A Memorial Day Reminder

As always, Uncle Kurt says it best (from Cat's Cradle):

 I do not say that children at war do not die like men, if they have to die. To their everlasting honor and our everlasting shame, they do die like men, thus making possible the manly jubilation of patriotic holidays. 

But they are murdered children all same. 

And I propose to you that if we are to pay our sincere respects to the hundred lost children of San Lorenzo, that we might best spend the day despising what killed them; which is to say, the stupidity and viciousness of all mankind. 

Perhaps, when we remember wars, we should take off our clothes and paint ourselves blue and go on all fours all day long and grunt like pigs. That would surely be more appropriate than noble oratory and shows of flags and well-oiled guns. ... If today is really in honor of a hundred children murdered in war ... is today a day for a thrilling show? The answer is yes, on one condition: that we, the celebrants, are working consciously and tirelessly to reduce the stupidity and viciousness of all mankind.

So today, as you remember fallen veterans of military service, don't forget to remember the many, many people who have worked consciously and tirelessly to reduce the stupidity and viciousness of all mankind, in the hopes that someday we won't need to have veterans or a memorial day for them.

Someone Else Wrote It Better: On the Magic of Numbers and Subservience

I had planned to pen an overly-long blog post on this, but then I stumbled across an article here that makes the point I was getting after far more eloquently and with significantly more documentation. It's super and interesting and very much worth your time. So here's a short blog post getting at why I think it's so interesting and worth your time:

Not too long ago I was at a sociology conference on a panel with a well-known (well, for a sociologist) old timer making an argument about why economics is more influential than sociology (as evidenced by the number of times either is cited in the New York Times, a terrible metric for measuring such things, but that's a different argument). To drastically over-simplify his argument, he pointed out that while pretty much all sociologists are liberals (as measured by their affiliation to or ideological closeness to the Democratic party, a similarly terrible metric for measuring such things), while economics departments have a decent number of Republicans (though they'll still heavily outnumbered by Democratic-identifying peoples). As such, sociologists come across as partisan and biased, while economists appear to be objective and balanced, with a much greater diversity of thought.

To put it politely, I think this argument is dumb and wrong for many, many reasons, but two in particular stand out: 1) "right" and "popular" are often very different things!, and B) a major reason economists are granted more mainstream coverage than sociologists is that they've been better at cloaking themselves in the mantle of "pure" science. Mainly because they use more math than sociologists do (as a whole; plenty of sociologists rely solely on math in their research).

And this largely comes down to the fact that: A) math eduction in America is terrible, so B) most Americans don't understand basic math, so C) anything that has even slightly complicated math in it impresses most Americans, as they confuse complexity for meaningful knowledge or understanding.

You can see this in political horse race coverage: while all pundits are generally wrong in their predictions (and hilariously so!), those that use math, like 538, are seen as not just speculating, but scientifically predicting outcomes. Of course, 538 is just as hilariously wrong as everyone else, but look at all the complicated models they use! So complex! So many different letters and numbers! As such, 538 tends to be seen as sober political scientists rationally examining empirical evidence, other than just another set of political pundits spinning shit out of their ass.

And this is more-or-less how the field of economics has bamboozled so many, or in the words of this philosopher (which, again, you should really just go read): "world history tells a story of mathematical models masquerading as science and a public eager to buy them, mistaking elegant equations for empirical accuracy."

In this fascinating piece, we learn that apparently astrologers used to use this very same model of complicated mathematical bullshit signifying nothing to spin themselves as a legitimate scientific enterprise. At the turn of the previous century, many top leaders in politics and business used astrologers to "scientifically" plan their investments, production rates, etc. To make another snotty point about how much I disagreed with that presentation mentioned above, I bet astrologers outnumbered sociologists in the pages of the NYT during that period as well, but I also don't see that as a terribly big problem.

But in addition to the fact that this math-humping "imbues economic theory with unearned empirical authority," this article does touch upon the other problem I noted in that argument when it quotes a tenured economics prof on what influences the models he develops:

‘In economics and finance, if I’m trying to decide whether I’m going to write something favourable or unfavourable to bankers, well, if it’s favourable that might get me a dinner in Manhattan with movers and shakers,’ Pfleiderer said to me. ‘I’ve written articles that wouldn’t curry favour with bankers but I did that when I had tenure.’

And this, to me, is the real heart of the matter: basically, whatever a sociologist writes is not going to win them much political esteem or favor in the business world. However, an economist can add several hundred thousand a year to their bank account if their models just happen to be pleasing to those with a lot of money. Now, I'm not saying they simply invent complicated mathematical models that have no connection to empirical reality solely to please those in positions of wealth and influence, making them little more than modern court jesters, but...well, I guess I'm more or less saying that. But Dr. Levinovitz says it much better, so go read that.

Do You Live In A Bubble? Why Not Let Some Asshole With An Agenda Decide For You!

Recently a friend, whom I otherwise respect, posted this link to face book exhorting his friends to take this test and see if they live in a bubble. This is exactly the kind of self-flagellating thing liberals love to do, wherein they mistake punching themselves repeatedly in the stomach for meaningful social action. "Oh no! Do I live in a bubble?" they ask themselves, as if this is a question that a) has any actual objective answer, or b) would mean anything if it did. But by engaging with such a stupid conservative straw man they can feel smugly self-satisfied with their commitment to open-minded bi-partisanship, again as if that means anything.

The test is designed to see how much of a sheltered bubble you live in versus how much you interact with other people. Which, in theory, is not such a bad idea. It's good to know people with different perspectives! It's not a particularly great thing to live in a tiny echo chamber!

But you can take one look at the author of this quiz and know exactly where it's going. It was created by Charles Murray, who works for the American Enterprise Institute. While the name sounds fairly neutral, it should more properly be labeled "Incredibly Regressive Billionaire Thinktank About How The Gubmit is Bad And Anything to the Left of Attila the Hun is Communism and Should Be Destroyed For the Sake of America's Future." But I guess that isn't as snappy and would probably lead to really expensive letterhead.

Anyway, I took the quiz myself and it would surprise anyone who knows me, and therefore knows how carefully I cull my circle of friends and avoid at all times interaction with anyone who doesn't agree 100% with me on every possible issue, that I actually have a pretty large bubble! Crazy, right?

Well, not really. Because of the many, many problems with this quiz, it assumes whomever is taking it is a big city liberal (which, given that it's being hosted on NPR's website, is probably a fairly safe guess, but it purports to be for everyone). So it doesn't actually measure how much you interact with people who are genuinely different than you in anyway, it measures how much you interact with working class people in small towns (who are assumed by this quiz, and the assholes who write these sorts of things, to be the exact opposite of big city liberals). The reason I supposedly have a much larger than average size bubble is because I grew up in a rural small town and have had my share of manual labor jobs over the years. That's it, that's why my bubble is so much bigger than most other people's.

Hell, if you live in a small town and have a working-class job, even if every person you knew was exactly like you, thought exactly like you, did all the exact same things you do, and were in every way what we would think of as living in a bubble, you would score as having a giant bubble. Which makes this a fucking terrible test from a measurement perspective, since it doesn't even come close at all to measuring what it purports to measure.

But an even bigger problem is the way this is just a gussied-up version of the "real America" versus...well, they never say what everyone else is living in. "Fake America?" "Unreal America?" "The Loose Federation of States Formerly Known as America?"*

I mean, they could have saved a lot of time and trouble if they just asked what they're clearly getting after. Instead of a 25 question quiz, Murray could have just written "When's the last time you left your vegan cafe and changed your own oil, homo?!?" and that would have just as thoroughly gotten to the point he's trying to make without wasting nearly as much time or involving nearly as much obfuscation.

To make it even funnier, it turns out the hypothetical all-white, working-class, small town, Reagan masturbation fantasy that Murray is using as his comparison point for real American is actually, statistically speaking, a terrible representation of "real America."

