Some Sections of the Middle Class

In which a mathematician masquerades as a math teacher.

2010-11-05T13:06:00.000-07:00

So I was in a colleague's classroom today, and I wrote down what my notes would look like if I had been a student who took good notes in her class that day. Then I wrote down what my notes would look like if I'd been in a class I taught, covering the same material. Here they are (in order -- although first scan was cut off for some reason.).I think the contrast is quite telling.

On the one hand, there's a shitload more insight in the class as I would have taught it. On the other, if you were a student looking back over your notes to try to figure out how to do a problem, the notes you'd taken in my class wouldn't do you a whole lot of good -- or rather, they would, but only if you had the patience to wade through a lot of conceptual shit in order to get there.

This brings up two questions:

1. These two teaching styles are clearly addressed towards different ways of thinking about mathematics, and different types of learning goals. (Roughly, we could describe those ways of thinking as "how mathematicians think about math" vs. "how people who are not mathematicians, but are pretty good at routine mathematical tasks, think about math.") Which of these reflects how we should be teaching our kids?

2. Is there, beyond the intrinsic value of each of these teaching styles, a value either to diversity or to consistency of teaching styles? Are students advantaged by having experience with both of these? Or do students who are used to one way of teaching/thinking freeze up when they're exposed to another way?

Briefly, I think we do want to be teaching our kids to think about math the way mathematicians think about math -- the understanding is a lot deeper and is rewarding on its own merits, but I think these ways of thinking also enable you to learn new mathematical concepts (and relearn forgotten concepts) much more easily -- because if you focus on understanding the underlying structure of mathematics, you can intuit the definitions and processes that would make sense in the context of that structure.

Unfortunately, my experience has been that there is an advantage to consistency -- and that students often react with frustration to the confusion introduced by exposure to new ways of thinking about concepts they already (at least partly) understand. I think I'm doing more harm than good by trying to teach mathematics the way I see it: by upending the expectations that kids have developed during years of math classes, I take what was once safe and predictable and render it frustrating and alienating. And I think, ultimately, that it's more important for students to have positive relationships with mathematics and with academics more broadly than it is for them to see it in particular ways, no matter how visionary or appealing those ways of seeing may be.

So I think teaching mathematics in shitty high schools is exactly the wrong place for me.

In which a supposed "anti-incumbent bias" is clearly more important than a Puerto Rican general strike.

2010-05-19T05:44:00.001-07:00

I am getting so fucking sick of hearing about "anti-incumbent bias" as an explanation for the losses of Blanche Lincoln, Arlen Spector, and Trey Grayson. Not only are all three of these people world-class schmucks who have nothing going for them except their incumbency, but I'm willing to bet that the vast majority of people sitting in Congress at this time next year are exactly the same people who are there now.

The thing is, these fuckheads are so used to the idea that they can win every election no matter what that when their win rate goes below 90%, they take this as a sign of bias against them, rather than a slight decline in the level of bias for them. And the mainstream media just slurps it up.

In other news, while the mainstream media echo chamber has been caught up whining about how the power brokers they've been ponying up to for all these years might not be there anymore, you know what they haven't been talking about? The student strike in Puerto Rico, which has been going on for nearly a month, and which is backed by a general strike of all Puerto Rico's major unions.

Check it out, seriously: a Google News search turns up not one source from the mainstream, non-occupied US media.

In which we don't actually believe all students can learn.

2010-04-28T11:12:00.000-07:00

Educators love to talk about reducing the achievement gap and about how all students can learn – in other words, about not giving up on students at or near the bottom of the spectrum. And it’s admirable that we say these things, and I think we really believe them, in the sense that, all other things being equal, we think it’s worthwhile to spend time on low-achieving students. Some of us would even go so far as to say that – again, all other things being equal – we’d spend more time with students who are doing poorly than with students who are doing well.

But all other things aren’t equal. Most educators believe that different students respond differently to instruction, and that spending the same amount of time with some students will produce more improvement than with other students. Usually this is blamed more on behavioral factors which lead to less time being spent actually teaching, but the fact is that almost always, the students we believe will respond best to instruction are exactly the ones who are doing well.

It’s not that we don’t think the other kids can learn. We do believe they can learn. But we believe that we’ll have to spend so much time on eliciting the sort of behaviors necessary for learning that it just won’t be worth the effort. So we end up prioritizing the students who are doing pretty well anyway, because we know then we can spend our time teaching.

Some people argue that this is missing a key piece of the equation: although it’s true that you’ll have a stronger direct effect if you focus on the “good kids,” there are strong enough indirect effects of prioritizing the “bad kids” to make it worthwhile. In particular, the bad kids spend all their time fucking up your class for other kids. If you spend the resources to enlist them, even though this probably won’t end up turning them into lawyers, they’ll probably stop fucking everything up. So even though it takes a lot of extra work, the payoff is huge not only in terms of the effect on their learning, but the effect on other people’s learning.

But I’ve recently started hearing about a third approach, which tends to be used especially at really shitty schools. At a school like the one where I just got hired, it’s really difficult to target the bad kids – they’re usually not in school, and there are enough of them that you just can’t do the kind of interventions that you’d need to get them back on track. You need really intensive work with a lot of these kids – probably the equivalent of a full-time worker each, between counselors, social workers, and teachers.

So instead, you target the kids who are pretty bad, but not terrible. Here, the priority goes to students who are failing one or two classes – roughly between the fifth and the twentieth percentile. These are kids who still have some hope for academic success, and who might get there with a little extra help at lunch or after school. By doing this, too, you can isolate the kids you can’t help – you ideally go from having four failing students in a 20-person class to having one, who probably will just stop showing up when ze doesn’t have accomplices anymore.

Beyond that, if you successfully target all the borderline cases, incoming frosh classes will start to see their options differently – and so you’ll get fewer students who fall to the level where you give up on them.

I can’t say I’m really comfortable with this. We really shouldn’t see our choice as being between teaching most of the kids and teaching none of them – especially since a lot of times what we’re doing is ignoring the most vulnerable students (even at a school that’s entirely made up of poor students of color, my impression is that the students we expel or allow to fail are more likely to be homeless, abused, or neglected). But at many schools those really are the only two choices.

Our two favorite phrases, as a profession, are currently “closing the achievement gap” and “all students can learn.” And the thing is, I think we really do believe in these principles. But we believe in them in an abstract sense – where, all other things being equal, we don’t think it’s a waste of time to work with vulnerable, low-achieving students.

But all other things aren’t equal. Targeting those kids is a lot more work. And we need to start asking, “Do you believe you should target low-achieving students from disadvantaged populations even if that means less total learning will take place? Does your belief that all students can learn come with a commitment to make sure all students do learn, even if that means other students don’t learn as much?”

I think most teachers would answer no to both of these questions, and they do, through their actions, all the time.

In which Jesus is a fucking radical.

2010-04-26T14:48:00.000-07:00

By the way, my posting volume has been down -- and will likely continue to be so -- because I now have a teaching job, so I've been scrambling to salvage the year for my kids, some of whom have now had three math teachers and two long-term subs.

Let's talk about Jesus, okay? The Sermon on the Mount (or the Plain, depending on whether you trust Matthew or Luke). He says:

If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if someone wants to sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well. If someone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles. (Matthew 5:39-41)

Now, I'd always been a little uncomfortable with this. Because the thing is, I'm all down with not fighting back -- that part makes sense to me. But can't you at least block? Isn't some kind of nonviolent resistance okay?

Then I heard new interpretations of these verses that blew my fucking mind.

First, turning the other cheek. Here's what Wikipedia says on the subject:

A literal interpretation of the passages, in which the command refers specifically to a manual strike against the side of a person's face, can be supported by reference to historical and other factors.^[1] At the time of Jesus, striking someone deemed to be of a lower class with the back of the hand was used to assert authority and dominance.^[2] If the persecuted person "turned the other cheek," the discipliner was faced with a dilemma. The left hand was used for unclean purposes, so a back-hand strike on the opposite cheek would not be performed.^[3] The other alternative would be a slap with the open hand as a challenge or to punch the person, but this was seen as a statement of equality. Thus, by turning the other cheek the persecuted was in effect demanding equality.

It goes on to talk about the coat/cloak thing, in the context of Deuteronomy 24:

10 When you make a loan of any kind to your neighbor, do not go into his house to get what he is offering as a pledge. 11 Stay outside and let the man to whom you are making the loan bring the pledge out to you. 12 If the man is poor, do not go to sleep with his pledge in your possession. 13 Return his cloak to him by sunset so that he may sleep in it.

See, if someone sues you and tries to take your tunic, they're not allowed to take your cloak. So by giving it to them, you're putting them in violation of Hebrew law. Furthermore, Shine Thomas points out that if you give him your cloak, you're probably naked -- and your nudity brings shame on the viewer, not on the naked person.

And it turns out that Roman soldiers were allowed to make you carry their stuff for a mile, but no further. So if you carried it for two miles, they were again violating the law.

All of these are a foundation not so much for a tradition of civil disobedience as for one of uncivil obedience. All of them involve allowing (even perhaps facilitating) wrongdoing, but changing the context of that wrongdoing so that the perpetrator feels uncomfortable about it. And there's definitely no civility in it: there's a kind of challenging hostility in the turning of the other cheek that I find really compelling.

Here are the two modern parallels to this kind of behavior that jump into my mind. Neither of them were things I would ever have dreamed of pointing to as Christian examples before this Sunday morning.

One of them is this account of the death of Che Guevara -- particularly the refusal to kneel to be shot, and his comment, "Know this now, you are killing a man." The other is the "Please, Lou, Please" scene from Fight Club -- and, come to think of it, the scene where Edward Norton beats the shit out of himself to blackmail his boss.

What we see here is a very confrontational Jesus -- rather than being a pitiable figure who was willing to suffer because of his unwillingness to use force, we see a figure who urged his followers to use their own suffering as a weapon. The Passion of the Christ image of a Jesus who passively suffered at the hands of his tormentors masks the fact that there are few things more unsettling than someone who, when you hit them, says, "Yeah, hit me again, but this time hit me like you mean it."

I'm also reminded of the reports that people gave of how they were affected by participation in the Milgram experiment and the Stanford Prison Experiment. People consistently talked about how they'd changed for the better when they saw the kind of cruelty they were capable of. They were forced to confront a side of themselves that they hadn't been ready to deal with, and they realized that there was a good chance other people wouldn't stop them from doing terrible things. These realizations forced them to accept greater responsibility for their destructive impulses, and made them less likely to allow those urges to take over in the future.

Notice, also, that all of these were ways of confronting forms of violence that were socially sanctioned: backhanding a slave, wife, or child; taking someone's most urgent necessities in lieu of debt repayment; and conscripting civilian labor for military purposes. All of them were about confronting oppressors with the reality of their injustices, which could otherwise be masked behind the formal sanction for them.

Now I'm just picturing someone losing their house to foreclosure, walking into the bank that now owns their house, and stripping down and handing over their clothes. Fucking brilliant.

In which false economies screw poor kids.

2010-04-16T13:47:00.000-07:00

I want to talk a little bit about class sets.

First, a little background: Lots of teachers make absurd amounts of copies. Completely preposterous amounts of paper get distributed to students, who end up throwing it all away or losing it in the sea of mostly-useless papers that their backpacks become. In addition to being counterproductive, this is environmentally unsound and costs schools a shitload of money. So many schools, as a way to counter this, put limits on the number of copies teachers can make, either by giving them accounts on copiers with limited numbers of copies, or by giving them a paper quota and making teachers keep track of their own paper. And some teachers, even when they're not so restricted, feel bad about the paper they're using, and try to cut down themselves on the number of copies they make.

One of the forms this takes is the class set. Since many teachers teach three or four or five sections of the same class, they'll make one set of thirty copies of whatever they would've handed out, and expect kids to use them in class, but then return them at the end of class in a state that allows the next class to use them.

Sometimes, this is done for things like readings -- in which case it makes sense, if we assume that no one is going to re-read these texts after the class ends, and they're simply going to get thrown away anyway, which is often the case. But more often than not, this gets done with things like worksheets, along with the instruction to work on a separate sheet of paper (the same principle is at play when math teachers assign problems out of the book, although on a somewhat longer-term basis).

What gets lost in this is that paper provided by students is also paper. In fact, we end up using more paper this way: we've gone from 150 sheets (one for each student) to 180 (one for each student to write on, plus a class set of the questions). It's actually even worse than this: many teachers know that students benefit, when reviewing, from having the answers and the questions in the same place, so instruct them to copy the questions onto their own sheet, so we now have to have enough paper for two sets of questions (one of them presumably copied in somewhat larger print).

We're also then using class time for the copying of words that are already printed, as well as the extra time the teacher needs to spend making sure to get all the sheets back (as a substitute, this is a huge issue -- teachers are sometimes generous enough to leave a couple of extra copies, but even so, if I lose an average of one in each period, I won't have enough for the last class, and since I don't have copier privileges, it's tough to remedy this) -- this ends up occupying three or four minutes of class time, which sounds trivial until you remember that it's almost ten percent of the class.

So in doing this, we use significantly more resources, all in order to transfer costs from schools to students. And the funny thing is, this always fucking happens in the schools where the students are poorest -- schools with rich students almost universally can afford a few extra copies. We are, on a large scale, transferring the costs of education to poor kids and their parents, and we're calling it "greening."

In which I write a letter.

2010-04-15T14:14:00.001-07:00

Brendan Coughlin
Chair, Nominating Committee
Wesleyan University Board of Trustees

Dear Brendan,

I am writing to tell you that I will not be voting in this year's Alumnae/i Trustee election. None of the candidates can be fairly described to represent me, or any of the thousands of Wesleyan graduates like me.

Of the six Alumni/ae Trustee candidates, five are from the business world. Of the six current trustees who will be returning, three are from business backgrounds -- so, regardless of the outcome of the election, business is guaranteed a majority of alumni trustees.

Outside of business, alumni trustees and candidates represent two professions: medical school professors and directors of nonprofits. It's worth noting, also, that the nonprofits we're talking about -- the Tiger Foundation and the Philanthropic Institute -- are both of the type generally referred to as the Nonprofit Industrial Complex; in other words, they're nonprofits who view themselves as primarily accountable to donors, rather than to the communities in which they work. Here's a text sample from the Tiger Foundation's "Who We Are" page:

Since inception, Tiger Foundation has pursued the dual mission of providing financial support to the top nonprofit organizations serving New York's neediest families, and training active and engaged philanthropists who serve on the foundation's board. Tiger Management was dedicated to maximizing the return on every investor dollar. Similarly, Tiger Foundation is dedicated to investing in nonprofit organizations in the five boroughs of New York City that maximize the social return on every contributed dollar.

I can understand why this is exactly what a Board made up largely of corporate officers and wealthy donors likes to hear -- but as someone whose primary involvement with Wesleyan was as a student rather than a donor, it makes me a little nervous to think our decision-making bodies are made of people who believe their primary responsibility is to donors.

You have to know that this isn't a representative sample of Wesleyan graduates. In fact, Wesleyan's embarrassingly small endowment is constantly being blamed on the fact that this isn't what most Wesleyan graduates look like. We're all going off to become social workers, and teachers, and community and union organizers, instead of going where the money is, the way all these nominees have.

Ultimately, I don't see any reason to vote for three more representatives of business and the nonprofit industrial complex to join a board that's already full of representatives of business and the nonprofit industrial complex. Boards of Trustees are not democratic institutions, and allowing us to choose from a list of pre-screened, pre-vetted candidates doesn't change that. This is a charade, and I'm not participating.

If you'd like some nominees that reflect the rest of the spectrum of Wesleyan graduates, I'm happy to submit a few.

Regards,
Per

In which feminists make jokes.

2010-04-14T09:50:00.001-07:00

So I think it's fair to say that Sady "Sady fucking Doyle" Doyle went all Rahm Emanuel on this douchebag, who is pissed because he feels men aren't treated fairly by feminists -- basically, because he thinks feminism isn't about women, it's about equality, and therefore men shouldn't feel like they need women's approval to be real feminists. There's a whole argument to be had there about how if women don't like your feminism, it's probably not feminism, and about the epistemic privileging of the oppressed, but for right now, I want to talk about this shit:

Look, I have to tell you: your whole enterprise here, the whole long and short of it, appears to be an edifice designed to give you a platform that paws at discourse while denying the possibility of you ever getting called on anything. I mean the whole apparatus of the place. It’s like this constant recursion of LOLspeak/serious speak/LOLspeak, this Russian dolls style thing you’re so enamored with. It’s just a mechanism to introduce a self-limiting aspect on what you want to say; you want to be heard and to be taken seriously, but you want the out to be able to say that you were just goofing. Well, goof away, it’s the Internet, and it’s your dime, but understand that you are denying intellectual rigor when you do so.

Sady, in her first response, gave some pretty good attention to some of the reasons why she's allowed to make jokes if she wants to (it's a little alarming that this is something women have to defend), but I want to add a couple more reasons.

Because of the humorless-feminist stereotype.

Over the years, I have noticed that sometimes, powerful people make really unpleasant jokes at the expense of women, or black people, or Jewish people, or Mexicans, or queer people. And when they do so, those people and their allies sometimes call them out on it. And almost always, when they do, we're told that the problem isn't in the joke -- no, the problem is that the victims of the joke were just too sensitive to get it, and were too caught up worrying about the fact that this joke was making light of very real hardships and dangers to get that it was funny.

So feminists get characterized, again and again, as humorless, because they're always cracking down on the enjoyment that normal, funny people get out of sexual assault; domestic violence; misogynist, racist, homophobic and transphobic stereotyping; violence against queer people; the grossness of queer people; and the grossness of fat people.

Almost all humor, people in marginalized communities are told, is at someone's expense -- it just happens that this time, it happened to be at your expense. But somehow these jokes never get turned around -- we don't actually end up hearing the jokes at the expense of men, or white people, or straight people. And when we do, without the context of oppression the meaning isn't the same -- I can hear jokes about straight white cis dudes without feeling threatened.

So what ends up happening is that many of the actual conflicts involving feminists (and, to a lesser extent, anti-racists and queers) are between some straight white dude making jokes, and some feminist earnestly telling him what's wrong with those jokes. And so feminism becomes the side of earnest, serious people getting in the way of fun-loving, if sometimes insensitive, dudes.

And that's not a fun side to be on. So it was nice to see, in this case, a real lady feminist getting criticized by a fake dude feminist for being too funny. And it's also a hopeful sign, that we might live in a society where people no longer feel that they have to trade in the funny for the feminism.

Because humor is a really effective way of policing a space.

The two standard options for policing feminist spaces are to simply refuse to publish offensive comments and to be willing to seriously debate the ideas contained therein. Both of those have their merits, but they have their flaws as well.

In particular, refusing to publish them gives assholes an excuse to cry censorship, which can end up creating a conversation about censorship instead of a conversation about them being an asshole. But publishing them and seriously debating them lets them derail, and in the process sends a message to marginalized people that this is a space that cares more about the free speech rights of assholes than about their safety or comfort.

And to be fair, a little of both of those are done in the posts I linked above, but mostly, the guy's subjected to endless mockery. And rightly so -- because his ideas weren't serious criticisms, they were derailments. Humor enables us to send a clear message that particular types of discourse aren't welcome, without giving a real opportunity for people to cry foul -- it's exactly what anti-feminists have used against us for all these years.

And so the final result is, if I was planning on making an misogynist comments over at Tiger Beatdown, you can be pretty damn sure I'm not going to now. Because if I did, Sady Doyle would fucking end me.

In which Glenn Beck finds an ally.

2010-04-13T14:45:00.000-07:00

Justice refers to rules of individual conduct. And no rules of the conduct of individuals can have the effect that the good things of life are distributed in a particular manner. No state of affairs as such is just or unjust: it is only when we assume that somebody is responsible for having brought it about...

In the same sense, a spontaneously working market, where prices act as guides to action, cannot take account of what people in any sense need or deserve, because it creates a distribution which nobody has designed, and something which has not been designed, a mere state of affairs as such, cannot be just or unjust. And the idea that things ought to be designed in a 'just' manner means, in effect, that we must abandon the market and turn to a planned economy in which somebody decides how much each ought to have, and that means, of course, that we can only have it at the price of the complete abolition of personal liberty.

F.A. Hayek, interviewed here (via)

I like this quote because it serves to show how what's being questioned by the most hardcore critics of social justice movements isn't merely the specific goals of particular movements, but the foundational notion of collective responsibility as an ethical imperative. There's actually a different set of ethical principles at work among advocates of social justice than among free marketeers, and if we don't actually talk about those differences of principle, we end up talking past each other and using justifications that don't answer the questions the other side is asking.

So I think it might be appropriate to spell out some of the ethical underpinnings of the idea of social justice, as I see them.

Firstly, markets are not natural forces. This is true partly because they are created and regulated through social and political processes, by real people. In particular, markets do not exist without the decision to violently enforce the property rights of rich people against poor people. We can meaningfully talk about markets and, by extension, about "the free market" as having architects, almost all rich, white, male, and European, who imposed the legal framework necessary for the market on the rest of the world.

Markets are also not natural forces in the sense that any particular condition which is the result of the "action of a market" is actually the result of actions by individuals. In general, if these individuals are acting as economists believe they should, they are acting selfishly. All of them had the option of acting to increase justice rather than acting to increase personal accumulation, and to the extent that they did not, they share in the responsibility for the injustice of the results.

It seems like part of the difference here has to do with trouble with the diffusion of responsibility. For Hayek, it seems to follow that, because the unfairness of the distribution of resources is not based on my actions alone but rather the action of a large number of people, therefore I bear no responsibility for my part in this continued injustice. For me, the sharing of blame does not make that blame disappear: all of the people who participated in a wrong share blame.

Furthermore, even if markets are thought of as impersonal forces to which terms like justice do not meaningfully apply, that doesn't mean we can't think about them in terms of justice. Floods, certainly, are such impersonal forces -- if a flood affects a particular subset of the population disproportionately, that doesn't make it an unjust flood, because floods can't be expected to be thinking about things like justice when they decide where to do their damage. And further, if a flood destroys my neighbor's crops, I shouldn't be held responsible for that injustice.

But -- and here's the biggest thing I think Hayek is missing -- that doesn't mean I don't have an obligation to remedy it. Even though I have not acted unjustly up to this point, it would be unjust of me to respond to this by saying, "Shit, sucks to be you," and hiring guards to make sure ze doesn't try to sneak in and eat my vegetables at night.

Even if you consider markets to be akin to natural forces, it's not always right to allow natural forces to dictate social outcomes. Or, to phrase it another way, the flood is the only person we can hold responsible for the destruction of the crops, but we're all responsible for the social structure that allows that destruction to starve one particular person rather than making all of us a little hungrier. And it is meaningful to apply principles of justice to that kind of action.

Essentially, all of this is about the idea that it is possible to ascribe responsibility to individuals for the actions of collectives of which they are a part. An interesting aside to this, though, is that a key ingredient in this ascription of responsibility is the separation of two aspects of responsibility that are often conflated: responsibility in the sense of guilt and responsibility in the sense of agency. This allows us to place responsibility for the injustice of the world as it is at the feet of the privileged and powerful, without also placing sole responsibility for the creation of future justice in their hands (and thereby endorsing their continued vanguard status in left movements).

This can seem like a bit of a sleight of hand on the part of social justice advocates: either oppressed people have the capacity to shape change or they don't. If they do, they should share responsibility for the injustice of the world as it is; if they don't, they might as well give up on trying to shape the future. But injustice can be created and maintained by a section of a community, for their own benefit; justice, on the other hand, requires the involvement of all. So even though poor people aren't to blame for their own poverty, we need their involvement in order to abolish poverty.

In which young people talk about violence.

2010-04-08T09:43:00.000-07:00

A girl in the sociology class I was in today told me she had just done a project on youth violence. "So tell me about youth violence," I said. The teacher hadn't left lesson plans, and I figured this was a good place to kick off a discussion.

"These people are all trying to say kids get in fights because they're abused, or because their parents are divorced, and all this other stuff, but I think some kids are just bad." I hear this one a lot.

"So the thing you have to realize is that not all neighborhoods are like this. Fights happen way less in Wilmette than they do in Englewood. You think those kids are just better people than you guys?"

"I don't know."

"So let me ask you this. You've all been in fights, right?" Everyone in the class -- it was still early in first period at Robeson, so there were only about five of them -- nodded. "Are you bad people?"

"No," said another girl. "But I only get in fights to protect myself."

A few other kids agreed. "But," I said, "different people have different definitions of what it means to protect themselves, what you have to do." I asked if they would punch me if I pushed them -- most said yes, and one girl said, "Why would you be pushing me if you weren't trying to start a fight?"

"What if you were just in my personal space?" I asked. "I wanted you out, so I pushed you back."

She told me how my response should have been exactly what a nonviolence educator would hope it would be: ask her to move away, explain that it's making me upset, etc.

