Open Thread And Link Farm, Hurty Gurty Edition
- Most thieves make almost no money and are teens going through a phase. Also, for those under 24, being poor doesn’t make being a thief more likely.
- Sword-wielding woman uses medieval combat skills to stop intruder
- Against Against Autism Cures | Slate Star Codex
- Read 2015 Nobel Economics Prize winner Angus Deaton’s take on inequality – Vox. “Why income inequality in society as a whole is a threat to democracy — and why worrying about it isn’t just class warfare or resentment.”
- A 58-Year-Old Black Man Reflects on the Death Around Him: Conflicted thoughts about how to stop crime, advance equality and save lives. I don’t agree with everything in this article – in fact, I think there’s a lot here that the more conservative readers of “Alas” will agree with – but it’s certainly tremendously interesting.
- The Debate Link: Two Types of Microaggressions and a Comment on Epistemic Injustice
- A vine of 17 hours of my friend Matt Bogart drawing comics in like 30 seconds. My favorite thing about this is that his girlfriend did a little cat animation by projecting pictures onto the wall behind Matt. You can read the comic Matt drew here.
- Who gets to be on grand juries? Current and former cops: Yes. Former ACLU staffers: Apparently not. – The Washington Post
- Boys can now wear skirts to school in Puerto Rico · PinkNews
- Noahpinion: Interesting Debate Regarding Racial Bias in Police Killings The argument is, both whites and blacks get shot for being threatening to police, but blacks are more likely to be shot for being insubordinate.
- Fox & Friends freaks out over black Captain America: It’s a plot to ‘target conservatives’
- Hispanic Coalition, MoveOn.org Petition Call for Trump’s Removal as SNL Host | Mediaite Eh. Obviously people have a free-speech right to object to SNL’s choice of hosts. But I think they’re wrong. Like it or not, Trump is an entertaining public figure who is important to current headlines (although I don’t expect he’ll have any lasting relevance), which makes him exactly the sort of politician SNL invites. And the impulse to try and keep opposing public figures from having access to mass media, while understandable, is wrong.
- UCLA Administration Considering Censoring Theme Parties, Punishes Frat For “Kanye Western” Theme Party.
- Bad Reporting on Matthew Keys’ Possible Sentence Conceals Prosecutorial Power
- Bernie Sanders Thinks Women Should Stay Home With Their Babies | Ravishly
- The Dispiriting Democratic Debate | The American Conservative
- The Legal Murder Of Tamir Rice – The Atlantic “Convicting an officer of murder effectively requires an act of telepathy.”
- How secure is health reform? | The Incidental Economist
- Sentencing Law and Policy: “The Reverse Mass Incarceration Act”
- Beepy Boopy Veronica — “this is the world where Brendan Eich has to quit his job, instead of me getting blackmailed cuz I like to wear skirts.”
- In China, credit score is now affected by friends’ activism
- What the wonky case for Obamacare’s Cadillac Tax misses – Vox
- Here’s Why “Arming the Opposition” Usually Doesn’t Work | Mother Jones
- CDC Study: The Myth of Poor Families and Fast Food
- Hasbro Spent Time, Money, Lawyers’ Attention To Barely Make A Difference Over My Little Pony Fan Game | Techdirt
- PETA monkey selfie lawsuit: It’s not just absurd. It’s cruel.
- Big Win For Free Speech (especially “fair use”) In Google Books Lawsuit – Postcards from Space
- I argue with someone on Tumblr about the ethics of reposting art without the artist’s permission.
- Similarly, I argue with someone on Tumblr about Sarkeesian’s statement at the UN.
This entry was posted in
Link farms. Bookmark the
permalink.
Re: 15) Does Bernie Sanders not support mandatory paternity leave? That would seem… odd.
I read link #6 when it popped up on the blogroll and I still think it’s tremendous.
I suspect he does, and that he just chose poor phrasing during the debate – but then he harped on that same phrase again, and again, and again. It was icky.
