Funmurphys: the Blog

My Summer Vacation

I just got back from a great vacation in the Washington DC area. We saw most everything of cultural import in DC although only briefly. We weren't arrested at the Pentagon despite our wandering around, pointing, and general middle eastern appearance. We spent some very relaxing time at the beach in Delaware at my cousin Linda's beach resort eyrie. We got to have some fun with Linda and Bill at their house in Columbia, Maryland. Now we are back, but we are leaving again for a weekend getaway at the lake.

Anyway, more penetrating insight and boring personal stuff is on tap here, and once I get a hold of the bung puller, we can begin the pour. (The captain has to go down with the metaphor.)

And thanks again Linda and Bill for all of your kind hospitality - it made for an excellent vacation and we do appreciate it.

Men Vs. Women, Me Vs. Maureen Dowd

The Man Without Qualities is all over Maureen Dowd's latest with three, oops four as of now, posts that demonstrate that (once again) she hasn't a clue about what she's writing about. I generally can't be bothered with Ms. Dowd as I'm clearly not her target demographic (something she makes clear in that latest column). I know people who admire her, and rave about her writing style. I looked into the matter and discovered that indeed they were right - her writing is amazing as she is able to write a column that is both the column they print and the perfect parody of the same. "As Dr. Judson told the journalist Ken Ringle, "Her spittle turns his innards to soup, which she slurps up, drinking until she's sucked him dry." I've heard ex-wives described exactly the same way.

To give Maureen her due, while she uses the same elements over and over, she does manage to arrange them differently on occasion, unlike Molly Ivins, for instance, who writes the same column over and over. No matter what the facts and circumstances are, Molly always manages to draw the same conclusion: Democrats good, Republicans bad, very very bad. Oh wait, sorry, that's Maureen too.

I try to never be surprised by the media, but I often fail. Michael Savage was (rightly) fired for telling a caller that he hoped he died because he was "a sodomite". Maureen Dowd tells her readers I hope men become extinct because, well, they have tiny little Y chromosomes, and ... ... nothing happened, no response. I suppose it's because of the sheer scale - Mr Savage's hate was something you could wrap your hands around because it was so personal; Maureen's hate is hard to see because it's so vast - half the human race vast. But this time I'm doubly surprised: A top columnist in the Newspaper of Record keeps writing columns on subjects I've already covered, and covered better IMHO, as this reproduction makes clear:

Dear Mr. Know-it-all,

My wife and I have been having an argument that is threatening to end our marriage and we need your help in settling it. She says that men can be replaced by a turkey baster, and I ask her who will fight their wars? Then she just laughs (a distinctly unpleasant laugh). So, who's right?

Dan Collision, Ottumwa Iowa

While I try not to get involved in domestic disputes, I felt I must help as your remark about the laugh makes me believe she has told this story to her friends and they all agree with her that you are a big goofball. So I will tell you, you're both wrong. Men can't be replaced with just a turkey baster; a hot water bottle is also required (in season). I can understand you two overlooking this as we are just now getting cooler weather and all summer long your mere presence in bed has been making her too hot (and not the good kind of hot, either). And the thing that's actually kept us from being replaced, since turkey basters and hot water bottles are cheap and plentiful, is an automated system to take out the trash. When this system is cheap and plentiful, then mankind will become womankind. For the nostalgic woman, it will store the odor from the trash and then spray this fragrance at random intervals in the house while saying "Ah, that's better", "Don't light a match", "Like roses", or "I wouldn't go in there if I were you".

As to your remark about fighting wars, physical combat would be obsolete without any men. Instead, each country would make catty remarks about the other country behind its back, until from embarrassment one country would surrender and the victor would take some of the remarks back (how much would be part of the peace settlement) and the loser would take them all back. So Dan, I hope I've done my part for domestic tranquillity.

PS You'll know women have been replaced when you see chisels and gasoline sold in the cleaning products aisle at K-Mart.

