Sports is one arena where the insistence on some objective fact (the ball was in or out? was it a catch?) has devolved into a set of rules so convoluted as to be indecipherable. We don't trust the discretion and judgement of the human official (in or out, ball or strike, safe or out), and demand something objective like "Hawkeye" to "get the call right" and "make the game fair."
Our enforcement of the law would be quite different if there wasn't the discretion of the arresting officer, the discretion of a prosecutor, and the discretion of a judge involved. We know as fact that more young black men are prosecuted for drug offenses than young white men, even though young white men and young black men use and sell drugs at roughly equal rates.
The bottom line is that we all rejoice when that person gets what he or she deserves, but none of us wants what we really deserve.
This statement was admiringly blurted out by political vlogger Jamarl Thomas on his program The Progressive Soapbox last week. What he was talking about was a recent interview that Aaron Maté, producer, journalist and on-air talent at Paul Jay’s Real News Network,
did with veteran journalist James Risen, currently of The Intercept.
What did they discuss? The jailing of Reality Winner—Risen’s source for a
leaked NSA document about potential Russian digital interference in the
2016 U.S. presidential primary.
It stands to reason that Thomas calls him Aaron “Buzzsaw” Maté. Even
during his youthful Democracy Now days, Maté showed a genuine talent for
interviewing people with a dogged focus on facts and an absolute
inability to let his interviewees get away with bullshit, regardless of
their perceived status.
As I listened to this interview with Risen, I started having
flashbacks to all the Columbo reruns I watched as a kid. If you’ve ever
seen the old detective show with the inimitable Peter Falk, there was a
formula: the disheveled working class Columbo would ask an endless
stream of seemingly basic questions of his suspects, who were usually
impatient and annoyed wealthy white people who thought he was far
beneath them in the pecking order. Eventually, they would crack under
the pressure of his incessant queries, realizing too late that he’d been
amassing reams of factual evidence against them while they’d been too
busy feeling superior to notice.
theatlantic | Judges, who are mostly technical people, help weave a fabric of
practices, rules, regulations, customs, agreements, and working
arrangements—some local and some regional, some formal and some
informal. The fabric, like that of Penelope, sometimes comes undone
during the night; but we must simply continue to work on the problems
before us. I have always liked FDR’s advice: “It is common sense to take
a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But
above all, try something.”
Third, and finally, my
legal examples suggest the importance of looking to approaches and
solutions that themselves embody a rule of law. To achieve and maintain a
rule of law is more difficult than many people believe. The effort is
ancient, stretching back to King John and the Magna Carta, and still
earlier. And the effort does not always succeed. I often describe to
judges from other countries how, in the 1830s, a president of the United
States, Andrew Jackson, when faced with a Supreme Court decision
holding that northern Georgia (where gold had been found) belonged to
the Cherokee Nation, is said to have remarked, “John Marshall [the chief
justice] has made his decision, now let him enforce it.” Jackson sent
troops to Georgia, but not to enforce the law. Instead they evicted the
tribe members, sending them along the Trail of Tears to Oklahoma, where
their descendants live to this day.
Not for more than a century, a
period that included the Civil War and decades of racial segregation,
would the Supreme Court hold, in Brown v. Board of Education, in
1954, that racial segregation violated the Constitution. Yet the country
did not abolish segregation the next year or the year after that. When,
in 1957, a judge in Little Rock, Arkansas, ordered Central High School
desegregated, the local White Citizens’ Council, supported by the
governor, rallied in front of the school, letting no black child enter.
It took more than judicial decisions to end segregation. It took a
president’s decision to send 1,000 paratroopers to Arkansas. It took
Martin Luther King Jr., and the Freedom Riders, and the words and deeds
of countless Americans who were not lawyers or judges. Today the public
has come to accept the rule of law. When the Court decided Bush v. Gore,
a case that was unpopular among many, and was (as I wrote in dissent)
wrongly decided, the nation accepted the decision without rioting in the
streets. That is a major asset for a nation with a highly diverse
population of 320 million citizens.
We do not have to convince judges or lawyers that maintaining the
rule of law is necessary—they are already convinced. Instead we must
convince ordinary citizens, those who are not lawyers or judges, that
they sometimes must accept decisions that affect them adversely, and
that may well be wrong. If they are willing to do so, the rule of law
has a chance. And as soon as one considers the alternatives, the need to
work within the rule of law is obvious. The rule of law is the opposite
of the arbitrary, which, as the dictionary specifies, includes the
unreasonable, the capricious, the authoritarian, the despotic, and the
tyrannical. Turn on the television and look at what happens in nations
that use other means to resolve their citizens’ differences.
For my generation, the need for law in its many forms was perhaps best described by Albert Camus in The Plague.
He writes of a disease that strikes Oran, Algeria, which is his parable
for the Nazis who occupied France and for the evil that inhabits some
part of every man and woman. He writes of the behavior of those who
lived there, some good, some bad. He writes of the doctors who help
others without relying upon a moral theory—who simply act. At the end of
the book, Camus writes that
the germ of the plague never
dies nor does it ever disappear. It waits patiently in our bedrooms,
our cellars, our suitcases, our handkerchiefs, our file cabinets. And
one day, perhaps, to the misfortune or for the education of men, the
plague germ will reemerge, reawaken the rats, and send them forth to die
in a once-happy city.
The struggle against that germ
continues. And the rule of law is one weapon that civilization has used
to fight it. The rule of law is the keystone of the effort to build a
civilized, humane, and just society. At a time when facing facts,
understanding the local and global challenges that they offer, and
working to meet those challenges cooperatively is particularly urgent,
we must continue to construct such a society—a society of laws—together.
