Category Archives: Psychological Musings

The Supreme Court isn’t always wrong

Americana, Politics, Psychological Musings

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I only have one data point, named Joe as it turns out, but, as Michele Stern says: One data point may not be proof but it is still a data point.

The Supreme Court ruled against Affirmative Action a couple of days ago (even though they did not couch it in those terms, everybody else seems to). Adam Liptak of the New York Times wrote: In a fractured decision that revealed deep divisions over what role the judiciary should play in protecting racial and ethnic minorities, the Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld a Michigan constitutional amendment that bans affirmative action in admissions to the state’s public universities.

Contrary to most of the columnists and bloggers I admire, I think that the Supreme Court is right. The operative part of the NYT quote above is  what role the judiciary should play in protecting racial and ethnic minorities and the implication is that giving racial and ethnic minorities special rights protects those minorities. I don’t think it does and I have my reasons.

My only data point is from when I had a development company and we hired a Stanford MBA for the the job of Construction Manager. It was probably in the mid-80s and his name was Joe. Joe was a full blooded American Indian and the job didn’t work out. Not because he he was an Indian – obviously – but because he did not like making decisions that didn’t have clear-cut answers. He didn’t like the stress. When we talked about going our separate ways, he asked me why I had hired him. I told him it was because he was a Stanford MBA and he answered something like Yeh, but I only got in because I am an Indian. I have no idea if that is true or not but he, clearly, thought so and, I suspect, many of his fellow students did also.

I think that Affirmative Action misidentifies the problem. The problem is that a huge proportion of racial and ethnic minorities – we are using racial and ethnic minorities as a euphemism for African Americans and Hispanics here in California – are poor. They come from poor families, poor neighborhoods, and they have almost no exposure to what they need to prosper in our society including useful connections. Most importantly and most powerfully, they come from substandard schools and they get a poor educations compared to their peers from affluent areas.

As an aside, those schools are substandard not as a result of chance, but because of Government Policy. In California, and – I think – every state, schools are primarily supported by the State, but, when State funds are cut, affluent local areas make up the difference or send their kids to private schools. In Portola Valley, where I live, the locals voted to raise taxes to compensate for State education cuts (not me, other locals). Portola Valley is a Liberal – even if somewhat Libertarian – town that prides itself on having voted for Obama and Anna Eshoo, but being able to compensate for for State cuts in Education makes it much easier to ignore those cuts. End aside.

Giving African Americans and Hispanics Special Rights just pisses off those whites – and probably Asians – that feel that the Special Right of Affirmative Action is unfair. That those Special Rights are an attempt – no matter how ineffective – at compensation for the screwing the affirmed minorities got in the first place, is forgotten or was never considered. It is easy to say that those pissed off whites are wrong – or racist – but that doesn’t change anything, it doesn’t make them less pissed and, in most cases, it doesn’t make them want  to improve minority education.

For whatever reason, the people of Michigan voted against Affirmative Action and I think the court was right in upholding that vote. Jamming Affirmative Action down their throats would not solve the problem, it would just build resentment and resentment is part of the problem. After what I just wrote, it may not be obvious that I think everybody deserves a good education, but I do. I think that giving everybody the best education that they can absorb should be one of the main jobs of our government; it is way more important than killing illiterate Taliban in Afghanistan. I think that education should be free, good, and equal for all Citizens. It is not only a moral imperative but a better educated Citizenry makes for a healthier country. But, the Affirmative Action that Michigan voted against, didn’t do that, it only made some people feel better about themselves without solving the problem and it made even more people angry and resistant.

My only complaint with the new Section 26 of Article I of  the Michigan Constitution is that it does not go far enough, it should also eliminate legacy Affirmative Action. The idea that an Alumni’s kid should get preference at State schools, paid for by taxpayers, is wrong and unfair and should also be eliminated. Hopefully this Supreme Court ruling will get people thinking about how to solve the real problem.

One suggestion that I have read and that appeals to me is that the top students from every high-school get to go to the top Universities in the State. There are somewhere in the order of 2100 high-schools in California so there would be plenty of room for the top five students from each school. That would mean that the top five students from Woodside High or Redwood High would be automatically eligible for Cal or UCLA or Davis, et al. The top five students from Compton High or Fresno High would also be automatically eligible.

I am sure that there are other good ideas out there, but traditional Affirmative Action isn’t one of them.

