Unqualified Offerings

By Thoreau

Sapphire and Steel have moved on to other tasks, so I have decided to cross the timelines and take us all the way back to 1992.  I’m hoping to talk some sense into myself before I ask out this one obnoxious girl and ignore the cute girl who was always smiling at me.  Anyway, ladies and gentlemen, behold:  Debates over whether the next First Lady should be a lawyer married to a lawyer or the stay-at-home mother of a rich guy.

FYI, there are some butterfly effects in this timeline, so 9/11 will never happen, but 4/09/2000 is, well, it’s ugly.  That’s all I’ll say.  You have a bit less than 8 years to get ready.

Bluntobject combines honesty and perspective in this passage:

One point I can add — from my own experience as a white straight cis North American able-bodied English-speaking middle-class right-handed male — is that discussion of privilege occasionally pokes my id in a nasty, resentful place.  ”You didn’t earn anything”, it seems to say, “you just got where you are by picking the right parents and phenotypes”. Well, yeah, sort of. Checking off all those boxes (note the misleadingly active metaphor) means I’m playing life on Easy Mode.

Of course, I didn’t get to pick and choose at character creation time — I just squirted right out into e1m1 without even the opportunity to remap the controls. But there’s no point trying to pretend that I’m some sort of gritty underdog and manufacture a set of fictional victim-traits for myself.

This is a thing I try to keep in mind these days. At an animalistic, hind-brain level, recognizing that critiques of privilege include me is – annoying! It toys with the breaker on my RAGE circuit, even if it doesn’t trip the thing. But it’s not remotely the worst thing that could happen to someone, even on the internet.

By Thoreau

There’s a lot to digest in this summary of a forthcoming Philip Zelikow article, and I think I’d like to read the original article before I say too much.  However, this is worth pointing to:

One traumatic experienced often overlooked — overlooked because it appeared in Stephen Hayes’s stenographic biography of Dick Cheney — was that the Vice-President’s daughter was (falsely, it turns out) told that her house with her children in it had tested positive for anthrax. Similarly, Cheney and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice were told that they and others had been exposed to an extremely lethal toxin in a particular area of the White House — and might soon die as a result. “The alarms did not stop and they too were not abstract … The pressure on Bush and his senior advisers was so direct because so much of the response had to be invented and improvised,” the article reads.

I was not aware that they actually thought a lethal toxin had been released in the White House.  It puts some of the insanity in perspective.  Although, honestly, I do have to wonder about that.  Secret Service honestly thought they’d been breached?  And how did they persuade themselves that their detector was working right?  I can sort of see how, in some moment of uber-paranoia, they might have turned it up to the most sensitive setting, one that they had not done any reliable calibration for, but they actually went to the people at the top and delivered bad news based on what I’m guessing is one reading of a badly-calibrated instrument?  Yeah, yeah, I get that they aren’t paid to take chances, but I’m still trying to see the links in the chain of professionalism-breakdown that leads to this.

But, whatever, that happened.  OK.  It’s fascinating that they learned NOTHING from false alarms.  Instead they just kept telling us to be afraid.  OTOH, maybe they saw what the false alarm did to them, and decided that they’d like the same to happen to us.

Also my observation from the trenches of science is that there’s a metric shit-ton of money thrown at biosensors and chemical sensors, and I’m less-than-convinced that more than a small fraction of that money has led to anything that is reliable outside the lab.  You functionalize a nanostructure and show a large change in signal in some condition, and you get to publish in a good journal.  Whether this is robust or useful is a matter for the lower-ranked journals to sort out.  So, it’s amusing to see that the Secret Service somehow used what I assume was a shitty, poorly-tested sensor to get themselves into a spell of fear.

In the race-oriented thread downblog, Leonard chides me for not marshalling high-quality argumentation to a comment he wrote defending John Derbyshire. This opens up a side issue worth discussing briefly*. One of my responsibilities in life is to help make the world less racist+, and one of the ways a white dude can do that is by deploying “privilege jiu-jitsu” – patiently making the same arguments to fellow white dudes that others have made before and better, knowing that fellow white dudes will give him more of a hearing because of the fellow white dude thing. This can work!

It’s not infallible, though. Some people are racist because it’s just the grain of the culture, and defend racist institutions in the heat of the moment because nobody likes to be challenged, particularly about things that don’t seem to be “their fault.” Those are the people on whom privilege jiu-jitsu can work. I know, because it was one of the things that worked on me. (By, among other things, getting me to actually pay attention to non-white non-dudes saying the same things.)

But some people are just into it. If you put effort into running around the internet posting anti-black factoids and pseudo-facts, shorn of whatever context, or bother to write long posts mythologizing a cranky old dude’s viciousness as the culmination of a struggle to overcome everyone’s “PC” “programming,” then oppression has become your hobby, your passion, or even your vocation. At that point it is not my duty to tenderly and patiently pry the spines of the massive urchin of animus from your flesh. Frankly, you piss me off too much. All I’m going to say is, “Ew! Watch out for the dude with the massive hate-urchin!” It’s your duty to stop cuddling the damn thing and running into other people with it.

* Postscript: was that briefly?
+ Also sexism, homophobia, transphobia – all the bigotries and structural oppressions mindfulness of which gets castigated as “political correctness” by, um, the me of ten to 20 years ago.

By Thoreau

Let us consider the most plausible scenario that would favor George Zimmerman: Trayvon Martin is walking down the street. He sees a stranger in a car following him. Eventually, having been told all his life of the dangers posed by strangers, Martin decides to try to get away. At that point, the stranger gets out of the vehicle. So now Martin is even more freaked out. Wouldn’t you be, if you were young and a stranger substantially bigger than you got out of his car to chase you? So Martin hides, gets the drop on his pursuer, and starts punching him. Perhaps not the brightest move, but a completely understandable one.

