PC Nonsense

Jonathan Chait tries to take on the whole internet, at least according to the weaklings at Gawker.

I am white and male, a fact that is certainly worth bearing in mind. I was also a student at the University of Michigan during the Jacobsen incident, and was attacked for writing an article for the campus paper defending the exhibit. If you consider this background and demographic information the very essence of my point of view, then there’s not much point in reading any further. But this pointlessness is exactly the point: Political correctness makes debate irrelevant and frequently impossible.

I doubt Chait and I have agreed about ten things in ten years. That's why PC is nonsense. These categories are just analogies. I doubt we have ten things in common, including 'being white' and 'being male.' He's a New York writer from a Jewish family -- which is fine, and I in no way mean to suggest otherwise, but it's almost totally different from my own Scots-Irish heritage in Appalachia.

And as for what it means to be a man, I doubt he and I agree at all. He'll answer to God for his conscience, and I for mine, but don't think they're similar -- let alone the same.

Good for You, Lady

I checked the history, and most mentions of Michelle Obama here at the Hall are from Tex or Cassandra (who has posting privileges she may have forgotten). I think the American tendency to pay attention to the First Lady and families of Presidents is a mistake, probably JFK's fault, that only hurts their ability to carry on with family life during a difficult few years. Best to ignore them and what they do, almost all the time, for the sake of the President's mental health and the individual good of each family member.

However, I'll break tradition this once. It's not mandatory for women from outside Saudi Arabia to go veiled, but it's good for an American not to. She may not have felt she had much choice, given the constant rumors that her husband is a secret Muslim, but all the same it's a healthy signal of independence. It's good for us, and it's good for the women of Saudi Arabia.

Fascists Have The Best Uniforms

"The Front National now has the support of a quarter of Paris’s gay voters – and only 16 per cent of the straight ones."

The Front National now offers a welcoming home to gay people who feel judged by Muslims and share wider concerns about immigration and the loss of French identity... Marine has worked hard to expand the FN’s membership beyond obvious bigots, racists and skinheads. She has publicly condemned anti-Semitism and insists that, far from being racist, her party is the only one that defends secularity and democracy against Islamisation. A key part of this strategy is using the Islamist threat to court the sort of people that the far right has traditionally persecuted. It’s working.

That's not just 'working,' that's amazing. It sounds like a leading indicator.

"Control Your Thoughts."

Apropos of a story about a Christian blogress who decided to quit wearing Yoga pants in public so as to avoid tempting other men into violating the commandment against coveting another man's wife, some advice:

Meanwhile, others criticised the entry for feeding into the idea that what a women chooses to wear dictates how men behave. “How about you learn to control your thoughts?” said one commenter.

That's great advice! Let's try it. Don't think of a pink elephant.

Snow and School Cancellations

A visual guide, with commentary.

Structural oppression

Grim linked to two very interesting articles on the subject of the War Between Nerds and Feminists.  In the first, Scot Alexander expounds on a number of topics, such as how useless it is to define human relations in terms of relative oppression, so that every identification of unjust behavior becomes a competition to determine which of us has it the worst: "You couldn't go to college? Well, I had to be subject to the draft! Top that!" He calls it the "one-dimensional model of privilege." Then he really grabs me with this:

And this is why it’s distressing to see the same things people have always said about Jews get applied to nerds. They’re this weird separate group with their own culture who don’t join in the reindeer games of normal society. They dress weird and talk weird. They’re conventionally unattractive and have too much facial hair. But worst of all, they have the chutzpah to do all that and also be successful. Having been excluded from all of the popular jobs, they end up in the unpopular but lucrative jobs, for which they get called greedy parasites in the Jews’ case, and “the most useless and deficient individuals in society” in the case of the feminist article on nerds I referenced earlier.

. . .

I am saying that whatever structural oppression means, it should be about structure. And the structure society uses to marginalize and belittle nerds is very similar to a multi-purpose structure society has used to belittle weird groups in the past with catastrophic results.

