Facebook helps manufacture consent around the idea of white privilege

by philg

Want to write on Facebook about “white privilege” and how “It’s for sure a white man’s world in America. … All you got to be is white in America to get whatever you want”? (see Being There) Go for it!

What about disagreeing with this, however obliquely? A Facebook friend wrote the following:

There are tens of millions of racists in america but most are white trash who don’t make any decisions that matter.

His account was suspended.

A friend’s post, quoting “Jeff Jarvis: ‘As an old, white American man, I must confess it’s people like me who got us here'”:

Soon, by 2050, the white majority in America faces the reality that it will become the white minority and that scares them. The most frightened are the uneducated, old, white men who hold privilege and power and realise how tenuous that hold is because it is based on what they had in the past — who they are — rather than what they contribute to the future — what they can do.

I responded with the following:

If they’re uneducated and old, how are they privileged? If they’re over 40, they wouldn’t even be able to get a job absent government coercion (see https://www.eeoc.gov/age-discrimination ).

My friend:

Because things would be even harder for them if they were uneducated, old, and not white. I think Jeff does a good job of defining privilege: when you get things others don’t because of who you are, rather than because of what you can do.

Me:

Let that uneducated unemployed old white guy go out on Tinder and see how far his privilege takes him….

(if he is successful on Tinder and his partner chooses not to abort the resulting child, see Real World Divorce to calculate the cash flow in various states)

His friends piled on about how wrong I was. Me:

Only a few years ago, these same men were being featured as victims by our media. Now they are “privileged” and “powerful”? From 2016, CNN: “Nearly one-quarter of white men with only a high school diploma aren’t working.”

As of 2017, they were dying even if the police didn’t have enough energy to kill them. ‘The Collapse of the White Working Class’ (Atlantic)

Readers: Why is the idea that all whites, however poor, uneducated, and old, are privileged suddenly so important that Facebook needs to censor dissenting points of view?

(Another Facebook friend was blocked for 30 days due to his attempt to make a point via sarcasm:

White men are the only rapists in the world. How can I disagree with the consensus view of the Ivy League elites?

See also “The Question of Race in Campus Sexual-Assault Cases” (Atlantic). Regarding the Obama-mandated on-campus sexual assault tribunals: “Black men make up only about 6 percent of college undergraduates. They are vastly overrepresented in the cases I’ve tracked.”)

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Immigrants on Juneteenth

by philg

In a country where some people showed up only recently (see “Modern Immigration Wave Brings 59 Million to U.S., Driving Population Growth and Change Through 2065”), how many people are interested in a conflict that may have occurred years or centuries before they or their ancestors arrived in the U.S.?

I surveyed some immigrants and children of immigrants regarding Juneteeth.

A Russian-Ukrainian: I was just discussing it with another immigrant. We had no idea this day existed. We had no idea this day existed. Russia abolished serfdom around the same time. No one keeps track who descended from the serfs.

A Hungarian: We got the day off and my company sent around some interesting background material. [I couldn’t get him to explain what he found interesting about it, given that he arrived in the U.S. only a few years ago. decades after the Eisenhower-era desegregation initiatives, for example.]

Child of immigrants from India: The whole thing is stupid.

Immigrant from China: This has nothing to do with me.

Immigrant from Russia: What would happen to me if I said that I was also likely a descendant of slaves?

Immigrant from Russia, asked “What did you do for Juneteeth?”: I have a job.

Immigrant from Korea: At this rate, Americans will need more than 365 days in the calendar. Why do the gays get a whole month if the slaves get only one day?

Immigrant from Ukraine: I heard some noise from their parade a block away. Apparently black parades are allowed during covid. My company gave us a floating day for reflection this year.

Child of immigrants from India: When do regular Americans work?

Readers: What do your immigrant friends say about inheriting this old conflict?

From a February stop in Charleston, South Carolina, a plaque regarding a 1951 desegregation case.

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Professor Karen prefers to stay home this fall

by philg

“Expecting Students to Play It Safe if Colleges Reopen Is a Fantasy” (nytimes), is by a 67-year-old professor whose paychecks are guaranteed to keep rolling in. What does Professor Karen (a.k.a. “Laurence Steinberg”) say?

Safety plans border on delusional and could lead to outbreaks of Covid-19 among students, faculty and staff.

Most types of risky behavior — reckless driving, criminal activity, fighting, unsafe sex and binge drinking, to name just a few — peak during the late teens and early 20s.

