I promise, really I do…

….that I’ll write something here soon. For the moment, here’s my latest post for New Voices on the connection between organizational funding and policy.

New post for New Voices on IAW

I just can’t seem to stop writing about Israeli Apartheid Week. Here’s another one.

Another post on a place that isn't here!

Man, I am just a posting-on-other-sites-but-not-my-own MACHINE today! Here’s my Jewschool post on Glenn Beck’s equation of social justice with Nazism.

New post at Jewschool: Alan Dershowitz misrepresents IAW

I’ve got a new post at Jewschool, in which I examine an article Alan Dershowitz wrote about Israel Apartheid Week.

An unsung benefit of reconciliation

Jessica Arons has written a fabulous piece for The Nation, explaining just how moronic the thinking behind the Stupak amendment is (and thus reminding me of how glad I am it won’t be part of the final reform bill):

No transaction in our modern society is completely free of government involvement. The food we eat costs less because of farm subsidies. Students attend private universities with the help of Pell Grants and Stafford loans. Our churches and temples can afford to operate in part because they are tax-exempt. And employers who offer health insurance do so because of tax incentives. Stupak’s reasoning, taken to its logical extreme, would mean that virtually every activity in which we engage is government funded, regardless of whether it is condoned or condemned.

As I see it, the extension of her argument is that in supporting, for example, transportation subsidies, a person makes a judgment that the good derived from the availability of public transportation outweighs the harm done by freeing up citizens’ personal money to be used for an abortion. Thus, opposing insurance premium subsidies is a judgment that the benefits of providing people with health insurance are less important than preventing those people from having abortions.

Simultaneously opposing insurance premium subsidies on abortion grounds while also supporting other federal subsidies shows that you prioritize your own religious or social beliefs over someone else’s health. While this isn’t a logical inconsistency, I’d say it demonstrates a severe lack of empathy and a healthy dose of self-righteousness.

But then, those are all in a day’s work for congressional opponents of health care reform.

Just someone whose story you haven't heard

Too often in conflicts we don’t hear stories. We don’t know what other people have experienced. This, I believe, is the root of many social problems.

Political realities are ultimately inseparable from the individual experiences that give rise to them. We can make generalizations about societal states of understanding, political theories, and large social constructs, but these must ultimately be grounded in a deep understanding of the individual, human nature of the issue.

At its heart, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a failure of understanding. Yes, we can and do identify policies, tactics, and manners of thought that continue it, but we cannot forget their inalienably human attributes. Applying the analytical tools of anthropology and other social sciences can tell us much about why the conflict has evolved the way it has. Why, for instance, does the Israeli government continue to lend tacit, if not explicit, support in most cases, to settlers who are actively violating international law and soiling Israel’s credibility? Why have Palestinian civilians been so easily represented by the few who decide to blow themselves up?

These are questions of understanding. I have strong disagreements with many people involved in the conflict, but there comes a time when I have to admit that I just don’t understand their point of view. I haven’t been to Israel or Palestine, I haven’t sat down across the table with these people and tried to understand what makes them tick.

I don’t think this makes me less capable of making strong and accurate judgments on the issue, but it does impart on me a responsibility to seek out such stories and incorporate them into my thought. In fact, I would argue that no one is exempt from this responsibility. Divorced as I am from the on-the-ground realities of the conflict, it’s easy for me to say that my priority is understanding. For an Israeli in Sderot who’s lived through rocket attacks and seen their children traumatized and suffering from PTSD, or for a Palestinian in Gaza who’s lived through massive Israeli air raids, destruction of vital infrastructure, and a continuing blockade, it must be incredibly hard to understand the other.

But there are those who do. There are those who put aside their own experiences, and, given the opportunity to do so without sacrificing basic needs, seek out the other’s perspective. And the fact that those people exist means that we should not just expect others to do the same, but we should strive for circumstances where they can.