"Of course," I said. "Those are all things I should have done, and that's what I'd hope my reaction would be. But can you honestly tell me that if I was up in your face like this" -- I stepped about a foot away from her -- "talking to you, that would be your response?"

She laughed. "I probably would push you. But you shouldn't have been that close to me anyway!"

"But look at what's happened -- using only your reactions, we've gotten from someone standing too close to you to a punch getting thrown. This is how fights get started. It's always OK to do just a little bit more than what's done to you, and before you know it knives are getting pulled."

The conversation drifted a little bit. I let it go.

A little while later, a girl was talking about an elementary-school pastime of hers. "We had these police tasers, and sometimes there'd be these white kids sitting on the bus, and we'd start tasing them, and we'd chase them off the bus with tasers."

Another girl -- the same one who'd said fights were caused by bad people -- added, "We used to -- I'm talking about when I was in elementary school -- we'd be riding deep, like, twelve or fifteen deep, and one of us would just point to somebody, anybody, at a bus stop, and we'd just jump 'em. And there was so many of us, they couldn't do nothing, and we'd just beat on 'em and then leave."

"We used to do that too, over on Jackson."

At this point, I had to bring in the rest of the class. "How many of you used to do that?"

"Do what?"

"You and your friends, in elementary school, beat up random strangers at bus stops."

"Well, you don't go into other hoods and start fights at their bus stops, because you don't know what's going to happen. But in my hood, at my bus stop? Yeah, you're going to get got."

"How about the rest of you?"

One boy piped up and said he never had. A girl stayed silent. Everyone else nodded. We were up to eight in the room by this point.

"So let me tell you guys. Growing up in my neighborhood, I never got into a fight with a random stranger in a bus stop. Do you think that's because I'm a better person than you were? Because let me tell you, I wasn't a good person in seventh, eighth grade."

"You never got in a fight?"

"That's not what I'm saying, but no, I didn't. But the point is, as a kid, it never occurred to me to beat up a stranger in a bus stop. There wasn't a pack of fifteen twelve-year-olds running around beating up strangers that I could've joined. It just didn't happen. Why do you think in my neighborhood in Evanston, that never happened, but on the South and West Sides, where you grew up, it happens all the time?"

They were a little shocked by this. "You know, some of those people did have some problems, like, anger problems, violence problems."

In which I probably should care more about abortion than I do.

2010-04-07T08:46:00.000-07:00

I don't care about abortion.

I've been waiting a long time to get that off my chest. I kinda feel bad about it, because I know it really matters to a lot of people. It's just another medical procedure to me -- like assisted suicide, it's a right, but it feels abstract to me.

And it's weird that it should be abstract, because people close to me have had them, and their lives and my life would be very different if they hadn't. And I'm glad they were able to do so, and I don't believe those choices should be stigmatized -- but I can't bring myself to get up in arms about it.

Maybe I'm overstating this. I do certainly find common cause with abortion activists on a lot of issues: I'm totally down with clinic escorting, for example, because I really like the idea of escorting as a way of showing support to victims of harassment and violence. And I shared in the outrage and mourning over the death of George Tiller, because I'm opposed to political violence, and to the way it gets minimized when it's carried out by white Christians. But when people started expressing joy over the fact that Roeder's sentence doesn't offer the possibility of parole for fifty years (like, thank God for that, right? Can't leave open even the slightest possibility that at seventy-fucking-seven he might have ceased to be a danger to society...) they kinda lost me. Similarly when it started to seem like the only way health care became a feminist issue was when that health care related to the removal of fetuses.

It's stuff like this that has led to me getting bored by coverage of abortion.

Partly, I think this has to do with the fact that, in addition to an argument about misogyny, there's an argument being had about whether fetuses are lumps of cells or humans, and at what point that transition is made. I don't think that's the sort of question I'm equipped to answer, just like the question of whether chimps have souls or the question of the existence of God. I don't think the question makes sense (aren't humans lumps of cells?), it bores me, let's talk about something else.

So I don't like it when people's stance on abortion gets taken as a litmus test for whether they think women are people. Because, as it happens, I think women are people and that they should be able to have abortions, but I care a lot more about them being people than I do about what they do with their fetuses, and it doesn't seem impossible to be feminist and anti-choice, provided that you've got some other way to mitigate the unfair distribution of the consequences of unwanted pregnancies. (Of course, I understand that one of those consequences is birth, and it's hard to distribute that one -- so there's some 'splainin' to do, but I don't think it's necessarily impossible.)

Another piece of it is that I think the centrality of abortion to feminist conversations reflects the dominance of particular groups in feminist conversation: specifically, it's an issue that is especially salient to straight women, but it also seems to me to alienate a lot of mothers, especially religious mothers (and therefore, especially poor mothers and mothers of color).

On the other hand, I don't think it's up to me to decide whether it's possible to be feminist and anti-choice -- or to decide how much to prioritize it within the feminist movement. And, of course, it's probably also true that part of the reason I don't care about abortion is that I'm a dude, and don't have to deal with it if I don't want to -- there's a long tradition of dudes not caring about feminist issues, and I recognize that and am uncomfortable with participating in it.

I can't shake the feeling that saying, "I'm a feminist, but I don't care about abortion," is a little like saying, "I'm a feminist, but I don't care about feminism." There's a certain hubris in thinking that I can choose which aspects of feminism to care about.

But, y'know, it is what it is. I can't bring myself to get excited about abortion.

In which nonprofits compete unfairly.

2010-04-06T14:01:00.001-07:00

So it seems that the fight over "unfair competition" from nonprofits is sprouting up again, this time in the form of objections to fitness centers in churches. Basically, the complaint is that churches can afford to charge much lower rates than commercial fitness centers not only because they have much easier access to clients, but also because they don't have to pay taxes, and can pass some of those savings on to customers.

I wasn't aware of this, but it seems this debate has existed for as long as clause 501(c)(3) has governed nonprofit tax exemptions. Small business owners get worried that nonprofits will undercut them by providing the same services without having to pay taxes on their profits.

I really don't get how this is a serious complaint. Is the fear here that small-business owners will be driven out of business by nonprofits providing the same services, and eventually all profits (which will then be known as surpluses) will be used for the public good?

One fear that might be raised in this regard is that the only limit 501(c)(3) status places on executive salaries is that they be "reasonable." Lax enforcement of this means that nonprofits can, to some extent, distribute the results of commercial activities to executives rather than to projects that benefit the public good -- and occasionally, they do.

But in order to have serious fears about unfair competition, it seems like you need some evidence that this is leading to a flooding of markets with cheap nonprofit options, and that on the whole the proceeds aren't being used for the public good. And in order for that to happen, you'd need some incentives for people to fund such a project, given that they can't make money from a later sale of the organization. In principle, you could hire such a person as a consultant or executive, but in fact, I don't think the salaries are high enough to ever make it worthwhile to do so.

The one exception might be an industry that requires a very small initial investment -- so you don't need to find donors, but can pretty much fund yourself by providing services. In a case like that, one might find it worthwhile to dodge taxes by starting a company that's officially nonprofit, but mostly, it seems like you've got to be able to convince investors, and there's really not much you can promise them. So ultimately, I think what we're dealing with is really small business owners who really can't see the difference between selling mugs to support the opera and selling mugs to line your own pockets.

In which corruption is defeated by a crack team of... wait, what?

2010-03-31T20:00:00.000-07:00

Via Ray Fisman and Edward Miguel's discussion in Economic Gangsters, I learned about Antanas Mockus, who was mayor of Bogotá in the late nineties and early oughts. When he came to power, Bogotá had the highest murder rate in the world. Worse, he couldn't address it through the traditional means: not only would that involve building massive numbers of prisons, it would involve relying on a notoriously corrupt police force.

So instead, he hired about 400 theater students as mimes. They walked around, and when they saw people doing bad shit -- jaywalking, running red lights, corruption, vandalism -- they'd make fun of them. And they'd flash red cards, like soccer refs. And maybe even more important, they'd give out red cards to passersby, and encourage them to get involved in the mockery and condemnation.

And it worked. By every standard, crime shot down in Bogotá. Of course, there were presumably other factors at play, including some more concrete programs -- but this and other street-theater efforts seem to have had a pretty significant effect in changing the culture of corruption in Bogotá.

In my mind, this is closely related to my post about the Assurance game that dominates the school system. Fisman, being an economist, actually talks a little about this, although he doesn't name it: he talks about the two competing equilibria, and the fact that no one wants to be the only person who isn't taking bribes. Basically, the logic goes like this: I'd rather we be in a society that isn't corrupt, but if we're living in a corrupt society, I'm damned if I'm going to be the one honest cop. This is especially true since, if the society is corrupt enough, you may find yourself subject to distrust because of your honesty, as people start wondering if you're going to rat them out for their own foibles.

And to get from one equilibrium to another, what really matters is that you create a sense that everyone's moving in that direction. And it strikes me that theater is a great way to do that. It gets everyone talking, in a positive way, about the issues of corruption and disorder that plague the society: when we address these problems through enforcement, we give people an opportunity to (often rightly) blame the enforcer rather than the perpetrator, but when we address them through mockery, the easiest way to continue the conversation is by continuing the mockery. And this creates a huge preponderance of talk that suggests that corruption is frowned upon, which makes it seem like everyone's stopping, which means they do. I love it.

What's In the Health Care Bill: Title I, Subtitle C. Quality Health Insurance Coverage for All Americans

2010-03-30T11:42:00.000-07:00

This is part of a series in which I'm reading the health care bill, because I really don't know what to think of it without doing so. The introduction to the series is here. Title I, subtitles B and C are here and here, respectively. The bill itself, as passed, is here.

Part I -- Health Insurance Market Reforms

Section 1201. Amendment to the Public Health Service Act.

Section 2704 [again, of the Public Health Service Act as amended]. Prohibition of preexisting condition exclusions or other discrimination based on health status.

Insurance companies can't exclude people based on preexisting conditions.

Section 2701. Fair health insurance premiums.

The only acceptable variation in rates for a particular health plan are based on whether it's individual or family coverage, rating area (each state sets up one or more rating areas within the state), age (up to 3 to 1), and tobacco use (up to 1.5 to 1).

Section 2702. Guaranteed availability of coverage.

Health insurers have to accept everyone who wants coverage, except that:

They can set enrollment periods, subject to restrictions set by HHS.
They can stop adding new customers because it will interfere with their ability to serve their existing customers, provided that they apply this uniformly; and
They can stop adding new customers because they can't afford to cover any more people, provided that they apply this uniformly.

Essentially, this extends the rules for restricting coverage in the group market to insurers operating in the individual market.

Section 2703. Guaranteed renewability of coverage.

They have to give you the option to renew coverage, except if you're fraudulent, don't pay your bills, they're stopping offering coverage or the particular type of coverage you have (provided they don't immediately re-enter that market, and that they tell you in advance and such), you move outside the service area, or your employer leaves an association through which the coverage was provided. Again, this essentially extends the rules on renewability of group health insurance to individual health insurance.

Section 2705. Prohibiting discrimination against individual participants and beneficiaries based on health status.

It's what it sounds like. Again, extending prohibitions on such discrimination that already exist in the group health insurance market.

It also creates requirements for wellness programs that don't discriminate based on health status -- they have to either provide incentives regardless of success (e.g., subsidize gym membership whether or not you actually lose weight), or provide alternative ways of getting incentives for people for whom the normal standards are unreasonably difficult or medically inadvisable (for example, if your wellness program involves incentivizing weight loss, you can't just give people money for being thin -- you have to give fat people money for losing reasonable amounts of weight).

There's an unfunded mandate for a 10-state project instituting such wellness projects.

Section 2706. Non-discrimination in health care.

Providers can't discriminate against health care providers, but they can pay them different amounts based on quality or performance measures. Also, they can't discriminate against employees who rat them out under the Fair Labor Standards Act.

Section 2707. Comprehensive health insurance coverage.

Health insurance issuers have to cover an "essential benefits packange," which will be defined by the Secretary of HHS, but includes at least the following categories of service: walk-ins, emergency services, hospitalization, maternity/newborn care, mental health and substance abuse services, prescription drugs, rehabilitative services, lab services, preventive and wellness services, and pediatric services, as well as anything else HHS adds to that list.

Adjusted for the overall cost of health care, your out-of-pocket expenses are limited to $5,000 for individuals and $10,000 for families.

If an insurance company provides a particular level of coverage (bronze, silver, gold, or platinum -- more on that in subtitle D), they have to provide a child-only plan that provides that level of coverage.

None of this applies to dental-only plans.

Section 2708. Prohibition on excessive waiting periods.

Health insurance plans can't have waiting periods of more than 90 days before they cover you.

Part II: Other Provisions

Section 1251. Preservation of the right to maintain existing coverage.

None of the changes made in subtitles A or C apply to your current health insurance; even if you renew that coverage after this act is passed. Also, your family members can join your current health plan, and employers can add new employees to their plan, even if those plans would otherwise be illegal under this act. If you're guaranteed coverage under a collective bargaining agreement, that coverage can persist as is until that collective bargaining agreement terminates, but changes to the plan to make it conform to this law don't terminate your collective bargaining agreement.

I suppose it's reasonable (sort of) as a way of allaying people's fears that this will affect their health insurance, to say if you're happy with your annual limits, or your lack of preventive care or dependent coverage, you can keep them. But this also allows your insurer to rescind or cancel your health insurance based on health status, not have an appeals process, hike your premiums unreasonably and without justification, not report on how they spend your premiums and reimburse you if their administrative costs are excessive, and not provide you with a nice statement of your benefits so you can comparison shop.

Section 1252. Reforms must apply uniformly to all health insurance issuers and group health plans.

When a state adopts standards of the kinds we've seen so far, they have to be uniformly applied to all health plans in the market where they apply.

Section 1253. Effective dates.

This subtitle takes effect on January 1, 2014, and applies to plan years beginning after that point.

What's In the Health Care Bill: Title I, Subtitle B. Immediate Actions to Preserve and Expand Coverage.

2010-03-29T14:49:00.000-07:00

This is part of a series in which I'm reading the health care bill, because I really don't know what to think of it without doing so. The introduction to the series is here. Title I, Subtitle A is here. Title I, Subtitle C is here. The bill itself, as passed, is here.

Section 1101. Immediate access to insurance for uninsured individuals with a pre-existing condition.

Creates a national pool (which may or may not contract out some of its work to existing state or non-profit high-risk pools), to cover citizens, nationals and documented immigrants who haven't had health insurance for 6 months and have pre-existing conditions.

In order to count, plans have to cover 65 percent of total benefit costs, and have an out-of-pocket limit of $5000 for individuals and $10,000 for families -- and they can't just use the federal money to replace the money they were spending already on these plans. They can only vary the premiums they charge by whether it's individual or family coverage, area, age (by up to 4 to 1), tobacco use (up to 1.5 to 1). They also have to be "established at a standard rate for a standard population," which I take it means they can't be more expensive than private health insurance for non-sick people.

Insurance companies can't encourage high-risk patients to leave their current plans for the high-risk pool, by giving them money. It also counts as encouraging you to leave if your plan considers health status in determining premiums at renewal (so they're hiking rates to get you to leave) or if they've got you on a policy that they're no longer actively marketing. My guess is that the latter clause is to prevent insurance companies from, rather than setting different rates for sick people on their current plan, hiking the rates on that plan and offering everyone who isn't sick a new plan, with lower rates -- thus effectively creating sick-people rates.

There's $5 billion available for this, "without fiscal year limitation" -- it seems like this means this is all they're getting until 2014, although Rutabaga Ridgepole at TPM seems to think otherwise. If there's not enough money to cover costs, HHS "shall make such adjustments are necessary to eliminate such deficit." I'm confused about what kind of adjustments are expected/authorized. Does this include adjustments to the provisions of the law itself -- for example, changing the 65%-coverage requirement or the out-of-pocket limits, or raising premiums? Renee James at the Sunlight Foundation seems to think so: "If we run out of money, we'll get less, pay more and wait longer."

What seems clear, both from that TPM post and xpostfactoid's take on this, is that $5 billion is woefully inadequate, so this question is going to come up. Estimates range from 2 million to 4 million for the number of people who will be eligible for this, and it's clear that state high-risk pools as they stand are horribly inadequate: they're expensive and have low lifetime coverage limits.

Let's split the difference and imagine it's 3 million people who will take us up on this -- let's also assume the $5 billion is per-year, rather than for the next 4 years. 3 million average citizens spend $23 billion on health care in a year (based on a total US health expenditure of roughly $2.3 trillion) -- since the premiums and out-of-pocket expenses of the high-risk insurance pool can't be more than what ordinary people pay, we can count on $23 billion coming from the customers. So this budget will only balance the cost of their health care is only around $28 billion -- about 20% more than 3 million average citizens.

It seems clear that if these people were that cheap to cover, we wouldn't have had health insurance companies in such a tizzy over the requirement (phased in in 2014) that they stop discriminating against those people -- since such people are about 1% of the population, their added costs would necessitate only a 0.2% raise in everyone else's premiums.

Those are going to be some pretty fucking serious adjustments.

Section 1102. Reinsurance for early retirees.

Provides subsidies for the costs incurred by employment-based plans in covering retirees who don't qualify for Medicare (which I believe means they're between 55 and 65). Specifically, it pays 80% of the costs of each individual beyond the $15,000 mark, up to the $90,000 mark (so the maximum they'll pay for any individual is $60,000). Again, they appropriate $5 billion for this, and will just stop taking claim applications beyond that point.

My impression is that, for the most part, the people who qualify will be union retirees whose contract guarantees them continued access to the health insurance they had while they were working. Some conservatives are apparently calling this a giveaway to unions, but it's really a giveaway to employers of union workers -- my guess is the biggest beneficiaries will be state and local governments and car companies (this guy notes that car companies have been having massive numbers of employees retire early). $5 billion seems small for this, too -- they probably won't get much further than GM and Ford's applications.

Section 1103: Immediate information that allows consumers to identify affordable coverage options.

Establishes a Web site through which you can look at health coverage options in your state, using a standardized format, including private options, high-risk pools (including both the one created under section 1101 and any state-based pool), Medicaid, and state child health plans.

HHS is authorized to contract this out, but no money is appropriated.

Section 1104: Administrative Simplification.

HHS has to develop operating rules for electronic transactions related to health care, and health insurance providers have to comply, document their compliance, and report to HHS about it.

Section 1105: Effective Date.

Immediate.

What's In the Health Care Bill: Title I, Subtitle A. Immediate Improvements in Health Care Coverage for All Americans

2010-03-29T12:40:00.000-07:00

This is part of a series in which I'm reading the health care bill, because I really don't know what to think of it without doing so. The introduction to the series is here. Title I, Subtitles B and C are here and here, respectively. The bill itself, as passed, is here.

Section 1001: Amendments to the Public Health Service Act.

Section 2711 [of the Public Health Service Act, that is -- the numbering confused me, too]. No lifetime or annual limits.

A group health plan and a health insurance issuer offering group or individual health insurance coverage may not establish --
(1) lifetime limits on the dollar value of benefits for any participant or beneficiary; or
(2) unreasonable annual limits (within the meaning of section 223 of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986) on the dollar value of benefits for any participant or beneficiary.

This bit's kind of a big deal, since the abolition of annual and lifetime limits on coverage was an important aim of this legislation, in the administration's book. The tradeoff here is between the financial ruin of people with cancer (who will run up against the lifetime limits and have to pay for their own treatment) and slightly higher deductibles for everyone else -- and since the point of health insurance is to protect you from the financially ruinous aspects of illness, it's pretty clear what should be happening here.

But instead of abolishing annual limits, they seem to have abolished "unreasonable" annual limits, without defining what "unreasonable" means in this context. Section 223 of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 is of no help -- it's about deductibles, which as far as I can tell are an unrelated issue.

EDIT: I misread this section of the Internal Revenue Code. Section 223(c) establishes a tax deduction for contributions to health savings accounts, which are only available to individuals who participate in "high-deductible insurance plans," which are defined as insurance plans that have deductibles greater than $1000 for individuals/$2000 for families, and have total out-of-pocket expenses less than $5,000 for individuals/$10,000 for families. I imagine that the idea of this reference is that if an annual limit makes a plan fail to meet this requirement, it's unreasonable.

It seems like any annual limit on coverage would at least have the potential to make people exceed this out-of-pocket limit, so I don't see how a reasonable out-of-pocket limit is possible. But it seems like if that were true, they wouldn't have specifically banned "unreasonable" ones.

Other people who have followed this better than I have are confused about this as well:

According to a CCH tax analyst, this means that "A plan can put in place annual limits so long as they do not circumvent the deductible and out-of-pocket expenses limitations in Code Sec. 223."

Consumer Reports also claims that the fact that saying they can't put limits on "dollar value" is a "loophole that would let insurers limit certain types of care, such as physical rehabilitation sessions or mental-health counseling." I take it what they mean is that if they phrase it in terms of the number of sessions covered, rather than the maximum number of dollars covered, it's legal.

Subsection (b) goes on to say that if a plan isn't required to provide essential health benefits, it can then go ahead and apply annual or lifetime limits on specific benefits -- I'm not sure yet who is required to provide essential health benefits, but my guess is that it's going to be a requirement for participation in the exchanges (the only reference here is to the definition of essential benefits). More on that when I get there.

Section 2712. Prohibition on rescissions.

They can't rescind your coverage unless you're fraudulent. They can only cancel your insurance if they tell you about it (that wasn't already in the law?), and only as permitted under section 2702(c) (which doesn't exist, as far as I can tell -- section 2702 is inserted by this bill, and doesn't have a subsection (c)) or under section 2742(b)*, which allows termination if you lie to them, don't pay your premiums, they stop offering coverage, or you move away from their area.

EDIT: 2702(c) does exist. It's an amended version of what's currently 2711(c), which section 1001 of this bill moves to section 2731, then edited and moved by section 1562(c)(8). You can find the current text of section 2711 here (note that subsections a, b, e and f are being cut completely). You can find amended versions of subsections (c) and (d) here. It allows them to not provide you coverage if they can't do so and still meet their existing obligations -- but if they do so, they have to do so uniformly, and can't offer coverage in that market for 180 days afterwards.

Section 2713. Coverage of preventive health services.

Health insurance providers have to cover vaccines and some other preventive care (stuff that's recommended by the United States Preventive Services Task Force) -- they get at least a year, and maybe more, to start providing coverage after recommendations are issued.

Section 2714. Extension of dependent coverage.

Extends dependent coverage to age 26 (but, interestingly, only if you're not married -- I suppose there's something to be said about how this reflects the problematic belief that marriage is a defining feature of adulthood) -- the Secretary of HHS decides who gets covered, but it specifies that children of dependents don't count (I suppose this is to make sure we're not creating incentives for people starting families to remain unmarried -- your parents' coverage won't cover your kids).

Section 2715. Development and utilization of uniform explanation of coverage documents and standardized definitions.

Pretty much what it sounds like. The Secretary of HHS develops the standards, in consultation with the people you'd expect (with a surprising specification that this include advocates for consumers with limited English ability) within 12 months -- insurers have to start providing this information within 24 months, both before and after you sign up. They allow that they provide them in electronic form (I'm not sure if this just means they have to publish it online, or whether "providing them in electronic form" means they have to make sure you can access them, and provide hard copy otherwise).

Section 2716. Prohibition of discrimination based on salary.

Employers/group health plans can't provide different coverage to higher-earning employees. It specifically says, though, that they can make higher-earning employees pay more for the same coverage -- my guess is that they could also price plans in ways that create de facto salary discrimination, by pricing them out of low-earning people's ability to contribute (since this isn't an "eligibility rule," it's not prohibited.

Section 2717. Ensuring the quality of care.

The Secretary of HHS will develop guidelines for reporting on the implementation of practices like"quality reporting, effective case management, care coordination, chronic disease management, and medication and care compliance initiatives... patient-centered education and counseling, comprehensive discharge planning, and post discharge reinforcement... best clinical practices, evidence based medicine, and health information technology... wellness and health promotion activities [examples given include smoking cessation, weight management, stress management, etc.]." Health insurance providers have to report on how their benefit structures encourage these sorts of practices every year, and make those reports available to enrollees; the Secretary will also make them available online.

The Secretary of HHS will also write "regulations that provide criteria for determining whether a reimbursement structure" meets the requirements shown above. The GAO will report to the House and Senate committees on the impact of this on quality and cost of health care.

This section strikes me as the creation of meaningless reporting procedures that will lead to exactly nothing.

Section 2718. Bringing down the cost of health care coverage.

Health insurance companies have to submit a report to HHS each year detailing how they spent their premium revenue. If they spend more than specific percentages (20% for group plans, 25% for individual plans) on non-claims costs other than "activities that improve health care quality," they have to reimburse customers (this bit expires in 2013, presumably because something else will go into effect then). States can lower the 20% and 25% levels, but (for individual plans) not if the Secretary of HHS thinks it'll destabilize the health insurance market in the state.