So in a turn no one could have predicted**, this quiz is not actually about encouraging people to examine their possibly-cloistered lives to see if they couldn't include more and different people in their social circles, but is instead just another completely-inaccurate fantasy of the right-wing culture wars. And while it's at it, it fails both in terms of science and ideology! What a great quiz! Take it right away!


*Unrelated fun story: whenever assholes go on about "real America" I always feel compelled to ask them if Manhattan is part of "real America." Of course it is not, they'll gladly let you know. NYC generally, but Manhattan specifically, is pretty much exactly what these assholes are trying to juxtapose "real America" against. Once that is established, I tell them I assume they must not be too upset about the September 11 attacks, since they didn't happen to America by that logic. This usually ends in that person getting very angry at me.

**Just kidding! Literally anyone with a functioning adult brain could have easily predicted that!

A Lesson in Empathy

I grew up in Iowa, but have little warm feelings toward the place. It's not that I actively dislike it, I just don't really care about it. My parents moved away from the hometown where I grew up about 5 years ago, and I don't think I've so much driven through the state since then, and I can't for the life of me conceive of when I would ever end up back in my hometown for basically any reason. Again, I don't feel any over antipathy toward the place, I just don't feel any meaningful connection. Even though I spent the first 23 years of my life in Iowa, and it undoubtedly shaped me in many ways, I just don't really care about it.

I moved to Minneapolis shortly before my 23rd birthday and immediately felt at home. My dad hails from Northern MN, and trips to Minneapolis were often the most exciting part of my childhood growing up. For whatever ineffable reasons, I always felt much more connection to and affection toward Minnesota. I remember once having a talk with my brother over some beers about how it just made so much sense to move to Minneapolis as we both did, because we both always felt much more like Minnesotans than Iowans. And now that my folks have moved up to Minneapolis from my childhood home, pretty much all of my connections to Iowa are severed.

Which is all a long way of saying I consider Minnesota my home.

I've also never understood why people get so incredibly upset about celebrity deaths. I mean, I get why people are sad when some artist or performer they enjoy passes, but I never understood getting legitimately upset about it. After all, it's not like you've ever met. That celebrity doesn't know you,  doesn't know shit about you, and doesn't care about you. Getting upset over their death just seems...odd. In fact, I'm pretty certain I lost some friends for life when I gently suggested it was weird how upset people got over the death of David Bowie, someone they've never even met.

But then Prince died.

It hit me like a ton of bricks. Frankly, it was fairly confusing. I mean, I'd long been a Prince fan and appreciated everything about his musical genius. But it genuinely felt like a close relative had died. I don't know that I've ever been more homesick for the Twin Cities than I was seeing all the spontaneous dance parties and tributes and all other forms of collective mourning happening in the immediate wake of his death. It felt like I was missing a relative's funeral in that way that I felt like I should be there. Like I needed to be around friends and family just to process this.

In trying to figure out why the death of someone I've never met affected me so much, especially given my previous stance of thinking this was an insane way to react, I think I've settled on the fact that we shared a hometown.

Prince loved Minneapolis and Minneapolis loved Prince. Here's a pre-fame Prince in 1979 explaining that Minneapolis is his home and he'll always stay. And stay he did. Paisley Park right there out in the burbs. While pretty much every other famous person runs away to find their fame and fortune in more glamorous environs, Prince stayed. He could often be found at Vikings games. After the Lynx won their last WNBA championship, he brought them back to Paisley for a post-championship concert. He wasn't just a celebrity from Minnesota, he was a celebrity of Minnesota.

It's a pretty strong contrast to the state's other famous musical export. Dylan pretty famously got out of Minnesota fairly quickly, landing in the NY folk scene before he was out of his teens. And he never really came back, not in any meaningful sort of way. While there's a lot about him that clearly stamps him as being a Minnesota product, you get the feeling the place is no more than a tour stop to him. Minnesota seems to be to Dylan as Iowa is to me -- a place you're from, not too much more.

And I think that's what makes Prince's passing so intense. We both claim Minneapolis; I as an immigrant who fell in love with it and have more connection there than anywhere else, he as the most favorite native son. It's a pretty tenuous connection, sure, but I'm obviously not alone in feeling it, if the thousands who spontaneously poured into downtown last Thursday are any indication.

So now I get it. I get why people can be so saddened by the death of someone they don't know or ever met. I mean, I'm not a monster -- I understood the basic process of it. But as with so many things, actually experiencing it is a hell of a lot different than understanding it on an intellectual level.

So in addition to eating this big ol' slice of humble pie, I think I've got a little bit more empathy in my angry, withered heart. That's Prince for ya, still teaching us all valuable lessons we didn't even know we needed to learn.

Saying Goodbye to Minnesota's Patron Saint

Grief. Sadness. Heartbreak. The day sex died. It's hard to put it into proper words.

One of my greatest regrets in my short life is that I never got to see the Purple One perform live in person. The only Prince story I really have involves specifically not getting to see him play -- I was at some sort of showcase type show of local music (I want to say it was one of the Doomtree blowouts, but I honestly don't remember) and suddenly there was an insane buzz all through the venue. Now, I have to assume that anywhere in the world, if Prince is in the house, people start to go crazy. But when Prince is in the house in Minnesota, people go even crazier. But when Prince is in the house in Minnesota and furthermore it's in First Avenue, a place nearly synonymous with his funkness, it's truly insane. As soon as the first person sighted Prince lurking in the wings, every person in the place knew within moments. In the greatest tease I'll ever experience, Prince stood in the wings for awhile, before eventually strapping on a (unplugged) guitar and beginning to noodle around as if trying to figure out the songs. It was only a matter of moments before he would join the performers on stage, surely. But, as is his beguiling way, he instead simply took the guitar off and disappeared back into the ether of the wings.

Really, this might be the most fitting anecdote I could have. After all, Prince is one of the few people to ever exist where you repeatedly tell the story of the time you kinda sorta could see him offstage. That's the kind of presence the man had.

Yet through it all, Prince remained a fairly...well, normal guy, as much as you could ever apply that word to a pansexual little person funk god. After all, he was a huge Vikings fan and regularly attended games. He continued living in Minnesota most of his life, despite being a world-famous rock star. He beat the siblings of celebrities at basketball and made them pancakes.

This is one of those times when I really wish I was in Minneapolis to join in the collective mourning for the hometown boy done good. I've got nothing to say that will compare to the inevitable countless eulogies and obituaries penned for the man by writers much more insightful and loquacious than I. I just know that I, like a lot of folks right now, feel like I lost a family member and it'll take a good while to recover.

Good night, sweet Prince.

What An Hilarious Failed Thievery Attempt Can Tell Us About Crime

Last night the weather was finally nice enough to sleep with the windows open for the first time this Spring, which is one of my favorite nights of the year (ahead of it on the list: the day we set clocks back and all sleep in, the night before Christmas, the night of my birthday, the night when Brigadoon comes out of the fog). Anyway, around midnight, as I was finally beginning to drift off to sleep, I heard a car door open and for some reason thought someone was breaking into my car. As I sat listening to the noise, I tried to somehow magically determine if it was just my neighbors coming home much later than usual, or if my paranoid first thought had indeed been correct. As I pondered whether I'd remembered to lock the car doors after bringing my groceries in, I had a trio of thoughts that prevented me from caring too much:

1) I leave nothing of value in my vehicle at any time. Mostly because I own nothing of value, but also because I've had my car broken into roughly 857,349 times and have learned my lesson (one of the few downsides to city life).
B) My car has a factory-installed CD player, which is both worthless and really difficult to remove. Given that non-factory CD players comprise the only things ever stolen from my vehicles, I could safely conclude there ain't nothing in there worth taking (or, just as accurately, that I would give a shit if it was taken).
III) What was I going to do? Hop up in the dark, throw some clothes on, find my glasses, run downstairs and then...I dunno, fight them? Yell at them? Explain in detail this is a prime factor in eroding the social trust networks that improve so many life outcomes? Plus, my bed is super comfy and I was super sleepy.