Both in his attempts to understand and his attempts to empower others to do the same, Avi Schaefer was one of those people dedicated to understanding. After graduating high school in Santa Barbara, he joined the IDF and spent several years as a counterterrorism instructor. To a naive American Jewish boy like me who’s never held a gun, it’s hard to comprehend his motivations. But it was crystal clear to me from the moment I met him up until the last conversation I had with him that he wanted me to, and he wanted to comprehend mine. Avi was in many ways extremely oxymoronic; but then, he existed almost for the purpose of defying those same oxymorons. Before I met him, I would never have guessed that an American Jew who became an Israeli citizen in order to join the IDF would be more dedicated to peace than arguably any other person I have ever met. But what Avi has taught me was that that doesn’t have to be a contradiction. That the only thing standing between us and a deeper personal understanding of the other is our assumptions. If we come to a discussion with an open mind and no assumptions, we inevitably walk away stronger and smarter.

Avi Schaefer was killed in the early morning of February 12th by a drunk driver on the streets of Providence. Who Avi was doesn’t make his death more tragic than if it had been someone else, but the people he touched, the good he did in his short time with us, and the taste that is left on our tongues, will linger. In Avi, a man of incredible virtue and dignity walked among us.

“An enemy is someone whose story we have not yet heard.” Avi attributed this quote to his father, Rabbi Arthur Gross-Schaefer.

Avi Schaefer, 1988-2010. Z”L. May his memory be for a blessing.

The smear campaign against the New Israel Fund

Here’s my Jewschool post about it. Links to informational and opinion sources are included.

The political obligation: constructive or not?

Are we obligated to be politically involved? Does being a citizen of a republic impart on me an ethical obligation to vote, to be politically informed, and to communicate with others about such topics? Certainly public awareness and discourse is improved by that kind of activity, but the question is whether it’s ethical to impose it on other people.

This is a particularly relevant question right now because of the mass political ignorance we see around issues like health care. The BBC has a great article on this, explaining some of the psychological reasons that the Democratic strategy hasn’t worked:

If people vote against their own interests, it is not because they do not understand what is in their interest or have not yet had it properly explained to them.

They do it because they resent having their interests decided for them by politicians who think they know best.

Of course, the current reform proposals do not presume to know what’s best for every individual person. That’s why they leave open the option of choosing where you buy your insurance plan from, something that I believe to be ultimately wrong. I see the purpose of health care reform to be laying the stage for an eventual progression towards single-payer.

But that’s neither here nor there. Where I disagree with the article is in what the ultimate problem is. It’s an uninformed electorate. In a healthy, functioning democracy, people have every right to disagree with the government, and to vote it out of office. In fact, that’s what we did in 2006 and 2008. Overwhelmingly, voters in this country voted out the Republican ideas that had run the country straight downhill. And if in 2010 they want to do the same thing for Democrats, they will. That’s how democracy functions.

Of course, it becomes more complicated, when you have a GOP propaganda machine busy undeducating everyone as fast as possible. The equation’s different when the minority party is deliberately lying to the public about what it is they’re opposing (and why they’re doing so). Frankly, given the Democrat’s historical and current inability to accurately and clearly explain their stances to voters, it’s even more amazing that we won so decisively in the last two elections. People must have been *really *fed up.

But go back a second. What’s the real issue here? I argue that it’s the nature of Democrats’ stances that they can’t be easily explained. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing. Yes, we’re losing the message war. That’s because economic stimulus is complicated and “five-year across-the-board spending freeze” is easy. “Free market” is easy and the subtleties that make it inapplicable to health care are complicated. “Soft on terror” is easy and criminal law is complicated.

So what do we do? Do we dumb down to face the increasingly ignorant electorate? No. We pass something that has tangible, immediate benefits, and we campaign on it. Because what does the country see right now? They see Democrats with a giant majority still not getting anything done. If we can break that view, we’re golden. In the political free market, political capital is allocated to whoever shows than use it to get results.