First, this is the age at which we are most sensitive and responsive to the potential rewards of a risky choice, relative to the potential costs. College-age people are just as good as their elders at perceiving these benefits and dangers, but compared with older people, those who are college-aged give more weight to the potential gains. They are especially drawn to short-term rewards.

This is fascinating to me! The alter cocker calls the students reckless and implies that they are not properly weighing “dangers” when, in fact, healthy 18-22-year-olds don’t face any “danger” from coronaplague! Out of 7,647 people killed in Massachusetts by/with Covid-19 through June 15, exactly 15 were under 30:

Maybe those 15 were running around the soccer field the day before coronavirus struck them down? Not likely. 98.3 percent of Covid-19 deaths in Massachusetts are among those “with underlying conditions” (dashboard example).

The old cower-in-place advocate for Zoom continues to write with the assumption that young people are taking “risks” unreasonably.

Finally, college-age people show more activation of the brain’s reward regions and are more likely to take risks when they are with their peers than when they are alone. There are no such effects of peers among people who are past their mid-20s.

Not all adolescents are risk-takers, of course, and not all adults are risk-averse. But it’s hard to think of an age during which risky behavior is more common and harder to deter than between 18 and 24, and people in this age make up about three-fourths of full-time American undergraduates. … It’s one of those perfect storms — people who are inclined to take risks in a setting that provides ample temptation to do so.

The NYT reader will infer from this that two slender undergraduates meeting for coffee are taking roughly the same level of personal risk that Andy Green took while driving ThrustSSC at 763 mph.

My pessimistic prediction is that the college and university reopening strategies under consideration will work for a few weeks before their effectiveness fizzles out. By then, many students will have become cavalier about wearing masks and sanitizing their hands. They will ignore social distancing guidelines when they want to hug old friends they run into on the way to class. They will venture out of their “families” and begin partying in their hallways with classmates from other clusters, and soon after, with those who live on other floors, in other dorms, or off campus. They will get drunk and hang out and hook up with people they don’t know well. And infections on campus — not only among students, but among the adults who come into contact with them — will begin to increase.

I look forward to a time when we are able to return to campus and in-person teaching. But a thorough discussion of whether, when and how we reopen our colleges and universities must be informed by what developmental science has taught us about how adolescents and young adults think. As someone who is well-versed in this literature, I will ask to teach remotely for the time being.

In other words, “Science (TM) tells me to stay at home and watch the direct deposits stack up in my bank account while occasionally checking in via Zoom.”

In what other universe would a national newspaper run a plea by an old guy who wants to sit at home and do almost nothing, but still get paid at 100 percent?

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What I learned about teaching computer nerdism remotely

by philg

My favorite kind of computer nerdism class is the lab class. Software development is a skill and the only way to learn it is by doing. A lecture from a successful programmer will not turn beginners into successful programmers.

In mid-March we got kicked out off campus. We had been teaching successfully (at least from our self-serving point of view!) in a classroom at Harvard Medical School. Three groups of three students each in the same room. By walking around we could fairly quickly see what was on everyone’s screen, help as necessary, and talk either to the entire group of 9 or to one group of 3. Groups of 3 could talk amongst themselves without disturbing the others.

Using Webex and Zoom reduced productivity by at least 70 percent. We could work with only one student’s screen at a time and essentially only one team at a time. Switching from screen to screen is a cumbersome time-consuming heavyweight process.

Now that we’re going to stay home for the next 20-50 years (even if we cure coronavirus, we still have influenza as our mortal enemy, right?), what would the ideal infrastructure be for teaching our brand of computer nerdism?

In addition to a personal monitor or two, the teacher needs an array of 9 monitors, each one at least as large physically as a student’s screen (teachers have older eyes than do students, typically!). This will enable the teacher to see what each student is doing and interrupt with help as necessary. We need four voice chat channels: one for each student group and one for the entire class. Each student needs two physical screens. One for himself/herself/zerself/theirself to use for editing and running SQL and R code and one as a mirror of the teacher’s screen (how else will students know which sites teachers like to visit?).

If we had had this infrastructure, I think we could have been 80 percent as productive as we had been during our physical meetings.

Readers: What else would help for hardware and software infrastructure for teaching?

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Most gunshot wounds are self-inflicted, coronaconomy edition (Sweden v. the Shutdown Karen Countries)

by philg

I personally don’t think economic performance is relevant when evaluating coronaplague policy. In a world where people don’t care about anything other than Covid-19 death risk, what difference does it make if they’re getting richer or poorer? That said, unemployment and poverty do lead to poor health outcomes and death. It just takes a while. So there is also a health angle to economics (see this post from March: “If All Lives Have Equal Value, why does Bill Gates support shutting down the U.S. economy?”).

