It lies in the fact that we hesitated to speak.

Gaston Bachelard:

What is the source of our first suffering? It lies in the fact that we hesitated to speak. It was born in the moment when we accumulated silent things within us.

A strange omission

from Bake Me a Cake—or Else by Mark Hemingway. Hemingway describes a fairly horrific abuse of the law on the part of Social Justice Warriors, in this case in their pursuit of a baker not wanting to bake a cake for an LGBT wedding.

You might think that once Sweet Cakes By Melissa had been driven out of business, the good citizens offended by the Kleins’ beliefs would have called it a day. But the totalitarianism of America’s liberal culture warriors is a thing to behold.

On April 24, 2015, more than a year and a half after the bakery was shuttered, Alan McCullough, an administrative law judge for Oregon’s Bureau of Labor and Industries, ordered the Kleins to pay $135,000 in fines for violating the state’s public accommodation laws. It is impossible to see this award as anything but excessively punitive. A few years back, a New Mexico wedding photographer was penalized by that state for refusing to work at a same-sex commitment ceremony. The fine in that case was $6,637.

When fellow citizens sought to mitigate the abuse, the SJWs continued their persecution.

The Kleins have five children to take care of, and their income has dropped precipitously since their business closed. Aaron now works as a garbage collector. They say the fine could bankrupt them. So shortly after the decision was handed down, supporters started taking up a collection on the popular GoFundMe website. In just a few hours, donors had contributed $109,000 to the Kleins. Then GoFundMe, under pressure from critics of the Kleins, shut down the fundraiser. The rationale? The website has a policy of refusing fundraisers “in defense of formal charges of heinous crimes, including violent, hateful, or sexual acts.”

Though it is appalling to see the details, the broad brush of this vindictive SJW story is familiar.

But this was new to me. In all the accounts I have scanned, I have never seen this aspect highlighted. Which seems odd to me because it adds a whole new light to the SJW abuse.

Behind the organized campaign to pressure GoFundMe was Lisa Watson, the owner of Cupcake Jones in downtown Portland. (Cupcake Jones also provides wedding cakes and was presumably a competitor of Sweet Cakes By Melissa.) “This business has been found GUILTY OF DISCRIMINATION and is being allowed to fundraise to pay their penalty. .  .  . The amount of money they have raised in a matter of a few hours by thousands of anonymous cowards is disgusting,” Watson wrote on her Facebook page.

You can dress up this campaign by Watson as a SJW noble movement, but surely it is relevant that the chief persecutor of the Klein's is a commercial competitor presumably deriving pecuniary advantage from the abuse of the Kleins and of the court system.

Perhaps it is not quite as bad as Hemingway's single paragraph would seem to indicate. Still, I am surprised that of all the accounts out there, this might be the only one to even draw attention to the fact that the campaign is being spearheaded by a commercial competitor.

Still see that the sun gilds your path

An ethos of a different time, some of which we need to recapture.

The Honor Men
by James Hay, Jr., Class of 1903

The University of Virginia writes her highest degree on the souls of her
sons. The parchment page of scholarship—the colored ribbon of a society—
the jeweled emblem of a fraternity—the orange symbol of athletic prowess—
all these, a year hence, will be at the best the mementos of happy hours—
like the withered flower a woman presses between the pages of a book for
sentiment’s sake.
But…
If you live a long, long time, and hold honesty of conscience
above honesty of purse;
And turn aside without ostentation to aid the weak;
And treasure ideals more than raw ambition;
And track no man to his undeserved hurt;
And pursue no woman to her tears;
And love the beauty of noble music and mist-veiled mountains
and blossoming valley and great monuments-
If you live a long time and, keeping the faith in all these things
hours by hour, still see that the sun gilds your path with real
gold and that the moon floats in dream silver;
Then…
Remembering the purple shadows of the lawn, the majesty of
the colonnades, and the dream of your youth, you may say
in your reverence and thankfulness:
“I have worn the honors of Honors.
I graduated from Virginia.”

Speed of social change

Quite interesting. I have long heard the proposition that abortion remains a roiling political issue because the Supreme Court preempted the political process. They got ahead of changing social views, in some ways making the issue worse not better.

This Is How Fast America Changes Its Mind by Alex Tribou and Keith Collins provides a graphical representation that supports that interpretation regarding abortion.

For each of six issues, it would be interesting to know the extent to which the action became legal in states through legislation or ballot versus through court decisions. The graph shows that same-sex marriage is legal in 36 states (25-30 states being the historical range where either the Federal government or the Supreme Court kicks in to resolve and nationalize the issue) and yet only 11 of those actually decided to legalize same-sex marriage through legislation or the ballot box. In other words 36 would seem to dramatically overstate the extent to which citizens have changed their mind.

