Lansing, Minneapolis, and Why "Reform" Ain't Gonna Cut It

Which group of demonstrators do you wager was heavily armed?

Just last week I turned in the final manuscript for a book I'm writing which will be published by the University of California Press in the Spring of 2021 (title TBD because even though I came up with what I thought was a super clever and thoughtful title, it has roundly been deemed terrible by everyone involved in the process and no, I'm not bitter about this in the slightest). The book is about my on-going research i the Kurdish region of Iraq, specifically focusing on the reconstruction of the police force. The central argument fo the book is that how the police are designed to function tells us a great deal about how that state operates.

To make this argument, one I've made throughout my decade or so of published research, I've had to spend a lot of time researching not only ideas about policing and police organization, but about political theory and democratic governance. The vast majority of my research and publications sit at the nexus of these two -- basically, what does a state need to continue existing and how are the police central to those needs?

Not surprisingly, there are a wide variety of arguments regarding the proper answer to this question (to get a great rundown of them, read Chapter 2 of my book!). They run the gamut from the pollyanna-ish of "the state exist to provide sunshine and joy and the police are what it uses to keep everyone safe" to the critical variety of "the state exists to enshrine exploitation and the police are what it uses to keep everyone from rising up and challenging it" and all sorts of other positions that fall somewhere between these two poles. I stick with the most critical view, which is that police exist as a barrier between those within power and those without, and that their actual material purpose is to enforce boundaries of race, class, and other significant social hierarchies. In other words, they exist to protect power, and everything else they do is subsidiary to that function. I reject not only the official pronouncements of police departments themselves as to what their duties are, but also more mainstream variants of sociological and criminological thought which posit the police as filling as meaningful public function.

Yet as is the beauty of Marxist science, you don't actually have to simply accept my argument, you need only compare the arguments of police forces and mainstream academics to the actual behaviors of police officers and departments (reality, of course, having a well-known Marxian bias). Because one central factor every police department and mainstream definition of police have in common is that police exist to prevent and/or react to challenges to the law and the existing order. Witness how the rallying cry of those who "Support the Police" has long been "Law and Order." This is meant both in the narrow sense of the term, as enforcing the written legal code and providing "order maintenance" have been official duties of the police basically since the founding of police as we think of them, as well as in the larger political sense of upholding the Constitution and preventing direct challenges to the state, such as allowing the duly-elected legislature to take up its duties without harassment.

This makes the police response to armed rightwing demonstrators shutting down the Michigan state legislature a few weeks back so telling. Because while I don't have the space or time to summarize every major theoretical view on policing here (buy my book!), every one of them would hold that a group of armed rebels seizing the legislature in an attempt to shut down legitimate government functioning is exactly the kind of thing police are supposed to A) prevent and/or B) end as quickly as possible. By every possible definition of what police are and why they exist, preventing armed insurrection against the legitimately-elected government is right in their wheelhouse. And yet, as so many have pointed out, not only did police neither prevent nor shut down this armed insurrection, they more-or-less just hung out and watched it happen.

If you were to rely on official police pronouncements of their roles and duties or the theories of most mainstream sociologists and criminologists, such a response is impossible to explain. These demonstrators, without masks or maintaining social distancing in the midst of a pandemic, are putting lives in danger and breaking the law. Even without the threat of a global pandemic coloring things, they are a group of people with extremely-dangerous weapons who are either directly breaking the law or threatening to do so, directly threatening both the public and the legislature, and of course, were directly preventing a legitimately-elected government from convening. Again, if you listen to mainstream academics or the police themselves, this is the platonic ideal of a situation that police should be shutting down.

It only becomes possible to understand the police response to the Michigan state house demonstrators if you understand the role of power in policing. In the case of American police, this means understanding the role of white supremacy. Put simply, the police in America don't exist to serve and protect the public, they exist to maintain capitalism and white supremacy. Sure, occasionally this necessitates serving the public, as hegemony is only born of material concession delivered through the state. But the purpose, the function, is and always has been, to ensure capitalistic white supremacy.

This has historically been quite obvious; witness how many early police forces in America were simply slave patrols (here's those notoriously far-left radicals at the National Law Enforcement Museum talking about it) or google any picture from the civil rights movement. But it also shows up in the much more subtle way of continually harassing Black people for things which are either not illegal or which are routinely ignored if they are done by white people.

But here's where I depart from where this post was originally going to go. You see, I had begun drafting this awhile back but shelved it to get to other things. I've dusted it off because it's only become much more relevant following yesterdays murder of George Floyd by four Minneapolis police officers. More specifically, following the extremely heavy-handed violent response of the Minneapolis PD to the demonstrators who showed up to the site of the murder to demand justice (as shown in the picture above and the millions other available online).

There's really nothing I could have written in my original post that would drive the point home more than reality has (again, reality seems hellbent on proving Marxism correct at every possible juncture). There's no existing mainstream idea or theory of why police exist and what functions they serve that possibly explains their disparate reactions to armed demonstrators taking over a capitol building and forcing the legislature to not convene against unarmed demonstrators gathering on a street corner to protest a murder. I mean this quite genuinely -- using any official pronouncement of what police are or what they do, or any mainstream theoretical account of what police are or what they do, it is very much impossible to explain these two responses. The only possible idea these theories have to offer is that these are isolated incidents of the police failing to do what they theoretically usually do. Yet these theories have exactly zero explanations as to why these isolated events keep happening and the police keep failing what they theoretically usually do. This is important not just to score points for the theoretical school I inhibit, but because if we are to ever move past the current state of affairs, we have to actually understand what is happening.

Because if one accepts the Marxian account of police as existing to preserve and defend enshrined power relations, it suddenly becomes quite easy to explain the differing responses. In the American context, enshrined power relations has always meant white supremacy. So if you understand that the role of the police is to preserve and defend white supremacy, suddenly the differing responses in Lansing and Minneapolis are so obvious as to be banal. The demonstrators in Lansing didn't threaten white supremacy, they were in fact upset that social-distancing regulations still applied to them even though they're white. If anything, their central message was that white supremacy wasn't being defended well enough. Demonstrators in Minneapolis, despite being unarmed, were met with tear gas and rubber bullets because their argument was that white supremacy is bad. It genuinely is that simple.

Understanding the role of police in protecting entrenched power and white supremacy is important not just for understanding why the Lansing protests were met with shrugs and the Minneapolis protests were met with extreme force, but for understanding where we need to go from here. Because in the next few weeks, we'll hear lots of calls for reforms, for more training, for implicit bias awareness, for cultural sensitivity, and all of the many other calls we hear every time this disgustingly common occurrence happens. The fundamental problem with these well-meaning calls for reform is that they are based upon the theories I reject above; that is, calls for reform are based on the idea that the police are a public service organization that exist to serve the citizenry. Their underlying premise is that each of these incidents is an isolated event and it is simply a coincidence that so many keep happening and that the victims (and non-victims) all sharing obvious similarities is another astounding coincidence. But given that such ideas are demonstratively false, they make for an extremely poor basis for future action.

Indeed, with a proper understanding of the police as a force principally concerned with defending white supremacy, it quickly becomes clear why any amount of reform and new kinds of training are bound to fail (and why all such previous efforts have produced minimal changes so far). If an institution is specifically and intentionally designed to defend white supremacy, what kind of reform is going to make it no longer a white supremacist organization?

The unfortunate answer is: none. There are no reforms for this. It's past time for abolition, and any answer short of that is what has me churning out variations of this post with disturbing regularity.

RIP George Floyd.

The Grocery Store is Racist, Capitalism is Stupid, and I Hate Most Everyone

This is going to be a post about a racist old cop at the grocery store. But it's also about why I fucking hate the invocation of need for civility and hearing the "other side" and engaging in dialogue with people who are clearly acting in bad faith and are just shitty people, not misinformed. It should surprise exactly no one who has ever spoken to me that I hate the concept of civility, both in and of itself because civility is a meaningless social construct, and because its invocation is 11 times out of 10 completely racist. Civility is very often evoked to me when I say "fuck X" with X being "Republicans," "Nazis," or any other shitty useless member of society.