“‘Striking’ Crisis Gap Exposed as Swedish Economy Stands Out” (Bloomber, June 16):

In a report on Monday, Capital Economics presented data that give Sweden an irrefutable edge. From peak to trough, Swedish GDP will shrink 8%; in the U.K. and Italy, the contraction is somewhere between 25% and 30%, according to estimates covering the fourth quarter of 2019 through to the second quarter of 2020. The U.S. is somewhere in the middle, it said.

Sweden has kept shops, gyms, schools and restaurants open throughout the pandemic. But the strategy, which the government says wasn’t shaped with the economy in mind, has resulted in one of the world’s highest mortality rates. Sweden’s state epidemiologist recently acknowledged he would have opted for a tighter lockdown with the benefit of hindsight.

(The article is written for American members of the Church of Shutdown, so the journalist points that Sweden has “one of the world’s highest mortality rates” without noting that the U.S. overall, in Month 4 of various degrees of shutdown, is only about 30 percent behind Sweden, that plenty of U.S. states have experienced higher death rates so far than Sweden, and that some countries that did shut down actually have higher mortality rates than Sweden. And, of course, Sweden is not actually planning on a “tighter lockdown” even when the inevitable second wave hits (Sweden’s latest plan).)

A figure from the article:

A gun enthusiast friend is able to say, in response to about 90 percent of news articles about companies or universities, “most gunshot wounds are self-inflicted.” These economic data from the Shutdown Karen countries add some ammunition to his theory!

(Again, since nobody cares about how poor they become, as long as they can be saved from the evil virus, I don’t think the self-inflicted impoverishment of the shutdown nations is relevant except that it will inevitably result in a shorter life expectancy and more deaths in the long run than any conceivable savings of Covid-19 deaths from the shutdown. See the Preston curve of life expectancy vs. per capita income.)

There might be some measurement errors for the U.S. A lot of our GDP for this quarter, for example, is going to be cleaning up cities after riots, the classic broken window fallacy. Also, people have been spending like crazy to try to adapt to the shutdown. Americans would prefer to go to a gym, but they’re buying home exercise gear as an interim stopgap. (Sweden’s gyms never closed, so they wouldn’t have as much of this type of no-added-value spending.) Americans would prefer to meet people in person, but they’re buying webcams for the Zoom sessions that they don’t enjoy. Ordinarily, Americans don’t need everything in the house or yard to be perfect, but as long as they’re locked into their houses why not fix everything up and tell the landscapers to go deluxe? (Anecdote: We had our shrubs mulched for the first time! I wanted to give Joe the Electrician some work, so we had him do a bunch of low-importance fixes (bad news for the Democrats who envision themselves as champions of the working American; like Joe the Plumber, Joe the Electrician is not easy to persuade: “The thing about Trump is that he does what he said he was going to do.”). Maybe all of this will cost $3,000 and add $500 in long-term value to the house?)

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Kill them all (mosquitoes) with genetic engineering and let God sort out the mutant survivors

by philg

“Plan to release genetically modified mosquitoes in Florida gets go-ahead” (Guardian) is exciting to me since one of the best things that we could do for humanity would be to kill all of the world’s mosquitoes (in addition to the epic level of annoyance, they are responsible for killing 1 million people/year?).

Of course, the only thing more American than getting a mosquito bite is litigation. From the article:

A plan to release a horde of 750 million genetically modified mosquitoes in Florida and Texas is a step closer to fruition after a state regulator approved the idea, over the objections of many environmentalists.

Oxitec, a British biotechnology company, has targeted the US as a test site for a special version of Aedes aegypti mosquitoes. The mosquitoes contain a protein that, when passed down to female offspring, will lessen their chances of survival and, it is hoped, prevent them from biting people and spreading diseases such as dengue fever and Zika.

But the plan has caused uproar among conservation groups, which have sued the EPA for allegedly failing to ascertain the environmental impact of the scheme. Scientists have also expressed concerns about the oversight of the trial.

If this goes bad, we can blame Donald Trump and what my Facebook friends characterize as his “defunding” of the EPA (I wish someone would “defund” our household in the same way that Trump has defunded the Federal agencies that he has been accused of defunding!).

Personally, I am excited! The Mosquito book referenced below says that these insects have zero redeeming value. There are no animals, for example, that would be significantly inconvenienced if mosquitoes were eliminated. In other words, there is no animal that depends on the mosquito for its subsistence.

