Gene Edward Veith Jr.'s Blog, page 445
December 6, 2012
Suing negative reviewers
You know those user reviews on online sites like Yelp, Angie’s List, Yahoo, and all those restaurant and travel sites? Some businesses are striking back at negative reviews by suing the reviewers.
A Fairfax County woman being sued for defamation over negative reviews she wrote on Yelp and Angie’s List must delete certain accusations and is barred from repeating them in new posts, a judge ruled Wednesday.
The preliminary injunction was hailed as a victory by a D.C. contractor, who took the woman to court claiming that her online reviews of the work he did on her home were false and cost him $300,000 in business. He is suing her for $750,000.
“It’s a win on morality, integrity and truthfulness,” contractor Christopher Dietz said after the hearing in Fairfax County Circuit Court. “This is permanent damage. I can’t undo what she did.”
Jane Perez hired Dietz to perform cosmetic improvements in June 2011 on her newly purchased townhouse, but she quickly soured on Dietz and gave him a scathing one-star review on Yelp and a similar treatment on Angie’s List.
The list of accusations over the job were long, but included damage to her home, an invoice for work Dietz did not perform and jewelry that went missing when Dietz was the only other person with a key to her home. Dietz denies those claims. . . .
In Virginia, someone can be found liable for defamation if he states or implies a false factual statement about a person or business that causes harm to the subject’s reputation. Opinions are generally protected by the First Amendment. . . .
Lawyers say legal actions over reviews on Web sites such as Yelp are on the rise, as the sites have grown in popularity and online reputations have become more important for doctors, dentists and a host of other professionals.
Some reviewers and free speech advocates view such suits as attempts to stifle freedom of speech, while business owners say they are being forced to fight back because a false post online can cause serious damage to their businesses.
via Judge says homeowner must delete some accusations on Yelp, Angie’s List – The Washington Post.
Should consumer reviewers have the freedom to say whatever they want? Or do businesses need some recourse against exaggerating individuals who can ruin their reputation?
Words Of The Year
Merriam Webster, the dictionary publisher with a big online presence, has announced the most looked-up words of 2012. The top two, tied as Words of the Year, are socialism and capitalism. That Americans evidently don’t know what those two words mean helps explain the election.
Others in the top ten are Democracy, globalization, marriage, bigot, malarkey, meme, touche, schadenfreude, professionalism.
Last year the top word was austerity. The year before that, it was pragmatic.
That Americans don’t know the meaning of these words and so have to look them up explains everything!
via Merriam Webster’s Word Of The Year For 2012.
December 5, 2012
Ten myths about church growth
Have you noticed how quickly “the latest ideas” become the old-fashioned ideas? Brian Orme is a Southern Baptist expert in church trends. What were once the foundational assumptions of the Church Growth Movement he is now labeling as “Ten Old Wives Tales about Church Growth.” Paul McCain usefully extracts them:
1. If You’re Not Growing, Something’s Wrong
2. The More You Grow, the Healthier You Are
3. Contemporary Music Will Save Your Church
4. Church Growth Can Be Manufactured
5. If Your Church Grows, Your Leader Is “Anointed”
6. If Your Church Doesn’t Grow, It’s a Problem with the Leader
7. Good Preaching Is the Answer to Growing Your Church
8. You Will Retain a Large Percentage of Your Visitors on Special Days
9. The More Programs You Offer, the More Your Church Will Grow
10. If You Build It, They Will Come
For Rev. Orme’s explanations of each of these points, go here.
Structure and freedom for kids
Washington Post education columnist Jay Mathews discusses some findings in Michael Petrilli’s book The Diverse Schools Dilemma; namely, that middle class and working class parents tend to have different parenting styles that impact education:
A middle-class, college-educated parent of any ethnicity is likely to be like me: Overscheduling children’s free time but preferring innovative instruction and informal discipline at school.
The research Petrilli cites says working-class and poor parents of any race are more likely to let their children amuse themselves as they see fit once their homework is done but tend to prefer schools with traditional teaching styles and strong discipline.
He cites the work of University of Pennsylvania sociologist Annette Lareau. She and her team closely tracked 12 families of different racial and class backgrounds. They found the center of life in middle-class families was the calendar, with what Lareau said were “scheduled, paid, and organized activities for children . . . in the two-inch-square open spaces beneath each day of the month.” But despite the forced march to improvement that characterized their children’s free time, those parents tolerated a lot of back-talk and often negotiated with children about what they wanted to do. They preferred teachers who did not give orders but encouraged creativity..
Working-class and poor parents, researchers found, left their children on their own on weekends and summer days but were more likely to set strict behavior rules. Those parents tended to like teachers who were tough and structured.