WaPo | Both sides are missing a crucial dimension — one
that ultimately bends in the direction of the pro-Williams camp. Just
like the criminal-justice system, tennis and many other sports depend on
the subjective discretion of neutral arbiters to apply a set of supposedly objective “rules.”
Ramos
did indeed follow the code, and each of the three sanctions had some
justification, thus satisfying the “rules” camp. But for two of the
three violations (the racket smashing was unambiguous), he used his
discretion to punish Williams for acts — coaching and heated exchanges
with an umpire — that occur routinely in tennis but are seldom punished.
Within the criminal-justice system, the same
principle of discretion also applies, with much more severe and damaging
consequences on human lives than the outcome of a tennis match.
At
every stage, criminal-justice officials regularly justify individual
decisions based on their discretionary interpretation of a rule. When a
police officer makes a “routine traffic stop” for a car that changed
lanes without signaling, or decides to arrest someone found with
recreational drugs, technically the decision is warranted — even if
numerous other people commit the same “infractions” without any
consequences. Prosecutors have tremendous discretion to decide, for
example, whether to charge a child as an adult, add additional
enhancements to press for a plea bargain or seek the death penalty.
Judges often make discretionary sentencing decisions (recall the Stanford University swimmer case).
And prison officials have almost full discretion in issuing
disciplinary infractions and sending inmates to solitary confinement.
In
all of these instances, one can always say, “Well, this person didn’t
follow the rules,” and on an individual basis that may seem sufficient
to justify the consequences. What gets lost, however, is that rules are
rarely applied regularly, consistently or fairly.
Without
diminishing Osaka’s level of play or achievement, and without excusing
Williams’s behavior, the outcome of the U.S. Open may have been
determined by an umpire’s discretionary decisions that were far outside
the norm. Rather than fool ourselves about the universality of rules, we
should question the vast and often unchallenged use of discretion in
both sports and criminal justice.
newyorker | The I.C.C., from its inception, has been impossibly compromised by
the simple, definitive fact that many of the world’s most lawless
countries, along with some of its most powerful—including the U.S.,
Russia, and China, the majority of permanent members of the U.N.
Security Council—reject its jurisdiction. After sixteen years with no
major triumphs and several major failures to its name, it would be
easier to make the case for it if there were reason to believe that it
could yet become the court of last resort for all comers that it is
supposed to be, rather than what it is: a politically captive
institution that reinforces the separate and unequal structures of the
world. Maybe the best that one can hope for the court, in its current
form, is that it can yet inspire some people who seek the rule of law to
find a way to achieve it. Bolton rejected the very idea that it could
inspire any good, simultaneously exaggerating the power of the I.C.C. as
an ominous global colossus and belittling it as a puny contemptible
farce. The only historically proven deterrent to “the hard men of
history,” he declared, is “what Franklin Roosevelt once called ‘the
righteous might’ of the United States.”
So what, really, was the
point of Bolton’s speech? Where was the news in this “major announcement
on U.S. policy?” He noted that Israel, too, faces the prospect of an
I.C.C. investigation and announced that, in solidarity, the State
Department was closing down the Palestine Liberation Organization office
in Washington. But then he said that the closure wasn’t necessarily
about the court but rather a general punishment of “the Palestinians,”
because “they refuse to take steps to start direct and meaningful
negotiations with Israel.” Beyond that, nothing that Bolton
threatened—by way of shutting out, sanctioning, and declaring war on the
I.C.C., and treating its personnel or anyone in the world who assisted
it as criminals—went much beyond a rhetorical amplification of what he
acknowledged has been established in U.S. law since the American
Service-Members’ Protection Act. This wasn’t foreign policy. It was
swagger.
Bolton has, thus far, enjoyed an absence from the
Woodwardian accounts of Trump White House backbiting, subterfuge, and
dysfunction. So it is tempting to think that he was deployed to deflect
attention from the White House
chaos, while his boss spent the day issuing uncharacteristically
Presidential tweets about the hurricane bearing down on the Carolinas.
Bolton, however, left out one point from his old Journal
piece in this week’s speech, and the omission seems telling: “The ICC
prosecutor,” Bolton wrote, “is an internationalized version of America’s
‘independent counsel,’ a role originally established in the wake of
Watergate and later allowed to lapse (but now revived under Justice
Department regulations in the form of a ‘special counsel’). Similarly,
the ICC’s prosecutors are dangerously free of accountability and
effective supervision.”
So the threat comes from within, after
all. The problem is the existence of the prosecutor, who endangers
sovereignty, which in Trump-speak means being above the law. The
President and the nation cannot be held to account or supervised, so the
prosecutor has to be. The President and the nation cannot be criminals,
so the prosecutor must be. The prosecutor cannot be recognized. The
prosecutor must be disempowered.
theguardian | The game’s top umpires are considering forming a union because they
believe Carlos Ramos was “hung out to dry” by the authorities during and
after the US Open women’s final despite upholding the rules in sanctioning Serena Williams.
Many officials were also left angry with the fact that the
International Tennis Federation took nearly 48 hours to defend Ramos, on
Monday afternoon, by which time the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA)
and United States Tennis
Association (USTA) had supported Williams’s claims of sexism after she
was given a game penalty for her behaviour during her defeat by Naomi
Osaka.
Umpires are not allowed to speak out publicly under the terms of
their contracts, and are employed by grand slams and men’s and women’s
tours, which means many are reluctant to say anything for fear of losing
their jobs. However, one senior figure told the Guardian that privately
there was widespread concern about how the USTA and WTA had rushed to
support Williams – which had led to vitriol and abuse on social media
for Ramos.
“There is a lot of unhappiness in the umpiring community because no
one is standing up for officials,” the senior figure told the Guardian.
