at the WSJ offices.

We're not the janitor working two jobs. And I'm not saying that our four person family qualifies for low-income status, though at $50k per year, we are below the median income for a family of four. But our lack of income DOES add considerable stress to our lives, and reduces the number of choices that we have compared to people that are more well off.

For example, while my wife and I have to spend time trying to figure out which lower interest credit card to transfer our several thousand dollar balance to, people with more money can spend their time on other things (yachting in the Bahamas, anyone? anyone?).

While we have to pay $150 in mortgage insurance because we couldn't afford to put 20% down on a house that was $40k below the Denver metro median cost those with more money need not sweat this -- and they can spend the extra $150 per month on say, high speed Internet, cable, and maybe a cellular plan (all things we forego to cut costs).

While I labor away in the garage to fix that broken appliance, and the other, and work hard to maintain a 15-year-old car (our only one), while I spend time cleaning our bathrooms, crawling into our attic to add insulation, while I take out the garbage, put up a fence in our yard and do other yard work, while I dream of the German-speaking nanny I'd like to hire so that my daughters could have someone other than myself teach them German, others simply dig into their cash supply and hire out.

And I bet they don't throw a fit when they mistakenly break the baby crib that they got for free because they're worried about plopping down an extra $150 for a new crib.

Absolutely, we are privileged compared to true low-income folks -- the folks working two, three jobs, with both parents, and possibly all kids working. The people, who despite the long hours and multiple jobs, are still unable to pay the basic housing, food, utility bills, etc. These are the people buying stuff at rent-to-own, and going to pay-day loan outfits so that they can buy their kids Christmas presents, or even, just put clothes on their backs.

Oh yeah, but I forgot: money plays absolutely no role in happiness and life satisfaction. (Right!)

OK, there are relatively happy low-income people working two jobs, who can't pay the bills, the basic bills, that is, who don't have a car, don't have Internet access, who can't even dream of sending their kids to college, or putting away money in a 401k, though I, and I bet Clements, and others who reproduce a "money doesn't really matter" ideology, don't actually know anyone like this.

Ultimately, it's incredibly patronizing, not to mention just plain ridiculous to claim, from a comfortable financial position, that money doesn't play into happiness.

The most accurate thing is to say that:

"Money might not buy happiness (though it may well buy SOME happiness for some of us), but it IS a significant factor in the qualify of life for all of us, and, of course, one's quality of life stands as a crucial aspect of one's overall happiness."

To qualify like this would be to acknowledge the complexity of life, its grayness. Gray doesn't sell well in a country that values simplistic, black-and-white views of life.

In the end, the "money doesn't buy happiness" mantra, is an ideological ploy used to gloss over the huge inequities in wealth that characterize the contemporary American, and global, economic climate. It's a way for the rich, or relatively well off, to feel better about themselves and the many things that they don't ever have to worry about that are everyday stressors for low income people.

Denver Post "lays away" obvious information on story on Wal-Mart layaway

A Wednesday, Dec. 6 Denver Post story that ran under the headline, "Some Wal-Mart customers upset layaway has gone away," should receive praise for being written and run in the first place. The erosion of consumer rights for poorer Americans is a growing problem.

Essentially, the story provides an overview of Wal-Mart's plan to eliminate layaway for its customers, with the ultimate rationale being, of course, the bottom line. Layaway's not making money for Wal-Mart.

The secondary rationale, one that resurfaces repeatedly in American political and economic life, is that of the tyranny of the majority. In this case, though, it is more indirect than in political life (where one can see it, for example, in the denial of basic human rights to gays by way of referendum). According to sources from Wal-Mart quoted in The Post story, it is because the percentage of customers taking advantage of layaway has dropped below a critical mass that they have decided to eliminate it.

Here, and elsewhere in majoritarian societies, if you don't run with the mainstream, politically, or economically, your SOL. This scenario gets played out repeatedly, though it is typically, and conveniently, ignored by moderates and conservatives who sing the praises of an allegedly perfect American democracy and "free market."

In the end, this Post Wal-Mart story fails to perhaps the most basic question of all --

What are the financial terms of Wal-Mart's layaway plan, and layaway plans in general (for now, notes the story, K-Mart is continuing its layaway program)?

In other words, what, if any, interest does Wal-Mart charge customers on items put away for layaway?

In fact, the story implicitly casts credit cards (with their loan-shark interest rates of 15 to 30 percent) as the easy answer to layaway for the financially less fortunate.

Wal-Mart sources stress that they'll offer zero percent interest cards for SOME customers who used to take advantage of layaway. Of course, they fail to mention that even those who get these cards will see their interest rate skyrocket after the first year.

