Scapegoat

     Few people seem to know the etymology of the word "scapegoat". It is in fact a contraction of "escape goat", a sacrificial animal that in certain cultures was sent into the wilderness, presumably to be eaten by wolves, and taking the community's wrongdoings with it. Hence, the modern practice of "throwing someone to the wolves" to assuage consciences and erase a wrong.

     These days, however, the people tend to see through such attempts to shift the blame. If an oil company, for instance, causes damage to the environment, they can't get away with simply firing one executive, as if he or she was the only one at fault. And so when people want to persuade the public to go along with their scapegoating, they have to be sneaky. They have to play on our natural suspicion towards them.

     Take this case, where Evelynn Hammonds, a dean involved in the Harvard email searching fiasco, is resigning. The flak from those events is reportedly "not a motivating factor" in her decision. My first reaction to that was, essentially, "Oh, right. This has NO connection. I totally believe it, she must be guilty." My second reaction was "Wait. Why the heck did I just think that?" If the majority of the populace doesn't have that second thought (not an improbable occurrence, as comparatively few people second-guess themselves), then Harvard has quite neatly created itself a scapegoat, without technically doing anything of the sort. What does this say about our trust, or distrust, of public figures and institutions? Does "innocent until proven guilty" only apply in official courts of law, and not in public opinion? 

     Also, Dr. Hammonds is both the first female and the first African-American dean at Harvard. Do certain groups make better scapegoats than others? What would have happened if Dr. Hammonds was a white male?

     Lastly, note what it says on the Harvard coat of arms: "Veritas", which is Latin for truth. Is Harvard living up to its ideal? If Dr. Hammonds' resignation really isn't motivated by the email incident, but is perceived that way regardless, who is lying: the university, to the people, or the people, to themselves?

Crutch

     Once you've depended on something once, it can be hard to learn to do without it. If a parent helps you with your homework one night, you're liable to immediately go to them when you have a difficult problem in the future, which will make for a sticky situation in college, if not sooner. When a foreign power has been holding your country upright for years, you may struggle to find your feet when they start to turn away. Same same. Either way, the metaphorical crutch you've been leaning on goes poof, and you discover your legs have atrophied.

     I did not pick the second example at random. If you've been reading the news at all, you probably know that Afghanistan is having more than a little trouble putting itself together after give-or-take three decades of war. Neither the US nor NATO nor any other "Western" power is in charge there - there is a government running most of the country. Or trying to. Attempts at stability aren't exactly helped by incidents like this. A police officer searched a vehicle (an only intelligent policy in an area where, bluntly, lots of people want to blow something up) that turned out to belong to the son of the most important military commander in the country. This guy proceeded to have his minions (unless they were flunkies) beat the crap out of the policeman. (The difference between the technical definition of minions and flunkies is that minions have to take orders, i.e. if they were soldiers and the guy was their CO. Flunkies are just hired muscle, and unlike minions, do not count as abuse of official power.)

     Say what you want about the United States's involvement in the Middle East, we never did anything quite that entitled. For all our attempts to encourage democracy everywhere we go, this event and others like it make Afghanistan seem more like a feudalism, with military commanders regressing into warlords inflicting their will on commoners as they please. This impression is reinforced by the whole father's-influence thing, especially when one learns that the son, too, is a ranking military officer. (Did he earn his rank, or just inherit it?) And as in medieval history, the central government oftentimes fails to, or cannot, control the ones who theoretically answer to them. (Although in the Dark Ages, the commoners didn't have the ability to go on television and tell the entire planet. Maybe progress isn't a myth.)

     So how does this affect the plans for troops to leave Afghanistan next year? Don't go thinking this is an isolated incident, this policeman could very well be the only one with the nerve to report it. Does the West have an obligation to stick around and help fix the place, or would that just be "America playing the global police force"? Maybe they genuinely need our help, others would say. Still others would reply that there's nothing we can do, we're throwing good money after bad, et cetera. Perhaps the solution can be reached through policy and diplomacy, rather than a physical presence. Who knows? No one, probably, but ten to one plenty of people have an opinion. Let's hear it.