The Monuments Men and Ted Nugent

Americana, Politics, Psychological Musings, Religion

Street Art-4

Michele and I saw The Monuments Men, a story about trying to save art looted by the Nazis, a couple of days ago. I kept thinking, How did these thugs take over Germany? As I type that question, it seems more rhetorical than an actual question because I do know the rough outline of how Hitler went from the failed Beer Hall Putsch to Chancellor. I somewhat know the facts, but I have a hard time understanding the undercurrent. They were thugs, afterall, and used the language of thugs; acted like thugs.

I really only know Germany through her artifacts; Audis, BMWs, and Mercedei, Leicas and IWC watches. The Germany of refined passion, of Bach and Run, Lola, Run. Her artifacts are so thoughtful, for lack of a better word. How did that Germany let itself be taken over by thugs?

One of my main tenets is that cultures are different but that people – worldwide – are more or less the same. I have a much better sense of The United States than I do of Germany and it doesn’t seem possible that thugs could take over here. It seems impossible that the Ted Nugents or the Duck Breath guys could gain real power. But, when I really think about it, I think that the first step – to take them seriously – is already here.

Why does the press – what we call The media, now – even acknowledge the ravings of a Ted Nugent? He is like a lunatic screaming in the street – the kind of guy we scurry by, heads turned away – except that he is not in the street, he is on the radio or TV. The media acts as if he actually had something to say. Part of it, I think, is that the media loves conflict, even manufactured conflict. It sells newspaper and airtime.

However, there is something deeper going on here. Huge numbers of Americans – and people worldwide – feel that their lives are getting worse and there seems to be no governmental plan as to how they will improve. Our government seems to be incapable of  solving the problems. Problems that I consider real problems; income inequality, gun violence, and climate change. But also problems that I consider phony problems or, even, actual improvements – but lots of people consider them real – like the diminishing influence of the Bible and Gay Marriage.

I listened to Nancy Pelosi on Jon Stewart and he kept asking her what were the systemic reasons that resulted in income inequality, the failure to control gun violence, and climate change, she kept blaming the Republicans and Stewart kept coming back to the question of the systemic reasons. I don’t think she even understood what he was asking, she just seemed completely befuddled. The crowd even booed her, this is the Daily Show crowd who are liberal, who should be her constituency. I like Nancy Pelosi – in March of 2010, I wrote With all the credit that should go to President Obama – and he has done an extraordinary job of getting the Health Care Bill pushed through – without Nancy Pelosi it wouldn’t have happened. Period! – and I was embarrassed, even pissed, and turned off the TV thinking She is not the solution.

When government loses people like me, when I lose confidence that government is going to solve income disparity or set a rational gun policy or forge a coalition to end destroying the world, it is easy to imagine, that people that didn’t like government in the first place, will look someplace else. Someplace where the people with answers are not part of The Establishment. Somebody who has answers that are easier to understand.

All over the world, people are finding those people. We see it in the anti-gay votes in Arizona and the Stand Your Ground laws in Florida. We see it in the resurging Nationalism movement in Hungary and Vladimir Putin being illegally reelected,  in the new wave of persecution and harassment of the Roma in Europe . We see it in the rise of Old Testament-hate-Christianity and old-time Mormonism, in Fundamentalist Islam and ultra-Orthodox Judaism. Against all that I would have predicted, growing up in the 50s and 60s, a growing minority is becoming more religious and superstitious, less scientific. They are more willing to accept the simple, clear answer over the complex muddled answer.

We are herd animals, it is in our DNA, and we want leaders, most of us want to follow somebody. When our leaders leave a void, the screamers in the street, the Ted Nugents, the Pat Robertsons, the Rush Limbaughs, have room to move in. They get taken seriously.

What I kept forgetting, as I watched The Monuments Men, is that thugs can be smart. Being nasty is not the opposite of being smart, they can go hand in hand. Also going hand in hand with thuggery is the crude – as in simple – answer.

 

Reading about Michael Schumacher, thinking about traffic

Psychological Musings

 

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If you haven’t been worrying about the fate of Michael Schumacher, perhaps now is the time to start. Doctors have spent the past two weeks attempting to bring the seven-time Formula One World Champion out of the coma he’s been in since a December 29 skiing accident, but attempts to elicit responses to “deliberate stimuli” have been absent. Rather, Schumacher has only displayed reflex twitches. By Brandon Turkus at Auto Blog.

Michael Schumacher has been unconscious for almost a month and a half. I wonder how that can be? Two months ago, he was one of the fittest human beings on the planet. He has been in crashes at over 150 miles per hour and walked away…smiling. Gabby Giffords was shot in the head and was off the ventilator in three days. I keep thinking how capricious life is. All of it, at every level.