In the end, high interest credit card rates are no substitute for layaway programs that allowed less fortunate customers to buy higher priced goods at Wal-Mart. Now, they either won't be able to afford those things at all, or they'll end up paying more, perhaps a lot more, while lining the pockets of credit card giants like Citibank. Another possibility is that they might end up going down the street to a rent-to-own place and lose even more money than they would if they charge their next washer and dryer on a high-interest credit card.

Though it might not be a earth-shatteringly important cause, you might want to consider signing the petition to "Keep Wal Mart Layaway" at -- http://www.petitiononline.com/tex3218/petition.html

It's Com-monopolistic!

Those of us who live in the Denver area (and perhaps beyond) have been bombarded for at least a year with advertising literature trumpeting Comcast's "incredible" triple play. For a year, you can subscribe to cable, high-speed Internet, and digital voice (Internet telephone) for $99 per month, or the equivalent of $33 per service.

It's, as Comcast puts it, "Comcastic!".

Not exactly. After a year, costs rise considerably, to about $130 per month.

And what about those of us who aren't really interested in cable, but want high-speed Internet for a reasonable price? By reasonable, I mean something between $20 to $30 a month.

For us, the most "Comcastic" it gets is $29.99 for three months, with the price going to $44-$50 per month after that. What a steal! Not in the traditional sense, though; it's Comcast robbing the consumer, not the consumer getting a steal of a deal.

Unfortunately, for some of us, Comcastic is the only option. Qwest, which offers DSL for $26.95 per month in the Denver metro area, doesn't service our neighborhood. Several calls to Qwest have only yielded a "we'll let you know when we service your area" answer.

Personally, I have a strong suspicion that the neighborhood on the other side of Meadow Hills Golf Course -- where homes sell from between $750,000 to $1.3 million, as opposed to $200,000 to $250,000 -- is serviced by Qwest. Qwest has most likely decided it's just not worth its time to challenge the Comcastically Com-monopolistic high-speed Internet stranglehold in our neighborhood.

Out of principle (and, admittedly because I have "free" dial-up through the University of Denver) we continue to go with glacial Internet while Comcast continues to gouge customers in our neighborhood.

This, according to a recent Pew survey numbers, puts us among the roughly 30 percent of people with home Internet access who are still dialing up. Many of the rest are paying outrageous amounts of money for high-speed Internet with little to no choice on how they can get onto the Information Superhighway at the "break-neck" speeds we've been promised.

So much for the wonders of the American free-market, which, more often than not ends up morphing into an oligopoly or monopoly.

I tried to convince a couple Denver Post reporters that it would be interesting and worthwhile to do a story on who in the Denver area has a choice in terms of high-speed Internet, who is actually on the Internet, not on the Internet, and how much Denver Metro consumers pay, on average, for Internet service per year. However, my e-mails were met with nothing but "e-silence."

Meanwhile, The Denver Post Business Section bursts with stories celebrating the wonders of the high-speed Internet age, with no stories on that most basic of all issues -- access and cost of (high speed Internet) access.

(Another interesting story would be one that looks at the ways in which Internet sites have essentially written off those of us with glacial Internet. My wife tells me that Capital One credit card's online payment site is essentially impossible to access with our dial-up service right now).

Do Americans care about traffic noise?

This past June my wife and my daughter and I travelled to Germany so that I could attend a conference -- and so that we could visit relatives.

One of the things that struck me as we travelled more than 1,500 miles in two weeks by car, much of it on the Autobahn, was the tremendous attention paid to mitigating sound from the highway for those who live nearby. Huge, thick, extensive, and obviously well-constructed sound barriers stood between the few houses that were near the highway and the highway itself. In fact, in most cases, it was clear that the highway had been deliberately constructed at a considerable distance from homes and apartments.

Bridges had transparent sound barriers as well -- so that noise would be mitigated and drivers could still get a nice view of rivers, lakes, and so on. Can't say I've ever seen anything like that in the United States.

I bring this up now, in a stream of consciousness sort of way, because as I type away in our metro Denver area home, Parker Road (Colorado 83), which carries more than 60,000 cars a day, is roaring right through our closed windows. This despite the fact that we are a quarter mile away from the road.

Last summer, to no avail, I lobbied the Colorado Department of Transportation for a quieter road surface prior to a resurfacing of the road. They went with concrete -- the loudest, and cheapest option. In fact, in much of Northern Europe, much effort has been invested in researching, and putting down quieter highway road surfaces. But here in the good old USA, land of the lowest bidder, the quick fix, and, apparently, the traffic noise indifferent, we go with what's loud -- and then tune it out.

