How do you feel about Shit Black Girls Say?
I didn't think it was that funny. I didn't watch the whole thing though.
As in, it seemed like the only humor was "Black people talk in a black dialect when they say regular people stuff!" which is irritating, although the comedian was kind of funny in his delivery.
Neither of these is funny bc they are both so cliched. The original SWPL site was funny because it found new things to make fun of.
Put differently, I want the new innovations in making fun of women and white girls that are being hindered by rampant joke piracy.
3: You were supposed to say "Kinda racist" because that's from the Shit White Girls Say to Black Girls video, that's all. And it would be funny because no one here ever jokes that anything is less than fully racist. Also, I really need more sleep.
Also, I really need more sleep.
White people are lazy.
7: White girls, anyway. And totes guilty as charged.
Shit Black Guys Say. Hopefully not racist?
not funny at all [...] making me laugh
Isn't making you laugh more or less the defining characteristic of whether something is funny?
You'd think. Humor is complicated. I don't like having the misogynistic side of me tugged at.
I've always found the SWPL thing really tiresome. It's basically a category that allows white people to say "see but I'm not one of the lame ones."
SWPL was argued at length here, back when. I basically agreed with you, and also just found it not very funny in any way.
I was anti-SWPL from day one. Dumbass thing.
The original SWPL site did a great job of coming up with somewhat original ways to skewer a demographic that's essentially that of majority Unfogged, in a way that hadn't exactly been done before. Not perfect at all but definitely funny, and the reaction here always struck me as having touched a nerve.
Bits were funny -- the mock-anthropologist tone is an easy one to get a laugh with. But it wasn't terribly funny. And kind of bogus.
the reaction here always struck me as having touched a nerve.
I can't believe we're reopening this. But I think comments along these lines are what really got the reaction going. It was a little funny, but not very, and sort of something I politically disapprove of, but not in a terribly important way (that is, attributing the risible or contemptible characteristics of a small demographic to a broad ethnic group is the kind of thing we know is a bad idea, right? It doesn't actually matter, because, you know, white people, not oppressed, but it's still a tacky way to talk.)
But if you tell me that my failure to think that it's both really funny and unobjectionable shows that I've been skewered by the truth of the biting social commentary, I'll argue about it forever.
Not perfect at all but definitely funny, and the reaction here always struck me as having touched a nerve.
New people just moved into the second floor of the triple-decker we live in. They're seem to be 5-7 years younger than us. We haven't interacted with them much, but so far we do know that
1. They have a ton of liquor bottles. The kinds of liquor you'd make cocktails from.
2. They both ride bikes.
3. They have a video projector, and they have their screen set up in the same place in their apartment as we have in ours.
4. They get the same weekly delivery of organic fruits and vegetables that we do.
We were telling Tweety's mom all this, and she asked if we were embarrassed to be such a type. Um, no? All those things are awesome? That's the same sort of puzzled reaction I have to the SWPL thing. Not that everything on it was awesome, but what, I'm supposed to be embarrassed for thinking recycling is good?
I mean come on this one is great. And the stand mixer one was accurate enough to feel like a revelation.
20: I get stuck on the offhand comment that white people hate self-tanner. Who else buys it?
18 -- I think it works better if you view it as gentle internal mockery. Like, no one's really criticizing you for recycling or buying a stand mixer, but, yeah, OK, this is a reasonable, somewhat amusing synechdoche for my demographic.
17: yeah, the whole debate was idiotic. The site was cheap and basically stupid, but pointing out that fact somehow meant that it was actually incisive social commentary. Lame-ass crock.
18: also one of them does internet nerd-y stuff and the other one does academic-y stuff.
19: but white people wear Ed Hardy! They are pictured right there.
Hey, look, 23 proves my point again.
22: Have you considered that possibly they plan to murder and replace you?
It is remarkable that the authors of "Stuff White People Like" failed to recognize that their list failed to capture things that are actually generally characteristic of people with white-colored skin, as opposed to the particular demographic it was intended gently to mock.
26: I prefer to think that we're mentoring them.
21 - I think we're mostly in agreement. I think the references on unfogged to stand mixers are funny! But the writing on that site didn't quite master the 'not really criticizing' tone, so just came off sounding assholish.
I didn't find the SWPL site that funny, but I found it pleasingly meta in that it was hard to imagine a more SWPL act than making a site like SWPL. It seemed animated by a neurotic concern with the fact that the behavior of the SWPL demographic was culturally specific, and not a human universal. What other group would be surprised by, and fascinated with, this self-realization?
touchy, touchy
It's like Freudianism. What, you assert that something isn't true? That just shows how true it is!
We were telling Tweety's mom all this, and she asked if we were embarrassed to be such a type.
I was just thinking the other day that I have a mixed feeling whenever I see somebody else at the co-op buying products that overlap with my tastes.
On one hand I think, "good for them. [X] is really tasty, they will enjoy it." On the other hand those people are always 10-15 years older than I am and inevitably look like a stereotype of smug, "socially conscious" professionals. I'm not quite ready to imagine myself as falling into that category.
It is doubtless humorless of me, but the "white people" thing really did drive me nuts. Why should the category of "white people" be synonymous with stand-mixing assholes like me? It is like what I find so irritating about "real Americans" bullshit, but from the other side.
27: Eh. I'm skewered to the heart.
30 is good, and addresses what I found so goddamned tiresome about it. Wow, your friends tend to like some of the same things! That's terribly special!
I remember an interview with the guy where he was talking about gosh, he loved to ride his fixie and then he was like wow, what's with that, you know? Is that like a thing? Why do I even like that? and I thought to myself HOLY CRAP SHUT UP WHO CARES.
The whole "am I really not as unique and interesting as I think I am?" genre of self-examination is just. I mean, the answer is no. There, done.
HOLY CRAP SHUT UP WHO CARES
New mouseover text?
Wasn't there a SWPL entry about riding your bike around with flowers in the basket? Last summer I biked to a garden center and bought a bunch of herbs (no flowers though) and put them all in my giant front basket (wire, not wood -- I'm not that SWPL). Let me tell you, people are fucking psyched to see a chick in a dress riding a bike around with a basket full of plants. Pedestrians and drivers were beaming at me.
Living where I do, of course, it's easy to think of these things as being typically Camberville stuff, rather than SWPL.
I honestly don't find the site that great, just pretty funny in parts and somewhat original in its time, but I do think calling it "Stuff White People Like" was a genius move, and by "genuis" I mean "well designed to push people's buttons." Because it pushes on two buttons of the target demographic simultaneously: the liberal racial anxiety and the class aspirations. It was kind of designed to piss people off.
The whole "am I really not as unique and interesting as I think I am?" genre of self-examination is just.
Sure, but it can be moderately funny at times. There are whole genres of humor based on dissecting demographics and making fun of what people have in common. Not saying that the SWPL site was anywhere close to the gold standard of that at all, but if we can't joke about the minorly ridiculous foibles of different groups, particularly as insiders (which is what the SWPL guys are), where are we.
but I do think calling it "Stuff White People Like" was a genius move, and by "genuis" I mean "well designed to push people's buttons.
Is button pushing always a good thing? I mean, there's lots of ways to piss people off, but that doesn't make them all admirable or clever. ToS does pretty well in his own special way.
The name kind of does annoy me, but it's because I can't see a funny reading of it that isn't either kind of racist, or an accusation that everyone in the demographic is kind of racist. It's not important, it's a big internet with lots of people being racist, and lots of people calling people like me racist, and it doesn't have much impact on my life. But it's not really where I turn for amusement.
39: Because it pushes on two buttons of the target demographic simultaneously: the liberal racial anxiety and the class aspirations. It was kind of designed to piss people off.
Right. It's the middle-browish, UMC version of Beavis & Butthead.
Standmixer. heh heh. Hippies. heh heh.
Ren & Stimpy was way better.
max
['But B&B was good for two or three minutes if you were flipping through channels because nothing was on.']
Without the racialized name, the site would be moderately funny in bits, mostly dull, and not a piss-off at all. I think my reaction is fairly representative in saying that the race bit is the only thing that makes the site memorable or worth bickering about.
18: Have you considered the idea that your neighbors are preparing to assume your lives, possibly wearing your clothes and/or skin?
Somewhere there is a website where we all have counterparts 5 to 7 years younger, bickering about SWPLness.
40: Is button pushing always a good thing?
Not always. But sometimes the results are pretty funny.
44: I blame my phone and its small screen.
I can't see a funny reading of it that isn't either kind of racist, or an accusation that everyone in the demographic is kind of racist.
I don't get that at all. I think the joke is that most people in the target demographic are white (true) and that they are doing things that are particularly common to their demographic and are therefore recognizably heavily done by "white people" (true) and that these same people hate precisely to be characterized as "white." (also true). I mean, the jokes often aren't either that funny or perceptive, but I don't think the use of the phrase "SWPL" is either racist or accusing everyone in the group of being a racist.
I think the joke is that most people in the target demographic are white (true) and that they are doing things that are particularly common to their demographic and are therefore recognizably heavily done by "white people" (true)
See, if that's the joke, and it seems like one of the possibilities, it's straightforwardly kind of racist. If you're not white, it's not normal for you to recycle, or bake, or eat sandwiches? I'm sure it's not meant maliciously -- it's in the range of racist that reads "Geez, you're tacky," rather than "Burn the witch," but it's racist enough that it kind of kills the joke for me.
I don't see why you have to take the implication in 50. Again, the joke is that this is something that is particularly common to a particular group or a reasonable synechdoche for it, allowing for gentle mockery. I don't think they did a great job in all instances but it seems weird to think of them as saying "only people with white skin recycle."
49 and 51 get it right, I think.
Obviously, it'd be racist if the affectionate mockery of white people included as SWPL, things particularly characteristic of white people, things like "having children in wedlock" "going to college" "being employed", right? When you make it about race, just because it's fun to make people uncomfortable, and you include a bunch of neutral, harmless, in some cases broadly common stuff like eating sandwiches, you're getting closer to that than I'm happy with. I realize that making smug, self-satisfied people like me uncomfortable with edgy racial humor is a great good, but it's close enough to the line that it kills the joke for me.
They are definitely saying "white people pride themselves on recycling" and the rest of us can laugh at them for that. How could a minority both recycle earnestly and simultaneously be in on the joke?
Hitler was a white person, you know, and he liked a lot of those things. I can understand why you're so defensive, but you need to look at yourselves too, even if it's painful.
Donald Trump. Joanie Rivers. Robert Pickton. All white people. Just sayin.
54: No they're not, come on. "Stuff That Predominantly-Caucasian Yuppies Similar To Ourselves Like" would have been an unwieldy title.
55: Whoa. Rivers and Pickton. I never saw that connection before, but yeah! Totally white. It all comes together.
They could have called them hipsters. Everyone else does.
It's all so obvious once you think of it. Like Einstein, I see the things that others don't see.
I guess the joke just isn't funny then.
54 -- by noting that it's something characteristic of the group the site is supposed to be mocking? (Characteristic does not need to equal "unique to").
53 -- If the site was called "Stuff Only White People Like," was written in earnest, and claimed that only white people liked to go to college, I would agree. I have a hard time seeing how, e.g., this entry has a necessary implication that "only white people go to Ivy League schools."
re: 54
I don't see why not. I'm not a non-white American. But, also, I'm not really the target for SWPL -- not being American, not being from a particular socio-cultural background, or whatever -- but I can laugh at stuff on it, even when that stuff is stuff I actually do. Sometimes the laugh is one of real recognition -- this is shit I do, and I do it in exactly the way that's being skewered -- and sometimes not. I don't see why, say, a black American couldn't laugh in exactly the same way.That's not to say that it's particularly funny most of the time.
I do read the title as if it had an "only" in it. For the link in 53, it's not "only white people go to ivy league schools", it's "white people, and only them, have an unhealthy obsession with ivy league schools."
I don't think reading the 'only' in is right. One can take the piss out of a demographic group that thinks of itself as the 'default' by pointing out the ways in which it is circumscribed or characterised by certain behaviours or preferences, without claiming that those behaviours or preferences are unique to that group.
If someone was writing a Stuff Middle-Class People Like blog, in the UK, and one of the things was 'Property values', that'd be a pretty bang on thing to hone in on, when taking the piss. It doesn't mean that other people don't care about property values, or only middle-class people do.
64 -- exactly, a better put version of what I was trying to say.
Plus with bonus LB-annoying "hone in on."
The seriousness with which this is being argued is indicative of .....something.
Hitler! Hitler! Hitler! Conversation over! Godwin's Law!
Looking at timestamps, 13 certainly started up a storm.
Isn't caring about property values kind of "middle class" of one, even if one isn't actually of the middle class? That kind of idea is a little more queasy-making when it's about being "white."
Why am I revisiting this why?
You are all right. I revert to comment 60.
The unsigned 58 raises a good question. Would those who find it (occasionally) funny still find it so were it named SHL?
I didn't really participate in the original SWPL Wars, but I'm basically with Halford and Ttam on the site. I found its tone pretty grating most of the time and didn't read it much, but it could be funny at times and the vehement opposition to it seemed odd. Not necessarily, like, revealing of the deeper import of the satire or whatever, but still somewhat disproportionate.
I don't think it would be as funny,both because the target demographic isn't exactly hipsters (to my mind), and for the reasons stated in 39.1 and 49. Although comment 60 is not an unreasonable response.
*I mean, having white people in this group feel a little uncomfortable for being singled out as being white people is a good thing, right? In the way that slightly unsettling humor is funny because it home a slightly hidden truth? The group in question really is very heavily white, you know.
Would those who find it (occasionally) funny still find it so were it named SHL?
I think a key part of it is that the (overwhelmingly white) urban-hipster-from-an-upper-middle-class-background demographic that the site targets is also a group that tends to be especially uncomfortable about being identified specifically as "white" (as noted by R.H earlier).
So it wouldn't have made quite the same impression with a different title.
My main thought on the site at the time was that you really have to read it as taking place in a very specific context of a gentrifying urban area for it to make sense.
I don't see why you have to take the implication in 50.
Seems to me that the title of the site pretty much forces that implication. If you're going to label the things we used to call "yuppie" as "white," then you're calling the stuff that isn't yuppie "non-white."
Yuppie is a cheap, easy categorization, but it really is a thing. "White," as used by that site, isn't a thing. Or it isn't a white thing anyway.
That is, a very different context from where most Americans (white or otherwise) actually live, but one within which "white people" does indeed basically signify the group they were skewering.
That is, a very different context from where most Americans (white or otherwise) actually live, but one within which "white people" does indeed basically signify the group they were skewering.
True!
64: One can take the piss out of a demographic group that thinks of itself as the 'default'
Wait, is the claim here that SWPL types think of themselves as the default?
I don't know why I keep writing as if my irritation was primarily with the idea that the site was pointing out that the people who do this stuff are mainly white -- it's more the idea that being white normatively means doing this stuff. But I definitely take Teo's point in 77/81.
The site didn't bother me, but it just struck me as hilariously, but unselfconsciously, neurotic. Like the author had just discovered that the things he thought were not universal opinions, and it really sort-of bothered him.
The Ivy League entry linked in 61 is pretty funny.
So, I know you all hate watching videos, but what of the OP within this argument?
87 -- I refer you to comments 60, 4, and 5. The videos in the OP are not funny because they are cliched and the jokes have been done so often (though, video 2 is funnier than video 1, but if like me you've had the pleasure of seeing White Chicks the jokes are totally stolen). But I think there is theoretically a possibly funny "Shit Girls Say" that was original and perceptive.
The parts of the SWPL site that did seem modestly original and perceptive at the time were the funniest.
I never found the SWPL site funny, but the concept didn't bother me too much. When I first clicked over, I expected it to be more anthropologically humorously written because I've spent too much time around academics, probably.
I think teo's point in 81 is very good and it also seems to me that the site may have taken the safest approach to talking about white people in the US. if you really wanted to plumb the depths of American whiteness outside of the SWPL-ness, you'd be running a different kind of site, and things could get really ugly really fast.
85: That really never occurred to me, but makes a great deal of sense.
That Ivy League post makes me realize the site is more of an etiquette manual.
89: That's a good point. You'd have to put up posts like "White people love Led Zeppelin," and there's no closing that door once it's open.
87: There are bits of observational comedy in the first one that I liked. "Would you do me a huge favor?" Guys don't say that.
The second one struck a little too close to home, in that I've hear most of the really offensive ones myself, and they always annoy me.
89: Plenty of people have put up anthropological takes on various subgroups of white people; relatively few have put up anthropological takes of the people who fancy themselves anthropologists.
97: Neither of those seem to be claiming to be about all white people.
92: Somehow over the years I've read many comments along the lines of "This reminds me of Bourdieu." No one ever elaborates, so the only thing I know about Bourdieu is that lots of things remind people of him.
If we can use the term "white people" to mean "David Brooks's bourgeois bohemians™", I don't know why we can't use "girls" to mean "annoying girls".
Sadly, I read some Bourdieu or other somewhere along the line in grad school and thought it was just marvelous, and remember not a thing about it now, although the book is, I suspect, all marked up, on account of the awesome.
87: I find the OP's "Shit Girls Say" thing unfunny, without having watched the video, because I object to the term "girls" when it means women.
This Mark Grief essay (a defense of and introduction to his longer "What Was The Hipster" piece) is a decent introduction to Bourdieu.
The statistical results were striking. The things you prefer -- tastes that you like to think of as personal, unique, justified only by sensibility -- correspond tightly to defining measures of social class: your profession, your highest degree and your father's profession.
The power of Bourdieu's statistics was to show how rigid and arbitrary the local conformities were. In American terms, he was like an updater of Thorstein Veblen, who gave us the idea of "conspicuous consumption." College teachers and artists, unusual in believing that a beautiful photo could be made from a car crash, began to look conditioned to that taste, rather than sophisticated or deep. White-collar workers who defined themselves by their proclivity to eat only light foods -- as opposed to farmworkers, who weren't ashamed to treat themselves to "both cheese and a dessert" -- seemed not more refined, but merely more conventional.
White people like being offended and explaining at length why things aren't funny.
I know, right? White people are so defensive.
My reaction to the second video was "That's not very funny, no one actually says that. Oh, wait. It's still not funny, though.".
103: This is what struck me when I went to college (I was the first person in my family to go). There were long lists of what you were supposed to like and not like that everyone knew, but I didn't.
Although comment 60 is not an unreasonable response.
Agreed! And yet.
I was about to write, "Does everybody know that the author of SWPL is Pilipino?" but then I double checked and the truth is more complicated.
109: Huh. I can't get worked up about whether Valentin is being remunerated for his contribution to SWPL (the "what if he were white, huh, huh?" line of questioning in the linked post is just, like, uh, I don't know, what if he were?) But I'm almost relieved to know that the SWPL site is a collaborative effort.
||-not-really
We just went to that cocktail joint again and holy shit it is just fantastic.
|>-not-really
104: Which is totally funny! It's like that Alanis Morrissette song about irony whose supposed examples of irony are all incorrect, which is ironic.
You're going to be in LA, right? Make a list. Drago Centro, Hungry Cat, Varnish/Cole's, and Library Bar @ Hollywood Roosevelt off the top of my head.
Incidentally, since I've heard White People like correct grammar: the title of the post should be "Among the spawn of SWPL." "Spawns" is a verb.
Or change "spawns" to "scions" - white people would love that!
Jesus christ. Don't get me started about faux irony.
since I've heard White People like correct grammar
White people like correcting grammar. The journey is what counts, not the destination. And it totally ruins it when you people go and do it first.
75: *I mean, having white people in this group feel a little uncomfortable for being singled out as being white people is a good thing, right? In the way that slightly unsettling humor is funny because it home a slightly hidden truth? The group in question really is very heavily white, you know.
I'm just poking at you here, but I think you've entirely failed to understand why some white people get uncomfortable being singled out as being white. If someone points to a praiseworthy or even neutral quality of yours, and talks about how characteristically white it is, they're a huge racist. A non-ironic (I know it's hard to imagine, but they used to exist) "Mighty white of you" is racist praise from one white person to another white person for being white.
You're right that the mockery in SWPL is gentle and affectionate. Someone in the identified demographic who was smug about their standmixer and bicycle and Ivy League education could read it and go right on being smug -- there's nothing in the site that would make anyone unhappy about any of their harmless, pleasant qualities. Affectionately calling attention to a bunch of nice, even if slightly cliched, things about a demographic while calling them characteristically white? Weirdly close to praising people for their whiteness.
The 'white people' bit of it disturbs people, but not, I think, because it's identifying that particular demographic as particularly segregated -- IME it's not more than any other mostly white demographic. It creeps people out because it's really close to asking them to accept straight-up self-congratulation on how appealingly white they are. And I think it's fair for them to be creeped out, because that's legitimately creepy.
I don't think the writer is a serious racist, I think he just has a tin ear about this stuff -- he's bright enough to know he's disturbing people, but hasn't figured out what's bothering them. But I do think the disturbed reaction is a legitimate one: the disturbance isn't "Oooh, you noticed something embarrassing about me", it's "ooh, you're getting really close to something I'm going to have to publicly object to, and that's a bummer."
119: Totally, right? But we've got Obama and his predator drones to back us up now. An authority is a grammarian with an army and a navy.
117: Still not as irritating as people who misuse "begging the question," IMO.
123: The same friend to whom I just forwarded the Mitchell & Webb video carries a pile of these cards to present to offenders.
109: That's a helluva correction at the end of that post.
I maintain that "begging the question" is a useful concept with a terrible name, and it would be better for everyone if it just blended peacefully into "raising the question" and people referred to question-begging as circular argument.
This is a micro-minority position, since most people who have gone to the trouble of figuring out what "beg the question" properly means tend to defend its correct use. A friend of mine said I'm like "the priest that people actually go to."
124: ZOMG! I am totally printing me a sheet of those cards. I am not even kidding.
126: If more people who actually knew what it meant were with you, I might flip. I've always been annoyed that I can't make the correct meaning work literally at all, where the wrong meaning makes perfect sense.
But in the world as it is, it's a shibboleth, and I'm not misusing it in case people think I don't know better.
I'm a little bit sad that this site has languished, since he never got around to talking about nutritional yeast.
126.1: There's something to that, it's true. It's like how "honour'd . . . in the breach" meant in the Shakespearean usage "it would be more honourable not to observe this custom," but has subsequently come to mean "this custom is honoured more by lip-service than actual observance." There's something to be said for the 'mistaken' usage.
But I claim Snobbery Exemption. The people who misuse "begging the question" are very often trying to lay claim to intellectual prestige and precision of usage by invoking the phrase. No free rides, you fuckers. If you want the prestige, put in the work.
