What choices do we have? The most obvious and most glib answer is: leave! Escape! In fact, after prayer and consultation and weighing options, that may end up being the best answer.

This seems like a very grounded look at some of the oft-recurrent dysfunctions in churches. Check out the list of problems. I suspect thet most seekers have run into at least a fee of these in congregations.

https://blog.canyoubelieve.me/2019/03/trustworthy-part-three-choices.html

Superposters tend to be “more opinionated, more extreme, more engaged, more everything,” said Andrew Guess, a Princeton University social scientist. When more casual users open Facebook, often what they see is a world shaped by superposters like Mr. Wasserman. Their exaggerated worldviews play well on the algorithm, allowing them to collectively — and often unknowingly — dominate newsfeeds. “That’s something special about Facebook,” Dr. Paluck said. “If you end up getting a lot of time on the feed, you are influential. It’s a difference with real life.”

A great many general-interest Facebook groups that I see are dominated by trollish people whose visibility relies on how provocative they can get without being banned. This is true in many Quaker-focused groups. Facebook prioritizes engagement and nothing seems to get our fingers madly tapping more than provocation by someone half-informed.

Formal membership in a Quaker meeting is a considered process; for many Quaker groups, public ministry is also a deliberated process, with clearness committees, anchor committees, etc. On Facebook, membership consists of clicking a like button; public ministry, aka visibility, is a matter of having a lot of time to post comments. Public groups with minimal moderation which run on Facebook’s engagement-inducing algorithms are the public face of Friends these days, far more visible than any publication or recognized Quaker body’s Facebook presence. I written before of my long-term worry that with the rise of social media gatekeeping sites, we’re not the ones writing our story anymore.

I don’t have any answers. But the NYTimes piece helped give me some useful ways of thinking about these phenomena.

Facebook Fueled Anti-Refugee Attacks in Germany, New Research Suggests (Published 2018)

Towns where people use Facebook more also had more attacks on refugees, building on suspicions that the platform…

www.nytimes.com

About 9 years ago I began to give voice to a lifelong frustration of mine. The frustration was that I cannot answer the question “What do Quakers believe?” I would always answer the questions somewhat defensively. I would say, “it’s kind of hard to know what Quakers believe, but let me tell you what I believe.” Or I would say, “well, it’s hard to know what Quakers believe today but let me tell you what Quakers believed at the beginning.” Or I would say what I thought Quakers believed and I would hope that no one else was listening because I did not want to be overcalled.

I think Arthur does a pretty good job tackling a very tough task. He barely even mentions Howard Brinton’s “SPICES.”

http://quakerspeak.com/9‑core-quaker-beliefs/

Holding the line, speaking the truth is the Christian’s (Quaker’s) obligation in the Lamb’s War. If the God of truth is honored in just one mind, heart, and soul, the world is not lost, as Jesus showed us by prototypal example. In this statement given before Pilate shortly before the end of his earthly life, Jesus identified his life’s purpose not only for himself but for us all.

https://patradallmann.wordpress.com/2018/07/01/dynamics-of-evil/

Friends are seeking ways to respond to the current refugee crisis. One example is a minute of concern recently approved by Santa Monica Meeting. Other Friends are taking action by visiting detainees in the Adelanto Detention Center. Some are accompanying refugees in the courts. Quaker organizations like FCNL and AFSC are calling for comprehensive immigration reform and an end to ICE. I am including this letter in hopes of stimulating more discussion among Friends (and others) about what we can do to respond to this latest moral crisis.

https://laquaker.blogspot.com/2018/07/reunite-refugee-families-separated-at.html

When it ended early on the fourth day, New Jersey had been treated to a remarkable political spectacle, even by Trenton standards, complete with dueling press conferences, nasty backroom shouting matches, and even propaganda posters.  Some of it played out publicly — very publicly. What didn’t is told here, the inside story of what caused — and what finally settled — the New Jersey government shutdown of 2017.

It’s especially depressing to read the kind of horse trading that was going on behind the scenes: other measures floated to end the standoff. It was a game to see which constituency the politicians might all be able to agree to screw over. I presume this is normal Trenton politics but it’s not good governing and the ramifications are felt throughout the state.

Read: The inside story of The Jersey Shutdown, 2017

First it was Dropbox, whose Carousel app promised to change everything. For $10/month, I can have all of the digitized photos I’ve ever taken all together. It changed how I access past events. Back in the day I might have taken 20 pictures and posted 2 to Flickr. The other 18 were for all intents inaccessible to me—on the backup drive that sits in a dusty drawer in my desk. Now I could look up some event on my public Flickr, remember the date, then head to Dropbox/Carousel to look through everything I took that day—all on my phone. Sometimes I’d even share the whole roll from that event to folks who were there.

But this was a two-step process. Flickr itself had boosted its storage space last year but it wasn’t until recently that they revealed a new Camera Roll and uploader that made this all work more seamlessly. So all my photos again went up there. Now I didn’t have to juggle between two apps.