Of the many reasons I'm opposed to civility and this kind of "debate," possibly the most central is that people who say and do shitty things are not the kinds of people who will change through civil debate. I wholly endorse every sentence of this piece on whether or not one should punch Nazis (spoiler alert: the answer is always YES), but I want to highlight this bit from the linked piece on "civil debate" with pieces of shit:

Dialogue is for reasonable people acting in good faith. Dialogue is between two acceptable positions. “Taxes need to be raised” vs. “taxes need to be lowered” is grounds for dialogue. “Taxes need to be raised” vs. “Jews should be thrown in ovens” is grounds for a beating.

So my story is not about a Nazi (well, he very well could be a Nazi, but this instance is just plain ol' racism), but the spirit is the same -- anyone willing to act like a Nazi is not going to be swayed by a patient explanation of why it's bad to act like a Nazi. Just like racist dickheads are not going to be persuaded to not be racist dickheads by someone kindly explaining that being a racist dickhead is a bad thing.

Anyway, the short version of what happened this afternoon: I stopped in the grocery store for a few things and was waiting to use the self checkout thing because I hate human interaction and want to keep it to an absolute minimum. In front of me in line were three young Black guys, probably in their late teens or early 20s, all holding boxes of pre-made sandwiches the grocery store sells in those weird little food stalls that make the one part of the grocery store a cafeteria. You know what I'm talking about. We're all just standing in line, those guys are chatting with each other, I'm scrolling mindlessly on my phone, nothing's out of the ordinary.

Then all of a sudden the security guard/cop (I thought he was just store security, turns out he's an actual cop) makes a beeline to the guys in front of me telling them they need to pay and leave. One of them, who miraculously stayed way cooler than I would ever have been able to in this interaction, told him that's exactly what they're trying to do, as they're standing in line holding money in their hands (which one might argue is a pretty traditional sign someone is trying to pay for their merchandise). He then asked why the cop was being so aggressive with them, which caused the cop to spin an amazingly fantastical story about how they weren't actually three people in line to pay for the items they were holding with the money they were also clearly holding, but instead that one was a lookout and the other two were going to rob the place. When another of the three pointed out they were standing in line with money in their hands, he told them they needed to pay right now and leave immediately. Still showing far more restraint than I would in such a situation, the guys set their sandwiches down and told him they didn't want them anymore and left, and the security guy picked up the discarded sandwiches to take them back.

After I paid for my stuff, I tracked the cop down and asked him if I could speak to his supervisor, and he asked me with a big friendly smile what the problem was and what he could do for me. When I told him it was insanely inappropriate the way he was clearly targeting those guys because they were Black, he simply said "Oh please" in an exaggerated manner and walked off (it's worth noting how much his behavior and demeanor changed from when he thought I was just a white person to when he found out I don't care for racism). As I followed him I activated my Clean Cut White Professional Demeanor (TM) and demanded to see his supervisor and he just told me to "go to the front of the store." Being both outraged and a dick, I told him I didn't understand his directions and at least made him shame walk me to a manager.

The manager (also white) dutifully listened to me, but then explained that I didn't know the full story and that the cop had actually been following them around the store for a while. When I loudly interrupted her to tell her that I was not at all surprised he had been following them and that was indeed the exact problem I had, she insisted that I didn't know the full story. But when I asked her for the full story, she was forced to admit she had no idea what happened, either. It was at this point I noted that I had just been walking around the store for about 20 minutes wearing an empty backpack. She didn't seem to understand the point I was making, so I pointed out to her that is suspicious behavior, as that is what people who are actually trying to steal stuff do. Of course, I contrasted this with the completely-normal behavior of the guys who got harassed, and she tried to sputter out a nonsensical explanation of how I wasn't suspicious.

Being tired of the go-around, I finally asked her if it was company policy to harass Black people doing nothing wrong or if that was just this one cop's prerogative, and she assured me in pained corporate speak that the company does not tolerate this sort of thing and that she would review the security tapes to see what happened (spoiler alert: she will absolutely not do this).

But you know what really sticks out in this story? As I walked out of the store, the asshole cop was back on his little cop perch by the registers watching me. And once he noticed I could see him, he got that fucking smirk. You know the exact smirk without even having seen it -- it's the smirk that says "Yeah, I can fuck with Black people all I want and you can't do shit about it hippie."

And he's right. That manager isn't going to do shit. I called the Giant Eagle corporate headquarters to report it and they aren't going to do shit. I called the police precinct that covers the area to report it and you know they aren't going to do shit. Hell, I'm not really going to do shit about it. I mean, I complained to everyone I can think of to complain to about this, but I know it's not going to go anywhere. I could stop shopping there in feeble protest, but that's not going to accomplish anything, and it's the closest grocery store to my house and I'm a profoundly lazy man.

This all put me in a shitty mood as I was walking home, reflecting on how there was nothing I could do that would actually effect this dickhead in any way, and he had just ruined what was otherwise a really great day I was having. And then the solipsism of this hit me and I spent the rest of the walking thinking about how shitty it would have to be to not be able to buy a fucking sandwich without someone treating you like shit for no reason.

But even more than my own hopeless feeling of powerlessness that comes from knowing that prick won't even be mildly inconvenienced for this or the rage I feel for those guys who just wanted some sandwiches is the anger over that fucking smirk. Because even if these young men had done something that called for such a response (though they hadn't, and I strain to think what would justify such a dick move), I would think any normal person who had just been told what they did was blatantly racist would be slightly repentant. Even if they had justification for their actions, I still think most right-thinking people would be at least slightly chastened by the appearance of being a racist dick, even if they weren't.

But not this guy. Nope, he smirked. And he maintained eye contact with me the entire time I walked out to make damn sure I knew he was smirking at me. He smirked because he enjoys this -- he enjoys holding power over people, and he especially enjoys that he gets to put Black people in their place and there's nothing they or I or anyone can do about it. All while he's being paid by the tax dollars of these young men to serve and protect them.

And yet what fucking kills me is how many white people will react to this story the exact way that manager did -- even while admitting they have no idea what happened, they are fully sure that these Black guys deserved to be treated like criminals for having the audacity to stand in line waiting to pay for sandwiches. Plenty of them would roll their eyes just like the asshole himself, because to these people the idea that a Black person wouldn't deserve to be disrespected is simply inconceivable.

These people deserve neither civility nor dialogue. They deserve a fucking two-by-four right into their smug fucking faces, and if you argue otherwise, you're just as big a problem as they are.

If You Don't Like Joe Mauer, Fuck You

Chairman Mauer

Joe Mauer played in what was likely his last professional baseball game last weekend. While the aging star is remaining coy about his future plans, the fact that the Twins sent him out for a ceremonial single pitch back behind the plate indicates they likely think his career is over. Did I cry watching that moment? You bet your sweet ass I did. Mauer's not just one of the most under appreciated Twins of all time, but represents even more to folks in my generation.

It's not just that he's a great ball player, though he was (is?) an amazing ball player. Check out this article and the comments for a sample of his impressive statistical achievements. Or check out this article for a much more sentimental look at his career achievements. Or check out this one. Or follow Aaron Gleeman's twitter account. I could easily provide you a few dozen more links, because God damn, dude could play baseball. While his entire career is pretty great, and we'll always be left to wander what ridiculous heights he could have achieved had not concussions robbed him of both much of his prime and his inhuman batter's eye, his 7 year peak as a catcher is arguably the best 7 years of any catcher ever, and while it's far from guaranteed, it's not too terribly difficult to put together a Hall of Fame argument for him.

In many ways, Mauer's life is like a sappy movie script -- he grew up in St. Paul, got drafted by the hometown team, became an All Star and MVP while playing his whole career for said hometown team. Hell, he even went ahead and had twin daughters just to make sure his life was as on the nose as possible. But what really made him lovable (and oddly hatable to some weird slice of the population) is how peak-Minnesota he is.

His first ubiquitous ad campaign was for milk. I'm pretty sure he genuinely said "golly" on a regular basis. I shit you not, when he was interviewed on-field after the game in which he collected his 2,000th hit, his first words were that it "sure was neat." His career hit spray chart looks like someone programmed a computer to the "solid fundamentals" setting. He says one of his favorite hobbies is mowing the lawn. Granted, there's a delightful symmetry in here in that he echoes Twin great and Hall of Famer Harmon Killebrew who once said washing the dishes was his favorite hobby, but I think it's worth noting that a millionaire sports superstar in his 20s reported mowing the lawn as what he liked to do with his time off. This man is the state of Minnesota granted sentience.