This section also strikes me as bullshit. You can cover all kinds of bureaucratic hogwash under "activities that improve health care quality" (although it does say the Secretary of HHS and the National Association of Insurance Commissioners will establish uniform definitions, I don't have much faith in this process), so my guess is that mostly the only things that will go under the "other costs" heading are the legal department and high-level executive compensation. 20-25% for those sorts of costs sounds preposterously high -- even if you include a whole host of other stuff, the idea that only three quarters of your health insurance premiums are spend on anything that could reasonably be classified as health care is fucking sad.

Also, the worry that states will destabilize the health insurance market is telling. I thought the point was to destabilize the health insurance market, because the health insurance market is a racket.

Section 2719. Appeals process.

Insurance companies have to provide an internal appeals process, and an external review process that meets the standards set by the National Association of Insurance Commissioners; they have to tell consumers about these processes.

Section 1002. Health insurance consumer information.

The Secretary of HHS will provide grants for states to create health insurance consumer assistance and/or ombudsman programs. These programs help you with the appeals process, track the problems consumers have and report this data to HHS, educate you about your rights, help you enroll, and help you with health-insurance-related tax issues.

This program gets $30 million in its first year (FY 2010, by Sec. 1004 below). To me, that indicates that this provision is a joke -- that's ten cents per American in its first year of operation. Assuming all of it went to workers making minimum wage who were actually directly helping people, and assuming funding increases about as fast as the minimum wage, you're entitled to about one hour of ombudsman time in your entire life. Given that those assumptions are preposterously generous, you're probably allocated more like fifteen minutes. Again, that's not per year -- it's per lifetime.

Section 1003. Ensuring that consumers get value for their dollars.

Health insurance issuers have to publish justifications of "unreasonable" premium increases before they go into effect. There's no word on what "unreasonable" means, so this seems pretty toothless. States report to the Secretary of HHS about patterns in premium increases, and may recommend that issuers be excluded from their health insurance exchanges because they keep hiking premiums. HHS gets $250 million to spend on grants for this purpose, which I take it is supposed to last until 2014. Grants to states have to be between $1 million and $5 million per year per state, if they have a qualifying program (so giving New York as much money per person as Alaska is out of the question).

Section 1004. Effective dates.

Everything in this subtitle goes into effect in six months, except sections 1002 and 1003, which go into effect beginning in fiscal year 2010.

*I can't find anywhere where the Public Health Service Act's sections are numbered starting with "27," the way they reference them here. If anyone can explain the difference between this citation and the actual section number, I'm interested.

In which maybe he did, and maybe he didn't.

2010-03-27T09:41:00.000-07:00

I overheard a conversation recently among students. One of them had been accused of bringing a gun to school -- throughout the conversation he insisted he hadn't, and the other kids seemed to believe him. When he was called to an administrator's office, she couldn't find conclusive proof that he'd done so -- but since she still believed he had, she suspended him for five days.

I'm not sure how confident I am in this version of the facts of the story, but I think it's worth talking about because it showcases a really common tendency among people tasked with enforcing rules of all kinds. There are often cases where any such person is not able to completely ascertain what's happened, and so they have to proceed based on partial evidence. Especially in cases like this one, such people really want to show that they're taking this issue seriously -- and they feel like that means they have to do something about it.

A really common response is to figure out what you think the probability is that the person did what they're accused of, and multiply that probability by the normal response -- so, if you're 60% sure, you apply 60% of the punishment (or 60% of the stern talking-to, or the counseling or rehab -- 60% of whatever your response would be if you were sure they had done it). From the perspective of the administrator, this makes a certain kind of emotional sense -- if there's a 60% chance that a gun was brought to school, you probably have about 60% of the worry and anger you would if you were completely sure, and so this level of response seems appropriate.

But from the perspective of the accused, either it happened or it didn't. And either way, they're getting the wrong message. If they did it, your response is 60% as strenuous as it should be (working from the assumption that you would give the appropriate response if they had done whatever it is they're accused of -- which, of course, isn't generally a good assumption). If they didn't, they're being maligned for nothing. Either way, especially if this happens repeatedly, they begin to realize that it ultimately didn't matter whether they had done it or not: what matters in terms of the response is entirely about the administrator's subjective state of certainty. Which is exactly not the message you want to send.

On the other hand, the other options aren't exactly good either -- no matter the mechanism by which your perception of what happened turns into a response, your response is based on your perception, which is again encouraging the belief that what actually happened doesn't matter.

Fundamentally, I think, any system of reconciliation that relies on punishment as its path to forgiveness is going to run into this problem. When you rely on punishment, you create incentives for perpetrators to conceal their wrongs -- which is going to create these types of damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't scenarios.

Let's suppose for a moment that, in the abstract, punishment of the guilty is an aid to the resolution of conflicts. I don't think it is, but let's imagine. Even so, it seems unlikely that punishment is as important to the resolution of conflicts as the ascertaining of what happened -- because our attempts to resolve conflicts without knowing who's done what always run into the sorts of issues described above. And since a general practice of punishment has the effect of making it very difficult to determine with any certainty what happened, because it creates incentives for people to conceal the truth, it seems like even so we have to abandon punishment in order to have any hope of an effective general procedure of conflict resolution.

The ultimate aim of the criminal justice system -- and especially efforts at juvenile justice, inside or outside of schools -- is reconciliation of the accused with the victim and with society, whether we're willing to say it out loud or not. Our goal is to make people feel able to return to their normal lives after a wrong has been done. We're never going to be able to do that if people are afraid of the process of reconciliation.

In which I launch a new and painful project.

2010-03-26T06:05:00.000-07:00

So I've been avoiding writing about the health-care bill, because I'm among the millions of Americans who still doesn't know how to feel about it. On the one hand, I'm committed to the idea that we should be taking care of sick people, even poor sick people. On the other hand, I'm not sure if this law guarantees that, and I'm definitely not confident that it does a good enough job of it to make up for the abortion-restricting insurance-company giveaway aspect.

And the thing is, I feel like there are enough bloggers reciting the talking points they've gotten from RH Reality Check, or the Center for American Progress, or Nancy Pelosi, or Charles Krauthammer, or Howard Dean, or any of the other framers of debate. And I think the only way I can genuinely contribute to the debate on the subject is to read some combination of the bill and the CBO analysis of it.

So I'm going to start doing that, and I'm going to post summaries of what I'm reading as I go. It's probably going to be one of the few analyses of the health-care bill by someone who hasn't decided what they think before they read it.

I'd planned to have my first post on the topic be an analysis of the first section of the bill. But then my first effort in this direction was thwarted by Matt Taibbi's link to an old copy of the bill (which I didn't pick up on until, twenty pages in, it mentioned the public option), so I figured I'd write a little bit about how this process reflects on our democracy.

First of all, as a citizen, my input is only relevant to the extent that I comment on this bill. While I can make philosophical arguments and talk about the form I think health-care would take in a genuinely just society, the thing my representative will ultimately be held accountable for is a yes-no vote, and so my arguments can only be a part of the decision-making process to the extent that they take a position on that vote.

And the process that shaped the bill on which I have to take a yes-no position is hardly democratic -- look, for example, at the fact that the public option isn't even on the table, despite being tremendously popular. And so it's important that we not let the health-care debate be reduced to options set by some combination of politicians, the health insurance industry, and the pharmaceutical industry, and that we treat opinions that don't center on this particular bill as valid, relevant parts of the health care debate.

Secondly, they don't exactly make it easy for you to find out about it. The official detailed summary of the bill is horribly written, and if you don't already know what it's saying, you're not going to learn anything from it. The bill itself seems to be the only option -- and it's over two thousand pages, riddled with references to other sections and other bills. This is clearly not an institutional framework for well-informed public involvement -- this is a framework for the professionals to tell us what they're doing and what we should think about it.

In situations like this, opinion polls end up getting thrown around all over the place, but they can't possibly mean anything -- how can I meaningfully form an opinion on a two-thousand-page document I haven't read? And opinion polls like this get cited as proof that democracy doesn't work -- as, for example, when polls recently found an overwhelming majority of Californians in favor of solving the state's budget crisis by cutting spending, but overwhelming majorities against cutting spending in any of the areas where the real money is.

What's happening here is that there's overwhelming societal pressure to have an opinion on these big issues -- those who don't are seen as detached, lazy, irresponsible. But because we don't have the time or the education to read these tremendously complex bills, our opinions are often self-contradictory or wrong. This gets seen as proof that you can't leave these decisions up to ordinary people, instead of as proof that you need to give people the time and support they need to understand the issues before they make their decisions.

The Medium Dog, over at Angel Economics, argues (in section 2 of the linked article) that it's reasonable, in a truly democratic society, to imagine a two-hour workday, giving people the time to really educate themselves and genuinely participate democratically. Basically, he argues that the coercive organization of our labor force is tremendously wasteful -- we expend a lot of work maintaining the incentive systems within workplaces, locking people up who don't participate in the economy the way we want them to, and dealing with social problems that arise as a result of this organization; lots of people are unemployed, and we lose the benefit of their labor; workers' motivation is hurt by the fact that they bear all kinds of burdens that they don't have any power to make decisions about; and we expend lots of effort making crap that no one wants, and then convincing people that they want it.

Reducing the workday to two hours might be a little optimistic, but I do think forty hours a week is really excessive, and I agree that we can do much better by eliminating some of the waste associated with capitalism. I'd add that there are significant economies of scale in housework, especially cooking -- both because of food waste and because cooking for eight isn't twice as much work as cooking for four. The construction of the family as the largest unit we can trust enough to share our food on a regular basis hugely increases the amount of domestic labor we have to do. And our efforts to outsource that labor add other kinds of waste, in the form of preposterous amounts of packaging, and the service aspects of the restaurant industry. So as we develop the kind of economic freedom and security to feel comfortable sharing a living space and cooking duties, we can cut down on waste and free up more time for democratic participation.

So I am going to read the health-care bill, and try to give as fair a summary as I can of what's in it -- and then I'll try to decide what to think about it. But, ultimately, we need to either make the process of forming well-informed opinions on political issues less onerous, or we need to give people the time to read these two-thousand-page monstrosities -- and write them in the sort of language people can understand without going to law school.

Update:
What I've read so far:
Title I, Subtitle A
Title I, Subtitle B
Title I, Subtitle C

In which we take a good look at the Chicago Public Schools budget deficit, and the plans to rectify it.

2010-03-22T06:18:00.001-07:00

So I had a bunch of questions after I saw Chicago Public Schools CEO Ron Hubermann's PowerPoint presentation on the budget crisis (which, by the way, ranks among the best of my gifted 10-12-year-olds in terms of professionalism). Here are some of them, along with the answers I've been able to piece together so far:

1. Aren't maximum class sizes set in the CTU contract?

Yes -- in section 28-1. But if you look at subsection VII, there's this great bit of fuck-you:

Prior to Board adoption of any amendments to this policy altering the class size provisions contained herein, notice and an opportunity to meet and confer regarding alterations will be provided to the Chicago Teachers Union at least 45 days prior to implementation.

We get to talk about it for a few days before you ratchet up our class sizes to 37? How fucking sweet of you.

This might seem like a totally bizarre sort of provision to find in a union contract -- it seemed that way to me, too. It turns out that class size is what's called a "permissive" subject of negotiation, as described in the Illinois Employment Labor Relations Act, section 4.5(b):

The subject or matters described in subsection (a) [contracting teaching duties to third parties, laying off teachers, setting class sizes, schedules, and calendars, and creating and staffing experimental programs related to educational use of technology] are permissive subjects of bargaining between an educational employer and an exclusive representative of its employees and, for the purpose of this Act, are within the sole discretion of the educational employer to decide to bargain, provided that the educational employer is required to bargain over the impact of a decision concerning such subject or matter on the bargaining unit upon request by the exclusive representative. During this bargaining, the educational employer shall not be precluded from implementing its decision. If, after a reasonable period of bargaining, a dispute or impasse exists between the educational employer and the exclusive representative, the dispute or impasse shall be resolved exclusively as set forth in subsection (b) of Section 12 of this Act in lieu of a strike under Section 13 of this Act.

[By the way, subsection 12(b) is about mediation.]

So basically, the union's right to set binding standards about these subjects is severely restricted under the law (we can't strike over these issues, and we can only include them in negotiations if they let us), and bargained away even further in our contract (we don't even require them to submit to mediation).

2. How does laying off 2300 teachers save $160 million?

Here's the thing: laid-off teachers go into the cadre substitute pool, which means that they work every day (even if there aren't enough teachers out to justify it) and still get benefits, and their salary cut is about $20,000 at the outside. That means, in terms of the savings on those teachers' salaries, you're looking at a total of less than $50 million.

The real savings come, not at the expense of those laid-off teachers, but at the expense of those of us who were laid off last year, who won't be getting new jobs, won't be working, and won't be getting our benefits renewed. Chicago Public Schools keeps a structural unemployment level of about 4% -- people who are certified to teach, want teaching jobs, but have been laid off and are working as substitutes with benefits. The people who are in that category this year almost certainly won't get new jobs, will lose their health insurance, and will almost never work, because it will be very rare for 2300 teachers to call in sick in a district with less than 25,000 teachers left.

3. Where does this come from?

Hubermann's presentation does a great job of outsourcing blame as much as possible: the first thing he points to in explaining a $700-million budget deficit is a $68-million decrease in state funding. There's also a $138-million decrease in local revenue, a $279-million increase in the district's pension obligation, $169 million in increased teacher compensation, and $133 million in increased operational and construction expenses.

Portraying the increases in operational and construction expenses as anything other than voluntary -- without giving any details on where these increases are coming from -- seems to me to be mostly nonsense. Given that they're using a whole bunch of resources closing old schools and opening new ones, it seems like that number ought to be negotiable. More research on this is needed, ideally from someone who has more time for investigative journalism than I do (I'd like to suggest the pros do it, but I know how good the odds are of something like that coming out of the mainstream Chicago press).

The increase in teacher compensation is entirely predictable: teacher raises are written into the contract, and health care costs and increases in average seniority have been going on for quite some time.

In order to talk about decreases in local revenue, we need to talk about tax increment financing, the system whereby property tax revenue gets diverted from local government institutions such as the school board and into the pockets of developers. Since the purpose of tax increment financing is to combat blight, and since it's clear shitty schools have a lot to do with driving people (and by extension, businesses) away from neighborhoods, it seems like there's a reasonable case to be made that we should shovel some TIF money into the schools.

Then there are state budget cuts, which, I suppose, we just have to accept for now.

And there's the pension obligations. The Chicago Public Schools contribution to the teachers' pension fund is determined by the assets-to-liabilities ratio of the pension fund itself -- the idea is that the Chicago Public Schools are responsible for putting in enough money to make sure the pension's assets-to-liabilities ratio reaches 90% (the widely-accepted minimum for soundness of a pension fund) by 2045.

This amount had already been increased by a combination of increases in promised benefits over the years (which increase the amount of unfunded liabilities to be covered by 2045), and state government failures to live up to its commitment. According to a Civic Federation report, the General Assembly declared its "goal and intention" of putting 20% to 30% as much money into the Chicago Teachers' Pension Fund as it did into the downstate teachers' fund (which makes sense given population figures), but actually less than 2% of its teachers' pension contributions are to CTPF -- a difference between about $32.5 million in FY 2010 and $482 million in FY 2010. Partly, this has to do with the mismanagement of the downstate teachers' pension fund, which put it in a much more desperate situation.

Add to this the effect of the stock market crash, and you see preposterously large requirements on CPS, in order to meet the goal of 90% funding by 2045.

4. What is to be done?

No one's being reasonable here. In the short term, regardless of the principles involved, we need to be teaching kids, and in the long term, we need to not be alienating newer teachers.

To be fair, it seems like some of what's going on here is posturing: CTU president Marilyn Stewart has dismissed Hubermann's presentation as "threatening rhetoric," saying negotiations are going on behind the scenes to resolve the issue. It seems like Hubermann's intentionally painting a doomsday scenario to push the union into concessions, and like the CTU's "no concessions" stance probably won't hold up. But for the moment, let's assume they're serious.

By refusing to compromise on the contract, the CTU isn't protecting teachers. Teachers are still taking a huge hit -- it's just that the hit is in the form of job losses, which disproportionately affect young teachers, rather than salary and benefit compromises, which disproportionately affect old teachers. This is why those of us who are young and idealistic are suspicious of the union: it consistently, whether in these debates or in the debates over tenure and incentive pay, prioritizes the desires of old, shitty teachers.

The cost of living adjustment should be waived this year. The cost of living hasn't actually increased, so we can live without 4% raises. Everyone else is doing it. I sympathize with the idea that this sets a precedent for continued concessions on the part of the union, which is why we should demand in return some fiscal responsibility from the schools (in the form of a Renaissance 2010 moratorium), the city (in the form of the diversion of TIF money from developers and corporations to the schools), and the state (in the form of an increase in the income tax -- and, ideally, the abandonment of the two-bracket tax system -- and demands that they make and keep realistic commitments to the pension fund).

The pension problem isn't going away. Most of the pension funds in the area, according to that Civic Federation report, are fucked even worse than the CTPF is. Asking the state for pension relief only makes sense if you believe the pension fund is going to rebound massively when (if) the economy recovers; otherwise, we're going to be stuck with even more massive deficits over the next few years, and even more demands for union concessions. We need to figure out what a reasonable, sustainable approach to teacher pensions is, and figure out ways to fund it.

And we need to involve parents and children in this process. As it stands, the biggest cuts are in places that hit parents and students directly. If these negotiations are only between CTU and the Board, we're leaving out the vast majority of the stakeholders.

In which right-wing nutjobs offer a correct analysis of the plan to try KSM.

2010-03-18T12:50:00.000-07:00

I've recently read (or read accounts of) three different attacks on the idea of a civilian trial for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed: here, here, and here. And, although it's clear that everyone involved in writing these pieces is an asshole, it's worth admitting that they're also right.

The argument goes like this: the US government is attempting to use a civilian trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to give some legitimacy to his impending execution. But the reason why civilian trials grant legitimacy to punishments is largely because they presume innocence, and make you prove guilt with admissible (i.e., non-torture-derived) evidence before you can apply those punishments. In this case, the ability to do that is far from assured -- a lot of the evidence will be thrown out on the basis of waterboarding, and there's a reasonable chance that a good court would throw out the entire fucking case due to prosecutorial misconduct.

But the administration has made it clear they don't give a shit about any of that. Just look at the disgusting smirk on Press Secretary Robert Gibbs's face when he says KSM "is going to meet justice, and he's going to meet his maker." And Attorney General Eric Holder's claim that "failure is not an option" clearly doesn't fit well with the whole presumption-of-innocence thing, either.

And in general, the Obama administration has made clear they think they get to hold suspected terrorists without trial. So it seems clear that, pretty much no matter what happens in the courtroom, KSM's never going to see the outside again. I believe the correct phrase for a trial that fits this description is "show trial."

Furthermore, this puts some fucked-up strain on the judges involved in the trial and the appeal: the courts have to either find a way to a conviction, or be rendered irrelevant. Either way, there are potentially disastrous consequences: either we set a precedent of allowing inadmissible evidence in certain cases, or we end up in a situation where the executive branch can not only hold someone without trial, they can hold them after an acquittal.

If you're going to try him, you have to be committed to live with the results of that trial. And that might mean an acquittal. If you're not going to do that, the neocons are right. Don't bother with a trial.

In which Karl Rove is a frighteningly talented commentator.

2010-03-17T13:22:00.000-07:00

So I was listening to an interview with Karl Rove on Fresh Air, and what struck me most was that the man is absolutely incredible at framing issues. When they start talking about his anti-gay agenda, he managed to cast it quite effectively as support of traditional marriage, rather than opposition to gay marriage, let alone actual anti-gay rhetoric and sentiment. And when the conversation shifted to the war in Iraq, he deflected criticism about WMDs by talking about the "broad bipartisan consensus" on the subject, had the gall to argue in favor of the war in terms of Hussein's flouting of the international community, and explained away the rise in insurgent violence in terms of worries that democracy in Iraq would mean a loss for al-Qaeda (he cites a letter from Zarqawi to bin Laden to make this point).

And here's the thing -- he actually got me to go and fact-check his claim about the letter. It seems to be somewhat true: Zarqawi seems to be making the point that as long as al-Qaeda is fighting against the United States, they have some support within Iraq, but if democracy gets strong enough that the US can pull out, their war with the Shi'a (whom he considers at least as important an enemy as the US) will lose some of its backing. It's worth noting, though, that the word "democracy" is used only once, and it's not entirely clear what it means to Zarqawi: elections? The general principle of empowering people to make decisions for themselves and their communities? Whatever it is that the US is pushing for?

Did you see what just happened there? I got caught trying to justify (or at least make sense out of) internal al-Qaeda communications. Why the fuck did I do that? Who the fuck cares whether Zarqawi said that? Was there any doubt in any of our minds that fucking Abu Mus'ab al-Zarqawi is an asshole?

And that's exactly the problem: Rove was so effective in portraying this as a decision between the United States and "the terrorists" that I actually thought it was worth looking into whether fucking al-Qaeda was really as unreasonable as he said they were. And Terry Gross took the bait too -- she asked him if he really thought what they were scared of was democracy rather than the US invasion, and it was easy for him to answer that, yes, in fact, Zarqawi did write that shit in a letter.

So he got two reasonably well-educated, intelligent, vaguely left-minded people to take the bait by implicitly assuming that (1) Zarqawi spoke for the insurgency; (2) people couldn't be radicalized into opposition to actual Iraqi democracy as a result of opposition to the forces arrayed in favor of Iraqi "democracy"; (3) it even makes sense to talk about the invasion of Iraq as though the real problem with it is the resulting increase in the numbers of Muslim extremists. And the conversation got to the point where the only apparent way to challenge him was to side with al-Qaeda.

I will never be as good at this as Karl Rove. If I get in a debate with him about Iraq, I will lose. I admit this is partly because he spends all his fucking time figuring out how to argue in favor of killing and torturing brown people, and I actually have to spend some time at a real job. But it's also partly because we've been culturally conditioned to accept all these tiny little assumptions like the three I mentioned above, and so it's really fucking easy to swing the focus of the debate in ways like that.

I dunno -- at this point, I think I would revert pretty quickly to, "Just stop. Please. Really, you don't have to do this. We believe you're very tough. Now step back from the lectern." Does anyone have any better ideas?

In which credit is due and credit is given.

2010-03-15T14:39:00.000-07:00

In the wake of the recent revelation that the gun used in the Pentagon shooting of March 4, 2009 came originally from the Memphis Police Department -- and that on that very date it became illegal for Tennessee law enforcement agencies to destroy guns that could still be used to kill people -- I figured I'd look into how these things go in Chicago.

It turns out that in both the case of the Don't Kill a Dream, Save a Life gun exchange program, and the case of guns confiscated in criminal investigations, CPD melts the guns down rather than selling them. Not only that, but Daley's involved in lobbying to have all cities destroy guns seized by and/or handed over to police.

Way to go, City of Chicago. You've lowered my expectations so much that I'm actually impressed that you don't participate in what might be the most counterproductive law enforcement practice ever (aside from incarceration, of course).

But quite frankly, I'll believe that you're serious about ending gun violence when you disarm the cops.

In which a lot of what we teach in school is conformity to the dominant culture.

2010-03-14T14:38:00.000-07:00

The AVID program is a course of study offered in some public schools aimed at teaching college-preparatory study habits to poor kids. And a whole bunch of the stuff they teach centers on acronyms. My favorite is SLANT, which, with some slight variations depending on who you ask, stands something like this:

Sit in front.
Lean forward in your desk.
Ask questions.
Nod your head.
Talk to the teacher.

If this seems a little pedantic to you, you're not alone. But NPR recently interviewed a guy who has a pretty solid theoretical justification for an approach like this (props to Jonathan for sending this to me):

If you tell a kid to pay attention, and the kid doesn't do what you want them to do, and you say back to them, I thought I told you to pay attention, I think most teachers know that the answer is going to be, I was paying attention. [...]So you sort of lack the accountability piece there, if you don't make your directions observable. [...]

When directions are vague, there's a lot of opportunistic opportunistic off past behavior. And there's a certain number of kids who may not be following the task because they - we just weren't really clear about it enough as teachers. Students may not - the issue maybe what I call incompetence, which is they don't know how to do what you ask them to do. When you tell a student to pay attention, does the student know that that means sit up, get your eyes on me and put your feet on the floor?

So, if you give them more specific directions, sit up, get your eyes on me, put your feet on the floor, you're actually teaching the kids who don't know what to do. You're eliminating the ambiguity that let some of the kids sort of exploit that, and you're making it much, much harder - a kid really has to willfully decide that they're going to defy you.