Of course it's also true that, for instance, a group of guys with some terrible habits about treating women as sex dolls might simultaneously be the target of crippling society hatred and the beneficiaries of lavish societal rewards of a different sort. It's even true that their distressing sex-doll mentality might be rooted in an oppressive social gender structure, even though they continue to suffer from some gender-based social structures and to benefit from others. It's not always about who's getting the short end of the stick in every possible walk of life. Sometimes it's just about treating people as individual human beings rather than as either objects or rigid categories. I'd really just as soon never read another article explaining that the "real" oppression is the plight of guys who would like to have sex with someone who doesn't happen to agree with the program, and therefore it follows as the night the day that all talk of oppression in the form of treating women as something less than human is illegitimate. I'm also all done listening to how a particular behavior couldn't possible be unjust or reprehensible, because the perpetrator also feels genuine pain about his life.  That's just suffering one-up-man-ship, and it's not shedding light on how we can treat each other decently.

Alexander continues explaining how little help oppression-talk can be:

If we’ve learned anything from the Star Wars prequels, it’s that Anakin Skywalker is unbearably annoying. But if we’ve learned two things from the Star Wars prequels, it’s that the easiest way to marginalize the legitimate concerns of anyone who stands in your way is to declare them oppressors loud enough to scare everyone who listens.

And if the people in the Star Wars universe had seen the Star Wars movies, I have no doubt whatsoever that Chancellor Palpatine would have discredited his opponents by saying they were the Empire.

(seriously, you wanted to throw the gauntlet down to lonely male nerds, and the turf you chose was Star Wars metaphors? HOW COULD THAT POSSIBLY SEEM LIKE A GOOD IDEA?)

He really dismantles theories of how Silicon Valley cleverly excludes women from lucrative STEM jobs while allowing women so to swamp the medical field these days that people are starting to worry who'll see all the patients when they start taking pregnancy leave.

Then there's this spot-on summary of the social atmosphere in a STEM-dominated office:

Any space with a four-to-one male:female ratio is going to end up with some pretty desperate people and a whole lot of unwanted attention. Add into this mix the fact that nerds usually have poor social skills (explaining exactly why would take a literature review to put that last one to shame, but hopefully everyone can agree this is true), and you get people who are pretty sure they are supposed to do something but have no idea what. Err to one side and you get the overly-chivalrous people saying m’lady because it pattern matches to the most courtly and least sexual way of presenting themselves they can think of. Err to the other, and you get people hollowly imitating the behavior they see in famous seducers and playboys, which when done without the very finely-tuned social graces and body-language-reading-ability of famous seducers and playboys is pretty much just “being extremely creepy”.

The second article grabs me just as hard with a nerd woman's paean to perseveration:

What I’ve got, and what I wish the rest of the “women in tech” community who rage against the misogyny they see everywhere they look could also have, is a blazingly single-minded focus on whatever topic I happen to be perseverating on at the moment. It has kept me awake for days puzzling out novel algorithms and it has thwarted a wannabe PUA at a conference completely by accident. It is also apparently the most crashingly successful defense against attempts to make me feel inferior that has ever been devised. When I’m someplace that says on the label that it’s all about the tech, so am I. I may have come by it naturally, but it is a teachable skill. Not only that, it’s a skill that transforms the places where it’s exercised.

The fact that Shanley Kane dismisses experiences like mine as “denial,” and regards them as “colluding in my own oppression,” both saddens and baffles me.

The author is perfectly describing the dreadful "Uncle Tom" or "Oreo Cookie" criticism. She's found a home in the STEM world, she knows why it works for her, and she's not interested in apologizing because it doesn't work for people not like her, whether anyone thinks the necessary qualities sort themselves out along gender lines or not.

The more I read about this, the more it seems like a war between people on opposite ends of the autism spectrum.

When privileges collide

Who's more aggrieved, feminists or nerds?

“I was terrified that one of my female classmates would somehow find out that I sexually desired her, and that the instant she did, I would be scorned, laughed at, called a creep and a weirdo, maybe even expelled from school or sent to prison,” Aaronson said.

....

The feminist response was swift and harsh, with controversial blogger Amanda Marcotte calling Aaronson’s mini-memoir “a yalp of entitlement combined with an aggressive unwillingness to accept that women are human beings just like men.” His essay boils down to a belief that women are “a robot army put here for sexual service and housework,” she said.