Interpreting the First Amendment

     Interpretation has always been a big part of how the First Amendment freedoms are enforced. We learned earlier this year that it was only recently, historically speaking, that freedom of speech was even taken seriously. Well, has that table ever turned now.

     The National Labor Relations Act, or NLRA, is essentially a list of all the things your employer can't fire you for. The idea is to keep companies from denying rights to their workers through fear of unemployment. But as Teresa Tritch of the New York Times recently observed, "Employees have rights under the N.L.R.A., but no right to be informed of those rights" (full article here). Why? The First Amendment. Requiring companies to tell their workers anything at all would abrogate their freedom of speech, which is not only the right to say whatever you want, but also the right to not say whatever you don't want.

     Whenever I see two laws working against each other, I feel like there must be a deeper issue at the center of it. In this case, the problem is freedom of speech. In general, I'm a fan - as someone who plans to become a journalist, it's difficult to be against it - but I do feel like it's gained an aura of infallibility it doesn't deserve. There are instances when information does not want to be free, and it shouldn't be. There are even more instances when invoking the First Amendment turns into a legislative "so is your face", an irrelevant remark designed solely to make the other guy shut up. Requiring companies to post a poster doesn't seem much different than requiring the city to put up speed limit signs, or making toy manufacturers put safety information on boxes so small children don't choke. It's simply a method of telling people how their world works and what they can expect.

     So where do we go from here? Do we continue as we have begun, and preserve the freedom to not speak? Has the First Amendment, crusader of democracy, gotten too big for its britches and our needs? Or is there a way to reconcile the two sides, and keep freedom of speech at its current levels while enacting a little spirit of the law to deal with those who take it out of context? America doesn't do a whole lot of spirit of the law, seems to me, or fewer people on trial would get off on technicalities and loopholes. But hey, it's not my question to answer. Comments please! Exercise your freedom of speech.

How Do You Say '500 Billion Dollars' In Spanish?

     Mexico gets no respect around here. People in this country seem to have the lowest levels of tolerance towards people of Hispanic descent I've ever heard of, classifying all of them as Mexicans. Studying for Spanish tests, I have had people come up to me and tell me to "stop speaking Mexican". And of course we have armadas of digital talking heads blaming Mexico for the US unemployment rate with the traditional "they're stealing our jobs" rhetoric.

     Leaving aside the fact that this is overt racism, hasn't anyone noticed that it's not true?

     Mexico is a huge economic help for the US. Trade with Mexico in 2011 totaled over half a trillion dollars, split only slightly unequally between imports and exports (ustr.gov). Have you heard of NAFTA? There's a reason that the North American Free Trade Agreement exists! (If anything, we stole their jobs on that one, when cheap corn from America put small farmers all over Mexico out of business. Leading in turn to them trying to come north for work - we created our own immigration problem.) President Obama himself has remarked on Mexico's bad rap: "Sometimes I think we forget this is a massive trading partner responsible for huge amounts of commerce and huge numbers of jobs" (nytimes.com).

The text on this Mexican peso translates to "United States of Mexico".
Just another example, albeit a poetic one, of the links between our countries.

     Do people not recognize how much Mexico helps us? I don't like to think that, since the people are the ones who control which direction this country goes in, but I suppose it's possible. It's the nature of the world that successes are thankless and failures get you only blame. Chalk one up in favor of the thickheaded / ignorant / uninformed hypothesis. On the other hand, plenty of anti-Mexico-ites are, other than that, intelligent and informed. So am I missing something here? Some reason for all the odio? Some factor that makes the public judgmental and biased? Something that Mexico actually did to us? Or am I going off on a tangent, and this isn't the big issue that it seems like to me? Let's hear the opinion of the people about the opinion of the people.

The Second-Most-Hated-On Profession in the US

     It doesn't take much effort to find people dissing the media these days.

     They complain that news isn't trustworthy; and sometimes it isn't, because need-for-speed can cause false or exaggerated stories to go live without verification. I will grant that this criticism is valid, with qualifiers. But that isn't what bothers me enough to write a blog post.