And that’s as it should be. We can decry public ignorance all we want, but ultimately, a voter shouldn’t have to have intimate knowledge of congressional politics in order to hold an opinion. I’m not condoning total ignorance of the way the government functions, but if we apply some kind of moral standard for what constitutes “enough” knowledge to be involved in politics, we’re setting a risky precedent. Remember poll taxes and literacy tests? That’s what happens when the government makes a decision on who deserves to be involved in the democratic process.

Political ignorance is a constitutionally protected right. But that doesn’t mean we have to assume it is a necessity of the political system. We need to be fighting two battles at once. One, to get our legislation passed, so we have something to campaign on. Two, an agressive information campaign in the form of TV ads and public speaking engagements. The fact that Democrats have been completely disconnected from voters has harmed us. We’ve seemed like aloof liberals who know nothing about the plight of ordinary people. We need to show the public that we are the party with their interests in mind. In other words, show people why our proposals will help them. “Oh, you’re having trouble getting insurance because you have a pre-existing condition? The legislation we’re passing will prohibit that. And you know what? The GOP used to agree with us, but they’re voting against it now to score political points. You can’t afford your premiums? Let me tell you about how our legislation will help you. And you guessed it, Republicans are against that too.”

We’re losing the information war right now, but that doesn’t mean we should dumb down. Yes, the bill is ridiculously long. For crying out loud, it’s federal policy. This is not simple stuff. Let’s not capitulate to the GOP’s dumbed-down message. We should be speaking to voters as equals, not pretending that we’re dumb and confused like congressional Republicans are doing. It’s stupid, degrading, and ultimately unproductive.

If the GOP wants to win elections, they’re on the right track. If Democrats want to, we need to change course. And we can’t pass health care without winning elections.

Fun with the JIDF

I wrote a new post for Jewschool! Predictably, it is about political debate, or lack thereof. Check it out.

Cloudy

I’ve used Wordle before, but hadn’t thought of it in a while. After seeing David A. M. Wilensky‘s last post, I decided to make my own word cloud, so here it is:

The road forward

Frankly, I can’t claim to be shocked about the outcome of the special election here in MA. I’m appalled, but not terribly surprised. From all evidence, Coakley ran a bad campaign and Brown ran a good one. Even a solidly-Democratic state like this one can’t withstand that sort of treatment, and Brown was enough of a catch-all for people’s non-specific anger towards vague concepts like big government that he harnessed anger from both sides of the aisle. Democrats should have seen this coming.

More importantly, however, I don’t really care about Scott Brown. Yes, he has a truck. Yes, he doesn’t really seem to have any sort of useful policy ideas. In other words, he’s not really that different than any other sitting GOP Senator.

I guess what makes it different (theoretically) is the fact that we no longer have our magical awesome super-great-majority. But let’s face it, we couldn’t even get anything close to meaningful reform even with one. This won’t be that different

If we want to avoid a filibuster, we can try to get the House to vote on the existing Senate health care bill. The House Progressive Caucus is strong enough, however, that I doubt that would go through without a fuss, and right now, we need to just get it done so we can move on and have something to campaign on in 2010.

But after much thought, I’m not sure we want to avoid a filibuster. Just the threat of one so far has been enough to swing the Senate negotiations dramatically in favor of the GOP. What if we, as Obama promised during his campaign, televised every bit of what was going on on the Senate floor, and in factforced the GOP to filibuster? They could no longer claim that we were shoving it down America’s throat. We’d stand up and say “Look, you’re the one who’s denying a straight vote and a real debate. You want to have ‘em, let’s go, and then we’ll vote. If not, we’ll show every single person in America exactly where your interest lies.”

We’ve been playing games to try to avoid a filibuster up until now. We can’t avoid it any more unless we want to woo a Republican over, which is completely implausible. For crying out loud, they’re already promising to repeal the thing when they take power.

Now that we can’t avoid it any more, it’s time to look a GOP filibuster square in the eye. Give us your best shot.

I’m waiting and ready. America’s watching.

Arson and the futility of the penal system: a reflection after 60 hours

It’s been a day and a half since we learned about the arson attacks here that killed two people here. All but one of the attacks were in Ward 3, my neighborhood.