This course is for thick-skinned, mature, open-minded, intellectually curious people

Keith Burgess-Jackson is a professor of philosophy at University of Texas. Here is his trigger warning for his philosophy classes. With a modicum of changes, it could be applied to all subjects.

Philosophy of religion is not for the faint-hearted, the close-minded, the thinskinned, the timid, the hypersensitive, the squeamish, the unintellectual (or antiintellectual), the developmentally arrested, the childish, or the easily offended. If you are traumatized (or even dismayed) by the idea of a punitive (retributive) god, or by the use of masculine pronouns (such as “He,” “Him,” or “His”) to refer to God, or by the mere possibility that God is male (rather than female, androgynous, or asexual), then this course is not for you. If you believe in God but are unwilling to entertain the possibility that your belief is false, then this course is not for you, since we will be examining (and taking seriously) arguments against the existence of God. If you disbelieve in God but are unwilling to entertain the possibility that your belief is false, then this course is not for you, since we will be examining (and taking seriously) arguments for the existence of God. If you are an adherent of a particular religion and believe it to be blasphemous, sinful, heretical, or immoral to think about, discuss, or take seriously other religions, then this course is not for you. If you believe that argumentation in particular or philosophy in general is coercive, masculine, belligerent, or militaristic, then this course is not for you. If you believe that morality is oppressive, sexist, or nothing more than a prop for capitalism or some other economic system, or that the making of moral judgments is “judgmental” (in the sense of being overly or gratuitously critical), then this course is not for you, for we will be examining (and taking seriously) an argument (the so-called Moral Argument) to the effect that the existence of morality (or the fact that we make moral judgments, or the fact that moral judgments or values are objective) supports, implies, or presupposesthe existence of God. If you are distressed or discomfited by the concept of evil, or by the possibility that there is evil in the world, or by the possibility that some people (or their actions) are evil, then this is not the course for you, because we will be asking whether (and, if so, how) the existence of evil (natural or moral) renders the existence of God either impossible or improbable. In short, this course, like any other philosophy course, is for thick-skinned, mature, open-minded, intellectually curious people.

When did our university population shift from thick-skinned, mature, open-minded, intellectually curious people to faux victims demonstrating advanced forms of self-indulgence and sloppy thinking?

Among the far Antipodes

The Wombat
by Ogden Nash

The wombat lives across the seas,
Among the far Antipodes.
He may exist on nuts and berries,
Or then again, on missionaries;
His distant habitat precludes
Conclusive knowledge of his moods,
But I would not engage the wombat
In any form of mortal combat.

Alienation from the police? Almost certainly not the critical issue.

From Progressives Miss the Point of Baltimore by John McWhorter.

I think McWhorter has several good points but still misdiagnoses the Baltimore (and national situation). From McWhorter's article.

The supposedly sophisticated twitterati take on what has happened after Freddie Gray’s funeral is to essentially rationalize the riots by explaining that the looting we’ve seen on our TV screens was just collateral damage for institutional racism.

Put aside for the moment that many of the businesses and cars destroyed in the attacks were black owned. Put aside also that Baltimore’s mayor and police chief are black. Nevertheless, there are indeed structural issues that have combined to create this moment—but they don’t fit the narrative being proposed as higher wisdom.

[snip]

Three key dynamics since the Civil Rights era 50 years ago created the inner city misery we are now seeing urgently rise to the foreground today.

First, the Black Power ideology that proliferated in the 1960s and 70s discouraged black communities from maintaining the old-time mantra that adversity meant that blacks have to try twice as hard. The wise insight was that after centuries in the United States, the persistent double standard was demeaning, and while that made basic sense, it changed black America’s orientation towards individual initiative. That helps explain, for example, why only in the sixties did it become common for poor blacks to burn their own neighborhoods in protest. Even amidst Jim Crow, black people did not do this.

Second, in the late sixties, partly in response to the riots of the Long Hot Summers, welfare was transformed from a time-limited program intended for widows to an open-ended program that didn’t care whether recipients ever got jobs. This had the unintended consequence of discouraging marriage, and made it easier for women to raise kids without the father around. This, a story too little told (read it here), decisively impacted the black experience nationwide.

Finally, the War on Drugs created a black market alternative to legal work for poor black men underserved by bad schools. Frankly, The Wire explained this dynamic better than any academic analysis.

