Open Thread And Link Farm: Escher Pushed Me Down The Stairs Edition
- Skin Feeling, by Sofia Samatar, is an exquisite essay about how being a “diverse” faculty member at a mostly white institution makes one both very visible and no longer visible as an individual; and Charlie Parker; and various acts of public nudity. Sit down in a comfy chair with a cup of coffee and read it.
- Sofia Samatar is also a fantasy and sf writer.
- 50 Years After the Moynihan Report, Examining the Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration – The Atlantic This long article by Ta-Nehisi Coates is REALLY worth reading.
- The Police Told Her To Report Her Rape, Then Arrested Her For Lying – BuzzFeed News
- “Oh so I can’t say ANYTHING anymore”
- This Is So Gay: When Death Threats Are Outlawed, Only Outlaws Will Make Death Threats Duncan comments on a thread here at “Alas.”
- Hillary Clinton and the Dangers of Political Ruthlessness – The Atlantic Conor F. makes the case against voting for Clinton in the primaries.
- How to Stop Mass Shootings – Why Mass Shootings Keep Happening Contains some very interesting first-person musings from someone who almost committed a mass shooting.
- Toxic masculinity is tearing us apart: Christopher Harper-Mercer, 4chan and the fragility of America’s alpha male – Salon.com
- The case against equality of opportunity – Vox
- Enough is Enough: Dark Horse’s Scott Allie’s Assaulting Behavior | Graphic Policy
- Revisiting The Effect Of Teachers’ Unions On Student Test Scores | Shanker Institute
- Ant Man and the Problem of Marvel’s Necessary Women | Feminist Fiction
- Want More Teachers? Pay More | Al Jazeera America
- The Comic Pusher: The Unexpected Delights of Wine and Comics in Etienne Davodeau’s The Initiates. I recently read The Initiates, a graphic novel about a winemaker teaching a cartoonist about his craft, and vice-versa, and I really enjoyed it.
- Study: White people react to evidence of white privilege by claiming greater personal hardships
- Beauty and the feast: Examining the effect of beauty on earnings using restaurant tipping data. More attractive waitresses get tipped more by women, but not men; and to a lesser degree, more attractive waiters get tipped more by men, but not women. I have no idea what that means.
- Speeding in Finland Can Cost a Fortune, if You Already Have One. This seems like a very sensible idea – speeding tickets, rather than being a flat rate, are proportionate to income. The article talks about one millionaire whose speeding ticket was enough money to buy a Mercedes.
- Wonder Woman Lunch Box Banned From School for being “too violent”
- The official poverty measure is garbage. The census has found a better way. – Vox
- My Temple, My Mountain | Popular Science A well-done short comic about science and colonialism and building a telescope on the tallest mountain on Earth. ((As measured from the sea floor.)) Thanks to Harlequin for the link.
- Wired magazine’s Absurb Creature Of The Week archive is a great way to make a lot of time when you should be working, pleasurably disappear.
- Why police could seize a college student’s life savings without charging him for a crime – Vox The answer, of course, is civil forfeiture laws (and, unsurprisingly, the student is Black). The extent to which this completely indefensible program seems invulnerable makes me despair; many (most?) Americans seem content to live in a police state, as long as they aren’t among the likely targets. (See also, no-knock raids.)
- Republicans Who Voted Against Sandy Aid Now Demand Help for South Carolina Flooding Victims. I still hope that they get their emergency relief, but man, what assholes.
- Today in the Systemic Persecution of Sex Offenders – Lawyers, Guns & Money : Lawyers, Guns & Money
- How to play Strip Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma – Exploring the Interesting
- The remarkable thing that happens to poor kids when you give their parents a little money – The Washington Post
- Locked Out Of The Sixth Amendment By Proprietary Forensic Software | Techdirt
- Holy Bullies and Headless Monsters: Fox News caught pushing another false story about the transgender community, bathrooms
- The Republican Party stands alone in climate denial
- What people in 1900 thought the year 2000 would look like – The Washington Post
- Planned Parenthood’s “Government Funding”: The Same Kind Your Doctor Receives
- Those folks who were kids in the early 1970s – do you remember a kid’s TV show called Candle Cove?
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“Study: White people react to evidence of white privilege by claiming greater personal hardships”
Alternative but less sexy interpretation: people respond to social cues about low and high status traits and play up high status traits and play down low status traits.
Gerontocracy? pretend to be older than they are.
Plutocracy? pretend they own more than they do.