“Umpires keep asking: ‘What if it was me in that chair on Saturday?’
There is a widespread feeling that Carlos was hung out to dry for nearly
48 hours and that no one is standing up for officials.”
In the absence of any official support for Ramos until Monday, it was
left to two former senior umpires, Mike Morrissey and Richard Ings, to
defend the Portuguese official. “I have had lots of messages saying this
is a joke,” said one source. “There is a lot of anger out there.”
telegraph | As the sport continued to tear itself apart over the Serena Williams sexism row, the International Tennis Federation stepped in on Monday night to defend beleaguered umpire Carlos Ramos.
In the absence of any representative body to speak for
tennis officials, it fell to the ITF to say what should be evident to
all: despite Williams’s repeated insistence that Ramos owes her an
apology, he was just doing his job when he penalised her a point and a
game during Saturday’s tumultuous women’s US Open final.
“Carlos Ramos is one of the most experienced and respected
umpires in tennis,” said the ITF, which is Ramos’s employer. “[His]
decisions were in accordance with the relevant rules and were
re-affirmed by the US Open’s decision to fine Serena Williams for the
three offences.
“It is understandable this high-profile and regrettable
incident should provoke debate. At the same time, it is important to
remember Mr Ramos undertook his duties as an official according to the
relevant rule book and acted at all times with professionalism and
integrity.”
The statement might not have been necessary were it not for
the further accusations of sexism that were levelled at Ramos on Sunday
by two of tennis’ major stakeholders. First Katrina Adams, the head of
the United States Tennis Association, told ESPN: “We watch the guys do
this all the time, they’re badgering the umpire on the changeovers.
Nothing happens. There’s no equality. There has to be some consistency
across the board. These are conversations that will be imposed in the
next weeks.”
counterpunch | Nike changes its brand more often than Madonna and more profitably.
In the company’s latest transformation, Nike has risked–make that
sought–the ire of Donald Trump and his drones by making Colin Kaepernick
the face of its latest campaign under the inspiring slogan: “Believe in
something. Even if it means sacrificing everything.”
Kaepernick’s brief
presence in an otherwise sentimental ad triggered a tweet from Trump
and a boycott by the Deplorables, who took to burning their
overpriced footwear. It was precisely the response Nike wanted and sales of Nike products have surged
over the last week. With social justice icon Kaepernick fronting the
brand, no one will be thinking about Nike’s wretched labor practices
inside its sweatshops in Honduras, Indonesia and Vietnam.
This is a
proven formula for the company. When Nike was under intense public
scrutiny in the 1990s, it recruited civil rights legend Andrew Young to
whitewash the company’s record. The image changed, but the cruel
conditions didn’t.
Now, with the company rocked by sexual harassment charges against some of its top executives,
Nike’s betting that Kaepernick will refrain from speaking out against
the dismal practices of his employer. Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods and
LeBron James have all remained mute about the savage treatment of the
workers who make the shoes and apparel that are sold under their image.
So as a reminder who Nike really is under the patina of its
pitchmen, we’re running this excerpt from my book Born Under a Bad Sky.–J
wikipedia |Eugenics in Japan has influenced political, public health and social movements in Japan since the late 19th and early 20th century.
Originally brought to Japan through the United States (like Charles Davenport and John Coulter), through Mendelian inheritance by way of German influences, and French Lamarkian eugenic written studies of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.[1] Eugenics as a science was hotly debated at the beginning of the 20th, in Jinsei-Der Mensch,
the first eugenics journal in the Empire. As the Japanese sought to
close ranks with the West, this practice was adopted wholesale, along
with colonialism and its justifications.[2]
The concept of pureblood as a criterion for the uniqueness of the Yamato people
began circulating around 1880 in Japan, while eugenics in the sense of
instrumental and selective procreation, clustered around two positions concerning blood, the pure blood (純血junketsu) and the mixed blood (混血konketsu).[2]
Popularity of the pure-blood eugenics theory came from a homegrown racial purity or monoculture national belief that has been part of Japanese society since ancient times[citation needed]. The local movement was however less focused on modern scientific ideals and more on the "outside person" vs the "native or inside person" and blood purity.[2]
Later legal measures were supported by certain politicians and movements that sought to increase the number of healthy pure Japanese, while simultaneously decreasing the number of people suffering mental retardation, disability, genetic disease and other conditions that led to them being viewed as "inferior" contributions to the Japanese gene pool.[3][4]
Opposition to the eugenics movement persisted amongst several right-wing factions, including members of the Diet of Japan
and obstetricians, who perceived eugenics as suggesting that the
Japanese people were only animals, not inhabitants of the "country of
the kami" (神国shinkoku) as believed by the Japanese national Shinto tradition.[5] Yoshiichi Sōwa (曽和義弌), author of "Japan's Shinto Revolution",[6] wrote in 1940, "When we look up into the past, the people of our country are descended from the kami. Are they claiming we must sterilize these people?"[7] Similar resistance to these theories occurred within conservative and traditional Christian communities in the United States.
wikipedia | Racial discrimination against other Asians was habitual in Imperial Japan, having begun with the start of Japanese colonialism.[62] The Meiji era Japanese showed a contempt for other Asians. This was exemplified in an editorial titled Datsu-A Ron, which advocated that Japan treat other Asians as other western empires treat them. The Shōwa regime preached racial superiority and racialist theories, based on nature of Yamato-damashii. According to historian Kurakichi Shiratori, one of Emperor Hirohito's teachers: "Therefore nothing in the world compares to the divine nature (shinsei) of the imperial house and likewise the majesty of our national polity (kokutai). Here is one great reason for Japan's superiority."[63]
According to the An Investigation of Global Policy with the Yamato Race as Nucleus, a classified report in 1943 of the Ministry of Health and Welfare completed on July 1, 1943, just as a family has harmony and reciprocity, but with a clear-cut hierarchy, the Japanese, as a racially superior people, were destined to rule Asia "eternally" as the head of the family of Asian nations.[64] The most horrific xenophobia of the pre-Shōwa period was displayed after the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake, where in the confusion after a massive earthquake, Koreans were wrongly maligned as poisoning the water supply. A vicious pogrom resulted in the deaths of at least 3,000 Koreans, and the imprisonment of 26,000.
