Category: Social Justice

New York Times tells Muslims how to be Muslim

by philg

“Brunei’s Royal Barbarity and Hypocrisy” is from the New York Times Editorial Board:

The oil-rich sultanate imposes harsh Shariah law on its subjects, while members of the royal family enjoy lives of conspicuous luxury.

Brunei’s cruel, inhuman and degrading penalties are not a relic of history, like the sodomy laws that stayed on the books of American states well into the 20th century, but the whim of Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah, 72, who has ruled the Lilliputian nation since 1967 and ranks among the most ludicrously wealthy people on earth. He has long pushed his predominantly Muslim nation toward a conservative and restrictive form of Islam, and he first announced the new penalties — which, in addition to death by stoning for gay male sex, include amputation for theft and 40 lashes for lesbian sex — six years ago.

Besides the barbarity of the penalties, there is the danger that the law could nudge neighboring Islamic giants Malaysia and Indonesia toward tightening their own national or regional versions of Shariah laws targeting homosexuals.

The biographies of the authors do not suggest any expert knowledge of Islam or Shariah law. What qualifies these folks to tell Muslims in Brunei how to organize their lives in accordance with Islam? Is this “Amerisplaining”?

Also interesting… “The U.S. Immigration System May Have Reached a Breaking Point” (nytimes), from the same newspaper that said, three months ago, Donald Trump had manufactured a crisis. Now it seems that the “crisis” started five years ago:

The very nature of immigration to America changed after 2014, when families first began showing up in large numbers. The resulting crisis has overwhelmed a system unable to detain, care for and quickly decide the fate of tens of thousands of people who claim to be fleeing for their lives. … The country is now unable to provide either the necessary humanitarian relief for desperate migrants or even basic controls on the number and nature of who is entering the United States.

Trump is on the wrong track, as usual:

Mr. Trump has insisted on simply trying to stop people from getting into the country in the first place — a policy of deterrence that not only has failed but has made the problem worse.

Only a rookie would try to stop people from crossing the border into the U.S. by trying to stop them from crossing the border!

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Sultan of Brunei owns Piper Aircraft

by philg

“Piper’s financial ties to anti-gay Brunei stir up controversy, with Harris caught in crossfire” (Florida Today):

Vero Beach-based Piper Aircraft Inc. has become embroiled in an international controversy, as a result of its ownership by the government of Brunei, which has just implemented a harsh new law that punishes sex between men and adultery with death by stoning.

Jackie Carlon, senior director of marketing and communications for Piper, said that, while “the shareholder of Piper Aircraft is the ministry of finance of Kingdom of Brunei,” and “we’re very, very aware of” the policy in Brunei, “I can’t control what they do in their country.”

Carlon said Brunei currently doesn’t profit from Piper’s business, but rather reinvests the profits back into the company.

I.e., so far this has been a money-sink for the Sultan. Surprise, surprise! (Who told him that general aviation would be a good investment? That Piper had already gone bankrupt twice in its history so plainly a third bankruptcy was impossible?)

Cirrus, the market leader in family-sized aircraft, was formerly owned by the First Islamic Investment Bank, ultimately renamed Arcapita, “the premier source for Shari’ah-compliant alternative investments” and “a global leader in Islamically acceptable alternative investments.” It is unclear if Arcapita maintained traditional Islamic views regarding sexual activities. Cirrus today is owned by the Chinese government, basically, and China does not comply with U.S. standards regarding, for example, same-sex marriage (Wikipedia).

Maybe the answer is to pay up for an Embraer Phenom 300? The company is Brazilian, part-owned by the Brazilian government, and same-sex marriage is available in Brazil (Wikipedia). If you’re passionate about flying and matters LGBTQIA, but approximately $10 million short of the $10 million necessary for a Phenom 300, Cessna is owned by Textron, which earned a perfect score in the 2019 Corporate Equality Index (“Rating Workplaces on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Equality”). New and used Cessnas are available to suit nearly every budget.

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Folks who identify new victims can’t figure out why the old victims are forgotten

by philg

“‘Women Here Are Very, Very Worried’: Afghan women used to be championed by almost everyone. Now they’re all but forgotten.” (nytimes):

It was once a prominent and bipartisan cause: the liberation of Afghan women from the tyranny of the Taliban.

These women were championed by an array of strange bedfellows: feminists like Eleanor Smeal, celebrities like Lily Tomlin and stalwarts of a conservative administration like Laura Bush and Dick Cheney.

