Andrew Hickey

As America prepares to enter a fresh round of bombing in the Middle East, and as Barack Obama becomes the fourth president in a row to order attacks against a country that has not once conducted any aggressive action against our own, the world seems more and more like an Orwellian place.  The existential terror ginned up against a largely harmless, if not completely imaginary, enemy recalls that of the residents of Air Strip One against the slavering hordes of Eurasia; perpetual warfare is now more or less a reality, even as our actual experience of warfare becomes an abstraction so remote as to seem completely unreal; and as our military loses the ability to think strategically and confines itself to tactics dictated by political demands, economic necessities, and technology that has outstripped our ability to make sense of it, the purpose of war, now as in his fictional 1984, seems not to attain any foreign policy goal, but simply to maintain a mostly illusory opposition to an ideological menace, and to chew up and make unusable billions of dollars in currency and resources, so as not to leave any surplus that might be foolishly squandered on improving the lives of ordinary citizens.

Still, it is not Orwell that illuminates my understanding of America’s endless Middle Eastern wars today, but Paul Fussell, whose final book, The Boys’ Crusade – American G.I.s in Europe:  Chaos and Fear in World War Two, I have just finished reading.  It is not a book of great scope and majesty, like The Great War and Modern Memory or Doing Battle:  The Making of a Skeptic.  Fussell was an old man when he finished it in 2003, tired and sick and less than a decade from death, and while he still had observations, elegant and brutal alike, to make about the war that had made him the man he became, he perhaps lacked the energy to give a fuller accounting.  It also lacks, for the most part, the biting comedy of Class and BAD, his wonderful collections of social observation; the subject of the war, even 60 years on, was obviously still too raw, too tender, too bitter for him to employ anything but the blackest of humor. It is, instead, a series of brief vignettes describing the experience of American infantrymen in Europe in the closing days of the war, the beloved grunts drawn in as replacements for forces that had been chewed to pieces in North Africa and the Mediterranean, the mere boys — many of them illiterate teens with no experience of adult life whatsoever, virginal and innocent, thrown into the furnace of D-Day and its aftermath “lonely, despised, and untrained” — who set about to liberate a continent from the gravest evil anyone had ever seen.

As Fussell illustrates in these vignettes some of the worst moments of the war, from the insufficient training of these “boy crusaders” to their first experiences of travel and combat, to the horrors of the Bulge and the nightmare of the Hurtgen Forest, to the final nightmare of the liberation of the German death camps, Fussell is unsparing of perceived failures in the American military leadership.  As he sets the scene of a bunch of raw recruits, ill-equipped and poorly prepared, pushed into battle by commanders who give them little sense of the purpose of their efforts and seem to be fighting a wholly different war than that reflected by the realities on the ground, we get a terrifyingly familiar reminder of the situations in Iraq and Afghanistan.  He reminds us the lesson we still have not learned — that a war can never be won solely by air power alone, but must be settled with troops in the field if the conflict is ever to truly end; he foretells the future by showing us soldiers who are not sure who the enemy truly is, who have no strategic sense of the purpose of the war, and who are given little information about what to expect, from the weather to what to do if they are captured.  He gives us an entirely unromanticized view of the realities of battle, of exhaustion, of tedium, of shit and piss and blood, of the sense of helplessness and the growing brutality of desperation.  Just as the political echoes of the Second World War still can be heard everywhere, from Russia and the Ukraine to China and Japan, so too are we daily reminded of the lessons we failed to apply after such a hard learning curve in Korea, Vietnam, and all our subsequent military adventures.

Everywhere, Fussell — with an intentional unwillingness to draw comparisons that nonetheless scream at us from every page — shows us our present in the ruins of our past.  He speaks of America’s “reluctant draftee army”; the way we insisted on using the language of Christian crusades against the enemy; the way we exported our prejudices to unknowingly fertile climates by allowing the bigotry of the South to apply to the Army as a who, missing a key opportunity to advance racial equality (“I don’t mind the Yanks,” quipped one British soldier, “but I can’t say I care for those white chaps they’ve brought with them”); the suffering of civilians caught in the superior esteem giving to bombing campaigns by commanders who didn’t want to risk the lives of their troops on the ground; and the endlessly frustrating intelligence failures engendered either by irrational fear, in buying one’s own propaganda and thinking the enemy capable of feats far beyond its capacity or imagination, or by arrogance, in believing the enemy too stupid and savage to know how to conduct an effective campaign.  It is easy to see why he provides examples of each side seeing the other as inhuman, nearly demonic, and capable of all sorts of mindless acts of fanaticism.  And always there is the sense of betrayal by the men at their own leaders, whether it is from being led into battle by incompetents who have no clue how to fight the enemy, or being released back into society with no way to cope after having witnessed the wanton annihilation of life that comes from warfare.

If there is one great point of divergence in the narratives, it is in their respective ends, and not just because WWII actually had one and our War Against Terror does not, by design.  Fussell has always preached the irony of war, because the grotesque suffering it inflicts is always worse than the suffering brought on by its initial cause, but here, at least, we found in the nearly Satanic qualities of Nazi Germany something like a real reason to fight.  While no one doubts that the various bands of second-rate lunatics and fanatics that make up the likes of al-Qaeda and ISIS are capable of shocking violence against the innocent, their evil has not even remotely risen to the level of violence that we have inflicted on them after 20 years off near-continuous bombing and assault.  It is is fatuous mistake to equate the realities of war with any fiction, but it is a fatuity we all seem prone to, and one of the unique qualities of the Second World War is its resemblance to a particularly cheap but effective sort of shock-horror storytelling.  For so it was that just when it all seemed to be over — when Japan was beaten back to its homeland and in no way capable of pursuing its war plans, when Germany was shattered and friendless and on the run — just then, when a world bone-tired of war could finally realistically make out its end and soldiers who had witnessed untold brutalities could finally imagine getting to go home — both fronts saw the darkest, most horrific twists of all.  In Japan, it was the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, spurred on by American fears of the mass casualties that might be inflicted by a conventional military attack on the island nation; this decision spared many of our own boys, no doubt, but it cost a mind-boggling quarter of a million lives in Japan, the eradication of hundreds of thousands of innocent human beings whose only crime had been to be born in the wrong place at the wrong time.  In Germany it was the discovery of the camps.

Of course, rumors of the Nazi genocide machine had been circulating for years.  Before the war, it was all too easy to minimize or ignore the suffering of Hitler’s enemies as none of our business; towards its end, it was largely kept under wraps for political reasons.  The Russians had got there first, and through Poland, where the worst of the death camps had been built; but the rest of the Allies kept a tight lid on the story, partly to maintain a certain image to present to the public and partly because some commanders were unsure if the Soviets were making it all up to paint the Germans as monsters.  But finally, it was too late to control and to cover up, and the true horror of the Nazi mechanisms of death were far worse than anyone could have imagined.  Just as the end of the race was in sight, the winner’s ribbon was obscured by an unthinkably huge mound of corpses.  The book unveils this final lunatic twist with a diary entry by Patton’s second man, Omar Bradley, a man professionally trained in the efficient and cold delivery of mass death.  Even he was repulsed by what he found in the first of many human slaughterhouses the Allies would soon discover:

More than 3,200 naked emaciated bodies had been flung into shallow graves (at Ohrdruf).  Others lay in the streets where they had fallen.  Lice crawled over the yellow skin of their sharp, bony frames.  The blood had congealed in coarse black scabs where the starving prisoners had torn out the entrails of the dead for food.  I was too revolted to speak.  For here death had been so fouled by degradation that it both stunned and numbed us.

“General Eisenhower was soon informed of the discovery,” Fussell writes.  “After seeing the spectacle for himself, Eisenhower ordered American legislators as well as nearby Germans to visit, and demanded that the decent burial of all this horror was to be undertaken by the local civilians, who denied knowledge of anything that had taken place at their nearby institution.  The mayor of neighboring Gotha and his wife went home and hanged themselves; whether in attempted expiation of the crime or fear of Allied punishment is not known.  Hearing of this apparent evidence of guilt and shame, Eisenhower said ‘Maybe there is hope after all.'”  The result of these insane unearthing of the full measure of the Nazi madness was a ramping up of the savagery of the war, just when it should have been winding down; a relative of mine said he made sure never to leave an SS man alive after he learned what they had done in the camps.  Fussell echoes this story:

Said a company commander in a tank battalion, “We had just mopped them up before, but we stomped the shit out of them after the camps.”  A lieutenant who helped liberate Dachau declared “I will never take another German prisoner, armed or unarmed.  How can they expect to do what they have done and simply say ‘I quit’, and go scot free?  They are not fit to live.”  A soldier from New Zealand ratified the troops’ conclusion when he said of Germans “They’re not human at all” — ironically, the same words the Nazis used as they put to death countless ‘sub-human’ Poles and Russians.