Racism was omnipresent in the press during the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Greater East Asia War and the media's descriptions of the superiority of the Yamato people was unwaveringly consistent.[66] The first major anti-foreigner publicity campaign, called Bōchō (Guard Against Espionage), was launched in 1940 alongside the proclamation of the Tōa shin Shitsujō (New Order in East Asia) and its first step, the Hakkō ichiu.[67]
Mostly after the launching of the Pacific War,
Westerners were detained by official authorities, and on occasion were
objects of violent assaults, sent to police jails or military detention
centers or suffered bad treatment in the street. This applied
particularly to Americans and British; in Manchukuo at the same period xenophobic attacks were carried out against Chinese and other non-Japanese.
pbs | Upper class men built and curated the U.S. Tennis and Lawn
Association, now the USTA, toward the end of the Victorian era. Even
though women played, men led the association for more than 100 years,
wrote its rules — what players wore, when women played, how many sets in
a match and more — and enforced them.
One of the first examples of this appears as an asterisk in its rules
from 1903, clarifying that, “it was (officially) decided that ‘all
matches in which ladies take part in tournaments … shall be the best two
in three sets.’” Men continued playing five.
Historian Warren Kimball, a former volunteer for the association who
spent years curating the association’s history for his book, “Raising
the Game,” said he never found a documented explanation for this rule,
but feels certain that men just decided that “women were not strong
enough.”
That rule persisted for the better part of tennis’ history and still
exists today for the biggest championship under the association’s
governance: the U.S. Open. Except now, Thompson said, some
traditionalists use this disparity as an argument to push against equal
pay.
The association was also ignoring if not rejecting black players,
even though Tuskegee Institute, an all-black college, held tournaments
as early as the 1890s, according to the book.
While it had black players on its Ivy League teams, it declined
Howard University’s application for membership in 1922, according to
minutes published in the book, because “southern clubs would ‘see red’
on that … there would be no chance in the world of a club of negros
[sic] getting membership in the Association.”
By the late 1940s, white women were struggling with rules policing
their femininity and how they should look on the court. American
Gertrude Augusta Moran, known as “Gussie,” wanted to feel more feminine,
and reached out to a top designer ahead of her Wimbledon tournament to
ask for a colorful ensemble.
The designer, knowing Wimbledon’s strict, all-white rules that are
almost the same today, instead designed a short skirt and lace-trimmed
underwear, which she wore for the first time at a pre-match tea party.
“Gorgeous Gussie’s Lace-Fringed Panties No. 1 Attraction on Wimbledon’s
Courts,” was the headline that ran in The New York Times reviewing the
party.
By the time she had to compete, she walked onto the court with the
racket in front of her face, while photographers pushed for space on the
floor to get a shot of the lace. She was eliminated from Wimbledon
early and the designer was banned from hosting and dressing other
players.
Even though she ranked fourth in the nation at her peak, because of
the reaction to her lace, her legacy as a sex symbol consumed her
reputation for talent.
“I really couldn’t handle the pressure,” she told the Orlando Sentinel nearly 40 years later.
theindependent | “Everyone was in a very awkward situation yesterday. A lot of emotions.
Serena was crying. Naomi was crying. It was really, really tough.
“But I have my personal opinion that maybe the chair umpire should
not have pushed Serena to the limit, especially in a Grand Slam final.
“He changed the course of the match, which in my opinion was
unnecessary. We all go through our emotions, especially when you're
fighting for a Grand Slam trophy.”
After the match Williams accused Ramos of sexism, claiming that he
had never deducted a game from a male player for calling him “a thief”.
The former world No 1 received backing on Sunday
from Steve Simon, the Chief Executive Officer of the Women’s Tennis
Association, who claimed that umpires do not treat female players in the
same way as men.
Simon said in a statement: “The WTA believes that there should be no
difference in the standards of tolerance provided to the emotions
expressed by men versus women and is committed to working with the sport
to ensure that all players are treated the same. We do not believe that
this was done last night.”
nakedcapitalism | Peggy McIntosh has described
how she stumbled upon the reality of her white privilege. She began to
brainstorm about what privileges she had that her black colleagues did
not, but encountered fierce resistance from her unconscious mind.
I repeatedly forgot each of the realizations on this list
until I wrote it down. For me, white privilege has turned out to be an
elusive and fugitive subject. The pressure to avoid it is great for in
facing it I must give up the myth of meritocracy. If these things are
true, this is not such a free country; one’s life is not what one makes
it; many doors open for certain people through no virtues of their own.
McIntosh was thus reluctant to see herself as having unearned
advantages relative to her black colleagues, and this reluctance stemmed
from a more fundamental commitment to believing that one’s life is
“what one makes it” and that doors open for people due to their
“virtues.”
She persevered, however, and understanding finally came. She was
unable to keep silent about what she had learned, and her talk in essay
form was soon being eagerly read by others; in the words of one facilitator,
[…] “white privilege,” was popularized by the feverish,
largely grassroots, pre-World-Wide-Web circulation of a now famous essay
by my now-equally-famous friend and colleague, Peggy McIntosh.