We live on a planet that is large enough to have an atmosphere and small enough to not have crushing gravity. We are the right distance from the sun to have water that isn’t frozen or boiling. However, what amazes me every day is the afternoon traffic. There are about seven million people in the Bay Area and, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, about 16% or 331,000 people use mass transit. That means that about 1,738,000 don’t use mass transit. Some walk and some ride a bike, but most drive; there are, very roughly, somewhere around 1,000,000 cars on the road every afternoon.

Most days, there is an accident or two, sometimes three and occasionally none. We have all had an occasion in which we jammed on the breaks and just missed plowing into somebody or something. That happens a hundred times a day, every afternoon, and in almost every case, it is a near miss. I find that amazing: amazing that there are so few accidents and amazing that there is one almost every day.

I find it amazing that we live on such a thin edge. That we could trip and fall and end up like Michael Schumacher or, much, much, more likely, get up and walk away with a dirt stain on our pants, mumbling about how unlucky that was.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Identifying with the Cliff Swallows

Americana, Psychological Musings

Kachina Bridge, Natural Bridges National MonumentKachina Bridge, Natural Bridges National Monument

A week ago, or so, I saw a post on Ta-Nehisi’s blog that I keep thinking about. He is reading Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder and the book prompted him to make a series of posts, one of them – I think – is about accepting Evil. The post, Grappling With History’s Greatest Gangsters , is well worth reading (uh…if you are into thinking about good and evil):

How can men commit such acts? The question is not answered by empty invocations of “evil” or vague invocations of “sociopathy.” The question is not answered by memorializing victims (though this has its place) or the construction of national oaths (though that too might have its place.) On the contrary the question might best be answered, not by identifying with history greatest victims, but by identifying with its killers. This is in fact, as Snyder argues, the moral position: It is easy to sanctify policies or identities by the deaths of the victims. It is less appealing, but morally more urgent, to understand the actions of the perpetrators. The moral danger, after all, is never that one might become a victim but that one might be a perpetrator or a bystander.

I remember walking with Michele late in the afternoon, we were somewhere in the Colorado Plateau – probably in Escalante, but I am not sure – and we were walking up canyon, wandering is more accurate, soaking in the afternoon. Just below the rim of the canyon – about where you might put a picture rail if this was a hall rather than a 200 feet deep canyon – there was a line of mini caves, sort of like the mini-caves in the picture above.1 We watched a Raven flying along the edge of the rim and every once in a while the Raven would circle back to a mini-cave to check it out. It was warm with a slight breeze and the Raven was effortlessly, silently, gliding up canyon.

Ravens don’t get the credit they should, they lack the style of hawks, but they are graceful flyers when they want. This guy was beautiful and then we realized it he was checking out the Cliff Swallow nests in the mini-caves and eating their eggs when he found them. Both Michele and I instantly started feeling sorry for the Cliff Swallows. The eggs were their babies, their future and the Raven was just cruising along, like walking a buffet, eating their eggs.

Walking up canyon, we started talking about how easy it is to identify with the victims rather than the Raven. I think our country, and I suspect alot more countries, are like that. We remember the Alamo – well, the Texans do anyway – we celebrate Pearl Harbor not our victory at Midway. I know I feel that way when I read about pre-civil war slavery or the holocaust. Reading about what the Germans did, I retreat into How could those people do something so inhuman? it is incomprehensible, they are monsters.

It is hard to get past that – often very hard – but they are not monsters, they are people like us. I don’t say that lightly.

Our national narrative is that we are the good guys and we would never do anything like kill people wholesale, especially innocent people. But, we would and we have. During World war II, on 9–10 March 1945, we killed an estimated 88,000 to 100,000 civilians – and wounded another 40,000-125,000, depending on who is counting. We did this on purpose during a raid by 334 B-29s on Tokyo.The purpose of  this raid was not to bomb airfields or munitions factories, it was to kill people. Because we were not doing enough damage to the Japanese homeland with conventional bombing, we had changed tactics to create more damage. First, we bombed Tokyo with high explosive bombs and then came back with incendiary bombs to create a firestorm. According to Robert McNamara, in The Fog of War, after the raid, General Curtis LaMay said It’s a good thing we are winning this war or we would be tried as war criminals.

In his book, War Time: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War, Paul Fussell writes about an American platoon killing a group of unarmed Germans who were trying to surrender.  But that wasn’t the part that shocked him later, what shocked him how much everybody enjoyed it and how it became a platoon joke to be used when they need cheering up.