Racism is too simplistic an explanation for all of this, as is an idea that “it’s complicated” where what’s really meant is “complicated racism.” Welfare was opened up by liberals who thought they were doing black people a favor, often at the behest of black protesters. The Rockefeller drug laws that ended up penalizing crack over powdered cocaine were supported by black Congress members.

[snip]

But the reflexive liberal rush to moral relativism on the subject misses the mark as well. A certain contingent will not be disabused of the idea that inner city Baltimore is the product of racism alone, as opposed to a complex cocktail of racism in the past, misapplied benevolence afterwards, and a cyclic process of dissonance now. Their take on all of this is better at assuaging white guilt than telling us where to go from here in a real world.

I can agree with a portion of this argument, though not all. I do agree with the main thrust that a focus on "racism" both misdiagnoses the root issues and fails to create good policies for addressing the current problems.

But here is where I disagree with McWhorter the most.

Today, regardless of the complexities of how we got here, the main thing that keeps black America feeling alienated in its own land is the police.

Sure, there is a lot of truth in there but I am pretty sure that the police are not the "main thing." There is much more to it than that.

There are two roadblocks to my accepting McWhorter's diagnosis.

Whether Broken Windows policing has contributed to multi-decade long decline in crime is still arguable (though I suspect it has contributed). What is often overlooked in the Broken Windows arguments is that there has been a major change in the role of technology as it pertains to policing that accompanied Broken Windows but is its own phenomenon. One of the central changes has been the role of such systems as CrimeStat which monitors and catalogs crimes and violations by time and location, providing police forecasting capabilities that used to be relegated strictly to the gut.

Along with CrimeStat though, there is another change. It used to be that 911 was only to be used for emergencies, for a crime in progress. Now, 911 is one of the major feeds into CrimeStat type systems and police forces across the nation that use a CrimeStat system encourage citizens to call in anything that looks suspicious or out of place. For a libertarian, this is an extremely problematic herald of the police state but for law-and-order citizens, CrimeStat and its ilk are a godsend. No longer do police have to make as many snap judgments about an ambiguous situation which can later be claimed as potential profiling.

Instead, that has been outsourced to the citizenry. On the one hand this is a good thing. People on the ground and familiar with a location will always know the local circumstances better than the police ever can. The average quality of information goes up. But anything open to the public also has a lot of variance and noise in the system.

But whether that is good or bad, is kind of moot. It is what we have and it has one particular consequence that I haven't seen particularly well addressed in the Ferguson/Baltimore etc. conversations.

Much policing and locational staffing is now driven by real time crime and citizen complaints. In my city (Black mayor, police chief, city council, school superintendent, etc.), for example, the police encourage everyone to call in anything that looks out of place, suspicious or dangerous. CrimeStat spits out a real time listing of everything that needs to be addressed and then through its algorithms prioritizes the limited police resources for the highest priority items. Investigating a suspicious character in a neighborhood will take lower priority to a physical assault, for example. Many of the lowest priority items age out before they can be addressed but at least there is a record so the police can spot emerging trends.

There is a lot of good to this system. It reduces the squeaky wheel syndrome whereby particularly influential neighborhoods draw in more police resources for less consequential crimes at the expense of poorer, less influential neighborhoods who can't command the same attention.

But the upshot of these trends also flies in the face of the more simplistic ideological diagnoses. The police, in most cities now using CrimeStat type systems, aren't in poor black neighborhoods on a whim to harass the residents. They are in those neighborhoods because the poor black law-abiding residents have called them there to address a real crime problem. The police aren't harassing, they are there to protect citizens and the fact that there are more crimes in one type of neighborhood than another has nothing to do with their possible prejudices or stereotypes. I think it was Jason Riley who referred to this as police having to deal with a behavioral pathology.

Back to McWhorter. Here's one of the problems with his analysis. He says "one simple thing is imperative: America must de-escalate the persistent tensions between cops and young black men." He frames this in a way as if it is simply or mostly up to the police to deescalate that tension. And certainly, there is always more training and higher recruiting standards that might help. But if the issue is, as Riley indicates, in the pathology of young black men and if black neighbors are calling the police to address those pathologies of behavior, then it is hard to see how the police on their own can solve that. The additional question becomes, what are the policies that could be implemented so that there are fewer instances of police being attacked, police being physically and verbally disrespected, individuals fleeing a stop, etc. Easy to focus on the police but probably dramatically insufficient. CrimeStat and dealing with crime where it is and crime by whom it is being committed limits the illusion that this is only a police issue. CrimeStat forces the unpleasant question - how do you stop young black men from committing such a disproportionate amount of the crime. Stop that and the de-escalation follows of its own accord.