A tax-free resident of the Sunshine State (from the Corkscrew Swamp sanctuary):

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Coronashutdown versus UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights

by philg

Let’s see what is left of the rights in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights in a world shut down by old rich people anxious to avoid their date with coronadestiny.

Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association.

This is gone, unless you’re protesting Black Lives Matter.

Everyone has the right to education. … Elementary education shall be compulsory.

Gone! Unless a Black Lives Matter School of Protest can be started?

Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms.

If “full development” means “sitting at the computer” and “respect for fundamental freedoms” means learning how to be a Mask Karen, I guess kids still have these rights. (My friends’ middle schoolers have not left their house/yard since mid-March. They say that they haven’t learned anything from the local public school.)

Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.

This is gone, unless the License Raj thinks you should be allowed to work.

(1) Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state.
(2) Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.

This is gone!

(1) Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution

Also gone? Or can asylum-seekers still walk across the U.S. border and sign up as customers for the welfare state?

No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.

What if your property was a daycare business? Given the lack of evidence that young children spread coronavirus, haven’t you been arbitrarily deprived of it?

Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.

Is it “liberty” for a healthy young person, whose life is not at risk, to be locked down in an apartment?

Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.

What’s the “community” if everyone is stuck at home connected only by Internet?

Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.

Religion in “community with others” is gone, right? Facebook, Amazon, YouTube, and other enforcers of coronaplague orthodoxy have eliminated “freedom of thought”, right?

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

As noted above, you still have freedom of expression, but just not on any platform that contains an audience. (Maybe some Virtue-brand toilet paper will help keep the censors at bay? (from a Target near Portsmouth, New Hampshire).)

All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law. All are entitled to equal protection against any discrimination in violation of this Declaration and against any incitement to such discrimination.

Hmm… coronashutdown hit the working class like a ton of bricks: unemployment, poverty, alcoholism, opioids, strife with other household members in tiny apartments. For a lot of upper-middle-class Americans, especially government workers, it meant continued paychecks, a reduced workload, zero commute time, and going for jogs in low density suburbs before turning to the spacious single family house. That’s not “discrimination”?

No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.

Why isn’t being locked into a small apartment “detention”?

No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.

Given the lack of scientific agreement on whether young children can spread the coronavirus, whether Western government lockdowns are effective at reducing the total number of infections and deaths, etc., would it be fair to say that the shutdowns are “arbitrary interference”?

In the exercise of his rights and freedoms, everyone shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society.

Maybe this is the escape clause. A state governor can say “I think there will be more public order and general welfare if everyone is locked down in apartments and houses, except for those whom I specifically let out.”

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If masks stop coronavirus, why no discontinuity in the numbers?

by philg

Masketologists have declared victory against coronaplague. If a population of humans is ordered to wear masks, coronavirus will pack up and go home. Example: “Identifying airborne transmission as the dominant route for the spread of COVID-19” (PNAS) and one of the less hysterical popular media summaries.

[6/18 update from the Department of Coronascience is Settled: researchers from Stanford, John Hopkins, and University of Colorado say that the above PNAS paper should be retracted. “While we agree that mask-wearing plays an important role in slowing the spread of COVID-19, the claims in this study were based on easily falsifiable claims and methodological design flaws”]

I was fully prepared to believe this, since it is consistent with my idea that whatever people are doing in Japan, China, Korea, and Taiwan is probably the right thing to be doing. However… the governor of Massachusetts imposed a strict mask law that was effective on May 6. Faith in the Church of Shutdown’s Ritual of the Mask becomes a little tougher to sustain when looking at stats from the New York Times:

If masks are the way to slay the Covid-19 dragon, why isn’t there an observable discontinuity in these curves as a result of the restrictions imposed on May 6? If anything, it looks like there was a bump in cases followed by a bump in deaths roughly correlated to a change on the May 6 date.

Maybe the answer is that masks do work, but the state reopened in early May and therefore the viral spread from reopening canceled out the viral suppression from masks? Definitely not! From the License Raj:

Construction and manufacturing were allowed to reopen, “with restrictions, some capacity limitations, and a staggered start”, beginning on May 18. There was no significant change until May 25 (hair salons) and June 8 (hotels, some childcare (with masks on children older than 2; see the happy preschooler below), retail with occupancy limits).

The anti-Karen wrote:

What I don’t get: If masks work, why aren’t we back at work? If masks don’t work, why are we being asked to wear them?

This mask-loving Karen wonders:

If masks work, why don’t we see a collapse in “the curve”?