113: I've been to a couple of those before. And many other fancy cocktail places besides. I'm telling you, this one is special.
130.2: I worry whether claiming Snobbery Exemption is okay in some circumstances. "Deconstruction" is misused, god fucking damnit. I think I'll have to let that one go, though, even as I cringe (a film critic on the radio recently described Truffaut's Shoot the Pianist as a deconstruction of film noir, and said this was remarkable because it was decades before we ever started using that term "deconstructing.")
I have a hell of a lot more trouble over the increasing use of "that" for "who".
Let me tell you, people are fucking psyched to see a chick in a dress riding a bike around with a basket full of plants.
It's like spotting a woman laughing and eating salad, or holding her cup with two hands.
132: "Deconstruction" is misused, god fucking damnit.
A. Fucking. Men. And hallelujah to boot. Don't let it go, we've got to stick together on this one.
"That" for "who" I haven't noticed as much, and now I guess I'm going to try not to notice it.
134.2: Sorry about that. It's, um, everywhere.
135: It's all good. You alert me to these things, it's part of why I've always been in blog-love with you.
133: Oh, but I'd trade them all for just one woman struggling to drink water.
Or looking desperately for a place to pee.
It's like spotting a woman laughing and eating salad, or holding her cup with two hands.
Maybe I should bike around while laughing and eating salad!
Oh gosh. Back at you. You were so wrong about Rick Perry, by the way.
But you know, you really don't want to notice the "that" thing. Look at it this way: I've almost gotten over people beginning sentences with "So, ..."
Speaking of stock photos, though, I recently did OSHA and hospital-internal orientations online for a temp job, and they were both illustrated with hilarious stock photos. Why is there a stock photo of a guy in full surgical scrubs eating an ice cream cone?
Why is there a stock photo of a guy in full surgical scrubs eating an ice cream cone?
Rule 34..
The Snobbery Exemption is useful concept. I'm a passionate anti-prescriptivist, but misused "deconstruct" and "beg the question" belong to those who are trying but failing to impress. Maybe "reverse pretention Judo" is better than "Snobbery Exemption."
140.1: I'm so happy to have been wrong about Rick Perry, you don't even know. I want to shout it from the rooftops: "I was wrong! The world is a little less ugly than I imagined! Maybe they'll nominate Santorum, please, baby Jesus!"
142: I cannot imagine the photo shoot that led to that image. Surgery is Fun! How can we show this? Try full surgical scrubs and a balloon dachsund...no, that's not quite it...
The world is a little less ugly than I imagined!
His downfall started when he defended educating immigrants.
Or rather, when he defended giving in-state tuition benefits to undocumented residents. He unsurged because of the only humane policy mentioned by a Republican this election.
120
I'm just poking at you here, but I think you've entirely failed to understand why some white people get uncomfortable being singled out as being white. ...
It's not because they are embarrassed about being white?
I don't doubt that 120 is how LB personally reacts to the "White People" part of SWPL, but as a general explanation it strikes me as totally wrong on several levels.
148, 150: I did say "a little." That he could have foundered as a result of having said one or two actually sensible things is no surprise whatever, though I srongly suspect it's the "Oops" moment that truly did him in.
Oh noooo, Shearer is here! LB, you shouldn't have carried on like that: now look what you've done.
On the "reverse pretension Judo" front proffered in 144, it's a corker, innit: you can't exactly say, "Look, you silly, you're pretending to know what that means, but you don't." There's nothing for it but ...
Oh, wait. I just recalled that on New Year's Eve, a couple of fellow attendees were involved with an international Surrealism show going up in Harrisburg PA soon, and one of them said that everyone wrongly thinks that Dali is a Surrealist, but that's so, so wrong (he said scornfully). I said that I saw his point, and asked who he'd name as quintessential Surrealists. Both he and his girlfriend kind of floundered on that one, though they questioned one another and said a few times that the other one knew more about it. I felt badly.
a couple of fellow attendees were involved with an international Surrealism show going up in Harrisburg PA soon
You should probably just assume they meant they were joining the state legislature.
154.3: You shouldn't feel badly, that's funny. (If they'd read more poetry, they could have used Steve Venright as an out. Too bad for them.)
I remember encountering a guy once at Teh Local Pub who claimed to be a philosopher, and whose deep philosophical insight was that "It's all bunk." I took him at his word and proceeded to treat his every subsequent statement as bunk until he kicked out part of the patio fence in frustration. Maybe I should feel bad about that... but no.
This horse has gone from dead to beaten to zombie to reincarnated, but my pair of pennies: I didn't like SWPL b/c it often went on too long and lacked a certain conceptual tightness in its posts, which I think is a race-neutral opinion, but I also didn't like it as a non-white person (specifically, as a middle class South Asian person) b/c by using race as a proxy for class (or even race(s)+class) it a) continued the annoying B&W American dialogs about race (both serious and funny) that completely ignores the rest of us b) it incessantly fed the 'acting white' accusation that hurts both non-black whites and plenty of blacks too and c) it was completely lacking in precision. Every fucking thing was on that site. It was like playing mad libs with a personified dictionary afflicted with dysentery. This is not quite the same thing as my original, race-neutral complain, even though it's related. As a minority who spent much of my life as the only non-white person in various social situations, the SWGS-TGS deeply resonates. It could be qualified that it's not "shit ALL white girls say to black girls (or girls of other colors)' but it could also be qualified as 'shit ONLY white girls to say to colored girls. The only part makes it a lot more interesting and funny.
I didn't report quite fairly: the girlfriend did after a while name a handful of non-visual artists (chiefly Breton), and the conversation went on -- I observed that these were not visual or plastic arts folks, but writers, but this was an art show, right? And once we define Surrealism broadly, cross-genre, it becomes much more difficult to say who or what is or isn't Surrealist, such a vexed question, as I'm sure they knew.
I really wasn't making fun of them at all -- I was just a little surprised that a strong statement about who wasn't a Surrealist couldn't be met with an immediate list of at least a few visual artists who are. The boyfriend said Duchamp after a while, and we all smiled and passed the pipe shook hands.
do men not say, "could I ask you a huge favor?" cause I say the fuck out of that. general female self-deprecatingness? as in, it's presumptuous for me to ask you to do anything, so sorry in advance? or just irritating tic? similarly I always temper my requests to waitstaff by asking them if they could please get me x "when they get a chance"?
"Beg the question" in its original meaning is gone, man. It's like "emo". You and I can keep using it to mean bands that sound like Sunny Day Real Estate, but that is decidedly a minority usage.
Since "beg" is used in its non-intuitive technical philosophical jargon meaning of "assume", and "question" is used in its non-intuitive technical philosophical jargon meaning of "conclusion", just say "assume the conclusion".
Also, people who use it in the wrong way are most likely not trying to be pretentious and not trying to do anything at all besides convey the meaning "raise the question" with what they believe to be an idiomatic phrase that means "raise the question".
158.1: No excuse. They should at minimum have been able to come up with a Surrealist poet in that case.
160: do men not say, "could I ask you a huge favor?"
We do. Followed by, "It's my birthday, and I've never [X] . . . "
I didn't like SWPL b/c it often went on too long and lacked a certain conceptual tightness in its posts, which I think is a race-neutral opinion
This was certainly my opinion of it, yeah.
the annoying B&W American dialogs about race (both serious and funny) that completely ignores the rest of us
Yeah, this is why I think it only really makes sense if you restrict it to a context in which the racial and class divisions both overlap and map directly onto "poor black" (or other non-white, but in practice usually black) and "middle-class white" (with all the cultural signifiers we know and love). These days the main places where these conditions obtain are gentrifying urban neighborhoods, and if you look at SWPL as limited to that context it makes a lot more sense than if you look at it as a commentary on race relations more generally.
I spent the whole thread saying to myself, no one's going to mention that the first video is the same person who did "Shoes". Probably because it isn't. But in my rich visualization it was until the movie came out and ruined it for me.
157: continued the annoying B&W American dialogs about race (both serious and funny) that completely ignores the rest of us
They don't ignore the rest of you (or of us). Anyone who's not white is varying grades of the Other Thing, that's basically how fundamentally white supremacist societies work. Sorry.
Anyone who's not white is varying grades of the Other Thing, that's basically how fundamentally white supremacist societies work.
Yes, but they also get to decide who counts as White and who counts as Other. Black people are always Other, of course.
I will say that nature of some of this debate has come close to making me flip my view of the SWPL thingie.
166: Yes, but they also get to decide who counts as White and who counts as Other.
Yep. And if you have brown skin, trying to get counted as White is a mug's game. Doesn't matter what you were in the old country.
(I say this because it is apparently the case, among other follies, that there are South Asians in North America who appear to think it will matter to the White majority that their ancestors were Brahmins. It really doesn't.)
Sure. How do we know they aren't faking it?
153: I think the polling data contradicts this, but googling poll data is beyond me at this point int the evening.
157: it incessantly fed the 'acting white' accusation that hurts both non-black whites and plenty of blacks too
That thought has crossed my mind, yeah.
172: Although there is effectively no such thing as "non-black whites" (if you're nonwhite, you're nonwhite, deal), an oversimplistic interpretation of SWPL could certainly feed the ghettoizing "acting white" narrative. Fortunately, the oversimplistic interpretation isn't the necessary ones.
170: They call me "Kshatriya Jim."
I say this because it is apparently the case, among other follies, that there are South Asians in North America who appear to think it will matter to the White majority that their ancestors were Brahmins. It really doesn't.
Indeed, IIRC there was at least one nineteenth-century US court decision making this point explicitly.
This is all pretty tangential to what Ile was talking about, though.
My only response to the SWPL thing was to remember someone that said (famously?) something along the lines of, "Americans can be uncomfortable at times talking about race, but they'll still talk about it. Americans do not, full stop, feel comfortable talking about class."
This thread is making me self-conscious about my sunburn.
176: I actually think it's responsive to all three of her basic points. All of which I think are problematic, for the reason 177 highlights. Obsessively fine-grained discussion of identity politics functions mainly as a distraction.
Bah to another humorless SWPL discussion.
I damn near burst out laughing today at a jury trial when they announced the not guilty verdict.
The charge was drug and paraphernalia possession on the following. Myself and another guy are in an area looking for some kids doing graffiti and see a guy parked off near the river trail in a Honda. The other cop ran the plate as he rolls by and when I pull up to him as we can't find the kids we're looking for he says something like "holy shit that's a stolen car." We flip around and box this guy in with our cars and order him out at gunpoint. I'm on the passenger side and he looks up with a panicked look and starts rummaging around the passenger seat area. I can't see what the hell he's doing so I tell him he's about to get his head blown off and he puts his hands on the wheel. We pull him out of the car and notice he's got a small amount of fresh blood on his hands but no obvious cuts or anything. I look into the car and sitting on the passenger side floor next to the center divider is a spoon with residue and scorch marks, the rubber piece to tie his arm, and an uncapped syringe. Under a hand towel on the passenger seat is an empty plastic twist with residue and another plastic baggy with a decent amount of brown powder heroin. The cap to the syringe is found in the little pocket in the driver door armrest.
Seems damn near ironclad but man it sure can pay off to take it to trial. Juries are pulled from a serious pool of gullible.
At first I was mostly with Halford - I didn't think the site was racially problematic, as I could tell who it was really about despite the title; I didn't think it was trying to generalize.
But then I thought this: it takes characteristics of a swath of the upper-middle-class and describes them in detail, using the word "white people" about once per paragraph or more. Part of the message through the humor, maybe somehow part of the humor itself, is in making those characteristics the Platonic ideal of whiteness, as in the phrase "that's such a white thing to do." Whatever any given white person might be like in reality (which reality it does not dispute), this is what they really are; they have an honorary upper-middle-class badge.
And that might not be such a harmful thing if it were things already highly associated with whites, like Ivy League colleges, but the site in its thoroughness extends the idealization to a lot of much newer things that otherwise, hopefully, in the fullness of time, alevai, shouldn't have to gain that association, like gourmet sandwiches. It ends up reinforcing the interweaving of socioeconomic markers with race in an uncomfortably overt (if presumably unintentional) way.
Did all this get worse with age? I just pulled up the site to refresh my memory on what it's like, and found this:
Note: if you encounter a white person who is actually good at manual labor they are either some kind of performance artist, writing a book, or the host of a show on HGTV.
177: someone that said
{clears throat}
Off to bed!
To be honest gswift, that verdict sounds good. You failed to further fuck up someone's life.
Nothing for the stolen car?
We charged him but (I shit you not) the attorney who screened the packet at the DA's felt we couldn't prove he should have known it was stolen. Come on motherfucker, he's a lifelong criminal with priors for car theft! And the car's owner came to the scene and said she doesn't know this guy! Aaarrgh.
Seems damn near ironclad but man it sure can pay off to take it to trial. Juries are pulled from a serious pool of gullible.
Or nullificationists.
I'm in the middle of a trial practice course, and tonight at dinner one of the attorney-instructors told us about a trial he did as a public defender. After he cross-examined one of the prosecution's witnesses, his client leaned over and said to him, "You know, I'm actually starting to think I'm not guilty."
a lifelong criminal with priors for car theft
Can't convict a guy for that. Can't even get it into evidence, probably.
Oh, I wasn't thinking of the car theft when I wrote that. Still.
177: Actually, I think teo is exactly right in 176. My problem with SWPL is not that it implies that I'm other/non-white. I know that, and I don't need 'Lord Castock' to point that out to me. I live it every day. My problem with it is that it implies that I'm trying to be like white people b/c I happen to like some of the things certain middle class white people like even though my liking of those things has nothing to do with white people, and I don't like people implying that I'm trying to be white when I'm just being me--in fact, often when I'm being explicitly 'ethnic.' I don't really get where your invocation of castism comes from with respect to the points I made. SWPL *is* a distraction from class. That's exactly my problem with it.
(Sorry I started SWPL War II. I wasn't around for SWPL War I. Those who do not RTFA are doomed to repeat it.)
(And then I went to the opera for like ninety hours so I couldn't even really participate.)
You failed to further fuck up someone's life.
Yeah, weird how I might have an interest in locking up the guy who supports his habit by stealing cars and burglarizing houses. A couple weeks after he bailed out on this case we had a BOLO out for a male in a black SUV doing house burgs and taking bikes. Turns out it was the same guy. A couple guys on the east beat cornered him in a dead end after he fled in that SUV and then chased him through yards on foot. One of the stolen bikes from the burglaries was still in the car.
Can't convict a guy for that. Can't even get it into evidence, probably.
Sure. But it's a reason to put some effort in making the charge stick.
This is something like SWPL War LXVIII or something. Bon Jovi is playing the halftime show.
192: And then I went to the opera for like ninety hours
Stuff People Who Like Opera Like.
I was lurking for SWPL War I and I'm pretty sure this was more like a half-hearted reenactment where people couldn't be bothered to find fake uniforms from the right historical period than a whole second conflict.
190: My problem with SWPL is not that it implies that I'm other/non-white. I know that, and I don't need 'Lord Castock' to point that out to me.
Well, if you don't, then I'm confused as to where the "non-black whites" horseshit would be coming from, but leaving that aside:
My problem with it is that it implies that I'm trying to be like white people b/c I happen to like some of the things certain middle class white people like
It's skewering the (perceived by the authors) absurdities of a currently largely-Caucasian Yuppie class. Beyond that it really doesn't necessarily "imply" much of anything, unless you're willing to take the "White People" categorization absolutely literally, which is possible but not necessary. And is arguably contra-indicated by much of the site's actual subject matter.
Basically I don't think SWPL is serious enough to be worth serious discussion, and that it's pretty adequately framed as not being serious enough to warrant it.
It's not like I'm heavily invested in a drug possession charge. But jesus people need to actually understand reasonable doubt so everyone can't just OJ their way out of stuff.
193, 195: Yeah, sorry about that. I'm not a fan of the criminal justice system, but complaining when it doesn't hit legitimate targets I don't mind so much.
unless you're willing to take the "White People" categorization absolutely literally, which is possible but not necessary
But apparently it's necessary for the humor.
Stuff People Who Like Opera Like
Oh I like opera and as it turned out this was just fucking tedious. And it was baroque so it was da capo tedium.
Boring thing.
Different boring thing.
Slightly ornamented boring thing.
Bon Jovi joke in 194 made me laugh in the out-loud manner.
201: No it isn't. Perfectly possible to take it non-literally and still laugh.
I do think there's some space between "absolutely literal" and "jocularly fantastic" that SWPL occupies.
gswift, maybe your DA should charge them for the real reason they should be off the street, rather than use the drug war as a convenience tool.
Oh, and everyone make sure to store the serial numbers to your laptops, bikes, etc. in an email account or something so that they can be entered on NCIC as stolen property. Dude had three or four laptops in that car and we couldn't link any of them to specific cases.
Oh. the non-black white horseshit comes from the fact that I can't type worth shit and I meant to write
non-black non-white.
I now see where the fuck your hostility is coming from. My bad.
But anyway, the classic SWPL thread that pisses me off is the vegetarian post. I'm a vegetarian. I've been one my whole life.I spent the walking parts of the first eight years of my life getting beaten up about it by children and undermined about it by adults in lily white Colorado, so I strongly associate my being vegetarian with pride in my ethnic, cultural, and religious identity and the ability to tolerate being Othered and to not be cowed into trying to 'act white.' I read something like the vegetarian post, and there's zero room in the joke for someone like me. You're either an uptight, pretentious white vegetarian or guilty white meat eater or you're a sensible humorous nonwhite person who has the sense to eat meat. The idea that you could be a nonpretentious default vegetarian, or that there are plenty of nonwhite vegetarians who are not just exotic beasts in a far away land but are here and read the media here, is completely inconceivable in the world of the joke. Big fucking deal but that's how it always is, and it's annoying.
gswift, maybe your DA should charge them for the real reason they should be off the street, rather than use the drug war as a convenience tool.
The drug charges are often useful in that it makes them eligible for drug court.
The drug charges are often useful in that it makes them eligible for drug court.
OK - who decides?
The drug charges are often useful in that it makes them eligible for drug court.
I've often wondered about this. It seems to me, in principle, that drug court could be awesome and could be a way to use the drug war and the criminal justice system to actually rehabilitate people with state funds and make their punishments for drug-related crimes lenient. And yet. .that doesn't seem to be the net result over the years. Does drug court vary by state? Is there some systematic problem with it? I've come to have a hard time wading through drug-war related writing b/c it so often seems to swing wildly between 'drugs aren't a problem at all! legalize everything always!' and 'lock em up and throw away the key' to paraphrase an aquaintance on FB.
Because if all the jury decides is guilty/not guilty without knowledge of whether they'll get help or be thrown in jail, then nullification would still be entirely reasonable.
208: Upper middle class white people.
205: I'm pretty sure that if someone stole my laptop, I would have to call my City Councilmember to get the MPD to do anything other than give me a "blue card".
154: everyone wrongly thinks that Dali is a Surrealist, but that's so, so wrong
This, I do not get. Dali was a Surrealist, and Breton excommunicated him, which is pretty much the best way to tell who was and wasn't a Surrealist. He certainly wasn't the best Surrealist, but you can't reasonably argue that he was not part of the movement.
I think the people having the surrealism conversation were having a misplaced reaction to the conversational over-generalization of "surreal" to mean anything strange or absurd. Dali was a surrealist.
On another topic altogether, it should go without saying there is a "shit gay guys say" and even a "stuff southern gay guys say." They're both slightly annoying, slightly funny. The latter includes the Designing Women "the night the lights went out in Georgia" monologue, which is amusingly specific.
It was a unanimous not guilty, they're not nullificationists.
It seems to me, in principle, that drug court could be awesome
These are the numbers our state claims from a 2001 eval. IIRC Will is a fan so I imagine we're not the only state getting good results.
Within 18 months of graduation, 39.2% of Drug Court participants had a new arrest for any type or level of offense, while 78.0% of the control group had a new arrest...Within 18 months of graduation, only 15.4% of Drug Court participants had a new arrest for a drug related offense, 64.0% of the control group had a new arrest for a drug related offense
Probably too late, but The Official Preppy Handbook is $25 used.
I would have to call my City Councilmember to get the MPD to do anything other than give me a "blue card".
Heh, our "blue cards" are double sided in English and Spanish with phone numbers and info about various resources for victims of domestic violence.
I told about the time our window got busted in at work and I had to call the cops, right? They actually showed up within 5 or 6 minutes of my call, which was shocking. When the other guy in my office had come in, there was shattered glass all over his chair, desk and surrounding area. So he'd swept most of it up, and put it in the garbage can by his desk. The cops get there, we take them up to the office, and the first thing they say is "are you sure this was a break in? Because usually there would be broken glass on the inside." Oh, gee, thanks, that would have never occurred to me. Anyhow, that's the only blue card I've ever gotten. I don't think it had much more than the general information lines printed on it.
206: But anyway, the classic SWPL thread that pisses me off is the vegetarian post.
Yeah, okay, I completely understand that.
(Sorry about the previous. The typo possibility should obviously have occurred to me. My bad.)
Lord C is right about the noteworthiness of SWPL. And, you know, "white people" as featured is not a category bounded by class and geography, but also by age. They're talking about a pretty narrow segment there.
But to the extent people in any segment think their shopping preferences (for whatever class of item, be it food, beer, music, etc) make them special snowflakes, they certainly deserve to be skewered: do you really think the store carries items on the shelf (actual or virtual) that no one but the coolest of the cool would know to buy?
The joke is completely told in half a dozen entries, though.
Here's a swpl experience for you, though: the wife went up to the wildlife refuge on our nearby Native reservation this afternoon to photograph some birds, and ended up with some shots of Amish girls playing pond hockey on a large frozen lake.
wait, gswift, if you're still here, how did he skate on the car theft thing? he's in a stolen car, the owner says she didn't lend it to him? it's inadmissible because you only knew it was stolen because you ran the plates? that can be right or how the fuck would you ever know a car was stolen? I'm confused. and surely you were right to pull him out and look if it seemed as though it might be someone else's blood in the car.
that the jury said: "fuck it, walk" on the drug charges is something I wholeheartedly approve of. sorry gswift. you'll nail him on some real theft charges later, OK? fuck drug charges. god, makes you want to never plead out to anything not commit crimes.
to the second video in the OP, I like "it feels like...cheetos."
the wife went up to the wildlife refuge on our nearby Native reservation this afternoon to photograph some birds, and ended up with some shots of Amish girls playing pond hockey on a large frozen lake.
A successful outing, then.