From #28:
It seems the best approach would be for you to license your work under a creative commons license (or similar), thereby preemptively giving permission to share the work and end up in the “go for it” outcome on the flow chart. It would probably help for the flow chart to explicitly cover this fairly common scenario though.
The idea of “Epistemic Injustice” from #6 is interesting but it’s not something that’s specific to micro-aggressions or social justice issues. It’s an issue that pervades any attempt at justice.
False recollections are also something that has been actually proven to exist. Humans in general are really poor at observing reality and inject their own biases in many ways.
Then you have people who are exceptionally poor at observing reality. I know such a person who has told others about things that happened in my presence, where half of the recollections are wrong.
So I find the insistence that we must always believe what a person says to be unreasonable. Especially when that only seems to apply selectively.
I understand micro-aggressions as micro-stressers – that is, the hail of moment-to-moment “negging,” intentional or not, that triggers visceral reactions and keeps me in a depleted condition, on my heels.
I think epistemic injustice refers to the burden of constantly second-guessing myself. And, yeah, we all endure some of that. But, also yeah, this would seem to be the most frequent manifestation of being a member of a traditionally subordinated group.
Basically, I don’t like —
– being victimized
– calling attention to the idea that I’ve been victimized, thereby causing people to regard me as a self-absorbed whiner who lacks the sophistication to avoid being victimized and lacks the resilience to cope on my own
– feeling like a patsy when I don’t stand up for myself
– feeling like a traitor when I don’t stand up for my kind.
This stuff is draining. And people in traditionally subordinated groups get more of this stuff than people who aren’t. So perhaps epistemic injustice refers to one consequence of micro-aggressions.
Conflict is draining — but task ambiguity adds to the load. And our society sends mixed signals about how to respond to slights. Some people will expect me to be stoic and dignified, letting slights pass, signaling that I have such deep wells of reserves that I don’t even notice other people’s petty behavior and bad manners. Other people will expect me to push back when pushed, and will regard dignity with contempt. Either response has its drawbacks. But the most burdensome response of all is to dither between the two.
I’ve sometimes been unsympathetic to people who advocating “calling people out” on their bad behavior. I’ve argued that a more dignified response would likely go over better – at least, in my social circles. I still feel that way – but I can also appreciate that dignity may require certain emotional reserves. That is, I can choose that response because I tend to be in a privileged position of having undepleted emotional reserves. Perhaps it’s unfair to expect people who lead higher-stress lives to maintain the same level of decorum.
desipis:
Does it say otherwise in the essay?
Aapje:
To quote from the essay:
The point is not that everyone should treat marginalized groups as perfect reporters. The point is that marginalized groups are often treated as inherently less reliable reporters than groups in power. It’s the difference between the two–not the absolute amount of doubt or credibility–that is the issue. Edit: a quick glance through the essay says that that comparison isn’t made directly; I interpreted it being there based on many conversations in this vein, but I suppose I can’t say for sure that’s what the author meant. Still, I think it’s likely that was the intention, since the author singles out the way marginalized groups’ opinions are dismissed.
Those of y’all intrigued by the idea of Epistemic Injustice might like the book by that name by British philosopher Miranda Fricker: Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (Oxford UP 2007). I won’t say I am precisely following Fricker’s usage, but her book really invigorated this line of inquiry (and certainly inspired and fortified my thinking on the matter).
Also, Harlequin @8 is correct in divining my intended meaning. The issue isn’t “women are inherently correct in all of their perceptions.” It’s the credibility gap (what Fricker calls a testimonial injustice) that is the problem; their perspectives are dismissed to a greater degree and extent than those of men. There’s more to it than just the testimonial injustice, but that’s a big player.
What makes you so sure you’re the one who’s right?
@8 Harlequin
Really? Because my observation is that ‘we’ are generally asked to believe the person from the victim group over the other person. In other words, we are supposed to see that person as more reliable, not as equally (un)reliable, as you claim.