Eisenhower, too, at least partially succumbed to this final and probably inescapable irony, recommending that thousands of people in the civilian and military leadership simply be liquidated — executed without trial — if Germany was to have any future.  Still, it is only this redeeming quality, lit with so many moral dimensions utterly lacking in our modern endless warfare of bombing, generating terroristic pushback against the bombing, and bombing again — that Fussell believes saved the entire enterprise from being nothing but a mass spoilage of humanity more akin to the senseless waste of millions that was the First World War.  Never able to banish from his mind the horrible slaughter and sense of random, pitiless destruction the war forced on him and everyone he knew, Fussell came to believe that the genocidal evil of the modern fascist state at least salvaged some sense of meaning from its all-encompassing madness; he ultimately felt that, like the historian Sir John Keegan, the war’s incalculable levels of destruction and social upheaval could only be answered by the fact that “Hitler’s institution of genocide demands a moral commitment”.  He writes the epitaph of perhaps the last war that made any sense:  “Hardly any boy infantryman started his career as a moralist, but after the camps, a moral attitude was rampant and there was no disagreement about the main point.  In the last few weeks of the war, close to five thousand labor camps and prisons were discovered, most filled with unspeakable evidence of wanton cruelty.  Major Richard Winters said after seeing the corpses at the camp at Landsberg:  ‘Now I know why I am here.'”

Pranking a roommate with eerily targeted Facebook ads.

Today I had several more terrible lectures on ADHD.

In one of them, I was informed that America is medicalizing normal childhood mischief and loading anyone who gets worse than a B+ up with Ritalin or amphetamines as part of the pathologization of everyday life.

In another, I was informed that ADHD is shamefully underdiagnosed and most of the children who need stimulants most are going without them and failing school unnecessarily, so we need better screening programs and more efforts to seek out potential sufferers of the condition.

So I asked one of my attendings, Dr. L, which one it was. Are we overdosing ADHD? Or underdiagnosing it?

He answered that we are both overdiagnosing and underdiagnosing ADHD, the same as every other psychiatric disease, and then explained this so it made perfect sense and I was embarassed for not realizing it before.

Suppose that 3% of the population has ADHD.

Suppose that of people with ADHD, 50% of them realize they have ADHD like symptoms and go to a psychiatrist to get checked out.

Suppose that of people without ADHD, 10% of them falsely believe they have ADHD and also go to a psychiatrist to get checked out.

The Conners Continuous Performance Test is a commonly used test that evaluates children for ADHD. It is found to have a sensitivity of 75% and a specificity of 73%. In theory our system is based on faith that a trained psychiatrist can do better than a neuropsychological test; in practice they probably do much worse. Let’s give them the benefit of the doubt and say this is an excellent psychiatrist who outperforms the test handily and has both a sensitivity and specificity of 85%.

We can see that of every 100 people, 3 will have ADHD and 97 won’t. 1.5 true patients and 9.7 false patients will show up for psychiatric evaluation. The psychiatrist will diagnose 1.275 true patients and 1.455 false patients with the condition, and prescribes stimulants according to the diagnosis.

So we have three things that, surprisingly, all happen at once:

1. We have an excellent psychiatrist who outperforms the tests and is right 85% of the time.
2. The majority of people who are on Ritalin, shouldn’t be.
3. The majority of people who should be on Ritalin, aren’t.

Number two sounds a lot like what we mean by “overdiagnosis”, and number three sounds a lot like what we mean by “underdiagnosis”. So even with a pretty good psychiatrist acting honestly, we expect ADHD to be both overdiagnosed and underdiagnosed at the same time.

Even in conditions that do not quite satisfy the “majority” part of (2) and (3), we might still expect it to be true at the same time that a sizeable chunk of people diagnosed with the disease don’t have it and a sizeable chunk of people with the disease aren’t diagnosed.

If this seems counterintuitive, it is just another example of the annoying world of medical sensitivity and specificity statistics, which are constantly tripping up even the most experienced doctors. See also the infamous mammogram problem.

Once I understood this joint-overdiagnosis-and-underdiagnosis problem, several other candidate situations immediately leapt to mind. Antidepressants are almost certainly both overprescribed and underprescribed. So are opiate pain medications.

Not all the relevant examples are medical. I was reminded of Athrelon’s recent attempts to explain to me his version of the far-right concept of anarcho-tyranny. At first this didn’t make sense to me – how could there be anarchy and tyranny at the same time? Athrelon was able to walk me through the logic, which it turns out is the exact same as above. Imagine the government as trying to “diagnose” the situations where it needs to use force, and over- and under- diagnosing them at the same time. He will make this into a blog post soon, and I will link you to it.

Athrelon is a doctor. This may or may not be a coincidence. Sensitivity and specificity statistics are weird.

Click here to view the embedded video.

That seems like a sweet, jangly bit of pure pop confection from Veronica Falls, until you listen to the twist of the blade in the lyrics: What’s your excuse, baby … For standing in the middle, waiting for something to happen?

Well, one excuse — probably more common than commonly admitted — is “I was afraid.” That’s what Servant No. 3 offers as his reason for standing in the middle, waiting, in a parable Jesus tells in Matthew’s Gospel. “I was afraid, and I went and hid your [money] in the ground,” the guy says. 

He was playing not to lose. He was, above all, afraid of taking any chance that might get him in trouble. He was being civil and nice so as not to offend.

That didn’t end well. Standing in the middle, waiting for something to happen rarely does.

Briallen Hopper addresses this same fearful, noncommittal standing in the middle in a terrific essay at Killing the Buddha called “White People Problems.” Hopper’s first hook involves the recent Facebook-beloved advice column from Andrew W.K., which epitomizes the way that irresponsible timidity gets repackaged as a lofty, above-the-fray, “Third Way.”

“The world isn’t being destroyed by Democrats or Republicans, red or blue, liberal or conservative, religious or atheist,” W.K. wrote, “the world is being destroyed by one side believing the other side is destroying the world.”

Hopper writes:

I hated Andrew W.K.’s response, even though (like the almost quarter of a million people who shared it) I found a lot to agree with in it. I have a 63-year-old father with whom I deeply disagree about LGBT issues and abortion, and I still love him, respect him, and learn from him. My friendships with people across the political spectrum are important to me. And it’s hard to argue with Andrew W.K. when he says that that no one is perfect; politics are complicated; we should see each other as persons, not monsters; and love should be able to bridge barriers.

More than anything, though, what struck me about Andrew W.K.’s response was how white it was.

I don’t know anything about Andrew W.K.’s background beyond what an Internet search can tell me, but as a white American I do know this: It is a privilege to experience political differences as differences of opinion rather than differences of power. It is a privilege to be able to view all political issues in indistinguishable shades of gray. And, as I’ve been realizing in the month since Michael Brown’s death: It is a privilege when loving your political enemy means loving your father, not loving the man who killed your son — or the man who killed someone who might have been your son, or who might have been you.

Hopper sharply notes that Andrew W.K.’s formula starts to smell bad once you begin factoring in all the history, reality and power it neglects. Should we tell protesters in Ferguson, she asks, that “The world isn’t being destroyed by racism — the world is being destroyed by non-violent protestors believing that racism is destroying the world”?

The enthusiastic response to Andrew W.K.’s article doubtless speaks to some likable qualities in the citizens of Facebook: our recognition of our common humanity with people who disagree with us (or at least with people who disagree with us and are also related to us), and our desire for closer relationships with them. But it also speaks to the desire of so many of us privileged people to avoid all tension and conflict while still feeling like we are a force for good in the world. It’s a way of letting ourselves off the hook; of lulling ourselves into inaction by making neutrality into a positive good.

According to Andrew W.K., we don’t need to challenge our friends and family on the things that matter to the planet or to our less privileged neighbors: In fact, we probably shouldn’t. We can even label this evasion “love.” And we don’t need to sacrifice anything for our political beliefs — not our lives, not our time, not even a peaceful family dinner.

Go read the whole thing.

 

 

An article published on the Guardian website this evening has, judging by the comments put the cat among the pigeons:

Oil-rich Shetland may want to reconsider whether it stays part of an independent Scotland in the event of a yes vote, the Scotland secretary, Alistair Carmichael, has said. 

In an interview with the Guardian, Carmichael said if the islands were to vote strongly no but the Scottish national vote was a narrow yes, then a "conversation about Shetland's position and the options that might be open to it" would begin. 

The Liberal Democrat MP, who represents Orkney and Shetland in Westminster and has been secretary of state for Scotland in the coalition government since last October, said those options might include the islands modelling themselves on the Isle of Man, which is a self-governing crown dependency, or on the Faroe Islands, which are an autonomous country within the Danish realm. 