I say this because it is apparently the case, among other follies, that there are South Asians in North America who appear to think it will matter to the White majority that their ancestors were Brahmins
Anecdatally, high-caste Indians are massively, massively over-represented in online discussions about the hereditability of IQ.
it's inadmissible because you only knew it was stolen because you ran the plates? that can be right or how the fuck would you ever know a car was stolen? I'm confused.
Plates are public and can be run at any time for no reason. Supposedly the screening attorney didn't think we'd be able to prove he knew or should have known the car's stolen. Like an idiot I thought him not having a credible story as to how he came by the vehicle and the owner disavowing him would be enough.
that the jury said: "fuck it, walk" on the drug charges is something I wholeheartedly approve of
In isolation I don't really care about drug possession charges. But this guy needs to be either in rehab or behind bars and to be honest I'm not that picky about how it happens.
I finally watched the two videos in the OP. They were both funnier than I was expecting from heebie's reaction.
226: "Stuff R/azib K/han likes": interesting speculation about anthropology, paleontology, evolution, genetics, blindingly obvious bursts of Galtonian scientific-racism, da capo.
As for SWPL, I ignored it for ages, clicked over, found it was moaning about people who think the US needs national healthcare...*plonk*. Black People Love Us! was much funnier.
similarly I always temper my requests to waitstaff by asking them if they could please get me x "when they get a chance"?
I say this a lot, but I say it because I mean it. Wait staff are overworked and underpaid and it isn't going to change my life if I get my second cup of coffee in five minutes or ten. I don't say, frex, "Excuse me, the table cloth is on fire, could you bring an extiguisher when you have a minute."
R/azib K/han, from his name, is a non-practicing Muslim, who ought to be inoculated against that sort of thing (but obviously isn't), rather than a Brahmin.
Like an idiot I thought him not having a credible story as to how he came by the vehicle and the owner disavowing him would be enough.
I just...this seems like some wacky nullification "fuck you, the whole system" from the jury. I mean, what now? there's no reasonable doubt there unless people are deeply, deeply confused about what "reasonable" means, and think it means "barely conceivable, in some possible world other than our own actually existing one."
agreed that it sounds like this guy needs to be off he streets somehow, I just like to hear about people walking on some bullshit possession charges because I'm on "team robbers" for cops and robbers like that. honestly, you're the only cop I like. well, I like drama club merc but it was genuinely hard for me to become friends him when I first met him, and he was an actual goverment-working-for super-cop. when we were both young, he was the one buying drugs from people and then busting them. bastard narc!! of course, now I realize it was a much better idea to have someone ordering him around.
230: I mean it too! I have been a waitress. same with the nurses at the hospital just now; "I'd like some more painkillers but I understand you have to talk to the doctor/follow the orders on the chart/whatever." no point in being an asshole to people helping you out, whether it's their job or not.
233. Didn't suppose you didn't mean it, but my point was that it isn't "general female self-deprecatingness" as you suggested, it's having a fucking clue. I know there are people who like to come the big I am and demand everything yesterday, but people like that are first against the wall come the revolution.
If I have to complain, I always ask to speak to a manager - they're paid for it - and try to frame the complaint in terms of looking at their systems rather than an individual's shortcomings.
Are you still in hospital? Any better?
discharged yesterday! still in quite a bit of pain but much improved and strength returning. hm, too active-sounding, rather: all-comsuming lassitude easing up a little. somehow the weeks-long infection triggered a sort of cascade of migraines and now they're just stuck in a bad loop. I'm going to see a neurologist soon. brain is fine though, allegedly, and para-typhoid fever is vanquished by the fourth course of antibiotics.
re: 226/229
Heh. Yes, definitely true.
In fact, there's a faint whiff of some kind of Galtonian scientific racism about quite a few anthropology blogs I read. You think, 'ah yes, this is all really interesting. Y-chromosome haplogroups, and migration over time. Fascinating stuff. But secretly, I know you think one or more of these groups is _better_'.
Not trying to be a jerk on the jury thing, gswift, but I know people who've been on juries who have acquitted in similar cases (if I've got it straight, only the drug charge went to the jury, the DA gave up on the car theft?) and it was about a generalized low opinion of police credibility. If the story was "We pulled this guy over, and then who knew, there were drugs in plain sight in the car" and it's all police testimony (and easily supplied physical evidence), the jury might have been thinking "Pull the other one." Not nullification, but systematic doubt of drug possession arrests as likely to have been faked by the police.
I don't know what you do about this, but at least in NY, it's a public perception problem for the cops. If you don't have a victim saying that a crime was actually committed, there's not a lot of faith in a purely police-supported case.
Today is the day Val and Alex's parent gets sentenced. Their family social worker is insisting on an inpatient treatment program (or maybe just a day program? Unclear) regardless of what the sentence is. I'm hoping for time served and maybe some kind of probation. Seriously, being in jail for two months for missing a court date seems sufficient, right? Surely that county could be spending its incarceration money on someone more deserving. I just hope this means the kids will see this parent this weekend, since supervised visits are still allowed.
209: This American Life (a certified Thing White People Like) did a great episode about drug court last year: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/430/very-tough-love
It mostly focuses on one dysfunctional court in Georgia, but cites some statistics along the way. There's a lot of variation state by state and, apparently, judge by judge.
233, 234: Hmm. I also say it because I mean it, and I think the default assumption (when I'm paying for service) should be that when I ask for something I want it NOW. So if I don't, I say so.
214: What's impressive is that even the group that entered but did not successfully graduate drug court had a lower recidivism rate.
241.2: that judge, happily, just resigned. Damn she sounded horrifying. She may face criminal charges.
Not nullification, but systematic doubt of drug possession arrests as likely to have been faked by the police.
That's what's killing me, I don't think they had that kind of doubt. I think they genuinely got together and agreed that yeah, it's not his car and and no one actually saw the stuff physically in his hand or anything. So, you know, reasonable doubt!
240: I hope it goes OK for them thorn. 2 months sounds kind of fucking harsh, actually, though I understand it's part of demonstrating increasing competence at life that you actually show up to court dates. I'm wishing them, and you, and val and alex the best. situation generally with lee and the kids improved or...? you should know the unfoggedtariat is concerned about you. I know this because the lurkers support me in email facebook messages.
245, 247: D'uh. Jury of his peers.
Halford linked this over at EOTAW, and I assume he's linked it here at some point. But it's relevant to a couple of the topics here, and unlike some web sites that purport to discuss race, it's actually pretty funny.
I would happily nullify on any non-violent drug charge. I also think the NYPD has earned the low esteem in which it's held in many parts of the city.
214, 243: Why is that impressive? Selection bias abounds, and there's no comparison to a reasonable control like no court at all.
Whoops, they do say similar defendants. Still, outperforming the normal penal system is not impressive, I think.
I was wondering about jury duty again yesterday evening: Is it possible that I'm getting pre-filtered out because of my misdemeanor plea and my vacated felony? There are totally different methods state-by-state for finding jurors, right? I've been registered to vote for a whole 10 years now, and not a single jury duty letter. Hmph.
If I am eligible to be called and do get called, I'm still on the fence about what I would do. Help out my criminal brethren by pushing a nullification line on any jury I was called for, or get filtered out initially by standing on principal and talking about my political beliefs and antipathy towards the justice system? It's a conundrum. I can't remember hearing about any other anarchists I know ever getting called.
Also, I'm on the fence about caucusing too. As you all may remember, I dived into DFL politics in 2010, but the precinct chair fellow and I totally flaked on doing anything about it, and now I'm leaning towards entryism to the Republican party as a more useful tactic. The whole thing was so fucking tedious anyway.
253: I went for 20 years without being called and then was called 2 or 3 times in 10 years. Maybe chance, or maybe because I moved from Portland's most leftwing neighborhood to an upper middle class neighborhood.
253.1: I've been called once in 22 years of eligibility.
253.2: You'll have almost no chance to talk about your political beliefs or antipathy toward the system. They ask yes/no questions so far as is possible.
256.2: So I never even get to say that I've been a member of an organization which supports the violent overthrow of the US government? That's no fun.
But this guy needs to be either in rehab or behind bars and to be honest I'm not that picky about how it happens.
And that right there is what I have a problem with. When a huge part of the population is guilty of picayune crimes, we rely heavily on the judgment and good will of the police/prosecutors, rather than juries. I realize you're trying to do good in the context of the system, and a conviction would have been a net good for society at least on the margin, but this particular line of thought (drug charges as instrumental to getting someone off the streets for another reason) seems the exact kind of thing that slippery slopes are made out of.
They'd probably just ask to subscribe to your newsletter.
259 to 257. 258 is very reasonable.
Twice in 35 years, one of which was in a state I no longer lived in (but hadn't gotten around to changing registration). And the other time, the case settled before they even had us go to the courtroom.
From the other side, I'll say I find the whole voir dire process pretty exasperating. Not that easy to write the questions, or to interpret answers and body language. High stakes guessing, and you get like almost no time to do it.
It'll surprise exactly no one to learn that I really really don't like nullification. (Having surely said so before). It's far more likely to be used on behalf of the powerful than the powerless, and guess what juror, you just might not have enough information to know why Al Capone is being charged with tax evasion, or how little your exasperation with your own tax foibles matters to the rest of society.
Here, the slippery slope slopes upward.
256, 257: I saw someone talk himself off a jury by talking about nullification and the drug war (I was waiting to be called in the next panel). And you know, rah rah rah, but he wasn't on the jury, and so he couldn't act on his principles. I'd be truthful but non-expansive, and figure that you can do more good on a jury than off.
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Jesus Christ pro se lawyers are annoying as shit.
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263: Did he get time to explain his views before being bounced?
263: That's been my anarchist lawyer friend's advice. Not that I know only one anarchist lawyer, just that I'm really only close friends with one of the anarchist lawyers I know.
258 -- Sure, but I think the slope slips more steeply in the other direction. A juror promises to follow the instructions. And one thing they will get asked in voir dire is whether they can put aside their personal views and follow the instructions. The information a juror is going to be given about a situation is limited on the specific basis of what the instructions are going to be. This is a really big deal.
I cannot endorse the notion of potential jurors lying in voir dire, or when they take their oath at the close of the case.
264: Did he forget to mention the Magna Carta?
So can you bring novels and MP3 players when you're waiting around at the courthouse? 'Cause then it would not be so bad.
I just wouldn't want to get a contempt charge for being anti-cop like that one person a few years back. Although, holy shit, if I did, it would be a huge cause celebre around here, given how solid my anarchist bona fides are.
269: NY you can. Free WiFi at the courthouses.
258 gets it right. Also, it's been fascinating (occasionally troubling, sure, but fascinating) to observe (what I perceive as) the evolution in gswift's views. "These are tools to help me, and I'm trying to do good" leads to a very different outcome from "these are tools that are available to X class of people, whose motives are not necessarily always clear but who have a lot of sanctioned authority to dramatically affect people's lives".
267: What does 258 have to do with nullification or putting aside personal views? The issue of prosecutorial discretion important and separate.
I've said this before and I'll say it again, but a legalistic view of police/law enforcement that sees the job of the police as mechanically enforcing violations of specific laws, as opposed to the police using the criminal law as a tool for maintaining a minimum of social order, is a fundamental and deep misunderstanding about what police work is and always has been. It helps if you learn that modern police forces were originally crowd control units with little if any connection to the criminal prosecution system. The point of a police force is prevention of bad behavior as much as it is punishment for actual crimes -- on this point folks like Natlio have the better understanding, although I think they deeply underestimate how necessary this role is to a well functioning society, especially in poor neighborhoods. Discretion is a necessary part of police work, and IMO should be a greater part of it.
I've been called once in 22 years of eligibility.
Once in 25 here, and then we didn't even have to show up.
A juror promises to follow the instructions.
What happens when those instructions are self-evidently crap, contradicting previous instructions or something? Is the juror meant to think, "Oh well, it'll all be overturned on appeal" and just forget it or what?
272 -- I don't disagree that prosecutorial discretion is a huge deal. People should pay close attention when voting for county attorney and the like, and encourage people who will be good at that kind of thing to run for office.
Not a very satisfying answer, but the instructions and jurors oath are for the protection of defendants as a class, and should not be compromised, where the problem lies in the other branches.
People should pay close attention when voting for county attorney and the like,
There's not a single jurisdiction where that has ever happened, though.
I've been called once in 22 years of eligibility.
3 times in 10 years. Served as an alternate once. Once successfully begged a judge to release me from serving on a 20+defendant, violent conspiracy case that would have taken at least 6 weeks. I've moved around a bit and haven't been called in over four years.
275 -- Ask a well worded question that points out the inconsistency.
277 -- I've lived places where these races are hotly contested.
273: although I think they deeply underestimate how necessary this role is to a well functioning society, especially in poor neighborhoods
I would rephrase this as "they disagree with the necessity of maintaining a well-functioning society that includes poor neighborhoods". I mean, if there's one thing that virtually all anarchists, even the rightwing anarcho-capitalists, can agree on, its that the security forces are both a necessary and sufficient condition of maintaining the socio-economic status quo. We're under no illusions about the role that the police play in reproducing social relations and the mode of production. They are absolutely essential to the current system. We envision a world in which the system has been changed on so fundamental a level that there is no need for a body to enforce those relationships through violence. Historically, the arguments against this have tended to fall into the categories "that's not possible" or "that's nod desirable", but we have many counter-arguments which we have held forth on at length in many different media.
There are organizations working to change the drug laws. I suppose one might consider supporting one or more of them.
268. I wish that would pass. Legislators could have so much fun:
"Mr Speaker, the bill before you is to legalise marriage between two men and between two women. I refer the house to Clause 6 of Magna Carta, which stipulates: "Heirs may be given in marriage, but not to someone of lower social standing. Before a marriage takes place, it shall be' made known to the heir's next-of-kin." Now it is clear from Clause 8 of the charter that the Barons who drafted it intended it to be understood that women were not the social equals of men. The bill before us provides therefore that if any man has any expectation of testamentary gain from any source whatsoever, he shall not marry a woman; however, he may be given in marriage..."
modern police forces were originally crowd control units with little if any connection to the criminal prosecution system
This is interesting. Can you recommend anyone who writes about it, web or print?
It helps if you learn that modern police forces were originally crowd control units with little if any connection to the criminal prosecution system.
I'm pretty sure this is 100% wrong, because surely the original professional police force was the Bow Street Runners, who were employed and paid by Bow Street Magistrates' Court?
277: Hennepin County has had the same DA for my entire adult life.
The recently republished autobiography of Joseph "Yellow Kid" Weil explains how, in late 19th century Chicago, jurors were rounded up from saloons by court bailiffs, and told to vote in favor of whichever party had most sufficiently bribed the magistrate. Not the worst system, if you can trust people you bribe to stay bribed.
I agree with 273 as the logic by which we give police great discretion out in the field. The problem of extending a similar discretion to who gets prosecuted, with the laws as they currently exist, should be self-evident. (Incidentally, don't like arguments from precedent here; who says we should act in accordance with what 19C English politicians decided?)
I think nulliication can and should coexist with limiting consideration to the facts of the case. Maybe this would be more feasible if any instructions on the subject were allowed.
I'm pretty sure this is 100% wrong, because surely the original professional police force was the Bow Street Runners, who were employed and paid by Bow Street Magistrates' Court?
ITYFIABMCTT. The Bow Street runners were the first professional police force in the Anglosphere, and Fielding saw them explicitly as thief takers, but the Gendarmerie in France was always pretty much a paramilitary crowd control outfit, as also the Carabinieri, Guardia Civil, etc. Intermediate cases would include Australia, where the first police force was recruited from the Met, but saw a lot more action putting down civil unrest once it got there.
289: I agree with Minivet again, at least as for the first sentence.
I found the SWPL site amusing, but it's obviously about class and not race, so the title was odd. In fact, I always thought the combination of the title and tone of the postings reflected a bit of weird racial self-hatred.
The point of a police force is prevention of bad behavior as much as it is punishment for actual crimes...they deeply underestimate how necessary this role is to a well functioning society, especially in poor neighborhoods.
There are a lot of social mechanisms for preventing bad behavior that do not require violence, coercion, and confinement that is so central to police work. Put another way, police work is only a tiny fraction of the human work that is one way or another devoted to "preventing bad behavior" but outside of the military it is the *only* form of work where large amounts of violence and coercion are seen as legitimate and central. (Parents are still permitted some degree of independent physical coercion, but even that is questioned). So you should start not with some abstract need for 'preventing bad behavior' but with the question of under what circumstances and for whom violence is really needed to control behavior, and also what effect the regular use of violence and coercion might have on those entrusted with the responsbility of using it.
I guess I see the whole question of policing as cyclical rather than linear. First you have a night watch, and their main job is to thump anybody whose out at night for no good reason, unless that person is too wealthy or powerful or has too many of their own guards to be thumpable. Then you get concerned citizens demanding more professionalism and accountability, which cuts down on the thumping somewhat. But then the pro-thumpification forces complain that bad people aren't getting thumped often enough, and that the watch should have more discretion to thump as it sees fit, and then the whole cycle repeats itself, ad thumpium.
Prior to establishment of the modern police force, law and order was maintained at parish or ward level by beadles and the watch, who were hired and maintained by whatever the then-equivalent of the local parish council would be. There's a nice description in P.D.James's "The Pear Tree and the Maul", about official attempts to investigate the Ratcliffe Highway murders in dockland London in 1811 -- who was in charge (basically no one) and who got what done and how.
I guess I see the whole question of policing as cyclical rather than linear.
Cycle-riding cops got two of my friends (on separate occasions) for peeing in the alley. It's a very quiet way to move and nobody expects it.
286, 290 -- 290 gets it right, particularly in the US context. But the Bow Street Runners are illustrative of the difference -- they were paid "thief catchers" (much like the old system) who happened to be paid by the magistrates court -- that is, a criminal case would arise and the thief catchers would be paid to run out and catch the thief, which was basically how criminal work had always been done before modern police. The point of the modern police force, including in England, was to provide a permanent presence to discourage crime and enforce breaches of public order -- the Metropolitan Police Act was designed to, and specifically authorized, the new cops to investigate and discourage vaguely defined disorderly conduct. In the US, the creation of police departments was even more closely linked to riot control.
297: Was that because sheriffs were already set up to serve the courts?
There have been a few pretty good mystery novel series about Bow Street Runners. One would think them a natural for BBC series but I don't know of one.
I agree w/289 to the extent that police and prosecutorial discretion are very distinct and need to be thought of separately. In reality, though, in the US any realistic attempt to limit prosecutorial discretion would do so in favor of tougher enforcement.
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Stuff you don't have in your state:* Groupon deals for a
10-hour concealed handgun license course. Regularly $300, now $149!
*gswift and CharleyCarp not included.
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$150?!? And then you have to pay for the gun, too?! What bullshit! How are poor people supposed to defend themselves from unwanted government handouts?
301: I don't need a course to get a concealed carry permit.
300: Fuck realism, be the change, etc., but certainly getting rid of at least possession laws would go much farther to fixing the problem, and in a much more targeted and technically implementable way.
Apparently, I only need $20 and a clean record.
Last time I was in Virginia I was eating at one of those suburban inexpensive buffet-type places and saw two people proudly wearing large handguns on their belt. (Not cops, not concealed). White, male, in their 50s or 60s, pretty fat. Maybe this is my liberal prejduice, but it felt like advertising a private pathology...no, I am not fully comfortable in public without prominently displaying that I have a ready means for killing people.
294: Speaking of the cyclical nature of guard labor, it struck me recently, that I've pretty much come to view that as the correct categorization of middle management in most organizations, which does hearken back to the days of management by threat-of-thumpification.
It turns out that I also need two references and I can't use relatives. That might be trickier.
308: I'll vouch for your behavior in this venue if you think it would help.
Me too, but they'd probably think it's suspicious that I don't know your real name.
I think I'll just remain under-armed in public. I still have my loaded cane.
306: Not that this would apply to a buffet, but when hunting or target shooting I was always told to keep the guns in the open. They were long guns, so they couldn't have been concealed on my person, but even the car you weren't to cover them with anything but a gun case. If you didn't have a permit (and nobody I ever heard of did back then) and you were stopped with the gun hidden, you were committing a crime. I remember working a drive-thru when I was in school and giving a burger to a guy who had has car loaded up like he was moving. His revolver was on top of everything (cylinder open and empty), presumably for the same reason.
We should have an open carry Unfogged meetup. Perhaps in Texas.
302: Forget concealed handguns. Brandishing rifles (or shotguns or whatever it was they brandished) Black Panther-style might be more effective anyway. Maybe that's what Newt has in mind:
"I will go to the NAACP convention, and explain to the African-American community why they should demand paychecks instead of food stamps," said Gingrich.
287 -- That sounds like a great project for one of your anarchist lawyer friends. Old out of touch servant of the 1% meets young person with lots of community backing in race that is not traditionally heavily funded or TV dependent. Even if your friend does not prevail, the conversation is changed.
I had noticed that Newt Gingrich has started working the words "food stamps" into every public appearance.
240: I think two months seems like a lot to me, but I suspect there were vacations and whatnot since this covered Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year and that the timeline would have been shorter another time of year. I'm really hoping it's not something that leaves the parents with even more debts to the system to pay off. The other parent's parole-related program requires consistent payment or you can't graduate to the next level. And yes of course I understand why all this stuff is in place, but from outside at least both parents' cases seem entirely like ones where the people they were hurting were themselves and if they've stopped that, maybe the system should stop piling on pain on top of that.
Lee is doing better, has only had one really bad and grumpy day, though I'm also back to doing basically all the childcare for all three to minimize her interactions. She's being appreciative or me, at least. Having the kids on every-weekend visitation until they go back home should help her a lot. My brain is being destroyed because between about midnight and five am, one kid or another wakes up and yells for me every half hour or so. I don't have any good solutions for this one, as kids who can't handle feeling tangled in blankets but insist on throwng their blankets all over the place are just going to end up wanting help. Lee got up once last night, which was nice, but since I can't sleep through the yelling like she can it doesn't really help if I don't have to go to the other bedrooms.
Mara just had her four-year exam and is doing so well, though still not a fan of blood draws or shots. She doesn't seem to hold it against me at all that I help restrain her, and she tried at least a few times to do some deep breathing as I was suggesting. She's grown four inches and gained seven pounds in her fifteen months with us, leaving her 95th percentile for height and weight. (She and Val are the same height, but Val's eighteen months older, so 75th for height and 15th for weight, which means she can still wear some of Mara's hand-me-downs. Alex, at 4, fits best in clothes for two-year-olds and weighs 2/3 of what Mara, six weeks younger, does.)