Aristocracy? pretend higher status ancestors.
If being white is perceived as a bad thing then they’ll make sure to mention that black great great grandmother no matter how irrelevant.
If being born wealthy is viewed as bad they’ll play up the whole “self made” idea.
If having things too easy is portrayed as negative and is linked to low social status then they’ll play up any hardships.
If someone is telling you about how you’ve got all the advantages and strongly hinting that that’s a bad thing what do you expect people to do other than play up whatever disadvantages they had? If someone’s hinting that you’re scum who deserve nothing because your life is a cakewalk compared to some other group then you’re going to start listing all the ways that is wasn’t.
Murphy: Absolutely, that reaction is a form of status jockeying and personal identity protection.
yrs–
–Ben
It’s the mirror image of so-called “respectability politics.”
I seriously doubt that this study’s protocol was to suggest that white people are scum.
The study is showing examples of people like you enjoying unfair advantages. You reply with “I have had to overcome serious hardships”. If this is not basic human nature, I do not know what is.
My best friend from college is Black and random assholes would (and will) sometimes bring up affirmative action in front of him. He applied as French, and left his race off the application, which MIT allows. You can be fucking sure that he will be tempted to bring up his GPA, the Master thesis he turned into a successful business, and the fact that he is likely more intelligent than someone tactless enough to offend people richer, stronger, and better connected than himself. He doesn’t always, so I sometimes have to do it for him…
As a matter of fact, I think there is something wrong with anyone who does not feel defensive, when a group to which he belongs is portrayed negatively. Whether the portrayal is justified does not matter until it comes to whether to act on the feeling. So people who have not had it drummed into them that they should be feeling guilty about their white privilege AND don’t care whether someone will think they’re racist will defend themselves.
Which is what the people in the study did. I wonder, how do Germans react when WWII is brought up? Hey, I know! They usually let it know that they, personally, are pacifists…
Fair point. So you agree with the study’s findings, then.
Absolutely. We are born racist, we are raised racist, and we remain racist all our lives. Learning how to repress the desire to act racist is what matters. It is important to also punish racist behavior, but realistically, punishing all such behavior is absolutely counter-productive, even if you have absolute power.
Which is why it is important to decide what racist behavior is unacceptable – sterilizing people because of their skin color, for example, and what racist behavior should be ignored – choosing partners based on race, for example.
It’s the cases in the middle that are contentious, of course. For example, people are divided on whether racist behavior should be punished differently depending on whether the perpetrator’s or the target’s group has more or less power within an arbitrary zone.
So people who feel they have faced hardship are opposed to policies that racially discriminate against them and may cause them to face further hardship. Why should we expect people who have faced unjust hardship to be willing to make sacrifices for the benefit of others, who may very well have been better off to begin with, purely because of one particular dimension of unjust disadvantage?
Duncan seems to have misunderstood the points I was trying to make in just about every response to my comments. Sigh.
Why should we expect people who have faced unjust hardship to be willing to make sacrifices for the benefit of others, who may very well have been better off to begin with, purely because of one particular dimension of unjust disadvantage?
Because at some point we have to reach some kind of agreement. Note that this exact same sentiment is an argument FOR affirmative action, so… what exactly?
I will say that privilege is not supposed to be used as a cudgel to pound people into submission. It’s not supposed to be, but, well… it often is.
And we don’t really live in an officially racist society, which means that privilege is often not something that benefits us, but is more the absence of further negatives, and nobody wants to be told that they should be thankful that things aren’t worse for them.
I think to some extent that when you’re working a shitty job that barely makes ends meet being told that you have privilege kind of leaves you going “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with this. I didn’t ask for privilege and it hasn’t given me an easy life, so I really don’t know what you want from me, here.”
Er, you’ve got the Vox article about equality of opportunity up there twice, I think. :)
#17 is fascinating. Depressing, but fascinating.
If I’m going to rant about gender issues in astronomy like I did on the other open thread, I should rant about some other issues as well, so: here’s a well-done (I thought) cartoon about the race-related issues going on surrounding the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope in Hawaii. http://www.popsci.com/my-temple-my-mountain If I have a criticism, it assigns to “commenters” some positions also expressed by well-respected astronomers, for example that the native Hawaiian protesters were a “horde.”
Thanks for the catch! I replaced one of them with your link to the comic strip about Thirty Meter Telescope.
Harlequin
I didn’t know about that. I have to admit that as a non-astronomer my knee-jerk reaction is that if astronomers want to build something they can get their own damn mountain.