Readers followed in McIntosh’s footsteps, coming to grips with
previously hidden and painful truths about their own privilege, and the
rest is history.
But what actually happened cannot have been this simple.
A problem of chronology
Three years earlier, McIntosh had given a talk about how decent people often perceive “fraudulence” in
the myths of self-realization which go this way: “I came
up from nothing, rags to riches, from pink booties to briefcase on Wall
Street. I did it all myself. I knew what I wanted and I was
self-reliant. You can be, too, if you set your sights high and don’t let
anything interfere; you can do anything you want.” Now it seems only
honest to acknowledge that that is a myth.
Did she at that time believe racial disparities were a thing of the past?
Women and lower caste or minority men are especially few
in the tops of the hierarchies of money, decision making, opinion
making, and public authority, in the worlds of praise and press and
prizes, the worlds of the so-called geniuses, leaders, media giants,
“forces” in the culture.
Let’s summarize.
In 1985, McIntosh proclaimed that meritocracy consisted of clearly
“fraudulent” claims, noted how it was in conflict with racial and gender
equality, and urged undermining belief in meritocracy as essential for
the survival of humanity; in 1988, she said that she had been fiercely
reluctant to accept that she was unfairly advantaged by being white
because it entailed “giv[ing] up the myth of meritocracy.”
We could try to rescue this chronology by postulating, for example,
that McIntosh composed her privilege lists and acknowledged her white
privilege before 1985. She then… kept silent about it for years, perhaps
because she was still embarrassed about white privilege? But wasn’t
embarrassed about her opposition to meritocracy, which she shouted from
the rooftops? This seems a bit… strained.
Or we could conclude, with Amber A’Lee Frost, that she is full of shit.
I will propose a more charitable alternative, which I think is also more likely.
Suppose McIntosh did experience a sort of epiphany in 1988, which
involved new ideas and the renunciation of important previous
commitments. If sufficiently traumatic, this experience could have
played havoc with her sense of time, and of her past self – a
development which has been amply documented in similar contexts.
To see whether this is at all plausible, we should look at what the
pre-1988 McIntosh believed. For this, we do not have to rely on what
McIntosh says she believed. There is in fact extant one piece of writing
by McIntosh from prior to 1988. Maybe only one, although it is a
difficult to be sure; according to Frost, McIntosh is “incredibly
protective of her intellectual property.”
It is a talk from 1985, about a dozen pages long in text form, entitled Feeling Like a Fraud. It is, to say the least, fascinating.
Guardian | When affluent urban men in plaid flannel shirts let their hair grow
wild and unkempt across their face and necks to affect a laborer’s style
for doing laptop work in coffee shops, I think of my dad immaculately
trimming his beard every morning before dawn to work on a construction
site. The men closest to me took meticulous care with their appearance
whenever they had the chance.
Mom, too, presented herself like her main job was to be photographed,
when it was more likely to sort the inventory in the stockroom of a
retail store. Her outfits were ensembles cobbled together from Wichita
mall sale racks, but she always managed to look stylish. My favorite was
a champagne-colored silk pantsuit that was cut loose and baggy. She
wore it with a scarf that had big, lush roses on it like the satiny
wallpaper she had glued and smoothed across our hallway. She had married
a farm boy but had no interest in plaid shirts.
For me, country was not a look, a style, or even a conscious
attitude, but a physical place, its experience defined by distance from
the forces of culture that would commodify it. That place meant long
stretches of near-solitude broken up by long drives on highways to enter
society and then exit again.
Owning a small bit of the countryside brought my father deep
satisfaction. The state had seized some of his dad’s farmland through
eminent domain in the 1960s to dig the reservoir and move water east in
underground tunnels for the people of Wichita. Sometimes Dad would park
his truck on the shoulder of the two-lane blacktop that ran along the
lake dam and take my brother and me up the long, steep concrete steps to
look at what would have been his and then our small inheritance, now
literally underwater. We couldn’t use the water ourselves; it was for
Wichitans to access by turning on a faucet. We thus had dug a private
well right next to a giant reservoir on what once was our land. It’s an
old story: pushing poor rural communities out of the way to tap natural
resources for cities.
Witnessing this as a child had affected Dad deeply, and he shared
Grandpa’s attitude toward the value of land: “They don’t make any more
of it.” He had plans to buy the bit of land north of the house and build
an addition when my brother and I were older and needed more room.
Mom was less sure of these plans.
Some evenings, I’d watch her curl and tease her dark hair at the
vanity mirror that my dad had built next to their master-suite bathroom.
She smelled of hair spray and Calvin Klein Obsession perfume. She left
in the darkness and turned her car wheels from our dirt road on to the
highway for Wichita.
When Mom went to a George Strait concert at the small Cowboy Club in
Wichita, when Strait was newly famous, Dad sat at the stereo next to our
brick fireplace, listening to a radio broadcast of the show on a
country station. George would pick a woman from the audience to join him
on stage, the man on the radio said. Dad held his breath, worried that
Mom would be picked and swept away by a handsome celebrity in tight
Wranglers and a cowboy hat. The men I knew more often wore ball caps
stained through by the salt of their foreheads.
Dad didn’t even like country music. Too sad, he said.
In college, I began to understand the depth of the
rift that is economic inequality. Roughly speaking, on one side of the
rift was the place I was from – laborers, workers, people filled with
distrust for the systems that had been ignoring and even spurning them
for a couple decades. On the other side were the people who run those
systems – basically, people with college funds who end up living in
cities or moving to one of the expensive coasts. It’s much messier than
that, of course. But before arriving on campus, I hadn’t understood the
extent of my family’s poverty – “wealth” previously having been
represented to me by a friend whose dad was our small town’s postmaster
and whose mom went to the Wichita mall every weekend.