Real Crushing Of Dissent

Here's how the Iranian government is handling dissent: Threaten force against protestors, and when the protest leaders back down, abduct them. But remember, it's only in America that dissent is crushed, and only by John Ashcroft.

I'm So Confused

When somebody in this country stands up and goes against the consensus, a certain segment automatically applauds this as "brave dissent". Accolades for not going along with the crowd but being your own person, fearlessly speaking truth to power, being the lone voice in the wilderness are given. Yet if the United States decides to stand up and go against the international consensus, that same segment instead of applauding it for such brave dissent rather berates it for refusal to do what everybody else thinks is right. Shut up and go along (how can the US possibly think it's right when so many other countries think it's wrong) is the refrain from the otherwise pro-dissent.

A few months ago, some people said that to intervene in Iraq would be wrong - we had no right to impose ourselves on the Iraqi people, but now those same people are urging our involvement in Liberia. And the idea that any Iraqi's would be happy to have the tyrannical regime of Hussein removed was just neo-colonistic wish fulfillment, yet now the idea that Liberians want the US - why, everybody there says so (well of course not Charles Taylor and his thugs, but then they don't count). The massive violation of human rights in Iraq were insufficient grounds for intervention there, while the massive violation of human rights in Liberia is ample grounds for intervention. The people who are now demanding the UN be brought into Iraq claim that only the US can successfully intervene in Liberia. And while Iraq was going to be a distraction from Afghanistan and Al-Qaeda, adding Liberia won't be. Those people who pointed to Afghanistan and said that mess had to be cleaned up before we got bogged down in Iraq, and who now claim we are bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan, now advocate taking on a third country.

I know a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds, but this is ridiculous.

The Perception of Racism

Clarence Page wrote about hate crimes in one of his columns a few years ago. Mr. Page was quoting statistics on hate crimes from the FBI that showed that white against black hate crimes were about 3 times more prevalent than black against white. He went on to state that since Blacks make up only about 10 percent of the population, they are being victimized out of proportion to their numbers. He had his statistics wrong, though, because it's not the number of victims that drive the number of hate crimes, but the number of perpetrators. That is, victims don't ask to be victimized, but perpetrators force them to be. So you would expect, given equal hate in this country and perfect crime reporting, that the ratio of racist hate crime would equal the percentage of the population, which is more like five times more white on black than black on white hate crimes.

That got me to thinking about perceptions of racism in this country, where blacks and whites consistently disagree about the amount of racism. Blacks consistantly report through surveys etc. that racism is more prevelant and more significant than whites. This led to the following thought experiment: let's say that there is a certain rate of racism, and let's say it is constant between the two races. Let's also assume for the experiment that whites outnumber blacks by a ratio of 5 to 1 (roughly true for the USA), and that whites and blacks have equal power to commit a racist act. What would each group experience with regard to the frequency of racist acts?

On average, blacks would experience 25 times the amount of racist activity directed against them that whites would experience, even though each race would perpetrate the same number of racist acts per person, simply because there are 5 times more whites than blacks (5 times more acts, but only 1/5 the people to experience the acts). In other words, the amount of animosity a minority feels is the square of the ratio of the relative majority to minority populations.

And when it would come time to report the prevalence of racist acts, whites would report only one fifth the number of racist acts that blacks would, simply because whites would spend much more time in white-white interactions where no racists acts would occur. The disparity is caused simply by the relative size of the two populations, and not any bias on either races' part. Each races' experience would be different and equally valid from its standpoint. Additionally, if you asked how important race was to your life, whites would tend to say unimportant since, on average, only 1/6 of their interactions would involve race, but blacks would tend to say very important since, on average, 5/6 of their interactions would involve race.

Again, all of this disparity is caused by the disparity in population, and says nothing about the underlying amount of racism or poor racial perception. It's not that "whites don't get it" or that "blacks are hypersensitive", but that each group is reporting accurately on their different, equally valid experiences.