So I went to sleep and promptly forgot about the whole thing. Until I was walking the dog this morning when on the way home, about 50 or so feet from my car, I saw a little black object that looks exactly like my CD carrier. Which, unsurprisingly, turned out to be the CD carrier I keep in my car. Unrelated to the point I'm making, this is by far my favorite part of the story*. After taking the dog home and feeding her, I went out to assess the damage. Fortunately I had left the doors unlocked so they didn't break a window (more on that in a bit). They emptied out the glove box presumably looking to see if I had anything worth taking, but they left everything. Including the nice GPS unit an ex's rich parents had given me for Christmas several years ago. Much like the CDs, this stands as a comical aside of how quickly the value of certain things has deteriorated with the technological changes of the past decade or so.

But as I looked around the car, it became increasingly clear they had taking nothing. Not nothing of value, but just straight up nothing (though, again, I don't keep anything at all valuable in there). Until I remembered that last night after getting groceries, I didn't have a free hand to carry in some of the non-perishables, so I just left them in the trunk figuring I would grab them later. "But surely they didn't," I thought to myself. "Why would they even want that?" I wondered with increasing curiosity as I rounded the back of the car only to open the trunk and find a true horror scene. I had found the one thing they did take from my vehicle:

A 24-pack of Diet Pepsi.

Humorously enough, there are some things of minor value in the trunk -- tools and the like -- which would probably fetch zero dollars but have some utility. But none of that was taken, either. Just the Diet Pepsi. So I have been keeping my eye out for people who look like thieves who don't use tool sets and are watching their figure, but have yet to ID the culprits.

But the question remains -- what does this teach us about the reality of crime? Short answer: a shitload!

For one, this bears all the marks of the crime of convenience, by far the most common type of street crime. Unlike the super intelligent super criminals of the television world, or the clever and always-plotting criminals of bourgeois imagination that lead to ever-hilarious "how to avoid crime" pamphlets, most people who commit these kinds of property crimes don't really plan them out ahead of time. They may have a general plan of "let's test the handles of parked cars," but they don't case vehicles for days scoping out the choicest prize (after all, if they did, they would have known not to bother with my car).

Also, it's not like they broke a window to get in there -- that's probably a level more than this particular group of kids was willing to do. Had I remembered to lock my doors (which I do 99% of the time!), they more than likely would have just moved on down the street. And I say "kids" intentionally, because I can all but guarantee this was a group of teenagers. Not only because I'm now over 30 and therefore do not trust any teenagers for any reason, but because it's been well-documented that these kinds of street crimes are almost exclusively the domain of people in their mid-teens to early-20s, and more often than not, boys rather than girls.

All this speaks to the most important point, which is that people aren't "criminals," they're people. That is to say, I think a lot of folks who aren't criminologists (so, you know, everyone) view people who commit crimes as if that's like their 9-5 or something, like they wake up in the morning and punch the crime clock, trying to work their way up the crime ladder so they can get a big enough crime 401(C)** to retire early and raise some little criminals in the suburbs.

Instead, people who commit these types of property crimes (who most people are referring to when they use the term "criminal") turn out to be not terribly different from most people. Maybe these kids were out specifically trying to steal things from cars that night, but there's also a pretty decent chance this was on a complete whim. But in either case, it's not like they identify as people who occasionally steal things from cars, as if that's what is central to their sense of self. Instead, that's more than likely just one of many things they do during the copious amount of free time teenagers have.

Also fun and related -- this is why official crime stats are not very good. Or are often, pardon the highly-specific scientific jargon, pretty damn shitty. What's often referred to with the super-metal-sounding-for-a-fairly-boring-concept name of the Dark Figure of Crime is the notion that probably well less than half of all crimes committed are ever reported to the police (whether those crimes reported to police ever actually end up in official stats is a whole other story). This story is a prime example of one of the many types of crimes that goes unreported -- even if they had stolen anything of value, it would have to have been very valuable for me to bother reporting it to the police, and then I'd only do that because I assume my insurance would require me to. But in every previous case I've had my car broken into and things actually stolen from it, I never bothered reporting it, because I knew exactly what would happen -- eventually a very polite officer would stop by my house, listen to my story, write down a report, and that report would be filed away somewhere to never be seen again (which is a quite reasonable thing for the police to do, as there is less than zero point to searching for a stolen car CD player, at least of the kind I could afford).

So in the end, this is all just a no-harm, no-foul reminder to lock your car doors when parking on the street. But it taught us some valuable lessons about criminology, and I'd like to think, the importance of taking all the groceries directly inside and putting them away.




*Why is this my favorite part of the story? Because what explains not stealing my CDs, but simply moving them a bit down the road? Like seriously just moving them roughly 50 feet. None were missing, they weren't broken, it doesn't even appear like they were thrown. Just moved. So here's my current theory: one of the guys rooting through my car grabbed them against the protestations of the other fellas. "Come on, these have to be worth something!" he tried to argue, while they all just laughed at him for his naivety (this was his first attempted theft). Now just trying to save face, but having already snatched them up, he carries them for awhile, waiting until all the other guys aren't looking, and then gently sets them down so they don't hear anything and look at what he's doing. Now there are no more CDs, and he can claim he was just kidding the whole time and was, like, never planning on stealing them for real! Shut up, guys!


**The C is for Crime!

Social Forces Exist and People Are Sometimes Just Shitty People

Many people hate them for the wrong reasons,
others hate the for the right reason

As a young(ish) white man, I am constitutionally required to #feelthebern. As such, I find this tweet hilarious. Not hilarious in a "Rita Rudner funny" kind of way, but hilarious in a "US Government Simultaneously Lecturing Cuba About Political Prisoners While Literally Operating a Lawless Prison on Cuban Soil" kind of way.

I find this tweet endorsement so insanely apt because Courtney Love is the Hilary Clinton of popular music. The parallels are simply too many: for one, both have always been and seemingly will always be overshadowed by their more famous husbands (regardless of how undeserved it may be). They're also both regularly accused of being willing to discard and discredit anyone who stands in the way of what they want. But more what I'm getting at is how they're spoken about, regarded, and just generally understood by so many people.

Because, frankly, both have gotten so much shit their entire careers. In many cases, it has been completely undeserved and obviously only heaped upon them because they are women who dare to exist and be successful in what stubbornly remain male-dominated industries. And while both have plenty of examples of staunch and vocal defenders, even those who greatly dislike either or both of them simply have to admit they've also gotten a lot of shit for things that would not have been a problem if they were men. It's an argument so self-evidently obvious it doesn't even need to be made.

So to sum up: Courtney Love and Hilary Clinton both get a ton of undeserved shit exclusively because they are women. Pretty undeniable.

...and yet you can already hear the obvious and obnoxious "however," right? Well, in this case, the obnoxious however is that both Courtney Love and Hilary Clinton also have some pretty major faults. Like...really major faults. For instance, pretty much everyone who has ever met Courtney Love seems to very much dislike her. Heck, here's a collection of 11 Diss Tracks That Are Probably About Courtney Love and you can peruse the comments section for suggestions of dozens more songs that are varying degrees of being clearly about the songwriter's distaste for Love. These songs are all written by people who have interacted with Love, and the sheer number of them all coming to the same conclusion seems to strongly point to there being something about Love beyond her gender that is causing this reaction. After all, while plenty most all women in the music industry suffer ridiculous levels of sexism, few come anywhere close to the level of vitriol Love seems to inspire.

Similarly with Hilary Clinton -- there are many, many reasons to dislike her as a candidate for President that have nothing to do with her gender. For instance, the horrid things she's said about black youth, her support for the disastrous and illegal Iraq war, her continued hawkish stance on the entire Middle East, her completely uncritical support of Israel, the fact that she is "stalwart friend of of World's Worst Despots,"  her continual leading from behind such as when she conveniently forgets everything she previously said about the TPP or her convenient about-face on gay marriage, or hell, just her inability to correctly pour a beer. Again, the point is that none of these are gender-based issues (unless you were to excuse male politicians for these same behaviors, in which case, totally sexist).

