A Different Kinda Challenge

Variation on a theme is almost always a good thing.



I've resisted the ice bucket challenge mightily.  Not because I'm a curmudgeonly old poopy head - OK, not just because I'm a curmudgeonly old poopy head - I care about ALS and I care about the people who have to suffer and die because of it.

I resist because the ice bucket thing has become so popular and so cool and so Cause Celebre, that it's not about the good works any more.  It's about participating in a fad.  Not that it's always and only a bad thing to go along with the crowd, especially when it's in service of a great benefit to the community.  The point is that this ends up detracting from bunches of other great ideas that need our support simply because a marketing department somewhere came up with an idea that's cut thru the clutter and gone viral (the holy grail of Digital Age Marketing), and because it lets us rationalize not doing much of anything else about much of anything else.

And BTW - the ice bucket thing did not originate as an ALS thing.
Today Show
Josh Levin - Slate (who can resist a really good creation myth?)

But more to the point, here's what Will Oremus at Slate Magazine suggests as a possible alternative to spending more on the ice and the water (plus your time) than you do on the contribution itself:

1. Do not fetch a bucket, fill it with ice, or dump it on your head.
2. Do not film yourself or post anything on social media.
3. Just donate the damn money, whether to the ALS Association or to some other charity of your choice. And if it’s an organization you really believe in, feel free to politely encourage your friends and family to do the same.

The curmudgeonly old poopy head has spoken.  So let it be written; so let it be done.

A While Back

200 years ago today, British troops sacked the capital of The United States of America.

The White House burned. So did the U.S. Capital, and most of the public buildings in Washington, DC. Invading British troops burned the city in this most humiliating episode in American history 200 years ago today. Some are tempted to call the War of 1812 “the forgotten war,” but that is absurd. Out of it came the national anthem, a daring act of bravery to save the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and the most lopsided defeat of the British military in all of their conflicts.

The British struck at the nation’s capital to weaken the morale of their enemy, and as payback for American excesses in York — what we now call Toronto — where they had pillaged and burned public and private buildings. Admiral George Cockburn, the driving force behind the attack on Washington, had justified the fall of a capital as “always so great a blow to the government of a country.”

But there's always some kind of review going on.  Scholarship never rests for long.  So what we think we know because of what they taught us in junior high school 45 or 50  years ago, is likely to change. The point being that it's a good idea to keep looking for things to learn - especially when it's about things we already "know".

One reason for the British raids so close to the American seat of government was to persuade Secretary of War John Armstrong to move U.S. troops from up north and thus ease the burden on the British of defending their remaining major colony in North America, Canada.

With the arrival of the highly professional 48-year-old General Ross, policies of retaliation and burning for the sake of it changed. Ross, who had only recently recovered from a bad wound to his jaw and right neck suffered in February at the Battle of Orthez in southern France, was determined to spare private property and only burn military or government buildings and even then only if the Americans did not negotiate to spare them. One of the first things that Ross’s aide, deputy quartermaster general Lt. George de Lacy Evans did, was to devise a policy to be used in dealing with the Americans. On August 18, following Ross’s orders, Evans drew up a proclamation to reassure local inhabitants about the safety of their private property if they acted with neutrality. In other words, Ross ignored Cochrane’s recommendation to “visit retaliation” on the American civilian population for U.S. actions in Canada. There was to be no wonton burning of American homes.

Kill 'Em All - Let God Sort 'Em Out

"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross." --Sinclair Lewis

I lost track of the contradictions and the fallacies just a few minutes in.

At about 11:00, this pops up on screen:

"Note: The statements made by Sargent (sic) Major Dan Page do not reflect the opinions of our local Oath Keepers Chapter, nor the national organization"

I'd kinda like to dismiss these blockheads as Peter Pan Patriots - guys who just can't quite get past the phase of their early adolescence that's marked (and sometimes dominated) by various Rescue Fantasies, but then, when my daughter's English assignment over the summer was reading Lord Of The Flies, I'm reminded how the seemingly idle tho'ts of boys can turn into deadly reality if you remove the rule of law; and as recent events might indicate, by removing the participation of citizens in their own governance.

People do things because other people do things that cause other people to do things. So maybe if we can figure out how to identify tin-plated martinets like Dan Page, we could then (while appropriately looking after their rights), isolate them and remove them from positions of power.

And then we can stop falling for the passive voice bullshit of "mistakes were made" or "shit happens" and get back to where we're actually holding people accountable instead of just gas-baggin' about it.

Nobody said it was gonna be easy.  Democratic self government is hard.  Guess what - it's supposed to be hard.  If it wasn't hard everybody'd be doin' it.  Hard is what makes it fucking great. (with apologies to Ganz and Mandell)

hat tip = Addicting Info

Today's Quote

With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil — that takes religion. --Steven Weinberg

Logical Fallacy #23 - The Texas Sharpshooter

The Texas sharpshooter fallacy is an informal fallacy which is committed when differences in data are ignored, but similarities are stressed. From this reasoning a false conclusion is inferred.[1] This fallacy is the philosophical/rhetorical application of the multiple comparisons problem (in statistics) and apophenia (in cognitive psychology). It is related to the clustering illusion, which refers to the tendency in human cognition to interpret patterns where none actually exist.