Essentially, the argument is that there are legitimate sources of misunderstanding about lots of types of directions that teachers assume are perfectly clear. There's no a priori reason why "Pay attention" should have anything whatever to do with putting your feet on the floor, and if you want students to put their feet on the floor, you have to tell them that, rather than getting mad at them for not understanding that that was included in paying attention.

There are often significant cultural differences that contribute to misunderstandings between teachers and students. In many cases, you have a teacher representing a middle-class, white, formal, professional culture interacting with a student representing a poor minority informal home culture. And teachers often are totally insensitive to that cultural difference, assuming their own definitions to requests (or commands) that have multiple legitimate meanings -- and students often respond to their uncertainty about what's expected to them by doing nothing.

There's another legitimate angle from which to question this approach, though. The teacher is, in many cases, one thirtieth of the people in the classroom -- why are we so thoroughly privileging their cultural associations? If twenty-nine people think "pay attention" doesn't mean putting your feet on the floor, and one person thinks it does, why are we not questioning whether the feet on the floor are really an essential part of the classroom experience?

Although this interview doesn't give a full answer to that, Lisa Delpit does, in Other People's Children. A lot of the book is a critique of white liberal educational practices with regard to literacy, but they apply in lots of situations. Basically, white liberals realized in the past couple of decades that white culture isn't actually better than black culture, and started questioning whether it makes sense for us to so thoroughly privilege white culture in schools. They started realizing (holy shit) that black (and Latin@, and Native American) children felt alienated by being told the language of their parents, families, and communities was "wrong." They realized that kids were being driven away from focusing on meaning, because the pronunciations that they were being taught to associate with written words weren't the ones that they used to communicate.

So they started de-emphasizing the whiteness-specific parts of the curriculum -- they stopped teaching grammar, and started teaching creative writing process; they stopped correcting the silent "r" in "before" when kids were reading; they stopped using words like "Spanglish" as derogatory.

But the problem is, no one else stopped judging those kids for their language. The set of linguistic practices that had been assumed in schools were the ones that they were expected to use in the rest of the world -- they were part of what Delpit refers to as "the culture of power." And parents were pissed at the schools -- their kids already knew how to write and speak in black English, they already knew that black was beautiful, but they were sending them to school to learn how to deal with white people, and they were being cheated out of this.

Essentially, then, we do have an obligation to teach kids that "pay attention" means having both your feet on the floor -- not as an absolute, but as a part of the cultural system that gives you access to the mechanisms of power. And I wish Lemov had been clearer about validating the other ways of paying attention, and I wish more teachers were clearer about doing so in their classrooms. The way he talks about it, it really sounds like there's an absolute meaning of "pay attention," that the teachers are responsible for teaching to their students -- instead of that there are two different meanings, and teachers need to teach students a new meaning.

Kids are remarkably sharp about stuff like this. They really can understand it if you say, "When people say 'pay attention' in school, they usually mean something different than when people say the same words in other contexts. And when people say it in school, it's going to include things like having your feet on the floor, nodding at appropriate moments, and taking notes."

Another piece of this, though, is that asking simple, measurable things of students, no matter how arbitrary those things are in an objective sense, gets them used to the idea that you will expect certain things of them, that you'll teach them how to do those things, and that they'll be achievable. I think this is a really important step in countering a lot of the negative feelings students have about school, and getting them ready to put effort toward the things that do require effort. I also think it's important to set the expectation early on that this classroom is a place where people are mostly working together, and mostly interacting positively -- because students' initial impressions of a classroom atmosphere have a huge effect on their willingness to risk their time and their cred by cooperating.

I do worry, though, that it creates a top-down atmosphere, where students are being taught that their job is to respond to teacher directions, and expect positive teacher feedback for those actions -- rather than allowing them to feel like they're responsible for coming up with some of the direction, and most of the motivation, for their success. It's probably worth it, but you have to counter it pretty quickly by giving them opportunities to participate in decision-making for the class, contribute ideas and get some positive reinforcement from other students, and do things that aren't "for a grade."

In which I endorse the provisions of the Creative Commons License, but reject the license.

2010-03-12T13:13:00.000-08:00

The Creative Commons project does great work by writing licenses that allow people to feel that their rights are being protected while they allow others to reproduce and distribute their work. In particular, I was drawn to the Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license. There are pretty strong moral arguments to be made for all of the provisions.

With regard to attribution, it just seems fair to mention who wrote something when you reproduce it. It's good for readers, who get to know where they should look for more of the same thought. It's good for writers, who in our vanity want to be recognized for our genius. And it's good for society to be able to operate under the assumption that information has a source, and one that you can track down pretty easily.

The noncommercial restriction makes sense partly because I really don't think ideas should be subject to the same treatment as commodities. The notion that having knowledge entitles you to make money off that knowledge is flawed in the first place -- and it's double-flawed when you're not the source of that knowledge. It seems deeply unfair for someone to get rich off the creation of someone who's giving their work away for free.

The primary reason I endorse the share-alike restriction is that I'm opposed to the idea of intellectual property, and so everything should be shared like this, whether or not its source is my writing. But, again, this especially applies when the original work is being given freely. Remember that the "share alike" restriction can only apply to reproductions or derivative works, not to works that fall under fair-use provisions. (As a refresher, basically if your work is legitimately new and not, say, an adaptation or a translation, it's fair use. Most judges are too conservative in what counts as fair use, but this is basically the idea.) What we're talking about is blatantly derivative works being placed under a more restrictive license, which then potentially opens them up to reproduction for profit. And it pisses me off to know end when, say, Disney adapts some classic folktale, benefiting in the process from the existence of the public domain, and then fights tooth and nail to keep their adaptation private and profitable.

So yeah. The CC BY-NC-SA license pretty much exactly defines how I think artistic production should be treated in a free society. But I'm still not touching it.

The problem is, the CC licenses all work on the foundation of copyright law -- that set of laws and precedents governing what disgusting plutocrats refer to as "intellectual property." And to quote the first director of the US Office of Patents and Copyrights:

If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.

That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.

Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.

Basically, many of the American founders thought the idea of they copyright was, deep down, an abomination, and that something else would hopefully be worked out at some point, but for now, it was important to encourage people to write and (especially) invent. In order to create incentives for people to invent and write and paint, they offered these people monopolies -- which were not, by any means, natural rights, but were considered completely artificial fictions designed to incentivize invention.

Since then, we've developed a natural-rights conception of intellectual property, which says that I somehow have a right to make money of my idea, because it's mine -- and that this right to a monopoly should last, for practical purposes, forever (75 years after my death, for most kinds of creative works, these days).

The problem is, subjecting things like ideas, which are inherently non-scarce, to restrictions like this is terrible -- for example, it allows monopoly-holders to drive up prices on life-saving drugs well above the cost of producing those drugs, thus restricting poor people's access to them.

There is no right to tell people what they can do with your idea once you tell them about it. It's poisoning us both as individuals and as a society to keep talking about whose idea something is. Yes, you thought of it. But it's an idea that you thought of, not your idea.

And that's what I think is wrong with the CC license. It's written with the assumption that the creator of a work has the right to restrict your use of it -- the assumption of copyright law. The "licensor" is allowing you to reproduce hir work, provided that you follow certain restrictions. The basis for this is that the licensor has the right to apply any of a large set of restrictions to hir work, and is choosing this limited, reasonable set as a favor to you.

That's bullshit. The authors of creative works don't have the right to decide how you use them.

So let me say this:

From a moral standpoint, anything I write on this site should only be used under the terms specified by the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license: tell people I wrote it (and, ideally, link to this blog); don't make money off of it; and share it willingly with others, under these or very similar terms.

But from a legal standpoint, I'm not willing to claim those rights under copyright law. I'm not giving you permission to reproduce anything I write, or to produce derivative works, under those terms. You have the right to do so. So, from a legal standpoint, everything on this blog is in the public domain (under CC0). I waive all legal rights to it.

In which Tom Friedman's still at it.

2010-03-10T05:54:00.001-08:00

I love Tom Friedman:

This war has been extraordinarily painful and costly. But democracy was never going to have a virgin birth in a place like Iraq, which has never known any such thing.

Yes, that's right: not only are we sending out invitations to Democracy In Iraq's baby shower, but we're defining that birth through the contrast of "extraordinarily painful and costly" births and "virgin" births.

At first I thought this was just a new chapter in Friedman's long, troubled relationship with metaphor. But, for the moment, let's take him seriously.

My impression had always been that what distinguished a virgin birth was the lack of sex. The only possible way this analogy makes sense is if you take "sex" to mean "an unwelcome incursion by armed men" -- in which case it makes perfect sense, I suppose.

And it's pretty well-documented that in military circles, that is at least one thing it means. Alicia Simoni wrote that "an integral part of the military’s objective to turn men (and women) into soldiers is the creation of a rigid hierarchy of power and subordination that exists in relation to imagined female and homosexual inferiors." She cites Anthony Swofford, talking about referring to hands as dickskinners and mouths as cum receptacles.

We refer to videos of drones blowing shit up as "drone porn" -- if that's a reasonable analogy, what does that say about what we watch porn for?

And by the way, what the fuck does "which has never known any such thing" have to do with anything? Is he suggesting that the only place where you can have democracy without killing hundreds of thousands of people is Bethlehem? Because if so, let me remind you that Bethlehem is in the fucking West Bank.

Also, I know Tom Friedman, at the time, was way active in trumpeting for the march to war. I imagine that at some point he claimed we'd be welcomed as liberators and everything would be hunky-dory. But there's no fucking way I'm wading through enough of his writing to fact-check that claim. If you have the stomach for it, I'd love to hear about what you find.

Other highlights:

Real “Islamic democracy” is just like any other democracy, except with Muslims voting.

Might part of the problem with what's going on in Iraq and especially Afghanistan be an effort to take an institution from one culture and forcibly transplant it in another culture, without regard for existing institutions? Taking "white American democracy," calling it "democracy," and presenting it as a model for the rest of the world?

We need to see real institution-builders emerge, including builders of a viable justice system and economy. And we need to be wary that too big an army and too much oil can warp any regime.
This is coming from the fucking United States of America?

In which textbooks are all that is wrong with education.

2010-03-09T17:56:00.000-08:00

I had two main questions when I read this post on homeschoolers getting tricked by science textbooks that teach that evolution isn't real:

Why is it so obvious to Amanda Marcotte that "Christian" automatically means "not believing in evolution"?
Why the fuck are homeschoolers using textbooks -- let alone textbooks they haven't read -- to teach science?

Almost all the reasons for homeschooling -- good and bad -- relate to not believing in technocracy as a way of making decisions about education. Whether we worry about biology classes reinforcing gender binaries or teaching evolution, whether we get pissed about the lack of classes aimed at our baby geniuses or object to the lack of good teachers and resources for remedial and special ed classes, whether we hate that white people don't get their own history month or that every month is white history month, homeschooling is about the realization that training and degrees do not guarantee good teachers and administrators.

Basically, a lot of this is about the realization that curricular, discipline and organizational issues in schools are political issues, not administrative ones. There are legitimate questions to be raised about the priorities shown in our curricula, and certification doesn't guarantee that people will share our priorities. Homeschooling is one way of democratizing those decisions, claiming the right to set priorities for our own children.

The same thing applies to science textbooks. Christian or not, textbook authors don't necessarily share your priorities. Relying on someone else to decide the shape of your child's curriculum totally reaffirms the notion we started out rejecting, that educational decision-making is something that should be done by experts.

Also, the textbook itself -- regardless of where it comes from -- is an embodiment of the monolithic, uniform education system that we rejected when we took our kids home. Of course, it's true that some homeschooling parents want a monolithic, uniform educational system, just a different one from the one that currently exists. But I think at least most of the non-fundamentalist ones are doing this because they recognize that there should be more room for kids to be different, learn different things in different ways and at different speeds.

Does that sound like the kind of learning you get from a textbook?

If you're not relying on a single source for your kid's science knowledge, it doesn't matter if some of it is anti-evolution, anti-scientific stuff. Let them figure out what they agree with. If you're not looking for textbooks -- that is, books that claim to account for all the knowledge about US history you'll ever need -- there are a lot of books written for lay audiences by real scientists (Richard Feynman and Stephen Jay Gould come to mind).

Amanda talks rightly about how "I think a lot of people defend evolutionary theory for the wrong reasons---not because they understand it, but because they (correctly) perceive the pro-ignorance, patriarchal bent of fundamentalists who oppose evolutionary theory." Even for such people, your kids don't have to be that kind of people. Let them read that textbook, and take it seriously, and then read some scientists too.

Teachers' job isn't -- can't be -- to tell kids what to think. It's to hold beliefs, both their beliefs and the beliefs of others, up to scrutiny, and give students the tools to make their own decisions. That's not what textbooks are about. Stop using them. Just stop.

In which I explore the inner workings of the poverty draft.

2010-03-08T12:53:00.000-08:00

Seniors I spoke to at one of Chicago's military academies today told me that in each graduating class of roughly 100, only about eight join the military after high school. That doesn't sound so bad, right? So I asked them about West Point and other military colleges. Maybe ten or fifteen more. Still -- only twenty percent? Maybe all this "military academies as a recruiting device" nonsense is overblown. Twenty percent's a lot, given that the military as a whole is about two percent of the 18-49 population, but still, it hardly seems like that percentage makes starting these academies worthwhile as a recruiting device.

Then they said about another thirty go into ROTC in college. This squares pretty well with DoD numbers from 1993, which show that about 45 percent of kids who do Junior ROTC (JROTC) in high school end up in some branch of the military.

Shit.

Some of the students I spoke to were considering entering some military organization after college, others weren't. I tried to get a bit of a sense of how they were thinking about it, and how their experiences at a military academy had shaped that thinking.

First of all, it seems pretty clear that, at least at the school I was at, students aren't directly pushed into the military by their teachers. Counselors talk to them about non-military career options, lots of them go to (and are encouraged to go to) non-military colleges, and they say there's no judgment on the ones who decide the military isn't for them.

Not having considered joining the military, I don't know much about the inner workings the sort of programs they were thinking about, so most of my information comes from them. But they at least talked like they were pretty well-informed about what joining the military means. They talked with confidence about the differences in pay scales and bonus policies of the different branches of the military, and about the scholarship programs available to students in ROTC. They talked about ways one might use ROTC to get money without having to commit to time as a military officer -- according to them, you can participate in ROTC and take their money for two years without committing, but once you start your fifth semester as an ROTC participant, you're pretty much locked in. At least one student was planning to participate in ROTC for exactly the two-year maximum, and leave before he had to actually commit to military service.

It sounded like incentives around college financing were very important to these students. At least two of them were planning on participating in the military only if they ran into financial trouble in their college endeavors. They also said they knew people from previous graduating classes who had decided they were done with the military after high school, but ended up joining ROTC in subsequent years when they started to have trouble with tuition.

In connection with such students, another important piece of the puzzle seems to be the feeling that "they're used to the discipline." For these students, entering military programs seems like a return to an admittedly unsavory, but ultimately bearable practice. They already know some drills, and they're used to the commands, the ways of walking, the rank structure, the hierarchy, etc. It doesn't sound quite as creepy as it might otherwise.

Also, they have connections in the military. JROTC instructors are retired military personnel, which means they know a lot of active-duty service members. Students said if they did get involved with the military, they'd get "hooked up" with placement opportunities, extra uniforms, and other stuff normal enlistees don't necessarily get.

It didn't sound like this was being presented as an incentive to join the military. These weren't being advertised as prizes, but rather as friendly legs up -- the same way my math professors offered to put me in touch with mathematicians they knew in Chicago when I moved here.

It was also clear, though, that the idea of special privilege -- even in what seemed to me to be trivial arenas like uniforms and boots -- really appealed to these kids. I think this partly relates to the hierarchical culture of JROTC itself: there are no less than sixteen different ranks students can achieve, each with its own insignia displayed on the uniform, along with several other types of insignias, plus aguilettes, arcs, ribbons, badges and medals. About half of this handbook covers this stuff; this one's got a lot of text on it too. Students also, in military academies, get special positions like "hall monitor" and "class leader" (they may have these in JROTC classes in normal schools as well; I don't know) -- I know hall monitorship is displayed on the uniform as well, but only while you're actively monitoring.

At least some kids take this stuff seriously. I've heard a student complain, "He don't even treat me like a First Sergeant! He treats me like I'm some kind of Staff Sergeant!"

Another piece to this is the emphasis of pro-military voices in JROTC classes' discussions of citizenship and history. I didn't ask students about this, but according to the Center for Defense Information,

The AFSC [American Friends Service Committee] report compared an Army Junior ROTC history text's coverage of the Vietnam War to a civilian text and found that the Junior ROTC discussion centered on the argument that the Vietnam War was necessary because the United States took on and should continue to assume "the responsibility for being the world's police officer for democracy." Protests and disagreements about the war were presented as "a threat to national security."

Given all of this, it's not all that surprising that many of the kids I talked to said that either they or their parents had been hesitant about the idea of a military academy. One boy said his parents had gone so far as to forbid him to have any involvement with the military after high school.

I asked some of these students why they had decided to attend (and/or their parents had decided to send them to) the military academy anyway, and their answers were almost universally related to the academic performance of the school. And it makes sense: the four Chicago military academies score far better than their neighborhood schools.

All four are selective; I'm not sure whether they're all academically selective. Students I spoke to said there was an interview, but students weren't rejected on the basis of bad grades; Chicago Military doesn't post its admissions standards online, nor does Carver, but Phoenix and Rickover are both clear about admitting only students who are reasonably academically well-off (by the way, a stanine of 5 -- the requirement for Phoenix -- means above about the 40th percentile, while "at or above grade level" means above about the 20th percentile).

So they're not super-elite, but they seem to be doing just enough to get rid of the bottom ranges that cause the most trouble at neighborhood schools (even the existence of an application process including an interview will get rid of many of those kids). So parents frantic to free themselves from shitty neighborhood schools -- or, at least, the ones with the wherewithal to jump through the hoops -- are being offered something meaningful. Walk three blocks from Phillips to Chicago Military and you'll see a thirty-four-percent jump in testing success.

Part of what I'm saying is, as a student in the middle of the Chicago Public Schools spectrum who would otherwise be going to, say, Phillips, Robeson, Fenger, or Julian, it's very possible to go into this situation with your eyes open and still believe a military academy is your best option. It might be.

And once you're there, they don't need to lie to you to convince you that ROTC is your best option -- because, again, it might be your best option. When you're in that situation, an option doesn't need to be that good to be your best option.

The poverty draft isn't just a problem because the military's recruiting tactics are coercive. It's a problem because poverty is coercive. And we can't stop it by removing the military option, or covering it up, or taking away the incentives -- although we should do all of those things. But we have to also be in the business of creating other options.

In which Easter is almost upon us, and I can feel it.

2010-03-07T17:36:00.000-08:00

[Spoiler alert: I am preparing to get theological. If that turns you off, please feel free to stop reading.]

One of my favorite arguments against Christianity is the one about how Easter shares its name, timing and a lot of its associated traditions with pieces of Anglo-Saxon pagan spring festivals -- and/or how pieces of the Jesus story correspond to preexisting myths about sun gods who died in the winter and were reborn in the spring. It's supposed to be this great "gotcha" moment: "Oh yeah? Well your celebration of the return of the metaphorical Light of the World bears a remarkable similarity to the way other people have celebrated the profound joy and relief we experience at the return of the literal light to the literal world! Take that!"

Yeah -- it sure would be a shitty ritual if it didn't have a counterpart in a deep human experience, wouldn't it? And it sure would be surprising if other people hadn't already figured out really powerful expressions of that joy, wouldn't it?

Today I could feel the coming of spring. And, more than anywhere else, I could feel it in Meeting, in a dim, windowless, linoleum-floored room. Because there I could see the effect that spring has on other people, even people who live in cities and drive to work and work indoors. I could see how fundamentally our spiritual experience is shaped by our bodily experience, and how effectively our bodies, through the joy of being outside in the springtime, can guide us to the joy of nearness to God.

The divide between the earthly and the divine is at least partly a false one. We need to recognize who made the earth, our earthly desires and our creature comforts.

And also, we need to spend some time outside, as the light returns to the world.

In which conversations about oppression get turned into conversations about censorship, and everyone loses.

2010-03-04T14:19:00.000-08:00

It's a little upsetting, in one of the most awesome videos in the world, to see the Southern Cross just hangin' out there behind Johnny Cash. It's like, I could've handled this from Merle Haggard, or David Allan Coe, or even Waylon Jennings, but Johnny Cash?

Country music's got a pretty troubling history in terms of its flirtation with racism, sexism, and homophobia. I think it has something to do with how easily "cowboy" slides into "outlaw," which slides into "rebel," which slides into "Rebel." And those -- the last one in particular -- shouldn't be so easy.

The thing is, I think the Confederacy plays an important role in Southern whiteness. And I don't think it's okay, or that it's something we should be compromising with, but I think it's something we should be trying to understand, especially in light of the racist and homophobic rebellion going on at the University of California.

The thing is, I think when a lot of Southern white people talk about the War of Northern Aggression, and talk about how it wasn't really about slavery, they mean it. And it's also true that there's a lot more that was going on in North-South relations at the time than slavery -- issues about uneven industrialization and arguments about taxation, for example -- and that those issues still color the way Southern white people think about the Civil War.

And when Southern white people lament the loss of the Civil War, it's true that a lot of what they're lamenting is a lifestyle that's based on brutal subjugation and exploitation. And that's fucked up. And there's no denying or excusing that it's fucked up. But to put the issue in fuller context, for many Southern white people, they've gone from being at or near the privileged end of an economic system based on brutal subjugation and exploitation, to near the oppressed end of another economic system based on brutal subjugation and exploitation. (Of course, even poor Southern white folks only come out near the bottom when you ignore the non-American world -- but since I'm trying to explore their narrative, I hope you'll excuse the oversight.)

Southerners really feel -- I can only assume they're being honest about this -- that the Confederate flag isn't and shouldn't be about racism. And there's an extent to which this feeling is understandable -- more slaves were lived and died under the Stars and Stripes than the Stars and Bars, and the vilification of the Confederate flag can definitely come off as a cheap way for Northern whites to avoid addressing our own racism by portraying racism as something exclusively Southern.

It's in this context, I think, that Southern identification with the Confederacy makes sense. They really do see it as being (at least partly) about the centralization of governmental control in the hands of a Yankee elite, and identify with the Confederacy as fighting that transition, and about rejecting Northern white hypocrisy about race.

The problem is, whatever the Confederacy means to Southern white people -- and it means a lot of complicated things -- and whatever it meant to Southern white people at the time -- which I have no doubt was just as complicated -- the people who are most offended by it, who feel most threatened and intimidated by it, are not New York bankers and Hollywood limousine liberals, or even Northern big-government advocates like Bernie Sanders. It threatens and intimidates poor black Southerners, who weren't guilty of the things Southern whites hate about the Civil War.

Part of what I'm worried about is the extent to which, through the use of slanders like "politically correct," being racially insensitive can be seen as sexy and rebellious instead of disgusting and brutal. The narrative that's being told about the Confederate flag is that Southern white people who just want to fight the Man and respect their ancestors' decision to fight the Man are being attacked by the Man for racism, as a way of sidelining that rebellion and also relieving the Man's own guilt about racism.

And I can see the same thing happening at the University of California. I also see it happening around the case of three kids I knew in high school getting arrested for a hate crime. I can see it happening any time racists, sexists, homophobes and transphobes start talking about "freedom of speech."

What should be happening is a conversation about intimidation and silencing of black people and gay people through hate-speech, some of which is overtly violent and some of which is just hateful. Instead, people manage to portray the anti-racist forces as the silencing and intimidating ones.

This is one of the big things I worry about regarding legislation surrounding hate speech and hate crimes (the other big thing I worry about is the entire fucking criminal justice system). By enlisting coercive mechanisms to prevent hate crimes, we create a situation where the visible tension is between authority figures and white individuals/groups, rather than between white racists and POC objectors. It fucks with people's perceptions of who the underdog is, and therefore who they should be rooting for.

I couldn't help noticing how Sociological Images talks about how "the vocal resistance to the overt prejudice and hateful stereotyping created a counter-resistance" -- but the only mention of actual anti-racist protest in their post is this: "A diverse group of students, with the support of many faculty, protested the administration’s slow response to the event."

When we focus our resistance on enlisting UCSD's fucked-up administration to act, we allow racists to claim that this is a battle between advocates of free speech and censors, rather than a battle between racists and POC. Racists should never be able to -- even for a minute -- seem to be the underdog.

In which Precious is compared to torture porn, with fascinating results.

2010-03-03T15:05:00.002-08:00

Michael Thomsen is one of my favorite unknown writers, so it's interesting to see his post comparing Precious to torture porn. I haven't seen Precious, and I don't watch much torture porn (I think I saw the first Saw movie when it came out). But his argument is interesting given that Precious tends to be treated very much as an artistic, even "audacious" film, while the torture-porn standards never get that kind of attention.