The other roadblock to McWhorter is that he has bought into the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy that underpins the Black Lives Matter advocacy.

The police have a dangerous job to do with 50-250 losing their lives each year depending on definitions and the studies you look at. Each one of those lives lost is a tragedy and ideally should be brought to zero. Correspondingly, some 400-1,100 citizens lose their lives each year (again depending on definitions and particular study methodologies). Each one of those lives lost is a tragedy and ideally should be brought to zero. Among the citizens, a disproportionate number are African-American. I have not seen the evidence of this, but there is good reason to believe that the same is true on the police side of the equation.

This is not a black lives matter issue. This is an issue of violence in America and the interaction of the criminal element with the police. Whites, Native Americans, African-Americans, Hispanics and Asian Americans are all subject to this, though in different proportions. Our challenge is not to reduce the number African-American police officers killed in the line of duty and the number of African-American citizens killed by police officers. Our challenge is to reduce the number of police officers killed in the line of duty to as near zero as possible and to reduce the number of citizens killed as a consequence of interacting with the police to as near zero as possible. To the extent that we are successful in overcoming that challenge everyone will benefit, and certainly African-Americans to a greater extent than other groups. Anybody who tries to limit this to an issue of police disrespect of African-Americans is, I suspect, ignorant, confused, or has misdiagnosed the problem.

Police training will help. I don't think police wearable cameras will make much of a difference other than to refine the training needed. I suspect much of this will come down to issues of mental health, substance dependency, personal behavioral pathologies and other such hard to tackle issues. But unless we tackle the whole problem, rather than pretending that it is a race issue, we likely won't make much progress. Those trying to make this a Black Lives Matter issue or a Police Biases issue are, I think, confusing the issue and postponing actions that could actually make a positive difference.

Definitions, Race and Advocacy Effectiveness

Thinking about definitions the other day and considering how we accept clearly bad definitions and then talk about an issue as if the bad definition was real. Two examples.

We have long wrestled with the consequences that for some 30 or 40 years we have conflated race and ethnicity in our national census records. Whether one agrees with the appropriateness of focusing on race or not, there is still a legitimate issue regarding definitions.

White, Black, Native American and Asian are reasonably settled (with some loose ends) but what about the hybrid category of Hispanic which is a linguistic/national origin category, not a race. Hispanics can be of any one of the races.

By mixing race and ethnicity, we are clouding the picture significantly. Why would anyone want to do that?

It is often claimed that America is becoming more diverse and it is often implied that is becoming more racially diverse with the prospect of whites becoming a minority within a couple of decades (a forecast going back at least three decades) when in fact the US is becoming more diverse by country or origin. In other words, what is the racial mix of the US today compared to, say 1970, stripping out the non-racial category Hispanic (i.e. getting Hispanics to self-identify their race)?

In 1970, as best I can tell, the US was approximately 85% white, 11% black 3% Asian and 1% Native American. In 2015, as best I can tell from various surveys that ask Hispanics to self-identify their race, the US is about 80% white, 13% black, 6% Asian and 1% Native American. Those aren't huge changes. Certainly, a doubling of Asians is significant, but otherwise, all this talk about increasing racial diversity seems much ado about nothing. However, diversity has increased, just not racial diversity. In 1970, about 6% of the population was foreign born and now it is about 15%, almost a tripling in diversity by country of origin.

Why does this matter? Well, in part, it would be nice to tamp down the racial alarmists out there who keep trying to stir up concern about the changing make-up of the US. Yes, native born whites are declining as a percentage of the total population but that is in part because of the influx of, to use the New York Times' infelicitous terminology, white Hispanics.

Part of this matters just in terms of fostering honest conversations. In the past year some advocacy group or another tried to stir up a hoorah about the lack of diversity in the tech industry by pointing out that Google, Amazon, Apple et al had numbers (recalling from memory) along the lines of only 5% black and 6% Hispanic. But that doesn't mean the tech industry isn't diverse when you consider that whites are also significantly underrepresented. What can be accurately said is that Asians are dramatically overrepresented in the tech industry (but not if you are baselining against the population that has STEM degrees). The narrative being spun was that the tech industry is an example of white privilege not extending an equal opportunity to blacks and Hispanics. That is completely contrary to the truth which is that the tech industry is dramatically diverse with openings and opportunities for anyone of any background as evidenced by the fact that whites are materially underrepresented. We don't need to do anything to foster diversity in the tech industry because it is already diverse.