The name comes from a joke about a Texan who fires some shots at the side of a barn, then paints a target centered on the biggest cluster of hits and claims to be a sharpshooter.[2][3]

The Texas sharpshooter fallacy often arises when a person has a large amount of data at their disposal, but only focuses on a small subset of that data. Some factor other than the one attributed may give all the elements in that subset some kind of common property (or pair of common properties, when arguing for correlation). If the person attempts to account for the likelihood of finding some subset in the large data with some common property by a factor other than its actual cause, then that person is likely committing a Texas Sharpshooter fallacy.

The fallacy is characterized by a lack of a specific hypothesis prior to the gathering of data, or the formulation of a hypothesis only after data have already been gathered and examined.[4] Thus, it typically does not apply if one had an ex ante, or prior, expectation of the particular relationship in question before examining the data. For example one might, prior to examining the information, have in mind a specific physical mechanism implying the particular relationship. One could then use the information to give support or cast doubt on the presence of that mechanism. Alternatively, if additional information can be generated using the same process as the original information, one can use the original information to construct a hypothesis, and then test the hypothesis on the new data. See hypothesis testing. What one cannot do is use the same information to constructand test the same hypothesis (see hypotheses suggested by the data) — to do so would be to commit the Texas sharpshooter fallacy.

Today's Smartest Thing

I'm generally not a fan of DailyKOS - just "a little too lefty" for me - but when I think they get something right, I gotta say I think they got it right.

From Phoebe Loosinhouse:

Whenever things make absolutely no sense, I think it can be said that while it may make no sense to you, it may make sense to someone. And nine times out of ten, what has previously appeared nonsensical may be sensical, especially if someone somewhere is making money from the nonsense.

When the whole Michael Brown episode appeared out of nowhere, I am sure that I am not alone when I wondered, how is it remotely possible that a young man could end up dead for jaywalking? But perhaps part of the riddle has been solved by Newsweek, in an exemplary story displaying actual curiosity, investigation and journalism:

Driving While Black In Ferguson

Very simply, a town that bankrolls itself through racial profiling and harassment of minority citizens in penny ante driving violations which are then ratcheted up in both costs and ramifications through manipulative measures, is EXACTLY the kind of place where a jaywalking offense would spiral out of control. There really is something very systemically awful going on in that town and it is tragic that it took the death of a black teenager to draw one's eyes to it.

So if we can manage to see past the race-baiting and the militarized cops and all the charges and counter-charges and the extreme Press Poodling, it starts to get a bit clearer.

Follow the money.

hat tip = Democratic Underground

Today's Pix

Worth Repeating

Paying particularly close attention to the first 3 minutes.

(the embedding has been disabled, so all I can do is post the link)

Tim Wise - The Pathology of White Privilege

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SIINVfqnxw

Is Our Children Learning?

From WaPo:

Teachers have long been accustomed to “going along to get along” but increasingly are raising their voices to protest standardized test-based education reforms of the last decade that they see as harmful to students. In this post, Georgia teacher Ian Altman explains what he and his colleagues are really sick of hearing from reformers. Altman is an award-winning high school English teacher in Athens, where he has lived since 1993, as well as an advocate for teachers and students. He has presented at several national conferences and published in the Journal of Language and Literacy Education. He won the 2014 University of Georgia College of Education Distinguished Alumni Crystal Apple Award as well as the 2012 University of Chicago Outstanding Educator award.

Altman’s list of seven things that reformers should stop saying to teachers comes from conversations he has had with educators across the country and speaks to the fury felt by many teachers who see their expertise being devalued and their profession denigrated.

#6 is a great cross-over from the Bidness Side that is a perfect reflection of what's so fucked up about USAmerica Inc:

6. Stop using education reform clichés.
Here is a compendium of common education reform clichés:
“After consulting the research and assessment data, and involving all stakeholders in the decision-making process, we have determined that a relentless pursuit of excellence and laser-like focus on the standards, synergistically with our accountability measures, action-oriented and forward-leaning intervention strategies, and enhanced observation guidelines for classroom look-fors, will close the achievement gap and raise the bar for all children.”

You can’t talk like that and expect to be taken seriously by educated adults.

If only people in any random Business Meeting could be relied upon to laugh the Cliche-Humpers out of the room, we might make a little progress.

And the payoff at the end:

Teachers didn’t choose this fight. It has been imposed on us by a misguided and deeply conservative “reform” movement. It’s time for reformers to back off because I, and my colleagues, will do a better job if you just get out of the way.

I welcome you to disrupt my thoughts with real argument if you can. But don’t insult me and my profession by telling me just to believe what I’m told and accept the way things are.

 hat tip = FB friend LLS

Suffer The Children

I have some kids, and I've tried to teach them a whole boatload of life lessons.

From--
"please and thank you"
--to--
"no, your socks don't have to match - it just makes it easier when you do the laundry"
--to--
"learn to live your life without needing me or a cop or Jesus looking over your shoulder all the time".

As any parent knows, some of the lessons will stick, while others get thru but don't take hold right away, and the rest just kinda bounce off and may or may not come back around in a (hopefully) benign way later on.

But since my skin is not a particular shade of brown, it never even occurred to me that I should be teaching my kids this:

That's just pretty fucked up right there.