As a nation, we have been arguing for many generations about the best parenting styles. Those of us who prefer lots of scheduled activities but not much discipline should remember that many members of the revered Greatest Generation who won World War II were raised the way many low-income children are brought up today. . . .
Do loose school lessons teach more than structured ones? Does regular weekend soccer practice do more for our children’s character than roaming around with their friends? I don’t know. The research doesn’t say.
If middle class and low-income parents have different methods with their kids and different expectations for their schools, how do principals and teachers serve both populations?
via Do rich and poor parenting styles matter? – Class Struggle – The Washington Post.
So when middle class teachers go with a “creative” free-form approach to teaching, working class kids end up with no structure, either at school or in their free time. Perhaps home-schooled middle-class kids tend to do so well because both their schooling and their free time are highly structured. If this breakdown is correct, poorer kids would do really well if they only had more structure in their schooling.
As I recall, though we were middle class, my school was highly structured and my free time was my own. That may have more to do with “greatest generation” parenting, times gone by, and local culture. I think it’s good to give children some space for freedom and for pursuing things they enjoy on their own, rather than scheduling every minute with sports and self-improvement lessons.
Do you think this holds true? Can you make a case for one of these parenting/educational styles over the others? Are there other possibilities?
History as a study in irony
Michael Dirda reviews a new book by the distinguished British historian J. H. Elliott, History in the Making, which reflects on how historians exercise their vocations and the lessons of history for our own times. Here are some quotations from the book, as put together in the review:
“If the study of the past has any value, that value lies in its ability to reveal the complexities of human experience, and to counsel against ruling out as of no significance any of the paths that were only partially followed, or not followed at all.”
Today, it is apparent that “the nation state, while remaining the standard form of political organization, has been under growing pressure both from above and from below. . . . From above, it has been compelled to yield ground to international and supranational bodies, of which the European Community is a prime example. From below, it has come under pressure from the suppressed nationalities, and from religious and ethnicities demanding their own place in the sun. As a result, what once seemed certain has become less certain, and structures that once had about them an air of permanence are showing signs of frailty.”
Certainly, contemporary history has shown us, with a vengeance, that “the stronger the emphasis on secularization, the greater are the chances of religious revival. The advance of science finds its antithesis in the advance of fundamentalism, and the supranationalism of a world of multinational corporations and organizations finds itself challenged by the upsurge of the irrational forces of old-style nationalism.”
Thus, as Dirda concludes, “The study of history is a study in irony.”
The more secularism the more religious revival. It would follow that conservatism is not dead, any more than liberalism was a few years ago, that ideologies ebb and flow and take their turn. I suspect the same is true of moral codes. The sexual revolution will probably spur a counter-revolution. Then again, world wars, totalitarianism, fascism, and communism will probably come back too.
via A historian’s Spanish lessons for modern America – The Washington Post.
December 4, 2012
Purging social conservatives from the GOP
As Christian activists are trying to think through the parameters of political involvement, some Republicans are thinking their party may be better off without them. In an opinion piece that is attracting lots of party discussion, Republican consultant Mike Murphy argues that the GOP needs to drop socially-conservative issues like abortion and gay marriage in favor of a “a more secular and modernizing conservatism.”
The Republican challenge is not about better voter-turnout software; it is about policy. We repel Latinos, the fastest-growing voter group in the country, with our nativist opposition to immigration reform that offers a path to citizenship. We repel younger voters, who are much more secular than their parents, with our opposition to same-sex marriage and our scolding tone on social issues. And we have lost much of our once solid connection to the middle class on kitchen-table economic issues.
A debate will now rage inside the GOP between the purists, who will as always call for more purity, and the pragmatists, who will demand modernization. The media, always culturally alien to intra-Republican struggles, will badly mislabel this contest as one between “moderate” and “right-wing” Republicans. In fact, the epic battle we Republicans face now is a choice between two definitions of conservatism.
One offers steadfast opposition to emerging social trends like multiculturalism and secularization. The alternative is a more secular and modernizing conservatism that eschews most social issues to focus on creating a wide-open opportunity society that promises greater economic freedom and the reform of government institutions like schools that are vital to upward social mobility.
via Can This Party Be Saved? | TIME.com.
He goes on to make the case for the latter. Never mind that the last two Republican presidential losers downplayed social issues and were not representative of the Christian right.
Bloomberg’s Josh Barro argues that it was precisely the economic issues favored by establishment country club Republicans that alienated middle class voters:
The Republican Party’s key electoral problem doesn’t come from social conservatives or nativists. It comes from the economic policy demands of the party’s wealthy donors. Murphy allows that Republicans “have lost much of our once solid connection to the middle class on kitchen-table economic issues.” But his prescription won’t do anything to fix that problem.