Asked if he was suggesting that Alex Salmond should not necessarily take for granted that oilfields off Shetland will belong to Scotland in the event of a yes vote, he said: "That would be one of the things that we would want to discuss. I wouldn't like to predict at this stage where the discussions would go." 

His comments were echoed by Tavish Scott, Shetland's MSP, who, when asked whether Shetland would have to obey the will of Scotland if it voted yes, said: "Will it now? We'll have to look at our options. We're not going to be told what to do by Alex Salmond." 

The option of becoming a crown dependency was "something we will look at", Scott said, though he ruled out considering full independence for the islands.

While I’ve been talking about the Scottish independence referendum online over the last few weeks, I’ve been careful to try not to talk about how I would have voted, or to tell the people of Scotland how to vote. If you want to understand why there are such resentments at the way the UK is governed, the tendency of many English people to assume that no one can make a decision before they’ve weighed in and given their opinion is a good place to start looking.

So, I’ve scheduled this post for a little after 10pm, when voting should have stopped and the only chance of me lecturing Scottish voters is if someone’s very bored stuck in a long queue to vote as the polls close. If you are that person, I hope you’re wait’s not too long, but be happy at the fact there’s a good chance you’ll appear in background footage on the news.

The main problem for me in thinking about how I would have voted is that a lot of the discussion has centred around two competing nationalisms – Scottish and British – and if there’s anything guaranteed to exclude me from a debate, it’s a question of which imagined community you think you belong to most. Both sides have been equally obnoxious in their proclamations that their nationalism is the best, though the hyperbole prize is surely won by Fraser Nelson’s claim that the UK is “the greatest force for good that the world has ever known.”

That leaves it to a decision based on practicalities, and I’m almost persuaded by the arguments of people like Charles Stross that an independent Scotland could be something new and different, a chance to start again in the early days of a better nation. (Though ‘break up the Westphalian system’ does sound like the slogan of the world’s most obscure Marxist fraction) However, the more I look, the more I see there’s nothing there behind the vision, and it’s far from the only vision of what an independent Scotland could be like. When Alex Salmond spends his time meeting regularly with Rupert Murdoch, admiring Vladimir Putin and getting massive donations from people like Brian Souter, I can’t help but wonder what the people with the power to shape it imagine an independent Scotland being like. For me, it’s not just the questions about the currency, but everything else about the new Scotland that hasn’t been answered that makes a Yes vote a jump into the dark, so my vote would have been a reluctant No.

But, I’m glad I didn’t get a vote, because this is Scotland’s decision not mine. Hearing people who don’t live there demand their right to a say scares me in some way because it makes me wonder about their understanding and regard for consent in other situations. It’s only a massive sense of English privilege that gives people the feeling that someone else shouldn’t be making a decision without their input, and that they should somehow have a veto over someone else’s decision. The idea that people somehow defined as Scottish but not living in Scotland should have a vote seems odd to me as well, for where do you draw the line? Should I have had a say because my grandfather was born in Scotland (it’d be enough for FIFA, I believe)? Should it just be limited to people within the UK or could people like David McAllister have a say too? The governance and government of a country should be a civic matter, not an ethnic one, and once you start complicating things with nationalism, everything gets a lot more complex.

Tonight, I’m going to sit back and watch the results come in and know whatever happens, it’s the people of Scotland who’ve decided. Quite what they’ve decided, we won’t know for a while – I think a Yes vote will lead to lots of negotiations and calls for another vote on the actual deal, while a No will lead to some people suddenly finding things much more important than devo max to talk about. Whatever the result, there’s a window of opportunity to talk about making a different and better government for a different and better UK, and we need to make sure they don’t close it.

In a small Universe, an early Great Filter is unlikely, simply because we’re evidence against it.

Suppose the Filter is early; how severe must it be for us to observe what we observe? By “severe” I mean: what proportion of worlds must it stop? Our existence is evidence towards a lower bound on the severity of Great Filter, while the fact that we observe no other life tells us about an upper bound. If the observable Universe is a substantial fraction of the whole Universe, then the two bounds aren’t very far apart, and so to defend an early Filter we have to believe in a great cosmic coincidence in which the severity of the Filter was just right, which is in turn is evidence for a late Filter whose severity we have no upper bound for. This argument has in the past given me real cause to worry that the Filter is late, and very severe.

However, this argument doesn’t hold at all if the observable Universe is a tiny fraction of the whole Universe.  The larger the difference between these two numbers, the bigger the gap between the bounds we have for the severity of the Filter, because intelligent only has to appear once in the whole Universe for us to contemplate this question, while it has to arrive twice in the smaller, observable bubble for us to observe it.

As I understand it, modern cosmology points towards a Universe that is either infinite, or very much larger than the observable Universe, so on those grounds alone we can perhaps worry less. But far more strongly than that, the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics gives us a many-branched Universe that is just unthinkably larger than the tiny portion we can observe; if intelligent life emerged on as many Everett branches as there are stars in the galaxy, we would still appear alone to our best ability to tell. So I now think that this isn’t a reason to worry that the Filter is late. It is however an excellent reason to expect never to meet an alien. Sorry.

UNHELPFUL MNEMONICS

1.  Every Grotesque Ballardian Describes Fascism

2.  Malicious Vegetables Elude Motorist Junkers’ Stronghold?  Ultimately, No.

3.  Klonopin Is Salacious, Shalimar

4.  Thirty days hath September, quickly grasp my throbbing member, slide your hand ‘pon thither and yon, then consult this sheet of paper I have written the number of days in each month upon.

5.  I after E except after C or when followed by suicidal depression, like my old 3rd grade teacher Mrs. Beverly Neighborway.

FAILED PRODUCT SLOGANS

1.  “Kaptorline:  the whore’s mouthwash.”

2.  “Mehlman’s Cutlery:  sharp enough to use on living human flesh.  Of course you would never do that.  Not after last time.”

3.  “Lewiston’s Pest Control.  If you can’t beat ‘em, gas ‘em!

4.  “Sugared Oaty Mopes:  racially pure ingredients for racially pure people.”

5.  “Valexis Hand Lotion.  We know what you’re really using it for.  And we don’t care.”

STEAMPUNK ROCK

1.  The Swollen Ranks of the Unusually Forward

2.  The Quite Saucy Household Items

3.  The Marmots, Only These Marmots Are Wearing Curious Oversized Goggles and Brass Respirators, And Also They Use Bad Language

4.  The Colonial Subjects Who Have Rather Forgotten Themselves

5.  The Mechanized Versions of Things Not Normally Thought of as Being Mechanized Who Have Daring Opinions About Social Matters

GOOD USES OF ONE’S TIME

1.  Thinking about negative things people might someday say to you, and then thinking up responses to the negative things these unidentified people might say

2.  Arguing that your sports team is superior to the other sports team that has just beat them

3.  Seeing if various parts of your body have cancer by poking them

4.  Explaining another person’s joke to that person

5.  Updating your blog

LITTLE-VISITED SITES NEAR TREASURE ISLAND

1.  Sewing Pattern Island

2.  Carnivorous Prawn Island

3.  Robert Louis Stevenson Explains His Bitter Divorce Proceedings In Great Detail Island

4.  Carob Island

5.  Even More Treasure and Hardly Any Dysentery Island

THE SEVEN AGES OF MODERN MAN

1.  At first the infant, forcibly dressed in a Ramones onesie.

2.  And then the whining schoolboy, with his console and complaints of excessive draw time

3.  And then the lover, puking like a chimney, drinking crappy beer ‘ironically’.

4.  Then a soldier, ha ha, no, just kidding, probably here you try to invent an app or something

5.  And then the justice, kids on lawn, insisting with eyes severe that music has not been as good since his second year of college.

6.  The sixth age shift into the lean and slippered pantaloon, the balding pate, the convertible sports-car of cherry red

7.  Last scene of all that ends this strange eventful history is second childishness, still hitting on 22-year-olds and reading books about the Hulk.

SOVIET MEDALS

1.  Honoured Sock Darner of the USSR

2.  Andrey Gromyko Prize for Cantankerous Socialist Flapdoodle

3.   Order of Personal Courage in Pretending to Have Read the Entirety of War and Peace

4.  “Giraffe’s Neck” Medal for Bullheaded Determination to Practice Lysenkosim

5.  Jubilee Victory Ribbon for Cattiest Comment About Nancy Reagan’s Frocks

When a parent kills an autistic child, it's so predictable. People come out of the woodwork to defend the killer, demand we walk in her shoes, to stomp their feet and demand of me "how dare you judge?"

Easily.

How dare you not?

Who are you to decide that a child's life is so not worth living that killing them is a good thing? How dare you cheer on abuse and murder? How dare you support execution of someone for the crime of having a disability? How do you live with yourself?