I have no problem with assuming equal reliability, with the caveat that I also believe in innocent until proven guilty. In a situation with no clear truth-sayer, I won’t condemn a person against whom there is an accusation, while there may have been a misunderstanding or innocent cultural difference.
Specific to micro-aggressions is that they can be very subjective. Some acts can be interpreted in several ways and are only micro-aggressions if interpreted in a specific way. Then the question is why that interpretation is correct and another isn’t (like the famous ESA Hawaii shirt with girls in bikini on there).
@10 Kate
This person has often remarked to me at having bad memory (which results in ‘filling the gaps,’ since that is how the human mind works), I’m not the only one who noticed, I’ve noticed a big difference between this person and other people (if the problem was on my end, my recollections would differ greatly with everyone else, not just with this person), etc.
We’re expected to believe that a minority knows more about being a minority than a white person does. This does not mean they have perfect observational powers, but it means that we have some basic trust of their self-reporting and their social intuitions. Certainly we will trust them more than a white person explaining “what it’s like to be black.” This seems obvious.
The problem is, many privileged whites only encounter this notion when they are on the wrong side of it, so they see it as a silencing tactic, which it can be. I can say to a cis person, “Hey look, you don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about so please go away.” After all, I don’t have to talk to you if I don’t want to.
In the bigger picture, white men dominate the media, so it’s not like we never hear what your average white dude thinks about things. In fact, I’m pretty sure I understand the various viewpoints that cis folks have about gender, or what white folks think about race — I mean, there is variety. We don’t all think the same stuff. But I have a sense of the spectrum.
This is the difference between outsider culture and insider culture. We see you, cuz you’re everywhere. You get to hold the microphone a lot. It is likely that you know much less about us.
Think of a person who is visiting Paris, versus a person who has lived their a few months, versus a person who has lived there three years, versus a person who has lived there their entire lives. Who better understands the city?
The visitor might know a few facts, but if he tries to lecture the person who has lived there their entire lives, it just comes across as presumptuous. This doesn’t mean that the person who has lived there their entire life cannot be wrong. Of course they can. But still, experience leads to knowledge.
I wasn’t referring to “believe the victim.” (For one thing, that’s about victims vs attackers, not men vs women; there are other dynamics of sexual violence apart from men attacking women.)
No, I was talking about the fact that women are considered less reliable reporters in many areas. Most psychological studies find women are considered more trustworthy than men in terms of not lying & doing what they say they will, but women eyewitnesses are considered less trustworthy than men, although this difference seems to lessen or disappear for expert witnesses. If a woman says something happened to her, people are less likely to believe her single report than they would a man’s single report; same with racial minorities vs white people. That’s only compounded when those groups say something they experienced was because of their group membership; they’re considered biased by the people with power in a way the people with power don’t think they themselves are.
I’m hoping more of this is in the book David Schraub linked to, which I’m looking forward to reading now.
@12 Veronica
That is a bad analogy, because white and non-white people have fundamentally different experiences. It’s not simply a case of one side knowing better than the other, both sides have a limited perspective. Try mine:
Two people get a closed envelope with pay for a job. Person A looks in the envelope and says that he is underpaid for the job due to X (his race/gender/looks/nationality/etc). Person B looks in his envelope and disagrees.
Do you agree with me that:
– It would be useful for A and B to know what is in the envelope of the other person.
– It would be useful to know if other people with X the same as person A get similar pay
– Person A may have jumped to conclusions and the actual reason for a pay disparity may be Y, rather than X.
Not necessarily, since a lot of experiences are specific to the individual, rather than generic. I don’t like coffee, but it would be absurd to then claim that no one likes coffee or that is objectively disgusting, because of my personal experience.
Furthermore, people tend to have a lot of cognitive biases that make the average person fairly poor observers.