If wikipedia is correctly, apparently you need a permit to move a gun to or from a house without breaking PA law. Which suggests that I'm a criminal or guns magically appear in my house.
289 -- I don't think explicitly telling jurors that any one of them can derail the prosecution of a someone accused of beating up a transgendered anarchist if the juror thinks s/he had it coming is a step forward.
"I will go to the NAACP convention, and explain to the African-American community why they should demand paychecks instead of food stamps," said Gingrich.
And yet, when you unionize to demand decent paychecks, Gingrich gets mad at you, too. You just can't win with some people.
To be fair, he said "demand paychecks" not "demand decent paychecks." He's perfectly consistent if he's going to go to the NAACP convention and demand that they take poorly paid jobs.
314: Has he clarified his janitor statements? Maybe Mara can start getting a paycheck when her WIC benefits run out.
317: Thorn, your ability to hang in there with such good grace continues to be impressive. Me, I want to smack Lee upside the head.
I've told this story before on unfogged but the one time I was on a jury I advocated for acquittal, which ended up being the verdict, but have changed my mind in retrospect and feel like I should have pushed for conviction. I still think it was enough of a gray area that I don't feel too badly about it.
In that case there was a fight at a party (at which everybody had been drinking for several hours prior to the fight) which ended with the defendant, who did not start the fight. stabbing somebody else with a kitchen knife.
The exact reasoning doesn't matter but I remember thinking, regarding reasonable doubt, that I was 100% sure that what he did was stupid and a mistake in judgement and that I thought that there was maybe a 60-70% chance that if I knew all the details with certainty I would support conviction, but I decided that, in my mind, wasn't enough to count as "beyond a reasonable doubt."
Part of my reasoning was a general feeling that, all else being equal, I'd rather not be responsible for somebody having a felony conviction on their record.
But, relevant to this conversation, I think I part of why I ended up leaning more heavily on that bias than I would with the benefit of hindsight is that I'd never been a juror before and it felt like having to make a high stakes judgement without having a lot of time to weigh the possible consequences (and without being able to sound out my friends on the subject).
Overall my experience was a positive one and made me think more favorably about the jury system, but, like anything, it would be easier to do the job after having done it once before.
301: I was just offered a cheaper concealed-carry class on LivingSocial a few weeks ago. And the bus that goes by my house goes straight to the gun shop/shooting range. I'm pretty sure you're not allowed to bring any guns on the bus if you don't have a concealed carry permit though. I believe in Maine open carry has always been legal, but I haven't checked the laws recently, so it might have changed.
315: It would be tough. He's the son of a former governor, he's very well connected to all levels of the DFL, and he's rarely done anything to arouse the ire of regular folx. His staff like him a lot too. Still, an acquaintance of mine got over 20% of the vote running as a Green against the most entrenched and untouchable member of the City Council, so you never can tell.
So do I, Sir Kraab, but it wouldn't do any good. I got very close on her cranky day when she said "We don't have any quality of life!" but I know she's working on doing better. And she's doing a good job conncting with both birth families, just not so great with the parental role. I only have to manage three for another month or so, so I can do it.
319: Right, but a lot of jurors would do that anyway.
326: I'm glad to hear that Lee is helping with the birth families and I know I don't understand the full complexity of her emotional struggles around all of this. I'm just glad relief for you is in sight.
327 -- Exactly. Too many. And this changes by changing the culture. But the current instructions and oath also empower those arguing for conviction in the jury room to tell the asshole that he can't use that as a basis for acquittal.
Some regret that I wasn't more of a shit-stirrer on my grand jury but I don't really think it would have made a diff. The two people I did sidle up to about nullification sort of nodded and went back to indicting every single ham sandwich that sold whatever drug ham sandwiches use to an undercover ham sandwich cop (dressed as tuna on rye, I guess.)
Related:
http://www.komonews.com/news/local/Seattle-sues-attorney-over-public-records-request-136704018.html
(I very much doubt that these were semi-automatic rifles. I'd bet anything that the FPS uses select-fire rifles in this kind of situation.)
299: City of Vice. A bit bland IIRC.
330: Did you major in geography or something? The differences seem minute to me, and "key attractions" superfluous and cluttering.
On the OP, a FB friend comments on "Shit White Girls Say to Black Girls":
Bible, I have had 85% of these things said to me. "It kinda feels like Cheetos." I am dying.
I read that article, and looked at the closeup of the two maps. I guessed wrong about which one was clearly superior.
Ive been called for jury duty only once in 34 years, and I did serve on a jury, and I was bummed by what happened.
The charge was bid-rigging for State construction jobs, and the sticky part is that putting in a high-ball bid is legal unless you are doing it in collusion with others for the purpose of intentionally trying not to get the job.
Allegedly two construction firm Presidents got together and said "You take the jobs South of this line, and I'll take the jobs North of this line. You bid high on the South jobs, but I'll bid even higher, and in return I'll bid high on the North jobs and you bid even higher."
The State's proof was the fact that the bids had that pattern, and when they put the screws to one of the Presidents he plead guilty and ratted out the other President, testifying at the trial.
The State had phone records showing conversations between the two Presidents when the alleged collusion happened, but they only really had the word of the one President against the other about what they talked about during those conversations.
I thought the second President was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, but my fellow jurors disagreed because, among other reasons, it was one guy's word against the other, because theft from the state didn't really hurt anyone, because the defendant was a respected (white) businessman and he wore a suit and had a family, and because at least one of the jurors was senile (in my opinion).
I finally caved on a Friday evening after more than a day of deliberations, but I still think that guy was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
Should I have fought harder? I dunno. I was sure disappointed in my fellow citizens though.
336, same here. Mainly because of the close-ups and what Stevenson singled out as the advantages. Cluttering up the white space by telling us that Wrigley Field and the University of Chicago are in Chicago is a bad idea. And conveying which parts of Kentucky are lightly forested and which parts are not forested is not important. And really, the one where every label was painstakingly placed in the right place is the one where every label turns out to be oriented precisely horizontally? And the font is CLEARLY inferior.
Looking at the whole map, it does look nice.
336, 338: Me also, but I have horrible visual taste. Also, I was annoyed by the article against pepper. That was just too much of the contrarian for me to take.
335: Hair-touching is the secret way white people feed of the life-force of black people. True fact.
Looking at the closeups in the Slate article, I agree, the Imus map doesn't seem that exciting. But look, for example, at this image on his website showing Pennsylvania. At that scale the contour lines and shading are very nicely done and informative.
I would get that as a gift for somebody.
I've been called for jury duty many times in Alabama and in California, about ten times total, and never been picked for a jury. The last time was for early this month and I told them I was too creaky and cranky now and to get off my lawn. They bought it.
From what I could tell the goal of both the defense and prosecution is to pick people with a high genetic correlation with the breed of sheep of their liking. They don't always reach that goal but they try.
From what I could tell the goal of both the defense and prosecution is to pick people with a high genetic correlation with the breed of sheep of their liking. They don't always reach that goal but they try.
Sure, where you live. Out here where it's 95% white people they have to ask a few questions in order to stereotype us.
341: Conspicuously missing are the Clarion and Dubois Taco Bells.
How does writing "Univ of Pittsburgh & Carnegie Mellon Univ" across half the state improve things? Especially since the square marking them touches the Allegheny when the actual campi are closer to the Mon.
330 et seq.: As you might expect, that article has been making the rounds of my Facebook feed. The map looks fine, but this is one case in which I think craftsmanship is not the most important consideration.
And conveying which parts of Kentucky are lightly forested and which parts are not forested is not important.
Totally disagree.
I will take them at their word (Cartography and Geographic Information Society not Slate), and defer judgment until I see the full paper map.
A quite different thing, but the Erwin Raisz landform map(s) is still my favorite artistic representation, along with this beautiful result* from a more automated process (Thlein and Pike -1991).
*Pdf, zoom it up to get a real feel for its level of detail.
I question the necessity of including Loyalsockville. It's a real place, but I doubt it's one of the 100 most populous towns within a 20-mile radius of Williamsport. If you want a town with a silly name, why not list Picture Rocks, or Jersey Shore. (yes, Jersey Shore, PA)
The links in 351.2 are beautiful. The Raisz map certainly captures the feel of the topography you get from driving around as anything I've seen.
Try here:
Which has the advantage that you can properly zoom into the maps. There's thousands, hence the facet searches on the left.
Hair-touching is the secret way white people feed of the life-force of black people
The secret way? You have so much to learn still.
348: I do think the landmarks are a dodgy choice.
and Especially since the square marking them touches the Allegheny when the actual campi are closer to the Mon.
At that level of detail his personal de-cluttering aesthetic renders a very odd Pittsburgh with its center being where 28 meets 8 (in Etna not even within the city limits) which apparently occurs a number of miles north of the Allegheny rather than being right on the river. A map to admire on your wall from across the room I'd say.
Ooooh, thank you. I have a fascination with maps and aerial imagery. I love the NASA stuff, and Google Earth. I like using images such as these for my computer desktop, and I have a number of poster-sized maps hung around my home.
Seriously, I appreciate these links.
Perry-Castenada map collection. Everyone's hunger for maps can now be sated.
Rick Perry and Carlos Castenada, that's right!
I do think the landmarks are a dodgy choice.
You just don't get it, man.
This is the first map to bring into focus the principal elements of the USA, allowing the reader to see, understand, and appreciate our nation more deeply than ever before.
(Imus, in comments on Slate)
I still disagree about the Imus map versus the standard Rand-McNally or whatever thing I have in the car. I especially like the dark green state borders, the timezone demarcations, the fact that most of the labels aren't angled, and the smaller color gradations, which I think are easier to look at and interpret. I agree that he could have left off Wrigley Field & similar, but it's not, after all, scaled so that you'd use to actually get around in Chicago and it's kind of nice to have a few notes about major things in each city.
Mostly I just want a beautiful paper wall map of the U.S. (and the rest of the world).
354: Pretening to second ttaM on the David Rumsey map collection link, but really just wanting to say "pwned last week" (near the bottom of a dying thread).
And the winner is: http://rockymountainmaps.com/item/210/montana-wall-map-by-raven
Mostly I just want a beautiful paper wall map of the U.S.
The Imus map seems like a fine choice for this purpose. All the praise for it seems a bit over the top, though.
My boss says Unfogged has been too active, interesting and engaging the last several days and y'all should knock it off.
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As it turns out, having the Gates Foundation come by your school and throw a bunch of money and advice around is not as productive a project as you would think.
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This one is especially good for conveying an important reality about Indian reservations. Look at CSK in the western part.
Elaborate maps are so SWPL.
I love the utility of map collection at 358. The maps at 354 are lovely as historical documents.
re: 361
Heh. I run this:
http://preview.tinyurl.com/tt4mwurk
Which uses the same server-side software engine as the Rumsey people, so have been aware of them for ages. Not sure if I've ever linked either here, though.
Heh. I have the big California Raven map on my wall at home by the front door. Sometimes guests will look at it for ten or twenty minutes before greeting me or making conversation or being social. I am fine with that.
362: I forgot about Raven, their overall US one is also quite beautiful. And yes, certainly they are very The-concept-formerly-known-as SWPL.
We have a version of this map hanging by our front door. It gives me great pleasure.
371 just got officially IMITATED.
This one is especially good for conveying an important reality about Indian reservations. Look at CSK in the western part.
The weird speckling? What reality is that? I had to hunt around to find out that CSK = Flathead Reservation, incidentally.
Which reminds me I wanted to pick up a good CSK map. Maybe they'll have one downtown . . .
Do you have the laminated Raven map or the paper one (if paper, is it framed)?
375 -- The white is for white people.
More of 264: That was the first deposition I've ever seen the court reporter throw a hissy-fit at the witness. Phone call to the judge, witness questioning the pro se lawyer who should have been questioning him, court reporter out of nowhere deciding that she's never been so insulted in her life and is going to file a formal complaint -- it had it all.
Laminated and framed (but not with a glass cover), in two separate and thoughtful birthday gifts from my Dad.
In addition to being a nice conversation piece, I actually refer to the map reasonably often, for planning weekend trips and the like. Beautiful AND useful.
http://www.correntewire.com/first_step_in_stripping_troublemakers_of_their_citizenship
Just great! Now I have my jones for wall maps again. I thought I had conquered that when I gave up my Nat Geo subscription several decades ago. Thanks, y'all.
383: We've done you a favor. Now you have something to tell people when they ask what you want for your birthday.
I will hijack this thread yet again by announcing that I have applied for 3 jobs. I interviewed for one yesterday, and just got called to interview for another one. Hooray!
370: Hm. Blocked for me here at work (for no good reason I assume). I'll check it out tonight.
380 -- thanks, order just made. I think it will look great in the stairwell.
387 -- congratulations!
Everybody be boring and/or talk about swimming fashion or something, I'm dying here and have no self-discipline.
I am thinking that if I sit in the lab every day, eventually by some magical osmosis I will start actually working. The fact that it's totally dead quiet around here does not much help.
389.1: Unfogged, economic stimulator!
381: I actually refer to the map reasonably often, for planning weekend trips and the like.
For years I had the USGS Pennsylvania 1:500000 topographic relief map up on my wall at work. Not as visually dramatic as the Raven, but still pretty cool, and also useful as both a conversation piece and for planning porpoises.
As long as you don't need to cross state lions.
One of the classrooms at my grad school had what I now realize is the Raven US map on the wall. It's a great map.
My neighborhood has a moderately large black SWPL population. (Taking your baby to a craft beer bar is SWPL right?)
Also, it's been fascinating (occasionally troubling, sure, but fascinating) to observe (what I perceive as) the evolution in gswift's views.
Not so much a change in views as a change in roles. I've got a job to do, and like Halford said it's not rote enforcement. Anyone who's good at this job tries to identify the problem that needs to be addressed, not the law that's being broken. The problem I'm presented with in this particular guy is that he's a chronic burglar, car thief, etc. I can be pretty sure it's an ongoing thing due to my just having pulled him (and have I mentioned the charming machete behind the seat?) out of a stolen car with a shit ton of stolen property (several laptops, cartons of cigarettes, loads of clothes and sunglasses with the tags still on them, etc.) In the absence of drug possession laws I would have written a warrant to draw his blood for driving under the influence. Tools to fix a problem, not enforcement for enforcement's sake. Not that the tools are always ideal, but I don't make policy. I'm limited to what's actually available as a solution in that moment.
Conversely, sometimes you have to try and help people avoid getting arrested because it's not a solution to the problem. The domestic violence laws are very broad and include blood relatives as part of the mandatory arrest if a crime has occurred. If you police an area with a lot of Tongans you know that there's a bit of a tendency towards family altercations turning physical. Usually it's done by the time we get there and other family members have separated the fighters and calmed everyone down. There's rarely a true victim in any sense and all that needs to be done is to make sure it's not going to start back up. It's often beneficial to everyone to shut them all up and give everyone a quick rundown of the DV statute and how if I'm told certain things I'll have to arrest someone. "So with that in mind, is anything criminal going on here tonight?" and they can all say it's just a verbal argument. Then we can move on to a plan for making sure there's no more calls to the cops that night.
Huh. There goes my Samoan-acquired stereotype of Tongans as peaceable (so long as there aren't Samoans in reach to start something with).
There goes my Samoan-acquired stereotype of Tongans as peaceable (so long as there aren't Samoans in reach to start something with).
Narcissism of small differences: not limited to the SWPL.
397.1: like I said, perspective matters a lot. I certainly trust you not to misuse those tools of enforcement against me, but there are lots of cops I don't trust and lots of people who have much less reason than I do to trust any cops at all. There have been times when I would have drawn immediate suspicion -- and possibly arrest -- for things that were basically (in terms of the kind of crimes that somebody concerned with public order and welfare would really be concerned about) not illegal, and again, I'm way out on one end of the "likely to get hassled by cops" spectrum. The fact that the tools of enforcement rely so much on immediate judgment can be really brutal for people with priors, or poor social skills, or seemingly anti-social fashion sense, or (obviously) the bad sense to have been born a less-optimal color. Again, I believe they have nothing to fear from you, but, you know, there are a lot of cops with a lot of different sets of stresses and obligations and prejudices, and an end result (in terms of who is currently in jail and who is likely to go to jail) that is manifestly and evidently unfair and counterproductive, taken as a whole.
I don't know which kind of giant Islander lives in my sister's neighborhood, but we see large adult men on tiny pink and sparkly little girl's bicycles. It don't know how that became a thing, but I approve.
To the OP: I went to middle/high school with Francesca Ramsey of Shit White Girls Say to Black Girls.
I'm as down on payday lenders as the next swippler, but somehow just can't get exercised about this.
I like "swippler." And I think the SWPL site is amusing (uneven in quality, but basically funny).
there are a lot of cops with a lot of different sets of stresses and obligations and prejudices, and an end result (in terms of who is currently in jail and who is likely to go to jail) that is manifestly and evidently unfair and counterproductive, taken as a whole.
I don't disagree with this but I think taking away discretion would make things worse.
I went to middle/high school with Francesca Ramsey of Shit White Girls Say to Black Girls
This isn't really related in any meaningful sense, but the twin girls on the cover of this month's National Geographic are the daughters of a woman I went to high school with.
They don't look at all like you.
I can't quite tell. Do those girls have red hair?
410: so it was a certainty, then
405: I don't think it's really possible to take away policing discretion entirely (and I agree with you that it would be a real problem to do that). I do think that structuring the law such that nothing is illegal unless it would almost always be a good thing to enforce that law is a good idea -- I'm comfortable with giving cops the discretion to occasionally turn a blind eye to a law that's generally enforced, much less comfortable with giving cops discretion to whimisically enforce a law that's conventionally overlooked (like, it functions, but speeding gives me the creeps. The fact that breaking the traffic laws is socially enforced (unless you're my dad) is really the wrong way to run things).
If there's a law that it would be bad to enforce implacably across the board, then it shouldn't be on the books at all.
I was just talking to Blume about the occasional weird folk traditions in Boston where a (generally traffic) law will be universally ignored. There are some intersections which have a right turn lane, and a separate light for the right turn. This, unambiguously, means that you have to wait for the light -- if this was not the case, the light would have no reason to exist. But everybody treats it as a right on red -- and will honk at you if you don't go -- and as far as I can tell the actual law isn't enforced.
This came up last night because we were walking across a bridge and I realized, to my great surprise, that it was completely legal to park on that bridge. Nobody ever does, even though it's in an area where the parking is quite tight. Baffling.
We had an initiative recommending county officials to make adult marijuana offenses the lowest law enforcement priority. Passed in 2006. Overturned by the state legislature in 2011.
I could see doing more of this sort of thing.
I think that the problems with policing are a function of the problems that are already there. Racial antagonism is one kind of problem, and the rich-poor divide is another, and large numbers of unemployed young men is another. And these are all functions of the kind of society you're looking at.
Wobegon policing is very mild, but the aggravating factors really aren't here.
Within police departments, the leading American proponent for limiting discretion of individual police officers was William Parker, the mid-century head of the LAPD. The idea was that instead of exercising discretion on the old beat cop model, you would have a professionalized, militarized police force that would respond to specific calls to action and enforce exactly the laws on the books (the TV show Dragnet, and also Adam-12, were popularizations of this theory of policing). It's a vision that's still reflected in the motorized, call-and-response version of the police -- the police sit in their cars until there's a call, and then go out and identify a violation of a specific statute being committed. This vision was initially popular with both city governments and communities -- the police would be more restrained (along the lines of 400), would be less corrupt (less discretion=way less opportunity for corruption), and would also be cheaper, since you need many fewer police for a call and response model than a beat cop model.
In practice, of course, the result was a total disaster. Removal of discretion and the isolation of police officers from communities meant that the police operated as an invading force, ineffective to prevent crime as it happened and massively distrusted (and given to excessive force) when it did intervene. Entire sections of cities were given over to crime and the local knowledge of policemen to intervene and protect communities was lost.
Progressive models for police reform -- "community policing" and its descendants --rely entirely on a large amount of police discretion. To be sure, this model also requires controls on individual policemen who are bad apples, making sure that cops aren't racist, act professionally etc. All those things are important. But severe restrictions on police discretion are a really bad idea. About the best hope we have for effective policing is to recruit good cops like GSwift and let them exercise their reasonable discretion about maintaining order.
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Completely OT: This is a good line from a commenter at CT today: "Capitalism is far too messy and far too dependent on failure as a regulatory mechanism to be safely used for a nuclear industry." (emphasis mine).
That nicely identifies the crux of the issue.
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Way back in 237, ttaM said:
In fact, there's a faint whiff of some kind of Galtonian scientific racism about quite a few anthropology blogs I read. You think, 'ah yes, this is all really interesting. Y-chromosome haplogroups, and migration over time. Fascinating stuff. But secretly, I know you think one or more of these groups is _better_'.
I'm a little slow, but I just realized, reading between lines on some blogs as you describe, that the net result of the discovery that 2% of non-African human DNA is Neanderthal will be that's the reason why Europeans and Asians are superior.
I think that same claim is already in TFA (that is, not that Europeans and Asians are superior due to being more cavemanny, but that someone's going to make the claim.)
re: 421
Yeah, it wouldn't surprise me at all if that idea is out there, even if it's not being promulgated too hard, just yet.
The idea was that instead of exercising discretion on the old beat cop model, you would have a professionalized, militarized police force that would respond to specific calls to action and enforce exactly the laws on the books
I feel like there are multiple things going on there.
418: that is right in one sense, but it also misses a lot. Police discretion includes the discretion to escalate to violence or even to killing, which is restrained by effective community oversight of police brutality -- notoriously lacking in the LAPD. It also includes the internal training, policies, and procedures, of police departments, which also governs how much discretion to use force individual police officers have (and how much force is a 'first resort'). These were also terrible in the LAPD. Finally, as LB was pointing out, it also includes the range of laws on the book.
A lot of the violence issue has to do with where police are situated on the social worker to SWAT spectrum. Both are problem solving methods but they differ quite a lot, and police procedures guide in one direction or another. My sense is that U.S. cops are pretty far to the violence-and-intimidation first end of the spectrum, and have lots of leeway to do that. They'll say it's because they're dealing with people who can't be reached any other way, etc.
pwned by Sifu, and he expressed the same point much more elegantly too.
421-423: hasn't this semi-explicitly been the whole theory of people looking for evidence of Neanderthal interbreeding all along? I don't think it's at all new, or at least I feel like I heard about it at least ten years ago (in a dismissive kind of way, in an anthropology class).