This case has prompted me to take a long look at some of the ways we as society, and as individuals, handle events that push us to the extreme. Arguably, crime is inevitable in any society, and given this, the issue becomes how we minimize it and respond to it. In a case like this one, with an individual who clearly is in need of psychological attention (the fires don’t appear to be targeted in any way, it really seems like it’s the work of a serious psychopath), there’s probably not much we can do except find the person and get them in an institution where they can’t cause any more harm, and can be rehabilitated, ideally. Could better social services and publicly available health care, for example, have prevented this? Maybe. But we should remember that someone will always slip through the cracks. It sounds defeatist, but it’s true: we can’t identify every single criminal before they commit their special crime (h/t Arlo Guthrie).

So in a way, it’s useless to obsess over the systems that may or may not have failed, the people that should or should not have known, and things that should or shouldn’t have happened as a result of those. The Northampton Fire and Police Departments responded well, with the help of many others from the surrounding area. Yes, we had the first fire deaths in over a decade. Yes, there is huge property damage. Yes, the arsonist was in fact still setting fires while emergency personnel were being dispatched, just one step ahead, but we have also, as a community, made some amazing progress. There’s been an outpouring of donations of all kinds for victims, the Facebook group continues to be extremely active, and the Ward 3 Association is holding a meeting tomorrow night to discuss what we can do as a community.

I firmly believe that the person or persons responsible for this terrible crime will be caught. My hope is that, as our mayor Mary Clare Higgins said at yesterday’s press conference, we come together as a community, and help those in need. I also hope that that spirit continues, that we don’t just give our donations and feel good about ourselves, or do our volunteering and stroke our own egos, that we continue to work together in the future, even past the resolution of this crime.

It can be hard to separate our own personal aggrandizement from work on legitimate causes and actually giving selflessly. I find myself treading that line all the time, and over the past day-and-a-half, I’ve had to stop many times and reevaluate, think to myself about if what I’m doing is really helpful. The feelings of insecurity and fear that all of us are experiencing are no excuse for not putting the victims first.

I’m proud to be a part of the effort to respond to this crisis. I know others are too. But it’s important not to let that pride detract from the cause.

I’ve written before about how futile I see components of our “justice” system to be. If what Northampton gets from these attacks is just another crazy person in jail, we will have missed the point. If we act the way the property owner I talked to early yesterday morning, standing in front of the smoking house on Fair St. where a father and son had burned to death hours before, saying “I hope they light the prick who did this on fire”, we will have regressed, not progressed. You know what truly could have stopped this? If for every angry, reserved, and crazy citizen, there were five other concerned ones, getting them psychological help, donating food or money, and so on. American hyper-self-sufficiency is largely to blame for the fact that someone capable of causing this much damage could go unnoticed for so long.

If it turns out I’m wrong, and this is someone who had been treated before, or was under scrutiny and somehow wasn’t detected, then I willingly stand corrected. If it turns out I’m drawing conclusions far too broad given the scope of our existing knowledge, then I welcome further information. But an event like this one really does cause me to profoundly question the way we perceive each other as individuals within a societal framework largely created by the government, at least in terms of social infrastructure. And when your government is consistently lacking in funds and political capital to sufficiently finance such social infrastructure, things fall by the wayside. Sorry to so blatantly politicize such a tragic event, but I can’t help but think “this wouldn’t have happened if we’d been spending the money we’ve spent on Iraq and Afghanistan on health care and subsidized housing”. There it is.

What do we do now? We rebuild, we restore, and we comfort. We work together, and we make sure that this never, ever, happens again.

Paul Yeskie, Sr., and Paul Yeskie, Jr., rest in peace.

Arson

If you follow me on Twitter, you might know about the arson attacks that happened in Northampton early this morning. I’ve been posting pictures and information, and there’s already a Twitter account created for them, a community-maintained Google Map of incidents, and a Facebook group. Here are links to some articles about the fires for more information.