     They complain that traditional media is being phased out by blogs, news aggregators, and streamers, all of whom reduce our reliance on traditional, so-called "ossified media platforms". Although the average American blog is less reliable than 'mainstream media' by an order of magnitude, and most newspapers have an online edition these days, this criticism has some teeth too - people are going to secondhand sites for their news more and more. But that isn't what bothers me enough to post about either.

     Finally, they complain that reporters are "unfeeling", "uncaring", and even "inhuman". And this is the point where I do a double-take and ask them what the heck do they think they are talking about.

     The infamous slogan "If it bleeds, it leads" gets a lot of airtime in popular opinion these days. Another phrasing would be "If there's a tragedy involving massive injuries or loss of life, it makes the front page". And, by implication, it makes the journalist's career. This creates a meme-like image in people's heads of reporters as cold, calculating bloodsuckers, and for supporting evidence they need look no farther than the TV reporters covering any disaster live-from-the-scene, who tell their stories in a businesslike way, portraying little or no emotion on-screen.

     A masterful argument, but in my opinion it's utterly false. For one thing, there is no way for any demographic group to be 100% emotionless. Basic rules-of-thumb of human nature are enough to refute the bleed-lead argument, but let's take it a step further and explain the phenomenon that has people thinking that reporters are soulless. Consider my phrasing above: "portraying little or no emotion". It's exactly that - portraying. Reporters cannot be weeping into their microphones; it impedes the flow of information, which is their job in the first place. Instead, they control their reactions long enough to cover the story, and as soon as they're off the air they can collapse and sob.

     I can think of no better illustration of the determination that characterizes journalists, and the flipside of the emotion coin, than the events of Saturday in the city of Ya'an, China. (Some of you have probably heard this story already.) A local journalist was in the middle of preparing for her wedding when a massive earthquake hit; she put everything on hold and ran off to cover the breaking news.

Chen Ying, in Ya'an, reporting on the earthquake in a wedding dress.

     It's not lack of emotion, it's dedication to the job. Or at least that's my take on it. Feel free to comment if you see another side to this.

Critics Call New Reality Show Out of This World!

     Call me crazy, but a one-way trip to Mars just isn't my idea of a good time. Being one of only four people  within 50 to 400 million kilometers and eking out a techno-subsistence farm on a freezing ball of rock without an atmosphere? Pass. But maybe you agree. Maybe instead of calling me crazy, you would prefer to direct your incredulity to Bas Lansdorp, a Dutch entrepreneur, who expects to begin collecting applications in the next few months.

     But for all that, if he can find four people as crazy as he is, this nutball plan could (bah-dum-bum) fly. His secret? Two words: American television. Mr. Lansdorp plans to film and televise the process from training, to launch, to landing, and through the foundation and development of the Mars colony. The full NY Times article on the project, called Mars One, can be found here.

Look, Ma! I can see my house from here!

     Can you really fund an interplanetary expedition through something as banal as reality TV? Sorry, silly question, of course you can. Even without our modern addiction to the stuff, Mars One would draw an audience: three times the population of the US at the time tuned in for grainy pictures of the first man on the Moon; adjusted for population growth, that's nearly a million viewers. Plus, these days we have way cooler cameras - now you can watch the new season, so to speak, of Boldly Going Where No Man Has Gone Before, in high definition! With a soundtrack! And surround sound! (And exclamation points!) So it should be much more appealing to those who grew up with tech toys (read: kids these days). Not to mention, the whole thing will be reviewed by an editing team before it airs, so you won't have to watch the boring parts : P

Will kids on Mars get robots for pets? Here, Rover!

     Of course, the real question is, what will the racial makeup of the crew be? Will the writers (sorry, I mean mission planners) succumb to TV Tokenism? Or is that just an American trait, and Lansdorp the Flying Dutchman is exempt?