Let's throw in a look at how general meanness (not race related) can get factored in as well. Let's assume there are 5 million whites, 1 million blacks, and on average each white and each black commits 5 racists acts a year and 5 mean acts a year. At the end of the year, there are 25 million anti-black racist acts, 5 million anti-white racist acts, and 30 million general mean acts. Therefore, on average, each member of a given race will experience in a year:

White: 1 racist act against, 5 mean acts against.

Black: 25 racist acts against, 5 mean acts against

So what would each races perception of how important general meanness is versus racism? Blacks would of course say racism is more important than meanness, while whites would say just the opposite. The truth? They occur at an identical (at least in this experiment) rate. So who's right and who's wrong? Both are right, since they are reporting from their own experience, and from their own experiences, each group is correct. Remember, all of this comes from whites outnumbering blacks, and having racism and meanness exist.

Of course the real world is is different than the purity of such simple statistics and assumptions, but I really do think that it tells us something about the perception of racism being tied to the underlying population sizes. The larger the disparity in populations, the larger in the difference in how each population perceives racism.

Not Just For Fun

I suppose it all started for me at the age of three when I won a tiddlywinks "tournament" at a friend's birthday party. I have been an avid player of non-sporting games ever since. I find them both relaxing and stimulating, a combination hard to find. Now Professor James Paul Gee claims that the oft maligned video games can be a great way for kids to learn.

"I was 53 when I began and was blown away by how long, challenging, and complex games like Deus Ex were. Yet millions of people pay a lot of money to buy them and they learn them very well, including kids who wouldn’t spend twelve concentrated minutes really learning algebra in school. It dawned on me that good games were learning machines. Built into their very designs were good learning principles, principles supported, in fact, by cutting-edge research in cognitive science, the science that studies human thinking and learning. Many of these principles could be used in schools to get kids to learn things like science, but, too often today schools are returning to skill-and-drill and multiple-choice tests that kill deep learning. Games are good at getting themselves learned for good old Darwinian reasons, namely, the ones that can’t get learned, don’t get bought and the companies that produce them go broke (Suikoden III is a good example of a very good game that does a poor job helping the player learn how to play it). What makes the situation interesting is that game designers can’t make games easier to learn by dumbing them down, since players want ever longer, more challenging, more open-ended games.

Yes, Virginia, he has a book out about it.

I Link, You Decide

The DOD has its own website devoted to the War on Terror: Defend America. You get the Pentagon's view of the war; how accurate that is, I can't say. Probably more accurate than some guy sitting on his butt in St. Louis getting most of his info from news organizations that can't get basic facts right on stories in their own country.

It's All About Collaboration

I've written before that some people don't like blogs and really don't like how highly they rate with Google. Well, Tim O'Reilly (of O'Reilly the computer book publisher) writes approvingly:

"Robert Scoble just told a great story that vividly explains how users help to build Google's product. He describes discovering a new Iranian restaurant in Redmond, WA, and linking to their website. He notes that the site doesn't now show up in google, but that, because of his weblog, it will now: "Oh, did you just realize that this weblog is nothing more than metadata for Google to use? Yeah, you'd be right. Google figured out how to get people like me to go around and look at websites and add meta data about those websites. How did Google do that? By giving us power. Think about it. That's how Google pays us back for the work we're doing to improve its index."

There's a dark side to this story. Scoble told it in the context of rumors that advertisers are lobbying Google to de-emphasize blogs in calculating its page ranks. I trust Google to do the right thing because of their relentless focus on the user. If they adjust the impact of blogs, it will be to get a truer result for users rather than for advertisers. But you can't underestimate the short-sightedness of many big players. Asking Google to take blogs out of the input is like asking EBay to stop taking product from small players and only take it from an approved vendor list, or asking Amazon to take reviews only from publishers and approved journalists! It's the essence of the new paradigm that users help to build the product. "

So maybe it's not love, but at least it puts the whole shebang into perspective. As a blogger, I'm not engaged in a selfish narcisistic hobby, I'm engaged in a giant collaborative venture that brings value to others. Yeah baby, how very yeah!