Also on race issues? Because it is my experience that the media actually give plenty of room to minorities to talk about these things. So much, that I find your comment rather absurd in this context (basically you are copying the ‘liberal media’ playbook, where conservatives claim that their voices aren’t heard. It’s tiresome).
There is not much hope for a fair discussion if you poison the well by using biased interpretations of what one side is doing. When black people are sharing their experiences, you call it ‘self-reporting,’ when white people are doing it, you call it ‘lecturing’. Your choice of words shows prejudice from the start.
My experience is that white people are actually often lectured and when they ask critical questions, ask for objective evidence, etc; they are accused of denying that racism exists or such. On the other hand, if they share their experiences, they are disbelieved for their skin color, rather than get the same basic trust in their own self-reporting.
This is the kind of double standard/prejudice against white people that causes the perception of being silenced.
@13 Harlequin
I wasn’t talking about sexual violence per se. The terminology of micro-aggressions intentionally invokes a victim vs attacker frame. In the context of ‘Patriarchy = men oppressing women’ or ‘racism = P +P’, there is a direct link between gender/race and the ability to be a victim (or attacker). That is actually one of my criticisms about these types of feminism/anti-racism.
Your own link argues that trustworthiness is linked to speech patterns and since we know that women talk differently to men (on average), this may explain the entire difference in how witnesses are judged. Other behavioral differences may explain it as well.
In fact, your link suggest that the actual prejudice is against men as they are judged as more likely to lie in the abstract. Women are then judged as less reliable in practice, strongly suggesting that men and women do something different to cause them to be judged differently.
Personally, I’d look at the reported tendency for women to soften their statements with qualifiers, which common sense suggests would make people think that the person using qualifiers is less certain about his/her statements.
If that is true, then the disbelief you noted in witness testimony can not be assumed to also exist in cases that report about a woman/man, but do not have the alleged victim make a statement in person.
The people out of power can also be biased. I’m a bit bothered by your one-sidedness.
@Aapje — Women almost certainly behave differently from men. However, that doesn’t mean that these behaviors are sufficient to justify different treatment. After all, you’ll always be able to find slight differences and use that to justify sexism.
We know this: if we give test subjects a written description of the actions of a business executive, where some are given a text that describes a person with a male-coded name, and for others a female-coded name, but otherwise identical texts, then the woman will be judged more harshly than the man.
This is a written text. No differences in behavior are possible. Perhaps the subjects imagine different behavior, but that doesn’t make the results less sexist.
This goes to the “women are seen as bitchy, men seen as assertive” thing. This is very real and well demonstrated.
You say “women should speak with less qualifiers.” Easy to say, but women who do this run into problems. Sexism is still present. Their words are heard differently from a man’s. Whereas he is seen as “forthright” or “assertive,” she is seen as “pushy” or “bossy.”
The point is, the qualifiers are expected. Women who do not provide them are punished in other ways.
I don’t think that’s common sense–or at least it’s not the only possible common sense response. For example, given the uncertainties that exist around us, one could say that consistently unqualified statements should be less reliable, since they indicate the person making the statements may not have fully considered alternate explanations.
See also Veronica’s comment: it’s not clear that removing qualifiers from a woman’s speech would make her sound more reliable to most observers, instead of unreliable in a different way (too angry/harsh). I always like to point to this This American Life story, where the hosts talk about the fact that they often get comments about how the female reporters sound, but not about how the male reporters sound–even when the male reporters are doing the exact same vocal tics (in this case, vocal fry). In at least some cases, people first hear women as less reliable/more annoying/whatever, and then come up with reasons why that’s true. I imagine similar processes are at work with racial minorities, etc, though I don’t have such a ready example to hand.
My point was that the people with power often don’t think they’re biased even though they also are, not that people out of power are unbiased. Which is why I was discussing the perceptions of the people with power (“considered by…”, “don’t think they themselves are”) and not the bias levels of the people out of power.
Also:
Ah, sorry for the misinterpretation. I hadn’t heard the term “victim group” before so I didn’t realize what you were referring to.