One thing I didn’t see in the links I followed from that comic is a good explanation of who owns the mountain and whether they came by that ownership. See, I would think that would be pretty important.
In traditional white culture, there is a thing called private property. And part of that concept is that you aren’t allowed to take somebody else’s things simply because you want them. People who do that are called muggers. Mugging isn’t legal even if you’re going to spend the money more responsibly than the person you stole it from.
Part of the purpose of racism is that it justifies things that are profitable but immoral. Normally “but I’m going to use that property better than the original owner” isn’t an excuse for taking something. But through the magic of racism, an idea like “maybe it’s okay to take land from native Americans if they aren’t using it properly.” Suddenly becomes reasonable.
That’s basically the history of white interaction with Native Americans. When you read about it even a little you realize that not only did we not respect their ideas of ownership, we didn’t respect our own.
I’m guessing the history of ownership here is probably a complicated mess, but it seems pretty important to me.
Christopher, are you aware that before the Europeans came, and pushed the ‘Native Americans’ off their land, there were at least two (most people think three) successive waves of migrants who came through the Bering straits and pushed the previous inhabitants to the South. The lacked the technology to genocide their predecessors, but hey, progress marches on!
My country of origin has changed its inhabitants six times since Roman times. Once the first (so called Macedonian) plague wiped out everyone, and once the new invaders allied with the conquered once-removed owners to kick out the owners. The other times, it was straight “We are stronger, we’re taking over”.
There are two regions on Earth that we think have still the original people who colonized them.
“What is mine in mine, and everyone else’s is up for grabs.” is an idiom that exists in Bulgarian, Russian, Chinese and Turkish. It’s sneered upon by well-brought-up people, at least in my country, and used mostly ironically. But this way at looking at private property is not an exception, or specific to the white race. It’s human, and the new fanged concept that the Other has rights is the aberration. A nice aberration, I’ll grant you that, but it came to be only because material resources became less scare for a particular society, and feeling good about oneself became an attainable luxury.
I know the labor negotiations version: “What’s mine is mine; what’s yours is what we bargain over.”
>Fair point. So you agree with the study’s findings, then.
Imagine that the Asch conformity experiments has been conducted like that experiment and only used black subjects and instead of saying that “people conform to the group” had instead said “black people conform to the group”. Would you agree with their findings.
Their findings are true and human nature but they’re framed in an extremely racist way.
Christopher, I believe it’s government-owned. There are a bunch of telescopes there already; one of the results of the protest has been a task force about consolidating and removing lesser-used telescopes so the impact on the mountain is smaller.
I don’t know the exact regulations, but there’s a requirement to get input or approval from native Hawaiian groups before any new construction is done on the mountain. That was done for the TMT, too. However, the protesters didn’t feel the process adequately represented their interests–which doesn’t surprise me, if they didn’t consult many people, in comparison with the well-represented desires of the astronomical community.
From the toxic masculinity article:
Oh wow. A serious thinkpiece about a mass-murder used the phrase “dank memes” with no irony quotes or anything. I had to stop reading there to keep from cracking up in the middle of the library.
(I’ll be back later with some more informed opinions on the article, but in general I agree that the extreme form of toxic masculinity you find on 4chan and manosphere communities really fucking scary.)
Fascinating links, as always, Amp — thanks for sharing them. I particularly enjoyed #8 and #13. Here a few things that may be of interest:
1) I really enjoyed this Autostraddle review/overview of “The Feminist Utopia Project: Fifty-Seven Visions of a Wildly Better Future,” and am now looking forward to picking up a copy of the book for myself.
2) A delightful interview with Dick Van Dyke (age 89) on the occasion of the release of his new book on aging, Keep Moving, conducted by the 78-year-old grandmother of one of the regular contributors to The A.V. Club. Incidentally, The A.V. Club’s movie/tv review podcast featuring the mother of a senior editor (“Mom on Pop“) is lovely and fun and one of the two or three podcasts I listen to regularly (or irregularly for that matter).
3) Just a reminder that Dorothy Allison is a wonderful poet (among many other things). Her volume “The Women Who Hate Me: Collected Poems 1980 – 1990” is sadly now out of print, but is well worth tracking down. You can read the title poem here, and indeed I highly recommend that you do : )
“Get your own damn mountain” is not an alternative. For one thing, pretty much every mountain top in the world is government-owned. For another, the number of suitable mountains is not all that great. They need to be:
1. quite tall, such that most of the Earth’s atmosphere is below the summit, minimizing atmospheric distortions of the incoming light,
2. has flat (or relatively flat) surfaces at/near the summit big enough to build telescopes and supporting structures (including those for housing and feeding staff)
3. has available transportation for construction and support staff needs
4. is relatively isolated from light and air pollution.