Basically, this is the centerpiece of Thomsen's argument:

I don’t think torture porn is necessarily derogatory term. I think making something for sheer emotional sensation is a fine use of any expressive medium. Showing close-ups of severed limbs and bleeding gashes isn’t necessarily nuanced, but that doesn’t make it any less powerful. Likewise, Precious is not a movie of great nuance but emotional sledge hammering. If it weren’t, it would be a bore, in the same way that porn without sex would be the story of a sensitive young pizza delivery boy dropping off some pies. Or Hostel would be a humorless story of a couple college dudes having a beer-and-boner contest in a foreign country.

Likewise, without HIV, incest, downs syndrome, obesity, and some cruel close-ups of pig parts frying in a pan Precious wouldn’t exist. Like torture porn it’s about the harrowing elation of having survived, and it wishfully pirouettes around the idea that violence has anything more than a glancing effect that can be overcome with just a little caring.

Essentially, according to Thomsen, Precious gives us the same kind of titillation as Hostel: it's about being given the opportunity to watch horrible things that we would never feel comfortable watching in real life.

It's also interesting that some of the criticisms of Precious have been similar to criticisms of torture porn: a lot of our worry centers on who gets seen as victims, who as saviors. From Feministing:

All this being said, the Hollywood version of the book absolutely invisibilized patriarchy, cast the system as a hero and not an actor responsible for the conditions of oppression in which Precious lived and survived, and over-simplified Precious' mother as an animal who fed her child to the wolves.

And from Jezebel, quoting yesand:

I don't know if I'm as worried about it being sanitized as I am about it black suffering being fetishized by a white audience.

And from Sociological Images:

Elizabeth points out that all the “good” adult characters are light-skinned (and thin) as well.

And here are a few quotes on torture porn, from Womens eNews:

The film's female characters receive similar treatment, but often while they are naked or dressed in lingerie...

Essentially I watched an hour and 45 minutes of a woman being stalked, drugged, nearly raped and terrorized... It's like as long as the woman kills the guy at the end, then of course it's a female empowerment movie.

In both cases, it seems like a lot of what we're talking about are objectified women (although in the case of Precious, we're talking about objectification in the sense of "othered," rather than in the sexual sense) who get victimized (usually by sadistic, unsympathetic individuals, often without reference to social forces behind the scenes), then rescued (often by agents of power -- men, cops, the welfare state).

My guess is that the different treatment, then, stems largely from the character of Precious herself. Centering on the experience of a black woman is revolutionary enough -- add in the fact that she's obese (and therefore not sexualized), and this seems like a whole new genre. Furthermore, the torture of Precious isn't (I don't think) portrayed as freakish and fantastical in quite the same way as the torture in more traditional torture porn is, but as in large part an extreme (but nonetheless realistic) portrayal of what growing up black in America can be like.

There's another piece of Thomsen's review that I find fascinating:

What is the purpose of watching footage of another human vomit, being beaten, or, worst of all, suffering rape by a father? Is it to raise social awareness? Have you begun to volunteer at a local chapter to support abused and battered women lately? Did Precious inspire you to donate to a boys and girls club in historically impoverished area of your local town?

We don’t participate in art as a social act of human betterment. We do it as emotional carnivores, to snatch the red meat of feeling from someone else’s visceral imagination. You don’t need art to sympathize with a human suffering. We’re surrounded by it. You do need art to forgive your need to stare at it without looking away in shame. The way you wouldn’t stare at a couple kissing in a bar, but you’d soak up the details in a movie close-up.

I don’t think I could stand to see a child beaten in real life. But I’d stare and stare and stare in a movie.

The first part sort of reminds me of David Mamet's line (from Three Uses of the Knife), "Drama doesn't need to affect people's behavior. There's a great and very, very effective tool that changes people's attitudes and makes them see the world in a new way. It's called a gun." But I think Thomsen trivializes a little when he reduces art to voyeurism, and I don't think it's entirely true that art can't be related to activism. And in fact, I think the reason why Precious doesn't inspire that might be tied to something Thomsen brought up earlier: "it wishfully pirouettes around the idea that violence has anything more than a glancing effect that can be overcome with just a little caring."

These stories about people who triumph over adversity with the help of nice light-skinned people in the welfare and education systems let us walk away feeling "uplifted" and "hopeful" but ultimately empty -- because we know that shit isn't real. Or rather, it's only partly real. Lots of people never recover psychologically from violence like you see in Precious or Hostel; having their escape be the end of the movie is dishonest and, I think, ultimately less compelling, although it might put asses in seats. (Remember the Poe/Lovecraft days, when horror stories inevitably involved protagonists who ended up either dead or permanently damaged?)

And I think partly what we're doing here is replacing drama with fairytale, which lets us walk away with a spring in our step but doesn't ultimately make sense -- and (let's see how many Mamet quotes I can work in here) "just as the purpose of the motion picture is the gradual revelation of the human genitalia, and the purpose of television is the support of several manufactories of small arms in Connecticut, just so the purpose of the theater is the making of sense."

It's that false sense of closure, of everything's-going-to-be-okay, that lets us keep going about our daily lives and ignoring the real-life Preciouses who don't escape.

In which homosocial masculinity displays still matter to adult men.

2010-03-02T11:12:00.001-08:00

In many ways I think Amanda Marcotte's critique of Rachel Simmons's post on hook-up culture is better than mine -- I especially like the way she emphasizes the continuity of male power through the different eras of mating rituals -- but I've gotta quibble with one piece of it. Here it is:

If you look at it from my perspective, however, the change is really obvious---as you drift from adolescence to adulthood, the severe power imbalance on the social scene between men and women evens out more. As we mature, we gain jobs and homes of our own, and become more sure in our tastes and our friendships. For women, this is an enormous power grab. The amount of our social value derived from male attention shrinks as more of our social value comes from our jobs and the image we project in the world. You can see this just from the difference in how women dress, honestly---very few women over 21 are going to stand around in microminis, shivering in the cold in order to grab some of that precious male attention. Even as the world continues to be sexist, women start to learn to self-validate more, and they need less from men.

In the meantime, men lose a lot of their homosocial support system. Even men who are the best at maintaining friendships outside of college, where you have roommates and endless hours to sit around drinking and playing video games, still find that they have less time to devote to each other. Misogynist displays of power over women start to lose their allure with maturity; men who come into themselves have less need to dominate women to get that buzz of self-esteem. Getting a girlfriend starts to look more appealing as that would both replenish emotional support, and because the stigma of being “pussy whipped” by the mere fact of showing enough esteem for a woman to socially validate her fades away. And as soon as one guy abandons the immature “girls and dating are GROSS” thing, the stigma loses its grip and they start to fall like dominoes. The possibility of cohabitation and marriage adds to women’s value to men, as well. (Even if men did half the housework, the benefits of living with someone usually outweigh the drawbacks enough to keep that value in place, except for loners.) Men also start to find more validation from career and interests, and need less support from other men, which reduces the incentives to engage in homosocial misogynist joking and displays.

I think there's some truth in this, but I don't think it tells the whole story. I think this reflects a tendency to confuse masculinity with testosterone, and misogyny with rape jokes -- and these distinctions are important to maintain, because by confusing patriarchy with its manifestations in youth, we risk ignoring a potentially even bigger piece of the puzzle.

For example, when she starts talking about how women's value to men is increased by the possibility of cohabitation and marriage -- throwing in an aside about "even if men did half the housework" -- she neglects the fact that since, of course, men don't do half the housework, we have to see our desire for cohabitation in a different light. As they grow older, men stop seeing women as sex objects, because we realize they can be so much more useful than that -- they can cook, and clean, and raise up healthy sons.

I think the same thing is true when she talks about men "los[ing] a lot of their homosocial support system." When she refers to their homosocial support system, she's talking about "drinking and playing video games," which are lost when they "find more validation in their career and interests." But aren't careers, for many men at least, vital sources of homosocial support? And don't men then jockey for masculine dominance in ways that are actually quite similar in structure if not in details to the collegiate who's-sleeping-with-who, who's-pussy-whipped discussions?

When men grow up, they don't give up the misogyny -- they replace immature and (relatively) ineffective methods of social control of women for mature and effective ones. And they don't stop struggling for alpha-male status, they just have new ways of measuring and reinforcing that status. Just ask Dr. Laura.

Or at least, upper- and middle-class white men do. Which is another problem with the way we've all been writing about "hookup culture" -- it's nominally colorblind, but it assumes things like college and "careers" (as opposed to jobs) which probably means it's talking about rich white folks. My impression has been that poor and/or minority youth think and act somewhat differently from rich white youth, and although I don't feel qualified to explain it, I don't think it's okay for us to be relying on narratives which leave out the experience of poor people and people of color.

Race and class also affect the transition from adolescent masculinity to adult masculinity. In many cases, poor minority men aren't offered the same reinforcement of their masculine dominance as they grow up -- these men have fewer options for career advancement and fewer possibilities for status-symbolic consumption, and images of themselves as breadwinners and protectors can be difficult to cultivate.

Our images about the difference between "adolescent" and "adult" masculinity have a lot to do with the transition from transience and insecurity -- which correspond with what one might call "conquering" youthful masculinity -- to stability, power, and what might be called "controlling" masculinity. But this transition has a lot to do with race and class, because for many men the stability and power necessary for "adult" masculinity aren't available.

(By the way, I think the "courtship era" and the "dating era" played out somewhat differently for people of different races and classes too.)

In which Rachel Simmons fucks up but good.

2010-02-26T13:05:00.000-08:00

For a piece that actually has a lot going for it, this still manages to fail pretty epically.

Simmons's primary point is that college "hookup culture" puts a lot of young women in tough spots, because men are given the power to decide whether a hookup is going to lead to a relationship, and women often have to have the sex and then hold their breath for the date. And there's some truth to that.

But throughout the piece, she just takes for granted the fact that what young women want is relationships (with men), and what young men want is sex (with women). By relying on essentialized conceptions of male and female roles in straight sexuality, she not only does damage directly, but also prevents her primary point from being as deep as it could be.

Part of what's really troubling about hookup culture is that it's juxtaposed with the broader trend of slut-shaming throughout patriarchal culture. The background of this is that expectations are constructed that normal, nice young women should want nothing but long-term, monogamous relationships, and should confine their sexuality to that context (Simmons's piece, incidentally, is a great example of how those expectations get constructed). These norms are reinforced by the economic reality that women make less money than men -- and that when relationships do break down, they're saddled with the kids.

It's this context that makes straight hookup culture so fraught, because it denies women the option of securing a commitment before sex -- and the withholding of sex was one of the few bargaining chips women had in securing that commitment (remember that hideous old slogan, "Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?").

But these aren't problems with sexual liberation -- just like the troubles of army moms aren't the result of women being allowed into the army. The stories Simmons tells aren't stories about liberation -- they're stories about coercion. This is a tale of how patriarchal culture (or, perhaps, a patriarchal subculture) accepts the trappings of feminism by picking up the word "empowered," then conflates "empowered sex" with "lots of sex," and pressures women to have lots of sex. It's a story about how you can't have straight sexual empowerment -- how you can't have straight sex on equal footing -- unless you also equally distribute the consequences of that sex.

Women are put into the awkward place where they're supposed to want to have sex only with men in stable relationships (and this conditioned desire is reinforced by economic coercion), but they have to have sex with men outside of stable relationships to get that -- and this is used to justify shaming their "irresponsible" decisions, and saddling them with a disproportionate share of the consequences of those decisions -- which feeds back into the whole "economic coercion" thing.

Add to this the "men ask, women swoon" dynamic, which I haven't even started to get into here.

So yeah, hookup culture is fucked up. But it's not fucked up for its promiscuity -- there's nothing wrong with promiscuity in principle. It's fucked up in its coerced promiscuity, and its unequal distribution of the consequences of promiscuity.

That said, my favorite part of the Simmons piece was a little parenthetical near the end: "(and I, like Bogle, am not discussing the lives of GLTBQ students here)."

Oh, okay. Because not talking about GLBTQ students isn't, you know, a problem or anything. It's not like anyone's, say, invented a word to describe what's wrong with that. No, it's probably fine to use "hookup culture" to mean "straight hookup culture," and assume that everyone knows what you mean.

UPDATE: Other writing on this Simmons piece here, from Amanda Marcotte, and here, from Kate Harding (and more linked from the original post). And a follow-up from me, after reading Marcotte, here.

In which there are so many kinds of wrong I almost don't know where to start.

2010-02-26T07:16:00.000-08:00

I could write an entire post about these two paragraphs:

So Glenn Beck, speaking recently at the Conservative Political Action Conference, identified a great enemy of human freedom as . . . Teddy Roosevelt. Beck highlighted this damning Roosevelt quote: "We grudge no man a fortune in civil life if it is honorably obtained and well used."
Ah, you don't discern the scandal in this statement? Look closer. "This is not our Founders' idea of America," explained Beck. "And this is the cancer that's eating at America. It is big government -- it's a socialist utopia." Evidently, real conservatives defend wealth that is dishonorably gained and then wasted.

But since everyone should know that, as always, I side with Beck, I won't. (But I will express my regret that Teddy would have a point, if such a fortune had ever existed.)

This bit, later in the piece, also deserves some comment:

Lincoln doesn't need defenders against accusations of tyranny -- the mere charge
is enough to diagnose some sad ideological disorder. But the Rough Rider also
does not deserve such roughing up.

No. Just no. No matter how you feel about whether the Civil War was necessary and appropriate, Lincoln's use of power was not what you'd call temperate. He suspended habeas corpus, which it was well-established only Congress could do; ignored the courts' rulings that he couldn't, citing that great abuser of presidential power, Andy Jackson; may have secretly ordered the arrest of the Chief Justice of the United States; and closed papers and arrested editors that criticized him.

But I think this is the most important part:

This I have against the Rough Rider: In the 1912 election, he betrayed his friend William H. Taft and his party by running as a third-party candidate. In his hubris, TR believed that neither party met his own exacting standards of purity. The attitude is familiar today.

What pisses me off here is the assumption that the default is picking one from the list. The expectation that you're going to vote for a major-party candidate has to be pretty strong in order for it to be considered a "betrayal" to refuse to do so.

It seems to me that granting someone presidential power is a gesture of extraordinary trust. Belief that someone is worthy of that degree of control over the lives of hundreds of millions of people (in 1912, roughly a hundred million) shouldn't be assumed. The default should be that we vote for no one -- unless someone makes a really compelling case that they deserve that kind of power. No major-party candidate has made such a case to me so far.

Think about the election of 2000. Liberals tend to think that Nader lost Gore the election, and that people who voted for Nader are responsible for Gore's loss. But this assumes Gore had a right to those votes in the first place -- that the default was them going to Gore, and Nader "took" what should have been Gore's.

Here's another way of thinking about this: presumably, some people who would have preferred Nader voted for Gore. Everyone seems to argue that the ones who voted Nader should feel stupid now. But both groups voted for a losing candidate -- at least the ones who voted for Nader voted for a losing candidate they believed in. Which of those losing votes should be considered stupid, irresponsible or morally suspect?

The only way a vote for Nader looks bad -- other than on the grounds that Nader would have been a bad President -- is if you assume a vote for Nader is taking away a vote that should have been Gore's. It seems just as reasonable -- probably more so -- to say that many of Gore's votes should have been Nader's.

This is also an argument for refusal to vote: the presidency carries the sort of powers I think no one should have (e.g., commanding armies). In order to convince me to vote for a presidential candidate, you have to convince me not only that ze's the best person for the job, but also that someone should have that job.

In which someone else forgets men have children too.

2010-02-26T06:28:00.000-08:00

Mary Eberstadt, in a piece at the Washington Post about how sending moms off to war isn't good for the kids, does manage to mention fathers at the end:

These studies mainly concern fathers, not mothers. But do we really think the children with deployed mothers aren't even worse off?
Sending fathers into military zones has been a tragedy for as long as war has been around. Sending mothers along with them -- many of them the only parent a child has -- is simply wrong.

Notice how there's an assumption that we're going to send dads off to war no matter what, and the only question is whether we're going to send mothers "along with them," or give them a chance to stay home and take care of the kids. Once we accept the assumption that it's either going to be moms taking care of kids, or it's going to be no one, we've lost. I also like that we merely accept that mothers are "the only parent a child has" without even suggesting that men might take some responsibility for that.

And Mary, your attempt to save some feminist cred by talking up the courage of women and moms in battle is pathetic. When you're arguing for women to stay home and take care of the kids while the men go off and do men's work, it really doesn't matter if you mention that it's not because they can't do men's work.

None of this, of course, should be taken as saying that the feminist solution is sending moms off to war -- or that the right to go to war is something we should be arguing for. It's devastating when either parent gets killed in battle -- or when either parent comes home a killer. But when we're talking about not sending people off to war, we shouldn't need to rely on sexist arguments about how we're keeping mothers from staying in their place.

Stay tuned for more on the WaPo opinion page later today -- I'm still trying to wrap my head around this.

In which NO YOU DID NOT, CHICAGO BOARD OF EDUCATION.

2010-02-25T13:11:00.000-08:00

I didn't think I could be more ashamed of the Chicago Board of Education.

It's traditional for the Board of Education meetings to start with the Good News Report, where they recognize a few CPS students who have done extraordinary things, and give those students a chance to say a few words. It should've been a nice moment before they got into the hairy business of closing/turning around 16 schools.

This month they recognized Shantell Steve and Kellina Mojica of Julian High School, who won second and third place in the Democracy in Action Awards, which are citizenship awards given to high school students. They also recognized Damani Bolden, a senior at Lindblom and the honorary student member of the Board, who's just been given the Rising Star Award by the DuSable Museum of African American History.

This is what Board VP Clare Munana said to Bolden:

I would like you, as a representative of the three students that we're honoring today -- would you mind saying a few words to represent all of you and the honors that you received?

This might seem a little confusing. Why, one might ask, would a student at Lindblom -- a West Englewood selective-admissions school -- be asked to speak for two students at Julian -- a an underperforming Washington Heights neighborhood school?

The Sun-Times appears to slurp up the official story that Munana didn't know they were supposed to speak -- which might seem a little bit shady given that she's not new to this job.

What the Sun-Times doesn't mention in its coverage of this is that Bolden's gone on record in favor of Renaissance 2010 -- as for Steve and Mojica, according to WBEZ's Linda Lutton, "The board has a pretty good idea of what they're going to say, and they're gonna talk about school closings, because they have before, and I was sitting at the meeting thinking, 'Oh my gosh, we're gonna get off to a fiery start.'"

Yeah. They recognized the winners of a fucking democracy award by muzzling them.

And people wonder why kids hate school.

If I can find a way to do so, I'm going to ask these two young women if I can publish the remarks they would've delivered.

I hope you'll all read them. It's not the audience they deserved.

In which we need to talk more about working fathers.

2010-02-24T10:20:00.000-08:00

The Center for American Progress recently released a report on work-family conflict. It's a troubling read, detailing how American workplaces really haven't done anything to adapt to the changing workforce -- believe it or not, households with two working parents need different kinds of accommodations than households where Mom stays at home all day.

It also talks a little about the classism that pervades media coverage of work-family conflict: media stories about wealthy women who stay home and take care of the kids admire their dedication to family, while media stories about poor women who stay home and take care of the kids talk about how they should get their lazy asses off the couch and get jobs. It does an admirable job of portraying the different kinds of struggles faced by parents in different income brackets, and is fairly sensitive to the reasoning behind poor mothers' decision to stay home (their wages often aren't high enough even to pay for the cost of childcare while they work). I thoroughly recommend reading the whole thing.

One of the things that bugged me about it, though, was that somehow they manage to get through the piece without talking about sexism. There are 31 uses of the word "mothers" and two of the word "fathers" -- it's clear they recognize that women are being saddled with most of this -- but there's no talk about why that might be. And because of that, the policies they propose are entirely about making American workplaces more "family-friendly" -- they're about enabling families to manage the interaction between work and home how they want to. And while I recognize that that's important -- and that working mothers do need the kind of flexibility they're talking about -- we also do need to be thinking about redistributing child-rearing obligations in fairer ways.

We can't keep up this practice of talking about women in the workplace without talking about women at home. That's what got us in this mess: we've generously allowed women to do "men's work," but we havent in the process excused them from any "women's work." So, as women start doing men's work, wages go down to the point where women have to do men's work, but they still have to do women's work too. So now we start realizing that's a problem, and so we have to figure out ways to allow them to do men's work, but still allow them the flexibility to get home and do the women's work when they need to. See how ridiculous this is?

I think, in some ways, it all comes down to the conception of feminism as a "women's issue." Because we think feminism is about women, we think the solutions to the problems pointed out by feminism involve changing the position and options of women in society -- but women are only half the story. We also need to be focused on placing new demands on men -- to cook, clean our houses, take care of our children.

It might be harder to sell this kind of feminism: it all sounds much nicer when you can ignore the fact that someone still needs to do the laundry. But I think it's something we have to be talking about.

And by "we," I mostly mean men need to be talking about this. Let's not make the ladies tell us we have to do our chores -- let's act like fucking grownups and do it. And let's try to do it without whining.

UPDATE: It happened again, this time with army moms.

In which sex-positive feminists have some splainin' to do.

2010-02-22T09:01:00.000-08:00

So I've been reading Amber Hollibaugh's My Dangerous Desires. It's brilliant, as an account of the real need women have to feel that their own sexual needs are respected and accepted by the feminist movement. But it's also gotten me thinking about the inadequacy of our ways of talking about the interplay of power and sex.

It seems like the terrain gets divided up too quickly between, on the one hand, "anti-porn" feminists, who think porn is inherently objectifying, BDSM is inherently sexist and women's participation in it is evidence of false consciousness, and sex workers deserve some combination of pity and contempt, and on the other, "sex-positive" feminists, who think porn is hot if it's done right, we should stop worrying about the interplay of power and sex as long as it's consensual, and sex work can be a reasonable and healthy response to economic and sexual repression of women.

All of this, I think, reflects a tendency to see things as either harmless (and therefore private, and something feminists should defend women's right to) or harmful, public, and something we should resist at every turn. But all of these issues demand considerably more nuance than this can afford, and it's a pity we're not giving it to them.

Feminist porn is a huge step. Women in porn need to have some control over what they do and the safe-sex practices they use in the process. Furthermore, images that force us to examine our stereotypes of women's sexuality as essentially passive are important -- especially when they involve sex that focuses on women getting pleasure. And showing women of different body types doesn't hurt, either.

But fundamentally, all porn does allow us to be involved in others' sexuality without having to think of them as human. Viewers aren't challenged in the notion that women are fundamentally for sex, even if in order to get that sex you have to worry about consent and pleasure -- that notion, if anything, is encouraged. And that's something we should be concerned about.

But porn has advantages, too. In particular, it enables people whose sexual agency is denied in mainstream culture to explore different sexual options, to learn about their own sexuality at home and in private. This sort of exploration is really important for developing sexual identities. I think it's probably worth it.

But the point is, it's important to realize that this "pro-porn" stance comes as a result of weighing positive and negative aspects of sex, and finding that what's good about porn is more important than what's wrong with it -- not as a result of a belief that there's nothing wrong with it.

The same goes for BDSM. It can't be as simple as the claim that, as long as it's consensual, there's nothing wrong with BDSM. Should men who like dominating and abusing women -- and who participate in creating and sharing narratives about dominating women -- really feel that this desire is unproblematic? I don't think so.

But I think part of the reason why BDSM gets so much shit is because we, as a society, have long thought of fantasies as real, as more real than actions or beliefs -- at least in terms of what they reveal about our personalities. If a man believes that women are humans deserving of respect, and acts on that belief, but then has sexual fantasies about beating them up, forcing his dick down their throats, and coming on their faces, we take this as a sign that he really hates women, but has learned how to talk feminist-speak and do the feminist-dance to trick us.

This is, of course, bullshit. It's based on the age-old idea that our spontaneous urges come from a pure place that's truly us, and our ideas are simply superstructures that we build over that. But we should have gotten rid of that long ago. Freud was pretty sure that many of those spontaneous urges are developed in early childhood, and it seems pretty clear that he was at least partly right. There's a multi-billion dollar industry devoted to the idea that those spontaneous urges can be profitably influenced by flickering images on a screen. (When was the last time you found an argument in an ad convincing?)

The point is, just because you fantasize about something doesn't mean you secretly believe it's right. We should treat people's actions and beliefs as sufficient to define them, even if they differ from their fantasies.

I think there's a valid analogy to be drawn here to other types of role-playing. Tabletop and computer role-playing games tend to be intensely violent, and there's a real sense in which they contribute to the normalization and valorization of violence. They're also male-dominated, both in terms of their content and in terms of their creators and players. When we play these games, we contribute to a collective fantasy life which centers on violent men and hypersexualized, usually helpless women. That's bad.

But it's also clearly not bad enough to make someone not count as a pacifist or a feminist if they play Baldur's Gate (or even Dante's Inferno).