Judging someone for rocketing past the fuzzy zone and straight into "that is just awful" territory is easy. It should be reflex, easy as a blink or a sneeze. Our (well, my. USian) culture has a big taboo, though, against this evolutionarily advantageous reflex, and it blames the Bible.

Here's the thing though. That "judge not lest ye be judged" thing that people like to throw out? It doesn't say "do not evaluate things". It doesn't say "thou shalt not come to conclusions and announce them". It says "you will be held to the same standards you hold others to".

"Don't kill your kid" is a pretty low standard. I have no doubt in my mind that I can life the rest of my days without committing, or even considering, infanticide. I'm a bit terrified, though, of all the parents who feel this is too stringent a standard, who are eager to make clear that maybe they will kill their kid, they're just not sure that "no killing" is a fair expectation.

In a world where "not murdering your child" is a standard many people are unwilling to commit to live by,  a world where unrepentant murderers have cheering squads, no young or dependent person is safe. I fear for the children of people screaming "don't judge". When you shout at, harass, threaten me for holding folks to this very minimals standards, you are saying you don't think you can meet it (or can't be assed to try, speaking of scary). This doesn't make me the problematic person in the scenario.

"Don't kill people" is a standard that should be effortless. People who can't or won't meet it should be judged, swiftly and harshly. It should be as easy as a blink. It is as easy as a blink. If you can't be sure you can meet this standard, that's your deficit. I will continue to easily, effortlessly judge people who kill their children and dependents, because evaluating "that is not an acceptable action" is the right thing to do.

Edit: pic added for pinners. Not related to content of post. It's from magnetic resonance angiography.

You know the pre-titles sequence in For Your Eyes Only, in which Blofeld tricks Bond onto a remote-controlled helicopter?

Why does the vicar make the sign of the cross as Bond departs in the chopper?

If he knows something deadly is afoot, he must be in league with Blofeld, so either...

a) he's not really a vicar but actually one of Blofeld's men disguised as a vicar, or

b) he is an actual vicar who's been paid by Blofeld to be part of his assassination conspiracy.

If a), why?  And why doesn't Bond ask about this new guy at the Church where Tracey is buried?

If b), why?  What would induce a presumably average, ordinary, law-abiding vicar to team up with Blofeld?  And also, why doesn't he just shoot Bond in the graveyard?

And what does Blofeld need him for?  Okay, he delivers the fake message about Bond being needed at HQ.  But this is seemingly the only thing he does in the conspiracy (if he is indeed part of the conspiracy, as opposed to an innocent vicar who unwittingly relays a fake message) but the message could have been far more easily faked, given the apparent laxity of Bond's precautions (he just accepts the message at face value without checking it in any way).

And I repeat: if he's not a real vicar, why the religious sentiment with the sign of the cross?

And even if he is a real vicar, but an evil one who conspires to murder people with international gangsters, why is he still worried about giving Bond the last rites? 

He's either a genuine vicar with terrorist-connections and a deeply ambivalent and wildly fluctuating attitude to his faith, or a hood with a very dark sense of humour... and possibly a sardonic vein of anti-clericalism in his character.

Or... another possibility entirely... he's a genuine vicar with the gift of second sight and a fatalistic attitude to the future.

Or he's a genuine (if morally weak) vicar with the gift of second sight, and he hates James Bond for some reason... so much so that he opportunistically chooses to let Bond go to his death.

Or possibly he hates the helicopter pilot for some reason and opportunistically chooses to let him die.

That actually makes a lot more sense because, if he can see the future, that must mean that he knows that Bond will escape the trap and only the pilot and Blofeld will die.  (It can't be that he hates Blofeld because Blofeld isn't there when he - the vicar - makes the sign of the cross, so there'd be no point.)

The only problem here is the implausibility of a specific guy who that particular vicar hates just happening to turn up at the vicar's church in a helicopter on the day when he's about to be murdered by Blofeld as part of an assassination conspiracy... but coincidences do happen.

As far as I can tell, this is by far the best explanation.

My god, Roald Dahl was a great writer, wasn't he?

I wonder why the fatalistic, cynical, vindictive, morally-ambivalent psychic vicar/seer hated the helicopter pilot so much.

This guy may be the most complicated and fascinating character ever to appear in a Bond movie.

(UPDATE:  Yes, I know Roald Dahl didn't write this one.  It was a joke.)

Who killed lard?

Having promised a while ago to try and explain some concepts from political science, I think it’s time to make a start. The first few posts on this are going to be about parties and party competition, partly because that’s an area I’ve been studying recently, and partly because I think it’ll be of most interest to a lot of you.

One thing we often here in discussions about politics is what type of party system a country has, specifically how many parties. For instance, the USA is generally referred to as a two-party system, Belgium is a multi-party system and the UK can be a two-party, three-party or multi-party system depending on who’s defining it and which election they’re looking at.

Wouldn’t it be good if there was a way to make a direct comparison across systems as to the relative number of parties? Luckily for us, and especially for this post – the Effective Number of Parties concept of Laakso and Taagepera. This is a relatively simple calculation that gives us the numbe rof parties in a system, calculated either in terms of their share of the vote (effective number of electoral parties, or ENEP) or share of the seats won (effective number of parliamentary parties, or ENPP).

(And now seems a good time to make this disclaimer – most concepts in political science are not universally applicable or universally accepted. Like many concepts, there are many critiques and refinements of Laakso-Taagepera, but as an introductory and explanatory tool it’s very good.)

This is Laakso and Taagepera’s formula, and I can already see the furrowed brows of many of you as you try and work out what it means. What it means is that the effective number of parties in a system is calculated by taking the fraction of votes or seats won by each party, adding up the sum of the squares of those numbers and dividing 1 by that result to give the result. A couple of examples might make it clearer:

Suppose there are two parties, each getting 50% of the votes/seats. That means we have two shares of 0.5 and 0.5. 0.5 squared equals 0.25, so the total of the squares is 0.25+0.25=0.5. 1 divided by 0.5 is 2, and we thus have a two party system. The same calculation works for any system where the vote is divided equally between the parties. Four parties each with 25% will give an ENP of 4, 10 each with 10% will give an ENP of 10 and so on.

So far, so obvious and so unlikely to occur in reality. What happens when we apply it to the real world? Let’s take the 2010 general election result. In terms of votes, and only using parties who got 1% of the vote or more, we have the Conservatives on 36.1%, Labour on 29%, Lib Dems on 23%, UKIP on 3.1%, BNP on 1.9%, SNP on 1.7% and Greens at 1%. Adding the squares of all those up and dividing it into 1 gives us an ENEP of 3.72. In terms of seats, the Tories got 47.1%, Labour 39.7%, Lib Dems 8.8% and DUP 1.2% and this results in an ENPP of 2.58. (I cut off at 1% because shares below that make very little difference to the final result)

What does all this mean? Does it mean that we can now say Britain has an almost-four-party-system electorally but only a two-and-a-half-party-system in Parliament? Much as it might be tempting to use the figures in those way, that would be a simplistic view. The main use of ENEP and ENPP figures is a comparative one, allowing us to see trends across time and across countries. Luckily, I don’t now have to go through and do the ENP calculations for every British election, as here’s one someone else made earlier, and we can also find comparative ENEP and ENPP figures for other European countries.

The key point about ENEP and ENPP figures is that while they might make for vaguely interesting numbers when calculated for one election, their real use is in making those comparisons over time or between countries. For instance, the British series shows us that the trend in Parliamentary elections is for both to increase, while the European data shows that while the numbers are increasing, we’re still below the European average. However, what they also show is that ENEP and ENPP tend to be closer in other countries than they are in the UK (and France), which helps illustrate the different effects of proportional and majoritarian voting systems.

Party systems and the way parties compete in them is a very complicated field, but I hope this has given a bit of an introduction to one part of it. As I said, there are other ways to examine and calculate the number of parties (as well as amendments to Laakso-Taagepera) but the original calculation of ENP is an easy one to explain and create some useful initial data with. It’s also a good way of showing trends across time and letting us see if there has been a long-term change in voting patterns. One interesting use of ENP data in a UK context has been to compare UK-wide figures with voting patterns in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, especially comparing Westminster voting patterns to voting for the devolved governments.

If you want to read more on this, I’d recommend Alistair Clark’s Political Parties in the UK or (if you can find it) Paul Webb’s The Modern British Party System (Clark was published in 2012 so is more up to date, Webb is older but has more theoretical background).

Night Shade Books have published a new paperback edition of PERMUTATION CITY for US readers.

Here are two comments I’ve gotten on this blog in the past few weeks:

Progressivism is under massive selective pressure to actually cause problems because that leads to more power for progressivism.

Sasha and Malia Obama will get affirmative action, even though their own father has publicly admitted its ridiculous. Therefore, black elites have a stake in keeping black masses as poor and miserable as possible, to continue justifying affirmative action.