So it makes a ton of sense that Love's and Clinton's supporters would view any and possible all criticisms of these two as motivated at least in part by sexism, and why their detractors would feel like they're being unfairly accused of sexism due to the fact there are many reasons they dislike one or the other (or probably for a lot of people, both) and none of those reasons are necessarily gender-related.

In the end, it simply had to be. How could Courtney Love Cobain endorse anyone other than Hillary Rodham Clinton when Courtney Love Cobain is Hillary Rodham Clinton?

A Prince Auction Is Exactly What You Think It Would Be

Would you pay a minimum of $1,500 for this?
What if you were assured someone ate lousy wedding
venue food off of it while making small talk with a stranger
and also Prince was somewhere in the building?

Apparently needing money and/or space in what I can only assume is a very ornate, very purple garage somewhere, Prince Nelson Rogers is having himself a good ol' fashioned yard sale. Well, less a yard sale and more a curated online auction, but that's about as close as Prince would ever get to a yard sale, I imagine.

While everything is ridiculously expensive, there is some interesting stuff for sale there. An old Gibson Prince wrote many of his early songs on would be pretty cool to own (if you have a spare 60 thousand dollars or so lying around). Ditto for some of his early masters and demo tapes. Hell, if you've got 6 figures to blow, you can have the engagement ring he used to propose to Mayte Garcia, as well as a series of notes comprising the handwritten marriage proposal that sealed the deal. In true Prince fashion, the person who pays over $100,000 for these items does not also get the right to reproduce or distribute the content of said notes. I would not be terribly surprised if they're not even allowed to let anyone else see them. Which is a shame, because I have to believe a Prince marriage proposal is either the most romantic or most fucking ridiculous (or both!) thing ever set to paper.

In addition to a lot of his old clothes and jewelry (you can own the scorpio necklace worn by Prince when he met Prince Charles for the low, low starting bid of $30,000!), by far the most interesting (and affordable) part of the auction is where you can buy various bits of the wedding china from Prince and Garcia's wedding. For $50,000 you can have a whole set, but for only $1,000 you can get a single plate. Granted, that's a shitload of money to spend on a single plate, but can you imagine the kind of conversation that would start? Well, it would most likely just be about why you spent so much money for a single plate. But you wouldn't care about your friends and their inability to understand why such a purchase is necessary, because you will be busy eating off of a plate someone who once was standing near Prince for a little while ate off of, and you can put a fucking price on that kind of history...

Walking While Black and Why "Legality" Is a Poor Measure

Here's a pretty common occurrence made special only by the fact the victim had the wherewithal to film it: a man in Cincinnati walks down the street obviously not being disruptive in any way, correctly predicts he's about to be subject to police harassment, and is shortly violently arrested. Seriously, go watch the video -- it's almost like a gag how quickly he goes from predicting he's going to be harassed to the officer being on top of him.

This is an incident that serves as such a great example for how mundane it is. What it's an example of is how poor of a measure of any action the concept of "legality" is.

For one, as noted in the article, the police insist nothing illegal happened (note they don't say nothing wrong happened). And technically speaking, the police are right when they say officer violated no laws. Of course, this in large part stems from the fact that very little an officer is capable of doing is deemed illegal in practice, but that's another post for another day.

But the more important point is that the officer in the video was probably technically correct that the gentleman in the video had jaywalked (it's difficult to tell from the actual video). And jaywalking is indeed illegal! Well, in theory. In practice, it tends to only be illegal for certain groups of people.

These types of what I teach my students to know as "bullshit laws" are a key mechanism for maintaining racist policing outcomes in the face of apparently neutral laws. It's really quite simple -- all you need to do is take something everyone does (like jaywalking) and make it illegal. Then you can technically stop pretty much anyone you want. Obviously you can't stop everyone who is doing this illegal behavior, because then you would be stopping everyone. But you can use it as a pretext to stop someone you otherwise would have no legal right to. This allows the law to appear neutral (jaywalking is illegal for everyone!) while maintaining white supremacy. Or what we would call the "arbitrary and capricious" application of the law, which is supposed to be a bad thing.

And this is one you can study for yourself, boys and girls and people who don't identify with the gender binary! It's quite simple: go downtown and pick a busy intersection at random during a busy time of the day (if you don't live in a big city, I don't know...make better life choices, I guess). Stand at that intersection for 10 minutes and count the number of people who cross the street legally (while the walk sign is animated and within the painted lines indicating a pedestrian crossway) versus the number of people who cross illegally. I would gladly bet everything I own that the jaywalkers outnumber the legal crossers. Hell, I'd be willing to bet the jaywalkers outnumbers the legal crossers by greater than 10 to 1, but that's for you to find out!

Anyway, once you've done that and realized basically everyone jaywalks all the time, you'll be discomforted to learn that the Supreme Court has ruled that as long as someone is objectively breaking the law, the subjective motivations of the officer don't matter and thus are not subject to scrutiny. Which, as anyone with a basic understand of human behavior could tell you will happen (and as libraries of empirical data can tell you does happen), means that an officer just needs to find any minor law broken and then has carte blanche to harass.

Or to bring it back to jaywalking, this would be why one of the only studies I could find on jaywalking while Black found that in Champaign-Urbana, a full 88% of those cited for jaywalking were Black. If you honestly think Black people, who make up roughly 16% of the population there, somehow made up exactly 88% of the people actually jaywalking there during that time period...well, I've got this really sweet bridge I'm willing to sell you for a song...

The Insanity of the War on Terror, Rendered in One Person

So for a long time I've been trying to figure out something to write about Omar Kadhr, a child was kidnapped by the United States Military and mercilessly tortured for years. Or was an "enemy combatant" who was subject to "enhanced interrogation." Whichever you prefer. I mean, it's clearly just a question of semantics as to whether you consider it torture or not to force a child into restraints so painful he literally pisses himself from the pain and then using him as a human mop to wipe up his own piss. Please do read the linked article if you weren't planning on doing anything but crying and angrily shaking your head all day.

What makes Kadhr's story even more horrifying than the countless other horror stories emerging from places like Gitmo is that he was abducted (we're technically still calling it an "arrest," but when you grab a child and lock them up for no reason, that's kidnapping) when he was 15 and not released until he was 28. That means he spent the entirety of his high school and college years being tortured in a secret prison instead of, you know, like living his life and shit.

And the "crime" for which Kadhr was kidnapped and tortured for over a decade? A crime which it's very difficult to believe he could have even physically committed? Surely this was a great and serious crime, yes?

Well, the alleged crime is throwing a grenade at an American solider. Which, hey, not a particularly nice thing to do, sure. But I seem to remember there was a war going on at the time, right? And isn't "fighting the other side" a pretty standard tactic of war? I mean, disagree with the concept of even having wars all you want (I sure do!), but as much as there are rules governing warfare, they all pretty much recognize the right to fight back when someone is trying to kill you. Hell, our own US law allows that!

So while there are a million ways to dissect the base inhumanity of America's imperial wars of folly, I  think none more succinctly demonstrate our collective shame than the case of Omar Kadhr: not only do we see ourselves as having the right to murder anyone in any place at any time for any reason, if any of them so much as dare to possibly fight back, then we are well within our rights to kidnap, imprison, and brutally torture them for as long as we care to.

Objectivity Through Negativity

I recently came across this article on the ol' Facebook, and it's one of my least favorite types of arguments. To save you the read, it's about how liberals are becoming like Fox News because they sometimes share memes that aren't 100% accurate. It's not so much this particular article I have a big problem with (though it is a pretty poorly argued article), but the idea this just happens to be the latest variation of this really annoying rhetorical device a lot of progressives use: talking shit about other progressives to show that they're the Very Serious one, who totally gets it, not like all those other morons, amirite?