The same goes for our more explicitly sexual fantasies. We should be uncomfortable about creating narratives about men dominating and exploiting women, and about allowing our fantasy lives to center on these narratives. And in the case of BDSM, there's a real argument to be made that it has a positive role to play, too -- one that, I'd say, outweighs the negative one.

Greta Christina writes about the relief BDSM can provide for women who have been raised to feel that submission is natural, but have been taught to believe that it is unethical. I've also heard at least one man talk about how being a sub in a 24/7 relationship gave him a sort of cover to undermine his own masculinity, and challenge other men's conceptions of what men do.

Also, as I've mentioned before, BDSM gives us a space in which to acknowledge and explore the role that power already has in our sexual lives. Without this space, our only choices would be to normalize acts that express male dominance or to abandon them. The presence of BDSM spaces allows men to acknowledge their desire to express dominance, while acknowledging that this desire can only be ethically expressed in a context that emphasizes consent and allows for other options.

Most importantly, though, if your feminism makes women feel that they have to choose between having the kind of sex they like and being feminists, you're doing feminism wrong. Even if female subs (or, depending on who you ask, all women who like BDSM) are victims of false consciousness, seeking out sexual pleasure is a fundamental human right, and feminism can't be about restricting that.

Lastly, sex work -- and, particularly, prostitution and stripping. And, in particular, let me talk about the non-trafficked, pimp-free side of sex work -- where the only incentives acting on sex workers are financial. Not because I think this is more prevalent, but because I think it's in cases like this that feminists tend to disagree.

To me, it's still impossible to separate the genderedness of sex work from gender inequalities in income. When people face hunger, homelessness, or other hardship if they refuse sex, they are being coerced. And very often, sex workers do face these things. And most of us would agree that coercive sex is bad news.

But, that said, when people face hunger, homelessness, or other hardship if they don't clean your house, or work in your factory, or sell your products, that's coercive and exploitative too. And who am I to tell sex workers that they've chosen the wrong kind of exploitation? We don't treat the other kinds of workers with nearly the same kind of pity -- and sex workers have chosen sex work even though they (at least sometimes) had those other options.

This just gets us to hating johns rather than prostitutes -- and that's a step in the right direction. But I don't think even demonizing johns is appropriate. Let's imagine an oversimplified version of this situation: someone will actually, literally starve to death without your money. It would, clearly, be unethical to tell them you will only give them money if they have sex with you -- which is essentially what johns are doing. But it would be at least as unethical to just not give them any money, and not have sex with them -- which is what most other men are doing.

Even "nonviolent" prostitution and stripping is coercive -- but it's not really fair to put all the blame for that coercion on the people directly involved. The coercion takes place before the john walks into the room, when we tell people they need to find some money in order to survive, and we systematically deprive women of their fair share of the money. And the solution isn't to not pay people to have sex with you -- it's to give poor people money.

So the point is, I don't think we have to believe any of these things are unproblematic in order to believe they're OK. But I think the distinction between "there's nothing wrong with X" and "X is an acceptable thing to do" get's blurred very frequently (linguistically and in a deeper sense), and so we feel more comfortable denying that there's anything wrong with porn, BDSM, or sex work, rather than acknowledging the wrongs and saying it's all right (and sometimes even good) to do them anyway.

It might be a bit of a stretch, but I see this as connected to the "unlockeing" project I embarked on earlier. In both cases, there's a tendency to turn the argument into one about whether our actions have potentially troubling consequences for others, when what we should be talking about is what those consequences are, and what good is being created, and whether it's worth it. I think we're reluctant to have these types of conversations, because they involve talking about values, which makes lefty types uncomfortable -- but I think they're exactly the conversations we need to have.

In which something good might happen in Chicago Public Schools

2010-02-19T11:52:00.000-08:00

I'm at Wendell Phillips Academy High School today, one of the worst high schools in Illinois, and one of the schools CPS is proposing to turn around in 2010. This has, of course, been gone about exactly the wrong way: the Phillips community wasn't consulted until the proposal had already been made, there's virtually no opportunity for community input into the process, and it's well established that turnarounds circumvent not only teachers' unions but also Local School Councils.

As a teacher, one of the things that's struck me is that teachers in schools like Phillips are hamstrung by attendance and behavior issues. For one thing, many of the methods that have the best best-case scenarios also involve the worst worst-case scenarios (because they involve increasing student freedom and placing more responsibility on students for their own learning and the learning of others). So if you don't trust your class, you're going to rely on more rigid structures, you're going to make less resources available to your kids, and you're therefore going to provide less opportunities for them to learn. Also, if you only have a third of the class attending regularly, lessons that use multiple days just aren't feasible -- the people who are there the second day won't overlap much with the people who are there the first day. And the best teaching methods require you to emphasize continuity from day to day.

So if you're going to address the failures of teachers, you've got to address the reasons why kids ditch and disrupt classes. But if you talk to kids about why they ditch and disrupt classes (I spent a good amount of time doing this today), the answer, of course, is that they do so because they're not learning anything anyway.

In game theory, this is called an Assurance game: each player has an incentive to cooperate if and only if the other player is cooperating. And the key to Assurance games is in the name: it really matters what you believe the other person is going to do. If you can convince each other and yourselves that cooperation will work, then it will.

This is the big potential advantage of the turnaround process. In normal years, everyone knows Phillips is going to be the same from one year to the next. In a turnaround year, people could come to believe that this year is different -- it sure as hell will feel different, what with none of the faces being familiar. If people do believe this year is different, it will actually be different.

The thing is, no one fucking believes it's going to be different. Talking to students, maybe a quarter of them (the ones that show up, at least) think this is going to spell significant change for the school. They've been given no reason to believe their concerns will be addressed, because no one has even asked them what their concerns are.

In the school business, the community isn't an obstacle to your success, or even just a customer. They're most of the people involved. If they don't feel their perspectives are being taken into account, and that they have the opportunity to change the things they feel need changing, it's not going to work. CPS, increasingly, has been forgetting that.

Which is why it's really exciting that the Hazel Johnson School of Environmental Justice might actually happen.

The backstory here is that Carver High School, which served Riverdale, was closed in 2005 and Carver Military Academy -- a selective, citywide military high school -- was opened in its place. Kids from Carver who either didn't want to wear the uniform or didn't have the grades got sent to Fenger, which is in Roseland (actually, I think at the time everyone was sent to Fenger, and Carver Military accepted only frosh).

The problem is, there are and have been tensions between youth in Riverdale and Roseland -- specifically, between the Altgeld Gardens projects and the Ville -- which erupted into the killing of Derrion Albert a few months ago. This also might have had something to do with the fact that all the Fenger teachers who knew the community had been canned in the turning-around of that school last year.

All of which provides pretty strong support for the idea that people from Riverdale need their own high school. So the community organizations in the area (notably People for Community Recovery) proposed the Hazel Johnson School of Environmental Justice, a new neighborhood school which will take over part of the old Carver building (the military academy is way underutilizing it).

I was sure this wasn't going to happen. It's got the support of the local community (and that community is almost all black), it's a good idea, it's a move toward neighborhood schools with Local School Councils -- all of these are things that tend to doom an idea in the current CPS climate. But when I called People for Community Recovery, they told me that even though it's dropped out of the news, it's still moving forward: they've got some meetings in high places, and they're going before the Board soon.

By the way, it's worth mentioning that if names say anything about what a school is going to be about, this is exactly the right name. Hazel Johnson, one of the founders of the environmental justice movement, is from Altgeld Gardens. At the time, the big problem was air pollution: she discovered in 1982 that 90 percent of the residents suffered from pollution-related ailments, and managed to stop the expansion of toxic waste dumping in the area.

The list goes on (from Chicago Politics, Ward by Ward):

Environmental concerns also seem to affect this ward more than any other. The sprawling Altgeld Gardens CHA project made headlines in 1986 when high levels of asbestos were found in some of the buildings, and residents made vociferous demands that the toxic substance be removed. Those in the southwest portion of the ward faced health tests after five cases of lead poisoning were attributed to a nearby recently closed paint plant. Residents of Maryland Manor, eight homes near 134th Street and the Calumet Expressway, for years drank well water before discovering cyanide, benzene, and toluene in it. Manor residents obtained hookups to Lake Michigan water in 1986.

It's still not over:

Altgeld Gardens is a heavily polluted area, a study by the University of Wisconsin has warned. Dozens of toxic facilities and 90 percent of the city’s landfills are located nearby. There is evidence of exceptionally high rates of miscarriage, stillbirths, and birth defects among residents, along with higher incidence of asthma and skin rashes. Residents say that during Chicago’s hot and humid summers, the smell emanating from the dumps is unbearable.

In a school that is coming about due to community activism among poor black people in housing projects as a way to protect their children from violence, named after an organizer in that community, people might start to believe this is the year. Shit, I might even start believing it.

I'll post more information about this as I find it, but for now, it looks like the places to bear witness are the City Council hearing Monday on the proposed moratorium on school closings, and the School Board meeting Wednesday. I won't be at either, as they (not coincidentally) schedule these things when teachers have to work.

[UPDATE: I recently learned about an innovative strategy for tackling the problem of moving between equilibria in Assurance games like this, taken in Bogota in the late nineties and early oughts.]

In which gay people are dull and suburban.

2010-02-19T08:09:00.000-08:00

This is the first time I've heard someone say this explicitly and treat it as a good thing:

This is all part of a slow shift that is transforming gay culture. During the twentieth century, our battle was to find a place of our own where we could be safely different, and recover some shreds of self-esteem. After millennia of being told our difference was a sickness, we needed a moment to celebrate that difference.

But after that was achieved, our goal changed. We started to realise – once we had the space – that we are actually very similar to our straight siblings. We have the same desire for stability and home-building as everyone else. Our tune changed from “I Am What I Am” to “I Am What You Are.” We wanted enough basic equality to have everything straight people have. It started with demands for marriage – and the logical next step is children. We want the chance to show we are as dull and suburban as everybody else.

Wow. I really don't know how to respond. I'm totally disarmed. This is almost exactly what I would have said to criticize this shift.

One of the things this brings out is that it's not fair to expect queer folks to do all the work of cultural change. That shit gets tiring. And in focusing on the importance of having a queer-not-just-gay movement, I've probably often been guilty of setting a double standard, where changing the way we think about gender and sexuality becomes gay people's job, because they've already been doing so much of it.

And it's fucked up for us to say -- or seem to say -- "You, gay people, can't have in on the institutions of compulsory monogamy, the demonization of single parenting and devaluation of single womanhood, and the suburban fortress mentality. That shit is for straight folks only." And I think sometimes we (I) do seem to say that, in that we're more openly contemptuous of queer people who try to claim those institutions, because they should know better.

Let's put it this way. I fully support the right of soldiers to be gay. But no one has a right to be a soldier. Soldiers kill people. But it's important to be just as diligent in attacking straight soldiers as gay soldiers -- far more diligent, actually, because they're far more numerous.

Straight people: Please stop killing people. Please also stop treating entry into a monogamous relationship as a necessary, defining moment in a person's (especially a woman's) life. Please stop making crucial rights contingent on participation in a long-term, two-person sexual relationship with the State as an implicit third partner. Please do not try to escape poor people and minorities by moving to the suburbs (or Lincoln Park, or Lakeview). You also should know better.

Capitalism and Resistance, Part III: In which we consider the issues facing the movement to resist capitalism.

2010-02-14T10:45:00.000-08:00

If you haven't read parts 1 and 2 of this series, I recommend reading them first.

It seems to me that the two things that are needed to fight this trend are radical sharing and radical trust.

Sharing, because self-sufficiency just doesn't work, because each of us worrying only about hirself just ties up resources that should be used for the people who need them now. And because some of us have bad luck before we have a chance to prepare for that bad luck, and punishing those people for that just doesn't seem right.

When I say "radical" sharing, what I mean is that (1) we can't just share when it's in our interests to (i.e., with people with whom we have formalized agreements, whom we have reason to trust, etc.); (2) we have to share more than feels comfortable, and be willing to take on real hardship for others' sake; and (3) we aim to displace the very notion of personal responsibility, rather than simply alleviate some of its consequences. This means we must destigmatize asking for help, do it ourselves often and sincerely, and not place any obligation on those who receive aid. It also means that, when it is appropriate and possible, we should share in rebellion rather than in oppression: occupy a house that is being foreclosed rather than simply distributing the payments among other community members, hold vigils outside hospitals that refuse to treat sick poor people, use guerrilla gardening, dumpstering and shoplifting as additional ways of supporting hungry people, etc.

This also needs to involve radical trust: a willingness to legitimately place our futures in one another's hands. The organizations that we use to support one another have to be the very same organizations we rely on to help us when we get sick, when we retire, when we have kids, and when we're short on rent. It's a lot to ask of those of us with middle-class backgrounds and desires -- especially since, at first at least, this can seem like a really uncertain prospect. But it will become possible, and secure even, precisely to the degree we invest in it, and we won't be able to invest fully in it if we don't make that leap of faith.

So I'm proposing the Chicago Radical Sharing Network -- following these principles, with no agenda but that which arises from attempts to meet its participants' actual immediate needs.

What do folks think? If you're interested, send me an email (you can do it from my profile).

Capitalism and Resistance, Part II: In which people find ways to deal with insecurity about the future.

2010-02-14T10:44:00.000-08:00

This is an installment in a series begun yesterday, in which I look at why we give the banking industry the power it has, and how we might start trying to take it back. If you haven't read the first installment yet, I recommend reading that first.

Looking back at the example in the last part of this series, in which I was the corn farmer and you were the barley farmer, let's suppose one year I had a bad corn harvest (never mind the fact that bad corn harvests never happen anymore because corn, in the proper sense of the term, doesn't exist in America). Supposing that we've eliminated money from our interactions, what do we do?

Well, there's a chance that you, sweetheart that you are, will simply give me some barley. But there's also a reasonable chance that you won't, and that I'll have to do without both corn and barley for the winter.

I think it's our desire to avoid this that makes us demand that our economy be arranged monetarily. If you want to store something for a rainy day, it makes sense that the value of that thing not depend at all on its freshness, and that that thing have a fairly steady value from year to year. So you need money.

So why banks?

Let's imagine, for a moment, that I have a savings account in a bank, in which I save for, say, retirement -- let's say (optimistically) it pays me one percent interest. Let's also imagine that you have a mortgage from that same bank -- and you're paying the bank six percent interest. And, for the sake of simplicity, that the size of my savings account is exactly the same as the size of your mortgage.

When we discovered this, you would no doubt say to me, "Jeepers, it's too bad we didn't realize this earlier, because I would've happily paid you four percent interest, and we would both have been better off." And I'd say, "Yeah, that would be great." But I wouldn't mean it.

Because the thing is, then you get into that messy business where you might lose your job, or your kid might get sick, or you might even just be a little irresponsible and pay me back late. And then what do I do? Break your kneecaps? I'm not that kinda guy. But I also don't want to just let you not pay me back -- I need that for when I retire.

This, then, is the purpose of banks. We feel morally uncomfortable with making people pay back the money we lend them -- fundamentally, because we think allowances have to be made in this sort of thing. But we're also scared of making allowances with the money that would go to our retirement, or our house, or our health care -- so we put other people in charge of that money, and then act morally outraged when they do the horrible things that need to be done in order to give us that security.

As another example, in a different industry: essentially, the purpose of health insurance is to distribute the costs of health care, so that if one out of every 100 people is sick at any given time, everyone just pays 1% of the cost of being sick all the time, rather than having to cope with the uncertainty of not knowing when you're gonna get sick. In a community without health insurance companies, this would take the form of us actually paying the health care bills of the sick people.

But the problem is, suppose some sick person wandered into our community. I know I wouldn't feel comfortable telling hir we weren't going to support hir sickness. But I wouldn't feel it was fair that we were expected to take care of that person, when ze hadn't taken care of any of us, and we had no reason to believe ze would.

So, in the real world, what we do is have a depersonalized industry tell that person they're going to die (literally). And the thing is, the responsibility is diffused: is it the hospital's fault? What about the health insurance company's? What does it even mean for such an institution to be at fault?

Every time we refuse someone support because it takes away resources we might need later, we are creating the need for such institutions. Every time we refuse someone support because they haven't earned it, haven't "played by the rules," we are legitimizing the mode of thinking that says sometimes people deserve to die for not seeking health insurance until they're 23. It is our insecurity, our unwillingness to trust one another, that creates demand for banking services.

I hope these problems are surmountable. I think they are. Tomorrow I'll talk about how.

Capitalism and Resistance, Part I: In which two farmers encounter an insurmountable problem.

2010-02-14T10:43:00.002-08:00

I've found it interesting, in reading coverage of the recession, to notice that while people often use small-scale examples when talking about the banking crisis, they abandon these small-scale examples when it comes to explaining how the banking crisis affects the rest of the economy. I thought I'd give that a shot.

Let's say I'm a corn farmer, and you're a barley farmer. Every year, I grow more corn than I need, and you grow more barley than you need, but fortunately, I want some barley to get me through the winter, and you want some corn. Since neither of us has any money, what happens is this: I go to the bank and get a loan for $100. I meet up with you, buy some barley for $100, and you buy some corn from me for $100. I bring the bank back their $100, and everyone's happy.

But then one year (let's call that year "2009"), when I go to the bank, it's closed! They got suckered into buying some mortgage-backed securities from Goldman Sachs, they made some predatory loans that didn't pay off, their credit rating got downgraded so they had to put some collateral on all their loans, whatever -- point is, they're closed.

So when I show up to our meeting, I tell you about this, and I say, "So that means I don't have any money to buy your barley."

And we're like, "What are we gonna do?"

So you see why no one ever covers this aspect of the financial crisis this way. Because if you shrink the size of the economy, the solution is obvious. Just give me the damn barley, and I'll give you the corn, and we both get the same results we got before (in fact, we get better results, because what I left out in my description was the little bit of interest I'd be paying to the bank).

The thing is, though, in principle the inclusion of more people in our economic picture doesn't really affect the feasibility of this solution. Add another person, it's fine -- we'll just do the same exchange we would have done if we'd all had the loans, everyone gets the same amount of goods they would have gotten otherwise, and we just eliminate the money. Everything's fine.

Seriously -- imagine for a moment that you hadn't been culturally conditioned to believe in things like markets. Imagine that you're a music teacher, and your boss says to you, "You have to stop teaching those kids music, because some people are refusing to pay of completely unreasonable mortgages."

You'd check if hir pupils were dilated. Then you'd sit hir down, offer hir some toast and tea, and remind hir that you're a fucking music teacher, and that has nothing to do with mortgages. Nothing.

So how did we get to the point where we allow these people, the Lloyd Blankfeins of the world, to have so much control over our lives that they affect whether our kids learn music? They don't have our best interests at heart. I'm not even sure they have hearts. They definitely don't listen to music -- except maybe Wagner and Ted Nugent.

More importantly, how do we rearrange our lives so that these people don't have this sort of power?

Tomorrow I'll start answering these questions by looking at what I think is the key reason for the involvement of the banking sector in our economy: insecurity.

In which I propose a new way of thinking about Quaker business process, and consider how this relates to education.

2010-02-14T10:43:00.001-08:00

For non-Quakers, Quaker Meeting for Business works about like this: Issues are brought before the Meeting, Friends talk about them, and try to reach unity. That unity is not expressed in a vote, and is considered incomplete when anyone feels they cannot assent to it. Quaker Meeting for Worship is conducted in silence, which is broken only when a person thinks the Holy Spirit is leading hir to speak.

Democracy might be thought of, broadly, as the attempt to design the decision-making structure of a society so that its decisions reflect the will of the society as a whole as accurately as possible. By its very nature, any attempt in this direction must be imperfect: because "the will of the society" is a pretty nebulous concept, and because the will of the society changes over time, the best we can hope for is to approximate the will of the society.

It's also worth noting that the goal of democracy should be to have decisions approximate the will of the people they actually govern. If our only goal was to approximate the will of the people making the decision, the easiest way to create a perfect democracy would be to have all decisions made by a single person, since people tend to be quite good at making decisions that approximate their own wills.

The key aspect of this that I want to draw attention to is that since people change over time, the society to be governed by a particular decision is not necessarily (in fact, is never) identical to the society that made the decision. Even if it contains the same members, those members change over time, and they may change their minds about what they want during the period governed by the decision.

Because of this, when we aim for democratic decisions to represent the will of the society, we should at least partly be aiming for them to represent the future will of the society, in addition to the present will of the society.

With this in mind, I'd like to look at methods of approximation, with a specific focus on ways of approximating the future behavior of things. In mathematics, in trying to approximate the behavior of a curve near a particular point, one of the standard tools is a Taylor polynomial.

The most rudimentary instance of this is the Taylor polynomial of degree zero, which attempts to approximate the future behavior of a curve using a horizontal line. In other words, we look at the current position of the curve, and assume that the curve will remain in that position in the future.

For example, the Taylor polynomial of degree zero for e^x near x=1 looks like this:Even though it's a perfect approximation of the current value of e^x, it's not especially good as an estimate of the value of e^x once you get even a short distance away, because it doesn't reflect the fact that e^x actually changes quite quickly.

Most traditional democratic -- i.e., voting-based -- models can be thought of as analogous to this. Since a vote can only represent an individual's view at a particular moment, the most we can hope for from any system that bases its decision-making on a vote is that it be a perfect approximation of the current will of the society (and usually it's not even that, since most of our methods of taking into account differences in strength of opinion, or of looking at multiple options, are ham-fisted at best).

The next step in the Taylor approximation process -- the Taylor polynomial of degree 1 -- attempts to create an function that not only matches the current position of the curve, but also its rate of change. It creates a tangent line to the curve. In the case of e^x near x=1, the Taylor polynomial of degree 1 looks like this (shown in blue):
It goes without saying that degree-1 Taylor polynomials tend to be much better than degree-0 approximations.

And this, I think, is part of the beauty of Quaker business process. Because the decision is shaped in exactly the same way as the actual will of the society -- through conversation, convincement, careful listening, and synthesis -- our decision-making process provides a better approximation of our future views. Because opinions don't change by voting, but by conversation and synthesis, decisions made through voting will tend to be far less effective at approximating future changes of opinion than decisions made through more organic processes.

Problems within Quaker and Quaker-like processes

Some Quaker readers might find my analysis so far disturbingly secular. Quakers don't tend to think of our business process in secular terms -- I've heard many Quakers adamantly reject the use of terms like "consensus" to describe Quaker process, because these secular terms don't accurately capture the religious aspect of our business process. I've heard Quakers refer to our business process as being about seeking "consensus not just with one another but with God," or that it's important that our decisions capture "the Light in each of us" rather than simply each of our opinions.

And, despite the lack of "God talk" in the above, I do think the religious aspect of Quaker business process has an important place in our understanding of its value. That place, I think, can be seen in looking at the times when Quaker and Quaker-like processes have failed to produce unity.

Radical groups adopting Quaker-like processes have had mixed results. Within the peace and anti-nuclear movement, there are great accounts of the difficulties presented by Quaker-like process. Francesca Polletta, in Freedom is an Endless Meeting, talks about how in a movement whose rhetoric centered around a politics of absolute conscience, Quaker process gave the opportunity for people, based on their individual consciences, to stand in the way of the collective will, unaffected by either the arguments of their opponents or the relative unpopularity of their beliefs.

Murray Bookchin offers a different account, in talking about the Clamshell Alliance, a nonviolent direct action movement opposing the construction of the Seabrook Nuclear Power Plant:

I can personally attest to the fact that within the Clamshell Alliance, consensus was fostered by often cynical Quakers and by members of a dubiously "anarchic" commune that was located in Montague, Massachusetts. This small, tightly knit faction, unified by its own hidden agendas, was able to manipulate many Clamshell members into subordinating their goodwill and idealistic commitments to those opportunistic agendas. The de facto leaders of the Clamshell overrode the rights and ideals of the innumerable individuals who entered it and undermined their morale and will.

In order for that clique to create full consensus on a decision, minority dissenters were often subtly urged or psychologically coerced to decline to vote on a troubling issue, inasmuch as their dissent would essentially amount to a one-person veto. This practice, called "standing aside" in American consensus processes, all too often involved intimidation of the dissenters, to the point that they completely withdrew from the decision-making process, rather than make an honorable and continuing expression of their dissent by voting, even as a minority, in accordance with their views. Having withdrawn, they ceased to be political beings -- so that a "decision" could be made. More than one "decision" in the Clamshell Alliance was made by pressuring dissenters into silence and, through a chain of such intimidations, "consensus" was ultimately achieved only after dissenting members nullified themselves as participants in the process.

Andrew Cornell also talks about how the focus on consensus within the Movement for a New Society led to a de-radicalization of the movement, as new members arrived who were more interested in the anarchist, countercultural lifestyle MNS offered than in the nonviolent direct action that had been its hallmark early on.