I have a question I’m hoping someone here can help me with. There was not too long ago, I think, a short video making the rounds–maybe on YouTube–about the images boys receive about how to be a man. I think it was the boys talking in their own words about it, but I am not sure. Does this ring a bell for anyone? I’m looking for it for my gender studies class. Thanks in advance.
Richard: This the one?
Thanks, desipis. Not sure if it’s the one I was thinking about, but it will help.
Hey Amp, random note–the blogroll links to Daniel Larison’s blog on the American Conservative, but the RSS feed is apparently for the site as a whole. Dunno if that’s fixable from your end, but just in case. (I’ve found his foreign policy stuff interesting, but I keep clicking over to read article titles he didn’t write!)
Harlequin – I think that’s something I can fix. Anyway, I just now tried fixing it. Let me know if it works. :-)
#1 (most thieves are teens going through a phase):
That was surprising to me–I would have expected that a lot of the difference in arrest/prison rates between low-income and high-income people would be that low-income people have more reason to steal. I guess at least for younger people that’s not true, and for older people it’s not clear which way the causality runs.
#15 (Bernie Sanders says moms should stay home):
Meh. I’d like Bernie to talk more about paternity leave, and I think the writer would have more of a point if she came up at least a few more quotes from him about what women “should” do, but one sentence is doing an awful lot of work in that piece. It’s a phrase that did sound an alert for me when I watched the debate because people arguing against working mothers use it–but they’re using it to argue that women should not have jobs if they have young children, and Sanders was using it to argue for paid maternity leave, i.e. something that women would not need if they were staying home with the kids indefinitely. I think that more likely than illustrating what Sanders “really” thinks, it’s likely he was trying to coopt the language of social conservatives to try and get their support on this issue.
Given that Clinton will at times ally with social conservatives, famously on video games, or really scarily, her affiliation with “The Family”/”The Fellowship”, I’m more worried about her trying to tell me what I “should” do.
Related: Hillary Clinton is Smearing Bernie Sanders as a Sexist–I have conflicting feelings about Saletan as a writer, but I think he’s correct here. Based on the headline I thought it might be on the same topic as link #15 here, but it’s about Sanders defending his moderate/lets-find-common-ground approach on guns by saying, “All the shouting in the world is not going to do what I would hope all of us want, and that is keep guns out of the hands of people who should not have those guns and end this horrible violence.”
#24 (poor families and fast food): As the piece briefly notes, this isn’t the first study to conflict with what “everybody knows”, but anything that “everybody knows” seems pretty resistant to correction, so the news media can usually get several rounds of “Did you know that coffee might be HEALTHY???!!!” “Could ‘overweight’ (BMI 25 – <30) people have a LOWER RISK OF DEATH than normal-weight people???!!!" I blogged about poor people eating less fast food in 2012.
ETA: I meant to address link #1 up top and forgot to. It’s there now.
I grew up in a relatively wealthy town (most of us had at least one parent who was a doctor or lawyer or engineer or something like that), and I knew plenty of kids in high school who would shoplift just for the thrill of it. Stealing stupid stuff like magazines or candy that they could easily afford.
[Moved to this thread from the Germaine Greer thread, by moderator fiat. –Amp]
Jeffrey Gandee:
(emphasis mine)
The dominance of the right in every branch of government at every level except for the presidency disproves this. “Certain progressive viewpoints” – aside from gay marriage – are in the ascendancy only on a select few college campuses and sometimes in a small number of self-styled progressive towns. Voting rights, abortion rights, school budgets, affirmative action – the number of “certain” progressive viewpoints in the ascendancy is vanishingly small. Even in big liberal cities, this corner of the left holds no real power.
And are they really in the ascendancy in any real way, or are we just seeing social-media enabled purges of in-group heterodoxy?