I assume the article omitted the intervening comments that formed some kind of rational bridge between the nerd's cri de coeur and the feminist backlash.  These two groups don't seem to be communicating well.  I've always been fond of nerds, myself, especially since I are one.

Gandhi Takes a Yoga Class

UPDATE: The Onion on a similar topic.

Landings you can swim away from

I had no idea such a thing existed:

Speaking of the 1st Amendment

Sometimes when a seemingly disgraceful story hits the right-wing news outlets, I like to check to see whether any mainstream sources have picked it up.  For one thing, if the news needs to be spread, experience suggests that the message can be heard more widely and without so much static if it comes in a more soothing wrapper than the Fox News banner.  Also, the rightosphere has been known occasionally to push a story for political purposes, shocking as that may be.  (I understand the leftosphere and the MSM occasionally err in this fashion as well.)

Anyway, when I heard that Bowe Bergdahl is to be charged with desertion but the White House is trying furiously to bury the story, my first reaction was to un-bury it as vigorously as one puny individual can.  My second was to see whether I might get some confirmation.  Naturally, confirmation in a case like this is tricky; if the White House really is squelching the news, can I trust the New York Times to carry it?  The question answers itself.

The upshot is that I'm getting hits on all kinds of sites like the Daily Mail, with The Washington Times perhaps being the closest to a traditional news outlet, but nothing in any sources like Reuters or the AP. Duffleblog is on the job, though:

For his own personal safety Bergdahl has gone into hiding in Idaho, a rugged mountainous area far from civilization, where he is being guarded by several of the local hill tribes.

The Taliban have asked the U.S. to immediately extradite Bergdahl back to Afghanistan to face criminal charges. The U.S. Department of Justice has vowed to work overtime to fulfill their request.

Thank you, Mr. Moore, Mr. Rogen

When Michael Moore and Seth Rogen exercise their First Amendment right to criticize "American Sniper," it's a tribute to everyone who served in uniform.

Syllabi

Glen Reynolds today:

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: U.C. Berkeley Students Complain About Having To Read Aristotle, Plato, Hobbes, Locke, Hegel, Marx, Weber and Foucault. In course on classic social theory. And if that makes it hard for you to focus on the course material, cupcakes, you don’t belong in college.

I thought that sounded like a pretty good syllabus, really. You could quibble a bit -- I'm not sure Hegel's comments on social theory are at all useful except as a prelude to Marx, and I might substitute out Foucault for Rousseau (since allegedly this is about "classic" social theory). So what could be the problem?

Well, of course, I should have known.

...a standardized canon of theory that began with Plato and Aristotle, then jumped to modern philosophers: Hobbes, Locke, Hegel, Marx, Weber and Foucault, all of whom are white men. The syllabus did not include a single woman or person of color. We have major concerns about social theory courses in which white men are the only authors assigned.

I am glad that the students didn't try to rope Plato and Aristotle into the category of "white men." That's a category that wouldn't have made sense to them, and which they would have rejected once it was explained to them. All those "white men" are from the category they would have referred to as "barbarians."

This reminds me of an attempt by Georgia State University, a couple of years back, to introduce a quota of 20% female authors in philosophy courses. If you're teaching a course on contemporary philosophy, that's not at all hard to do. If you're teaching a course on "classic social theory," it's pretty hard. You could grab something from Christine de Pizan, who had some social commentary. But it's more commentary than theory, as she was accepting a Christian framework and challenging members of society to live up to it better than they did.

So that's probably what you'd do here: grab works by contemporary women who are commenting on the classical authors. You could fold them in side-by-side with the original authors as a kind of running critique by contemporary female thinkers of what the classical tradition has to say. Maybe that would be interesting to do.