Although, it's a little odd. I completely buy the argument in 418, and have for a long time. But at least anecdotally, it seems as if the lower-discretion model did drop corruption a great deal; we talked about this back when I was crushing on the drunk from Life On Mars. If it's a tradeoff, I think I'd take the corruption back, but I'm not sure. And of course it may not be a tradeoff, it may be possible to have mostly non-corrupt police forces even with a great deal of discretion.
427: It's news to me, but I generally avoid GNXP and similar blogs for the reasons Ttam mentions.
re: 427
There's an SF short story in which someone re-engineers Neanderthals from the remnants of them in human DNA. The resultant children prove far superior to Homo Sapiens, and replace them. Can't for the live of me remember who by. Spinrad, maybe?
evidence of Neanderthal interbreeding all along
I'm not psychic, but I don't think that this is a widespread motivation among people doing the work, no. Sequencing the Neanderthal genome fragments gives an estimate of divergence time between populations. If a genetic basis for language gets convincingly identified, Neanderthal speech capacity will be something we can start thinking about. Also, since humans in Africa are extremely varied, seeing that there's less similarity between N and any African human than between N and non-African was new information, not a foregone conclusion.
431: I sort of misspoke; I meant (some) people who had floated or promoted the idea early on, not necessarily all or any specific members of the research community.
But Neanderthals were losers. How could they be smart?
re: 433
Maybe Neaderthals were smart, but Homo Sapiens were the junior high jock bullies of the late Pleistocene?
424, 425 -- militarization is a necessary component of call-and-response policing. The two go together. If you're going to have a model in which the police do nothing but respond to calls and enforce statutes as written, in practice (especially with fewer numbers) police are going to demand and get military-style protection, for their own safety, and will also have fewer resources available to get information that aren't violent.
The beat-cop model allows trading enforcement for information, as well as making judgment calls about what is or isn't effectively a big deal. That's what allows it to both operate within a community and exercise an element of coercion (some element of coercion, of course, is a necessary element of policing). If you get rid of the beat cop, discretionary enforcement, trade-off model, the cops need to be ready and able to go in guns blazing. There's also a vicious cycle effect, as police that is more removed from the community becomes increasingly reliant on militarization which removes it more from the community etc.
428 -- call and response policing was very effective at killing off corruption (though it wasn't the only change responsible). But I think US cities are generally noncorrupt enough these days so that you can have more of a return to the beat cop model without rampant total corruption.
What's the status of your book project on the history of the LAPD, Halford?
It's devolving into an argument on Unfogged. Actually, since I've been busy with work and kid, I've put it aside completely for about 2 years now.
434 - Yeah, I just think that this sort of Neanderthal narrative raises a real problem for the scientific racists.
The entire point of the Charles Murray/Sailer/Shearer worldview is that outcomes are a result of inherent worth. If African Americans have poorer outcomes, it's because they are inherently intellectually inferior.
And what outcome is worse than extinction?
433. They never got around to doing anything with their really great plans. Also, poor grooming.
Or they were better suited to cold and the earth warmed up some.
militarization is a necessary component of call-and-response policing. The two go together.
Yes, I realize. But I do not see either of them as intrinsically tied to the question of how to manage selective enforcement of laws and the negative consequences thereof. They may have been proposed as a solution to some of the issues raised by giving beat cops a huge amount of enforcement discretion, but that doesn't make the two approaches dichotomous.
I think the discovery that humans originated in Africa raised a pretty huge problem for the scientific racists that they've never quite managed to solve.
427: Really? This never, ever, occurred to me. I thought people were looking for interbreeding because the idea that humans exterminated their closest living relatives is quite disturbing. Weren't the Neanderthals more "animalistic" looking, and wasn't their culture rather static? They don't seem like an attractive basis to claim superiority.
Apparently they've found a third homo subspecies that is a source of 5% of Melanesian DNA. They've found a single bone of the species in a cave in Siberia, but it had freakishly well-preserved DNA. It's closer to Neanderthal than homo sapiens.
I was reading this post on a blog where the author was quite incensed about the "out of Africa" hypothesis, and how it was utterly refuted. It seemed bizarre, in that the vast majority of non-African DNA comes from Africa, with apparently a small amount of additional DNA from other populations. Other than this small amount of interbreeding, people of African descent completely swept away the Neanderthals, and so completely supplanted this third subspecies that the record of its existence is a single bone.
What you're not considering, Walt, is the Up In A Spaceship Hypothesis, which consideration you will be no doubt be forced into when the Neanderthals return to Earth after global warming shuts down the ocean conveyor and crush us like so many frozen grapes under their impressively large thumbs.
441: Well, yes. There's that.
They don't seem like an attractive basis to claim superiority.
It doesn't have to be an attractive basis, it just has to be something that light-skinned people have, and people with ancestry exclusively from Africa in modern times don't have. Once there's a hook, that can explain everything.
And it doesn't have to be that Neanderthals were globally better than Sapiens (by whatever stupid-ass metric), just that they had the crucial admixture of a few key genes necessary to make the Sapiens they interbred with better than the ones they didn't.
I haven't seen this argument made for real myself, but I'll bet it's got legs.
440 -- no way to have beat cops without selective enforcement of laws. That's the coercion lever.
Not sure why I capitalized Sapiens there. Parallelism with Neanderthal?
Doesn't the call-and-response model predate militarization by quite a bit? Isn't the drug war a better correlate?
I'm sure you've thought about and researched this more than me, but I am resistant to the idea that you have to have either one form of police unaccountability or another.
How many police calls are answered by heavily armed patrolmen? They may have something stashed in their cars, but they almost always only carry sidearms.
Discretion does not mean no accountability. Not at all. Any system that permits discretion also needs (in order to function properly) means of disciplining bad cops, ensuring professionalism, training people to respect community members, etc. All of those are absolutely important parts of the equation, not just because they're the humane thing to do but because they increase effectiveness.
448 -- no, not really at all. The weapons and scale got much bigger with the drug war, but the push towards militarization in the sense that I mean here was a post WWII phenomenon. It correlates best with the postwar automobile city, not the drug war.
I don't see how that's consistent with:
About the best hope we have for effective policing is to recruit good cops like GSwift and let them exercise their reasonable discretion about maintaining order.
Where do you draw the line between measures that unacceptably reduce discretion and measures that properly foster accountability?
re: 444
Yeah, the 'Denisovans'. I expect once they look they'll find a lot more evidence for them. It's early days.
I think it pretty clearly does refute the out-of-africa model, in its classic form. It replaces with with something much messier -- migration out of Africa, possibly in waves, with episodes of possibly quite extensive interbreeding with populations that evolved separately outside of Africa.
The fact that some racist arseholes might repurpose the research for nefarious ideological purposes doesn't stop it being pretty mind-bogglingly huge in scientific terms.
re: 450
From a British perspective, having guns = heavily armed.
Where do you draw the line between measures that unacceptably reduce discretion and measures that properly foster accountability?
It's a balance, but managing a large public organization is hard. You need to track results, take community complaints seriously, and weed out bad apples. No PD is going to get it right all of the time but some are better than others and some are doing very good jobs.
435.1: militarization is a necessary component of call-and-response policing. The two go together. If you're going to have a model in which the police do nothing but respond to calls and enforce statutes as written, in practice (especially with fewer numbers) police are going to demand and get military-style protection, for their own safety, and will also have fewer resources available to get information that aren't violent.
This seems counter-intuitive to me, as I've long been under the impression that call-and-response policing can take place without significant degrees of "militarization" of the police, or the police developing a "go in guns blazing" mentality in those communities affected. This model is AFAIK largely the urban Canadian standard, for instance, in most of which centers the police are not significantly "militarized," apart from having developed small and uncommonly-deployed TAC (SWAT) teams.
Where militarization of the police and the "invading army" phenomenon is strongest, does this not tend to be an issue of ethnic, class and racial tension more than what particular system or model is being used? It's always seemed to me that no matter such problems with policing were likeliest to disproportionately manifest around poor and nonwhite constituencies. (For that matter, the recent surge in militarization of American police departments doesn't seem to me like something arising directly out of the call-and-response policing model either.) I also don't see why, if the beat cop model was previously associated with police brutality and corruption, it should be assumed to be resistant to those things if it was reinstated now.
re: 458.1
The British model is similar. There are special armed response units, and there's been a gradual increase in the number of police who've had firearms training, but the vast majority of police are un-armed and police who respond to emergency calls will generally (unless it's a situation with a known firearms risk) not be armed.
452: I see Eggplant beat me to the question about militarization. In what sense are you using that term?
My fundamental problem is still with the nature of the laws on the books - 413.1 gets it right. But if one strives to be an ideal cop, one should stay aware of how morally hazardous wide discretion becomes with such laws.
458 has some good points that were supposed to be addressed in the book that will never be written. But basically "militarization" in the sense that I mean here doesn't just mean SWAT; it means a whole series of changes to the model of policing that bring it out of local communities and towards a top-down disciplinary model.
Ethnic and racial (not so much class) tensions are absolutely a big part of the story; part of the push towards call and response policing was precisely because it allowed for white officers, many of who lived in or were moving to the suburbs, to sit in their cars without participating in the life of neighborhoods their families had abandoned. But the two phenomenon played on themselves; call-and-response increased the racial divisions which increased the need for call-and-response. And the existence of call and response made and is making it hard for PDs, even when they put a lot of effort into integrating and getting rid of hardcore racists, to actually gain community trust; it turns out its not enough to have a lot of black or latino officers, even in positions of power, if the local community knows that they don't have any discretion to actually do or not do anything (other than to respond to calls with force).
re: 462
One of the demands in Bobby Seale's book, which I still remember, was that police officers live in the communities which they policed. Explicitly for the sorts of reasons you give.
Two other points maybe worth mentioning are, first, that call-and-response works reasonably well (what wouldn't?) in areas without significant crime. That is, if nothing much is going on anyway, call and response doesn't seem like a big deal; the police get out of their cars and go on their way. Second, in practice, it (so I think anyway) is essentially always combined with strict border patrolling. Since it's deeply ineffective at preventing crime within communities, it becomes largely a containment strategy, of keeping people out, which requires a deep militarization but one that is largely invisible. Part of the story of the LAPD, I think was pushing the borders further and further back until by 1992 it became clear that most of the City had been left to go to hell and even the protected areas got scared.
I don't know the Canadian story well at all, but I'd be surprised if either one of these two factors, or both, wasn't driving LC's impression -- that is, there's simply not much crime to begin with (for reasons that are mysterious, no one actually understands why there is or isn't crime) or that Canada has got some very effective bordering going on.
I'll go back and reread what people have actually written since I was last here, but Val and Alex's parent will be out of jail Monday and will probably be brought heree immediately to see them. I don't know any details beyond that, but I'm so relieved for all of them!
The first bit of 464.1, while interesting, also smacks somewhat of circular reasoning. If the call-and-response model is operating in many areas with low crime rates, why should our assumption be that the crime rates are just "mysteriously" low and not actually connected with the effectiveness of the model? What grounds would we have to assume that any other model would yield results as good?
The point about bordering is an interesting one, but to whatever extent bordering takes place I would have to think it's a larger social phenomenon than just the police (if I'm understanding the term right, then bordering would be something that would manifest at all levels, including the kind of "redlining" by real estate developers which has been used in Calgary to channel immigrant populations into one relatively poorly-served quadrant of the city). Visible "bordering" by the police would, it seems to me, be likely to follow whatever general pattern of "bordering" is pursued by society as a whole, again regardless of policing models. But maybe I'm misunderstanding your use of this term.
Halford, your schema here seems too neat and single-factor. Leaving call and response aside, it seems obvious that there's a big scope for the range of discretion given to officers in community policing. Saying that 'some discretion' is necessary doesn't go to the question of the proper level. Saying that infinite discretion is needed to give the officer the maximum scope to manipulate (bribe, bully, threaten, harass) information and assistance out of the locals seems way off too.
why should our assumption be that the crime rates are just "mysteriously" low and not actually connected with the effectiveness of the model
Because there's good historical evidence that call and response is ineffective at preventing crime in areas where it consistently occurs. I overstated the case a bit; no one has a deep understanding of the origin of crime but it's pretty clear that policing does make a difference.
to whatever extent bordering takes place I would have to think it's a larger social phenomenon than just the police
Sure. But the police are key constituencies in both erecting and maintaining the borders. Crime control is (and, especially, was through post WWII America) a key element of urban planning, and plans for police-driven bordering went hand in hand with other planning efforts. I'm not saying police act in total isolation; that would be a dumb thing to say.
Saying that infinite discretion is needed to give the officer the maximum scope to manipulate
Who is saying that? All I'm arguing against is the idea that "police should just enforce the law without exercising discretion" which is a pretty common misperception. Officers do need some ability to manipulate; how much is a key question.
doesn't go to the question of the proper level
Of course not, you actually have to manage police departments as if they were a big complicated thing to manage in the real world, not an abstract exercise. Again, I'm just resisting the "cops should not be permitted discretion in selectively enforcing the law" argument, which is very common.
438 strikes me as ridiculously unfair to Shearer. He's an asshole about race sometimes, but lumping him in with either Murray or Sailer is insane.
468.1: Because there's good historical evidence that call and response is ineffective at preventing crime in areas where it consistently occurs.
While this doesn't really seem to answer my question, I'm sure there must be more to this claim than just up-front assuming that the model has nothing to do with keeping crime low where it coexists with low crime rates. If I wanted to see someone make that case in a bit more detail, is there somewhere Internetty I could go to find it?
This is one of the classic articles that is available online. In general, there's not enough of this work.
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Jesus. I had no idea people hated Mark Lilla so much. There's an awful lot of butt-hurt going on over his review of Corey Robin's book. I had no idea.
As you were.
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A friend on fb, someone I haven't actually known in 20 years but was kind of excited to reconnect with, posted:
"Here...let me tick some people off...Did you get drug tested today? Thank you Florida, Kentucky, and Missouri, which are the first states that will require drug testing when applying for welfare. Some people are crying and calling this unconstitutional. How is this unconstitutional? It's OK to drug test people who work for their money but not those who don't?... Re-post this if you'd like to see this done in all 50 states. I just did!!"
Like a moron, I waded in. As usual, I have no notion why.
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476: You could mail him a cup of piss.
To be fair, it follows from his embrace of small-government conservatism.
And the constitution clearly says you can be searched if you have a job. Or if you don't have one.
Wanting a big, powerful government that fucks with poor people could become an option if people do just a bit of work with political theory to half-ass a supporting rationale.
481: Neanderthal society was done in by its unwillingness to subject inferior populations to the same intrusive security measures as society's largest cranium-ed and most robust members.
Like a moron, I waded in. As usual, I have no notion why.
Because it's an outrageous policy (talk about policing the poor), and a stupid policy too. And sometimes you just have to say something, even if it's to dumb fb people.
Neanderthal jaw anatomy was so ideally suited to oral sex, they forgot to have babies and went extinct.
476: Thankfully not true in KY at least, though my fb feed back when this meme first made its way around suggests that it would be popular. Fuckers.
Way delayed, but 218-220, cool. (And teo, I appreciate that you gave me the benefit of the doubt despite my cracked out typing skills. It's nice to be remembered.)
I believe that when they tried the drug-testing routine for welfare recipients in Florida, when Rick Scott became Gov., the percentage of ne'er-do-wells who actually tested positive and were denied benefits was so small that the state's cost for testing all those people ran into the millions of dollars (against the paltry amount they saved by refusing benefits to some few). Oops.
441
I think the discovery that humans originated in Africa raised a pretty huge problem for the scientific racists that they've never quite managed to solve
This makes no sense to me. Place of origin seems irrelevant.
422: I think that same claim is already in TFA (that is, not that Europeans and Asians are superior due to being more cavemanny, but that someone's going to make the claim.)
Well LB (aka Mnemosyne of TFA), turns out someone did make that claim on unfogged last year:
How long before the first 'scientific' racist speculates that the crucial 4% admixture of Neanderthal genes explains why Europeans and Asians are so much smarter than Africans? I give it a week.One presumes their identity is not a surprise to you.
Yes, I knew it was me, I just felt like a bit of a jerk crying pwnage.
OK, I'm willing to be the jerk of you.
445
And it doesn't have to be that Neanderthals were globally better than Sapiens (by whatever stupid-ass metric), just that they had the crucial admixture of a few key genes necessary to make the Sapiens they interbred with better than the ones they didn't.
I was under the imperssion that, given how long ago any intermixture with Neanderthals would have been, there is enough gene flow between Europe and Africa, (Australia may be another story) for any favorable Neaderthal genes to have spread back to Africa and if they didn't they are probably for things like cold weather tolerance that aren't useful in Africa. Is this wrong? And is it really the case that Europeans are 2% Neanderthal? That sounds awfully high to me.
445: And it doesn't have to be that Neanderthals were globally better than Sapiens (by whatever stupid-ass metric), just that they had the crucial admixture of a few key genes necessary to make the Sapiens they interbred with better than the ones they didn't.
Setting aside questionable ulterior or subconscious motives which might or might not motivate interest to begin with, I believe there is some evidence consistent with theories that offspring might have been "better" (i.e have some positive differential reproductive success compared to others in local populations) due to benefits to the immune system*. The evidence would be that there is a proportionally a much greater % of Neanderthal/Denisovan material in part of the immune system genetic material than the genome in total. So there can certainly be non-stupid metrics.
*I only have access to the abstract.
456: LOL right? "they're just carrying 9mm handguns, tasers, pepper spray, and batons, so, not that heavily armed at all really."
470: I'm not sure it's actually possible to be unfair to shearer on this point. rather, I'm mystified by the continual desire to imagine he is making good-faith arguments that just happen to always turn out super-racist, by chance. if you rtfa you will come away with the impression sailer comments here under a cunning pseud. unclear why everyone (except parsimon and castock iirc) wants to pretend otherwise.
People who need people who treat people differently based on their perceived continent of origin are the luckiest people of all.
496: I'm genuinely hurt that you don't remember my consistent disdain for Shearer. I guess I'll just have to be a bigger dick to him in the future. Consider it my pleasure.
Von Wafer said his pleasure involves Shearer and a bigger dick. Pass it on.
People who need people who need people to fit into broad taxonomic categories which reify current social status hierarchies by rooting them in a prehistorical past are the luckiest people in the world.
The-concept-formerly-known-as-SWPL thinks people who can use "reify" in a sentence are the luckiest people in the world.
I learned how at a state school, not one of those elitist universities with a shitty football team.
s/b "consistently shitty football team" for reasons made obvious a few days ago.
470
438 strikes me as ridiculously unfair to Shearer. He's an asshole about race sometimes, but lumping him in with either Murray or Sailer is insane
I wouldn't say it is ridiculously unfair. I am not that familiar with Murray but I read Sailer's blog and I agree with him (in his blog persona) about a lot of things. Which does not mean I agree with him on everything. Or that I am 100% sure that his blog is a fair representation of his real views.
496
I'm not sure it's actually possible to be unfair to shearer on this point ...
Sure it is. There are plenty of people with views more extreme than mine or even Sailer's. Check out Sailer's comments sometime if you doubt this.
... I'm mystified by the continual desire to imagine he is making good-faith arguments ...
I don't get the bad faith accusation. In general I don't make arguments I don't believe or factual claims that I know to be untrue and I have at least some willingness to admit error if I become convinced I was wrong on some point.
476: a good example of the spite spiral that rules the populist right. I have no rights at work, my employer fucks me over and makes me miserable, my politics will be about ensuring others are as or more miserable.
There are plenty of people with views more extreme than mine or even Sailer's. Check out Sailer's comments sometime if you doubt this.
We could check out Stormfront too, but we'll take your word for it. Sailer agrees with his commenters, he's just more polite about it.
I don't get the bad faith accusation.
Well, I think people mean good or bad faith in terms of a standard of humane intelligence that you seem happy to reject (or so your endorsement of the views of Sailer in 505 would lead one inevitably to believe; and btw, what is this nonsense about not being '100% sure that his blog is a fair representation of his real views'? do you believe that he habitually and deliberately misrepresents his own views on his own blog, while reserving a 100% percent accurate depiction of his social/intellecutal pathology for his twitter feed? do you suspect that drunken gnomes take over his blog nightly, creating the distorted impression of a despicable racist who is in fact, by day, a card-carrying member of the ACLU?). In any case, sure: you are openly and honestly a racist, so no "bad faith," I guess, but otherwise alameida is absolutely correct.
James: do you really not get this?
sorry von wafer! I retroactively include you in my statement. you can still work on being a bigger dick if you want, though, that's cool.
509
... btw, what is this nonsense about not being '100% sure that his blog is a fair representation of his real views'? do you believe that he habitually and deliberately misrepresents his own views on his own blog, ...
I think it is possible he tones down his views on his blog. I was distancing myself from any more extreme views he may have expressed in other venues.
I was distancing myself from any more extreme views he may have expressed in other venues.
You want to be known as a merely moderately hateful racist, while distancing yourself from the more murderous or genocidal extreme? Duly noted.
yggles has a bizarre weakness for linking to sailer. I sort of hope/bet that his slate overlords forbid it.
I sort of hope/bet that his slate overlords forbid it.
Considering the short leash they seem to have him on otherwise, that sounds like a safe bet.
I'm curious to see if Yggles ends up voting for Romney.
I don't see why he would. He's always been a neoliberal sellout, but he's not that far gone (yet).
In other news, I just finished reading a Michael Chabon novel (guess which one!). Dude's a hell of a writer.
Hasn't Yglesias been very consistant in his position that you should never vote for republicans in national elections? He'd still vote for Romney for governor of Massachusetts or mayor of New York, but national politics is different.
I don't recall him saying much about the topic lately, but I believe that is his position, yes.
Halford, have you read Fogelson's book on city police? I happened to come across it in the stacks while looking for something else and immediately though of your hiatused book project.
It was on the to read list but I gave it back to the library. I don't like his Fragmented Metropolis book very much but if I ever restart (aka become unemployed) I'll have to read the city police book.
517: I loved the book but felt let down by the ending.
494 is right about gene flow, according to current thinking. If the Neanderthal genes in Eurasian populations (2% is about right AFAIK) were any damn use to Africans, they'd have them by now. It's hypothesised that some of them may help immunity to endemic diseases in the areas inhabited originally by Neanderthals. They don't have to do any good at at all for populations in most of Asia, Oceania and the Americas, as long as they don't do any harm, because those populations were descended from the people who picked up the Neanderthal genes, so unless they're positively selected against, they'll stay around.
chris y, you and I are the late shift, after even teofilo goes to sleep in his igloo or whatever. it must get dark there at like 2 pm, I would die.
Yes, but it's half past nine in the morning here; I picture you having your tea around now.
Bit late, I know, but was no one else amused by Diane Abbott's attempt to start writing for SWPL?