Really what they're doing is falling prey to the South Park version of objectivity, wherein if you treat all sides of an argument as equally wrong (regardless of the veracity of any of the claims) then you therefore must be objective, because you've dinged everyone! And of course, as everyone knows, objectivity doesn't mean getting things correct, it means making sure you don't appear as if you have any particular proclivities toward any particular idea. If you can meet that bar, then everything you say is ipso facto objective, regardless of how inane or empirically false it may be.

To bring it back to the article in question -- the author's saying lefties are becoming like Fox news because they'll believe stuff that fits their worldview that isn't always entirely accurate. Beyond the fact that the idea people are less critical of things that support their worldview and more critical of things that do not (something which has been both thoroughly empirically verified as well as just being so intuitively obvious), this is a dumb argument.

I clicked one link at random, in which he discusses misconceptions about the 1994 crime bill. Because he is a smart and critical thinker, not like all these other morons he's lumped in with, he spends awhile explaining that while the bill made some difference in our imprisonment rates, it wasn't single-handedly responsible for mass incarceration. A fair, if largely uninteresting, point.

Though here's the problem: the entire thing was premised on some unpublished review of data. You know what good unpublished data is? Absolutely none at all. With unpublished writings, we have no way of knowing whether they are worthwhile or just completely made up. In fact, the entire justification for why we have scientific journals is to avoid exactly this situation; by having a peer review prerequisite to publication, we can have some faith that the data in question has been analyzed in a meaningful way that leads to trustworthy conclusions. Without that process...well, here's some unpublished data analysis for you: the more you cite unpublished data analyses, the more likely you are actually a lizard person from outer space! I've got all this unpublished analysis here to prove it!

Anyway, not to pick too much on this one particular point I happened to click on, but if the entire premise of your article is to chide people for playing fast and loose with the truth, it's not a particularly good look to cite a study that has not at all been vetted for rigor or accuracy.

Besides, such fine-grained critiques don't really matter, as the underlying logic of this argument is terrible. It basically amounts to "There's no evidence Hitler ever killed anyone, so you're way off base if you think he merits being in a discussion about the Holocaust." Because, to stick with this one example, pretty much no one is saying the 1994 crime bill single-handedly gave us mass incarceration, or that by overturning it, suddenly our cjs would be completely fixed. Instead, every mention I've seen of it really just use it as a short hand, as one of the most recognizable pieces of official legislation to come out of a decade or two of public hand-wringing about urban crime and "super predators." So pointing out that the crime bill only had a modest effect on mass incarceration is so completely missing the point, it forces one to wonder if there isn't another reason this guy is getting so pedantic with this.

And my guess would be that it's because he's trying to show he's above the fray and has magically gained some sort of objectivity not available to anyone else. It makes him a Very Serious Person, unlike all those other immature people blinded by their ideology. Which is a dumb argument.

Who's More Likely To Steal Your Stuff -- Police or Criminals? The Answer Will Shock You!

If you're not familiar with civil asset forfeiture, you really should be. Here, let Jon Oliver explain it to you:



If you're too lazy to watch the video, here's the really short version of asset forfeiture: it's terrifying. As opposed to criminal forfeiture, which is the result of a criminal conviction, civil forfeiture requires no trial. Hell, it doesn't really even require evidence. Hell, you don't even need to be aware that your property is suspected of being used in a crime for it to be taken from you. And then the entire burden of evidence is on you to get your stuff back.

Because, in one of the many fun legal quirks of our criminal justice system, in civil asset forfeiture cases, it's the physical object considered guilty, not a person. This is why these types of cases feature ridiculous names like "The United States Government v. 1,960 Bags of Coffee" or "The United States Government v. 667 Bottles of Wine" (and yes, these are both actual case titles). Since it's the property that's considered guilty, it literally does not matter at all if the person who owns it is factually innocent (in most cases, the person whose property was seized is never even charged with a crime).

Originally this began as a way to break up criminal organizations. The theory was that beyond just putting people in prison, we would take all their criminal goods and supplies as well so someone else couldn't just pick up where they left off. And it was largely used that way, until 1986, when legislation was passed allowing police to keep up to 100% of the seized cash and items, depending on various minutiae and state laws. Prior to this legislation, the vast majority of seized assets were simply turned over to the general fund.

Do you care to take a guess as to what happened when we switched from police having to turn all of that sweet loot over to someone else and instead let them keep it themselves?

You should really only need one guess, as the results are not terribly surprising: in 1985, there was a little over $27 million in assets seized nationwide. By the turn of the century, that number was well over 1 billion dollars a year. Funny, but it turns out that if you tell the police they are allowed to take whatever they want in a system that provides basically no oversight and in which anyone whose stuff they take has to go through an insane amount of legal hurdles for the chance of ever getting it back...well, it turns out the police will just go ahead and take whatever they want.

And while the very practice itself is horrifying to anyone who believes in democracy, or individual rights, or you know, just not having their shit taken by random assholes, 2014 marked a milestone in the rampant abuse of asset forfeiture laws:

In 2014, federal law enforcement alone took more from stuff from people than burglars.

(It should be noted that only counts federal law enforcement, neglecting the insane amount stolen er "seized" by state and local law enforcement.)

I don't really think I can come up with anything appropriately snarky enough to make a joke funnier than the reality of the fact that you're more likely to get robbed by a police officer than by a burglar. Though I will say that as someone who occasionally brings up the idea of police abolition, the most common argument against such a proposal is that crime would run rampant. I guess now I can note that at least in the case of property theft, police abolition would actually greatly reduce the amount of crime in our fair nation...

Black Quarterbacks Sulk, White Quarterbacks Lead

It took just about three minutes -- three childish, sulking, petulant minutes -- for Cam Newton to completely undo all the goodwill he'd created this NFL season 

This particular HAWT TAEK was penned by Chris Chase, but it could have been written by any thousands of people who hate Cam Newton.

Or maybe they don't so much hate Cam Newton, as they hate the idea that a Black man, a vocal and charismatic Black man nonetheless, is playing the most important position for a team in the Super Bowl. Could it be that maybe these folks are less concerned with the specific things Newton has or hasn't done, but are more concerned with the idea that an uppity Black man is spoiling their conceptions of how sport and authority work? After all, if the quarterback is supposed to be the smartest guy on the team, and there is a large and vocal segment of the American public that does not think Black people are capable of being intelligent leaders...well, just give it a quick google search.

For while I can't speak for everyone who finds Newton's post-game press conference distasteful, I can speak to exactly what Chris Chase thought the last time a quarterback didn't show the utmost in sportsmanship after the big game. Of course, this previous time it was a white quarterback, but since Chase's anger probably has nothing to do with race, I'm assuming he was just as hopping mad when Payton Manning (a guy whose sexual assault charges were conveniently swept under the rug) threw a hissy fit and stormed off the field after he threw away his team's chance at a championship.

Let's see, what did Chase write about that behavior? Behavior much worse than holding a shorter than usual press conference? I bet he totally took Peyton to task for his "sulking, petulant" behavior, right?

Huh. When Payton Manning does it, it's a sign of a fiery competitor, and anyone who thinks it's poor sportsmanship is misguided. Yet when Cam goes "against our misguided notion of what sportsmanship should be" he doesn't get the same spirited defense.

Gee, I wonder why that might be. I mean, what could possibly be the difference between these two quarterbacks?

Hilary as the PUA of Presidential Politics

I've been trying to come up with a good metaphor for how, well, insistent Hillary supporters are in the lead up to the Democratic primaries. When challenged, Hillary and her supporters seem less angry in the way anyone is angry when challenged on something important to them, but more annoyed that anyone dare interrupt the coronation. It would not be hard at all to imagine Hillary or one of her supporters explaining "You need me, America! Your guilty conscience may force you to vote for Bernie, but deep down inside you secretly long for Hillary to lower taxes, brutalize criminals, and rule you like a king! That's why I'm running -- to protect you from yourselves!"

For a long while their behavior both in real life and online has reminded me of something I couldn't put my finger on, but this morning it came to me:

Clinton supporters are like a horny teenager trying to pressure his girlfriend into sex.