Even at a midwestern state university, my background – agricultural
work, manual labor, rural poverty, teen pregnancies, domestic chaos,
pervasive addiction – seemed like a faraway story to the people I met.
Most of them were from tidy neighborhoods in Wichita, Kansas
City, the greater Chicago area. They used a different sort of English
and had different politics. They were appalled that I had grown up with
conservative ideas about government and Catholic doctrine against
abortion. I was appalled that they didn’t know where their food came
from or even seem to care since it had always just appeared on their
plates when they wanted it.
There was no language for whatever I represented on campus.
Scholarships and student organizations existed to boost kids from
disadvantaged groups such as racial minorities, international students
and the LGBTQ community. I was none of those things, and professors and
other students often assumed from looking at me or hearing me speak that
I was a middle-class kid with parents sending me money.
nakedcapitalism | If we consider modern privilege discourse as a sort of semi-animate
entity, a part of its genius lies in its ability to convince its
adherents that questioning it means claiming that no disadvantages
distributed unfairly according to collective patterns exist.
Or that questioning it means denying the existence of subtle
conventions that make certain people feel unwelcome in certain settings.
Or, closer to home, that critiquing McIntosh’s œuvre means dismissing all of her ideas.
I believe, on the contrary, that there are important questions that
should be asked about all of these topics. Privilege discourse doesn’t
exactly encourage asking them, but that doesn’t need to stop us.
First, the lateral/vertical world distinction is worth thinking
about. The way in which the distinction is partially overlaid on gender
in McIntosh isn’t really essential, even to her own treatment of the
idea.
Real questions arise at this point. To what extent can things
smacking of meritocracy be done away with? To what extent can the
vertical world be marginalized?
To what extent can people, even well-meaning people working towards
similar goals, discuss ideas without sometimes tearing the social
fabric?
The lateral world seems less uncomplicatedly good than McIntosh
suggests. The secretary praised by her for “keeping everything going” might
be working for an elementary school, but might instead be working for
an arms dealer. In a case like the latter, the lateral world’s
relationship with the vertical world is not conflictual but symbiotic.
One thought I’ve had is that I think people respond better if treated
as individuals who are potentially involved in larger group patterns,
rather than as exemplars of groups, fighting an uphill battle in any
effort to be seen as single people.
One way in which privilege discourse has been “efficient” is by
separating the process of classification of something as a privilege
from the process of assigning it a moral charge. I don’t think there’s
anything inherently wrong with trying to look at advantages as a single
large category. But from this starting point, it seems clearly important
to make distinctions about where these advantages come from, what they
signify, and what can be done about them.
In the spirit of McIntosh’s vertical/lateral distinction, we could
make a (not at all hard and fast) distinction between “vertical” and
“lateral” advantages. Vertical advantages would include things like
money, where people generally feel like having more is preferable.
Lateral advantages would include things like speaking French versus
speaking English, where either one can be preferable, depending on the
milieu.
One problem, in fact, with classifying lateral advantages as
“privileges” (and therefore presumptively bad) is that they are more or
less coterminous with culture. If the goal is to make it so there are no
environments where some people are more confident and others less
confident, I don’t see how to do this without leveling all cultural
distinctions. After all, one name for a place where a particular group
of people feel disproportionately comfortable is home.
Counterpunch | Dalits call themselves Dalits because they reject what they have been
historically called, “untouchables”, though most other oppressed
peoples in India are included in the title. The word comes from the
“dal”, crushed lentils, that is India’s staple food, as in a crushed and
broken people.
Most of the leadership of India’s Dalit community see Gandhi as the
main force in preserving the practice of Varna in post independence
India for his opposition to reserved voting rights for India’s Dalits in
India’s post independence constitution. This means all castes can vote
for the elected Dalit leaders, for those seats in the Indian Parliament
reserved for “minorities”.
Dalits believe that if only Dalits could vote for Dalit leaders than a
more truly representative selection would take place. This is where
Gandhi drew the line, that allowing Dalits to chose their own leaders
directly was not to be allowed, and he went on his famous hunger strike
to the death to prevent this from happening.
The Dalits leader, Dr. Ambedkar, finally gave in, accepted Gandhi’s
demand and Dalits lost the right to directly chose their own leaders.
This loss of choice is what Dalit leaders say is what is most
responsible for preserving Varna in India after independence. Without
Dalit leaders chosen directly by Dalits there has been no one to fight
for Dalit rights by the effective outlawing of varna through the
enforcement of the Indian Constitution authored by the Dalit leader Dr.
Ambedkar, or so most Dalit leaders will tell you. After over a half
century of independence India’s Constitution is still not being enforced
with only a fraction of positions reserved for Dalits in employment and
education being filled.
One thing is for sure and that is caste/varna is king in India’s
almost half a million villages where caste infested Hindus dominate
society and Dalits are forced into the most menial and degrading
professions. Even drinking water from the wells reserved for caste
infested Hindus is forbidden.
Most Dalit’s lives in post-Gandhi India remain one of misery and
hardship with basic education for their children still just a dream.
Being unable to even chose their own leaders directly through reserved
voting and with Gandhi playing such a pivotal role in this happening is
the reason India’s Dalits hate Mohandas Gandhi.
Counterpunch | Well, the harsh truth about the integrity and fortitude of
billionaires is finally out in the open for all to see, and the results
are repugnant: Billionaires are gutless, chicken-hearted cowards. The
proof is found in the pudding as several Silicon Valley billionaires
purchase massive underground bunkers built in Murchison, Texas shipped
to New Zealand, where the bunkers are buried in secret underground
nests.