Anti-trans arguments of various sorts, intemperate criticism of BLM, and nearly all of the other no-platforming episodes of late would be laughed out of town had they taken place almost anywhere else. Even on campus, the loudest activists are indulged, since they’re the only ones who care and the stakes are so low. The vast majority of students, the civil engineers, marketing majors and premeds, chuckle and get on with their day.
In ten or twenty years, who is more likely to be on a school board or a city council making real decisions about public policy: the Young Republican who got pilloried for an op-ed that would run without issue in any non-campus newspaper from coast to coast (burnishing his right wing credentials in the process), or the activists who believe it their tuition-given right to build a cocoon around their campus where no bad thoughts can get in?
It seems like the left has settled for exercising and expanding their power in the tiny fiefdoms they control at the expense of having a shot at making change anywhere else. This is progressive fragility and while we can enjoy arguing in circles whether it’s censorship or something else, it is creates its own irrelevance.
So the above was described as “partisan anti-left,” which it really isn’t.
Believing that the left is getting walked over everywhere that matters except for a few colleges isn’t partisan, it’s reality.
Believing that the traditional circular firing squad is increasing in vehemence isn’t a critique of substance, it’s a pretty obvious observation. Anyone allying against the left would be encouraging this, not decrying it.
Now, this is Amp’s blog and mods can do what mods want. But don’t confuse me for a right-winger.
Regarding my Saletan link in comment #24–I was debating whether to get into my problems with it, decided not to, and changed my mind after reading this post on Fannie’s Room.
I agree with pretty much all of Fannie’s points–and one thing that particularly bothered me, because it’s so very Saletan, was his “if you really care about X you’ll agree with me: false claims of sexism should make you really really mad”–the worst example was when he had that series about “maybe black people aren’t as intelligent on average as white people for genetic reasons–you’ll agree with me or you’re just like a Creationist!” Certainly it is plausible that the reason Clinton did not imply Sanders’ comment was sexist until quite some time later was either that it did not strike her as sexist until some time later (either because she didn’t spot it right away or because it became more sexist in her memory), or that she wasn’t sure whether it was prudent to point out the sexism. Certainly I’ve walked away from online conversations and on rereading the post of the person I’m arguing with, I’ve found that their remarks were more civil or aren’t as strong a demonstration of the point that I wanted to make as I remembered them. Though I’m also not naive enough to think that whether Clinton says it has more to do with whether she believe it than whether she thinks it will help her politically.
But the post at Fannie’s Room doesn’t address what I think is Saletan’s strongest point–for something to be sexist it has to be applied unequally to men and women. A lot of sexist things are not always said/done due to sexism, it’s the difference in how often they’re done to men vs women that’s sexist. Sanders used similar language with O’Malley and with Clinton. And beyond what Saletan wrote, I’m not convinced that the line “All the shouting in the world is not going to do what I would hope all of us want, and that is keep guns out of the hands of people who should not have those guns and end this horrible violence” is meant to refer to anything Hillary said. I saw it, at the time I watched the debate, as about gun control advocates in general–including, weakly, Sanders–especially since he says to O’Malley, “Here is the point, governor. We can raise our voices. But I come from a rural state, and the views on gun control in rural states are different than in urban states, whether we like it or not. Our job is to bring people together around strong, common-sense gun legislation.” [emphasis mine] Sanders is implicitly including himself. And I don’t think he’s saying that being loud about it is something people should stop doing because it’s actively hurting gun control as a cause (at least within that debate), rather than saying it’s not enough–let alone telling Clinton to ‘stop shouting’. And there’s no reasonable way to read Sanders’ “when we develop that consensus, we can finally, finally do something to address this issue,” (from later in the same response to Clinton where he used the word ‘shouting’, no other candidates speaking in between) as saying that Clinton should stop talking about gun control altogether, as Clinton implies: “I’ve been told by some to quit talkin’ about this, to quit shoutin’ about this. Well, I’ll tell you right now, I will not be silenced, and we will not be silenced.”