The problem seems to be that Twitter feels like a conversation - like IMing or email - but it isn't; it's (generally) publicly visible. If you get carried away it's easy to forget this and come a cropper, especially if you are a) extremely publicly visible and b) not very bright.
Not as amused as I've been about all the WP getting their knickers in a twist over it.
She used to be my MP. She was terrible.
I've heard no good of her as a constituency member or really as anything else much. I don't really understand how she acquired such a high profile.
But the offending tweet seemed perfectly harmless to me, unless you read it with malice aforethought.
I don't really understand how she acquired such a high profile.
Buggins' Turn, I think. She's been in politics a long time and knows a lot of people.
Best line from her wiki page:
"Abbott and Portillo have known each other since school, when they appeared in joint school productions of Romeo and Juliet (although not in the title roles), and of Macbeth as Lady Macduff and Macduff respectively."
Link to some background, for people as unfamiliar with Abbot as I am.
Abbott and Portillo have known each other since school
But not as long as Abbott and Costello...
518: I hadn't realized that he'd spelled that out. I agree it seems unlikely, but it's clear he likes the guy and thinks he did a great job as executive. Whenever he (so help me) tweets a criticism, it's without his usual Republican-mocking tone.
More importantly in the British political scene, the jury in this case has just returned not guilty on all counts. It isn't my cup of tea, but this is a good thing for liberal societies.
||
You can all stop tussling with Thucydides to images of Bob Holness.
|>
523
... 2% is about right AFAIK ...
What does this mean? A 2% change in the whole pre-contact genome or a 2% change in the places where the pre-contact genome differed from the Neanderthal genome?
Thorn, that was Whiskey Fire's not mine, but it should become universal.
James, try this.
I've heard no good of her as a constituency member or really as anything else much. I don't really understand how she acquired such a high profile.
Oddly, she comes out of the same Thames Television media/politics incubator that gave us Peter Mandelson and David Aaronovitch. She was (and is) well liked by professional politicians as being the one of the movement politicians of that era who (unlike Bernie Grant, Lee Jasper, Linda Bellos) was basically Oxbridge in orientation. Her role was always to be the bridge between the Labour Party and the London Carribean ethnic machine. If Paul Boateng had been of Jamaican rather than Ghanaian roots there would have been no role for her and she'd presumably have gone on into media industry middle-management.
539
I skimmed your link and I think it is saying that Europeans have 3% more Neandertal genes than Africans. So if Africans have .1% Europeans have .103% or if Africans have 1% Europeans have 1.03%. As far as I can tell it is not saying Europeans have 3% (or any other number) Neandertal genes. And there seems to be a complication in that Neandertal genes don't necessarily imply Neandertal ancestry (they could both be coming from the joint ancestors of humans and Neandertals). There is reference to a model which assumes Africans have no Neandertal ancestry but this is an assumption not an empirical fact.
Well, right. I don't know the number, but all modern humans have better than 99% Neanderthal genes in some sense, given that we've got better than 98% chimpanzee genes.
The human genome, like the newspaper, is mostly useless filler.
In re: Diane Abbot: Billy Bragg pointed out on FB that the best thing to come out of the kerfluffle was the Mail demanding that anyone making racial generalizations must issue abject, scraping apologies. I'm not sure the Mail could acquire enough newsprint.
The human genome, like the newspaper, is mostly useless filler.
Hmmm, I dunno. I know that they are now discovering the functions of some of the previously considered "junk" dna. This stuff is complicated.
Well, if they find Arby's coupons, I'm still right about the genome being like the newspaper.
542
Well, right. I don't know the number, but all modern humans have better than 99% Neanderthal genes in some sense, given that we've got better than 98% chimpanzee genes.
I think (based on a superficial reading) that they were looking at sites with variation. And if I recall correctly 98% is high for human chimpanzee common genes.
539: I just meant for bringing it here as a NMM to "NMM" suggestion.
Well, if they find Arby's coupons, I'm still right about the genome being like the newspaper.
I am right now working on my patent application for A Method Of Inserting Arby's Coupons Into The Human Genome.
547
The point, I thought, was that people use very different metrics when they talk about the amount of shared DNA, and in popular discussions, those metrics are never defined. I know you must be measuring things differently if you say siblings share half their DNA and humans and chips share anywhere upwards of 90%. But no one ever explains how these things are done.
Shit 16 Year Old Australian Schoolgirls (Convincingly Portrayed by a Grown Man) Say.
The Science paper is here
If one number to talk about is the goal, it's the proportion of non-african ancestry that is Neanderthal, derived from observation of point differences and their population frequencies; getting this from overall sequence comparison takes many steps-- all simple.
Chris Y's link in 539 is very good, deserves more than skimming.
Human-Chimp overall genome similarity is between 95-96%, diveregence time 4-5MYA. Similarity between a pair of modern humans about 99.9%, mitochondrial eve about 200 k years ago. The neanderthal genome fragments are tiny bits of degraded DNA, not like chimp, a single overall similarity number is misleading for this reason. So thinking about population variation is necessary to determine similarity. The inferred overall sapiens-Neanderthal similarity (pointless to think about) would clearly be much less than 3%. Ancestry time estimate in the Science paper human-Neanderthal is 825k years ago; IMO this derived figure is a more useful single-number summary than various measures of sequence similarity. We care about the reading on clock rather than how to count the complicated ticks.
551: Much to unpack there.
1. Why do Australian schoolgirls have to dress up like hotel maids? (Hotel maids at a real estate convention when they wear their blazers.)
2. What is it about teenage girls that makes parodying them so attractive to grown men? I think part of what is going on is that the hypertrophied sense of enforced social cohesion in the stereotypical girls' HS milieu makes it very easy to pick up on a couple of nearly universal affectations and craft a convincing portrayal -- there's very little in that video that is not familiar to anyone who's seen any caricature of middle- and upper-middle class teenage girls over the past 30 years. Obviously, a big part of that is the penetration of US (and especially Southern California) youth culture tropes into the rest of the anglosphere.
3. I felt like the portrayal foundered a bit at the end by making the racism so over-bearing. It would have been much funnier to leave that aspect of it implicit, as it's hard to imagine someone as intelligent and in tune with social cues as the character being that oblivious to the way her descriptions of the sponsored children sounds. Leaving the mockery at the much more subtle level it rose to at the start of the piece would have been much more effective. (That said, I'm not sure how that part of it plays in Australia -- I know there's aspects of race relations there which are shockingly retrograde to US eyes.)
4. Where do they get the money for production values that high? Huge cast, great videography, very well-chosen locations and sets -- it is hard to imagine a US show of the same kind of humor commanding that large a budget.
But no one ever explains how these things are done.
When a man and a woman love each other very very much . . .
Seriously, though, this stuff is more complicated than I expected. I mean you need a computer. But I'm digging into it in my new job, and I won't stop until I have proven that we lefties are the next step in human evolution. You can count on that. And red heads are more temperamental. But worth it. Heheh.
What is it about teenage girls that makes parodying them so attractive to grown men?
Teenage girls are pretty bizarre. My 10 and 12 year old nieces were quite sensible and perfectly charming, but now that they're 15 and 17 they've become monsters. Not bad monsters, they have no pathologies or serious bad behaviors, but they're downright weird. And part of it is that they have this undirected and untamed sexuality bouncing around unpredictably with no particular object, expressing itself frequently in multi-g-force speed-of-light mood swings.
part of it is that they have this undirected and untamed sexuality bouncing around unpredictably with no particular object
I know this wasn't meant to start a fight, but "untamed sexuality" just sounds odd. They're supposed to be tamed? I mean, they're supposed to behave in a socially acceptable fashion, if they're masturbating on the dining room table during dinner that's something to discourage, but 'untamed' clangs.
if they're masturbating on the dining room table during dinner that's something to discourage.
I am so sick of these prudish feminist bluestockings.
They sound a lot less Australian than the Australians I've known.
How about "unfettered", LB? Better? Or just as bad?
Well, mostly it's that in the absence of specific complaints (sexually harassing the mailman or something), it looks like a complaint that they're perceptibly sexual. Emerson probably didn't mean anything I'd be cranky about if I knew what he meant, but I'm having trouble with any comment of the form "there's something objectionable about teenage girls having the kind of sexuality they have" without knowing why their sexuality is a problem. I mean, they're allowed to have some kind of sexuality, right?
Basically at a certain age people learn when they're having sexual feelings and when they're not, and they know when they're sending sexual messages and when they're not, and have at least some directionality and self-awareness. But notnecessarily at 16.
When I worked in a HS in my early 30s I noticed that the 16-18 year old girls were doing a lot of the same things that 20-25 year old young women did when they were flirting, and they were also fully developed and dressed to kill. A few years later I got to know one of the mothers of two of the girls and said something about this, and she said that what they were doing wasn't sexually intended at all. They were imitating grownups and movie stars, and looking good for their friends, and trying to get people to look at them. But someone else sending out the same signals (e.g., the people they were imitating from the movies) would be being seductive and flirtatious.
And at the same time, they had these enormous mood swing which at some level were sexually motivated, whether there was an object or not, and whether they were aware of it or not.
And then, a few years later I met one of the girls who was going to the same college as me, and she pretty definitely was flirting with me, in a perfectly nice way.
And as it happened, the band director of the school did lose his job and maybe his career by getting involved with a student (who happened to be the daughter of a school board member).
I'm having trouble with any comment of the form "there's something objectionable about teenage girls having the kind of sexuality they have" without knowing why their sexuality is a problem
As I recall it, it was a problem for me, because I was horny all over the place in weird and unproductive and difficult to channel ways. I would have liked to have had my sexuality tamed a little more, in the sense of being more compliantly subject to my wishes and priorities.
A few years later I got to know one of the mothers of two of the girls and said something about this, and she said that what they were doing wasn't sexually intended at all. They were imitating grownups and movie stars, and looking good for their friends, and trying to get people to look at them. But someone else sending out the same signals (e.g., the people they were imitating from the movies) would be being seductive and flirtatious.
That was a problem too! And then when I wanted to flirt on purpose, it came out all wrong.
That poor band director. If only he had been an assistant coach on Joe Paterno's staff he wouldn't have been fired until years later.
Judging from her facebook page, the younger niece spends a lot of her time batting away scuzzy guys. That's scary too. You can't just say "Please, be a lesbian like your older sister", but you can think it.
You can't just say "Please, be a lesbian like your older sister", but you can think it.
Can't you just get her Melissa Etheridge albums for gifts, or is that too dated?
562, 563: Well, sure, that kind of not-knowing-exactly-what-you-want-or-how-to-get-it is a problem for adolescents in all sorts of areas, but it's not really something that third parties are entitled to complain about.
561: Well, that clarifies what you meant.
My high school band director married a student shortly after she graduated. As far as I know, there were no repercussions.
568: well of course not; she played a horn.
As far as I know, there were no repercussions.
I guess he didn't marry the drummer.
In my HS the football coach married a student right after she graduated. They're still married, she has a law degree, and she's a facebook friend of my brother.
I wasn't exactly complaining about my nieces. They have a right to be monsters, etc., but they're much harder to relate to.
And I'm a little hair trigger defensive about generalizations about teenage girls these days, with Sally stalking around the apartment looking disturbingly teenage.
I'm Facebook friends with a high school acquaintance who married the history teacher/wrestling coach 6 months after graduation. Like JE's story, they're still married and apparently happy with kids. I think that goes in the "don't try this at home" category, though.
Also it turned out in later life that my good guy friend's longterm girlfriend ended up becoming the lesbian partner and then wife of my favorite high school English teacher. Which was surprising since neither guy friend nor girlfriend went to my high school. I guess that one is convoluted but not that interesting.
Also, the guy in my high school who had a locker-room reputation for having a remarkably gigantic penis is now the principal of a well known and very fancy high school.
One of my roommates married his high school teacher. Not immediately after high school or anything. He was nearly finished with his doctorate before they got married.
And then there's ..... Newt Gingrich!
An excellent, but kind of sleazily flirty, English teacher from my high school had long before he taught me married a student of his after she graduated. It was right at the beginning of his career, so not too much of an age gap.
553: Some thoughts, in reverse order:
4. It's a production of the Australian equivalent of the BBC.
3. I agree that the race stuff is a bit jarring, but looking at some of the other episodes, it does seem intended to shift from the relatively realistic to the quite surreal.
2. The hypertrophied sense of enforced social cohesion, leading kids to exhibit stereotypical modes of behaviour that are therefore easy to mimic, is I think part of it, but is just as relevant to parodying HS boys as girls. I'd say that the target of the humour in the case of the girls in particular is the idea of a disjunction between the performance of sisterly solidarity and the reality of ruthless hierarchy. Likewise, I think what's being parodied in the OP "Shit Girls Say" episode is the idea of a sort of cutesy self-production which, you're invited to feel, masks self-absorption ("can you do this for me"), passive aggression ("can you not do that"), etc. The misogyny of the latter lies in the unstated assumption that men don't have their own bullshit which they deploy just as frequently. (I don't think that assumption is there in the Australian clip - everyone knows that teenage boys are meatheads.)
1. Beats me!
In high school, my dad and his friends used to physically lift the typing teacher and put her into a barrel from which she could not remove herself without assistance. They would go for a smoke and then come back and free her. I don't think she married any of them, but the fact that nobody got arrested does seem to imply a very small age gap.
There's a genre of film making young guys look dorky too, though young guys seem to enjoy them. "Animal House" is the classic of this genre.
580: Jeez, don't make me laugh that hard, I'm trying to look like I'm working.
Also, why was there a barrel in the typing room?
The barrel was for trash, but hopefully clean trash.
I'm finding with my teen daughter that while I resent generalizations about her behavior, I'm also starting to make some of them myself, although I suppose they are not really generalizations if they refer to a specific person.
In particular, I was a little disappointed to see my normally sensible daughter behaving in a giggly, breathless manner with her friends, gushing about some AWESOME COLOR!! or CUTE STUFFED ANIMAL!!!, and in general behaving more like a three year old than a 14 year old. Also, if I do say so myself, she is a knockout, and I pity the boys she is around, because they are powerless when faced with her. Bwahahaha.
580: Sounds like a gentler, funnier version of an episode from one of Laura Ingalls Wilder's books, where the older boys keep beating up the teacher.* I'm imagining them smoking corncob pipes.
*He eventually keeps them in line with a blacksnake whip.
573: with Sally stalking around the apartment looking disturbingly teenage.
I Was a Teenage Teenager.
And as it happened, the band director of the school did lose his job and maybe his career by getting involved with a student (who happened to be the daughter of a school board member).
We all remember the sad tale of Eula Varner's teacher, I'm sure.
There's an awful lot of butt-hurt going on over his review of Corey Robin's book. I had no idea.
Did you read the review? It's incredibly condescending and pompous. (And apparently ill informed to boot.)
I loved the book but felt let down by the ending.
Really? I liked the ending; he doesn't quite tie up all the loose ends explicitly, but there's enough of the story revealed to figure out the rest pretty easily, and ending it where he does makes it delightfully evocative and ambiguous. I found the book as a whole intensely frustrating in some ways, but I liked it overall.
Googling "Eula Varner" has made me aware that there is a tv movie with Don Johnson, Cybil Shepherd, and Ava Gardner. Sadly, it is not a re-remake of Showboat.
588: I curious enough now to overcome my embarrassment over my cluelessness -- what Chabon novel are you talking about?
Don Johnson couldn't play mixed race regardless of how good a passing.
593: Oy! As if the world needed further proof of my idiocy!
Now go read Wonder Boys teo (since you said you liked his writing). Other people might tell you to read other things but they will be wrong if they do.
I liked his writing, but not enough to read any of his other books.
I'm going to read all his novels right after I finish Finnegans Wake but before I read the entire SAS manual from cover to cover.
I liked Wonder Boys but couldn't get into the one about the Golem and comic books at all at all.
596: OK. One might suspect that you are judicious in your choices of how to spend your time ... if we didn't know better. OK, at least rent/stream the movie Wonder Boys (it was well-adapted) and read it if you are intrigued. And then I'll quit bugging you on it.
the movie Wonder Boys (it was well-adapted)
The rare case of, "better movie than book".
One might suspect that you are judicious in your choices of how to spend your time ... if we didn't know better
Heh. Touché.
This is only slightly off topic but since high school teachers and post high school relationships have come up I have a problem I'd like to mull. . .
I went to a private boarding school (though I wasn't a boarder) that was very big on the 'relationships' thing. .we called the teachers by their first name, hung out at their houses, etc. For the most part it worked well, but there was one young English teacher who definitely attracted crushes. I for one spent a lot of time with him--almost none of it alone---his behavior seemed then and now, impeccable. And many others did too, that I'm still in touch with, and they still remember him fondly and seem to think his behavior was indeed, impecabble. There are others I know who don't like him, but it always boils down to harsh things he said about their being late or phoning in their papers. I had no reason for suspicon. I briefly had an agonizing crush on him, but I got over it fairly quickly when someone else came along.
We kept in vague touch after he left. . .not unusual with teachers from our school. . .and he stopped being a teacher. ..we ended up having several mutual 'grown up' friends. In college I happened to work near his mother and ended up being good friends with her, and then I also got to know his girlfriend, now wife, through a later job. Eventually, I even worked with him. They now think of me as one of their regular grownup friends, and I do likewise. I play with their adorable kid, and they both write to me and email me, etc. I really forget he was ever my teacher and lump him (and his wife) in with my friends-who-were-graduate-students-when-I-was-incollege. Older, but not really different.
So I'm at a reunion like event, 15 years after the fact, and speculating does anyone know happened to this beautiful wonderful sweet sweet girl who dropped out in 10th grade, where she is, I'd love to find her, and someone laughs, thinking I meant why did she drop out, and he's like, "duh. . .her parents found her diary about sleeping with that English teacher. Why do you think he left and stopped being a teacher?" But he left a whole year and a half after she did, and he used to come and visit and sub all the time, and her father was on the board, I don't see how that would have just been smoothed over. And . . I just can't see him doing it. HE always seemed like a very moral person, and does today, very deliberate and thoughtful. And the guy who told me that our classmate and the teacher were sleeping together, he himself had a famous falling out with the teacher over a paper, so he's not totally credible. On the other hand. . .I know it happens. And if its true, it's horrible and he ruined her education for years and it just makes me feel terrible and I dont want to have anything to do with him. But I can't ask him, and I can't ask her, and it makes me really uncomfortable when I'm hanging out with him and his family, and I'm not sure who I could ask without making things worse.
How did Reunion Guy know this tale?
I don't see how that would have just been smoothed over.
This. Why would she have had to drop out while he continued to teach, especially with her board member father?
And if its true, it's horrible and he ruined her education for years ...
This seems a bit unfair. How exactly did he ruin her education?
605: Given the timeline and other context you give, it sounds like Reunion Guy's story does not add up. Doesn't sound worth agonizing over.
I'm sort of on the ignore it front. You're not in touch with any of them, so you don't need to figure out how to interact with them, the story's from a tainted source, and doesn't make sense. Doesn't mean the teacher can't possibly have done anything wrong, but you don't know that he did based on the gossip.
(Belated thanks to Halford for that interesting link in 473, BTW.)
People make up that shit all the time.
Some years back, I learned from my secretary that a number of people at the place were pretty sure I'd been having an affair with the secretary before her. I was kind of flattered to think people thought an attractive married woman 15 years younger might actually be interested in me, but on the other hand, geez, I've been working here for 15 years, it's a small outfit, and you people don't know me better than that?
I took her to lunch on her birthday. I suppose that was the tell.
Here is a report on the Neandertal HLA genes introgression study I mentioned in 495.
I agree with 613. People have vivid imaginations. I once went to lunch with a married deputy clerk who was immediately accused by her boss of having an affair with me. The accusation initially referenced an unnamed lawyer. When the deputy clerk said "Lawyer Carp?!?!?!," her boss said "No! Lawyer Will!"
She quit on the spot due to the outrageous (and false) accusation.
I might have been slightly peeved that she was so offended about being accused of having an affair with me.
Oh, wait, I'm wrong, you are currently friends with him. Erm, if it's driving you nuts, you could ask him if he knows what happened to her so you could get in touch, and overinterpret his reaction? If nothing of the sort happened, it's a perfectly inoffensive question. But I doubt it'd get you much information.
The Wonder Boys movie was good. I read the one about comics books too, and I didn't get what the big deal was supposed to be.
605: I dunno, sounds like a bit of black-and-white thinking there. People can be moral in some contexts and not in others, and as Eggplant says it's not necessarily true that even if it did happen, it ruined her life or education.
I can come up with a lot of scenarios ranging from bad-behavior-on-both-sides to total-abuse-of-power on his part to immoral manipulation on her part (lying about whether any relationship actually existed). The more important question is what do you, as his friend, feel comfortable living with. I personally would be inclined to confront it -- say to the guy, "Look, this is horrible and awkward but here's what I heard at the reunion and rather than just make an assumption about this guy and whether he was telling me the truth, I wanted to ask you directly."
But there are lots of reasons you might not want to confront it, and in that case I think you have to make a judgment call about what you personally are going to regret more.
Would you feel worse if you make a false positive (believe Reunion Guy, end your friendship with the former teacher, and later find out the story was false), or a false negative (disbelieve Reunion Guy, continue friendship with teacher and one day find out the story was true)?
I could see wanting to confront something that was bit better established. From the description, there is at best second-hand story (unless reunion guy was there when the parents found the diary) from fifteen years ago.
Lawyers are normally scuzzbags who screw anything that walks, present company excepted of course, so the misunderstandings were unsurprising. In real life there's always that 0.1% dedicated to screwing up perfectly valid generalizations.
Were I Edith, I'd be drawn to the gossip aspect of this, but largely uninterested in the morality. Fifteen years of seeming good behavior seems like it meets the statute of limitations. I wouldn't confront him on it in any fashion, including the manner that LB proposes in 616.
But it wouldn't stop me from quizzing Reunion Guy. How does he know this? How does he respond to Edith's obvious questions? Does anybody else know about this? And where is the woman involved?
But my approach would be purely self-indulgent - I'd be trying to satisfy my curiosity - and therefore it wouldn't be appropriate for me to potentially cause someone grief over it. On the other hand, if you really are grossly offended 15 years later, and this is a potentially friendship-disqualifying matter, then it would be reasonable to ask Mr. Ex-teacher about it, even if only in the indirect fashion that LB proposes.
present company excepted of course
What makes you think they wouldn't screw present company?