Problems with this decision-making model have occurred within Quaker meetings, as well. In Beyond Majority Rule, Michael Sheeran talks about how birthright Friends (people who were members of Meetings by virtue of having been born to Quaker parents) who did not attend Meeting showed up to Meeting for Business in order to block decisions regarding integration and
anti-racist action.

I think, though, that we can think of all of these negative experiences, not as flaws in the Quaker business process itself, but as stagnation of the general will that the process is supposed to reflect. Quaker process can only work as an approximation of future changes in our opinion if our opinions are actually subject to change -- if we are actually following through on the process of re-examining our opinions by conversation, convincement and synthesis. If not, then even when people can cajole a victory out of the process itself -- in ways like what Bookchin was describing -- this victory is itself doomed to failure, since it doesn't represent actual evolution of will.

It is in the process of persuasion and synthesis that I see the action of God in our meetings. Although secular, cynical methods can be used to manipulate the business process to achieve particular results, those results will be hollow without underlying efforts to hear the Light in one another, and to allow the sense of meeting to emerge from this practice. And it's here that I see the value of the Meeting for Worship -- by learning to listen to one another speak out of the silence, to suppress our initial responses, and to listen to one another's messages as we would the sermon of a priest, we prepare ourselves to be shaped into the sort of unity which can be reflected in our business process.

What This Means for Quaker Education

In thinking about education, it's important to think about who the education process is for. Most of us agree that education must be for the student -- but not for the student as ze is now, but for the student as ze shall be.

How can we best craft a decision-making process that can approximate who the child will be in several years? Looking at the principles we were talking about above, it's important to incorporate knowledge about the direction in which the child is moving, as well as the child's current self.

Teachers are valuable in this process because they see enough children grow to understand how our priorities change as we get older. Their theoretical background in child development may also be useful, although it must continually be questioned, because most of our theories of child development hinge on the fiction of a "normal" child, a concept which inevitably confuses our notions of the way most children do develop with our notions of how all children should develop. They are also the people whose focus is most completely on the development of the child, rather than on the current state of the child.

Parents are also really important, because they ideally have the most complete knowledge of the child's environment, and are best equipped to predict the future shape of that environment.

And, of course, we mustn't leave out the child. The child ideally has the most complete knowledge of who they are now (although the reflection that leads to this knowledge is an important skill in itself) -- and who the child is now is an immensely important component of who the child will become.

It's crucial that none of these components be left out of our decision-making process. When we assess children's current status and plan for their future, we must endeavor to base that decision on the best possible approximation of what the child will want to have happened, when they look back. And none of those parties is equipped to provide that picture independently.

This process of unity-seeking among teacher, parent and child is the most important component of education. Ignoring children can lead us to ignore the need for individuality, and to see children as clay to be shaped rather than as people to be nurtured. Ignoring parents can lead us to ignore the child's social and emotional development by neglecting the importance of developing relationships with others. Ignoring teachers can lead us to a self-absorbed cowardice, which cares only for present well-being and flees from challenge and conflict.

As Quakers, we believe God makes Hir will known through our corporate life, and that each of us has an irreplaceable contribution to make to that Whole. Let's not forget that, when we think about how we teach our children.

Postscript: I had in my mind while I was writing this post the following quote from G.K. Chesterton, which I first found in Dorothy Day's autobiography:

Tradition is democracy extended through time. Tradition means giving the vote to that most obscure of classes, our ancestors. Tradition is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who are walking about.

I couldn't find a way of using it, in particular because I'm talking about the exact opposite conception of "democracy extended through time" -- one which attempts to enfranchise those who do not yet exist, rather than those who no longer exist. I think this is the truer conception of democracy, as I defined it above, but I confess I find something beautiful in Chesterton's conception as well.

For the record, just in case: When I'm dead, don't worry about making sure I'm enfranchised. You fuckers do whatever the hell you want.

In which we all boycott the Olympics together.

2010-02-12T11:05:00.001-08:00

Everyone I talked to in Chicago (well, almost everyone) during Daley's infamous, ill-fated Chicago 2016 bid recognized the Olympics were going to be bad for Chicago. Incurring huge amounts of public debt to displace poor people to make way for rich tourists who were going to be mostly confined to a small, tightly-controlled, corporate-dominated area just didn't sound like our vision of economic development.

But then the IOC chooses Rio instead, and we all breathe a sigh of relief, and go about our daily lives. It reminds me of that moment in Catch-22 when the Chaplain hears about a plane crash:

Twelve men killed -- how ghastly, how very, very awful! His feeling of terror grew. He prayed instinctively that Yossarian, Nately, Hungry Joe and his other friends would not be listed among the victims, then berated himself repentantly, for to pray for their safety was to pray for the death of other young men he did not even know.

The Olympics are a terrible phenomenon, no matter what city they're in. They're a giveaway of public funds to have a corporate event that uses amateur athletes to promote merchandise, that inevitably involves the displacement of poor people, the covering-up of visible poverty through police crackdowns on homeless people, and the degradation of the local environment.

Don't watch them. Even if you don't have a Nielsen box, and so your watching doesn't directly give financial support to them, you're still participating a culture that valorizes athletic spectacles even when they destroy communities.

For more on all of this, check out the Olympic Resistance Network, a direct action organization fighting the Winter Olympics.

In which I talk about unlearning hegemonic masculinity.

2010-02-10T15:37:00.001-08:00

Something amazing happened to me yesterday. I was reading an old Feministing post about feminist masculinity, and the ad on the page linked to this. I almost thought it was supposed to be ironic.

I was reading that post because I'd been having a conversation with Jonathan T, who's busy fighting the good fight against the conservative takeover of Shimer College, about feminist masculinity, and about how because most feminist writing is (rightly) directed at an audience of women, there aren't that many resources available for feminist men trying to rethink their masculinity. People talk about the importance of rethinking masculinity, but there are few resources for men who want to unlearn the harmful habits they've picked up.

The problem, I think, is that the patriarchy largely feeds on our subconscious beliefs about women. Our conscious beliefs can change, and we can try to base our actions around these conscious beliefs, but many of the habits of mind we've picked up will persist, and will continue to have effects on our choices of friends and lovers, our use of language, our ways of presenting ourselves, etc., and these effects serve to reinforce the patriarchy. So I think it's important for us to think about how to unlearn those habits of mind.

I'm not sure I think it's appropriate to talk about this project in terms of feminist masculinity. To me, that phrase carries the baggage of implying that we're going to excise the problematic parts of masculinity, and replace them with a new, virtuous masculinity -- which weirds me out because conceptions of masculine virtue (including, I suppose, use of the word "virtue," which is etymologically roughly equivalent to "manliness") are some of the very same problematic parts of masculinity that we're trying to be rid of.

Basically, what I'm saying is, once we've gotten rid of the fucked-up parts of masculinity, we don't need to refer to what's left as "masculinity." Because if we've really gotten rid of the fucked-up parts, the gender binary should cease to matter. So let's just talk about unlearning problematic habits of mind.

I've got a couple of techniques that have worked for me.

1. Shut the fuck up and listen.

As men, we are taught to be assertive/aggressive in social interactions. This is partly problematic in itself, because the counterpart is the expectation that women will be submissive. But it's also fucked up because we don't hear shit that we need to, because we're busy talking. I've found it really useful to actively stop myself from responding to things I'm told -- especially by women, people of color, or queer people, and especially when they're criticizing me or privileged groups I belong to -- until later, when I've taken the time to listen and to think about what they're saying.

This is especially important because it helps you unlearn the defensiveness that's built into us, as men, as a response to criticism. I remember having furious objections to people talking about rape culture, because as I was interpreting it, I was being accused of participating in rape -- which is a pretty heady accusation. Once I got past that defensiveness, though, of course there's a great deal of truth to arguments about rape culture.

Another piece of this that's important is that it gets your subconscious to realize what (hopefully) your conscious mind already knows: that just because someone isn't jumping on the ends of other people's sentences to get a word in, doesn't mean they don't have anything to say. It helps you get around your tendency to monopolize conversations, by helping you to the realization that other people -- even people who haven't been trained to be assertive -- have shit to say too.

Hopefully, this will also help change the way you think about women. By forcing ourselves to listen, to not try to change the subject to something we know about, to view our conversations with women as opportunities to learn, we can hopefully start viewing women in terms of what they think and say, instead of in terms of their bodies. The more experience we have with what women do think and say, by giving them chances to speak, the more opportunity we have to define them that way.

2. Practice absolute nonviolence.

It's really difficult, as a man, to get around the idea of yourself as a protector of "helpless" people (women and, if you have them, children) around you. This casts women as victims who can do nothing to secure their own well-being without you. As long as you're thinking of yourself as their protector and acting as their protector, you're denying them opportunities to prove you wrong.

That, on its face, is just an argument for a reluctance to use violence. But even casting your own violent action as the last resort if someone else is endangered is problematic, because it's still reinforcing the idea that women, in the end, need men for protection. Also, Geoffrey Canada, in Fist, Stick, Knife, Gun, talked about how the willingness to use force in an emergency leads us to create those emergencies for ourselves as ways of demonstrating our masculinity:

At first I continued to avoid the gang of teenagers. I crossed the street or turned down another block when I saw them. But slowly as I carried the gun with me day after day, my attitude began to change. I began to think, "Why should I have to walk an extra block? Why should I feel that I have to cross the street or look down when I pass those kids?" By the end of two weeks I had convinced myself that all the habits I had cultivated to avoid conflict with the gang were unnecessarily conciliatory.

My behavior when I went outside began to change. I stopped going out of my way, or crossing the street, or avoiding eye contact when I passed the gang. In fact, I began to do the opposite. I would choose to go to the grocery store on the side of the street where the gang was gathered. I would walk through them head up, eyes challenging, hand in my coat pocket, finger on the trigger. I was prepared to shoot to kill to defend myself. (source)

Your willingness to fight in an emergency will lead to your broadening of your understanding of emergencies in ways that deny women's ability to defend themselves.

The knowledge that we're not going to end a conflict in violence also changes the way we handle conflicts, and makes us less aggressive and less domineering in our disagreements. This leads to #3:

3. Actively lose face.

A lot of the damaging aspects of our masculinity are reinforced by our unwillingness to look unmanly in front of others. If we actively lose face by refusing to participate in hegemonic masculinity -- even though internally we might be scared shitless of being seen as pussies -- we can deny this mechanism a lot of its power. Over time, others will expect less violent masculinity from you, and so it'll become less scary to back off from that masculinity.

This sounds really hard, but if you start small -- sometimes in ways no one but you consciously notices -- you can make a lot of progress. Sit "like a girl." Wear a dress in public. Refuse to get worked up -- "Yes, I am going to let him do that, because I don't think it's worth fighting over." Start taking pride in emasculating yourself. Eventually, your unmanliness starts to seem like a natural part of your masculinity, and you start to realize that people have stopped bothering to think less of you for it (which you can think of as having nothing left to lose, but either way, it's working for me so far.

4. Stop watching sexist porn.

I've become convinced this is completely necessary. It's fucking terrible for you. It really does shape what you think is hot, in ways that are unacceptable. Not only in the obvious ways -- unreasonable expectations of women's bodies, dehumanizing sex acts, rape and exploitation themes -- but also in that it makes you think sex should be pandering to you rather than challenging you.

Go cold turkey with me. Please. It is as hard as it sounds. Do it anyway.

Unfortunately, for many of us, a great deal of damage has been done already. It's less clear what to do about this, but here are a couple of thoughts:

5. Explore kink.

There are whole worlds of people out there who think all kinds of shit is hot. Looking around the kink scene may or may not change your love for money shots or schoolgirls, but it can make you see it in a new light -- as a fetish, rather than as normative. It gives you a language in which to talk about your desires that doesn't imply that that's just what sex should be about. It also puts you in a framework that very strongly emphasizes the importance of consent, and of valuing your partner's agency even as you subvert it.

Also, there, you'll find a lot of people who have believed their desires for specific acts or styles of sex was wrong, and who haven't been able to completely rid themselves of those desires.

There's also the issue of what categories of women we find hot -- and since I can't do better than fromthetropics's description of it here, I'll just quote it:

What we have here is male desire for women. This is obvious. Specifically, white male desire for white women. This is also obvious. But it is not merely a desire, it is a desire to (sexually) conquer and subjugate (white) women (in order to appear masculine). Still obvious.

What is less obvious is that it invites all men to express their masculinity by conquering, so to speak, white women. Conquering WOC is easy. But to conquer white women? – now that’s the pinnacle of masculinity for all men in a white dominated society. The emphasis is on masculinity and men. It is not about women striving to be on top of the food chain, hence it is not about whether or not WOC feel as though their beauty is being (de)valued. It is about the male struggle to be at the top of the food chain, and whether or not their masculinity is being (de)valued.

There's no doubt that this constitutes a lot of what sexuality is about for many of us. And there's no doubt that the most important first step to remedy this has to be to stop seeing our sexuality in terms of conquest, and therefore viewing women as potential objects of sexual conquest (which has a lot to do with our desire to "protect" them, as well).

But having talked about some steps we can take to remedy our conquest-based sexualities, I still want to address our hierarchies of sexual desire. Extending our conquest-based desire to women of color, fat women, women with disabilities and other women who don't meet our expectations of femininity won't do anyone much good, but reforming other aspects of our thinking and feeling about sexuality without addressing the hierarchy that we create among women based on their bodies seems incomplete.

My one suggestion on the subject is based on fromthetropics's later comment that "it's easier for people (of all colors) to objectify someone who seems very different from them." Here, I'd change the word "different" to "unfamiliar." If you're looking at a body that's unlike any body you've seen before, it can be difficult to remember that there's an actual person, with real opinions and stuff, inside that body. In your curiosity, you can turn the person into a specimen rather than a human -- which renders them fine, if not particularly important, as targets for a conquering sexuality, but completely incomprehensible as partners in a truly human sexuality.

6. Explore different types of bodies.

It should go without saying -- but I'll say it anyway because all too often it doesn't -- that this exploration of bodies should always be done with the utmost respect for the owners of those bodies. After we just got done talking about the turning of real people into specimens, please don't go and do that.

But some people do, voluntarily, put their bodies on display. Take advantage of that. Find out what fat bodies, bodies of color, bodies with disabilities, are like, so that you can get over how weird they are already and see the beauty in them -- both in the bodies themselves and in the people they contain.

This was the scariest post I've written. I'm sure I fucked it up in places, left some things out that were important, said some things I didn't mean to say. I'm sorry. But I think it's important for us to have concrete steps we can take -- in our lives as well as in therapy sessions -- to unmake some of the horrors that masculinity has created in our brains. I think some of these things have worked for me, but I have a long way to go. Please, everyone, share thoughts about what I and other feminist men can do better.

UPDATE: With regard to sexist porn, check out Cindy Gallop being the shit.

In which I begin to unlocke my thinking about queer sexualities

2010-02-10T10:12:00.000-08:00

Most of the standard arguments about the legitimacy of queer relationships center on the idea that they're harmless -- that queer relationships are between the two people involved, and everyone else should just butt out of their private business. I worry about this type of argument, and I think it's time that we reexamine it.

In the first place, I think the premise is false. Queer relationships do have an effect on heterosexuals. The presence of openly queer people (and I assume ) transforms our discourse on sexual relationships, and it seems like queer people in particular should be sensitive to the ways that discourses can have very real effects on people's lives. My relationship with a woman is undoubtedly shaped by the queer people in the society around us, and I think we should stop pretending otherwise.

More importantly, though, this style of argument is part of a discourse, stemming, I think, originally from Locke, that there are essentially two types of activities. On the one hand, there are private activities (which for capitalist apologists includes what you do with your property, and for liberals tends to include things like speech, religion and sexuality), which, because they don't affect anyone else, should not be regulated by the state. On the other hand, you have public activities (which for socialists include property relations, and for capitalist apologists mostly only includes the sorts of things that get classified as crimes -- violent acts and acts that affect someone else's property).

Historically, radicals' objections to this kind of framework have mostly been about switching things from one list to another -- sexuality, speech and (sometimes) religion to the "private" list, employment, gun ownership and (at other times) religion to the "public" list, etc. This can be seen as progress because it entails a recognition that employment relations are not always harmless and are often coercive, that no one actually followed the Lockean Proviso, and that diversity of opinions shouldn't be criminalized.

The problem, though, is that the original structure is left intact. This structure is troubling partly because it relies on the false notion that there are actions that have no effect on others. But it's also based on the ethical principle which says you can do whatever you want as long as you're not actively harming anyone else. This allows us to disavow our collective responsibility for others' suffering -- as long as we're not directly causing the harm, it's considered legitimate to allow the harm to continue.

I think it's important that we disavow this type of principle, and focus on actively creating good and alleviating suffering. In the face of the evils that can be created passively through thoughtless self-absorption, I think it's important that we feel a real sense of responsibility for one another. This entails abandoning the individualism which says that some of our actions are private -- all of our actions (and all of our inaction) should be thought of in terms of their potential ramifications on others, and we should be rid of the idea that any piece of us is truly individual, at least in the sense of separate or independent from others.

So, with that in mind, I think it's worthwhile to begin talking about things that have previously been seen as private -- and therefore morally neutral -- from a new perspective, to combat the pervasiveness of that asshole John Locke. I call it "unlockeing." For now, I'd like to address some of the ways I think the existence of queer sexualities creates a positive good, and enriches my life.

Queer relationships help to show us what sexual relationships that don't center on men's subjugation of women look like.
Queer relationships give women options that don't involve relationships with men, which may give women who do choose relationships with men increased bargaining power.
Queer sexualities deepen our understanding of sexual choice, and make us all feel freer to explore our own sexual interests.
Queer sex has been instrumental in developing our understandings about sexual pleasure -- especially for women.
Queer theory has been an important part of our understanding of the way our categories shape our thinking, and the way discourse shapes our lives.
Queer people have rethought gender in ways that allow all of us to more consciously shape our gender presentation.
Queer people, perhaps partly because of the lack of acceptance of their relationships, have helped us rethink monogamy and partnering.
Gay bars. 'Nuff said.

Beyond the arguments about the distinction between private and public action, as someone who's deeply grateful for the role that queer people and queerness have played in my personal development, it offends me to see queerness reduced to mere neutrality.

In which I announce my candidacy for Lieutenant Governor of Illinois

2010-02-08T15:51:00.000-08:00

I appreciate Governor Quinn's willingness to open the position of Lieutenant Governor to applications from the public. The Democratic Party has, yet again, lived up to its name. I value the courage he's shown in tackling the elitism and insider politics that plague Illinois government, and I have faith that my application will be taken seriously, in the spirit in which it is intended.

Here's how Quinn described what he's looking for in a running mate:

I want to run with somebody who's qualified to be governor, who has a record of public service, someone who is able to speak to ordinary, everyday people in plain language about the importance of the economy and someone who also stands up for the progressive values of the Democratic party

I think I meet these criteria.

Additionally, I have experience in many of the policy areas our state government needs to tackle in the next term. As a teacher, I have seen firsthand the improvements our educational system needs, and I have big ideas about how to enable students to succeed. As a displaced teacher, I also have firsthand experience with the effects of shortfalls in educational funding.

The Democratic Party has a proud tradition of representing working people in America. As one of very few candidates who do not earn above the state's median income, I am a part of that tradition. I also have experience balancing a budget, even when things get tight – something I know our state government is having trouble with.

It's also worth mentioning, since it seems like it's something we've been having trouble with lately, that I have never been violent toward any of the women in my life. I have also never been involved in predatory lending.

Here are a few of the things I would try to use this office to do:

Abolish legal marriage, and replace it with packages of rights and supports granted on a per-household basis, without regard for sexual orientation, relationship status, or age.
Investigate what true equality for all genders would look like, and how it can be achieved.
Rethink the way we organize our households to allow more collective responsibility for the healthy development of our children, and distribute the burdens and blessings of child-rearing more equally among genders.
Rethink the phrase “healthy development of our children.”
Change the Illinois constitution to allow for multiple tax brackets, rather than the flat-tax-with-exemptions system in place now. Use this reformed tax system to drastically raise taxes on all income above $200,000 per year, and a sliding scale for incomes in the upper-middle range.
Abolish inheritance. Use the funds this generates to empower all youth to choose their educational and career outcomes.
Change the Illinois constitution to create participatory, direct democracy on a local level, and to allow all power to rest in these local governments, except those powers they specifically vest in the state.
Abolish corporations. Redistribute all corporate wealth to cooperatives, workers' councils, and local governments.
Abolish the sales tax.
Dissolve the Illinois National Guard. Replace it with a corps of teachers, community organizers, engineers, doctors, nurses, and other people whose jobs involve generating value.
Institute an immediate moratorium on all prison sentences. Reinvent the justice system as a place for the resolution of conflicts – the set of practices Jesus Christ referred to collectively as “binding and loosing.”
Immediately begin the reintegration of prisoners into society.
Disarm police.
Pay massive reparations to black people and American Indians.
Abolish tax increment financing.
Call for a federal constitutional convention to address some of the same issues on a federal level.

I think I've got a real chance here, folks.

Update: Check out my campaign's official position on the Participatory Socialist International.

Per for Lieutenant Governor: In which I endorse, with reservations, the Proposal for a Participatory Socialist International

2010-02-08T11:23:00.000-08:00

Z Communications has released a Proposal for a Participatory Socialist International, presumably in response to Hugo Chávez's call for the creation of a Fifth International at a meeting in Caracas.

I think it's important that the Quinn/Per administration have a position on this. And, while I can't speak for Pat Quinn, I'm sure, given his history of strong support for progressive politics, and his expectation that his running mate have a record of standing up for progressive values, he would not only approve of my issuing this statement, but will freely endorse it once I am selected as the Democratic candidate for Lieutenant Governor of Illinois.

First, let me say that I'm skeptical about efforts like these. Even beyond my skepticism about any organization created by Hugo Chávez, I worry about the extent to which an International could be truly democratic. Even if Chávez wasn't running it, the first meeting would be dominated by people who could make it to Caracas -- aside from Venezuelans, that means either relatively rich folks or folks with the backing of powerful institutions such as states. Here's how the ZCom proposal addresses democracy:

“democracy” or perhaps even a more inspiring conception of “people’s power,” “participatory democracy,” or “self management,” to foster participation and equitable influence for all."

member groups would have a wide range of sizes - but since the International’s decisions would not bind groups other than regarding the collective International agenda, a good way to arrive at decisions might be serious discussion and exploration, followed by polls of the whole International membership to see peoples’ leanings, followed by refinements of proposals to seek greater support and to allow dissidents to make their case, culminating in final votes of the membership.

We need more here -- we need specific efforts to combat the dominance of rich white folks from developed countries.

As a prefigurative organization, it's important that the Participatory Socialist International not only refrain from actively undemocratic processes, but that it work to combat existing inequalities of influence and access. As Illinois's Lieutenant Governor, I will work to make sure the Participatory Socialist International lives up to its goals by ensuring equality of access to all decision-making structures, formal and informal.

On a related note, it's important that the Participatory Socialist International work to reach out to people of color, women and queer people, and to make sure these voices are heard prominently In the proposal, women's issues were recognized as significant, but no attention was paid to the needs of women within revolutionary movements, or the importance of fighting sexism within the International itself. If our organization is to be the seed of the future society, it's important that we not allow queers, women and people of color to be marginalized within our ranks, and that we dismantle oppressive structures and habits of mind within our community, even as we seek to reform the world.

As Lieutenant Governor, I will pressure the International to make sure its internal practices are consistent with its vision for a society free of gender-, race-, and sexuality-based oppression.

I will also push the International to do more to prioritize equitable distribution of resources among societies. Here's what the proposal says about the distribution of wealth within societies:

economic production, consumption, and allocation be classless - which includes equitable access for all to quality education, health care, food, water, sanitation, housing, meaningful and dignified work, and the instruments and conditions for personal fulfillment

Here's what it says about the distribution of wealth between societies:

"international trade, communication, and other interactions attain peace and justice while dismantling all vestiges of colonialism and imperialism - which includes canceling the debt of nations of the global south and reconstructing international norms and relations to move toward an equitable and just community of equally endowed nations"

The former is much more radical. If they talked only about canceling debts within a society, and moving towards an equitable and just community of equally endowed individuals, this could very well involve the maintenance of class and, indeed, capitalism -- we could be talking about Scandinavian-style "social democracy."

In addition to these problems, the politics of queer people were drastically underrepresented in the proposal: queer sexualities were mentioned only twice, and then in passing, and issues of gender identity were not discussed at all.

As Lieutenant Governor, I will use my bully pulpit to bring queer issues to the forefront of the International's agenda, and make sure rights of sexual choice and gender identification are an important part of the International's platform. I will make sure the International's vision for the reshaping of our child-rearing and family structures to end oppression of women also explicitly includes welcoming and supporting families of all compositions.

I was also disappointed by the lack of discussion of cultural change in the Participatory Socialist International's proposed platform. I don't believe any incentive system, no matter how well-designed, is impossible to game – and so it's important that we recognize that change can't come only through a change in the incentives, but also through a transition from a culture of self-interest to a culture of sharing.