Show Me Stalin's Grave, And I'll Show You A Communist Plot

     If those who do not remember their history are doomed to repeat it, then I guess we should watch out for the rebirth of the Soviet Union, because Russians seem to have forgotten a lot about Stalin. I know people don't like holding on to bad memories, but there should be limits, people. For the 60th anniversary of his death, a crowd gathered to place flowers, pictures, and religious icons on his grave (that last item despite the fact that communism professed a disbelief in a god, God, or gods). Almost half the population of Georgia (the country Stalin was from, not the state) still admires him. And three-quarters of a million Russian citizens voted for a political party devoted to continuing "Stalin's attempt to battle the ancient Egyptian priesthood of Ra, which supposedly runs the world from its base in Switzerland". (You can't make this stuff up.) This isn't to say that all Russians are pro-Stalin (most of them still hold that he was an oppressive monster), but vocal minorities often have more power than quiet majorities. A full article on Stalin and the Russians (drat it, that sounds like a bad rock band) can be found here.

Picture from the Associated Press

     For me, and possibly most AS readers, the most striking thing is not that an evil dictator is enjoying a nostalgia-fest, but rather the connection to The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. (Yeah, I know you saw that one coming. Let me finish.) You may remember that parts of the DR were convinced that El Jefe had "superpowers" - well, a lot of Russians still believe Stalin had mystic abilities (see above, regarding war with ancient Egyptian deity), more than half a century later. You may also recall that even after the Fall of Trujillo, there were still plenty of Trujillistas trying to keep his government alive - well, Stalin's hometown of Gori wants to put his statue back up, and the current Russian government has created history textbooks that praise Stalin's industrialization attempts in the '30s. Everything ties together into the whole circle-of-history theme that characterized the last chapters of Oscar Wao.

     So here's my question to you: are all dictators the same? Do they all find the same methods useful in their tyrannical goals? Are these just parts of the characteristics that make someone a dictator? Do they have to pass some kind of Evil Villains Review Board to get their diploma in Totalitarian Regimes? I admit, the last one is unlikely. So comment! I want to hear what you think.

They Make A Better Loophole

     For some time now, both federal inclination and public opinion have been slowly leaning towards creating stricter gun-control laws. (The image in my head is of a stone pillar, which would fall on the heads of criminals were it not for a group of people pulling it back upwards - kicking and screaming. That might just be my inner drama student, though.) Regardless, it looks to me, from statements issuing from DC, that some new and improved legislation will arrive on Congress's doorstep shortly.

     New and improved, but maybe not improved enough.

     This is not a debate about how tightly, or otherwise, firearms should be limited. This isn't a rant for or against the argument that owning firearms saved lives during certain riots of the previous generation. (Although the police should be capable of doing that job. And if they aren't, then send in the army. But I digress.) This is merely an observation that if you're going to bother passing legislation in the first place, you should do it right, so you won't have to do it over. That is to say, make a better law, not a better loophole.

     The full article on the subject can be found here, but the general gist of it is as follows: if you make an organization to own the gun, then they don't have to go through background checks, and moreover can purchase weaponry that is restricted or liable to become so. There are plenty of people who will insist on the necessity of gun trusts, as they're called, and their reasoning can mostly be found at the bottom of page one of the article. Fine. For the third time in this post and the umpteenth on this blog, I'm not here for a fight. I would just like to request background checking on the people from which the gun trusts are formed. This seems a rational way for you to share your firearms without allowing extremely powerful weapons to be potentially sold to criminals. Could be you disagree, though. Fine by me if so, that's your Constitutional right as well. Leave a comment.