Readers: Should we believe “science” or our own eyes looking at the NYT graphs? I picked Massachusetts because that’s where I live (unwisely, it seems). Is there another state that adopted a mask law and in which the coronavirus waved a white flag and packed up?

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Perfect illustration of the “Less is More” principle

by philg

“UCLA lecturer’s job in jeopardy after refusing ‘accommodations’ for black students”:

University of California-Los Angeles Lecturer Gordon Klein faces an online petition that asks UCLA to terminate his employment, following an email he allegedly sent to a student regarding “special treatment” for black students in light of the George Floyd protests.

The viral petition, signed by nearly 20,000 people, claims Klein’s “blatant lack of empathy and unwillingness to accommodate his students during a time of protests speaks to his apathetic stance on the matter.”

UCLA Anderson School of Management spokeswoman Rebecca Trounson confirmed to Campus Reform that Klein is “on leave from campus and his classes have been reassigned to other faculty.”

What the accounting expert do?

“Thanks for your suggestion in your email below that I give black students special treatment, given the tragedy in Minnesota,” Klein’s email read, according to the petition. “Do you know the names of the classmates that are black? How can I identify them since we’ve been having online classes only? Are there any students that may be of mixed parentage [sic], such as half black-half Asian? What do you suggest I do with respect to them? A full concession or just half? Also, do you have any idea if any students are from Minneapolis? I assume that they probably are especially devastated as well.”

Klein’s email continued, “I am thinking that a white student from there might be possibly even more devastated by this, especially because some might think that they’re racist even if they are not. My TA is from Minneapolis, so if you don’t know, I can probably ask her. Can you guide me on how you think I should achieve a ‘no-harm ‘outcome since our sole course grade is from a final exam only? One last thing strikes me: Remember that MLK famously said that people should not be evaluated based on the “color of their skin.” Do you think that your request would run afoul of MLK’s admonition?”

He/she/ze/they would still have a job if he/she/ze/they had followed the “less is more” principle by responding with the following:

Thanks for your suggestion.

(first four words of the above actual response)

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Friend in Texas runs, but cannot hide, from coronavirus

by philg

Anecdotal evidence that my cherished hope of summertime relief from coronaplague is illusory: a friend in Austin, Texas has developed Covid-19. If the virus can survive not only summer, but the Texas summer, that is indeed sobering.

His Facebook post:

I had a 100ish fever last Thursday night/Friday, with none of the other effects I’ve read about. Got tested just in case so I didn’t increase anyone else’s risk.

No fever or anything else since then except occasional headache and maybe some fatigue. My primary care doc thinks I may have gotten a very small exposure and fought it off quickly – we’ll see. He may have me do an antibody test in a week or two to rule out a false positive.

Be safe – remember that even being very careful, wearing a KN95 mask and gloves at the grocery store with plenty of hand sanitizer, social distancing, etc are not 100%.

UPDATE 6/17: Low grade fever early this morning (100.1) but responded to ibuprofen and now I feel pretty normal. Still no other symptoms.

UPDATE 6/16 – Q from the comments: Do you have a feel for where/how you got it?

A: Not sure. I’ve mostly stayed put since early March since I work from home.

Could have been at the store – KN95 is still 5% failure rate, and even though I bought the masks at Staples, it’s hard to know the quality of the Chinese manufacturing.

We’ve seen a small number of people while socially distancing in recent weeks – that would be my bet, but none of those people (already notified) have reported symptoms so far.

My guess is I’ll never really know.

He’s in his 50s so he is not statistically invulnerable to the plague, but he is otherwise healthy as far as I know, so I am not heading down there to dig a grave for him.

A friend recently traveled on JetBlue (empty middle seats, unlike on American) and was surprised to see a fellow passenger in full Ebola doctor PPE: respirator mask plus face shield. Maybe this is the way to dress for the next 2-3 years!

Alternatively, could we be (very slowly) proving the Bishops of the Church of Sweden correct? They said that the virus would wait for us to come out of bunkers. The U.S. right now has a Covid-19 death rate roughly 30 percent lower than Sweden’s, but we have years to catch up. (And don’t forget we have all of the shutdown-related deaths, e.g., from delayed health care, from unemployment and poverty, etc., that nobody is bothering to tally.)

[Update: his fever went away by Wednesday. So it was a one-week fever with “occasional headache, fatigue, and tight chest but really nothing else.” Both children, age 6 and 11, got it (“mild” and/or “brief” fever), but not the wife. Maybe that tells us something about the typical amount of physical intimacy in an American household with children…]

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