What are the “kitchen-table” economic concerns of the middle class? They’re high unemployment, slow income growth, underwater mortgages, and the rising cost of health care and higher education. Democrats have an agenda that is responsive to these concerns. Republicans don’t — and they don’t because the party’s donor class specifically doesn’t want one.
For more discussion and links to other voices in the debate, see this post at First Thoughts.
So what do you make of this? Would you support a “secular and modernizing” Republican party?
Forgive us our debts
University of Chicago theologian Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite says that when Jesus told us to pray (in some translations) “forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors,” he was calling for the forgiveness of economic debts. She also says how Occupy Wall Street is “operationalizing” Jesus’s economic teachings:
The folks who brought you Occupy Wall Street have launched what they call “Rolling Jubilee.” By donating to Rolling Jubilee, individuals can give money to buy up distressed consumer debt that is normally sold to debt collectors for pennies on the dollar. But instead of acting like debt collectors, hounding folks for the full payment, you are giving to cancel the debt, that is, forgive it.
What Jesus taught as a prayer about forgiving debt (Matthew 6:12) has just been operationalized by Occupy.
Through prayer and deed, Jesus pursued an economic plan called the “Jubilee,” as I write in ‘#OccupytheBible: What Jesus Really Said (and Did) About Money and Power,’ my new book on how what Jesus really said about money, and what he did about economic issues in his own time that is just now launching as an e-book, and then in print.
It is critical that American Christians learn that Jesus really meant it when he asked us to pray, “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.” Conservative Christians would like you to forget that Jesus really meant debt forgiveness. The Religious Right would like you to focus only on specific, individual “sins” like homosexuality (something that Jesus actually never mentions), and ignore that Jesus was really concerned about structured economic inequality in his own time. To Jesus, systemic economic inequality was the “Kingdom of Caesar,” not the “Kingdom of God.”
Jesus starts his ministry (Luke 4:16-19) by standing up in the synagogue and reading from one of the key texts of his Hebrew scriptures on the biblical “Jubilee.” The biblical “Jubilee” is a time of debt forgiveness.
Rolling Jubilee is exactly what Jesus was talking about and doing something about throughout his whole ministry.
According to the Jewish tradition in which Jesus stands, and from which he preached, the Jubilee is a special year of “liberty” where every 50 years there was a kind of “reboot” of Jewish economics and social relations. As described in Leviticus, “And you shall hallow the fiftieth year and you shall proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you; you shall return every one of you to your property and every one of you to your family” (25:10). This 50th-year (or 49th-year) Jubilee followed seven “sabbatical cycles” where every seven years male slaves were released without debt, and land was allowed to lie fallow.
But that was millennia ago, some will say. How could the biblical Jubilee possibly be an economic plan in today’s economy, one that is far more complicated than in the first century CE?
It has never been more important to raise the issue of debt forgiveness and do something about it in concrete ways than it is in 21st century America.
This reminds me of a preacher I heard, back in my pre-Lutheran days when I belonged to a liberal denomination, who taught that because Jesus proclaimed “release to the captives,” we need to empty our prisons by letting all of the inmates go free, a gesture of grace that would surely reform them all.
What do you think of Dr. Thistlewhite’s exegesis? If you disagree, how would you answer her? OR, does she have a valid point somewhere in her teaching? What is the principle behind the Jubilee year?
“In a struggle against all the musicians of the world”
The nation of Mali has Africa’s richest musical tradition and most vibrant musical talent. But Muslim radicals have taken control of that country and are stamping out the music–destroying instruments, forbidding singing, and driving musicians out of the country. The article, linked below, is worth reading in its entirety. But I was struck by this quotation:
“Music is against Islam,” said Oumar Ould Hamaha, the military leader of the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa, one of the three extremist groups controlling the north. “Instead of singing, why don’t they read the Koran? Why don’t they subject themselves to God and pray? We are not only against the musicians in Mali. We are in a struggle against all the musicians of the world.”
via In northern Mali, music silenced as Islamists drive out artists – The Washington Post.
Does anyone know where this attitude comes from? Does the Koran specifically forbid music? (I understand how its iconoclasm restricts visual art, but music is art without images.) What is it in the radical Islamic worldview that sets it against music? And, conversely, what is it in the Christian worldview that has made it so open to music–more than that, so creative and influential musically?
December 3, 2012
He comes to us
advent (n.)