As Lieutenant Governor, I will push the Fifth International to consider a politics of sharing, and to think about what this means for our internal organization as a prefigurative movement.

Unfortunately, I'm not sure, even if a Participatory Socialist International comes to fruition, that it will meet these key criteria. It seems quite likely that, whether or not I am chosen as Quinn's running mate, the Fifth International will be less radically democratic than I hope, and Illinois will refuse to participate.

In which Scott Lee Cohen is accused of "steroid and domestic abuse"

2010-02-05T16:57:00.000-08:00

That was the way Chicago Public Radio just referred to the charges against the Democratic candidate-elect for Lieutenant Governor of Illinois.

Maybe this is nitpicky, but "steroid and domestic abuse"? Really? That's a complete misuse of parallel structure, given that the two meanings of "abuse" in these sentences are totally different. It's like referring to "green and hand jobs," or "Colombian and Diet Coke," or "spiking volleyballs and drinks." Since the shared word between the phrases carries a different meaning in each phrase, using them together is confusing at best.

The reason why it's particularly egregious in this case, though, is because in many people's heads, drug abuse and domestic violence are still thought of as parallel, in that both of them are essentially private affairs. If you want to fuck up your body or your relationship, the logic goes, that's up to you -- because your relationship (and by implication, your partner) is yours to fuck up if you so choose.

It's not like this phenomenon is rare, either -- a Google search turns up 1.7 million results for "drug and domestic abuse."

Also in two articles about allegations that he "forced himself sexually on his ex-wife," Huffington Post and the Sun-Times refuse to use the "R" word to describe this -- I guess because when it's your wife, it's a domestic dispute rather than rape.

Of course, there are real connections between steroid use and domestic violence that we should be talking about -- both directly through skyrocketing testosterone levels, and indirectly because both spring from a conception of masculinity in terms of dominance through aggression.

While we're at it, it's worth mentioning that the guy's a pawnbroker on 48th and Ashland who poured $2 million of ~~poor black people's~~ his own money into his campaign.

Dear Democratic Party of Illinois: this is why I will never, ever vote for you.

Dear voters of Illinois: what made this seem like a good idea? Has anyone heard anything good about Scott Lee Cohen?

In which a near-fuckup on my part explains why no one knows anything.

2010-02-04T15:56:00.002-08:00

As a substitute teacher, your job mostly bears little resemblance to teaching, because you're constrained by teachers' instructions, which assume that you're not qualified to teach, because most substitutes aren't. Occasionally, teachers don't leave lesson plans ("lesson plans" is the euphemism of choice for "worksheets"), which at least gives you the option of actually teaching.

Today I was given that option, in a special-ed science class that had just transitioned from chemistry to physics. Another teacher in the science department suggested that I might talk to them about unit conversions.

I started class -- once we'd talked a little about what they'd done so far -- by asking them if they knew how many meters were in a kilometer. Most of them didn't. I started to talk about how many meters actually were in a kilometer, before thinking to stop and ask, "Do you guys know how big a meter is? Can you hold your hands up about a meter apart?"

Blank stares.

I had been ready to teach kids about how to convert between two concepts which might, as far as they were concerned, have been imaginary.

I got to thinking about the implications of this when I read an LA Times piece about how frequently journalists confuse "million" and "billion. It features the following assessment of the causes of the problem, by a professor of statistical literacy:

Schield, who is about to publish a research paper on statistical literacy for journalists, said journalists are failed by an educational system that doesn't distinguish well between math and quantitative literacy, and they're not alone.

The implication here is that, if the educational establishment were only aware that mathematics was different from quantitative literacy, we would be better at teaching the latter.

But from looking at what I was doing, it seems obvious that the problem was precisely that I was aware that mathematics (used in the narrow sense of "skill at manipulating quantities") and numeracy (here, in the sense of "ability to make meaning out of numerical expression") were distinct, and that my job was to teach the mathematics, rather than to teach quantitative literacy.

My experience in education classes backs up a thousand times over the idea that if math teachers believe that something isn't math, they won't fucking teach it. It's someone else's job. English teachers aren't teaching math, so why would we teach kids how to read? And ultimately, it's this disjointedness, this sense of subjects as distinct, that gives rise to our troubles with quantitative literacy in the first place. If we had never decided that mathematics could be done without attention to the meanings of the numbers -- if we had kept our teaching of mathematics tied to our efforts to solve actual problems -- we would recognize that mathematics, to the extent that it is useful*, is inseparable from quantitative literacy, and from scientific reasoning, and even from social justice (to the extent that how you represent, quantify and measure something has significant political implications).

It's not easy to reverse these thought patterns. It seems clear to me, though, that adding a new subject called quantitative literacy won't help in any deep sense. What it will do is create a new set of things that aren't anyone's job in particular: Is the process of looking at a graph and using it to sketch a line of fit quantitative literacy, or mathematics? How about using that line to extrapolate the trend shown? Choosing how to draw the graph to effectively show your data is quantitative literacy, but the decision of what the graph should show probably grows out of your experiment, which is science -- and the actual numerical analysis of that data is math, but describing the results of that data is back to quantitative literacy. And what about aesthetic decisions about your graphs? Some graphs, in addition to being effective, are also beautiful -- should quantitative literacy teachers be teaching that too, or is that the job of art teachers? (Remember when we had those?) And just how quantitative does something have to be before the English teacher can safely ignore it? Or do you read different parts of the same piece in different classes?

Creating new departments and new classes doesn't solve anything. The endless partitioning of knowledge, starting at younger and younger ages, hurts people.

* Please don't take this as disparaging pure math. I love pure math. But pure math should never be considered necessary for life, and should always be treated as optional. To the extent that we believe all kids should take math, we cannot be talking about pure math.

In which white folks get to decide what's racist.

2010-02-03T15:34:00.000-08:00

I never thought I'd be siding with Sarah Palin against Matt Taibbi, but, well...

Here's what she said:

The Obama Administration’s Chief of Staff scolded participants, calling them, “F---ing retarded,” according to several participants, as reported in the Wall Street Journal.

Just as we’d be appalled if any public figure of Rahm’s stature ever used the “N-word” or other such inappropriate language, Rahm’s slur on all God’s children with cognitive and developmental disabilities – and the people who love them – is unacceptable, and it’s heartbreaking.

Here's what he said:

[W]e’re going to have to get another soap opera over somebody using a naughty word.
I think we ought to get it over with once and for all and ask all the people who are interested in banning words to get together and form their inevitable committee on word propriety. I think it would be a great thing if we could just get the list together ahead of time, along with what the committee feels the appropriate sanction is for each word. “Ho” we know is a fireable word, as is “niggardly,” but what about “snapper”? How about “curry muncher”? What is the appropriate punishment for a “What’s wrong, do you have sand in your vagina?” joke? I mean there are so many unknowns right now, nobody knows where he or she stands.

One of the first, most obvious problems here is the “naughty-words” argument – that, since the objections are to use of language, objections to slurs based on race, sexual orientation, disability status, etc., must be the same sort of thing as objections to obscenity. This, of course, denies the cultural context of these words – they're not objected to on a puritanical basis, but on the basis of their position in a tradition of intimidation and oppression. Hate speech has a performative component, in that it serves to further marginalize oppressed groups.

There's also a weird element where Taibbi seems not to be able to tell the difference between objecting to something and wanting it banned. I obviously can't (and wouldn't want to) speak for Sarah Palin here, but it seems like what she's doing is objecting to someone's use of a word that serves to further the marginalization of disenfranchised communities – and arguing that we shouldn't give more power to people who use those opportunities to do this. There's all the difference in the world between that and saying that ordinary people should be punished for using such words, or that the machinery of law and order should get involved in such a case.

More fundamentally, though, the “They're just words, people” attitude reflects Taibbi's belief that this isn't really a serious problem – and implied in this is the belief that he gets to decide whether it's a serious problem. This idea that rich, white, cisgendered, straight, able-bodied men should be able to decide when and how we should worry about classism, racism, sexism and gender oppression, heterosexism, and ableism is, of course, preposterous, but it seems remarkably prevalent.

Look at Chris Matthews. Most aspects of this have been covered well by others. One thing I haven't seen many people talk about, though, is that Chris Matthews implicitly admitted that his primary experience of racism was his inability to listen to a black person talk without constantly thinking about race. But yet, somehow, when he stops getting that “uh-oh, there's a Negro talking” feeling – even for a moment – that qualifies him to usher in the post-racial era in American history.

I really shouldn't have to say this, guys. When you're talking about any kind of oppression, the oppressors don't get to decide when it's over.

In which standardized testing is mostly nonsense

2010-02-01T09:51:00.000-08:00

This post started as part of an email conversation about standardized testing, and the problem of using standardized tests to measure "value added" by teachers and schools -- this measurement system, in addition to being a key factor in the allocation of federal No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top funds, is an important part of efforts to give teachers financial incentives for good teaching.

In most objections to the use of standardized tests to measure student academic achievement or, indirectly, teacher or school quality, the argument tends to hinge on whether or not these tests are actually good measures -- whether students are really rewarded for the amount of knowledge they receive, whether we weight questions correctly to convey the quantity of knowledge they represent, etc. But I think the problem goes deeper than this.

Because knowledge isn't directly measurable, it's difficult to know what "quantity of knowledge" entails -- number of propositions embodied in the answer of a question? Number of logically independent propositions? Number of "atomic" propositions? All of those are hard to measure. "Amount of time it takes a person to learn something" seems like the easiest one, but then you need to somehow specify under what circumstances, and there's a definite arbitrariness there, too.

The point is, given that "quantity of knowledge" isn't well-defined, when people weight tests (assuming they're consciously thinking about questions like these), I think they tend to weight them based on one of two things:

try to make the test predict success in some future endeavor -- usually, a future course or category of courses (e.g., "Algebra 2" or "college").
try to make the test measure effort/success in a previous class. For example, people might weight the test based on the amount of time teachers tend to spend on a particular topic.

Usually, I think, test weighting comes from a combination of these things through a more circuitous route. Standards boards meet, and come up with a list of things students ought to know by grade X (which, since there's no absolute sense in which we need to know anything by a particular age, must be based on a combination of what people tend to learn by grade X and what they need to know to succeed in a typical course of study in grade X+1). They implicitly weight
these expectations by classifying them in a hierarchy -- "standards" are assumed to be roughly equally weighted, as are "benchmarks" within each standard, "performance descriptors" within each benchmark, etc.

But, of course, there's no absolute sense in which there's a well-defined quality that these tests measure -- at best, they measure a specific set of historically contingent skills, weighted in a
specific, historically contingent way. And you can tell these aren't absolute by looking at variation between different state tests. In Illinois, for example, the ISAT was "re-standardized" between 2005 and 2006. Pass rates shot up by 8% statewide, and although only 32% of 8th graders in Chicago passed the math portion in 2005 (I couldn't find statewide data divided up by subject and grade level), 65% passed in 2006.

Clearly, these aren't testing the same thing in the same way. Asking which test is a better measure, though, assumes it's agreed-upon what they're supposed to be measuring. Clearly they're weighting different types of questions differently -- in particular, they seem to be weighting easy questions more heavily now than they used to.

Fundamentally, I think what happened is when we started referring to "standard-referenced" tests as distinct from "norm-referenced" tests, we implicitly convinced ourselves of the lie that those standards -- and the way they're weighted -- aren't themselves based on norms. Because what does "third-grade knowledge" mean other than knowledge that successful third-graders tend to have?

This also has to change the way we think about value added, and therefore, about teacher rewards. The fundamental problem here is that it's not obvious that, in general, equal test gains represent equal teacher quality. Under equally good teaching, will students at all points on the spectrum progress equally (in other words, is it the same amount of work to bring a student from a 30 to a 60 as it is to get them from a 60 to a 90)? If so, then those gains should reward teachers the same amount. But if not -- if, for example, getting someone from a 30 to a 40 takes as much work as getting someone else from a 60 to a 90 -- we should be weighting gains accordingly, so we're not paying teachers more for teaching smart kids.

So in order to talk about how to translate test gains into teaching quality, we need to know how well students at different levels do under equally good teaching. But it's tough to talk about "equally good teaching," too -- again, we're assuming there that there's some absolute measure of teaching quality.

One thing we might do is look at specific teachers teaching students at different levels -- is there a correlation between improvement of high-achieving students and improvement of low-achieving students? How good is that correlation? Suppose that it turns out that, in general, if a teacher tends to bring students' grades from 60 to 90, they tend to bring other students' grades from 30 to 50. Does that mean that we should weight those two improvements the same way, when judging other teachers' performance? Or do teachers who teach both good students and bad students tend to prioritize their good students? If teachers do prioritize their good students, we're excusing bad teaching of bad students, and blaming their smaller gains on the
students rather than their shitty teachers.

I think what I'm saying is, when you try to create tests to measure things that can't be measured directly, you have no way of discerning test validity. It's a deeper problem than "these tests aren't valid" -- it's that we don't know what it would mean for these tests to be valid.

In which netroots democracy is maligned by a schmuck

2010-01-30T15:03:00.000-08:00

Clay Johnson of the Sunlight Foundation talking to Guy Raz on All Things Considered:

Mr. JOHNSON: ...[I]t's important to remember that just because, you know, an organization or a group or a community is the most well-organized doesn't mean they're the most popular. So when you see, for instance, marijuana questions being the top question, it doesn't mean that they're the most popular amongst all of America. What it means is this is the most organized community...
RAZ: Yeah.
Mr. JOHNSON: ...that's capable of getting their, you know, plus-one-ing their question.
RAZ: And when you plus-one-ing, that means you're voting for it.
Mr. JOHNSON: Yeah, you're up-voting it. What's really interesting is you can watch people organize to rig these questions, which isn't something that you can do, you know, with, say, lobbyists.
RAZ: And how can you see that?
Mr. JOHNSON: So you can go on like groups.google.com, right, and plug in CitizenTube, space, marijuana and you get a list of all of the mailing lists that Google indexes out there. And the discussions of people saying, hey, go plus one this question. And you can, in a really transparent way, watch people organize and see what's going on.
RAZ: Does this process actually distort the power of a small number of people, in a sense, kind of undermine the whole point of democratizing this whole thing?

First of all, the answer is yes, "YouTube democracy" does distort the power of a relatively small number of people. In particular, it distorts the power of people with webcams Internet connections fast enough to upload videos YouTube -- mostly class-privileged folks. It also distorts the power of people who are, in general, more likely to be chosen as spokespeople for that crowd -- mostly white, class-privileged cisgendered men.

But that's not what Guy Raz was going for. It was not the problem of access that Guy Raz was worried about -- it was the problem of get-out-the-vote efforts. The problem with YouTube democracy is that sometimes, people try to encourage other people to vote, especially if they believe those people will vote in a particular way.

In any democracy, it's problematic when some people are more likely to vote than others. And it's also somewhat problematic when get-out-the-vote efforts target particular populations and ignore others. But this is by no means a problem that's unique to Internet democracy. Furthermore, the analogy we should be drawing isn't to lobbying, it's to (a) voter registration drives and/or (b) all forms of campaigning.

If you want to object to the fact that some people are much more likely to vote than others, and the people who vote tend to be whiter and richer than the people who don't, that's fine. I object to that too. But the solution should not be for the people who do vote to stay home -- it should be to have get-out-the-vote efforts targeting people who are currently underrepresented. And if you're going to talk about these problems as "undermin[ing] the whole point of democratizing this thing" when it's happening online, shouldn't we consider our formal democracy at least as undermined?

It's also worthwhile to talk about the specifics -- they were complaining about the fact that a bunch of potheads voted up a question about pot legalization, and got Obama to talk about it. Really? This is the one time when I've heard Obama talk about legalization -- and he treated it as a joke. I didn't hear it talked about seriously by his opponents during the campaign, either. All of this is despite the fact that 44% of Americans support legalization, and support is at 78% among liberals -- who are theoretically Obama's base. Given these levels of support, and the paucity of serious politicians who talk about legalization, we're complaining about these people being over-represented?

(Granted, the question Obama chose to answer talked about legalization of pot as though it would fix the economy. While I agree that it couldn't hurt, thinking of this as a serious economic policy makes me wonder if some stoner mixed up "million" and "billion.")

In which user-generated geographies of religion say more about access than about religion

2010-01-29T09:54:00.001-08:00

Fascinating stuff over at floatingsheep where they map "religious references in user-created content indexed by Google." Here's the key image:
What they don't talk about at all is the way other factors (other than religion) influence the prevalence of these references. In particular, a couple of facts seem startling to me:

China almost doesn't show up at all -- probably due to a combination of an anti-religious political culture, a censor-controlled online environment, and a lack of Internet access.
They comment that:
Likewise the Malay Peninsula and the Indonesian archipelago (particularly the island of Java) illustrate the complexity of religious practice in this region. References to Buddha, Allah and Hindu are all in evidence on Java.
What they don't mention is that Java is more than 90% Muslim, so although I agree that there is a great deal of "complexity of religious practice" there, this map totally misrepresents its nature. The map makes it look like it's about evenly split between Muslims and Hindus, with a few Buddhists and Christians thrown into the mix.
Another even more egregious example is Bangladesh -- you can see it there tucked in just to the right of India as a huge concentration of red dots. This despite the fact that Bangladesh is 90% Muslim.
Nigeria is huge -- about five times the size of Morocco (and three times the size of Spain). Would you ever guess it from the number of dots there? Furthermore, Nigeria is majority Muslim as well. There are not only more Muslims in Nigeria than in Morocco, there are more Muslims in Nigeria than in Turkey.

It seems like the big story here is the broad lack of Muslim-generated content. You would never guess from looking at this that there were more than half as many Muslims as Christians. I assume this largely reflects the relative poverty of the Muslim population of the world as compared to the other religions -- but I really don't know. Does anyone know more about this than I do, and/or see more discrepancies between map and reality?

Separate question: take a look at the map where they overlay user-generated content mentioning sex. What's going on in Algeria and Tunisia? Is there a huge Algerian/Tunisian porn industry I don't know about? Fascinating.

In which we explore the consequences of equating money and speech.

2010-01-28T09:58:00.000-08:00

The Supreme Court ruled recently that, since money is speech and corporations are people, restricting corporate spending on electioneering communications is a violation of their First Amendment rights. This made me think of another fairly recent case, which does a great job of showing the consequences of that sort of approach.

So the newsroom staff of the Santa Barbara News-Press decided to unionize. The bosses there started doing the worst kind of union busting -- suspending workers for legitimate, routine organizing activity, forcing themselves into labor meetings uninvited, etc. The employees brought this shit to the National Labor Relations Board, who backed them up completely.

But a district court found that in this case, the workers' right to organize didn't matter. See, workers' right to organize is a statutory guarantee, and in this case, the courts found that it conflicted with a constitutional guarantee. That's because the original source of the controversy had to do with management's intervention in editorial decisions, and compromises of journalistic integrity. And journalists' decision to organize to protect their right to do honest journalism from these kinds of attacks -- to protect, you might say, their right to free speech -- constituted an infringement on the News-Press's First Amendment rights.

Respondent argues that by preventing Respondent from disciplining employees engaged in such activity, the proposed injunction in its entirety infringes on Respondent's First Amendment right to maintain its editorial discretion. In so arguing, Respondent takes the view that a newspaper has a First Amendment right to retaliate through discharges and other standard disciplinary tools against concerted or union activity demanding, in part, the ceding of that newspaper's First Amendment-protected editorial discretion. (source)

In other words, the right to freedom of speech is really the right to absolute control of speech made with one's property. This gives you the right to use what are widely accepted as coercive, unfair and intimidating methods to make sure employees say what you want them to say -- no matter what statutes may say to the contrary.

I can't speak for the framers of the First Amendment -- most of them were pretty squarely in the Lockean camp that saw one's property as an extension of one's person, and it's pretty clear that "freedom of the presses" did not mean, for them, freedom of access to presses by people who did not have the resources to buy them. But it is ironic that a provision that was intended to prevent the censorship and bullying of writers is being used now to protect the censorship and bullying of writers.

I'm really troubled by the fact that this interpretation of "freedom of speech" explicitly values the opinions of rich people more than the opinions of poor people, to the point of enabling rich people to control the speech of poor people.

See, when we interpret the right to free speech as the right to use private resources to promote speech -- thus implicitly tying the right to free speech to the ownership of capital -- we're not privileging freedom of speech per se. We're privileging freedom to coerce poorer people to deliver a certain kind of speech.

In which poop becomes a metaphor for learning

2010-01-25T13:24:00.000-08:00

Lorraine Forte on Eight Forty-Eight, talking about use of time in Chicago schools:

The consortium says that, you know, based on their observations, there's just no way to make up for that amount of time -- you can't be that efficient. I mean, you need a certain amount of time to do announcements, to line kids up to go to the bathroom... You have to do that because it's part of the school day.

Yeah, I guess that makes sense... If Chicago does have a short school day, we might need to lengthen it... Yeah, sure, I guess you do need some announcements... Wait, what? To go to the bathroom? What the hell do bathrooms have to do with lines?

Apparently this is a common practice among elementary school teachers, resulting from the assumption that you can't trust kids to walk down the halls by themselves, let alone to come back from the bathroom when they're done. This, of course, means they need to be accompanied by a teacher -- and since you can't have a teacher going out of the room every time someone has to go to the bathroom, you've got to have kids saving up their poop so they can all go at once.

Let's save the human-rights issue about controlling one's own body functions for another time -- not that I don't think it's significant. Let's also save for another time the question of what this does to our relationships with children.

For now, let's suppose that I take a long time to poop. Way longer than normal people. Would you want your child in class with me, knowing that an average bathroom break takes seven minutes without me or twenty-seven with me? I know many parents would actively lobby to have the slow poopers put in a separate class -- which, depending on the relative number of slow poopers as compared to the number of stalls, could mean that that class spends half the damn day at the bathroom.

Even if that didn't happen, imagine being the one slow pooper in the class, when everyone else is waiting to go back to the classroom. Imagine knowing that every time you had to go to the bathroom, the class would be forced to choose between waiting for your slow ass and moving on to leave you behind. My reaction would probably be to give up on pooping at school altogether. Some other people would probably respond by stretching out that process even longer, until everyone else went back to class, and then taking advantage of that time to themselves, while -- for once -- their slow pooping wasn't the subject of everyone's discussion.

Okay, maybe I'm going a little over the top with this analogy, but there's something here. The point, obviously, is that if you don't maintain the expectation that everyone's going to be doing the same thing at the same time, it doesn't matter whether some people take longer to do some things than others. But when you decide that it's multiplication time, and so everyone's going to be doing multiplication for the duration of multiplication time, then it becomes an issue.

It's the bathroom-line approach to education that led C.S. Lewis to say:

What I want to fix your attention on is the vast overall movement towards the discrediting, and finally the elimination, of every kind of human excellence -- moral, cultural, social or intellectual... The basic proposal of the new education is to be that dunces and idlers must not be made to feel inferior to intelligent and industrious pupils. That would be 'undemocratic.' Children who are fit to proceed may be artifically kept back, because the others would get a trauma by being left behind. The bright pupil thus remains democratically fettered to his own age group throughout his school career, and a boy who would be capable of tackling Aeschylus or Dante sits listening to his coeval's attempts to spell out A CAT SAT ON A MAT.

Despite Lewis's obvious elitism, he has a point. There's no reason we should all have to be doing the same thing at the same time, and to insist upon it is tyrannical. But Dante doesn't actually have to happen in a separate classroom. And the fact that you're reading Dante doesn't mean that you have nothing in common with someone who's struggling with phonics, let alone that you should be isolated from them.

What's truly democratic is to enlist the smart kids, according to their abilities, to spend some of their time helping those who need it -- and also give them chances, without leaving the room, to push the boundaries of their own knowledge. The presence of someone sitting nearby plugging along with multiplication does not actually stop me from thinking about algebra -- and the opportunity to take breaks from my own work to explain foundational concepts in simpler terms can actually help me harness those concepts in more complicated ways.

In which we learn what the two kinds of gays are, and what we should think about them.

2010-01-25T09:58:00.000-08:00

Today's episode of the Oprah Winfrey Show featured an interview with Rosie O'Donnell, including some footage from a documentary she filmed about her family going through a divorce, as an attempt to show (paraphrasing her words) that gay families are just like straight families.

During this episode, there's a preview of the next episode: "If your husband cheated on you with another man, would you stay? Why Gayle Haggard did."

See, it's important to show a balanced view of what it means to be gay in America. Despite what the religious right might want you to believe, there's not just one way to be gay. There are two.

On the one hand, you've got married lesbians with children, who love their children and maintain close family ties despite divorces. As far as I can tell from watching, this type of gay person doesn't have gay sex: their gayness just means their children have extra mommies.

On the other hand, you've got secret gay sex on meth, by someone in a monogamous relationship who publicly condemns homosexuality in the strongest possible language.