It's the only other group of people I can think of that have the same singular persistence on a goal and who treat any obstacle to their goal as not only a horrible affront, but as basically unthinkable behavior. After all, they want this so much. How could anyone else not want it? Not to mention how quickly their courting turns into rejection when it's clear that you're not going to be swayed. It's virtually the exact same logic:

HRC: Come on, vote for me. Vote Hillary. You know you want to.
Democratic voters: I don't know, I don't think it's such a good idea.
HRC: Oh, come on, it'll feel great. I know you, and I know you want this.
DV: Well, I've been thinking about it, and I think Bernie's better for me.
HRC: What? That loser? He can't satisfy you like I can. Come on, let's do it.
DV: I don't know...
HRC: Come on -- everyone's doing it. You don't want to be the one loser not doing it, do you?
DV: I don't know. I care about racial and economic justice and keeping the US out of disastrous illegal foreign wars.
HRC: Oh yeah, I totally believe all that, too. Didn't you see the copy of Infinite Jest I have sitting on my desk? I totally get all that deep stuff and, like, think about it all the time.
DV: But didn't you support so-called welfare "reform," DOMA, the disastrous criminal justice measures of the 90s that lead to the US having the world's largest prison population, the horrible shame that is the war on Iraq...
HRC: But that was then. I totally get why that stuff was not cool and I've already apologized! WHY DO YOU KEEP BRINGING THAT UP IF I'VE ALREADY SAID I'M SORRY?!?
DV: Well, I just don't feel comfortable with someone who believes those things.
HRC: I don't believe those things anymore! I believe what you believe!
DV: Yeah, but Bernie's always believed what I believe, instead of just conveniently believing it now that lots of other people do.
HRC: Ok, but what about the Supreme Court?
DV: Yeah, that's important.
HRC: So you get it! We better hook up before that becomes an issue!
DV: Well, that's one important issue, but that seems like an awfully thin premise for such an important decision.
HRC: Yeah, but I can handle all those other things because I'm the most popular.
DV: Sure, you're pretty popular, but I don't see what that has to do with evaluating you as a person.
HRC: WHAT?!? THAT'S THE ONLY THING! You'll never get a chance to be with someone so popular again!
DV: But I'm not concerned about how popular you are, I'm concerned about whether you're the right person or not.
HRC: GOD! Why do you have to be so frigid?!? I've put in all these years as Secretary of State. Why the fuck were you letting me do that if you weren't going to put out?!?
DV: I thought you actually wanted to be Secretary of State. I didn't know that you serving in that capacity meant I had apparently agreed to this.
HRC: UGH! You knew what the deal was! Why are you making this so hard instead of just giving it up like I know you want to?!?
DV: Sorry, I think I'm going to go with Bernie instead.
HRC: FINE! Fuck you, you crazy bitch! I didn't even want you in the first place! There's plenty of people that want me! I don't need you!!!!!

Scene.

Police Murder: Probably Not As Accidental As Advertised

In case you missed, an officer from the St. Paul PD has made some waves with his face book post detailing how to murder Black Lives Matter demonstrators:



It's hardly shocking that a police officer would be so racist (though being so stupid as to do it so publicly is mildly surprising), but what's really disturbing about this is not that a police officer is advocating attempted murder of innocent people (because that shit happens all the time). No what's disgusting about this is how clearly Roth outlines how to do it -- not only the exact pattern of behavior to follow, but the script to employ to get out of it (remember: in America it's official state policy that if you're scared a Black person, you can murder them). This is a script that's been proven to work, as it formed the basis of the criminal defense of Zimmerman, Wilson, and multiple others. Especially chilling is the way he (accurately!) notes few juries are going to find fault with an upstanding white person for a crime as petty and meaningless as attempted murder of Brown people.

What makes this most disturbing is that this course of actions and scripts that allows one to, as Roth accurately if callously points out, almost assuredly get aware with it is likely not something he could have come up with off the top of his head while he was posting online. No, this is clearly something Roth has at least put a little bit of time into thinking about previously. And Occam's razor suggests that you probably don't spend a lot of time thinking about how to get away with murdering innocent Black people unless you think you might have some reason to need that information in the future. I mean, I don't plan on robbing any banks, so I don't have a detailed plan of how to get away with a bank heist just sitting here at the ready. I could probably come up with one if I spent enough time think about it, but why the fuck would I spend my time thinking of that if I'm not planning on ever robbing a bank?

Here's where one also has to point out that despite a string of disciplinary infractions on his record, Roth was elected the Vice President of the local chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police. Think about that -- this is not the "rogue agent" or "bad apple" police apologists love to blame this kind of shit on. This guy was elected to the second most powerful position of the group that is "The Voice of Our Nation's Law Enforcement Officers."The guy who posts face book statuses about how to get away with murdering innocent people is someone the police chose to represent them.

Adding more glaring asshattery to the situation, Roth apologized. Kind of.

Because there are two glaring problems with Roth's apology. The first is this obnoxious line:

"As a law enforcement officer, I would never intentionally encourage someone to commit a crime."

Well, this is just empirically false. Because remember a few days ago when you literally encouraged people to commit a crime? You know, in the screen shot on this very post. So you can't say you would never do that, because you did do that.

But the most fucking aggravating, and telling, bit of the apology is this, when he says he regrets:

"exposing law enforcement officers to increased scrutiny, during this difficult time of ongoing conflict between officers and members of the community."

Seriously. He said that. His apology is not so much concerned about the fact that he literally attempted to incite the murder of innocent people, but instead the fact that his blatantly racist, illegal behavior might make the cops look bad. That is where his concern lies.

So please remember this during your next discussion of America's law enforcement: they don't mind murdering Black people, they're happy to advise others on how to get away with murdering Black people, and when the public finds out about their desire to murder Black people, they are sad that it makes the police look bad.

Being a "good" person, racism, and MLK

The long national nightmare of me taking a break from blogging for the holidays is finally over. Of the many highlights of my past month or so, few can compare to being part of one of the most amazing, well-organized, and downright heartening demonstrations I've ever been a part of. While the demo itself really deserves it's own post (seriously, we successfully shut down the Mall of America, the MSP airport, the LRT, and a major freeway with only a couple hundred people. The young folks who organized it deserve a damn medal), today on MLK day I'm more inclined to reflect on the response to the demonstrations.

Unsurprisingly, much of the reaction to the demonstrations, or at least the negative reactions, centered on the disruption of private property. "How dare these uppity demonstrators disrupt the mall's daily business?!?" they shouted repeatedly, never minding it was the mall's own (completely unnecessary) decision to close their stores. And as happens so often these days when anyone advocates for racial equality, these folks' complaints often used the civil rights movement of the 50 and 60s and the figure of (their completely and often intentionally misremembered) Dr. King to somehow shame and condemn the people carrying on their legacy. Which is ridiculous for so many reasons (after all, that civil rights movements would have never disrupted businesses or disturbed private property. No sir, no way).

While there's many causes to people feeling the need to invoke Dr. King to argue against something he would have obviously supported, I think one of the primary causes is white America's incredibly shallow understanding of what race and racism are and how they operate. They know that to be racist is to be bad. But they don't know what it is to be racist; only that it is bad, they themselves are not bad, and therefore they cannot be racist. As I teach my students, though, at the personal level racism is a verb. That is, it's not about who you are as a person, but about what you're doing. This is an important distinction because to live in America means to participate in racism at least some of the time, given its deep institutional roots here. It effects all people of all backgrounds. So even well-meaning people can (and undoubtedly will!) commit racists acts. This doesn't make them racists in toto; that's really more in how/whether you a)recognize what you are saying/doing is racist, and then b)stop doing that shit/educate other people about why that's racist/dismantle white supremacy/etc.

But again, most people who aren't sociologists don't think about racism in that manner, but instead think of it as people in hoods committing horrible violence. Which these good people don't do! Because they aren't racist! Case closed!