Yet what made him so great was also what made him come across as boring to so many people. Mauer's skills weren't awesome home runs that make highlight reels, but instead opposite-field singles appreciated only by people over 65 who have coached at some point in their lives. I remember after one of his batting titles the Star Tribune published a giant graphic that was just his batting line from every game that season, and what stuck out the most was how ridiculously consistent he was. There weren't big hot streaks or slumps, just constantly one or two hits every single night (or, you know, the exact thing every hitter is trying to do, but only a rare few are capable of).

Weirdly enough, this all seems to have caused a significant and vocal section of the Twins fan base to just hate Mauer, to the point where even national publications are running stories wondering why Twins fans hate the greatest player they've had in a generation. For many of these people it was that Joe was somehow too much of a weakling to shake off a brain injury and just go back out there. For others, it was that he was paid for his work, which as this nice summary points out is incredibly stupid both because A) the family that owns the Twins is worth multiple billions and can easily afford it, and B) at least by FanGraphs valuation, Mauer produced at least $100 million more in value than he was paid by the Twins. For other, even more dumb people, it's because he never single-handedly won a World Series. Which, considering that Mike Trout, the greatest player alive, already by Baseball Reference WAR the 144th best player out of all 19,103 to ever play in the MLB, has only been to the playoffs once and didn't get out of the first round, should put to bed that argument.

I, on the other hand, in addition to remembering the near-decade of Hall of Fame-level play, choose to enjoy the fact that Mauer was actually quite incredibly weird in a fun, goofy way, albeit one hidden behind suffocating layers of Minnesotan reserve. Like the fact that despite being the #1 pick of the team, he shared a house with teammate Justin Morneau, and for many years, when new players were called up from AAA, they would stay in their basement. Although a google search is not turning it up, I swear to all that is Holy that I once read a profile about what it was like inside the Mauer and Morneau house, and it was an adorable baseball version of the odd couple, where the fastidious Mauer has all of his shoes carefully arranged in his closet, and the slovenly Morneau has empty pizza boxes all over his room with his curtains actually just bedsheets he nailed over the windows. Hell, Mauer once had a beat-making lab in his house because he's so into rap music. Seriously, this guy had a studio for making rap music. Tell me that's not funny and endearing.

The funny thing to me about having to defend why people should like Joe Mauer is that I'm not a particularly big fan of his. I actually have his jersey, but it's only because I bought it when I was broke grad student and knew I could only ever afford one nice realistic jersey (though it's definitely still a knock off, I ain't paying clubhouse prices), so I had to go with someone I knew would never leave the team. I don't want to be walking around Target Field with a fucking Boof Bonser jersey on or some shit. And yeah, his style of play can definitely be pretty boring at times. And, of course, he himself seems to be pretty boring most of the time. But he's also a really fucking good baseball player.

A large part of my defensiveness about Mauer, despite the obvious fact that he's arguably a Hall of Famer but many Twins fans think of him as a bum, is that he really represents an era of not only Twins baseball, but of my life. Joe's only a few months younger than I am, and came up to the big league level the same year I moved to Minneapolis, so I've always felt a special affinity for the guy. Moreover, he was central to the scrappy Twins teams of the 2000s that really coincided with me falling back in love with the game of baseball after not really having paid much attention to it since I quit little league.

Even though those teams never won anything of much importance, they were fun as hell to watch. And despite the lack of post season success, I did get to see a Cy Young and two MVPs during the stretch I lived in Minneapolis, and the far lesser impressive but insanely fun rise of The Piranhas, so it's always an era I'll remember fondly. Beyond how the team performed, my affinity for that era is probably due a lot more to the fact that it coincided with the majority of my 20s and my first time living in a major metropolitan area. The Twins of that era, and their incredibly shitty home field, were perfect for a young, broke graduate student. Tickets, which were never expensive, were available for 5 bucks on Wednesday nights, which were also Dollar Dog nights. Someone like me with basically no money could go to a game AND get dinner AND still afford a few overpriced ballpark beers. This era of Twins baseball also coincided with the time that my brother and I both lived in Minneapolis, and much of actually getting to know one another again as adults happened with a Twins loss going on in the background.

In the end, I'd argue that's really where the value of baseball lies. As the late great George Carlin noted, a baseball game is a lot more like a picnic than anything. Even the structure of the season belies how unimportant most games are -- lose tonight and there's a hundred more chances to get it back. Yeah, winning is great, but really baseball is about the experience. I'd probably rather watch a bunch of Twins losses with my friends at the field than I would want to watch the Twins win a World Series by myself in my living room.

So yeah, a lot of this affection has little to do with the team, but there was one constant through it all, and that's Joe Mauer. So I'm probably prone to be a bit overly-protective of the guy and/or inflate his importance. I'm definitely not arguing he's, like, a good person or anything; I don't know the guy and if the past few years have taught us anything, it's that the public face of famous people is often very different than what they're really like.

The point is just that he's undoubtedly one of the best Minnesota Twins ever and yet a lot of Twins fans think he sucks. That's dumb. If you don't like Joe Mauer, fuck you.



Image credit to the dearly-missed blog of Bat Girl

Why I'll Keep Teaching the Stanford Prison Experiment (Even Though It's A LIE!!1!1!!1!)

So there's a new article making the rounds of academic social media (and maybe normal people social media, who knows?) about how the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE) was bunk. Here's what I believe is the original piece that sums it up as "a sham" while this one calls it "a fraud."  But I would submit it's much less the case that this very famous experiment is a fraud and a lie that academics have been uncritically accepting for decades, and more the case that, as always, science reporting sucks pretty bad.

As far as I can tell, most of the reports suddenly appearing about this decades-old experiment are drawing from the piece linked above to the article written by Ben Blum, who notably has a book he's trying to sell. This is really important, because you don't drum up book sales with nuance, you drum up book sales with splashy headlines about how a famous old study is a FRAUD full of LIES.

The interesting thing about this is that it's almost the inverse of how science reporting typically sucks. How it usually goes is that a study (like all studies!) finds an interesting, but limited, effect of X on Y in a very limited setting, and then reporters blow it out of proportion with headlines like "New study proves X causes Y!" without noting any of the many, many limitations of the study. This one just does the mirror inverse, where it acts as if the SPE was canonical scientific gospel which has been DESTROYED and SHREDDED by new evidence. Like all shitty science reporting, if you actually pay attention to it, there's nothing much here (famous old study has plenty of issues, all of which are well known to pretty much everyone), but it's trumpeted as EXPOSING A LIE!

Really, there's so much wrong with Blum's piece that it truly deserves an FJM-style line-by-line takedown, but ain't nobody got time for that. And yet a lot of otherwise intelligent people are falling for this shoddy writing, so I do feel compelled to hit on some of the major issues with Blum's style of...reporting? Yeah, let's call it reporting.

One big problem is that Blum's critique reeks of anti-intellectual posturing. The whole thing has the distinct tone of "Oh, these nerds think they're so smart, but look at how they were all duped by this fraudulent study!" But...that's just not the case at all. Sure, maybe in the immediate period after study was released academics might have accepted it rather uncritically, but no one currently thinks of it as solid research. I mean, when I first learned of it in undergrad...checks calendar, lets out long defeated sigh...nearly 20 years ago, it was already the go-to example of unethical and shoddy science. Hell, even in Blum's article he has to note "methodological criticism of it was swift and widespread in the years after it was conducted." Swift and widespread. SWIFT. AND WIDESPREAD. That does not sound like uncritical acceptance! Of course, he brushes past that point really quickly, probably because it undermines the entirety of his argument. Even more annoyingly, when he (or any of the other articles I've seen written about this) actually talks to an academic about the SPE, they all pretty much uniformly say something along the lines of "Oh yeah, that study had tons of problems, but it's useful for illustrating some certain points." So again, there's literally no evidence academics are simply uncritically accepting this study, and yet that's the hook of every one of these articles.

This is, of course, to say nothing about the fact that it's one single study. Something people outside of the sciences and/or academia have a hard time grasping is that it's incredibly rare that a single study really amounts to anything. Because no study is perfect, there are always more variables to include, more ideas to consider, etc. Science works by collecting a large number of studies. So even if people were uncritically accepting this as true (which they aren't), it's being disproven (which it isn't) wouldn't really matter, because there's been tons and tons of other research conducted on prisons, the prison environment, the power of authority, etc., many of which come to the generally the same conclusions. Again, one study in isolation is typically pretty useless. That's why we have lots of people studying things lots of different ways. I mean...that's just what science is.