Last week, Google finally (finally!) broke its photos from Google+ and the remnants of Picasa to give them their own home. It’s even more fabulous than Flickr and Dropbox, in that its search is so good as to feel like magic. People, places, and image subjects all can be accessed with the search speed that Google is known for. And this service is free and uploads old videos.

I’m constantly surprised how just how emotionally powerful an old photo or video can be (I waxed lyrically about this in Nostalgia Comes Early, written just before our last family vacation). This weekend I found a short clip from 2003 of my wife carrying our newborn in a backpack and citing how many times he had woken us up the night before. At the end she joked that she could guilt trip him in years to come by showing this video to him. Now the clip is something I can find, load, and play in a few seconds right from my ever-present phone.

So what I’ve noticed is this quick access to unshared photos is changing the nature of my cellphone photo-taking. I’m taking pictures that I never intend to share but that give me an establishing shot for a particular event: signs, driveway entrances, maps. Now that I have unlimited storage and a camera always within reach, I can use it as a quick log of even the most quotidian life events (MG Siegler recently wrote about The Power of the Screenshot, which is another way that quick and ubiquitous photo access is changing how and what we save.) With GPS coordinates and precise times, it’s especially useful. But the most profound effect is not the activity logging, but still the emotions release unlocking all-but-lost memories: remembering long-ago day trips and visits with old friends.

The three-fort tour from Ft Mott near Salem, New Jersey, to Ft Delaware on Pea Patch Island (de facto Delaware), to Delaware City, Delaware and adjacent Ft DuPont.

A few weeks ago Yummygal at Southjerseyexplorer.com wrote up a trip report on The Three Forts Ferry Tour. It didn’t take more than two minutes of texts before my wife and I decided we would recreate this.

It’s wasn’t so easy at first. I spent way too long on the park system’s website trying to figure out how to board the ferry at Ft Mott on the New Jersey side. Every option I tried had me board in nearby Salem, N.J. It wasn’t till I was home that I read that the Ft Mott stop had been out of commission until early this summer because of Sandy and that Salem had been the alternate boarding location. The website hadn’t been updated.

Once we got to the dock we saw there was no ticket kiosk. Once the ferry came in we found they couldn’t swipe a credit card onboard (really? can’t any modern smartphone handle that?, but I digress…). The only place they could handle a credit card was the far end, in Delaware City. We’d have to dock on Fort Delaware/Pea Patch Island but stay in the boat and continue to this city. We’d hadn’t even really planned to necessarily go to Delaware City but we ended up spending much of our day there.

Delaware City was a small port town whose claim to fame was its location as the eastern terminus of the original nineteenth century Chesapeake and Delaware Canal. The modern canal bypasses it a few miles to the south, so Delaware City is a bit frozen in time.

First stop: Crabby Dick’s, one of three eateries recommended to us (the others being a pub and an Italian restaurant). Being a vegetarian I don’t get into this sort of a restaurant very often but they had veggie burgers and creative sweet fries (cinnamon-covered with an apple butter dip–yum!). Luckily it was nearly empty around noon in a Sunday so our troublemaking kids didn’t cause too much commotion.

Next door was a small ice cream shop. The temperatures were in the 90s so this was an obvious stop.

What we should have done next is wander the town until the next ferry to Pea Patch Island and its fort. One of our party was determined to see all three forts so we set out for Ft DuPont. It’s adjacent to Delaware City’s dock and downtown as the crow flies. But we aren’t crows, or fish. DuPont’s on the other side of the old canal. You have to walk about a mile to the first bridge that crosses it, a rickety one at that, then make a sharp left to travel in the same direction you had just come from, only on the canal’s south side.

There’s no signs for the fort. Even Yummygirl had gotten lost on her trip so I knew to rely on my phone’s maps. Most of Ft DuPont’s acreage is a large campus dotted with an odd assortment of run-down early twentieth century military buildings surrounding an old parade field. The camp had been a major deployment center during WW II and had also served as a POW camp for Germans. The state’s been trying to repurpose it in recent years but it’s an odd assortment of halfway house services and national guard associations, stuck in between crumbling buildings that will never find a new role.

At the far end of all this a nature trail going through what remains of the nineteenth century Ft DuPont. Walking it is a bit like touring a jungle-covered Aztec city: every so often a ruin sticks out of the trees and tangled vines. It’s an interesting-enough trail but not worth a four mile round-trip hike with four kids in 90 degree heat. We were able to beg a ride back from a park ranger finishing her shift thank goodness but much of our day was sitting under trees drinking the last of our water.

Back at the Delaware City ferry office, we bought a small fortune of water from the vending machine till the next (and final) boat to Pea Patch Island. This is typically the destination of the tourists but by this time we only had about 45 minutes before the last boat from the island to Jersey. We had an extra half hour as the boat waited in dock for a spectacular storm to pass over the river.

We’ll definitely return but probably skip Delaware City except for possibly a meal.

Links:

• Ft Delaware ferry info (and on Wikipedia)
• News story on the Ft Mott dock reopening
• Fort Delaware, Confederate Hellhole on Roadside America
• Yummygal’s trip report