So you have this shallow understanding of what racism is and how it operates in combination with the incredibly watered-down version of Dr. King most people learn in school, in which Dr. King is not a man who advocated for the fall of capitalism, condemned the war in Vietnam, strenuously argued for labor rights, etc., but is a guy who once said "hey, let's all just get along and hug!" That version of Dr. King is an easy person to make into a civic saint, and in many ways, he has been.

And now you see the logic start to form for the people who somehow inexplicably say with a straight face that Dr. King would condemn the current civil rights movement and #blm specifically. And how they can further claim they believe in the aims of racial equality, but can't support the groups most actively working toward it. It works something like this:

Dr. King = good
Me = good
It would be bad to dislike Dr. King, because Dr. King is good. I am good, so I do good things (like liking Dr. King) and don't do bad things (like disliking Dr. King).
Therefore, I like Dr. King.

Me = good
Making good people uncomfortable = bad
It's bad to make good people feel uncomfortable. I am a good person (see Argument 1), so therefore it is bad to make me feel uncomfortable.

Making me uncomfortable = bad

#blm = makes me uncomfortable

It is bad to make me feel uncomfortable (see Argument 2), so anything that makes me uncomfortable must be bad. Since the Black Lives Matter movement makes me uncomfortable, it must be bad.

Being good = only approving of good things, not bad things
#blm = bad thing
Dr. King is good and therefore only approves of good things. The Black Lives Matter movement makes me uncomfortable and thus is bad (see Argument 3), so therefore Dr. King must disapprove of the Black Lives Matter movement.

I'm not completely certain that's how they get there, but it's the only way that makes sense. After all, what to make of the fact that almost everyone who criticizes #blm notes they support the previous civil rights movement? I mean, other than the fact it's this discussion's equivalent of "I have a Black friend?" Well, I'm pretty certain the answer to that paradox is the fact that they're alive now, because had they been alive during the previous civil rights movement, they probably would have disapproved of that one with most of the same arguments they're using against #blm right now. The only difference is that the previous movement has been officially declared a Good Thing that all Good People must like, while the current movement is not afforded such a narrative.

Because looking at sources from the time, people sure had pretty similar arguments against Dr. King and the previous civil rights movement:

A Gallup poll taken in 1959 found that, by 53-37 percent, Americans thought the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education, a seminal case in the civil rights movement, “caused a lot more trouble than it was worth.”

"Most Americans told pollsters they still had doubts about the civil rights movement. In May 1961, most people (57 percent) told the Gallup poll that sit-ins at lunch counters and the 'Freedom Riders' would hurt African Americans' chances for integration. In 1964, Harris found 57 percent who disapproved of the 'Freedom Summer' effort by civil rights workers to organize black voters in Mississippi."

I Will Never Tire of Shaming People Who Talk About "Student Shaming"

I've written about this subject before, but self-righteous academics keep writing these articles, so I'll keep belittling their arguments (shaming them, if you will). Recently published on the Shit Academics Say new blog SAS Confidential (which is hugely disappointing, because I normally love SAS), we have yet another post about how super upright moral professors never say anything bad about their students, and if you do, it means you're a horrible person who is single-handedly destroying the institution of higher learning. Ok, so I hyperbolize a little, but not that much.

While I think my previous take down of what is, essentially, the same argument holds up pretty well, this gives me an excuse to catalogue the many more problems I have with this line of thinking. And Lord knows I love nothing more than to complain on the internet. So in addition to all the previous reasons I've listed for hating this opinion, here are some more crotchety complaints! In numbered form!

1) This is the most annoying type of argument: the kind where what is claimed to be the most moral position possible and the author's own position on the subject just happen to be one and the same! "Oh no, it's not that I'm writing 2,000 words about what a great person I am and how I'm so much better than you, it just turns out what I do is the only possible way to do things!" Kevin Gannon, the person who wrote the offending column this time, promotes himself as a pedagogical expert on his linked website. So I have to assume he's familiar with the fact that people have all sorts of varied learning styles, and what works for one may be terrible for another, etc. And yet, he writes things like:

I don’t like shame. I run and hide from what makes me ashamed, and do my level best to stay hidden.

Bummer dude. It legit sucks that you feel that way. But did you know that not every person alive responds that way to shame? Let me take you on a special journey in the way back machine to learn about a time Young Jesse got his ass shamed pretty fucking hard in front of a college classroom. In my very first semester of college I was a music major (vocal performance, to be exact) and of the many music-related classes I had to take, one of them was Aural Training. Which is basically learning how to pick stuff up by ear, but in a very formal way (this, by the way, is a skill I do not posses to this day, and it blows my mind that people are able to do this).

So in one of the first weeks of class, by which point in time I had already realized I was in way over my head with this music shit (I just liked to sing!), we had an in-class assignment where the professor played simple songs on the piano and we had to transcribe them. Just by listening to them! Witchcraft! By virtue of the fact I'm still amazed people can do this, you might surmise (correctly!) that I was not able to do so. My transcriptions were bad. Laughably bad. And I mean that literally -- they were so bad that the next class meeting, the prof played what I had transcribed for the entire class, all of whom (including the professor!) were laughing uproariously. Of course, he didn't announce whose it was, but I still don't think I've ever been more embarrassed. If anyone was actually wondering whose it was, it would have been pretty easy to figure out it was the kid whose face was turning brighter red by the second and who was doing everything possible to slink as far down in his chair as possible.

But this also kicked my ass into gear and made me realize I needed some serious help if I planned on passing the course. So I went out and got a tutor and put in a shitload of time on practicing this stuff, and I managed to pull a B- in the class, simultaneously the lowest grade I earned in college and the one I'm most proud of. Would I have put in all this extra work had I not been shamed in front of the class like that? Eh, who the hell knows. This is a rather pointless anecdote from which we can draw no conclusions. But it is the same level of selective, completely non-empirical evidence employed in Gannon's piece, so it felt appropriate.

2) Gannon actually kind of gives away one of the biggest problems with his piece when he writes things like:

What would have happened if I saw or heard about this “venting?”

And:

I don’t know if my professors joked about me at the coffee pot, or traded stories about me at cocktail parties.

You see the running theme there? It's that as a student himself, Gannon had no idea whether his professors were doing this kind of behavior or not (But let me help out: they were. They definitely were. One, because so many professors complain about their students. Two, if you were half as sanctimonious as an undergrad as you are now, all of your professors were complaining about you). After all, the only two examples provided of dangerous student shaming in Gannon's piece are the Dear Student column on Vitae (an offshoot of the Chronicle of Higher Ed) and one twitter account of an anonymous professor. Well…do you think any undergrads are reading these things? I mean, seriously? I would wager somewhere between 98 and 99.99% of all undergraduate students don't even know what the Chronicle of Higher Education is or that it exists. I didn't even know it existed until I was several years into grad school.

But upping the ante of simplistic dichotomous thinking, Gannon follows up admitting he has no idea if the professors he had ever vented about him, he notes:

But I do know that they took an interest in helping a student who was trying to get his act together.

Hey, did you know that these two things are absolutely in no way mutually exclusive? That a professor can both be upset by his students shitty behavior, even going so far as to commit the crime of complaining about that behavior, while simultaneously attempting to help the student correct said shitty behavior? If we did live in your weird hypothetical world in which to complain about bad behavior automatically disqualifies one from attempting to help students, then I could follow your argument. But since those are completely unrelated activities which do not effect one another in any way, I can't follow how one supposedly prevents the other.

3) Finally, in what is possibly the most glaring omission of these two pieces is the complete dismissal of the concept that sometimes students do things for which they should be shamed. I briefly touched on this in the previous post, but it's worth noting that the two most prominent critiques of the Dear Student series specifically and the idea of "student shaming" more broadly have both been written by white men. While the Dear Student series, for instance, is edited by a woman of color and regularly features women and/or scholars of color, many of whom are in precarious labor positions.

As a sociologist, I'm not really trained to see many things as coincidence, so I'm having a hard time not seeing something in the fact that the two most prominently-shared pieces I've seen on this subject were both written by white dudes. Which means we have to delve into the thorny world of privilege, and especially how privilege can blind one to the experiences of marginalized people.