In the early days of the invasion, the world heard vivid stories of the changes the war had brought. Women could walk freely outside their houses and put on makeup; girls could go to school. It was a narrative that helped buoy public support for the fight in Afghanistan and deflect criticism about American empire.

Nearly two decades later, Afghan women are all but invisible to an American public thoroughly weary of the war.

My comment:

A lot of new classes of victims have been discovered right here in the U.S. since 2001. For example, the NYT was recently running stories about Federal employees victimized by getting 35 days of paid time off in exchange for a delayed paycheck (one of my friends is a senior FAA employee; he said that he enjoyed his vacation trips to Arizona and Europe during the shutdown). Human sympathy and attention are not unlimited. If paid-late-for-not-working Federal employees are front-and-center victims then Afghan women cannot be front-and-center victims.

Example: “As Shutdown Drags On, Some Step Up to Help Unpaid Federal Workers”:

Predictions of pain that had been theoretical, or theatrical, in shorter shutdowns are now a reality for around 800,000 federal workers, scattered through states red and blue.

“The public does not realize the impact that a shutdown has on the F.B.I. or on our families,” a bureau official wrote in an email this week to supporters of the nonprofit Society of Former Special Agents of the FBI.

Readers: What do you think? Is there something special about women in Afghanistan, or is it simply that the victims of 2001 must yield mindshare to the victims of 2019?

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Transgender solution to the Boeing 737 MAX problem

by philg

How to handle the public relations challenge of operating a new two-pilot two-jet-engine airliner with a safety record far worse than that of a 50-year-old single-pilot piston-engine plane such as the Cessna 402 (when used in airline service)? United Airlines seems to have found a way. From a friend on Facebook:

I ❤️ #United #LGBTQ #nonbinary

(Over a link to “United Becomes First U.S. Airline To Offer Nonbinary Gender Booking Options”)

What did the database programmers at United accomplish?

The U.S. airline will offer multiple gender options for customers booking flights, including M (male), F (female), U (undisclosed) and X (unspecified). United added that the title “Mx.” also will be available for travellers to select.

The gender option chosen by the passenger must correspond “with what is indicated on their passports or identification” in order to satisfy the Transportation Security Administration, United said. Anyone regardless of identification can choose the title “Mx.”

For whom can this work as a practical option, then?

More and more states have added gender options on identification. Oregon, California, Arkansas and Washington state currently offer a third gender option on birth certificates, while Washington, D.C., offers a third gender option on driver’s licenses. Most recently, the New York City Council announced it will offer “X” as a gender category for people who don’t identify as female or male.

What about for international travel? The U.S. Department of State offers a helpful page for those transitioning from one officially recognized “sex” to another. On the other hand, it seems that male/female are the only options. From “Victory! State Department Cannot Rely on its Binary-Only Gender Policy to Deny Passport to Nonbinary Intersex Citizen”:

The State Department denied Dana’s passport application because Dana could not accurately choose either male or female on the passport application form, and the form does not provide any other gender marker designation.

This is the second time Zzyym has won against the U.S. State Department for denying them a passport. In November, 2016, the same district court found the State Department had violated the federal Administrative Procedure Act and ordered the department to reconsider its binary-only gender policy.

The State Department doubled-down on its discriminatory male-or-female-only policy to deny Zzyym a passport, leading to today’s ruling.

So the nonbinary traveler making a domestic connection before an international flight would need a reservation with two genders: X for the domestic leg to correspond to the driver’s license and M or F for the international leg to correspond to the passport.

Backing up a bit… if the airline’s record must correspond to the gender stated on the passenger’s ID, did United have any choice but to task its database programmers with this project? Wouldn’t every airline have to invest in updating its systems to the modern world of gender-on-a-spectrum if the governments issuing IDs are changing their policies? So the PR folks at United are possibly even more brilliant for getting positive press for an expensive IT project that they were forced into doing.

Related:

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Other than Elizabeth Warren, who would be eligible for reparations?

by philg

“2020 Democrats Embrace Race-Conscious Policies, Including Reparations” (nytimes):

Last week, on the popular radio show “The Breakfast Club,” Senator Kamala Harris of California agreed with a host’s suggestion that government reparations for black Americans were necessary to address the legacies of slavery and discrimination.

Ms. Warren also said she supported reparations for black Americans impacted by slavery — a policy that experts say could cost several trillion dollars,

The U.S. has no authoritative genealogy service. If the government is handing out $trillions and eligibility is based on being a descendant of a slave, how will people be sorted into “gets paid” and “does not get paid” buckets?