All of which begs this question: What’s with capitalism/capitalists?
As soon as things turn sour, they turn south with tails between their
legs and hightail it out of Dodge. However, they feast on and love
steady, easy, orderly avenues (markets) to riches, but as soon as things
heat up a bit, they turn tail and run.
History proves it time and again, for example, FDR rescued
capitalism, literally rescued it, from certain demise by instituting
social welfare programs for all of the citizens as capitalists fled
and/or jumped off buildings.
Then during the 2008 financial meltdown capitalists were found curled
up in the corners of rooms as all hell broke lose. Taxpayers, “Everyday
Joes,” had to bail them out with $700B in public funds, and even more
after that. All public funds! Taxpayers, average Americans, bailed them
out!
Capitalists can’t take the heat as well as gritty American industrial
workers that ended up bailing them out of the “jam of the century.” As
explained by Allen Sinai chief global economist for Decision Economics,
Inc, discussing Milton ‘laissez-faire’ Friedman’s free-market dogma vis a
vis the 2008 economic meltdown: “The free market is not geared to take
care of the casualties, because there’s no profit motive.”
The chicken-hearts from Silicon Valley already have Gulfstream G550s
($70M each) readied at a Nevada airstrip for the quickie escape journey
to NZ.
theconservativetreehouse | From a pure economic/financial perspective this Nike branding campaign doesn’t make sense…. unless, you realize a much bigger picture. A hidden bigger picture.
On its face, it just seems absurd. Why would any major corporation
intentionally stake out a branding position that is adverse to their
financial interests?
I’ve spoken to some very excellent business actuaries on this late
today; and one specific conversation finally helped to make it all make
sense. During that conversation a good ally shared: “a multinational corporation would never make a branding decision adverse to their financial interests. Unless there is a hidden risk unrelated to what is visible on the surface.” ….
''BINGO, there it is, the lightbulb went on.
A hidden risk that likely has nothing whatsoever to do with Colin Kaepernick.
The bigger risk to Nike has nothing to do with Black Lives Matter,
U.S. Consumers, or Antifa-like political advocacy. The bigger financial
risk to the Nike Corporation has everything to do with geopolitics and a
reset of international trade agreements.
Here’s the hidden aspect with research
to back it up. Nike Inc. has hitched its massive corporate existence
to a 10-year business plan that is dependent on the continuance of
recently negotiated manufacturing contracts.
The Nike political branding position is reconciled when you look at the bigger picture and see where the real
financial risk aligns. The Nike economic decision is to align with
China, and by extension North Korea, for a position of mutual benefit.
It is all about the proverbial $$$$ and Nike’s best financial play is to
mitigate risk and assist Communist China in their trade strategy.
China is willing to subsidize Nike (lower production costs), and
replace any dropped revenue, in exchange for mutually beneficial
political opposition against Trump and by extension his policies that
are a risk to Beijing. As a result there is minimal financial risk to
the Nike Corporation.
And with the current multinational Wall Street agenda now being confronted, we should not expect this approach to stop at Nike.
ineteconomics | Buchanan, a 1940 graduate of Middle Tennessee State University who
later attended the University of Chicago for graduate study, started out
as a conventional public finance economist. But he grew frustrated by
the way in which economic theorists ignored the political process.
Buchanan began working on a description of power that started out as a
critique of how institutions functioned in the relatively liberal 1950s
and ‘60s, a time when economist John Maynard Keynes’s ideas about the
need for government intervention in markets to protect people from flaws
so clearly demonstrated in the Great Depression held sway. Buchanan,
MacLean notes, was incensed at what he saw as a move toward socialism
and deeply suspicious of any form of state action that channels
resources to the public. Why should the increasingly powerful federal
government be able to force the wealthy to pay for goods and programs
that served ordinary citizens and the poor?
In thinking about how people make political decisions and choices,
Buchanan concluded that you could only understand them as individuals
seeking personal advantage. In an interview cited by MacLean, the
economist observed that in the 1950s Americans commonly assumed that
elected officials wanted to act in the public interest. Buchanan
vehemently disagreed — that was a belief he wanted, as he put it, to
“tear down.” His ideas developed into a theory that came to be known as
“public choice.”
Buchanan’s view of human nature was distinctly dismal. Adam Smith saw
human beings as self-interested and hungry for personal power and
material comfort, but he also acknowledged social instincts like
compassion and fairness. Buchanan, in contrast, insisted that people
were primarily driven by venal self-interest. Crediting people with
altruism or a desire to serve others was “romantic” fantasy: politicians
and government workers were out for themselves, and so, for that
matter, were teachers, doctors, and civil rights activists. They wanted
to control others and wrest away their resources: “Each person seeks
mastery over a world of slaves,” he wrote in his 1975 book, The Limits of Liberty.
Does that sound like your kindergarten teacher? It did to Buchanan.
The people who needed protection were property owners, and their
rights could only be secured though constitutional limits to prevent the
majority of voters from encroaching on them, an idea Buchanan lays out
in works like Property as a Guarantor of Liberty (1993).
MacLean observes that Buchanan saw society as a cutthroat realm of
makers (entrepreneurs) constantly under siege by takers (everybody else)
His own language was often more stark, warning the alleged “prey” of
“parasites” and “predators” out to fleece them.
In 1965 the economist launched a center dedicated to his theories at
the University of Virginia, which later relocated to George Mason
University. MacLean describes how he trained thinkers to push back
against the Brown v. Board of Education decision to desegregate
America’s public schools and to challenge the constitutional
perspectives and federal policy that enabled it. She notes that he took
care to use economic and political precepts, rather than overtly racial
arguments, to make his case, which nonetheless gave cover to racists who
knew that spelling out their prejudices would alienate the country.