George Zimmerman’s fate will hinge on one simple question*: At that moment, did he have a good reason to fear for his life? However, in all of these encounters between a young black man and a person with a gun (usually a white man in some sort of security role), the young black man is held accountable at every moment. One movement that can be construed as reaching for a waistband, and the young black man can be shot. The white man with the gun, however, only has to account for one moment, not the totality of the situation. It’s only the young black man whose fate is in the balance for every moment of the encounter.

Now consider a different scenario: A young white woman, a high school athlete, is walking down the street at night, talking on her phone. She sees a large, strange man in a car following her. Eventually, she has enough of this, so she flees to a place where he cannot follow in a vehicle. Confirming her worst suspicions, he follows her on foot. So, being young and athletic (and, being young and panicked, perhaps not possessed of the best judgment) she hides, gets a drop on her pursuer, and starts punching him. If he drew a gun on her, do we have any doubt what the outcome would be?

Stepping away from the hypothetical, it may very well be that at the critical moment of the real incident there will be reasonable doubt as to whether the legally-admissible evidence establishes all of the necessary elements of a criminal charge. So be it. However, we have a problem when we keep having these sorts of incidents in which one party’s life is in constant jeopardy and the other only has to justify himself for one moment. We need to think about these encounters, and think about the responsibilities of the man with a gun.

And, on that note, I’m off to celebrate the Roman Empire’s failed attempt on the life of Issa Bin Allah. Remember, he may not have gotten judicial process, but he did get a due process, and I salute the brave centurions in uniform.

*I am paraphrasing my understanding of the law; this is not intended as a literal rendering of the legal standard. Void where prohibited. No purchase necessary.

Let me add an aside to the discussion of John Derbyshire’s racist screed with extra racism that ran yesterday in Takimag. (Mataconis; Holbo; Kelly.) Derbyshire’s notional white counterpart of “The Talk” itself is as straightforwardly hateful as you’ll find from someone writing under his own name, and actually reading it feels fairly soiling. But the obvious motivation driving the piece is contemptibly hilarious.

“The Talk” – the real one – is a genuine feature of African-American culture. Not a fun feature, like jumping over broomsticks at weddings or whatever, but a characteristic one. It is “A Black Thing.”

A certain spectrum of my fellow white people find the idea that there might be a Black Thing, any Black Thing, intolerable. “They get to say the N-Word and we don’t! Some of them celebrate Kwanzaa!” And now, “They get to have this cool ‘The Talk’ thing all to themselves!”

John Derbyshire is jealous. Of “The Talk!” Man, he’s got your “victimology” right here. Why should black people have all the nice things? Huh huh? John Derbyshire will not stand for it. He will have his own The Talk, dammit. For efficiency’s sake, probably also involving the N-Word.

If he shows up at your house on New Year’s Eve in a kufi, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

By Thoreau

First on the list: ratemyprofessorsandhotels.com

Your recommendations?  (Either for professors and hotels or for sites that need to be created.)

I want to get my bet in on Kyra Phillips winning “Wanker of the Decade,” because she is a stone-cold lead pipe lock.

You may object, “But Jim, what Kyra Phillips said in that interview doesn’t constitute ‘wanking.’ It’s monstrousness.” I say, oh that too. But I’m just trying to win some money right now, having missed the Mega Millions jackpot last weekend.

By Thoreau

Any predictions about the November election are meaningless right now.  For starters, there’s summer, and gas prices, which always do a number on the public mood.  And then there’s August, which is crazy time in the news cycle.  I fully expect to see all sorts of crazy theories get taken seriously in the August news cycle.  Most of them will probably be negative things about Obama, but remember that Romney is a Mormon and there are all sorts of crazy theories about Mormons, so who knows what might get said about him?  Fortunately, the worst of the craziness seems to dissipate by mid-September.  Until then, any predictions are meaningless.

By Thoreau

I decided to calculate my teaching productivity for each quarter of the 2011-2012 year.  I took each class and multiplied the number of students in the course by the number of units that the students are receiving.  It’s far from perfect as a measure of how much you’re helping people, but it at least gives you a rough measure of how many people you’re helping make how much progress toward their degrees.

Separately, I calculated my “Weighted Teaching Units”, basically, the bookkeeping measure of faculty workload.  For many classes it’s equal to the number of units that the students get, but for some (e.g. labs) it might be more (because the hours/week are greater than the number of units, unlike most lecture classes), and for some (e.g. directed research) it might be less (because helping 1 student get 2 units of directed research or senior project credit is not doing the same amount of “good” for the world as teaching a 2 hour/week lecture class).

Here’s a summary:

Fall: 12.97 weighted teaching units, 236 student-units

Winter: 11.63 weighted teaching units, 294 student-units

Spring: 8.66 weighted teaching units (I got release time to help with a service project), 357 student units (one of my classes has 100 students)

Key things left out of the workload calculation:  Publishing 2 papers in top journals this academic year (one of them with student co-authors), holding a busy office in a professional society, chairing a committee, and helping a student apply for external awards (the fruits of this effort being that for the second time in 2 years a student in my lab won an award from a professional society, which makes the institution look very good).  Also, a lot of those fractional units (i.e. the 0.63, 0.97, and 0.66) come from helping students with senior projects, i.e. the things where they develop the employable skills that we brag about in the “hands-on learning” part of the brochure.

As far as the institution is concerned, I am doing hardly any work this spring.  As far as I’m concerned, I’m helping more students AND I have some time to actually focus on the research that has already resulted in major awards for 2 students in the past few years.  So I’m covering both depth and breadth.

It is rather perverse when the system views your most productive quarter as the one in which you slacked off.