Also, you need multiple mountain tops, as you cannot see the entire sky from any one spot on Earth (e.g., Polaris cannot be seen south of the Equator, and the Southern Cross from pretty much north of it).
I’ve followed this controversy in Sky and Telescope (I’m a subscriber).
Understand, too, that getting time to use a major telescope is difficult, and getting rid of lesser-used telescopes will only make that worse. These things are scheduled a long time in advance (plus leaving time open to observe targets of opportunity such as supernovas) and getting rid of lesser-used telescopes will destroy research schedules.
Minor point: if you’re at the Equator you can see the whole sky. (But for the most part true: your image quality goes down if you have to look at something near the horizon, since you’re looking through thicker atmosphere. You can see Polaris from the equator but you wouldn’t get a good photo.)
It’s also not clear this is true. Major telescopes are oversubscribed by a large factor (Hubble accepts less than 25% of proposals), but you can’t substitute data from the underused telescopes on Mauna Kea for the stuff you would’ve got from a Hubble proposal. (There are telescopes there that could potentially get you data good enough to do a project you wanted Hubble data for; those telescopes are oversubscribed, too, though not as badly.) It’s not like, say, college applications, where (at some level) the best schools take the best students, and the next tier takes the ones who didn’t get into the top schools, etc. You do different things with different telescopes.
Or, to take a really obvious example, if you’ve got two telescopes which are each used only 45% of the time, you could get by with only one of them if they have similar capabilities.
(I’m not in favor of entirely getting rid of all the instruments on Mauna Kea: it’s one of the best observing sites in the world, and I think it’s possible to come to an agreement that honors what the native Hawaiians want as well as what’s useful for the astronomical community, which I imagine will involve scaling down over the next couple of decades. But this is a point I have some skin in–I have a research program on one of those instruments right now–so you might not want to listen to me.)
#7: Jamelle Bouie recently wrote an article that’s basically the same as the Yglesias one that Friedersdorf is reacting to, with a little less emphasis on Clinton’s Machiavellian tendencies:
The thing is, I’m not all that convinced that Sanders is more averse to strong executive action than Clinton. I think one of the main ways that Clinton is more cynical than Sanders is, as Friedersdorf points out, her willingness to change positions on an issue or ally with social conservatives when it’s convenient. I think that he legitimately does care more about the issues that he’s passionate about than about personally having power or becoming president–and I think that’s why journalists make the mistake of not treating Sanders’s rhetoric as rhetoric–but I haven’t seen any evidence that he will be less aggressive about using executive power to advance the issues he cares about than Clinton will be about using it to further consolidate her power. However, some of the issues he cares about are things like ending the NSA, which will naturally limit what kinds of means he uses if he does take a Cheneyesque approach. I think that based on his rhetoric a lot of journalists are putting him into the trope of “uncompromising radical with a lot of passion but not a lot of political savvy”, in sort of the same box as the Freedom Caucus–but based on his record, Sanders does not indulge in the all-or-nothing refusal to accept a part of his agenda if he can’t get it all.
My sister is fairly heavily involved in helping promote Bernie Sanders, so she’s been following him quite closely, and she may be indulging a bit in contrarianism, but she feels that Sanders is the more likely of the two to abuse executive power. (She describes this as a possible ‘dark side of his legacy’, not a reason she supports him.) I wouldn’t be completely surprised if, if he becomes president, Sanders became the next FDR, and not just in his approach to social programs, but also in his approach to executive power.
ok, so this is old, but wanted to say one thing… re this:
#5: “I wonder, how do Germans react when WWII is brought up? Hey, I know! They usually let it know that they, personally, are pacifists…”
The Germans I know usually let it be known that they were children then, or they weren’t even alive and their *parents* were children then, and they had nothing personally to do with the war. Which is different than stating that they’re pacifists.
source o’ knowledge: I lived in Munich for a year and hang out with local expats (in the U.S.) to keep up my language skills.
But there are some interesting (off-topic) conversations to be had around the subject of German responsibility and reparations, and how individual Germans feel about said things.
Somewhat related to the Bernie Sanders articles by Yglesias, Friedersdorf, and Bouie: this article about post-debate polling notes that