America’s greatest intellectuals don’t seem to have come up with any practical ideas in this area. See “The Case for Reparations” (Atlantic) by Ta-Nehisi Coates, for example. There is nothing about what to do when Elizabeth Warren shows up with a family legend about an enslaved black ancestor and asks for her check.

More than 40 years ago, the Malone brothers availed themselves of jobs reserved for Americans identifying as “black”. See “Boston Case Raises Questions on Misuse of Affirmative Action” (nytimes):

Philip and Paul Malone are fair-haired, fair-complexioned identical twins who worked for the Boston Fire Department for 10 years. Last month both were dismissed when a state agency ruled that they had lied on their job applications: They had contended they were black.

In 1975, the Malone twins, now 33 years old, took the Civil Service test for firefighters and failed. But in 1976, according to their lawyer, Nicholas Foundas, their mother found a sepia-tinted photograph of their great-grandmother, who, she told them, was black. In 1977, they reapplied to take the test, contending they were black.

Philip Malone scored 69 percent and Paul Malone 57 percent, below the 82 percent standard minimum for white applicants, according to the Massachusetts Department of Personnel Administration, which monitors Civil Service tests and hiring.

The twins won appointments in 1978. They were questioned about their race last February, when their names appeared on a list of black firefighters applying for promotion, said Capt. Matthew J. Corbett, a spokesman for the Fire Department. ‘They’re Devastated’

The system under which the Malone brothers prospered for 10 years was a lot simpler than what Kamala Harris and other politicians are proposing. The Boston Fire Department was allocating jobs based on skin color, which can be observed and measured today, not ancestry, for which there is no official source.

Readers: How would it work? If people are lining up for their $trillions and all say that they are descended from slaves, who will decide whether to write a check or not?

Also, how do we decide who pays the reparations? It can’t come out of general tax revenues, can it? Why should an asylum-seeker who arrived via caravan in 2018 have to pay reparations for something that happened 200+ years prior to the caravan’s arrival? How about Native Americans? Should Sachem Elizabeth Warren have to pay for what white people did to black people?

Related:

  • “Cure for Racial Dishonesty” by Walter E. Williams: “We can learn from South Africa. During its apartheid era, it, too, had a racial spoils system. The government combated racial fakery by enacting the Population Registration Act of 1950, which racially classified the country’s entire population.”
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College bribery scandal is evidence of social mobility?

by philg

Frequent U.S. media theme: social mobility in the U.S. is low. If your parents aren’t rich and/or famous, you’re never going to get anywhere (unless you vote for Elizabeth Warren and AOC so that they can grab what is rightfully yours!). If, on the other hand, your parents were rich, you can coast into an elite adult slot. (Exhibit A: Donald Trump!)

Recent U.S. media theme: rich and famous people bribing college officials to get their children into selective universities.

Apparent contradiction: If social mobility is, in fact, low, why are rich and famous people bothering to bribe college officials?

Related:

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New York Times highlights academic achievement-skin color correlation

by philg

“Only 7 Black Students Got Into N.Y.’s Most Selective High School, Out of 895 Spots” (nytimes):

Students gain entry into the specialized schools by acing a single high-stakes exam that tests their mastery of math and English. Some students spend months or even years preparing for the exam. Stuyvesant, the most selective of the schools, has the highest cutoff score for admission, and now has the lowest percentage of black and Hispanic students of any of New York City’s roughly 600 public high schools.

My comment on the piece:

What if you heard about a reporter and some editors who hung around outside an academic testing center and noted the skin color of every person who failed a test? And then published the observation that people with a particular skin color were very likely to fail?

If that isn’t racist, what would be?

Readers: What does this story even mean? If Elizabeth Warren had gotten into Stuyvesant, would the NYT have included her in their Native American participation statistics? Who is the arbiter of race or skin color in the NYC public schools? Also, how does it help a group of people when there is a front page story underlining for employers the correlation between membership in this group and low academic achievement?

Thought Experiment: Suppose that Fox News had run a story revealing the same statistics and then Donald Trump had referenced that story in a Tweet. What would the NYT Editorial Board have said?

Related:

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Provincetown Public Library

by philg

One of the exciting things that I am able to do after 18 years of flight training is go to public libraries in different towns. The photos below are from a recent rare calm-wind, above-freezing day in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

Adjacent books in the featured Young Adult Non-Fiction section:

From the rest of the shelf:

What about New (and/or featured) Children’s Fiction?

I do hope that at least one candidate in 2020 adopts Gordon Jack’s slogan of “When they go low, we go slightly lower.”