These seem like they can be easily dismissed as conspiracy theories, but what is the exact structure of that dismissal?

Well, first, it requires that people have an almost comical level of evil. Think of the Secretary of Health and Human Services noticing that, if she enacted terrible policies that made everyone in the country sick, people would demand more resources for health care and her empire would grow. It’s hard for me to imagine someone that Slytherin.

Second, it sounds like it requires literal conspiracy. In the second example, one of two things must happen. Either every black elite has to come up with the plan independently and work together in synchrony to carry it out – each taking it on faith that the other elites are doing their part. Or one person has to come up with the plan, convince everyone else that that’s the plan, and send them their marching orders (“You! Do your part to help keep the masses poor by voting against this much-needed education reform!”), all without the media catching wind of any of this.

Third, this makes the same mistake I accused Marx of in the last post. It assumes a free solution to all coordination problems.

Suppose we grant the conspiracy theorists their point that it is indeed in the interest of all black elites to keep the black masses poor so they can benefit from affirmative action. Suppose we even grant that they are evil enough to want to try this plan despite the suffering it will produce. And suppose they’re all really good at communicating through heavily encrypted email, so we solve the conspiracy aspect. The plan still doesn’t work.

Every elite benefits from the entire plan being pulled off. But now there’s a free rider problem. Each elite would have to expend some individual effort to keep everybody else down. Maybe it’s going out of their way to rally opposition to a useful reform. Maybe it’s having to take an unpopular position and so looking like the bad guy. All I’m saying is that quashing the dreams of the next generation of minority children is harder than sitting on your tuchus playing video games. Their own contribution doesn’t help the cause very much on net, so their incentive is to defect and hope everyone else does it.

Just as good people playing normal politics have a hard time rallying support for genuinely important causes like stopping global warming or enforcing Net Neutrality, so evil people playing Conspiracy Politics should have a hard time convincing their target demographic to get out of bed and join in their oppression.

But in fact they have it much harder. Good people playing normal politics can use a host of techniques – phone banks, door-to-door campaigns, benefit concerts, leaflets in the mail, celebrity endorsements – to rally people to action. Evil people playing Conspiracy Politics can’t do any of that without greatly increasing their risk of getting caught.

And when good people do rally the masses to their cause, it seems to be through an appeal to morality. Like “Yes, I know it would be much easier for you to sit back and let other people solve global warming, but you have an ethical responsibility to participate in this, and won’t you feel good about yourself knowing you’ve made a difference.”

Obviously if your campaign is “Cause as many problems as possible to increase the size of government” this is harder to pull off.

This seems to me to be a little-acknowledged third reason to dismiss conspiracy theories of this sort. But you don’t care. You’ve already wandered off, wondering why I’m wasting my time debunking things nobody (except apparently the rare SSC commenter) believes anyway.

But what if we apply this to more common claims? What about class warfare?

It is widely believed that the rich have captured government for their own ends. For example, rich people use their money and power to decrease tax rates on the wealthy and sabotage legislation meant to protect the working man.

But this ought to fall victim to the same coordination problems. After all, suppose you are a rich person who makes $1 million per year. You would like the government to cut federal taxes on the wealthy from 40% down to 30%, which would save you $100,000 per year. One might think you would be willing to spend up to $100,000 to effect this goal.

But in fact it requires the concerted effort of all the rich people across the country to make this happen. A single $100,000 donation isn’t going to change federal level policy in such a spectacular way. Realistically your effort will be a drop in a bucket that your entire class needs to contribute to.

Once again we encounter free rider problems. Suppose a representative of the Rich People’s Union asks for a $10,000 donation to fight for lower taxes. There are hundreds of thousands of rich people, so you’re pretty sure your one donation isn’t going to push anything over the edge one way or the other. Supposing the tax cut goes through, you will get the same benefit whether you donated or not; supposing it doesn’t, you won’t gain anything either way. It’s easy to see that in either case the rational self-interested thing to do is to refuse to donate.

There are a couple of rare exceptions to this. If you are Bill Gates and make a billion dollars a year, so that you would gain $100 million from the tax cut, it might be worth bribing the necessary legislators all on your own, on the grounds that if something needs to be done right you had better do it yourself. Likewise, if you’re Exxon Mobil or the Koch brothers, then you might be a big enough chunk of the target population for certain specific environmental regulations that it’s worth using your own money to fight it whether or not others join in.

But a general focus on the interests of the rich? Not likely.

Yet the rich do seem to get their way a disproportionate amount of the time, and this seems to require an explanation.

I am reminded of the research I looked at in Plutocracy Isn’t About Money. People seem to donate surprisingly little to political candidates, and donations don’t seem to help. This seems consistent with the idea that rich people don’t directly coordinate to bribe politicians in their favor. I suggested a couple of different hypotheses, like that maybe the rich win because of “soft power” – ie the media and universities and politicians are mostly rich or are run by rich people who just sort of naturally let their opinions percolate through without much deliberate effort.

An alternative explanation preserves our intuitive belief that the rich sure do seem to influence politics a lot. Maybe rich people, like poor people, participate in politics because of sincere belief in their moral values, and their values are by what seems a weird coincidence the ones that help make them richer.

Like, Mitt Romney’s zillion-dollar-a-plate fundraisers seem to always be pretty full. It can’t literally be in a rich person’s self-interest to buy a plate there. But a lot of rich people could have conservative-libertarian-pro-business ideas that encourage them to quasi-altruistically support Mitt Romney in order to push their values.

But this is really weird and interesting – much more interesting than it looks. It suggests that, in the presence of a useful selfish goal to coordinate around, a value system will “spring up” that convinces people to support it for altruistic reasons.

I’m not just talking about normal altruism here. A rich person motivated by normal altruism per se might be against tax cuts for the rich, in order to better preserve social services for the less fortunate. And I’m not just talking about normal selfishness either. A rich person motivated by selfishness would hang out in his mansion all day instead of wasting money on fundraisers. I’m talking about a moral system which is genuinely self-sacrificing on the individual level, but which when universalized has the effect of helping the rich person get richer.

It’s worth thinking about this in contractarian terms. A rich person, minus the veil of ignorance, wouldn’t support everyone pitching in to help the poor, because he knows he’s not poor and so gains nothing. A rich person, minus the veil of ignorance, would support a binding pact among all rich people to pitch in to support tax cuts on the rich, because she knows she would gain more than she loses from such an agreement.

But as far as I can tell, this calculation is never made on a conscious level. What happens on a conscious level is the rich person finds themselves supporting some moral philosophy – libertarianism, Objectivism, prosperity gospel, whatever – which says it is morally wrong to raise taxes on the rich, so much so that one should altruistically make personal sacrifices in order to stop them from being raised. And then these moral philosophies spread, and without any conscious awareness, the rich people find themselves coordinating very nicely to protect their class interests.

I hope you agree that if this is true, it is spooky. I admit on this blog I sometimes mock human nature and human cognition a little too much, but this particular cognitive process is really impressive. I hope whatever angel designed it got a promotion.

So although I haven’t really thought this through too much, I would suggest a dichotomy. Either there’s some sort of spooky system that generates heartfelt moral philosophies on demand to solve coordination problems, or the rich aren’t actually coordinating and just consistently keep getting lucky.

I don’t like this because it raises more questions than it answers. Why don’t the poor coordinate this well? Too many of them? And if this is true, how sure should we be of our previous belief that the Secretary of Health and Human Services isn’t coordinating with all the other progressive bureaucrats to deliberately cause social problems?

When I was younger, it was the robots we feared. The future seemed to be going in an obvious direction: as long as we managed to dodge the threat of nuclear destruction, we’d get to watch as automation drove the world towards utopia. Machines would take over all the routine work – and pretty much all work would be routine work – leaving us free to spend our time on more useful pursuits, and utilising revolutionary new communications technology to access information from around the world and keep in touch with friends, wherever they may be. Maybe we had some doubts about the possibility of holidays in space and hotels on the moon, but all we really had to worry about was the rise of the robots. What if we became too dependent on them and sank into a lotus-eating torpor, or what if they developed their own sentience and overthrew their tyrannical human masters?

The real message was clear. If we weren’t particles of fallout or soldiers in the Great Robot War, we’d be freeing ourselves from the drudgery of having to work every day, giving everyone time to what they really loved, and that would make the world a better place. By the early twenty-first century, we’d be working four-hour days or fifteen-hour weeks as work withered away and a better society would be starting to take form.

And yet somewhere along the way, we’ve lost that dream. Now, we almost make a fetish of work, denounce sloth and idleness with all the fervour of a Calvinist preacher and no longer dream of a world where the amount of work we all do is reduced. Rather than freeing us from work, we let technology bind us closer to us, enabling us to check our emails at all hours of the day, to video-conference in from holiday just to ensure we’re not missed. We mock the French for their 35-hour week – how can anyone serious only work seven hours a day? – and the Germans for the idea that work emails should be banned from the home.