Final Exam: Hidden in Plain Sight

     With all the hullabaloo over gun control, people and politicians alike have been mostly overlooking an existing solution. While the two parties rage back and forth over fewer guns! more restrictions! second amendment!, they ignore the fact that there are already laws in place to help. As this NY Times article observed, laws concerning background checks are not being enforced. Less than half of those who falsify a background check are charged with a crime, despite the fact that it's a felony. And people who need to hide something in order to acquire a weapon are "more likely than the average person" to hurt someone with it, meaning that arresting them could seriously reduce firearm violence. So why did it take until last Wednesday for anyone at all in the government to realize this?
     Ostrich-style solution ignoring is far from a new theme in the material we've studied in the last semester. C. P. Cavafy's poem "Waiting for the Barbarians" said it well: "What's going to happen to us without barbarians? / Those people were a kind of solution." Without the barbarians, who are presented previously as the reason that officials aren't doing their jobs, someone will have to find a way to get the government to work. Likewise, Washington has been cowed by the shadows of two competing political philosophies, and as a result nothing has been accomplished.
     Another prominent example is the debate over sweatshops. On one side, you have people demanding better working conditions, and on the other you have people pointing at the bottom line and threatening that such improvements would send prices skyrocketing. Many arrived at a consensus that there was no way to resolve the dispute, and a safe and enjoyable job was "only attainable and realistic to affluent people", as Alana W wrote on her blog. Again, the simple solution was being ignored - a study cited by the New York Times showed that safe working conditions would cost a price increase of "roughly 3%", or fifteen cents on a five-dollar shirt.
     Why would the government neglect the solutions in front of their eyes? Maybe it's because it hasn't always worked out well. The story "Adams" by George Saunders, in which the title is a close anagram of Saddam, is a metaphor for the rationale behind the war in the Middle East. In the story, when a father finds his neighbor standing outside his kids' room in his underwear, he takes the obvious solution: pass out flyers about what the neighbor did, take away anything that could be used as a weapon, and "wonk him". Now, I'm not going to debate the right or wrong of the US's response, but you can't deny that it has resulted in a lot of criticism from a number of places. Perhaps it's understandable that these days, the government doesn't take the first course of action that suggests itself. But then again, perhaps not.
     Consider two analogies from the movie Glory. Firstly, despite the Union Army's need for troops, the 54th Regiment is sidelined. They are used only for parades, just as today the second amendment is paraded around without anyone paying attention to the country's actual needs. Secondly and most powerfully is the case of the quartermaster. He denies the 54th crucial supplies - including guns. He isn't doing anything to keep firearms away from the South when he does this. He only penalizes the Union. Similarly, when background check falsification is not punished, the people who would use their firearms against US citizens are not penalized. They can just go to a private seller, purchase a weapon, and continue unimpeded. While the government should always consider the effects of any action, there is no excuse for failing to utilize and enforce preexisting, pre-thought-out laws.

The Finals Myth

     Finals start tomorrow. Seniors will be looking forward to being Second Semester. All four grades will be studying under their eyeballs bleed. As soon as I finish this post, I'm going to go brush up on my calculus in preparation for tomorrow afternoon. I will also probably spend my lunch break, between tests tomorrow, with a textbook.

     My question for you all is why?

     Say that you have a 91.5% in science, an A minus  on the brink of B plusness and solid A alike. Say that finals are worth on average 12.5% of your semester grade (which they are). Do you know what grade you need on the final to keep your A minus? About seventy nine and a half percent - a C plus.
     Say your parents will ground you if you have any grades in the C range. Do you know what grade you need to maintain at least 80% in your physics class is? Negative point five percent, according to my handy-dandy calculator. You could get a zero on the final and still have a B minus average.
     Say you really want an A to impress that college you're applying to. Solid A is 93%, and to achieve that you would need to get one hundred and three point five percent on your final on Thursday. Which is possible, with curving, but if you haven't been acing your tests all semester, you're not likely to start now.

     With brings us to the dominant fact: that you're probably going to do on your final what you've been doing all year. A week or two of hiding in your room with your physics book is ridiculously unlikely to change a months-long behavior pattern. If you have an A minus now, then by golly you'll probably have an A minus on the test and an A minus for the semester. (Unless you test really badly or really well. And keep in mind that most people who 'test badly' don't drop by more than ten percent, which in this scenario still gets you your A minus.)

     So honestly, why the heck are we all so riled up?

     Well, if you're in AS it's the unpredictability - without letter or numerical grades, no one's positive what footing they're on. I have heard people say that this is the final they're "freaking out about the most" - and it's a two page paper. We wrote longer essays for the freshman year final of the analogous EH class, two years ago. And again, your writing tomorrow is gosh darn it going to be roughly what your writing has been like for the last four and a half months. (I know my blog posts don't usually take more than the final's ninety-minute time limit.)

     So where does that leave us? Do we honestly think that an extra half hour of studying crammed in on the bus will affect our grade? Is it the sheer amount of material to remember? I dislike that hypothesis - in many classes, including every math, language, and science course I've taken, each new chapter of content is built upon the last one. Try doing complex trig without knowledge of the Unit Circle. Do students simply have an irresistible need to be capable of controlling our futures, even at the last minute? Tell me what your reason for cramming is, or what you think others' might be.