It would be done at the expense of at least some of the classical authors, though. That means students will be less prepared to do novel work of their own, as they will be less aware of and engaged in the great questions. That's where I finished when talking about the 20% experiment:

I would think the way to draw women into philosophy would be to engage them with the great problems, and get them excited about wrestling with them. (It might not hurt to suggest, which is actually true, that any university will be especially considerate of a female philosopher who wants a job -- you can be sure the academy is aware of the disparity, and will bend over backwards to help ensure their numbers reflect a devotion to doing something about it.) Engaging them is what will really qualify them to do the work, as it is only someone genuinely engaged with the questions who will perform at the level at which real contributions are made -- the kind of contributions that would justify your inclusion in a class reading list.

That's also the way you'd do best by your female students as students, which is the right way for you to relate to them if you are a professor or a teaching assistant. It is, perhaps, the only way you ought to engage them.

I wonder how that 20% experiment worked out? Looking around Google, I only find the fanfare that accompanied its beginning, and no further comment on whether it has been continued or what the results were.

UPDATE: In terms of "people of color," Charles Mills has a thoroughgoing criticism of this whole tradition. Of course, he's a man, so if you read him you'd have to also separately include female critiques. The more of these things you do, the less of the tradition itself you can read.

My Support for Walker Solidifies ...

Walker '16

Good Luck, Yankees

Sometimes making history isn't much fun.

Good Topic

A good reflection on how you can be wrong about the most important things. I like the comments section especially, because it shows people reflecting on the question in their own lives.

I think I was wrong about isolationism in the 1990s. I was really against intervening in Somalia, and then in Bosnia, Serbia, etc. I thought that was none of our affair, and that we should let these people kill each other if they wanted to do so. I agreed with Otto von Bismark's opinion that the "whole of the Balkans is not worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier." If you'd have suggested to me that, just a few years later, I would support an American invasion of Afghanistan I'd have laughed out loud.

"The Greeks defeated the Persians because of Aeschylus"

I completely agree with the claim about intelligence and strategy being made here, ably defended by Jakub Grygiel.

Unemployment benefits vs. unemployment

The National Review tries to make sense of data about unemployment rates in areas with greater and lesser unemployment benefits.  It's a notoriously difficult subject to examine, and would be so even if the trigger points about callousness toward the jobless weren't always being pulled.  Ends and means, intentions and results:  there's just no guarantee they'll match up.

The skills needed for unskilled work

Again via Maggie's Farm, the experience of a California employer with a business model built on unskilled labor.

I am not an economist, I am a business school grad. We don't worry about explaining structural imbalances so much as look for the profitable opportunities they might present. So a question we business folks might ask instead is: If there are so many under-employed unskilled workers rattling around in the economy, why aren't entrepreneurs crafting business models to exploit this fact?

. . . .

The reason for my despair comes from a single source: the government is making it increasingly difficult and costly to hire unskilled workers, while simultaneously creating a culture among new workers that short-circuits their ability to make progress.

It would be nice to say that the things "government" is doing along these lines are confined to California, and they're certainly at the absurd end of the spectrum there, but the rot has spread.

Neurotypicality and Tolstoy

Via Maggie's Farm:  Interesting findings about connectivity patterns between right and left brains in most people and in people on the autism spectrum:  people without autism symptoms generally share a typical left-right connection pattern, but autistic people show patterns that not only different from the ordinary, but each from all the others.

The King of Jordan and al-Sisi

The quest to deal with radicalism in Islam expands. The two regional leaders are going to hold a conference aimed at finding ways to "modernize" Islam in the hope of constraining groups like Daesh.

Although their voices may be stifled by tightened anti-terrorism laws, many of his subjects are dubious. In a country where some 90% of the population is Sunni Muslim, many wonder why their monarch has joined the American-led coalition against jihadists from Islamic State (IS). “We don’t understand why the king has joined the alliance against Syria’s Sunnis in IS and is helping to prop up Bashar al-Assad, who has far more blood on his hands,” says a Jordanian writer. After the capture by IS of a Jordanian pilot whose plane came down in Syria in December, a group of retired army officers issued statements arguing that Jordan should not be involved.

The king’s appearance at a march in Paris alongside world leaders after the attack on Charlie Hebdo caused further unhappiness. Shortly after the king returned home, a protest gathering against the magazine and its cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad drew thousands of people.