In between the fiction and non-fiction sections:

What about for little kids? The library is in a converted church and makes great use of the high ceilings:

There is a restroom:

The little kids have their own books, in which it turns out that adults and cisgender boys are guilty of cisgender-normative and hetero-normative prejudice.

The reviews of I’m a Girl on Amazon:

  • A wrongheaded picture book attempts to celebrate “girl power” and the rejection of traditional gender roles but ends up perpetuating stereotypes. … The damaging fallacy extends in every direction, though, as the bystanders’ sometimes derisive comments, which assume that she’s male (“Ugh! Boys are so messy.”), support an additional set of (binary) gender stereotypes.
  • Besides the message of “you can be as annoying as you want as long as you’re breaking gender stereotypes,” having to read “I’m a girl!” with emphasis throughout the entire story gets tedious.
  • Intentional or not, it’s about gender identity and being misgendered. … It never says she is trans, but could easily be read that way

And of 10,000 Dresses:

  • I am building a collection of books and lessons to help my children understand what the GLBTIQ crowd experiences to help teach them how to treat others and how NOT to treat others.
  • I selected this book as part of an independent English literature course that I am taking that involved examining LGBT experience through literature. This is an excellent selection for starting discussion on transgender identity in childhood. The author’s use of pronouns is especially insightful and overall it’s a reaffirming story. I removed one star from my review because the main character’s parents and sibling are rude and intolerant and the book in no way addresses this.
  • I do have a problem with the girl running to a stranger’s house and going in as if that is a perfectly safe behavior.
  • I returned mine today and was appalled as I read the story to my son before reading it to myself. Kids need to feel safe at home, especially when dealing with gender non-conformity.
  • This book seems intended to be positive about a boy wearing dresses, but in the story, the boys’ parents and sibling reject him, and one girl becomes his friend and makes dresses with him. The issues with his family are never resolved.
  • [From American University] 10,000 Dresses is a true depiction of what a young child goes through when feeling that they do not fit in. … There are also no diverse races in this book; every character that is depicted is Caucasian. Since children of color are unable to see themselves represented in the book, they cannot relate to the greater message behind the story.
  • The story is poorly conceived: the parents are unsupportive and cold, while a stranger provides comfort.
  • A child is systematically mocked by each member of his family, only to find refuge with a random stranger.

Should these paper forms be called “Normally aspirated tax”?

From the convenience store, we learn that customers are passionate about marijuana, but that the claimed health benefits for humans do not translates into health benefits for our canine companions:

What’s happening in the rest of the town?

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Shop from women-owned businesses at Amazon

by philg

A friend recently pointed out this feature from Amazon: “Shop women-run businesses”:

In a gender-fluid age, what does this mean? Can any enterprise in which an owner or manager clicks “I identify as a woman” be considered “women-run” as far as the Amazon database is concerned?

[Separately, I’m not sure that this works. I searched for “razor”, hoping to see if it was possible to purchase an anti-toxic masculinity Gillette product from a woman-owned business. The first option was to buy a Fusion 5 (my continued testing against the Dorco Pace 7 and Pace 6 Plus show that the Koreans make a superior product if performance, rather than politics, is the relevant measure) from Amazon itself. In what sense is Amazon “women-owned” or “women-run”?]

Things are simpler here in the Boston suburbs. From a coffee shop in Lexington today, “we source this coffee exclusively from women coffee farmers”:

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Bulletin board at the Lutheran chuch

by philg

From University Lutheran Church in Harvard Square. Small sign to fit small window:

Why don’t black lives matter enough for a big banner down the side of the building?

Ever wonder about the difference between “use” and “utilize”? This sign should help:

Concerned about starving Venezuelans? It is the “hundreds of thousands of federal workers” whose paychecks are delayed for whom you should worry. Also that “this President [has made] numerous statements disparaging our fellow human beings, fellow people of the faith, and all of them children of God.”

Turns out that the God’s Jewish children living in Israel (perpetrators of “colonialism”) might need to be disparaged…

[Martin Luther himself proposed “First, to set fire to their synagogues or schools … This is to be done in honor of our Lord and of Christendom, so that God might see that we are Christians …Second, I advise that their houses also be razed and destroyed. …” It seems that the majority of Lutherans were supporters of Hitler and National Socialism (not to be confused with the Democratic Socialism espoused by Bernie Sanders and AOC). This church is part of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, which periodically makes the news for its anti-Israel positions (example). Maybe they can’t forgive Israel for executing fellow Lutheran Adolf Eichmann?]

Need help changing your gender so that you can qualify as an LGBTQ (but not “IA”?) minister?

Some final notes:

Related:

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