Jack or Theresa?

Tom McMahon picks up a question originally posed by Rodney Balko: If we could clone a thousand Jack Welches and/or Mother Theresas, and drop them into Bombay with some start-up money, which of the two options would do more good for more people, a thousand Jack Welches, or a thousand Mother Theresas? I'd say why not both, but that doesn't respect the spirit of the question. So if I'm forced to chose, I'd have to say Mother Theresa. She's already proven she could do a lot of good in India. People like Welch are a dime a dozen; Mother Theresas are far more unique.

Since I consider myself a Hayekian (Freiderich, not Salma) when it comes to political/economic systems, I think the system here made Jack Welch, not the other way around. GE was a thriving concern when he arrived, and it's a thriving concern after he left. There are very few indespensable CEOs (Herb Kelleher and Steve Jobs are the only two who spring to mind) and they are almost always the founders of a company. The problem with India isn't a lack of entrepeneurs, it's the quasi-socialist economy. Indians in the US thrive. A thousand Jack Welches would just disappear without a trace. Instead of Jack Welch, you might consider the founder of GE and great inventor, Thomas Edison, but again the problem with India is it's political/economic system, not a lack of brain power.

So if I had to pick someone who I'd clone and send to a bunch of countries (if I can clone people and provide them startup money, why limit them to Bombay?), it would be Benjamin Franklin, grandfather of the United States. Not only was he a successful business man (he started with nothing, unlike Jack Welch) and inventor, he also was a philanthropist and a political innovator. Franklin would agitate for the needed reforms both through writing (he was a famed satiricist and top author) and political action and be able to take advantage of them, and yet retain a sense of charity and love for his fellow man.

Moral Smugness

One of the classic situations in which almost all ethicists will tell you it's okay to lie is the following: You're sheltering a Jewish family in your house in 1944 German occupied Europe when the Gestapo knocks on the door and asks if you're hiding any Jews. I bring this up because it leads to the point we all tend to be morally smug. If we were polled, most of us would answer that not only is it OK to lie in that circumstance, but had we been in German occupied Europe in 1944, we would have had to lie as we would have had half a dozen Jewish families living in the attic. Sadly, this isn't, and wasn't the case. Most people didn't shelter the Jews - the few exceptions such as Oskar Schindler, Raoul Wallenberg, and the rescue of Danish Jews by ordinary Danish citizens (It's a myth that the Danish king put on the Jewish armband but the truth that Denmark was able to save most of its Jews - the majority who were smuggled to Sweden and even the fraction deported to Theresienstadt) are notable by their rarity. We look down on those who failed at such an obvious moral test. And yet we fail to realize that there are times and places where it's very hard to be virtuous, and other times and places it's easy. Apparently, it was far easier to thwart the Nazi's in Denmark than anywhere else in Europe; not necessarily because the individual Danes had more moral courage, but perhaps because of the support found within Danish society and culture.

We look back at slavery as a huge evil and a moral stain on our country -- which it was. But we too easily dismiss the difficult decisions men such as Thomas Jefferson had to make and the moral anguish they suffered. We feel superior - we tell ourselves we would have done everything in our power to end such terrible suffering and injustice, unlike so many of the time. And yet we forget that to be opposed to slavery here and now carries no cost, no penalty, and no moral superiority. Sadly, slavery is still an issue in the world, but mostly overlooked in this country, although you can still do something about it. We feel the superiority, yet it we didn't earn it, but the people who worked against it and finally ended it at such great cost, they earned it. We've simply inherited it, along with a host of other moral improvements that allow us to look down at our ancestors.

We feel so much better about ourselves when we consider how much better we would have done in prior moral challanges than those who actually had to face the consequences. It helps us ignore what we are failing to do because of the consequences to ourselves here and now.