     And yes, even having written this, I will still be studying at 1:59 pm tomorrow, a minute before the exam.

I Am Not a Number

     But are you, in fact?

     Even if you don't know the name "Big Data" (in which case click here), you've encountered it somewhere. It's used in election predictions (remember Mr. Nate Silver?), for Google's and Facebook's "custom advertisements", and hundreds of other things besides. The general, synopsized idea is that if you get enough data on people, you can predict what they will do, what they will buy, and what they will think.

     "But I have free will!"

     Yes. Yes, you do. And by the logic of Big Data, you will exercise your free will roughly the same every time. Consider: you have free will in choosing what music you listen to, but if you're a metalhead you're going to pick metal, and if you think you're a gangster living on the North Shore you're going to pick rap. People are creatures of habit. On the other hand, people are also prone to shaking your assumptions. To go back to the election example, there were people confidently predicting a Romney victory on Monday night, and they had numbers to "prove" it. I use the quotes because, obviously, Romney didn't win.

It's a big number. And you know what?

It doesn't mean anything.

     Which brings me to my main point: people are too complex to be represented by a single number or statistic, or even a half dozen. The human brain has between eighty and one hundred billion neurons in it, depending who you ask. Each of those interacts with its neighbors at the speed of electricity to form a knot, each knot interacts with others to form a lobe, and all the lobes of your brain work together to create you. And you're going to summarize the results of that in a couple of digits? Give me a break.

     There's one other problem with Big Data that the New York Times recently brought to my attention. It can isolate you from anything you don't already agree with. If you only read conservative e-newsletters or whatever, then you're only going to see conservative results when Google, Facebook, or anyone else uses a search customized engine for you. To hark back to the election example, searches customized for conservatives were never going to show them posts from anyone who, like Mr. Silver, calculated that Obama would win.

     What is the right thing to do, in a scenario like this? Because obviously leaving everyone to stagnate in a pool of "autopropoganda" isn't it. Do we eliminate the custom search, when it can help to eliminate false positives, like getting ads for plasma TVs when you're researching blood plasma, because Big Data is too much like Big Brother, an electronic monitor telling you what to read? Do we insist that tech gurus invent the perfect search? (Hint: that's difficult, bordering on impossible, and ergo rather impractical.) Is there any middle ground at all, or are we doomed to live in a world of filtered information? Please comment with any ideas for a solution, or simply your opinions on Big Data.

Triangulating a Solution

     By now, the debates have been raging for a few days over how to implement safety standards in overseas factories. The Triangle fire a century ago ignited a tremendous backlash against dangers in factories - in the US. For a long time, no one has really been thinking about outsourced production. Now, human rights advocates draw attention to fire hazards, hot and crowded working conditions, and injury rates; meanwhile, savvy economists point out that increased safety precautions would increase costs, and a majority of Americans would prefer not to spend more money than absolutely necessary. (For more, see Sean's and Jake's recent posts.)




     When two sides are at an impasse, the solution is cold hard facts. How about this one? The improvements demanded would increase prices by "roughly 3 percent", according to this NY Times article. On the oft-decried "$5 T-shirt", that would mean an increase of fifteen cents. You know the old saying If everyone gave a nickel, we'd be done here by sundown? Well, if everyone gave three nickels, we'd have safer working conditions in Bangladesh.


     Or how about this fact? Even after some retailers claimed to have ceased ordering from unsafe factories, their garments have still arrived on the shelves through subcontractors and middlemen. This problem is perhaps reminiscent of the blood minerals trouble in the electronics industry, and the solution is the same. Demand transparency from the people you're buying from. Make them tell you where they got the product, and if they're real weasels, make them show you some provenance. Then showcase your new policy, like Apple did, and not only have you helped save lives, but you don't even lose face with your customers.

     Of course, these are people we're talking about, and they're not always rational. Are "big name" stores likely to implement a solution? If so, how long will it take, and will the changes be real or just cosmetic? If not, why? and what can we do about it? Comment please!