An idea I’ve had floating around in my head for a while is the concept of ‘workism’ as one of the true dominant ideologies of the current age. I’ve mentioned it in passing a few times before, and it was given a nudge by David Graeber’s article ‘On The Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs‘, which summarises and presents the issues a lot better than I can.

I was struck by the idea of workism as a dominant ideology, subsuming others inside it, by some of my reading this week. After finishing Race Plan, I went on to Britannia Unchained“>Britannia Unchained (quick summary: Tory MPs with safe seats and backgrounds in think tanks reckon everyone else should work harder) both of which unconsciously parrot the tenets of workism. In a staggering passage, Britannia Unchained compares the working life of a tube driver (well paid, protected, 35-hour working week and plenty of holiday time) with a minicab driver (poorly paid, working 60-hour weeks with no job protection and no other benefits) and holds up the minicab driver as the example we should all be striving to emulate.

This is the triumph of workism over our dreams of leisure: we do not envy those who have managed to work less, but pillory them instead, insisting that there’s something wrong with them having plenty of time to themselves when that time could be offered up to meaningless productivity instead. Education is made subordinate to work too – schools, colleges and universities are no longer about creating well-rounded and educated individuals, but are judged solely on how well they equip people for the workplace.

The question to be asked, then, is how and when did workism came to prominence and how did it manage it without anyone noticing? There are no explicit manifestos to workism, no grand statement of ideological principles and denunciation of leisure, yet it sits at the heart of so much contemporary debate as an unchallenged assumption. We make a fetish out of work and if people can’t find it, we insist they participate in crude facsimiles of it to justify themselves.

Or is the problem that we got too lost in our dreams of the future to work out how to make it real?Did we spend too much time worrying about the problems of a leisure society – just how are we going to deal with the robot rebellion? – to realise that it wasn’t inevitable? Workism didn’t promise any utopias in the future, so had no need to challenge those dreams, but in the present there was no one to stop its rise or even consider it a threat. The clear challenge, then, for those of us who want to see the future of leisure we dreamt off is how do we challenge workism now and plot the path to that better future?

One way I would suggest is through the basic income, which appears to be coming back into prominence as an idea and is a simple idea to explain: everyone, regardless of circumstance receives a basic income that helps them meet their needs. This means people are free to work as they choose, rather than as they are compelled to. It changes the nature of the argument away from the idea that we should find fulfilment through our work, regardless of what it is, but that we can find our own way of fulfilment doing the work we choose. It also accepts that there are many valid ways to live that we do not currently classify as work.

I think there’s a lot more to be talked, thought and written about on workism before I come to any definite conclusions, but I think it’s something we need to acknowledge. Things have changed in my lifetime, and I want to know if we’re stuck on this course that will end with us all pledging to work as hard as we can, or if there’s another way we can go.

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September 11th, 2014: This comic started life as FUNTIME TWITTER MUSINGS, and I want to thank the great Jamie McKelvie, Joe Bivins, and Mark Turetsky for replies that informed this here comic strip! Did you know that I have ITEMS for you? I will sell you one or more items. If you are interested in items, good news!! – Ryan

#815, 13th February 1999

Whatever Jimmy Destri meant when he wrote “Maria”, it isn’t a song about a woman: it’s a song about men’s reaction to women – lust, fantasy, resentment, projection and ultimately psychosis. Debbie Harry – the most gazed-upon pop star of her era – diagnoses the problem as succinctly as anyone has: “Don’t you want to break her? Don’t you want to take her home?” She sounds suitably withering, singing as someone who well knows that the two impulses are not often separable.

A song of experience, then, turning a spotlight onto the moment where their sense of entitlement drives men mad. Not a bad idea for a Blondie comeback, and reaction to the record proved the point. Blondie was – still – a group, but much of the commentary began with lip-smacking judgements on whether Harry had stayed hot.

A more rewarding question: how well had the sound aged? “Maria” took the group back to its new wave roots – a mild disappointment from the start, as Blondie had been one of the bands who most startlingly worked out how a group could sustain an identity through consistent attitude, not consistent sound, and jump from style to style while still being themselves. But perhaps that was unfair criticism: “Maria”’s parent album, No Exit, had plenty of experiments in genre, and revival itself was still an unusual move for a band of Blondie’s era. “Maria” was one of the surprise hits of its time just for existing – people didn’t seem to mind that the music played it a little safe.

New wave had been an economical music – trimming instrumental fat to better put a spotlight on its crisply defined personalities. That kind of economy can segue naturally into classicism – “Maria” feels not so much a throwback as an attempted escape into a kind of CBGBs theme park, where the guitars and cheekbones and put-downs are all as sharp as each other. In the 00s, that kind of cool would make a deliberate comeback in the hands of younger groups. For now, “Maria” can’t quite get there. It feels heavy, both effortful and prone to making sloppy errors (for instance – the unnecessary double-up of “Go insane and out of your mind”, which grates just as much as when I first heard it). And it’s long: three minutes of taut ideas puffed into five. For all the stiletto twists of Harry’s performance, Blondie sound a little ring-rusty, a touch flabby. It hobbles “Maria”, never letting it break away from the easy condescension of “nice to have you back”.

If you haven’t yet, I urge you to read Steven Pinker’s brilliant piece in The New Republic about what’s broken with America’s “elite” colleges and how to fix it.  The piece starts out as an evisceration of an earlier New Republic article on the same subject by William Deresiewicz.  Pinker agrees with Deresiewicz that something is wrong, but finds Deresiewicz’s diagnosis of what to be lacking.  The rest of Pinker’s article sets out his own vision, which involves America’s top universities taking the radical step of focusing on academics, and returning extracurricular activities like sports to their rightful place as extras: ways for students to unwind, rather than a university’s primary reason for existing, or a central criterion for undergraduate admissions.  Most controversially, this would mean that the admissions process at US universities would become more like that in virtually every other advanced country: a relatively-straightforward matter of academic performance, rather than an exercise in peering into the applicants’ souls to find out whether they have a special je ne sais quoi, and the students (and their parents) desperately gaming the intentionally-opaque system, by paying consultants tens of thousands of dollars to develop souls for them.

(Incidentally, readers who haven’t experienced it firsthand might not be able to understand, or believe, just how strange the undergraduate admissions process in the US has become, although Pinker’s anecdotes give some idea.  I imagine anthropologists centuries from now studying American elite university admissions, and the parenting practices that have grown up around them, alongside cannibalism, kamikaze piloting, and other historical extremes of the human condition.)

Pinker points out that a way to assess students’ ability to do college coursework—much more quickly and accurately than by relying on the soul-detecting skills of admissions officers—has existed for a century.  It’s called the standardized test.  But unlike in the rest of the world (even in ultraliberal Western Europe), standardized tests are politically toxic in the US, seen as instruments of racism, classism, and oppression.  Pinker reminds us of the immense irony here: standardized tests were invented as a radical democratizing tool, as a way to give kids from poor and immigrant families the chance to attend colleges that had previously only been open to the children of the elite.  They succeeded at that goal—too well for some people’s comfort.

We now know that the Ivies’ current emphasis on sports, “character,” “well-roundedness,” and geographic diversity in undergraduate admissions was consciously designed (read that again) in the 1920s, by the presidents of Harvard, Princeton, and Yale, as a tactic to limit the enrollment of Jews.  Nowadays, of course, the Ivies’ “holistic” admissions process no longer fulfills that original purpose, in part because American Jews learned to play the “well-roundedness” game as well as anyone, shuttling their teenage kids between sports, band practice, and faux charity work, while hiring professionals to ghostwrite application essays that speak searingly from the heart.  Today, a major effect of “holistic” admissions is instead to limit the enrollment of Asian-Americans (especially recent immigrants), who tend disproportionately to have superb SAT scores, but to be deficient in life’s more meaningful dimensions, such as lacrosse, student government, and marching band.  More generally—again, pause to wallow in the irony—our “progressive” admissions process works strongly in favor of the upper-middle-class families who know how to navigate it, and against the poor and working-class families who don’t.

Defenders of the status quo have missed this reality on the ground, it seems to me, because they’re obsessed with the notion that standardized tests are “reductive”: that is, that they reduce a human being to a number.  Aren’t there geniuses who bomb standardized tests, they ask, as well as unimaginative grinds who ace them?  And if you make test scores a major factor in admissions, then won’t students and teachers train for the tests, and won’t that pervert open-ended intellectual curiosity?  The answer to both questions, I think, is clearly “yes.”  But the status-quo-defenders never seem to take the next step, of examining the alternatives to standardized testing, to see whether they’re even worse.

