June 11, 2018
Posted by Jay Livingston
In a recent article at Vox (here), Julia Belluz says, “Only 4 percent of women give birth on their estimated delivery date. . . Medicine is surprisingly bad at measuring the precise age of a fetus or how far along a woman is into her pregnancy.” The rest of the article explains why doctors suck at predicting the date of delivery.
But that’s not the way we talk about it. We don’t say, “The doctor was wrong.” We don’t say, “The doctor made a really bad prediction.” Instead we blame the woman. We say she was “late.” She “missed her due date,” as though childbirth was something akin to a term paper. I guess if she provides a good excuse, we’ll give her an extension till Friday.
Or we blame the baby. Look at the opening sentence of the article, “A pregnant friend of mine is due to give birth on Saturday, but as she told me this week, she really has no idea if the baby will come on time, or two weeks from now.” [emphasis added.]
The kid is still in the womb, and already we are taking him or her to task for not arriving “on time.”
It’s not just obstetrics. Talk related to most other areas of medicine also rests on the same charitable assumption of doctor infallibility, especially when the ones doing the talking are doctors. The patient “failed to respond to treatment,” not “the treatment we used didn’t work.”
I caught on to this trick long ago, when I was reviewing the literature on compulsive gamblers. There wasn’t much to review, and most of those accounts were from psychiatrists. One of them said that treating compulsive gamblers was difficult because they “do not make good patients.” At first, that tallied with what I had found. Many of the compulsive gamblers I was listening to had tried psychotherapy without much success. It took me a while see that if you translate this idea out of the language of psychiatric infallibility, it sounds very different: “We psychiatrists have no idea how to cure these guys.”
This way of speaking — the one we frequently use — places the blame for failure on the patient, not the doctor. Those compulsive gamblers don’t make good patients. And babies — don’t get me started. Totally unreliable. They just have no sense of punctuality.
A Class of Rich People — Gallup Goes Marxist
June 10, 2018
Posted by Jay Livingston
Gallup asked “Do You Think the United States Benefits From Having a Class of Rich People, or Not?” Here are the results.
Gallup’s lede is that Democrats have grown more skeptical about the rich while Independents and Republicans haven’t changed their views. The other obvious conclusions from the survey is that Republicans think far more favorably of the rich and that Independents are closer to Democrats than to Republicans. (The Gallup summary is here.)
What surprised me is that Republicans would agree to even answer the question given that it was about “a class of rich people.” The true conservative would tell the Gallup interviewer, “There are no classes in America. We have only individuals; some of them get rich.” But overall, only 3% of the 1500 people surveyed refused to answer, though Gallup does not provide data on the political affiliation of these refuseniks.
Most of the time, when Americans talk about “class” they really mean “social status” – a scale based mostly on money which, therefore, has infinite gradations. A person with $100,000 is higher on the scale than is a person with $90,000. But “class” in the Gallup question implies a more Marxian definition — a group of people who share common economic interests and who act to secure those interests against the interests of other classes.
Unfortunately, we don’t know what Gallup’s respondents had in mind when they heard the question. Maybe Republicans, Independents, and Democrats interpreted the question differently.
What else could Gallup have asked?
“Does the US benefit from policies that allow some people to get very rich?” frames wealth as an individual matter with America as the land of unlimited opportunity. A question like this would probably draw higher rates of agreement across the board.
“Do Americans in general benefit from policies that benefit the rich?” treats the rich more as a true class. It implies that some policies benefit one class, the rich, even though they might not benefit most people. This question might have fewer people agreeing.
I wonder what the results would be if Gallup asked both these questions.
Posted by Jay Livingston
Gallup asked “Do You Think the United States Benefits From Having a Class of Rich People, or Not?” Here are the results.
Gallup’s lede is that Democrats have grown more skeptical about the rich while Independents and Republicans haven’t changed their views. The other obvious conclusions from the survey is that Republicans think far more favorably of the rich and that Independents are closer to Democrats than to Republicans. (The Gallup summary is here.)