If you’re in the are, please get involved. This is a senseless tragedy, and we need to help the victims. I’m working on organizing a community patrol of some sort, perhaps involved with the Northampton Police department. Keep an eye on my Twitter for more info, and I’ll try to post here if I can.

The liberal's cardinal sin

As a self-styled liberal and far-left progressive, I know I’ve often caught myself assuming that people to the right of me are less in support of human rights than I am. This is equivalent to the conservative tactic of accusing liberals of attacking liberty and restricting freedom.

Liberty, freedom, and human rights are not political views, they are moral views. Politics is where we differ on how to achieve those moral high points. This isn’t to sugarcoat the entirety of the political spectrum as uniformly supporting the same ideals. I believe that there are enemies of freedom and human rights, but accusing everyone with a different political opinion than me of being those enemies prevents me from accurately identifying and calling them out when I do come across them.

This applies to a lot of political discussions I’m involved in: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, health care reform, Guantanamo detainee housing, and more. All are curtailed by these accusations. We need to stop making them.

But that can be difficult; bipartisanship is an old tune when you’re working with people who don’t want to compromise. Hence, the value in Obama’s approach comes from the realization that as many of the people opposing health care reform do so on the basis of their own beliefs as do on the basis of corporate interests. Estranging those people by making them feel as though their opinion is not valid just makes for more political trouble down the line.

Now, that becomes a moot point when you have a GOP that’s adopted fringe tactics to delegitimize the President in any way, but we elected Obama to be better than that. He’s delivering. We don’t have what I’d call substantial health care reform, but it ain’t meaningless either. Us progressives need to stop arguing that Obama has betrayed our ideals and wake up to the fact that he did what we thought was impossible. We’ve broken a unified Republican opposition, and we’re on the way to lowering costs, bringing down the deficit, and providing substantial subsidies to people significantly above the federal poverty line.

When we equate political aims with moral beliefs, we estrange more people than we endear ourselves to, and we blind ourselves to what little good we can wrestle out of a deeply broken political system. It’s time to stop that equation, and to work for real change, both in the current bills, and in ending the necessity of a supermajority to pass anything. That is change we can believe in.

Yet another post on Jewschool

I promise I’ll write a blog post here soon. In the meantime, check out my newest post at Jewschool. It was just too good a topic to miss.

Exquisite Corpse: Now with Ajax (courtesy of jQuery)

If you check out the Exquisite Corpse page, you will notice some pretty friggin’ awesome updates. It is now ENTIRELY Ajax-based. This means that you don’t EVER have to reload the page to get a new poem or submit lines, and there will be no more of the obnoxious thing where after someone submits a line of a poem, they click refresh a bunch of times to get a new prompt line, and then the line they entered gets added on over and over again because they’re resubmitting the POST data over and over. No, no more! jQuery to the rescue!

If this doesn’t make any sense to you, that’s okay. The upshot of it for an end user is that the page is way more user-friendly, has some sizzling-hot visual effects (yes, Mr. Spinning-Gear-Progress-Indicator, and Ms. Snazzy-Awesome-Slide-Up-and-Slide-Down-to-Respectively-Hide-and-Show-Content, I’m talking about you), tracks when a poem was begun, not just when it was ended,and is just generally slicker. Enjoy!

I’ve tested the page pretty thoroughly, and I don’t anticipate any problems. However, if you do run across something, please let me know using the contact form.

Keep up the good work! This project has been pretty incredible, and I hope that people will continue to contribute to it.

New post at Jewschool

Interrupting my unofficial final-induced blogging hiatus is this newest post over at Jewschool!

New Jewschool post!

I wrote a new post for Jewschool! This is very exciting as I haven’t written a blog post in a little while. It’s also the first NSFW post I’ve ever written (or at least it links to NSFW content). And still, I hope, maintains intellectualism. A major milestone. Enjoy!