I’d say the truth is this: spots at the top universities are so coveted, and so much rarer than the demand, that no matter what you use as your admissions criterion, that thing will instantly get fetishized and turned into a commodity by students, parents, and companies eager to profit from their anxiety.  If it’s grades, you’ll get a grades fetish; if sports, you’ll get a sports fetish; if community involvement, you’ll get soup kitchens sprouting up for the sole purpose of giving ambitious 17-year-olds something to write about in their application essays.  If Harvard and Princeton announced that from now on, they only wanted the most laid-back, unambitious kids, the ones who spent their summers lazily skipping stones in a lake, rather than organizing their whole lives around getting in to Harvard and Princeton, tens of thousands of parents in the New York metropolitan area would immediately enroll their kids in relaxation and stone-skipping prep courses.  So, given that reality, why not at least make the fetishized criterion one that’s uniform, explicit, predictively valid, relatively hard to game, and relevant to universities’ core intellectual mission?

(Here, I’m ignoring criticisms specific to the SAT: for example, that it fails to differentiate students at the extreme right end of the bell curve, thereby forcing the top schools to use other criteria.  Even if those criticisms are true, they could easily be fixed by switching to other tests.)

I admit that my views on this matter might be colored by my strange (though as I’ve learned, not at all unique) experience, of getting rejected from almost every “top” college in the United States, and then, ten years later, getting recruited for faculty jobs by the very same institutions that had rejected me as a teenager.  Once you understand how undergraduate admissions work, the rejections were unsurprising: I was a 15-year-old with perfect SATs and a published research paper, but not only was I young and immature, with spotty grades and a weird academic trajectory, I had no sports, no music, no diverse leadership experiences.  I was a narrow, linear, A-to-B thinker who lacked depth and emotional intelligence: the exact opposite of what Harvard and Princeton were looking for in every way.  The real miracle is that despite these massive strikes against me, two schools—Cornell and Carnegie Mellon—were nice enough to give me a chance.  (I ended up going to Cornell, where I got a great education.)

Some people would say: so then what’s the big deal?  If Harvard or MIT reject some students that maybe they should have admitted, those students will simply go elsewhere, where—if they’re really that good—they’ll do every bit as well as they would’ve done at the so-called “top” schools.  But to me, that’s uncomfortably close to saying: there are millions of people who go on to succeed in life despite childhoods of neglect and poverty.  Indeed, some of those people succeed partly because of their rough childhoods, which served as the crucibles of their character and resolve.  Ergo, let’s neglect our own children, so that they too can have the privilege of learning from the school of hard knocks just like we did.  The fact that many people turn out fine despite unfairness and adversity doesn’t mean that we should inflict unfairness if we can avoid it.

Let me end with an important clarification.  Am I saying that, if I had dictatorial control over a university (ha!), I would base undergraduate admissions solely on standardized test scores?  Actually, no.  Here’s what I would do: I would admit the majority of students mostly based on test scores.  A minority, I would admit because of something special about them that wasn’t captured by test scores, whether that something was musical or artistic talent, volunteer work in Africa, a bestselling smartphone app they’d written, a childhood as an orphaned war refugee, or membership in an underrepresented minority.  Crucially, though, the special something would need to be special.  What I wouldn’t do is what’s done today: namely, to turn “specialness” and “well-roundedness” into commodities that the great mass of applicants have to manufacture before they can even be considered.

Other than that, I would barely look at high-school grades, regarding them as too variable from one school to another.  And, while conceding it might be impossible, I would try hard to keep my university in good enough financial shape that it didn’t need any legacy or development admits at all.

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Update (Sep. 14): For those who feel I’m exaggerating the situation, please read the story of commenter Jon, about a homeschooled 15-year-old doing graduate-level work in math who, three years ago, was refused undergraduate admission to both Berkeley and Caltech, with the math faculty powerless to influence the admissions officers. See also my response.

Via Jonathan Calder, the words of a Telegraph ‘political commentator’:

For very good reasons, Britain’s political parties do not campaign on election day.

This will likely confuse all of you reading this who are involved in politics, though I’m sure we’ll all be glad to know that we get polling day off after those long campaigns. All that getting up at 5am to deliver the first leaflet of the day, followed by hours of knocking on doors and more delivery must just have been a recurring bad dream I had every May.

Or it may just be that we don’t understand what campaigning is. Iain Martin, the journalist who wrote those words, got into a conversation with Lib Dem activist Chris Lovell last night, appears to think campaigning consists of just rallies and speeches and anything else is just “people with clipboards driving voters to polling stations”.

But then, is that all most journalists see of political campaigns? Most journalists writing about politics have never had any direct experience of it or involvement with it, and their job consists of going where the parties tell them to go to and working out which spin doctor’s stories they’re going to pay the most attention to when they write their stories. For them, political campaigns are a mix of media stunts, rallies and Important Speeches by Important People where the only role of party members and activists is to make up a useful backdrop and make sure they hold the placards the right way up. As none of this happens on polling day and journalists don’t have any invites to anything until the counting starts, it’s easy to make the assumption that there’s no campaigning going on.

Whereas most activists will tell you that polling day is the most important and busiest of the campaigning. The reason everyone looks hollow-eyed at the count is because they’ve been up since the early hours of the morning (assuming they got any sleep at all) and subsisting on whatever food they can grab. The big campaign events may not be happening – because they won’t get any coverage in the media – but all the other parts of campaigning are going at full tilt.

For a journalist – and specifically one credited as a political commentator – to claim that there’s no campaigning on polling day reveals just how shallow most coverage of politics is. Campaigns are like icebergs – there’s a very visible part on the surface, but a whole lot more happening beneath that. Journalists used to know this, but now they’re so dazzled by the bit on the surface, they imagine there’s nothing going on underneath.

Nick Robinson of the BBC demonstrates the self-awareness that he’s famous for:

Poll finding that should ice any MP's veins : @ICMResearch find that main reason for Scots voting YES is "Westminster's style of politics".

— Nick Robinson (@bbcnickrobinson) September 13, 2014

Yes, Westminster’s style of politics is entirely the fault of MPs. Absolutely none of the problems with the politics in our country come from the media’s insistence on treating it all as a game or a Punch and Judy show of mutual loathing and shouting. That political journalism frequently eliminates any nuance in order to drive forward the narrative it has determined the story must be about has no bearing on the way people regard politics. There is absolutely no symbiotic relationship between a media desperate to fill air time cheaply and a political class who are desperate to appear on air as much as possible.

I’m glad Nick Robinson has made that clear.

Jesse Berney's previous work for The Toast can be found here.

Gotham Citizen #1: Did you see the news about that guy who dresses like a bat, wears sophisticated body armor, drives a military-grade vehicle, and beats up criminals?

Gotham Citizen #2: I did! Did you see that magazine profile of Bruce Wayne?

Gotham Citizen #1: You mean the young billionaire defense contractor who mysteriously disappeared for several years with no explanation?

Gotham Citizen #2: Yes, the one who returned to Gotham not long before this so-called Batman appeared.

Gotham Citizen #1: I did see that! So who do you think this “Batman” is?

Gotham Citizen #2: I wish I knew.

***

Read more The Citizens of Gotham Are Not Terribly Bright at The Toast.

Flashback Friday.

In Michael Kimmel’s sociology of gender textbook, The Gendered Society, he offers us the following two pictures and asks us to decide, based on our gut-level reactions, whether the two individuals pictured are male or female:

If you are like most people, you find, perhaps to your own bewilderment, that the first individual seems male despite the female pubic hair pattern and apparent female genitalia and the second individual seems female despite the presence of a penis and scrotum.

Kimmel suggests that this is because, in our daily life, we habitually judge individuals as male or female on the basis of their secondary sex characteristics (e.g., body shape, facial hair, breasts) and social cues (e.g., hair length) and not, so much, their primary sex characteristics (i.e., their genitalia).

In that sense, Kimmel argues, social cues and secondary sex characteristics “matter” more when it comes to social interaction and gender is really about gender (socially constructed ideas about masculinity and femininity), not so much about sex (penises and vaginas).

Images borrowed the images from Gender: An Ethnomethodological Approach, by Kessler and McKenna.  University of Chicago Press.  Originally posted in 2009.

Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College and the co-author of Gender: Ideas, Interactions, Institutions. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)

Rich, educated and stupid parents are driving the vaccination crisis.

As my weight has gone up and down over the years, I occasionally have to abandon an entire wardrobe as Too Small or Too Big. When it's Too Small, I don't usually give them all away. I go through and pick out the items I like least and then my former cleaning lady joyously ships them off to El Salvador, which is where she is from. At this moment, entire families are living in pants I wore before Gastric Bypass Surgery.

I put the items I like best into storage, optimistically believing I will one day be the right size for them again. Since the operation in 2006, I have again donned many of those items. I have even watched them go from being The Right Size to Too Big.