What surprised me is that Republicans would agree to even answer the question given that it was about “a class of rich people.” The true conservative would tell the Gallup interviewer, “There are no classes in America. We have only individuals; some of them get rich.” But overall, only 3% of the 1500 people surveyed refused to answer, though Gallup does not provide data on the political affiliation of these refuseniks.
Most of the time, when Americans talk about “class” they really mean “social status” – a scale based mostly on money which, therefore, has infinite gradations. A person with $100,000 is higher on the scale than is a person with $90,000. But “class” in the Gallup question implies a more Marxian definition — a group of people who share common economic interests and who act to secure those interests against the interests of other classes.
Unfortunately, we don’t know what Gallup’s respondents had in mind when they heard the question. Maybe Republicans, Independents, and Democrats interpreted the question differently.
What else could Gallup have asked?
“Does the US benefit from policies that allow some people to get very rich?” frames wealth as an individual matter with America as the land of unlimited opportunity. A question like this would probably draw higher rates of agreement across the board.
“Do Americans in general benefit from policies that benefit the rich?” treats the rich more as a true class. It implies that some policies benefit one class, the rich, even though they might not benefit most people. This question might have fewer people agreeing.
I wonder what the results would be if Gallup asked both these questions.
Gentrification and Its Discontents
June 6, 2018
Posted by Jay Livingston
This Facebook post by a Rutgers history professor has gotten picked up by the usual right-wing suspects – Breitbart, Washington Examiner, Daily Caller, New York Post, etc.
Here’s a clearer version of the text:
Facebook removed the post. Rutgers is investigating. The official university statement says, “There is no place for racial intolerance at Rutgers.”
All these reactions have the same take-away – this is race hatred. That’s understandable, I guess, since Livingston (no relation to me, btw) says, “I now hate white people.” FB and Rutgers are concerned. The right-wing media are delighted. See, they say, it’s really the leftists who are bigots.
They’re missing the point. It’s not about bigotry, it’s about gentrification.
Imagine that you’re a committed leftist. With perhaps a hint of romanticism, you identify with the oppressed – the poor and the Black. Maybe you’re also looking for an apartment in the city. What better place than Harlem? The awful years – the closing third of the twentieth century – are now just a bad memory; still the name still carries a hint of risk, of danger. But the name also throbs with the rich history – Duke Ellington and James Baldwin and the Apollo. That’s the Harlem you want to move to, the authentic Harlem where you can still call Lenox Ave Lenox Ave and not Malcolm X Boulevard.
So you take apartment on 117th, and when people ask you where you live, you don’t say “SoHa,” the term coined by the real estate rebranding geniuses. You say, “Harlem.” You get to know the stores, the restaurants, even some of your neighbors.
But after a few years, you see the neighborhood changing – more White faces, kids in their twenties. Starbucks is everywhere, and there’s a new a Whole Foods that seems to be all glass. This is not what you wanted. This is what you were trying to escape. You wanted Harlem’s authenticity, its soul. But that is waning, and in its place, Privilege.
You go to that newish restaurant you like, Harlem Shake, that opened a few years ago, and all you can see are White kids. Why are you surprised? You should have seen it coming. Look at this place with its umbrella-shaded sidewalk tables, its menu that includes a Veggie Burger ($17) and Kale Caesar. (“Kale Caesar,” you think, “We who are about to diet salute you.”)
But tonight, it’s too much. It looks like an outpost of the Wharton school. You think, “I just don't want little Caucasians overrunning my life. Please God, remand them to the suburbs, where they and their parents can colonize every restaurant.”*
So you go home and vent to your Facebook friends. They’ll get it. They’ll appreciate your dilemma — hating White people and yet, “I am a White people.” They’ll know you don’t mean all White people, maybe not even most White people —just these Jakes-come-lately in Harlem. They’ll understand the internal conflict of the White lefty in a gentrifying neighborhood, an internal conflict that’s reflected even in the dilemma over which pronoun to use. — “can we keep them – us – out of my neighborhood?”