Another major problem is that neither Blum nor any of the other people writing about this at all address the concept of what we call in our fancy-pants social science language "desirability bias." Which is pretty much what it sounds like -- all of us want to present ourselves as good people, consciously or unconsciously. That's why we have all sorts of checks and measures built into survey and interview research, because it's rare that you can just straight-up believe what people say. A classic example of this from political science is asking people who they voted for in prior presidential elections. When you do this, even if your sample is very carefully calibrated to be representative of the US population, you will get significantly more people saying they voted for the winner than actually happened. For some this is a conscious manipulation of the truth (no one likes to be lumped in with the loser, or to have voted "wrong") while for others its subconscious (they don't really remember who they voted for, so their mind fills in the blank with the more memorable winner). But the point is that it doesn't matter at what level it's happening, just that its empirical reality that most people will try to present themselves in what they think is the best light.

How this applies here is that most of Blum's damning expose is based on the fact that several of the principal research participants now say they knew what was happening all along and that they were just playing the roles they thought they were supposed to play. And maybe this is indeed true! But there's zero reason to just accept these guys' word on that. Because you could just as easily argue that if you're someone who's famous for, say, being a sadistic asshole during this world-famous experiment, or freaking out and having a massive panic attack, you have pretty good reason to later say "Oh no, no. None of that was real. I was totally just acting the entire time! I definitely knew what was going on and wasn't tricked in the slightest!" I mean, I sure as hell would. Really, there's no way to actually know, and my point is not that these guys are lying. Rather, the point is that it's just as likely they're inventing a new story to excuse their behavior as it is they had this all figured out from the get-go.

But yet, even if most of the people involved were consciously acting out a part (even though it's obvious not all of them were, such as the fellow who staged a hunger strike), this still stands as a damning condemnation of our prison system. After all, is it not telling that a group of college students told to be prison guards assumed that meant they needed to be abusive assholes?

Furthermore, the training of the guards in this study was not terribly different than the training actual prison guards receive. If you're interested in a great detailed account of prison guard training, I highly recommend Ted Connover's Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing.

For instance, check out this supposedly damning quote from Zimbardo:

"“We cannot physically abuse or torture them,” Zimbardo told them, in recordings first released a decade and a half after the experiment. “We can create boredom. We can create a sense of frustration. We can create fear in them, to some degree… We have total power in the situation. They have none.”"

Yup, that's pretty much what actual prison guards are taught -- what they legally can and cannot do, and then from there are basically told to make it work however they can. Indeed, here's another passage that is somehow supposed to prove the SPE was a fraud:

"In 2005, Carlo Prescott, the San Quentin parolee who consulted on the experiment’s design, published an Op-Ed in The Stanford Daily entitled “The Lie of the Stanford Prison Experiment,” revealing that many of the guards’ techniques for tormenting prisoners had been taken from his own experience at San Quentin rather than having been invented by the participants."

So sure, this proves Zimbardo oversold his experiment (which, again, is a point so thoroughly established and accepted that it's beyond banal). But it really undermines the whole "SPE was nothing like actual prisons!!!!" argument when you note that the guards' techniques were taken directly from actual prison experience.

Here's another passage that, again, while being marshaled as evidence the SPE was bunk, actually makes the very point the study was trying to make:

"Once the simulation got underway, Jaffe explicitly corrected guards who weren’t acting tough enough, fostering exactly the pathological behavior that Zimbardo would later claim had arisen organically."

Again, read the Connover, book -- this is what happens in actual prisons. Any guard who is being too friendly with the inmates or not enforcing tough rules will have superiors and/or coworkers set them straight right quick. So while again Zimbardo comes off as an ass, it actually reinforces the claims of the study.

But what's probably most frustrating about this poorly-formulated take down is how this dude clearly knows little else about prisons and has obviously read little-to-no social science, in general or about prisons specifically. For instance, take a look at these two quotes:

"According to a 2017 survey conducted by Cullen and his colleagues Teresa Kulig and Travis Pratt, 95% of the many criminology papers that have cited the Stanford prison experiment over the years have accepted its basic message that prisons are inherently inhumane."
"The SPE is often used to teach the lesson that our behavior is profoundly affected by the social roles and situations in which we find ourselves."

These things are both true! Seriously, spend 10 minutes perusing the literature on American prisons and I'll be pretty shocked if you don't come away with the notion that they're inhumane. And the idea that "our behavior is profoundly affected by the social roles and situations in which we find ourselves"? That's more-or-less the basic starting point of all social sciences. Even if the SPE was completely made up and completely bullshit, these things would still be true. In this sense, it's a lot like finding problems with one study of climate change and using that to declare that climate scientists are all dopes who have been duped into believing bullshit.

The reason the Stanford Prison Experiment sticks around in textbooks and lectures is because it's an interesting example with a lot of media produced around it, making it accessible in both the figurative sense of being easy to grasp and the literal sense of having all sorts of videos and interviews and whatnot available. It's in many ways the same as how we teach the scientific method to kids in elementary school. I very distinctly remember learning that 6-stage process of science in the 4th grade. And now, as an actual research scientist, I can tell you it's complete bullshit. No scientific study in the history of scientific studies has ever followed that 6-stage process. But that doesn't mean we're teaching our children lies, it's just a simplified version of a much more complex and nuanced process. The SPE is roughly the same -- I have a hard time believing anyone is teaching it as an example of great science, but rather it's handy for discussing all sorts of methodological and ethical issues, as well as serving as general entry point to studies of the prison as well.

Again, Blum's piece undercuts itself quite directly with this quote, which I think more-or-less reflects how the majority of academics feel about the SPE:

“Even if the science was quirky,” said Kenneth Carter, professor of psychology at Emory University and co-author of the textbook Learn Psychology, “or there was something that was wrong about the way that it was put together, I think at the end of the day, I still want students to be mindful that they may find themselves in powerful situations that could override how they might behave as an individual. That’s the story that’s bigger than the science.”

And that's really the entirely of my problem with Blum's "expose." He writes as if he's blowing the lid off of a conspiracy by pointing out the problems with the SPE, when in reality, academics have been discussing these issues with the study for literal decades.

So really, what we learn from all of this is that A) the SPE has all sorts of problems that have been widely recognized from basically the day it was published, B) Philip Zimbardo is a bit of a publicity hound, C) most of the conclusions/arguments of the SPE have been confirmed by subsequent, much better-designed research, and D) none of this is news to anyone who pays any attention to this stuff.

But those conclusions are not nearly as catchy as calling something a sham, and they sure as hell won't help you sell your book.

Starbucks, Pig Motherfuckers, And When "The Law" Isn't A Great Defense

By now you've surely either seen the video or at least heard about the two guys in Philly who were arrested for SASWB, or Sitting At Starbucks While Black (not the best acronym, I know, but these things are happening faster than our collective ability to make witty shorthand for them). But in case you've been living in a cave on Mars with your eyes closed and your fingers in your ears, the gist of the story is that two Black men were sitting at a Starbucks waiting for their friend when the manager told them they needed to leave if they weren't going to buy anything. When they explained they were waiting for their friend, the manager called the police, who showed up and arrested the two, perp-walking them out of the store, before eventually releasing them without charges.

A lot of the reaction to this has been in pointing out the double-standard obviously at play here, pointing out that had these two guys been white, it's laughable to think this would have played out in anywhere near the same way. Indeed, the linked article above frames it as an example of implicit bias, even though I'd argue this seems much more like a case of explicit* bias.

Yet at whatever level the bias was operating, it's pretty clear to everyone who's not being willfully obtuse that this ordeal was clearly the result of racial bias. This is one of those situations where you don't need to see empirical studies or have a broad grasp of the literature on racial hierarchies and racialized order in America or any of that fancy pants book learning stuff, you just need to walk to any Starbucks right now and see how many white people are there who obviously have not purchased anything and who are not being handcuffed and perp walked out of there.

But here's where the people who are being willfully obtuse will point out that technically these men were loitering and that's against the law, so the manager did nothing wrong by calling the police, and the police did nothing wrong by arresting them. Because they were objectively breaking the law! You can't break the law and complain when you get arrested!