Other option, if it's really bothering you. Go to Ex-Teacher, and say "This sucks, but you should know that people from [School] are gossiping about you. [Reunion Guy] told me that [Nice Girl] dropped out of school because her parents found out she was having an affair with you. If people believe him, that could have a real impact on your current life -- I thought you should know the story was out there."
And see what he says.
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CORRECTION: The original version of this item repeatedly misspelled "Barnes & Noble".
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What was the nature of ET's and RG's paper dispute?
620: Lawyers tend to be risk-averse and repressed, in my experience, but that experience was largely acquired in fancy Manhattan firms that told disapproving stories about the goings-on at other, younger, less collegial, cruder firms. On the other hand, the chairman of one of those firms remarked that "you aren't a real [firm name] lawyer until you've sacrificed at least one marriage to the firm."
624: I was wondering how Yglesias was going to reconcile his eccentric spelling with the standards of his new employer.
But apparently those standards only extend to proper names. The word "serenly" is still in that item.
You and numerous other people observed nothing but impeccable behavior and now someone with an axe to grind drops a 15 year old smear that doesn't make sense? And you're now friends with him, his spouse, and play with his kid? Yeah, better ask about all that because doubtless good things will follow. Don't be obvious about it though. Maybe casually make a reference to how you totally wanted to make out with that girl in high school and she left before you had a chance and how it's killing you not knowing if it would have been worth it. If he responds that yeah, boy did you miss out on a hot piece of ass well there's your answer.
It is pretty easy to come up with an interpretation that exonerates him.
Nice Girl crushed on him and wrote about sexually wanting him (unilaterally, with no encouragement).
Invasive parents read that and spooked, pulling daughter out.
Teacher moves on for unrelated reasons.
Reunion Guy hears enough elements of the story to weave his version.
You have a lot of direct evidence about the guy. How good is your usual judgment about people? If you aren't often suprised to find out seemingly great people are ax murderers then you probably have a good read on people. Have some faith in your judgment if your track record warrants it.
But my approach would be purely self-indulgent - I'd be trying to satisfy my curiosity - and therefore it wouldn't be appropriate for me to potentially cause someone grief over it. On the other hand, if you really are grossly offended 15 years later, and this is a potentially friendship-disqualifying matter, then it would be reasonable to ask Mr. Ex-teacher about it, even if only in the indirect fashion that LB proposes.
I agree with pf here. LB's 623 isnt so bad, I guess. But I think it is better left alone.
Wait! I change my answer to a full and enthusiastic endorsement of gswift's comment. The cruder the insinuations about her, the better.
Sorry, home internet is new and died. This actually inspired me to come into the office!
606: He was her best friend for a while, though they grew apart, so on that front he was credible.
609:She had been at the school since the sixth grade, her sister went to the school before, her family was very tied up in it. *I* thought she dropped out b/c she was having trouble with the classes (and spent hours trying to coach her through our shared history class, trying to keep her from dropping out, b/c I was very fond of her, if not her closest confidant) and when I did see her in the ensuing four years or so, before I lost touch, she was always very sad about dropping out and implied that not being able to hack it had ruined her confidence. She didn't finish high school or college for years and years, though now I think she has. That was very sad and somewhat unfortunate if the reason was only academic, but suddenly seemed vile when it occured to me that the root cause was being molested.
Nice Girl crushed on him and wrote about sexually wanting him (unilaterally, with no encouragement).
We don't know this. Maybe he was intentionally wearing overly snug pants in an environment where his package would be at eye level to a bunch of high school girls all day. Man, that's genius.
611: Oh no, I see him quite often, and his wife and child and mother more often. And I hear from him a lot.
That was very sad and somewhat unfortunate if the reason was only academic, but suddenly seemed vile when it occured to me that the root cause was being molested.
Ooh, it could be both! Maybe she knew she was leaving over grades and was all, "fuck it, might as well bang the English teacher before I go".
628, 629: You know, mostly I'd say leave it alone, only pick at it if a false negative (that is, he did it, and you continue being friends without knowing) would be a serious issue for you. But really I'd say leaving it alone is the best idea.
But this kind of issue is the sort of thing where I'd have pretty minimal faith in my judgment about his character. Not this guy specifically, but people do very unexpected things around sex, and surprise their nearest and dearest all the time.
I'm inclined to think Witt and Megan are right here, but that LB's 623 is the way to go if your answer to all your questions is still "no". I would say that it's possible that you can never resolve this satisfactorily, and that being the case, how far do you need to push it? That's a personal thing, with no right or wrong answers.
338: I read Witt and Megan at opposite ends of the spectrum on this one (Witt: Confront. Megan: If your judgment is generally good, there's no need to look into it, he didn't do it.)
Chris y is not afraid to embrace all approaches.
Oh, I read Witt as, only confront if you don't trust your judgment. Still do. Confused now.
Truly, there is an overabundance of happiness in the world and on any baseless rumor we should all peer decades into the past of our nearest and dearest to look for any hint of a lapse so that we might shun those who currently enrich our lives.
Listen to the sarcastic cop, Miss Wilson.
641: Neither are hardline, but Witt wasn't 'trust your judgment' she was 'if believing in him and being wrong is worse than confronting him and he was innocent, then don't ask. But in your shoes I'd confront.'
I say pursue it, because the whole thing, especially with the boarding school setting, has a great romantic air of mystery around it; a fatal sexual error! Powerful parents! A charming teacher! A secret that's been buried for decades! The whole thing sounds like a set up for a pretty good novel. This advice only applies if you liveblog it.*
*More serious advice: I might pursue it a little bit, just because it doesn't seem like the kind of thing you'd be able to just put out of your head and ignore w/r/t your current friendship. But there clearly comes a point at which you just have to decide on an answer based on the evidence you have.
gswift, in all honesty, she is in fact the only girl I have ever wanted to make out with, before I quite understood what making out entailed. (This was in middle school and I was two years younger than everyone.) So this does probably color my dilemma, as Witt so precisely put it. It always seemed like she was lost for a long time after dropping out, and if someone was to blame for it, that makes me feel really bad. I feel complicit, somehow. But. . .I'd hate to falsely suspect him.
The details on the paper are a bit foggy for me, but I think the teacher thought that a paper was plagiarized in the spirit of the law, if not the letter. . that RG had read a senior's previous paper on the same topic too closely and reproduced its line of argument, without actually copying any phrases. TG did not want to punish him very harshly for it, but he did want to dock a grade (under the argument that he spent less time developing his argument than the rest of us) and he did want to have a meeting with his parents explaining that this was problematic and could lead to problems in the future. I actually thought TG was being lenient, b/c I suspected that RG secretly thought he'd get away with it b/c TG had never taught the SeniorGirl (oh this is getting so complicated, we were such a small school. . .) and wouldn't have read her paper so there was an element of intentional deception. Not that I said anythign about it. So RG suffered very little, but he acted all hurt and indignant and went from being a fan to being a critic. This kind of thing happened a lot, it's just the swing was very dramatic in his case.
TG did wear snug jeans with rolled up cuffs, which we mocked him for as being a throwback to his 80s youth. (We were in the early 90s, baggy jeans all the way.) I think I was too inexperienced and naive to be attracted to a package on display at that point, and might not have even realized that's what I was looking at.
I think Megan's interpretation strikes me as the most reasonable. Her parents were very reasonable people, I thought, and I could see them freaking out but also making sure something was true before causing a crusade. (Not the case with some scenarios I've watched myself as a teacher.) And I do generally have good judgement, I'd say, so maybe I'll put it off as gossip. I guess the shock of it made it seem more credible.
628 and 642 are gold. All that needs to be said, really.
We need to know more of the character of Reunion Guy. Did he get caught for plagiarism or fabrication?
So yes, I think Sarcastic Cop + Practical Engineer carries the day.
MEW, on the strength of 647, I revise my position marginally: stop right there.
647: I think I was too inexperienced and naive to be attracted to a package on display at that point, and might not have even realized that's what I was looking at.
??? So... he was wearing jeans tight enough to highlight his "package," and you were in graduate school and did not know what a penis was?
653: The penis doesn't really figure into most graduate programs until orals.
Mmm. Yeah, 647 makes RG sound completely unreliable, to the point that I can't see confronting.
It does sound, though, like you want to look Nice Girl up and catch up with her. Why not do that? It's easy to find people these days.
What? no, I was in tenth grade. And I should have been in 8th or 7th grade, depending on how you count.
If you don't know how to count you probably should have been a few grades lower.
653: Middle school, m'lud. Not grad school. At that age, while you might know what a penis is, being unsure as to where exactly in the crotch it sits and so what it looks like through tight pants isn't surprising.
Wait, the making out thing AND the tight jeans thing are true? I'm now high fiving everyone, THROUGH THE INTERNET.
And what I meant to say was that I wasn't really thinking in terms of packages enough at that point to really recall if his was on display, I just recall that we made fun of him for wearing 80s style tight jeans.
656: I still wouldn't bring it up (except with RG if you wanted to), but you being younger than everybody else does at least provide a reason for RG knowing and you not knowing.
In a more serious voice, I would note that history, recent and remote, is not short of cases of people hearing and ignoring rumors about sexual abuse because they seemed out of character for the subject or the attendant details appeared inconsistent and odd. I don't say that for, or to recommend, the J'accuse! rush or to encourage loose gossip about such things, but some of the stories that gossip can distort almost unrecognizably have ugly facts at bottom.
662 is a much better way of putting what I was groping for in 637. I still don't think it's worth confronting, but "That guy wouldn't do that" is an unreliable way to think around sexual misconduct.
654: Well played.
656: The later reference to graduate school in 605 mixed me up. So you were basically in your early teens and did not know this. Sorry get sidetracked here, I just find it fascinating that someone can reach that age and not know certain things about anatomy.
664 before I saw 658, of course. Yeah I guess so, I just would've thought that would be truer of children of say Henry Darger's generation than one growing up in the Nineties.
657: good point. I meant how you count the grades I skipped/merged/did in random places. In theory I was a full 3 years younger than most of the 'normal' students in my class--they turned 16 in 10th grade and I turned 13. But by my count I only skipped two grades and plenty of my classmates turned 15 that year.
And yes, I had a completely absurd idea of how, exactly, penises sit inside of pants.
659: consider yourself high fived.
All this advice to stop investigating is so boring and is killing the fun. Let's solve a mystery, people!
I don't buy the suggestion that RG's resentment over a paper grade is strong evidence that he was likely to spread a wholly false rumor about the student/teacher affair, especially if RG and Nice Girl were good friends, and especially years after the fact. I do think that something like Megan's story outlined above is plausible, but based on what you've written I'd say an actual affair is reasonably plausible. Taking daughter out of school and then quietly years later arranging to have the teacher go away is exactly the kind of thing that parents that are powerful but deeply afraid of the embarrassment of a scandal might try. And i also agree that it's extremely unreliable to project general impressions of character into situations like these.
Velma has sex-gossip issues of her own.
What I'm thinking about RG is that he was likely to have believed malicious gossip based on little evidence back when he was in high school and actively pissed off, and now it's just something he remembers as neutrally true.
670 -- definitely possible, but (1) he and Nice Girl were best friends at the time, so it's likely he's taking on the air of passing on first-person knowledge, not just rumor; (2) Edith was at least two years younger than the rest of the class and may just not have known what was going on at the time.
The Henry Darger reference is threatening to suck me down into a deep, deep Wikipedia hole that I cannot resist. Never heard of him before. I might not resurface. . . I would say that I was not your typical 90s kid when it came to sex. (In fact, [while sitting backstage during rehearsals for the school production of Henry IV through VI] when I was getting thoroughly bored of everyone comparing shagging techniques, I once cried out, " can we pleaaaase talk about something else? and really? Am I only the virgin in our class?" and there was a long silence and then everyone, said, almost at once, "there's C [my best friend]. Pretty sure the rest of us have done it, one way or the other.") I was very sheltered and highly obedient to my parents dictum that dating wait for after college. Some, um, vestige of my strange ideas about the morphology of the male crotch were still around when I was, in fact, almost in graduate school, and finally got a good look at one.
I wasn't a prude, and I think my friends honestly tried to shelter me most of the time, except [backstage] there was no where for me to go. So it is totally plausible that no one wanted me to know about this sordid affair in high school b/c they thought I shouldn't have to deal with the dilemma then. Except for the 'fun' part, Halford is hitting on exactly the reasons I feel bad about just discounting it.
655:That was my original intent at the reunion, trying to find her. She has an amazingly generic name.
In the case I was thinking of, the teacher's relationship with the student was found out about on a Friday and the guy didn't come to school on Monday, or ever. I suspect it was quit in lieu of prosecution. The long wait rings false to me.
Could Nice Girl have made it up? As in, I'm failing out of this place my parents have put an enormous amount of pressure on me to succeed at, and I need a plausible story to tell about the reasons why?
I need a new job like yesterday. I hate everyone.
At least you've got a start at the intro do the cover letter.
"Morphology" is fun to say.
Note to self: trademark "Pago Pago Morphology Archipelago."
I don't hate everyone, but man am I unenthusiastic about working for a living. I'm in the middle of digging myself a hole on a bunch of stuff that needs doing.
674: I think she *might* have been capable of lying to RG for that reason, who was a bit pretentious about how smart he thought he was, etc.. I do not think she would have been capable of carrying a false accusation through any hoops that would have made anything happen. . .but I also don't know that she would have been capable of carrying a true one through those hoops either. The scenario that makes me feel relieved is that she wrote a fictional diary and her parents took her out upon finding it, and that RG was either deceived or deceiving out of spite. The scenario that frightens me is that it's all true, it caused her misery and caused her to suddenly fail her classes, she dropped out, and then the next year her parents found the diary, and *that's* when TG left. (But then wouldn't the school want him to never visit or never sub?) Or what if the school never knew about it and the parents went to him directly and then (not having a child at the school anymore) were satisfied by his mere quitting and promise that he wouldn't teach again, not realizing he was visiting us now and then and subbing now and then?
I feel I should really just ask him directly, but if it's not true, wouldn't he be terribly hurt that I could even think it was true? And it feels like it would rewind our friendship by 15+ years to this awkward time when we weren't actually friends.
I essentially alternate between 674 and 679, which is probably why I am allowing this 30 second snippet of holiday reunion chat bother me weeks later. Probably should stop now . . .thanks for the input. . .
I got sucked into a deep, deep Henry-Darger-related hole last week. (I was wondering what the longest novel was.)
I'm surprised by Von Wafer's claim that the movie of Wonderboys is better than the book, but I experienced them years apart, so I have no idea.
I enjoy the hell out of Chabon's writing, and I'm really not the sort of reader who gets impressed by prose style - turns of phrase, sure, but Chabon will write whole sentences and paragraphs I want to immediately reread, which almost no one else does (Melville is one).
Anyway, both the Alaska one and the comic book one are awfully long; the Pittsburgh ones are much shorter and snappier (if also collegiate, which may turn off some). I loved Summerland, but that's because I'm a sucker for baseball.
Which is all my way of saying "Yes" to 679.
680: If it's going to drive you nuts, ask. If there's nothing to it, it shouldn't be that insanely offensive to him, and I doubt it would really screw up the friendship.
I think that even if it's not true, asking might chill the relationship.
680: I feel I should really just ask him directly, but if it's not true, wouldn't he be terribly hurt that I could even think it was true?
Wouldn't he? You know him, we don't, but I'm guessing you should expect him to react the way most people would react to being asked: "So I'm just wondering, would you mind confirming or denying this random rumor I heard at the reunion that you're a statutory rapist?" I mean, seriously, I'm going to have to refer you to 628 again.
Glad you got to discover Henry Darger out of all this, though.
684-5: I think it really depends dramatically on the relationship. My close friends, I cannot imagine hearing something like this and NOT asking them. It would weird me out completely to know something like this was circulating (for whatever version of "circulating," and however unreliable the narrator) and to carry on my friendship NOT telling them. I'd expect them to tell me.
But for less-close friends, it's a bit different. My answer remains the same as above: you have to do what you think will make YOU feel most comfortable.
(I can't believe nobody's mentioned the most time-honored reason for a young woman to abruptly leave school in 10th grade. Are we all so certain she wasn't pregnant? Regardless of parentage, that's a reason for grades to suffer and parents to flip out and/or want to hush up.)
Also, belatedly: 659 is hilarious. You go, gswift!
(Even though I think your job makes you more likely to hear the crazy-made-up rather than the so-crazy-it's-actually-true that I more often hear.)
Or I would put it differently than 685: if you're really burning to know the answer to the question but would prefer not to end the friendship until you know for sure, maybe inquire with some parties who are not the guy being accused. For instance, it may be worth tracking her parents down and asking them. (It doesn't sound like it's at all worth it, but the fact that we're having this conversation illustrates you've already decided that it is, so you might as well do something about it.)
I'd argue against confronting the guy. It's fifteen years in the past, and at best you have thirdhand old information that says "her parents found her diary and later he left and then he adjuncted a little" I'm not sure of the likelihood of it being the case both that he molested (note the escalation-- RG describes it as 'they found her diary' not 'didn't you hear about the hearing?') the daughter of powerful parents on the board and was eased out of his job and permitted to keep coming around. Possible,sure, but it seems to be just as likely that she was having problems in school, her parents found the diary, decided it wasn't working, pulled her out, and she complained to her friend that they just pulled her out over her stupid diary,parents are soooo lame and he assumed later that the guy left due to the fallout.
EW is freaking me out. A very similar thing happened at my hippie boarding school, with a tight jeans-wearing English teacher. I never found out how that resolved, as I dropped out of tenth grade due to insufficient molestation. How common is it for those sorts of schools to [produce all Shakespeare's Henry plays as one giant combined theatrical event]?
687: I saw her often enough afterwards to know there was no bump and both she and her parents were vociferously pro-choice, so if there was a pregnancy, it was ended.
I think I might just try to forget about it for a while. I owe him and his wife a phone call but they're busy people and won't mind if I delay until I can forget about it.
It's funny, I don't really disagree with what gswift and will and Carp are saying as far as what can happen in various situations, but for whatever reason I'm vaguely inclined to lean toward 662 or the like on this one. Many charmer has some inappropriate history of inappropriate boundary-crossing, sometimes escalating to an amazing degree over the years as they show one face to "good" people (of the same social class, age, gender, whatever) and another to the more vulnerable people they're exploiting.
Huh; you think asking the question would be friendship-ending? She can certainly ask in a way that assumes the answer is no: "RG is spreading the story, and it freaked me out. I mean, I assume it's not true, but what with being younger than the rest of the class I wouldn't have known even if it was an open secret. There's nothing to it, right?"
oh geez. uh. .crap . ..not that common. I think LB knows who I really am. LB, do you want to connect us offblog? And while you're at it, could you delete the reference to the [production of Henry IV-VI]. crap crap crap.
694: Someone saying "you should know somebody is spreading the story" would not be friendship-ending. But if it were me and someone came to me and implied in any way that they felt it okay to wonder whether maybe I was really a child molester because they heard this rumor, yeah, that would be kind of a deal-breaker.
And the "how did he keep his job" thing doesn't seem crazy implausible to me. She wasn't a pre-teen; depending on ages and states it may not even have been statutory rape. And he sounds like a charming, sympathetic guy in a situation that sounds like a setup for this sort of thing to happen. Depends totally on the individuals, but I could completely see parents not wanting to 'ruin his life' over it.
Oh, wait, though. I just had a reassuring thought that makes me think it didn't happen. You described the school as really encouraging close personal relationships with teachers. If this happened, even if it got swept under the rug, they would have had to have backed away from that. If there wasn't a real change in atmosphere around the warm&fuzzy relationships with teacher after she left, then either it didn't happen or the school didn't know.
695: Um, I've got a guess on who you are, but not sure. Tell you what -- the two of you email me, and I'll email you both each other's addresses. Lizardbreath@unfogged.com.
I think it's a risk, and probably hard to disguise it as neatly as you think.
698.1: I still don't see how it could possibly coincide that a) something actually happened that was worth pulling the girl out over, and b) that something was not serious enough to have him fired on the spot. Especially given that the school encouraged "close personal relationships" between students and teachers.
697: I was specifically thinking it's not child molesting -- late high school teacher-student "consensual" relationships are sometimes going to be statutory rape, and always going to be forbidden by school rules, but it's more a question 'did you do this thing that was wrong' than 'are you a monster'. Still an offensive thing to ask, but not quite child molestation.
But then wouldn't the school want him to never visit or never sub?
My hippy prep school (non-boarding) had a tight-jeans-wearing English teacher leave because of an inappropriate relationship with a student--students plural, actually, which caused the jealous accusations that caused the thing to surface. Now, the girls were seniors, and I think that the one he really had sex with was 18, so it may not have actually been a criminal matter. Gross, certainly. Anyway, he resigned and immediately got a job at an all-girls private school in the same region. Meaning that our school didn't pursue the matter, may have even given him a positive recommendation, and certainly didn't out him if the new employer called for references.
I only knew about this because I was unusually tied into the gossip circuit with older sisters. For most upsetting school events, we would have schoolwide meetings and sometimes even discussion sections. Not for this.
I doubt my school would handle the situation in the same way today.
Oh, my point was that it's not impossible for a pervy teacher not to have been totally ostracized.
I don't know what I'd do in Edith's situation, but Witt makes a lot of sense to me here. (Actually, most of the time.)
702: As a matter of strict legality, true. As a matter of connotation and the register in which these things are actually viewed, not true. Tacitly saying you think someone is capable of "not quite child molestation" is virtually identical to saying you think they could be a child molester.
701: If they were having sex, and the parents for some reason didn't want to 'ruin his life' over it, but thought the girl needed to change environments entirely, not just get away from him but from the whole school? I think that'd be a lousy way to handle it, but not wildly implausible.
698: It's not implausible, but the evidence doesnt rule out possibilities that allow him to keep his job more plausily.
As a matter of connotation and the register in which these things are actually viewed, not true. Tacitly saying you think someone is capable of "not quite child molestation" is virtually identical to saying you think they could be a child molester.
I really don't think so. There are very few people who would consider an adult man sexually fucked up for being attracted to a 15/16 year-old girl. We've decided as a society that acting on that sort of attraction is wrong, but not that there's anything strange about feeling it.
I mean, I hate to bring in local examples, but we've got at least one story here at Unfogged where parents condoned that kind of relationship. A fucked up situation all around, but not that insanely bizarre.
703: Reunion Guy's story is that her parents, one of whom sat on the board of the school in question, pulled her on discovering evidence that he was having sex with her, or at any rate that she had diarized having sex with him. I want someone to construct for me a plausible scenario in which 1) she is pulled out over this discovery, 2) it is possible or likely that something could have actually happened, AND 3) he continues at the school for another year and a half and subsequently comes back for visits. Let alone whether the school would have pursued it or not after he left. How could 1, 2 and 3 fit together?