BDS: a threat to peace

On Thursday night, I attended Brown Student’s for Palestine BDS event. The BDS movement is a global call to remove financial backing from Israeli companies that profit from the occupation. This was my first encounter with the movement, and I went without really knowing what to expect. Certainly, I was looking forward to the opportunity to engage in dialogue about how to promote peace, and I looked forward to meeting people outside of the Jewish community involved in that process, as most of my involvement thus far has been through J Street, J Street U, and Brown Hillel.

I didn’t experience a dialogue about peace. I didn’t experience a discussion of what was in the best interests of Palestinians. And I didn’t feel welcome.

There are some important distinctions that I think need to be drawn when analyzing a political group or event like this one. First of all, I wholeheartedly support this group’s right to purse whatever political strategy they’ve chosen for whatever ends they’ve chosen, and, if doing so requires it, to act independently of other organizations and disregard their input. This is how one runs a political campaign you decide on what you want to do, you form a strategy, and then you do it. That’s how you elect people, it’s how you push for change, and it’s how you (hopefully) gain public support.

I missed the first half of the event, which was an info session, and got there right as they were opening it up for questions. One of the first things I heard them declare during that process was “We know that we want to run a divestment campaign, and we’re here to talk about how.” This didn’t initially mean much to me I thought “Okay, good, they know what they’re doing.” That’s better than endless indecisiveness in the service of some high moral ideal, at least. But a minute later, it was followed by an entirely different statement: “We want to figure out what’s in the best interest of Palestinians.”

What? Take a step back for a moment. If you’ve decided to a pursue a campaign without knowing if it’s in the best interests of the Palestinians, you’re in a sticky situation. What if, hypothetically, what you were doing would actually cause more harm, immediately and in the long-term, to Palestinians and their ability to self-govern? What if your resolve on a single reflexive course of action by its very nature, prevented you from effectively analyzing the situation?

As you can probably guess, those aren’t really hypothetical questions. I believe that the BDS movement is inherently shortsighted. At Thursday night’s event, the former president of Brown Students for Israel asked the panelists what they saw as the ultimate end of the peace process. Their answer was extremely revealing “That’s not our job. We don’t have a political opinion on the end of the process. We’re trying to give them the right to self-determination.”

I have no doubt about the purity of these people’s motives. I don’t claim, as would some others, that they’re selfishly just trying to wash their hands of the responsibility for Israel’s actions that they currently bear by virtue of paying taxes. I honestly believe that they have every intention of doing what they say they want to, and that they have great value for the lives of Palestinians. And that they honestly believe that what they’re doing is in Palestinians’ best interests. And they have every right to believe that, and every right to act upon it.

But by refusing to look at their actions in the context of an end to the conflict, they’re missing something big, namely understanding whether or not their actions will lead to peace. Do I support the occupation? Absolutely not, contrary to what I and others were accused of over and over. Do I support the systems of institutionalized discrimination that are a part of Israel’s domestic policy? No, although I was also accused of supporting of that too. Do I believe that Israel has the moral or political right to pursue foreign policy that prevents Palestinian self-governance? In no way, shape, or form.

But I also believe that economically weakening Israel will not expedite the peace process. In focusing only on the purported issue of “equal weight in negotiations” (BDS’ intention is to weaken Israel enough that it can’t continue the occupation, thus allowing for a level playing field in negotiations), the BDS movement ignores some glaring realities. First of all, a boycott will not be immediate. Israel will not wake up one morning and not have enough money to fuel its airplanes and pay its soldiers. It won’t wake up to unified international outrage over its actions (if that was going to happen overnight, it would have, or it would have at least materialized in the last 60 years). And it certainly won’t wake up to find that its guns don’t shoot or its bombs don’t explode or its settlers don’t resist evacuation.

A boycott will take years to have any kind of effect. And beyond that, it will take even longer for it actually to put any kind of restrictions on Israel’s military power. And do you know what will happen before the boycott kicks in? More bombs. More rockets into Israel. More death all around.

Even worse, once Israel starts to lose economic backing, it’ll really kick into high gear. The Israeli defense industry is huge, and there’s an immediate economic benefit to be gained from military campaigns. Not only that, but history shows that when Israel feels its security is threatened in any way, it responds. As would any country. Especially one in such a volatile geopolitical context.