Hell, that's pretty much the exact argument made by the PPD Commissioner about it. Check out his official statement:

"They did a service that they were called to do. And if you think about it logically, that if a business calls and they say that someone is here that I no longer wish to be in my business, (officers) now have a legal obligation to carry out their duties. And they did just that. We are committed to fair and unbiased policing and anything less than that will not be tolerated in this department. These officers did absolutely nothing wrong."
-Philadelphia Police Department Commissioner Richard Ross (on the actions of his officers at the 18th & Spruce Starbucks on 4/12/18)

The problem is that we're pretty much all objectively breaking the law, all the time. Mostly because of the gargantuan number of laws we're subject to, and how incredibly broad and vague many of those laws are. Hell, we don't even know how many laws there actually are. But important for this conversation, the Supreme Court has ruled that as long as someone is objectively breaking the law, the subjective motivations of the police don't matter. So even if the police in this case had said "We're arresting you because we don't want Black people in Starbucks" it still would have been a legal arrest, given that in the technical sense the two men were objectively breaking the law by loitering. In the eyes of the courts, it simply doesn't matter at all that this is a law pretty much everyone has broken at some point in time (hell, this is a law I break all the damn time). Hell, it doesn't matter that loitering laws are almost always so vague as to mean that we're pretty much all violating it all the time.

This plethora of poorly-written and vaguely-defined laws creates a scenario in which we live according to two sets of laws. There are Laws, which are passed by congress and signed by a president or governor, and then there are Laws, which are what the police enforce. Now, the two aren't entirely unrelated, but there are a hell of a lot of Laws which are not really Laws, and more than a few Laws which are not actually Laws. But even more importantly, there are a whole mess of Laws that only become Laws depending on who is breaking them. Which is what obviously happened in Philly. I can all but guarantee there were other people in the store at that very moment breaking the Law but because of their appearance were not deemed by the manager or the police to be breaking the Law.

But even though the Starbucks manager and the police were well within their official legal rights to do what they did, it was an incredibly stupid thing to do. The best analogy I can come up with is one I often use to teach my students the difference between Laws and Laws: it is your complete constitutional right (and has been verified as such by the courts) to walk up to a police officer, flip them off, and say "Fuck you, you piece of shit pig motherfucker." As long as you don't touch the officer or interfere in their work, this is 100% the Law and legal for you to do. Yet despite the fact that it's legal for you to do, it's a stupid thing to do for two reasons -- first, that's a rude thing to say. Not really the kind of thing you should go around saying to people for no reason. But second, even if you don't care about the politeness angle, it's dumb because it's pretty likely going to end in that officer whooping your ass and arresting you for some kind of trumped up charge (my guess would be some combination of disturbing the peace, interfering with an official act, and/or assault of an officer). And even though this is full your constitutional right, good luck getting any court in America to prosecute the officer who beat your ass for calling them a pig motherfucker. Because while your right to call them that is a Law it sure as hell isn't a Law.

The Starbucks incident is a case of that manager and those police officers acting similarly stupid for two very similar reasons; the first is the obvious one that racism is bad. You shouldn't treat people differently because of the color of their skin. Duh. But the second is that even if you don't care about racial equality, it's still dumb for Starbucks and the police to do this. All you need to do is look at the fallout -- look how much backlash the company is experiencing, and just think about what this is doing for police-community relations. Because even though it was all perfectly legal, that doesn't mean it wasn't a terrible idea to arrest these men.

So just like you can call a police officer a stupid pig motherfucker, it's not a good idea to do so, if for no other reason than self-preservation, it's similarly not a good idea to arrest people who are doing nothing actually wrong, if for no other reason than it will (rightfully) lead a lot of people to believe the police are biased and harass Black people for no reason.

*I'm not just being a pedantic asshole here, as I think the distinction is really important (though I definitely am a pedantic asshole). Implicit bias is generally best proffered as an explanation for split-second decisions; there is, after all, a reason it's so often invoked in the case of fatal shootings. Implicit bias happens at a subconscious level, so it's most pertinent in events which require immediate reactions which cannot be consciously processed but instead must rely on unthinking reaction. But in a situation like this, when both the Starbucks folks and the police had plenty of time to mull their decisions and think about what they're doing, it sure seems like they were explicitly making the decision to treat these Black men differently, not reacting based on a lifetime of unconscious social conditioning.

Free Speech and Whatnot

"The remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence"
 --Louis Brandeis (originally), Asshole White Guy Playing Devil's Advocate (usually)

As you're undoubtedly aware, the US is current mired in a fight for its very political soul, as college kids occasionally interrupt literal Nazis giving speeches. Ok, that might be setting up a bit of a straw man, but it's more-or-less correct. Read pretty much any David Brooks column from the past several years (this is a rhetorical device, under no circumstances should you actually read a David Brooks column) and you'll hear an old white guy ranting and raving about how the kids these days don't accept free speech because they keep interrupting people who are just saying the maybe there's an intellectual case to be made for why Black people are subhuman, or trans people should be beaten up in the streets, or anyone with brown skin should be rounded up and deported en masse. You know, for the sake of argument.

Again, maybe I'm being a bit unfair to the position, but it's so difficult for me to take that position seriously that I can't genuinely write out their arguments, because they're so obviously facile that presenting them with a straight face offers them far more legitimacy than they deserve.

Of course, in an empirical sense, the war on free speech is not happening at all. In fact, actual data demonstrates the vast majority of Americans strongly support free and open speech, and those who show most support for it are...wait for it...the very college students who hack writers love to wring their hands about for the blue-hairs that actually still read newspapers. But let's skip right past this, since the empirical reality of what's happening has very little to do with why people are writing these columns and think pieces and whatnot.

If you do read the link above, you will find that there is one group that Americans of all stripes feel pretty comfortable in denying free speech rights to, and that group is Muslims. Funny that I've yet to see a David Brooks article worrying about the abuse of free speech rights for Muslims, but I'm sure that's just because his cab driver hasn't told him about this yet.

But what makes it most interesting that the same Americans who just ~love~ free speech have no problem with it being denied to Muslims, is that the group most often harmed by their beloved free speech just happens to be Muslims.

A central facet of the argument made by the white guy free speech warriors of today is essentially the old "sticks and stones" bit, in which they note that, sure, sometimes these speeches are pretty caustic and offensive, but at the end of the day, they're just words. And words have never hurt anyone! Why, even the implication that words could harm someone means you're just so juvenile! You should have thick skin, like the rich white guys who write these articles who have, just coincidentally, never been on the receiving end of racial slurs or wide-scale attempts to demonize them. Some even go so far to concede this point, but argue it's a strength that allows them to view these issues rationally and dispassionately, not like all those hot-blooded, irrational coloreds (well, they use a bit more polite coded language to make that point, but that is unmistakably the point they are making).

This is, of course, a very dumb point. Words hurt immensely, as literally thousands of psychological and sociological studies demonstrate. But even if we ignore the mountains of evidence regarding how discourse can harm people at the individual level (which we absolutely shouldn't!), there's plenty of evidence to demonstrate that words hurt in a very substantial and real way on a larger scale.

A recent study by the New America Foundation found that spikes in anti-Muslim hate crimes in American happen not after notable terror attacks or other major news stories regarding the supposedly perfidious acts unique to Muslims, but rather that such attacks follow a clear pattern of mimicking the election cycle; that is, people don't attack Muslims because they saw a news story about a terror attack and felt the need to retaliate, they attack Muslims because they listened to a politician speak about how bad Muslims are.

So I ask of the "the only counter to speech is more speech!!1!!1!!1!" crowd -- exactly what speech should these Muslims who were beaten and/or killed by bigots riled up by bigoted speeches have used in their defense? Because I'm willing to bet they tried the counter speech of "Please don't beat me to death!" but that was clearly not effective. Seriously, though -- what speech would have countered this? Because it sure looks like shouting down those speakers before they riled up a crowd of murderous bigots would have had a chance at being successful, but that's an open empirical question. But what is not an open empirical question is if more speech would have prevented these attacks, because there's been a shitload of "more speech" about how Muslims are human beings who do not deserve to be beaten and/or murdered simply for who they are, but that has been emphatically proven to not be effective.

This is not a process limited to the United States. For instance, the preeminent criminologist John Hagan has pretty conclusively demonstrated that rhetoric (a/k/a speech) was integral in laying the groundwork for the genocide in Darfur (particularly these two studies). Once again, many people tried the "more speech" option of arguing against the mass slaughter of human beings, but once again, that was clearly not effective.