And we build houses with no sound barriers that back right up to highways such as Colorado 83. It never ceases to amaze me that so many people apparently don't care about the noise. Then again, they're among the majority of modern-day Americans who've been conditioned to tune out more and more of the world around them, even as the volume gets turned up, and up, and up and up.

In fact, it seems to me that we, as a society, have become so inured to noise that many of us don't know what to do when confronted with relative silence -- so we turn on the radio, the television, and so on, out of a fear of the natural sounds that we've drowned out with our allegedly universally progressive "modernity."

Criticizing critics of the critic

There's little doubt that dominant society (meaning mainstream society) favors the optimist over the pessimist, the pollyanna over the critic -- at least when it comes to protecting its own ideological and normative turf.

The critic of the status quo, things as they are, and apparently as most people want them to be, is immediately put on the rhetorical defensive for being too negative. A recent debate I had with friends over the socially constructed nature of fatherhood and its limited and restricted contours illustrates this point.

Not long after I challenged the notion that women are "naturally" more nurturing, my friends were on me for being "too negative." And once you're labeled as negative, as pessimistic, as "too critical," then everyone is allowed to shut you out, shout you down, and so on -- on the "obvious" grounds that a critic is, well, "bad."

In the end, no one needs to entertain your ideas, thoughts, or criticisms intellectually. That's too much work and/or it's too threatening to the status quo. Basically, many people don't want to (or aren't able to) to do the intellectual heavy lifting to defend things as they are. So, they label you a "cynic," or in the case of the mainstream media, a "radical" and tune you out, turn you off, etc.

(Hmm...wonder how one arrives "objectively" at the decision that something/someone is "radical"; actually, one does so subjectively, by invoking a particular set of social values that determine what is "normal," what is "abnormal," who and what is "mainstream" and who and what is "radical"; once again, "objectivity" turns out to be an ideological instrument wielded to keep particular people and points of view in positions of domination over others).

"Love it (the way it is because I want it to stay that way) or leave it (because your criticism is threatening to me)" baby!

(Gotta love logically fallacious reasoning like that, eh?)

Or you can stay and struggle to change things and be a thorn in pollyanna's side.

Blogger.com login nightmare

Maybe it's just because I'm sleep deprived by our newborn, but I can't believe the headache I've had trying to figure out how to log in to blogger.com -- after I'd created a blog a few days ago.

Way back when, I created a google account username and password -- and then never used the damn things. I decided last week I wanted to try blogging on blogger.com and created a new account, not remembering I had a google account at all.

Anyway, now I can't get back to a blog I created at dr-dh.blogspot.com without my google account and have been forced to create a new blog with my google account username and password. So I guess, dr-dh.blogspot.com might sit out there in cyberspace for eternity.

My frustration with blogger.com had me going to other blogging sites -- www.wordpress.com, www.blogdrive.com, etc. But I'm back at blogger.com, at least temporarily, because I can't stand the flashing ads at the top of the page for blogdrive.com and because, at least at first glance, it looked like wordpress.com didn't have labels.

Of course, what I would really like to have is nested "labels," or nested subject links for things like a critique of a Thomas Friedman column that would logically be nested under the label 'media criticism.'

Blogging won't change the (media) world

Given that I was labeled as the family "commentator" as a child, and that I love to comment on things, especially macro-sociological and larger philosophical questions and issues, it is strange that it's taken me so long to start blogging. Blogging seems perfectly suited to this sort of approach to life.I guess you could say that somehow I never carved out the time for it, or spent my time in other ways (at the moment the biggest draw on my time is my two very young children).

A deep skepticism about the power of bottom-up human social organization is probably another reason it's taken me awhile to get around to blogging. As far as I'm concerned, large, top-down political, economic, and social institutions, and the privileged elite who run them, basically dictate the shape of society.In the realm of news media, for example, large producers such as The New York Times, ABC News, CNN and so on -- still hold the balance of power despite the rise of blogging or what Dan Gillmor has labeled a "We, the media" movement. Yeah, so I can blog now -- but no one's going to read what I write, while millions will continue to surf to CNN.com, foxnews.com, and so on.

OK, so a relatively few people have made it big blogging -- and blogging has, on the whole, affected the way traditional news media cover the news. But it hasn't been a revolution. I can challenge Thomas Friedman's free-market, individualist ideology all I want in this blog (and I will!). But, in all likelihood, no one will read my critiques, certainly not Friedman himself, and other nationally syndicated columnists and pundits such as David Brooks, Kathleen Parker, and so on (all of whom I will challenge in this blog at some point). They will all continue on in blissful ignorance of criticisms of their views.