Because while much of this student shaming is indeed about students just saying or doing something dumb, a great deal of what I see is coming from women and/or people of color who are venting far less about their students' lack of technical skills and far more about their students' lack of respect for them, which often comes in the form of directly challenging their knowledge or authority. This is something that I can attest through both empirical evidence and personal experience does not happen to white men at anywhere near the levels it happens to people of literally any other identity in the classroom. I've heard countless stories from academics far more accomplished than I about being belittled or disrespected in the classroom, while I, a literal long-haired hippie, have never once experienced that in roughly a decade in the classroom.

This isn't a case of some young, misguided student not knowing the subtle ins and outs of the world of academia, this is assholes being sexist, racist, homophobic, etc.That kind of behavior deserves shame!

And therein lies the rub -- by lumping all forms of complaining about students into the nebulous category of "student shaming" and then labeling all student shaming as bad, you necessarily silence very real problems. This is, in fact, a very classic derailing technique, a way of dismissing out of hand very legitimate critiques from people who are experiencing problems that will never effect you. Because the guys writing these articles don't experience this kind of crappy behavior from their students, it's clear they're basing their critiques of "venting" on the kinds of problems they encounter, ignoring (willfully or not) the wide array of problems that effect people with other identities. And then they hold up the fact that they don't complain about their students' minor transgressions as evidence they're more virtuous than those who complain about their students' racism/sexism/homophobia, etc. Again, it seems hard to call it coincidence that we have two white men positioning themselves as the arbiters of reason and civility against a horde of women and people of color who are all angry and irrational.

Really, that's the take away point; I'm not trying to make venting about problem students or anonymously shaming them on twitter out to be great moral enterprises or anything, just noting that they serve some pretty legit purposes. So if you don't like participating in these kinds of things, that's fine, ignore them. But please knock it off with trying to argue that because you personally don't like something, it's somehow necessarily an immorally corrupt practice. To borrow from your arguments: wouldn't it be a lot more helpful for you to reach out to those of us venting and try to help us learn rather than take to the internet to shame us?*



*Included only as a mildly humorous jab at what seems to be a fairly hypocritical stance on their part. Please do not actually reach out to me.

Holy Shit, Ghostbusters Is Super Conservative

So two weeks ago I was in Washington, D.C. for a conference, and a friend of mine and I had planned on walking around and doing some sight-seeing and other touristy stuff. But then it was raining heavily, so instead we hung out on my friend's couch droning beers and watching t.v. (I mean, why travel to our nation's capital to do anything else).

Anyway, we ended up stumbling upon an airing of Ghostbusters, a movie I hadn't seen since I was a kid and mostly just remembered as the reason for Ecto Cooler existing (which will forever give the movie a pass in my eyes). But watching it again as a grown adult is really a very different experience.

For one, man, do they get a lot of milage out of that Ray Parker, Jr. song. In addition to playing in full over the opening credits, it pops up at least three times in the movie. Very economical use of the soundtrack budget, I guess. But that's not the point of this post.

Also, there is definitely a seen in which Dan Akroyd's character, Ray Stantz, receives oral sex from a ghost. In a movie that is only rated PG, nonetheless. This is neither here nor there, it was just really weird to realize there's a ghost fellatio scene in a beloved children's movie. But that's not the point of this post, either.

No the point of this post is that Ghostbusters has to be one of the most conservative movies I've ever seen. Because the real villain of the film is not Vigo Carpathian, but is instead Walter Peck and the Environmental Protection Association:

Pictured: Every 80s movie villain

What makes it most ridiculous is not even the fact that, hey, objectively speaking the EPA has good reason to be concerned here (after all, these are a bunch of amateurs building nuclear reactors), but instead how the EPA is portrayed: as an all-powerful, despotic organization. Instead of, you know, the underfunded and completely feckless organization it actually is.

For one, just look at how dude is dressed there -- in the world of Ghostbusters, apparently low-level government bureaucrats can afford finely tailored three-piece suits. But even more ridiculous is the level of power he's portrayed as having; the instant he decides something is up wight he Ghostbusters, he's back with about a dozen NYPD officials. Because if there's one thing we all know the NYPD prioritizes, it's EPA inspections. In a world in which environmental protections a rebutted at every turn, it's downright hilarious to see a fictionalized EPA which apparently has direct command over local police departments in its long litany of extensive powers. And of course, EPA inspectors have basically unlimited power to shut down private businesses at a moment's notice in this world, as opposed to issuing tiny fines and milquetoast letters of condemnation like they do in the real world.

It's hard to even catalogue all the ways this depiction of the EPA is not only wrong, but so far from the truth as to be about as backwards as possible. The whole EPA plot (which drives most of the action in the film) is so paranoid about the government having any power whatsoever, it reads like something Ron Paul would dismiss as being a bit too paranoid about the role of government power.

I suppose it's not terribly surprising that a Reagan-era movie would cast environmental protections as the antagonist, but it was definitely jarring to see this movie as an adult who actually knows what the EPA is and does, as opposed to when I was a kid and mostly fascinated by the antics of Slimer.

I'm now very curious if the new remake will have the same rabidly anti-regulation focus as the original, or if they'll find some even more powerless regulatory body to pin all the world's evils on. But in any event, the new movie might spurn the reintroduction of Ecto Cooler. And if that's actually the case, I can forgive pretty much any amount of blatantly propagandistic conservative messaging….

Oh, I Definitely Would Have Supported That Civil Rights Movement

One of the more obnoxious white people complaints about what's happening at Mizzou and Yale (and spreading elsewhere!) is that this is all over some petty stuff. But this argument is tricky to make, not because it's empirically wrong (which it is, but that's not what these people are concerned about), but because it has a good chance of making you look like a racist.

And of course you're not a racist, you're a Good Person™. So to prove your bonafides as a Good Person™, you have to point out that you don't disagree with equality, you just think these damn kids are going too far and being too sensitive when they complain about being called racial slurs and threatened with death. So what you do instead is find something some Black person did sometime that you can safely agree with to show how not-racist you are.

I can't count the number of times I've seen denunciations of Mizzou phrased as some version of "the civil rights movement was actually necessary, these kids are just whining about nothing!" Because everyone supports the civil rights movement…now.

But did you know there was a time when MLK and the civil rights movement and all those other now-venerated events and people were not super popular? In fact, it turns out that when the civil rights movement was actually happening, a lot of people didn't think it was necessary. They thought it was a bunch of uppity kids complaining about petty stuff that didn't matter. And it wasn't just Klan members, but self-appointed Good People™who thought this was all a bunch of unnecessary grandstanding by self-important troublemakers.

It might help these people who argue "MLK = good, Mizzou = entitled brats" to go back and read what Good People™ like them were saying at the time these things were actually happening. It turns out white America wasn't super fond of the civil rights movement! Shocking! To hear most white people tell it, everyone supported the obviously-correct civil rights movement. Of course they did! They were Good People™, not racists!

….and yet, for some reason the civil rights movement had to happen. Why, it's almost as if there were a lot of white people who weren't on board. Hell, it almost seems like most white people weren't on board, which is why the civil rights movement was necessary in the first place.

But that can't be, because that would imply that progress can happen against the wishes of white people (who are, of course, Good People™), which wouldn't make any sense, because no white people are actually racist. Hell, to hear them tell it, the civil rights movement was basically their idea and the only people who opposed it were a very tiny number of sheet-wearing terrorists. Why the federal government had to repeatedly intervene is kind of confusing, but we can just leave that aside, I guess.

Anyway, not able to come up with any better ideas, I've been collecting and cataloging screen shots of people making this argument, so that 40 years from now when this period is codified as a universal good that only a very small ignorant minority opposed, but whatever current struggle is happening is just a bunch of spoiled kids, I can pull up all of these to point out that, nope, the white, moderate Good People™always oppose progress. That is, of course, until the progress happens, and then they claim they were on-board the entire time.