Obviously people of good faith can argue about, say, what limits on speech are or are not acceptable, or what utility there is in shouting down individual speakers, and all of that sort of thing. But what is clearly inarguable is that the idea that "more speech" will effectively counter hate speech is simply false. And not "false" in the sense that I disagree with it, but "false" in the sense that all available empirical data demonstrates the "more speech" tactic to be completely ineffective.

But the point, of course, is that the "more speech" crowd is not arguing in good faith. Their central argument is not about the freedom of speech, but about the freedom of bigots and white supremacists to continue being bigots and white supremacists without anyone doing anything about it.

The Only Good Foreigner is Rod Stewart

Of the many stickers, posters, and other political ephemera I have hanging in my office, one of my most favorite is a bumper sticker referring a joke from the great webcomic Wondermark. It's so great, this is at least the second time I've used it as the header of a post. If you can't read it, it's amending a famous old quote attributed to Ghandi to now read "First they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win. Then their children claim it was their idea all along."

I think it so very perfectly encapsulates our desire to constantly re-write and whitewash the past. Since history has already decided who the good side and the bad side are in most every conflict, it's pretty easy to look back and pat ourselves on the back for our presumption we would have been squarely on the good side. It's what allows us to pretend like everyone loved MLK and the freedom riders and the lunch counter sit-ins, because they were so obviously correct, when at the time, a majority of the nation disagreed with what the freedom riders were doing and felt lunch counter sit-ins were doing more to hurt the cause of civil rights than help it.

We've got another handy example of this happening in real time as Trump's attempt to ban entry for travelers from numerous nations was shot down, only to be followed by a ramping-up of immigration enforcement and deportations, with ICE raids happening all across the nation and ICE agents working to lie about who immigrants are to paint them as villainous. And, of course, this is likely to only get much worse following Trump's SOTU, in which he played the classic xenophobic card of claiming all of our problems are due to dirty, dirty foreigners and their dirty, dirty foreign ways.

A popular narrative to try to sell these policies is that the people we're deporting or not allowing to enter the nation are bad and dangerous people, and keeping them out/kicking them out is a matter of national safety. Many others counter that by pointing out that a large number of people being deported/prevented from entering are actually refugees, very often refugees from political violence either directly inflicted by the US government or indirectly through regimes supported and financed by the American government.

But regardless of the position take, ultimately the heart of the debate is whether these people are "worthy" or "deserving" to be in America, in large part defined as whether they're fleeing something truly dangerous, thus giving us a moral imperative to accept/continue to allow these refugees.

The problem is that for one side of this "debate," there seems to be no one who is truly deserving.

Side note: this pretty well parallels the Right's concern over the "deserving" poor. Realizing that a platform of "Fuck the poor, let them starve to death in the streets" is not terribly politically palatable, they instead attempt to divide the poor into the "deserving" and...well, they pretty much never articulate the implied other category, again I'm assuming largely because it's not terribly palatable to many. But given the constantly-shifting and extremely-narrow criteria it takes to meet the definition of "deserving," it leaves one to strongly suspect they truly see no poor people as deserving of assistance.

It's pretty easy to understand this by looking at a case in which it's extremely difficult to argue the "deserving" portion of the immigration debate -- Jewish refugees during the Nazi regime. As you can see from the poll below (from the twitter account Historical Opinion, though I snagged them from this pretty good WaPo article) in 1938, about 2/3rds of Americans not only opposed allowing refugees fleeing Nazi persecution into America, but actually agree that "we should try to keep them out."

Of course, you could argue it's easier to see which opinion is "correct" with the benefit of hindsight and all that. But hindsight wasn't really necessary for the second graph below, which is the results from a poll conduct after Kristallnacht, so it wasn't really a secret that the Nazis were pretty shitty to Jews and other groups they didn't like. Not that the Nazis had exactly ever hid this fact, but I suppose you could make the argument that in the early days of the regime people might not have known to take them seriously. But once they started instituting official mass violence against Jews and other minorities, it's hard to argue that people could have assumed the Nazis weren't serious about all of their anti-Semitic proclamations. Not only that, but this poll question was only asking about whether we should accept children who are fleeing Nazi violence. So you can't even make the (already absurd on its face) argument that there might be Nazis posing as refugees to sneak into America and then...I dunno, take us down from the inside? Whatever the argument is, it doesn't hold up when we're discussing children fleeing from the Nazis. If ever there was a group that would be the dictionary definition of "deserving immigrants," I think you'd be pretty fucking hard pressed to come up with something better than children fleeing Nazis.

But as you can clearly see, a strong majority of the nation felt children escaping from the Nazis did not meet the definition of "deserving" immigrant. So I could write several thousand more words on the problematic construction of dividing immigrants/refugees into "deserving" and "not deserving," but nothing I could write would make this point nearly as well as this poll result. If Jewish children fleeing Nazi violence does not meet the bar of "deserving," I think it's safe to say no one ever will. Although, of course, now pretty much everyone would agree that we should have accepted these children fleeing the Nazis. Just like I'd be willing to be that in 50 years it will be so obvious that we should have been open to accepting Syrian refugees.

But of course that belated realization will be just about as useful to Syrian refugees as it was to those Jewish children denied entrance to the US...

For those that don't get the reference in the title, you really need to watch Much Apu About Nothing

A Shithole by Any Other Name Is Still As Exploited By Colonialism and Imperialism

So Trump has said something really stupid and racist again and we're all angry about it (this sentence should probably precede every post I make for the next several years). It was obviously stupid and racist and bad and this is most definitely not going to be some contrarian post about how, like, he wasn't really wrong if you think about it, you know, or some bullshit about how it's good he said it.

Nor do I want to minimize what he said -- calling large swaths of the world "shitholes" and the implications about those places and the people that live there, especially when this comes from the President of a world superpower, has real effects and does real damage to real people. Everyone condemning Trump is right to do so.

Now here is where the obnoxious contrarian "but" comes in. What I can't jibe with is a central feature of many of these condemnations, which is that Trump is violating some great norm or going well beyond the pale here. Certainly his rhetoric is unsavory, but if you think Presidents like, say, Nixon didn't say this exact same kind of thing, then...I dunno. Go listen to the many White House recordings of him saying exactly these kind of things. Maybe not these exact words, but the same sentiment.

But more than the nasty rhetoric, I can't stand the insinuation that Trump's assertion that there are "good" and "bad" nations and that we only want people from "good" nations and those "bad" nations need to quit whining and get their shit together is somehow a viewpoint unique to Trump or his brand of far-right incoherence more generally. As Corey Robin has done a yeoman's job pointing out repeatedly since Trump first entered the presidential race, most of Trump's views (and his actual policies since becoming President) are pretty boilerplate Republican views (even more, they're often pretty traditional bipartisan views). He just doesn't put as nice of a sheen on them. Here's Robin discussing this while Trump was but a candidate, but there's plenty more where that came from and I highly encourage you to read all of his work on Trump.

Even more to the point, though, Trump's castigation of African nations as "shitholes" is, again apart from the course language, pretty much been official US policy since...oh, the founding of the United States. Hell, take a look at the person most often used as contrast for Trump's "unpresidential" ways -- his predecessor, Barak Obama, who is often held up as the eloquent, compassionate statesman we wish the President could always be.

Well, what were Barry's views on these shithole African nations? He told them, basically, to quit whining about colonialism, slavery and racism and to admit that everything wrong in Africa is their fault and they need to get their shit together. From the article: "And yet the fact is we're in 2009," continued the US president. "The West and the United States has not been responsible for what's happened to Zimbabwe's economy over the last 15 or 20 years." (Click on through for more victim-blaming fun!)

The difference between Trump and Obama in their view toward the political and economic problems facing so many African nations is not a difference between compassion and belittlement, it's a shared belittlement divided by using nice or mean language. Eloquence in defense of colonial empire is effectively no different than vulgarity in defense of colonial empire, at least in terms of outcomes.

And really, one could argue that Obama's eloquent defense of empire is more dangerous than Trump's artless bumbling, as empire sure goes down easier with pretty language and thoughtful speeches than it does with the equivalent of a drunk fratboy bragging at a kegger.