Unless of course we are also abusing the word diversity, which I would argue we are. These advocates were clearly arguing that diversity only meant African-Americans (and maybe Hispanic). They did not mean diversity as we usually mean it, i.e. degree of mix from all sources. I have come across this phenomenon, the airbrushing out of Asians from the figures, in several conversations covering different industries (especially in regard to universities).

What is going on here? Why are we using diversity just to mean African-American representation and not including other minorities?

Well partly, given the advocates and their goals, it just doesn't support the preferred narrative. It is hard to make the claim that tech industry executives are racist bigots if half their employee base and executives are minorities or foreign born.

Which made me wonder about related words such as multicultural, people of color and affirmative action. Here was my hypothesis. From 1965 onwards we had a federal policy of affirmative action in many fields which was originally intended to assist primarily African-Americans, in part as redress against past crimes. But as America became more ethnically diverse and in part because affirmative action has always been at its core a race-based program of benefit for one group of citizens at the expense of another, affirmative action had relatively little electoral support and was increasingly challenged in the courts and at the ballot box from the late 1980s through the 1990s. As affirmative action, now a tainted and rejected policy, lost favor and cache, my hypothesis is that the advocates for affirmative action began a switch to ostensibly more neutral terminology such as "people of color", "multicultural," and "diversity." Instead of the old affirmative action/quota advocacy for more African-American (police, candidates, employees, etc.), now the advocacy is for the fuzzier and somewhat more neutral "diversity."

To test this, I looked at the trends for all these phrases on both Google NGram Viewer (1900-2008) and Google Trends (2005 to present). Based on the hypothesis above, one would expect to see alternate terms for affirmative action to come into play prior to the peak of affirmative action, i.e. in the time frame where affirmative action was being challenged and picking up negative connotations.

And that is basically what you see. The tainted term affirmative action gains ground from 1970 onwards reaching a steady plateau circa 1980, popping up circa 1994 when many legal cases were being brought, and then peaking and declining from 1996 onwards. In 2008 it was used about third as often as it was in 1996. That's a pretty steep fall. "Multicultural" follows pretty much the same trend line. "People of color" emerged after 1990. None of these three ever gained significant traction. "Diversity" rocks along pretty steady state through to 1990 and then pops up, increasing in usage by 40% through 1994 and plateauing from then onwards.

So this data seems to sustain the hypothesis. Affirmative Action was the preferred term for racial quotas and preferences before accumulating sufficient negative connotations and falling away from usage after 1996. People of Color, Multicultural, and Diversity all came into increasing usage between 1990 and 1995 but only Diversity has had significant penetration.

Pending other evidence then, my working supposition is that Diversity replaced Affirmative Action as a term denoting racial preferences and quotas for African-Americans without the negative connotations of Affirmative Action. It is this specific genealogy of the word that explains why people are describing the tech industry as not diverse when it demonstrably is exceedingly diverse. It is not diverse in the old sense of having sufficient African-Americans. It also explains why the tech industry has responded as it has. It hasn't promised to hire more non-whites as it already has too few whites (per the proportional representation argument). It has responded by making a number of policy changes to favor African-Americans (and to a much lesser extent, Hispanics). In that regard, the race advocates have been very effective at hijacking the term Diversity to mean something quite different from its dictionary meaning.

Whether any of this is good or bad depends on the extent to which you favor using racial quotas and racial preference policies instead of race blind policies. However, it is interesting to see and measure the evolution of terminological meaning independent of dictionary meaning.

The three iron laws of social science

Arnold Kling passes along the three iron laws of social science developed by his father Merle Kling, a professor in political science at Washington University in the 1950s and 1960s.

1. Sometimes it’s this way, and sometimes it’s that way.

2. The data are insufficient.

3. The methodology is flawed.

After more than two years and a 455-page report they were unable to determine what the lyrics of the song were

From Jack Ely, Who Sang the Kingsmen’s ‘Louie Louie’, Dies at 71 by Sam Roberts.

High school and college students who thought they understood what Mr. Ely was singing traded transcripts of their meticulously researched translations of the lyrics. The F.B.I. began investigating after an Indiana parent wrote to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy in 1964: “My daughter brought home a record of ‘LOUIE LOUIE’ and I, after reading that the record had been banned on the air because it was obscene, proceeded to try to decipher the jumble of words. The lyrics are so filthy that I cannot enclose them in this letter.”

The F.B.I. Laboratory’s efforts at decryption were less fruitful. After more than two years and a 455-page report, the bureau concluded that “three governmental agencies dropped their investigations because they were unable to determine what the lyrics of the song were, even after listening to the records at speeds ranging from 16 r.p.m. to 78 r.p.m.”

And here's the song.