Yes, these are wartime stories and war brutalizes everybody and it is easy to tell ourselves that our acts of inhumanity are different from, say, Amon Goeth the commandant of the Kraków-Płaszów concentration camp. That is the point, it is easy to make Goeth the other, incomprehensible, like Goeth made the Jewish people he killed the other. It is not a direction that makes us more human. I want to end with a poem – I remember it from a LP record of poetry my mother often played – that we have probably all heard and forgotten, it is by John Dunn: No man is an island, Entire of itself, Every man is a piece of the continent, A part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less. As well as if a promontory were. As well as if a manor of thy friend’s Or of thine own were: Any man’s death diminishes me, Because I am involved in mankind, And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.

Disney Princesses and the right of the insulted to decide if it is an insult

Current Affairs, Film, Politics, Psychological Musings, Uncategorized

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I am not an expert on Disney princesses, I don’t think that I have seen any of the princesses in a movie except for Cinderella (front row, second from the left). I am pretty sure that the redhead, second from the left in the top row, was originally a Pixar princess from Brave, and the princess on the far right might be Pocahontas. It is my understanding that at least some of the princesses – Cinderella and Snow White (where is she?) for sure – came from old  European fairy tales.

The European fairy tales, in turn, came from earlier folk tales that were rooted in the deep humus of the collective European past. According to Robert Bly, those classic fairy tales lay out stages of initiation into adulthood which we’ve entirely forgotten, that our ancestors apparently knew a lot about. However, the new Disney Princesses, and the fairy tales they are in, are not rooted in a deep wisdom, they are made to sell dolls or amusement park rides. Additionally, they do damage to susceptible little girls by setting an impossible standard of what a woman should look like (a Barbiesque caricature of European homogeny).

As a protest to this, an English artist, David Trumble, Disneyfied a group of women who he considered real feminist heroes. As I understand it, he thought that, by showing how the Disney treatment trivialized these very real, heroic, women, it showed how Disney trivialized all women by their depiction of Princesses. I drew this picture because I wanted to analyze how unnecessary it is to collapse a heroine into one specific mold, to give them all the same sparkly fashion, the same tiny figures, and the  same homogenized plastic smile.

David Trum Princesses

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But a funny thing happened, not everybody thought the Disneyifacation of real women was bad. Some women liked it, at Feminist Disney, one woman said Of course it’d be nice if there was more diversity (they have one less WOC than the actual disney princess lineup!), less western-centric, more modern women, and women who are not cis hetero, as well as disabled and/or fat women. But I thought it was a cool take. I am here for Princess Malala Yousafzai. One woman started complaining and then, sort of, turned around.  In an article in Women You Should Know, Marijayne Renny said, Sadly, (my daughter) was immediately drawn to the sparkly dresses, but on the flip side it made her ask questions about these women and she was genuinely excited to know each and every one of their back stories. 

I first ran into the Princesses in an article in Atlantic, Why Shouldn’t Gloria Steinem Be a Disney Princess?, whose title, more or less, is self explanatory. Disney Princesses are not something that I think about very much, but, when I do, they do seem somewhat pedophilic what with the big eyes and all. But I am not a woman and either is the artist who made these satirical images and that is the problem.

A couple of years ago, Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote a blog post on the backhanded apology to an insult that is actually a new insult, Oh, I’m sorry if you feel insulted by the way I said what I said, I didn’t mean to insult you. The assumption here is that the  person feeling insulted is wrong because the insulter didn’t mean to be insulting and that, somehow, that makes the insult non-op. Coates argued, and I agree, that the insulted party should have the right to feel insulted. I think that the reverse is the case here, it seems that Trumble felt women should be insulted when alot of them were not.

His drawings, designed to show how insulting Disney is, turned out to not say that to many women who don’t necessarily  regard Disney as insulting. Answering that, Trumble said, I feel like good satire shouldn’t be understood by everybody. Some people were angry at me because they thought I was reducing the women, which was obviously the point. But if it gets children interested in these real women and what they do, is it so bad? Leaving aside that I agree that good satire should be close enough to the truth that some people don’t see it as satire and it is is great if these cartoons end up making children, especially little girls, want to know the back stories of these remarkable women, a man shouldn’t be deciding if the original Princesses are objectionable.

As a postscript to this, there are now drawings and cups of the Princesses available at søciety6 for only $15.oo. They seem to me that they would make a good gift, but what do I know?

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