So I end this rant as I have many of my Trump-related rants by looking for the silver lining in our current dystopian hell scape; in this case, its that Trump's inarticulateness serves to sharpen the contradictions (as an old Marxist might say) of US policy. At least with this jackass crowing about our foreign policy in the most crude and brash way, people might start to see the problems with what we're doing to the world.

Or to put it in an even simpler way: at least he's admitting how we've always officially viewed these places. And the first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem...

Everyone Wants Nuance (But Everyone Hates Nuance)

The vast and growing #MeToo movement has long since moved from exposing the people pretty much everyone knew were creepy abusers (your Harvey Weinsteins of the world) and has moved on to exposing people that are a bit more surprising (Al Franken comes to mind), though at this point, we probably shouldn't be surprised by any man being outed as an abuser or harasser, save maybe a Fred Rogers or Tom Hanks.

Recently we've seen a prime example of someone I think most people were surprised got called out in the person of Aziz Ansari, whose generally-thoughtful writing and comedy around gender relations and whose position as a relatively-outspoken feminist made him seem like one of the least likely to be called out. But called out he was, by an anonymous woman's account of a really shitty date they had where she felt pressured to perform sexual acts she didn't want to.

There's a lot to unpack in this story, but the angle I find most interesting is where this fits in the larger #MeToo movement. One thing those opposed to this movement toward some justice for women (or at least an acknowledgement of the difficulties they face) have focussed on relentlessly is the concept of nuance -- that is, are all men who have been accused of bad behavior to be all lumped together? For instance, as was constantly heard throughout the Franken affair, sure he shouldn't have done what he did, but that didn't make him Weinstein. And shouldn't that matter? Shouldn't we talk about that difference?

Predictably, this crowd has jumped all over the Ansari story as proof that those crazy feminists have gone too far again. The New York Times said Ansari is guilty only of "Not being a mind reader" while WaPo has deemed this "A gift to anyone who wants to derail the #MeToo movement" (which I assume means them, because that's exactly what they're doing). Anyway, you can find a million more hot takes on this line of thinking, where the regressive forces of people who are so concerned that in the middle of the thousands and thousands of women coming forward to tell their tales of abuse, assault, and harassment, a man might be inconvenienced have finally found their hallelujah moment.

Except...this story is really what these people have been calling for all along, a nuanced portrayal that recognizes it's not a white/black dichotomy of good and bad, that consent is not always a completely straight-forward matter, and that there are degrees to this kind of thing. If you actually read her story, you'll see she presents a pretty nuanced understanding of what happened, and indeed, it was only after parsing through the nuance that she came to see it as a sexual assault. Why, it's almost as if she did exactly what all these people so concerned about nuance and not getting carried away say they want, and yet it's still not good enough.

Because the bigger point is that sexual consent is not simply a yes/no matter, and is impacted by all sorts of things (remember, I bet very few people explicitly said "no" to Weinstein or Cosby, yet we don't forgive them their crimes for that). As this great piece points out, consent is just the baseline, not a get-out-of-jail-free card, and it's not ridiculous to expect men, (all men, but especially men who make a big public deal out of what a feminist they are) to conceptualize consent beyond a simple yes/no. It's not a terribly difficult or onerous task to recognize that gendered power imbalances exist and then take the incredibly minuscule effort required to address that. Whether it be the fact that women are socialized since birth to prioritize the feelings of others (especially men) over their own, to try to navigate an impossible Madonna/Whore complex, and of course, to fear for their safety should they dare explicitly say "no" to a man, it's clear that it's not as simple as saying no and walking away, as the incredibly offensive NYT opinion piece linked to above claims.

But what that horribly offensive NYT piece (seriously, don't read it unless you've taken your blood pressure meds this morning) misses is that, no, Ansari didn't need to be a mind reader to know she wasn't comfortable. You know what magical powers he did need? The ability to have a conversation at an adult level. For instance, maybe after the third or fourth time he forced her hand onto his penis and she clearly wasn't into it, maybe he could have been a grown up and spoken to her? Remember, this isn't a 15 year old kid figuring out what all this stuff is, this is a grown man who literally wrote a book on romance and relationships. But instead of actually seeking out her consent (her active consent, if you will), it seems that Ansari took the fact that she wasn't screaming "RAPE!" at the top of her lungs to mean she must be into it, right? I mean, who has ever heard of a woman going through with a sex act she didn't want to simply because she felt like she had no other choice?

Gee, if only there were a handy hashtag one could use to quickly find literally thousands of such stories.

In that way, this reaction to the Aziz Ansari story seems to be like a modified version of Lewis' Law ("the comments on any article about feminism justify feminism") -- something like "the reaction to any particular #MeToo story justifies the need for the #MeToo movement."

Because the real impact of the #MeToo movement is not that we're outing famous abusers (though it's great that's happening), it's bringing to light all of the many much smaller ways women are harassed, intimidated, and abused on a daily basis that don't rise to the level of the explicit legal definition of rape. It's about recognizing how the personhood of women is so easily discarded by men whenever it's convenient to them. Or, to put it a much more nuanced way, it's about recognizing that just because someone didn't do what Harvey Weinstein did doesn't mean they're incapable of being shitty to women.

The Brazen Conceptual Activities of the Wealthy

So Trump is an obnoxious asshole, but he is good for some things -- laughing at his insanity as we inch ever-closer to the destruction of all humanity, driving a nail though all meritocracy-based arguments about American society and/or politics, and of course, hilarious pictures of super-long ties (seriously, what is up with dude's ties?).

What I think Trump is especially useful for is how well he pulls back the veil of rich person executive culture in a way that few others have. Anyone who follows most any news about corporate malfeasance knows that the majority of corporate executives do basically nothing of any meaningful or substantial use -- they golf, they drink, they have meetings with other do-nothing rich assholes, and just kind of putter their way through their days, collecting giant checks and stock options along the way.

But their life of do-nothing opulence is typically only visible to those who seek out information about them; I think most people assume they must be working hard. After all, they're CEOs and high-level executives! Surely they're doing something. And, of course, these CEOs and other executives will be glad to tell you about all the hard work they're doing, albeit without providing any evidence of having done any actual work. But again, I think the majority of people don't give it much thought at all and instead just fall to the default assumption that those above them on the economic ladder must be working much harder then they are. You know, American meritocratic myths and all that.

Trump is a fantastic example of this kind of do-nothing corporate ridiculousness. By all accounts of his professional life prior to the White House, he was pretty much the archetype of what I'm discussing -- he'd golf and have discussions with important people, but his actual money came from inheritance, not from any actual work he'd done or good deals he'd made (indeed, more than a few accounts have argued he'd have more money if he just sat on his inheritance and never actually tried to do any of his beloved deal-making).

While he was just any other rich asshole, like most all other executives, could skate by on reputation and a political and media environment that worships wealth and is unlikely to question its holders, the office of the President carries with it some level of scrutiny. I'm certainly not arguing that contemporary American media really hold the President's feet to the fire, but there's at least a certain level of scrutiny about basic aspects of the job and his performance thereof that just doesn't exist for the CEO of a hotel chain. Not to mention, of course, that simply by being in the world of partisan politics, no matter which side, you instantly have a group of people on the other side with a vested interest in scrutinizing what you're doing, again in a way that no random CEO is ever going to experience, save some sort of major scandal.

So when you switch up the corporate penthouse for the White House, you start to get stuff like this, where people leak what your daily schedule is actually like.

Now in the linked article, Trump's absurdly lackadaisical schedule is presented as some sort of aberration, but I'd argue this looks pretty much exactly like any other rich asshole's schedule. It might be different than that of your typical President, but compared to your typical CEO, I'd bet it's basically run-of-the-mill.

What really stands out to me is not how short and light the scheduled day is for someone whose job supposedly carries such great weight, but more so how it's conceived of by Trump. Especially this sentence:

The schedule says Trump has "Executive Time" in the Oval Office every day from 8am to 11am, but the reality is he spends that time in his residence, watching TV, making phone calls and tweeting.

This is the purest distillation of the worthlessness of high-level executives one could possibly find. What you or I would call "screwing around" and what any of our employers would call "knock that off and get back to work," for Trump and his ilk is "Executive Time."

Ooooo! Executive Time! Time for doing executive stuff! He's not "sitting on his couch watching TV," he's having "Executive Time!" He's not "fucking around on Twitter," he's having "Executive Time!" You see, you and I are not executives, so when we sit around watching tv and scrolling social media, we are doing nothing special. But when An Executive sits around watching tv and scrolling social media, they are doing Important Executive Things.