So let’s also consider the consequences of our actions beyond grand ideals of “ending oppression” and “justice for all”. Yes, these are great things. But they can’t be bought or induced. They have to be won. When you don’t have them, you demand them. You negotiate for them. You don’t shut up.

What can we do to hasten the peace process and ensure safety for everyone in the region (Israelis too remember, BDS, they’re also people go figure)? We can lobby Congress. We can write letters. We can talk, rather than accuse. We can listen, rather than spread divisive disinformation. We can unify, rather than divide, strengthen the players in that region, rather than weaken them and force them to act out of fear and instability, whichwill not serve the cause of peace.

But because BDS doesn’t propose an end to the solution, they don’t have to deal with any of these things. Conveniently, their responsibility ends when we have no more money in Israel (which, by the way, will never happen). What then? What before then? However genuinely they support the Palestinian people, their core mission prevents them from acting in those same people’s best interests, or at the very least, having the discussion about what’s in their best interests.

So this first encounter with the radical left has been eye-opening. It’s forced me to rethink many of the views I hold, and to reexamine my opinions on what the best way forward is. I’ve certainly been awoken to the fact that there’s a need for direct dialogue and education on how to achieve peace.

I’m ready to meet that need, and I know others are as well. I will publicly debate anyone on what the best way forward in this process is. But I will not be called a racist. I will not be told I’m a militant Zionist. I will not be told I don’t support human rights, or that I support the occupation. These are regressive tactics whether they come from the left or the right.

We’ve been bogged down in them too long. BDS’ continued use of them is a direct obstacle to a useful dialogue on peace.

The Text Reassembler

Tonight marks the launch of the newest entry to the projects section of this site, currently called the text reassembler (if you have a better idea for a name, please let me know). It’s something I started over a year ago that’s languished undeveloped for much of that time. I decided to put in a bit of time to get it viewable, and put it up as a work in progress.

The project is based off of something I saw demonstrated atbyProf. Allen Downey atOlin College in the fall of 2008 while I was visiting. Although I didn’t end up applying there, I really liked the presentation he gave, on various computing methods and some of the ways of using computers to produce humanistic output. Particularly, he demonstrated a program thataccepted inputted text, andbroke down that text into anassociative array with the following properties:

• the array keys were each word in the array (so the text “hello how are you” would generate an array with keys “hello”, “how”, “are”, and “you”)
• the value of each key was a non-associative array consisting of a list of every word thatfollowed the key somewhere in the text (so the text “I saw you and he saw her” would be (in PHP format): array(“I”=>array(“saw”),”saw”=>array(“you”,”her”),”you”=>array(“and”),”and”=>array(“he”),”her”=>array())

This sounds complicated, but bear with me; the next step will make it make more sense. Once the program has generated this array, it begins to iterate through it in the following manner:

1. it takes key from the array and outputs it
2. it selects a random item from the list of words following that key (the array stored in that key’s associate value) and outputs it
3. then it jumps to thekey entry for that word, and moves back to step 2

It repeats this until it encounters a word that has nothing following it (the last word in the source text if it appears nowhere else) or until it’s output a specified amount of words (much more common). Thus, if you take any two adjacent words in the resulting text (which sounds uncannily similar in tone to the original and sounds like it should make sense, but is complete nonsense), you’ll be able to locate them, still adjacent, in the source text. It’s legitimately one of the most fascinating and beautiful things I’ve ever seen a computer do.

I came home determined to write a copy, and made a bit of progress. It lay around for a while, I did some more work on it some point, but I never completed it. I rediscovered it this evening and just manned up and made it work well enough to be publicly viewable. When finished, it will accept input in a text field, or will be able to read input from a specified URL. At the moment, though, it’s just dealing with block of text I hard-coded in (thus it’s not accepting any user input right now), and a word output limit imposed the same way. Both the source of the text and the length are displayed on the page.