702: Except that in this case, the reason Ms. Wilson cares so much is because she thinks that the girl's life was, if not ruined, severely worsened. So the "not a really big deal" option seems closed.
710: "A big deal" doesn't mean "the same as child molestation". Adultery can be a big serious life-damaging deal, but it makes you someone who did something bad, not the same sort of thing as a child molestor. I think lots of people might put this in the same box as a professor/undergraduate relationship -- a very wrong thing to do, depending on the circumstances, but not like molesting children.
706: I really don't think so. There are very few people who would consider an adult man sexually fucked up for being attracted to a 15/16 year-old girl.
But plenty of people who would think he's monstrous for actually screwing one, obviously.
Now, even granting the parents would pull their daughter but still feel punctilious about "ruining" his life -- seems highly unlikely, but just possible given sufficiently bizarre parents -- why on Earth would the school risk keeping him on? Remember the whole premise here is that this story was generally known.
It's funny, I'm usually the one saying sexual relationships with big age/power differentials are really wrong. And I do think that, but I don't think there's anything like the societal consensus around it that people are suggesting. This girl was at an age where she was socially, if not legally depending on the state, capable of consenting to sex with someone her own age or close to it. A young teacher might not have been more than five or six years older than she was. I think there's a good chance people might have found it out, thought of it as something that needed to be stopped but not punished, and removed her from the situation because she was upset about it.
709: Lots of room in #2 for suspicion, accusation, denial, recantation, confusion, obfuscation, etc.
I should say that in Edith's shoes, I'd probably drop it -- she should ask only because it's bothering her. But it doesn't seem wildly implausible that the story could be true, and, as Jackmormon illustrates, it's the kind of story that can get winked at, which means to me that it's not too horrible to ask about.
Even if it's true -- what is asking him going to accomplish? If he says, "Very sad case, girl was delusional and fixated on me, I left because of rumors but nothing happened", are you going to be satisfied?
713: Don't get me wrong, I think the societal consensus as it exists now tends to be on the wrong side of hysterical and over-the-top. But it's virtually guaranteed of any hundred parents you're dealing with at a given school, at minimum a fifth of them would react to this story as being about the despoilation of a child, full stop and forget whether it's technically legally molestation or not. And it seems to me there is zero chance that an educator is caught sleeping with his high-school students, in the Nineties, and someone finds out about it and thinks at best that the student should be removed, but there should be no consequences to the teacher. Even if what happens is that the teacher is quietly told to move somewhere else and given a good recommendation -- which with a private boarding school would be possible -- I can't imagine a school risking its reputation by actually keeping a teacher on after he was found sleeping with students.
709 -- the parents are as interested in keeping everything quiet as they are in punishing the guy, and not having their daughter's life and their relationship with the school tarnished by the incident. They realize that simply having the guy fired will cause a scandal and won't achieve that. So they pull the daughter out, whom they may also blame just a little bit for the affair, and then quietly arrange with the teacher that he will move on with his life.
Not at all an unusual or implausible mentality for upper class folks IME and IMO.
715: it's the kind of story that can get winked at
It's not the kind of story that can get winked at, I'm sorry but that just seems nuts. Precisely the reason it bothers MEW is that it's not the kind of story that could get winked at.
Depends on who knew exactly what. What the parents knew isn't necessarily what the school knew, and what the kids knew really isn't necessarily what the school knew.
Again, if I were going to guess on this information, I'd say it probably didn't happen and I'd drop it. But the story doesn't sound self-refuting to me.
719: I was counting Jackm's story of just such a teacher being allowed to continue teaching girls of the same age as 'winking' at it.
And it seems to me there is zero chance that an educator is caught sleeping with his high-school students, in the Nineties, and someone finds out about it and thinks at best that the student should be removed
Maybe in a religious setting, where the man is an elder or a clergyman.
Without religion there is no morality, as we know.
721: The school in Jackm's story quietly made him leave and go somewhere else. That's the common pattern in boarding school cases where evidence of impropriety surfaces; get the sources of the scandal away from the school as quietly as possible. That's not what Reunion Guy's story is claiming.
The kind of scenario in outlined in 713 is hard to reconcile with the girl being so upset that she fails an entire year.
I hate disagreeing with Witt, really I do. But knowing the truth of this really doesn't much risk. If you have to pursue it, though, Miss Wilson, I think maybe you'd best find the girl. It's not hard at all to find people these days, even with common names.
718 -- It's the crappy aftermath for the already struggling kid that makes this seem implausible to me. The parents were on the ball for this part, and then awol?
Who says they were AWOL? They might have been trying to make things all right for her, but that's not always possible -- teenagers can get thrown off track by stuff and have a really hard time recovering.
Or for that matter, anyone can get thrown off track and have a hard time recovering. It's really the school's supposed behavior that's the sticking point for me; a private boarding school not trying to shelter itself from potential scandal for a full year and a half rings really false.
725 -- Really, with a date of birth and a first name, Veromi.com will do it in 15 seconds. Look up her parents by name and town, and you'll likely see your friend listed under her married name. I wouldn't say it's any better than 80% accurate, but it's pretty easy to verify what you find, and correct what's wrong.
My only thinking on that is that the administration didn't necessarily know just because the parents knew, or alternatively if the parents wanted to hush it up and do it all as quietly as possible, they were on the board of the school and might have controlled the decision.
Still, on the information given, would guess it didn't happen, but it doesn't seem like it couldn't have.
727 -- I'm not going to argue with you. I inferred relatively awol compared to state managing the departures from the description, and if I'm wrong, well, it won't have been the first time.
This account by my writing partner is extremely germane.
728 -- the boarding school trades on its reputation, and the first instinct of a boarding school in a situation like this, as in many other similar situations, may well have been to keep things quiet, so long as the parents and teacher offered a plausible method of doing so.
|| Hey, how bout that First Lady? |>
This account by my writing partner is extremely germane.
What a good writer she is. What an incredibly shitty situation that was. It's interesting that it made her feel specifically extra alarmed at the prospect of having a daughter (though I can see why that would be) -- it fills me with a quite generalized sense of despair about anyone at all, no matter how well- or ill-intentioned, boy or girl, protected or not, making it through adolescence okay. Ugh.
734: If the administration had somehow been kept in the dark I could see it. But there's a reason the most common way boarding schools "keep it quiet" is to quietly move the teacher along, and even ease his way in doing so: because the boarding school trades on its reputation. Keeping a teacher around who is a risk for scandal is putting your balls on a chopping block, even laying yourself open to lawsuits. I cannot imagine such an institution knowingly signing on to do so.
I can't wait to hear alameida's take on all this.
737 -- I just disagree on the plausibility. Admittedly not based on any experience with these situations at schools, but I've certainly seen organizations keep people around whom they shouldn't have for a while in order to move them out quietly.
If the choice is (a) move beloved teacher and have everyone know it's a result of the scandal with the student, or (b) move the girl, get teacher to agree to leave and occasionally adjunct and stay quiet in the meantime, and accepting option (b) is a deal that reasonably keeps everything quiet or at the level of rumor, I can see the school taking option (b). Not saying that's the wise or the right thing to do, just not at all implausible.
Everyone should check out the piece in 733.
What a horrible idea to make the students responsible for an investigation.
740.2: What sort of mind comes up with such ideas?
One answer: A powerless one, flailing the air like a cat-o'-nine-tails.
739: In a school, the organization will be judged on whether it can cover its ass when someone enrolling their child asks them if it's a safe environment. Plenty of schools exist that will happily put students elsewhere at risk to get a scandal out of their backyard and safeguard their reputation. I pretty much don't believe that the school exists that would keep a scandal in its backyard in order to "keep it quiet." There is no risk from moving the teacher on quickly and quietly that could possibly compete with the risk of having to sit face to face with the wealthy, powerful parent of one of your students and having to explain to them why you knowingly kept a molester on your staff. That's why the entire pattern of private schools going to great pains to distance themselves from scandals, and potential sources of scandal, exists.
(It's the same reason, it seems evident, why the Catholic Church kept moving molester priests from diocese to diocese. It was the best way to look like it was doing something without actually having to admit scandals existed.)
Do you people know about Mr. Antolini? This is an old, classic problem.
742 -- it would definitely require collusion with the parents involved. Or maybe the deal was struck between the parents and teacher without involving the school. Who knows, obviously we're in the world of total speculation here, but it still doesn't seem at all like something that just couldn't happen.
Everyone should check out the piece in 733.
Very good, and the comments add a lot as well.
the boarding school trades on its reputation, and the first instinct of a boarding school in a situation like this, as in many other similar situations, may well have been to keep things quiet, so long as the parents and teacher offered a plausible method of doing so.
Exactly.
I've certainly seen organizations keep people around whom they shouldn't have for a while in order to move them out quietly.
Oh yeah. Often because both parties are have sufficient power (money and/or control over people's jobs and an institution's reputation) to force a kind of everyone-saves-face deal that takes a lot of negotiating and time to work out.
I'm in the realm of total speculation here and really haven't any idea what was going on in this situation, but as a general phenomenon this is definitely not rare.
The link in 733 is really interesting and really well-written, but I'm also surprised at how idealistic her idea that the adults should have known better seems to me. Sure, they should have. But in general, my experience is that any random segment of the public is terrible at handling this sort of thing, and if you add in the factor that it concerned the self-image of an obviously super-privileged school, it's not hard to understand why they flailed around and did hurtful, responsibility-offloading things.
I admire your cynicism, Witt, but I have to say that offloading a disciplinary investigation onto students is a rare bird. Even if clearheadedness can't be assumed, you'd think that the reluctance to give students power over one another or anything at all would have carried some weight.
Oh 733 is beautifully written but awful. That is just awful. That is definitely the wrong way to handle it.
I'm still spooked I've said too much, but
Or maybe the deal was struck between the parents and teacher without involving the school.
The more that I think about it, the more this is the only hypothesis that makes any sense to me but still gives RG credence. I know the people who were in charge of the school then, I know other things that I'm now too spooked to share, but suffice it to say it seems there *is* a right way to do these things, and I've known them to do it. They would not keep him around, they would not give him references, they would not let him sub, they would not be as friendly and warm to him as I've seen them be. RG's implication was not that *everybody* knew. It was that *I* should have known, and that many others in our wider and mutable friends' circle might have known. She confided in me about other things (like failing out, before it happened, and being sad about it, after) and if he was being truthful, he might have genuinely overestimated our closeness and therefore genuinely been surprised at my cluelessness. If he was being slanderous, then he might have relied on the fact that I was a bit of an outsider and therefore not in a position to know he was making it up or embroidering.
My school (Catholic, some nuns, all girl students) had a package-displaying teacher. We actually kinda thought he didn't really realise - he wore boring grey slacks but used to sit on his desk with knees wide apart leaving things fairly clearly outlined. His nickname was Johnny Bigb/alls. In retrospect he was younger than he seemed to me at the time (by which I mean, well under 30). And whaddys know, he later married a former student, although they apparently didn't start going for a couple of years. Anyway it just shows gswift is a smart man.
/ down
/ at it
/ all the way
/ "coo-coo for cocoa puffs"
Offloading onto students: around 1968-9 when countercultural and new leftist things were tearing my alma mater apart, a friend of mine was selected to be the the student mouthpiece for the mainstream faculty-administration position. He was buttered up and flattered by his keepers and may have enjoyed it up to a point, but he became a lightning rod for peer hostility during a hostile time. In the end his studies suffered, he didn't graduate on schedule, his almost perfect GPA became B+ or so, whatever drug problems he had worsened, and he eventually died of an overdose.
This was college rather than HS, but the us / them divide was almost as strong as in HS, especially given the ideological stuff. He told me in so many words that once he was no longer the superstar student and ideological mouthpiece, the people who had been buttering him up dumped him pretty hard.
Somewhat of tangent, but moderately relevant, I think. He was sort of in the position of being a worker stooge for management during a bitter strike.
733 sounds like a horrible mess.
Were I Edith, I'd be drawn to the gossip aspect of this, but largely uninterested in the morality. Fifteen years of seeming good behavior seems like it meets the statute of limitations.
NO IT FUCKING DOESN'T.
also, fuck off, gswift.
if my HS could have figured out a way to quietly offload me and keep my photography teacher on till the end of the year so that no parents asked any questions about his departure and there was maximum hush they would have done it in a motherfucking heartbeat.
749: if [RG] was being truthful, he might have genuinely overestimated our closeness and therefore genuinely been surprised at my cluelessness
It's not clear whether another opinion is needed at this point, but I'm with those who feel that the whole thing is a (baseless) rumor, a fabrication: RG may well believe it, but he'd be inclined to, wouldn't he?
As others have noted, these kinds of rumors abound: I heard from a fellow grad student a year or so after my grad school advisor left (didn't get tenure) that "everybody" thought he and I had been having an affair. Huh? We spent a fair amount of time together, became personal friends -- he'd been a grad student himself at my undergrad institution, and I'd studied with him then -- but there was no affair. I could see why they might have jumped to that assumption, but I'd had no idea whatsoever that they had. GOOD LORD -- he didn't fail to get tenure because "everybody" thought ...?! No, that can't be.
Honestly, I'd have a further conversation with RG: he's the source of the rumor.
hey, remember this everybody? I totally do. sure, sometimes this kind of thing turns out fine. but sometimes it does go a long way towards ruining the rest of the student's education. I had been planning and dreaming of going to art school since 8th grade, researching them in the magic of the pre-internet, and making my portfolio, and all those things. after I just couldn't really go to the art studio at our school anymore I gave up. if I were a real artist blah blah nothing could stop blah. in real life though, it stopped me. I like to think if I ever see him again I will have the presence of mind to hit him in the head with a tire iron.
and if somehow a friend of his of long standing, who has seen him be a good father and an admirable person, should figure out who he is from reading this site, I would absolutely expect them to drop him like a hot potato. not fucking likely, but it would be the right thing to do. ain't like he ever apologized; that might be different.
||
There is My Little Pony dubstep called dubtrot..
|>
I willing to allow everyone a 50% discount on my opinions because I have a "thing" about this particular problem (which thing I call actual experience but you may term unreasonable prejudice if you are high-minded in that fashion, considering things only in the OR lights of reason, and not allowing your own life experiences to intersect with your forming of opinions at any points.)
additionally if I hadn't already been sexually molested I might have experienced the whole thing in a different way. I have to say I never talked to him about that frankly. but he spent enough time at my house to see the whole thing was fucked beyond hell, and in fact fancied himself a rescuer of some kind. (restrains self from yelling.)
unless I misread the above, gossip-puveyor boy was a good friend of the girl in question. this seems different from him being just some random classmate who heard something. as to the time lag, dad may have blamed her more than him (not unusual) and been genuinely invested in the image of the school.
agre the best idea is to track her down and ask her, and say "I always wondered about and worried about you, how are you now?" second best is to say to the former-teacher friend "I went to the reunion and oh my god people are still gossiping about everything just as badly as in HS, it's unbelievable. someone even said...x" one imagines his reaction would be instructive.
756: See, a school keeping someone around for a few months so their departure seems natural: maybe. (Still seems like an insane risk: if the scandal gets out in that few months and it's clear they had done nothing about it, they're screwed. This is likely part of why they could not find a way to do it.) Running that same risk through a year and a half, and with repeated visits thereafter? I can't see it.
I dunno, don't we have to have recourse to LizardBreath's Law, regarding never automatically disbelieving that intelligent people might do something because it was too stupid? This would have obviously been a complicated situation, to say the least. It seems like the number of bad ways to deal with sexual violence is almost infinite. Everybody is capable of great wickedness and stupidity if put in the right situation.
761.last: Well, yes: asking either the HS girl friend or the ex-teacher is the best way to get an answer, as has been said. What I don't like so much is the assumption that it might could probably possibly be true, and so, what an asshole!
Rumor-mongering is an evil thing.
763: I don't think my view presumes any particular intelligence or good will on the part of the people involved. I'm simply noting that such institutions are constitutionally extremely risk-averse and paranoid, and that this is the reason they so frequently prefer the option of sweeping the situation and in particular the involved parties out of sight, and preferably out of any connection with them, as quickly as possible.
Whether the organization does anything about larger problems or manifests any kind of sympathy to the victim is something else again. Decades of problems within the Boy Scouts, for example, appear to have been dealt with (especially in the US but also elsewhere) largely through out-of-court settlements, confidentiality agreements and bannings of the volunteer involved. This again is not an unexpected pattern.
But what we're getting here is, at best, a third hand account of something that happened quite awhile ago. There could be all kinds of other things going on that our informant is unaware of. Enough to make any real idea of what happened pretty conjectural. I guess I don't see the soundness of making really definitive statements about what "must" have happened. There are too many exceptions possible.
A few years in the litigation trenches will teach you to never make definitive statements about the ways in which people "must have" responded to bad information. There's a limitless number of ways people can fuckup and cover up.
766: I think that's precisely why the prevailing counsel to MEW is to try to verify the account by contacting other involved parties. Like the girl herself, or the parents. The account as it exists does not cohere. So either it happened and something crucial has been left out of or distorted in the account, or it didn't and the account is a baseless and toxic rumor. One would presumably want more than this to go on before essentially confronting a long-term friend and implying you think it's possible, based on this thread of rumor, they were a [statutory rapist/molester/whatever other term floats one's boat].
767: Given a certain type of institution with certain incentives in place, you can make pretty good guesses at the ways its members will tend and tend not to misbehave. There were an infinite number of ways the Boy Scouts or the Catholic Church could have fucked up their situations, but with good reason only a very limited and quite consistent pattern of ways in which they're known to have actually fucked up.
This thread's progress from Who Is More Less More Racist? to Adults Exploit Minors Sexually, Again is not relieving the depressing tension of listening to my older friends and hosts get divorced, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?-style, upstairs.
513 514
yggles has a bizarre weakness for linking to sailer. I sort of hope/bet that his slate overlords forbid it.
This seems unlikely. Here is Slate writer, David Weigel, linking to Sailer.
... the underappreciated and un-P.C. writer on race ...
Truly, I remain attracted to gswift's sentiment as expressed in 642.
771: Yeah, the idea that Sailer's racism is beyond the pale - that he is effectively censored from polite society - is useful to Sailer, but it's certainly not true.
770 -- Flip, have you considered, I dunno, getting the fuck out of there, having a nice meal, a pleasant glass of wine, and picking up a floozy?
774: boy would that come back to haunt somebody in a couple decades.
I think Flip might still be in New England, from the reference to his hosts.
A teacher at my junior high agreed to resign from her job almost twenty years after having a long affair with one of her students (starting when the student was about 14). It seems that the student, now an adult, went to the school and asked that the teacher be removed from teaching and that the police not be involved if possible. The school went to the police, things became more public, and eventually the teacher admitted the affair and resigned.
This all appears to have started a year or two after I had classes with the teacher. When I heard about the case it came as a complete surprise. I'd never have suspected the teacher of anything untoward.
(On the legal side, charges were dropped: apparently because the victim did not want to testify and there were statute of limitations issues; I'm not entirely clear on this from the press reports.)
Also, "floozy"? Are you ... um ... I had something for this ... Walter Winchell?
I'm in the Tebow State, actually.
780: I don't know what that means without looking it up, but yes, right, you can't just pick up a floozy, now can you.
I can bench, like, 0.5 floozies, easily.
772: Yes. Or invite both of them to a hotel room. Supply them with envelopes containing the info we have here. Retire to the bar. Remain friendly with whoever joins you later.
782: So awkward, what with all the flopping about. You'd be looking at a heave-her-over-the-shoulder routine, I'd think. You can call that "benching" if you wish.
you can't just pick up a floozy, now can you.
The altitude makes it difficult. Less oxygen to the muscles.
There will be no floozy flopping on Flippanter's watch.
Can't say I blame you. Halford has some explaining to do.
Don't tell me it has something to do with his Crossfit thing.
But they may be sufficiently lighter to counteract your weakness. We need a chart of the specific gravity of flooze.
The only way this ends well is if we can see Flippanter flopping floozies in the flickr pool.
For floozy flops Flippanter fails, fine. Forthright flinching fearing frigid friends' frangible future? Flippanter faces fraught feelings firmly.
Do it! You shouldn't take your watch into the pool anyway, Flip.
Forbid fear, foppish friend! Fudge forfend! Flummox fear! Freedom!
Flickering fluorescents find Flippanter feeling frail.
Forsooth, feisty frolics feel fabulous.
Flippanter Flop : Floozy-lift :: Fosbury Flop : High-jump
You're all still racist, of course.
Among the spawns of SWPL
The scions of irony dwell
Ribald, retrograde racists
Which was the style at the time
Fuck you, clown.
Flippanter's photos: floozy phalanxes frenetically flirting, flaunting flesh, frenzied, frantic, physical.
The thing linked in 801 didn't really work, but having made it I sure as fuck was going to link it.
Flaccid flâneur fatuously flogs failed reification. No Irish need apply.
I remember the bird-eating-bird picture from before.
The wordle thing was nice also, but blood catches my eye.
blood catches my eye
Today I learned that you can tell that a least auklet has been killed by a rat by the small drop of blood at the nape of its neck. I learned that from a picture caption on page 66 of this 13MB pdf, so you should probably take my word for it unless you want to see the actual picture.
ok, sorry I told you to fuck off gswift. I'm just really touchy on the subject. but now I feel bad. please accept my apology. you were actually being hilarious.
Like other populations outside Africa, the Australian Aboriginal man owes small chunks of his genome to Neanderthals4. More surprisingly, though, his ancestors also interbred with another archaic human population known as the Denisovans. This group was identified from 30,000-50,000-year-old DNA recovered from a finger bone found in a Siberian cave5. Until now, Papua New Guineans were the only modern human population whose ancestors were known to have interbred with Denisovans.
http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110922/full/news.2011.551.html
I didn't realize this thread was dead. Anyway, it's curious that the first people to leave Africa would go the farthest. Why not stop in India or something? It's the same question I have of the homeless. "If you're homeless and have no fixed address, why, of all the sidewalks in the entire city, did you pick this particular spot on this sidewalk? Why not five feet to the left?"
"Aboriginal Australians are descendents of the first human explorers. These are the guys who expanded to unknown territory into an unknown world, eventually reaching Australia," says Eske Willerslev, a palaeogeneticist at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, who led the study.
I suppose some may have settled down somewhere on the way to Australia.
I think it got harder to get to Australia at some point.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Map_of_Sunda_and_Sahul.png
810: I ask people in Pasadena why they didn't continue to Santa Monica. I've never received a convincing answer.