All the while, a ghost hovered in the background — that of John C.
Calhoun of South Carolina, senator and seventh vice president of the
United States.
Calhoun was an intellectual and political powerhouse in the South
from the 1820s until his death in 1850, expending his formidable energy
to defend slavery. Calhoun, called the “Marx of the Master Class” by
historian Richard Hofstadter, saw himself and his fellow southern
oligarchs as victims of the majority. Therefore, as MacLean explains, he
sought to create “constitutional gadgets” to constrict the operations
of government.
Economists Tyler Cowen and Alexander Tabarrok, both of George Mason University, have noted the two men’s affinities, heralding
Calhoun “a precursor of modern public choice theory” who “anticipates”
Buchanan’s thinking. MacLean observes that both focused on how democracy
constrains property owners and aimed for ways to restrict the latitude
of voters. She argues that unlike even the most property-friendly
founders Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, Buchanan wanted a private
governing elite of corporate power that was wholly released from public
accountability.
Suppressing voting, changing legislative processes so that a normal
majority could no longer prevail, sowing public distrust of government
institutions— all these were tactics toward the goal. But the Holy Grail
was the Constitution: alter it and you could increase and secure the
power of the wealthy in a way that no politician could ever challenge.
Gravy Train to Oligarchy
MacLean explains that Virginia’s white elite and the pro-corporate
president of the University of Virginia, Colgate Darden, who had married
into the DuPont family, found Buchanan’s ideas to be spot on. In
nurturing a new intelligentsia to commit to his values, Buchanan stated
that he needed a “gravy train,” and with backers like Charles Koch and
conservative foundations like the Scaife Family Charitable Trusts,
others hopped aboard. Money, Buchanan knew, can be a persuasive tool in
academia. His circle of influence began to widen.
MacLean observes that the Virginia school, as Buchanan’s brand of
economic and political thinking is known, is a kind of cousin to the
better-known, market-oriented Chicago and Austrian schools — proponents
of all three were members of the Mont Pelerin Society, an international
neoliberal organization which included Milton Friedman and Friedrich
Hayek. But the Virginia school’s focus and career missions were
distinct. In an interview with the Institute for New Economic Thinking
(INET), MacLean described Friedman and Buchanan as yin and yang:
“Friedman was this genial, personable character who loved to be in
the limelight and made a sunny case for the free market and the freedom
to choose and so forth. Buchanan was the dark side of this: he thought,
ok, fine, they can make a case for the free market, but everybody knows
that free markets have externalities and other problems. So he wanted to
keep people from believing that government could be the alternative to
those problems.”
soundtravels | We live in a vast ocean of sound, whose infinite waves ripple the
shores of our awareness in myriad patterns of intricate design and
immeasurably complex vibrations … permeating our bodies, our psyches, to
the very core of our being.
So begins the program, Of Sound Mind and Body: Music and Vibrational
Healing and so begins this whirlwind account, unveiling the mysteries of
sound. Perhaps because it is invisible, less attention has been paid to
this sea of sound constantly flowing around and through us than to the
denser objects with which we routinely interact. To those of us for whom
‘seeing is believing’, Cymatics, the science of wave phenomena, can be a
portal into this invisible world and its myriad effects on matter, mind
and emotions.
The long and illustrious lineage of scientific inquiry into the
physics of sound can be traced back to Pythagoras, but this article will
focus on more recent explorations into the effects that sound has upon
matter. However, a brief sum- mary of the last three centuries of
acoustic research will help to highlight a few of the pioneers who
blazed the trail so that Cymatics could emerge as a distinct discipline
in the 1950s.
READ THE WHOLE ARTICLE (PDF) - click this link (opens new window)
opentheory | I think all neuroscientists, all philosophers, all
psychologists, and all psychiatrists should basically drop whatever
they’re doing and learn Selen Atasoy’s “connectome-specific harmonic
wave” (CSHW) framework. It’s going to be the backbone of how we
understand the brain and mind in the future, and it’s basically where
predictive coding was in 2011, or where blockchain was in 2009. Which is
to say, it’s destined for great things and this is a really good time to get into it.
I described CSHW in my last post as:
Selen Atasoy’s Connectome-Specific Harmonic Waves (CSHW) is
a new method for interpreting neuroimaging which (unlike conventional
approaches) may plausibly measure things directly relevant to
phenomenology. Essentially, it’s a method for combining fMRI/DTI/MRI to
calculate a brain’s intrinsic ‘eigenvalues’, or the neural frequencies
which naturally resonate in a given brain, as well as the way the brain
is currently distributing energy (periodic neural activity) between
these eigenvalues.
This post is going to talk a little more about how CSHW
works, why it’s so powerful, and what sorts of things we could use it
for.
CSHW: the basics
All periodic systems have natural modes— frequencies they
‘like’ to resonate at. A tuning fork is a very simple example of this:
regardless of how it’s hit, most of the vibration energy quickly
collapses to one frequency- the natural resonant frequency of the fork.
All musical instruments work on this principle; when you
change the fingering on a trumpet or flute, you’re changing the natural
resonances of the instrument.
CSHW’s big insight is that brains have these natural resonances too,
although they differ slightly from brain to brain. And instead of some
external musician choosing which notes (natural resonances) to play, the
brain sort of ‘tunes itself,’ based on internal dynamics, external
stimuli, and context.
The beauty of CSHW is that it’s a quantitative model, not
just loose metaphor: neural activation and inhibition travel as an
oscillating wave with a characteristic wave propagation pattern, which
we can reasonably estimate, and the substrate in which they propagate is
the the brain’s connectome (map of neural connections), which we can
also reasonably estimate.
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