Is there a cushier job on the face of the planet than (inter)nationally syndicated columnist or broadcast media pundit? You write a few columns a week, appear on this talk show or that, have the opportunity to voice your views to millions, and rarely if ever reflect upon the extreme privilege and comparative power you hold. I don't mean power in the sense that media pundits and columnists will mold readers views as if they are a bunch of ideological sponges (Does Bill O'Reilly really think he's EVER convinced anyone of anything other than the minions who are already in his choir?). I mean power in the sense that your take on the world, politics, culture, the U.S. is far more widely circulated than those of an individual media consumer, who very well may be incensed by your views -- and may well be able to easily deconstruct your "logic".

If a reader of a widely published columnist challenges that columnist, if they are lucky, he or she will be reduced to 250-word letters to the editor. More than likely, they'll never have their letter to the editor published. Some will be relegated to cyberspace, forced to post responses on bulletin boards read by comparatively few people (I wonder how many Denver Post reporters actually troll the newspaper's bulletin boards and blogs, for example, or if columnists such as David Harsanyi -- whose elitist libertarian columns -- yes, on a macro-level, libertarians are elitists -- they presume that their opponents are idiots for not seeing the world the way that they do; in short, they assume that their views are better than others -- do), or banished to the black hole of the blogosphere, where no one will read their response -- though their response may well be more sophisticated and represent better thinking than that of the columnist whom they are challenging.

Sure would be nice to see news media columnists and pundits occasionally acknowledge their tremendous and unusual power and privilege explicitly, rather than what one usually sees, which is, if they acknowledge readers and viewers at all in their columns, they do so in order to belittle their views (see Bill O'Reilly's mailbox, for example -- though certainly he is not at all the only media pundit/columnist to wield his power in this way). Usually, they do so by selectively culling material from mail they receive, and framing it in a context that suits their own rhetorical ends.

Though I can't, and won't, claim to have the definitive view on the relationship between news media producers and consumers, it seems to me that much of the anger and frustration with the traditional "mainstream" (and powerful) media and its various elite does not come from a sense of media "bias." Admittedly there are plenty such charges levied against the mainstream media, which, of course, is, and always will be "biased" -- biased toward a centrist politics and ideology that is deceivingly cast as the "objective".

It's worth emphasizing that at a certain level all stories about the social world, indeed, the natural world, are "biased." They always reflect particular human, social, cultural, theoretical and political perspectives on "reality." One need not look far for confirmation that the notion of a "pure objectivity," a notion which typically embeds itself in the general term "objective," is a mirage. Compare news coverage of the same events, say the Iraq war, in the U.S., in Canada, in Germany, in Iran, in India, and you'll immediately see that ALL news, yes, even "objective" news from the U.S., reflects a national "bias." The documentary Control Room clearly illustrates this basic fact while occasionally underscoring the arrogance of American journalists who claim to be objective (but then laugh, clap, and cheer wildly as the first images of U.S. troops entering Baghdad are shown at CENTCOM).

I will return to deconstructing "objectivity" in another post. Here I'll contend that much of the frustration and anger with the mainstream media in the U.S. comes from the up-until-very-recently almost exclusively one-way flow of news -- from the powerful producer, to the largely powerless (though not passive) news consumer. This sense of frustration is, in my view, justified. For it is human social nature to want to have an opportunity to challenge -- in the same context and from within the same position of power as the original person(s) advancing a view, ideology, etc. -- perspectives that clash with one's own.

Seems to me that news media professionals of all types ought to acknowledge the reality and legitimacy of such frustration more explicitly and more often. In other words, they need to acquire more humility than many now have. (Indeed, this is something I teach my news writing and reporting students at the University of Denver. As a former journalist with eight years in print media, I'll never forget some of the paternalistic and patronizing attitudes I saw among some of my fellow journalists.)

Yes, the advent of the Internet, blogs, discussion boards, e-mail, and so on has altered the news mediascape -- somewhat. But so far, it has not at all been a radical transformation. As far as I can tell, the one-to-many, the one-talking-down-to-the-masses, or, in the case of self-appointed purveyors of reality like Fox's Bill O'Reilly, the shouting-down-those-with-whom-you-disagree-because-you-aren't-smart-enough-to-engage-their-arguments-intellectually style of news media production and consumption still dominates.

Yet despite the fact that the current climate is still one dominated by the few and predicated largely on a one-down-to-many model of transmission, for some strange reason, I have chosen to start blogging. Perhaps this isn't surprising given my general fixation with the paradox that is the relation between individual and society, or with the ways in which the individual can at once be seen as both helpless and hapless and as contributing to the very forms of directed social action that reinforce, and, yes, occasionally, mitigate (though only slightly) this helplessness and haplessness.