“important arrival,” 1742, an extended sense of Advent “season before Christmas” (Old English), from L. adventus “a coming, approach, arrival,” in Church Latin “the coming of the Savior,” from pp. stem of advenire “arrive, come to,” from ad- “to” (see ad-) + venire “to come”
We are now in the season of Advent. The word derives from the Latin venire (“to come”) + ad (“to”). So the word can be rendered “He comes to.” Advent is about Christ coming to us.
Luther said that it isn’t enough to believe that Christ died. We need to believe that Christ died for us, for me, for you. Christ rose from the dead for you. When we realize the “for you,” we have gone from historical information to saving faith.
Similarly, God became Man for you. Christ came for you, and He still comes to you, and He will come again for you.
May you have a blessed Advent!
Cutting charitable deductions
The Republican proposal to step away from the fiscal cliff is to raise revenue by cutting tax deductions while also lowering overall tax rates. Democrats would keep rates higher for those who make over $250,000, and probably cap their tax deductions at $50,000. So it looks like we have some agreement from both sides and that deductions for home mortgages, state taxes, and charitable giving will be cut, if not cut out entirely. From Ezra Klein:
“Base-broadening, rate-lowering tax reform.” It sounds so good, right? But what if you call it what it really is? Charity-destroying, home-shrinking, state-burdening tax reform.
Doesn’t sound as good, does it?
But that’s really what we’re talking about. The term ”base-broadening, rate-lowering tax reform” has the advantage of vagueness: No one knows what it means. But the practical definition, at least the one that’s emerging in the ongoing “fiscal cliff” negotiations, is tax reform that limits itemized deductions among high-income taxpayers. And as former OMB director Peter Orszag points out, 90 percent of the value of those deductions comes from just three categories: “taxes paid (mostly state and local taxes), home-mortgage interest and charitable contributions.”
So when we say “base-broading, rate-lowering tax reform,” here’s what we’re really saying: Tax reform that’s paid for by cutting tax breaks for charities, homes, and state and local taxes.
Most economists will tell you that cutting the home-mortgage interest deduction, particularly for high-income taxpayers, is a good idea. There’s no real reason the tax code should be subsidizing McMansions. But cutting the break for charities is more complicated. As Orszag writes:
In 2009, households with incomes of more than $200,000 claimed almost $60 billion in charitable deductions — or about 20 percent of total charitable giving in the U.S. that year. Households with incomes of more than $10 million claimed an average of $1.75 million each in charitable donations in 2009, and they accounted for roughly 5 percent of all giving.
Charitable giving reacts to tax incentives, and in response to any limits on deductions it could even fall by about the same amount as the increase in the tax bill, according to John List of the University of Chicago, who recently reviewed the literature on this subject. Other studies have suggested an effect about half as large. Even that smaller estimate, though, suggests that limiting deductions to $50,000 a year could easily reduce giving by tens of billions of dollars.
via The reality of tax reform: Less charity, smaller homes, higher state taxes.
As Klein says, “limiting itemized deductions in order to raise revenues is a tax increase.” So the Republican plan to eliminate or cut back on these deductions as a way to raise revenue is a tax increase, even if other rates are lowered.
People complain about “the rich,” but whenever there is a capital campaign for a museum, a college, an arts group, a charity, or a church, the wealthy are wooed and generally come up with most of the money. Conservatives want “the private sector” instead of the government to bear more of the responsibility to help the poor, support the arts, and do other good works. That means those worthy causes would need the support of wealthy donors. Do you think that donors would be as generous as they are without the incentive of a large tax deduction? I am convinced many of them would, but I worry about the practical effect on non-profit organizations (which incorporate for that status precisely so they can become tax deductible).
What impact do you think cutting deductions for charitable giving might have on churches? Specifically, on your congregation? Probably most of your members come nowhere near the high-income level that would trigger the limits. And yet a total limit of $50,000–including home mortgage, state taxes, charitable giving, and everything else–would hit people who don’t consider themselves all that wealthy. [Tote up how much you deducted last year.] And yet, very often a big chunk of a congregation’s revenue comes from a few families. Again, one would hope that they give because the Lord loves a cheerful giver, because they believe in tithing, because they see themselves as stewards of the Lord’s gifts, etc., etc. But a tax deduction is surely an incentive to generosity. What would happen if all deductions for giving to the church were eliminated for everybody?
Perhaps this would become liberating in the long run. No more would churches or other organizations have to operate under the regulations for non-profits. They could express political opinions and endorse candidates without the threat of losing their tax-exempt status.
At any rate, we need to consider the consequences–including especially the unintended consequences–of these proposed changes. (And remember, these ideas aren’t coming primarily from liberals but from Republicans.)