And I've not a doubt in my mind that this is not cynical manipulation by Trump, as if he knew he were just dicking around doing nothing of any worth but felt the need to dress it up. No, it's pretty clear he (and those like him) genuinely see this as qualitatively different from when you and I do it. It's not hard at all to believe Trump honestly believes that his twitter and TV time is of vital necessity, and therefore is truly, genuinely part of his working day.

But again, this is almost assuredly not an aberration in the high-levels of the corporate world. I'd be willing to bet the CEO of wherever you work is having their version of executive time right now. It might not be Fox and Friends and twitter, but it's of similar value.

So there's a small silver-lining: Any time any person tries to make the argument that wealth is obtained through hard work can simply be presented with the schedule of Mr. Trump, the schedule of a very wealthy and therefore successful businessman. And then the rest of whatever they have to say can be completely ignored, as it already should have been, anyway.

Thoughts on the Kurdish Independence Referendum

Having spent a fair bit of time in Iraqi Kurdistan over the past several years, a number of people have asked me for my opinion about the recent independence referendum. Of course, there's an entirely separate post to be written about why there is a dearth of news and analysis on this relatively major global political moment available to these people such that they don't have to ask me, but this post turned out to be far too long already.

So to cut to the chase, do I support the independence referendum? Well, it really is a case of short answer: "yes" with an "if," long answer: "no" with a "but."

Ideologically, ethically, and morally it makes sense for Kurds to have their own nation (although I'm generally opposed to states defined in large part by ethnicity, but again, that's another post). There's not nearly enough room to go into all the history of it here, but the Kurdish people have been, to put it very mildly, quite poorly treated in most every nation they've been a part of.

At one point in time, Kurds were promised their own nation after the break up of the Ottoman empire and the end of the first World War, but instead they were partitioned into 4 separate nations (Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Turkey) by the major world powers of the time (Britain being most guilty for the, again to put it quite mildly, poor conception and design of what is now the Iraqi state). There have been many times throughout the history of Iraq when the Kurds might have had a chance at gaining independence had everything broken exactly the right way, but world history is complicated and things are always easier to figure out in hindsight.

But importantly, there have been more than a few times the West in general and America specifically have either strongly implied or outright promised to help build an independent Kurdistan, which is a bit more relevant for the purposes of this conversation. Iraqi Kurds were very much led to believe that their assistance in the first Gulf War in 1991 was going to earn them if not their outright independence at the moment, at least US support in gaining it eventually. After all, the genocidal Anfal campaign Saddam carried out against the Kurdish people was a major selling point of the war to the American public (indeed, as a third grader at the time, I remember the phrase "gassed his own people" as being used nearly every time Hussein's name was mentioned).

Instead, the US more-or-less abandoned the Kurds as soon as the war was declared over. Sure, they maintained a No Fly Zone above Kurdish airspace, but that was far from enough to stop Saddam from enacting all sorts of revenge against the Kurdish people. So instead they had to settle for the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), the semi-autonomous state-within-a-state they continue to occupy to this day. Although there was supposed to be a referendum regarding Kurdish independence completed by 2007 as part of the original federal agreement, for a laundry list of reasons this never happened. Most recently, as by far the most effective force in fighting the Islamic State, again Kurds hoped to earn their independence by successfully ousting the group from their territory as the central government forces had been unable to do.

This thumbnail sketch is obviously a woefully too short summary of the various trials and tribulations of the Kurdish people within Iraq, but I think it's more than sufficient to demonstrate why I said at the top there are so many reasons to support immediate Kurdish independence.

The but, however, is one of practicality.

As the KRG currently stands, it's somewhat difficult to envision where a lot of the basic necessities of a functional state would come from. There's little industry or agriculture in the area, and the KRG as a whole imports the vast majority of what it consumes. This is already a big enough problem before you realize that an independent Kurdistan would immediately be surrounded by four nations that are strongly opposed to its very existence, two of which (Turkey and Iran) are currently the KRG's biggest trading partners, who would likely immediately cut them off upon independence. Not to mention that land-locked Kurdistan's only trading routes would be through Iran, Iraq, and Turkey, all of whom again are strongly opposed to the existence of a Kurdish state. That's...not ideal.

Independence could be somewhat feasible with meaningful support from the United States, but that support was not forthcoming from the Obama administration and will not be coming from the current administration, either. Pretty much the only nation that supports an independent Kurdistan is Israel, and I probably don't need to give you an extended primer on Middle East politics to know why that's not super helpful.

Again, I want to make it clear that I fully support Kurdish independence. Pointing out the many reasons it's largely not feasible right now is not at all to say it shouldn't happen, just that its prospects for success right now are dangerously slim.

Somewhat ironically, the Kurdish people get a fairly good deal  in the current Iraqi constitution. For instance, the region gets significantly more in its share of the nation's oil revenues, at least in the context of what the KRG itself actually produces. Which is yet another reason independence will be quite difficult -- the only way the KRG could survive as a nation is if they control Kirkuk, a disputed city on the edge of the region which is also the only oil-producing area within/near the KRG.

Kirkuk has a long and interesting history (Mary, as in the mother of Jesus, was said to stay at a temple there for a period of time), but that is again another post for another day. What is relevant now is that Kirkuk used to be a Kurdish city. However, in the 1980s, Saddam began a campaign of Arabization in Kurdish areas, giving the cities Arabic names and offering large sums of money to Arab families that would move from the South into homes of displaced Kurdish people. It was a concerted campaign to break up the large Kurdish majority in the city, and it largely worked, as the city is now quite multicultural. Which is generally a good thing, but in this case was done specifically in an attempt to thwart Kurdish claims to the city.

So the current Government of Iraq will never just cede Kirkuk to the KRG without a fight, and sure enough, immediately after the independence referendum, Iraqi troops and tanks began massing on the border of Kirkuk. While tensions are still fairly high, at this point it doesn't look like any major fighting is going to happen, but it almost assuredly would if the KRG actually declared independence and officially severed ties to Baghdad.

All of these practical problems are not lost on the people of Iraqi Kurdistan. Having spent the majority of this past summer there and spoke to a lot of people about the referendum, opinions were pretty mixed. More than a few people felt it to be a political ruse, an attempt to distract people from the corruption of the KRG's current ruling regime (and there's quite a bit of that!) and the current economic crisis the region is experiencing. Others felt it to be a useless exercise, given all the issues I've laid out here and the many others that could have been brought up. Indeed, there was a concerted political campaign called "No for Now" that made many of these arguments. Of course, a number of the leaders of this movement have been receiving death threats and facing violent retaliation. Which I'm sure is completely unrelated to the aforementioned corrupt political leaders who would greatly benefit from independence.

Of course, many people were more than happy about the referendum, and the fact that it passed with something like 85% indicates whatever problems most people had with it, they still voted yes. And really, how could you blame them? You live all of your life under a brutal dictator and then a violent occupation from a world super power and you get a chance to declare that you should finally be allowed to rule yourselves? Even with all I've written about the actual practical problems of trying to create an independent Kurdistan right now, I'd have voted yes if given the opportunity.

So to drastically oversimplify it: Of course the Kurds deserve independence, but it's hard to see how an independent Kurdistan would be able to survive for long under current conditions. So, do I support Kurdish independence? As the Right Reverend Lovejoy would say "Yes, if they can grow a domestic economic base and secure more regional political cooperation" or "Not but that's only because there's so many seemingly insurmountable challenges right now." Which is  fancy way of saying I can't really say whether independence should happen right now or not.

What I can say is that there is no doubt the United States owes the Kurdish people some meaningful assistance in this matter. The Kurds have been the only allies the US has actually had in Iraq or probably even the wider Gulf region, and the US has constantly leaned on their assistance in a number of important and serious issues, not least of which the number of Kurdish fighters who have died defeating IS and securing the nation they don't even want to be a part of. And for all of their decades of loyal assistance, we've done...well, pretty much nothing for them.

So I guess I'd say independence is not really advisable right now from a cold realpolitik standpoint, but that's really easy for me to say when it's not my life and freedom on the line. And ultimately, that's really the point -- this is a question for the Kurdish people, who have pretty clearly laid out their preference. And despite the long odds, if they want independence, I want their independence. And, really, the United States should, too.