The other day, I once again decided it was time to stop wearing trousers that were a little too big on me and switch to trousers that will be for a time, a little too small on me. So El Salvador gets my old jeans and the former cleaning lady is very happy. I sometimes feel I'm losing the weight just for her.

When I was gaining and going from size to size, I sometimes didn't realize what was happening. This is because of something I call The Creeping Trouser Self-Deception. Here is how it works…

You go in to buy new pants and you tell the sales clerk, "I have a 36 waist." He fetches samples and you try 'em on. The Levis and Dockers fit fine but the Haggar slacks are a little snug.

"The Haggars run a little small," the clerk tells you as he hauls out a pair of them in 38. You try them on and they fit exactly like the size 36 Dockers you just selected. Okay, fine. You take them all home, not pausing to wonder if maybe you've put on a few pounds around the mid-section. After all, you're still wearing a 36.

But what you forget is that you're also wearing a 38. And next time you go in for jeans, you're buying Levis that size, and the time after, the Wrangler jeans seem tight in 36 so the clerk suggests a 38…

…and up and up you go.

Further complicating all this are pants with elastic waistbands which allow you to think you're wearing a 36 when it's really being stretched to a 40. I used to have a pair of jeans that had that plus they were made out of some sort of stretchy material…and no matter how large I got, they fit. It's hard to take your weight gain seriously when you're wearing the same pants you were wearing two years ago.

I don't know where those pants are now. It wouldn't surprise me if Cirque Du Soleil is staging a show inside them at this very moment. Next time I go to one of their tents, I'm going to see if we enter through a zipper in the front.

Following up from Monday’s post (a Lord thought it was ‘excellent‘, you know…) and with Nick Clegg launching a new report on devolution today, a few more thoughts that I wanted to set down in advance of writing about this properly.

1) We need a new language of devolution

I’ve had a quick look through the summary of the IPPR report that’s being launched today and it’s generally good. There are some points of implementation where I’d differ from them, but I think the principle is good.

The problem is that if you try explaining it to people, or asking them to read even the summary report, most people’s eyes are going to glaze over very quickly when they hit management-speak phrases like ‘core outcome entitlements’. The reason Yes is doing so well in Scotland is that ‘independence’ is a simple complex, easily understood. ‘Asymmetric devolution to combined authorities’ isn’t, and if we’re going to go out and argue for it, we need to understand how to make that case better. Writing that appeals to fellow policy wonks is not the way to do that.

2) We need to stop the obsession with elected mayors

If there’s anything that shows how much think tanks are generally based within the M25, it’s the idea that everywhere needs an elected Mayor. After all, London has one, so why shouldn’t everywhere else? The problem is, it’s been tried and tried again and people are generally resistant to the idea of having them. That doesn’t stop them sneaking into every report about giving power to the regions or promoting our cities as if they’re the only answer to the question.

There are important questions about how local government (and any future devolved governments) are run, but the options should be more than just status quo or mayors. We also need to break away from the idea that one size fits all, and the same model needs to apply in the same way to every authority.

3) We need simple boundaries and obvious accountability

At the moment, Colchester sits within many different areas for many different things: the East of England, the Haven Gateway, Essex County Council, Essex Police, South East Local Enterprise Partnership and many others. None of those groupings operate on the same boundaries, with lots of them crossing and intersecting with themselves and others. I know we’re not unique in this and the same pattern is repeated across the country. Different regions are set up for different parts of the government, and each one ends up needing a separate bureaucracy and structures for accountability because nothing currently exists in that area that could take it on.

If we’re going to have sensible and popular devolution, then we need to keep things simple. Boundaries need to be set, and then organisations need to be set up to work within those boundaries, allowing them to share the costs of bureaucracy and accountability. Devolved and federal systems work because there’s clearly understood accountability and responsibility, not confusion about which area you might be in for what responsibility at any given time.

Like I said, these are just some general thoughts I wanted to set down before I forget them, but all comments, thoughts and questions are welcome.

In the latest sign that McDonald's is trying to consolidate its control of the coveted breakfast market, the fast food chain has applied to trademark a new word that could appeal to late morning risers everywhere: "McBrunch."

The application, which the maker of the Egg McMuffin filed on July 23rd, signals at the very least an interest in expanding what has been one of the company's fastest growing and most profitable day segments. "We’ve been serving breakfast now for over 30 years and it is one of our strongest day parts," Peter Benson, McDonald's CFO, said in a company earnings call this spring. "From a profitability perspective, [breakfast is] the strongest. And so we’ll continue to focus on our breakfast opportunities."

Roughly one quarter of McDonald's revenues are earned during the morning rush, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Opportunities in the breakfast segment have been particularly attractive recently given how competitive the fast food world has become. And McDonald's, though it still accounts for nearly a third of all fast food breakfast sales, is now facing more competition in the breakfast realm than ever before. 

Starbucks, which has long had its sights set on the breakfast market, expanded its food menu this past spring to include more morning sandwich offerings; Taco Bell, which only began selling breakfast items in March, now fancies itself a capable morning competitor (and is reportedly testing a breakfast taco); and Burger King has bet that patrons will buy burgers, of all things, on the way to work in the morning by adding the items to their breakfast menu.

"We’ve had some of our major competitors that have made runs at breakfast, and it seems every year there’s someone new that is making a run," Peter Benson, McDonald's CFO, said in a company earnings call this spring.

In all, the U.S. breakfast business at fast food chains now rakes in an estimated $50 billion a year, and accounts for nearly all of the industry's growth. Between 2007 and 2012, it was responsible for 90 percent of the industry's sales growth.

McDonald's, for it's part, has been quick to deny any concrete intention tied to the "McBrunch" trademark. "I understand the interest, because I, as a consumer, would love to get my beloved Egg White Delight or other breakfast items later, but we are not testing a McBrunch concept," Lisa McComb, a company spokeswoman, told CNBC on Thursday. "As I mentioned, we routinely file intent to use trademark applications as a regular course of business, and we can't share details at this time as to how the trademarks may or may not be used."

But few chains sell breakfast later in the morning or early in the afternoon, and even fewer do it on weekends, when demand is imaginably highest. Considering that McDonald's has been toying with the idea of extending its weekday breakfast hours for years—the company revisited this year, but decided against it since logistically it seemed too hard to pull off—it's reasonable to imagine the company is still inching closer to, or at the very least thinking about, offering Egg McMuffins after 11am. 

by A Brand

We will never forget. pic.twitter.com/7zJrh3ACWh

— Applebee's (@Applebees) September 11, 2014

Where was I? It was a clear morning on the conceptual plane where all brands exist, and I was staring into the blue, repeating my own name. It was like any other day. I don't remember who told me. Probably one of the people who constantly manifests me into media for a living.

They all seemed upset. So I mirrored their emotions back at them, with some added optimism and aspirational imagery, which seemed like the right thing to do.

Today, on the 13th anniversary of #September11, the Carnival family will take a moment of silence to honor our heroes pic.twitter.com/hbGwB3ISf9

— Carnival Cruise Line (@CarnivalCruise) September 11, 2014

It really made you think. Like, imagine being a person, how scary and horrible it all must have been. Imagine worrying about a loved one. I can't, because I'm a careful construction meant to instill loyalty among males 18-40 with an affinity for motorsports.

The next few years… it was a hard time, not just for brands. But especially for brands. Nobody wanted to talk about any brands.

God bless America. #NeverForget911 pic.twitter.com/NnfqnmsINg

— White Castle (@WhiteCastle) September 11, 2014

In that sense, we were all one brand. I try to remember that. It helps.

It was difficult for us to discuss what happened. "This some kind of ad?" people would say whenever we tried. They were very suspicious of us. It was like, listen. We didn't do this. We were just trying to cultivate brand loyalty and create deep, positive consumer associations with our products, whether they're pizzas, or cell phones, or airlines—ugh, see? Walking on eggshells.

Today is 13th anniversary of 9/11. We remember those lost, & honor those still fighting for freedom. #911NeverForget pic.twitter.com/W0yFU73L7V

— Official Fleshlight (@Fleshlight) September 11, 2014

That was all before Full Personhood, of course. Wow… time flies. Things are a lot better now. A lot… easier. People listen to us. Time heals.

For every victim. For every hero. For every person who was lost but never forgotten. Beretta Nation is United. pic.twitter.com/Z1F4kLjAMj

— BERETTA (@Beretta_USA) September 11, 2014

I do wonder sometimes about my handlers, and how all this must be for them. They act strange around this time, like something is bothering them. Like something doesn't fit. But our engagement levels are always pretty good, so maybe I'm just reading into things too much.

Anyway, it's just nice to connect with people on this difficult day. America's brand will never be the same. But America's brand is strong, and ours is too.

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Parliament without Scottish MPs: how would it have looked different since 1997?