It’s like Chris Rock’s rant, the one where he says, “I love Black people, but I hate Niggas.” The audience laughs. They get it. But you can imagine the reaction from Breitbart, et al., — “Self-avowed Black-people-hater Chris Rock said in a racist rant. . . .”
The Internet is no place for ambivalence. The right-wing media could grasp the humor and irony. They just deliberately refuse to. College administrators seem truly incapable of even minimal subtlety. Oh well, Chris Rock won’t play colleges any more either. They take everything literally.
“There is no place for racial intolerance at Rutgers.” Apparently there’s also no place for ambivalence, irony, and humor.
---------------
* From his subsequent explanatory post on Facebook
UPDATE: September 18. The right-wing media were all over this, hollering about racism. The Rutgers administration swiftly caved. It issued a report finding that Livingston’s post on his personal Facebook page violated the university’s anti-discrimination policy and had brought “damage” and “disruption” to the school. That finding would allow Rutgers to fire him.
Livingston appealed the decision. Rutgers denied the appeal. Ten days later the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) spoke out and threatened a lawsuit. Ten days after that, late in August, Rutgers president Robert Barchi discovered that academic freedom and the First Amendment might also be at issue, and he “remanded” the report. “I...have asked the Office to more rigorously analyze the facts and assumptions underlying its conclusions.”
UPDATE: April 3, 2019. In November of last year, five months after Rutgers tried to get rid of Livingston, it reversed its decision that he had violated the school’s discrimination and harassment policy. Without the threatened lawsuit, the school probably would have gone ahead and fired him.
Posted by Jay Livingston
This Facebook post by a Rutgers history professor has gotten picked up by the usual right-wing suspects – Breitbart, Washington Examiner, Daily Caller, New York Post, etc.
| OK, officially, I now hate white people. I am a white people, for God’s sake, but can we keep them — us — us out of my neighborhood? I just went to Harlem Shake on 124 and Lenox for a Classic burger to go, that would [be] my dinner, and the place is overrun with little Caucasian assholes who know their parents will approve of anything they do. Slide around the floor, you little shithead, sing loudly, you moron, Do what you want, nobody here is gonna restrict your right to be white. I hereby resign from my race. Fuck these people. Yeah, I know, it’s about access to my dinner. Fuck you, too. |
Facebook removed the post. Rutgers is investigating. The official university statement says, “There is no place for racial intolerance at Rutgers.”
All these reactions have the same take-away – this is race hatred. That’s understandable, I guess, since Livingston (no relation to me, btw) says, “I now hate white people.” FB and Rutgers are concerned. The right-wing media are delighted. See, they say, it’s really the leftists who are bigots.
They’re missing the point. It’s not about bigotry, it’s about gentrification.
Imagine that you’re a committed leftist. With perhaps a hint of romanticism, you identify with the oppressed – the poor and the Black. Maybe you’re also looking for an apartment in the city. What better place than Harlem? The awful years – the closing third of the twentieth century – are now just a bad memory; still the name still carries a hint of risk, of danger. But the name also throbs with the rich history – Duke Ellington and James Baldwin and the Apollo. That’s the Harlem you want to move to, the authentic Harlem where you can still call Lenox Ave Lenox Ave and not Malcolm X Boulevard.
So you take apartment on 117th, and when people ask you where you live, you don’t say “SoHa,” the term coined by the real estate rebranding geniuses. You say, “Harlem.” You get to know the stores, the restaurants, even some of your neighbors.
But after a few years, you see the neighborhood changing – more White faces, kids in their twenties. Starbucks is everywhere, and there’s a new a Whole Foods that seems to be all glass. This is not what you wanted. This is what you were trying to escape. You wanted Harlem’s authenticity, its soul. But that is waning, and in its place, Privilege.
You go to that newish restaurant you like, Harlem Shake, that opened a few years ago, and all you can see are White kids. Why are you surprised? You should have seen it coming. Look at this place with its umbrella-shaded sidewalk tables, its menu that includes a Veggie Burger ($17) and Kale Caesar. (“Kale Caesar,” you think, “We who are about to diet salute you.”)
So you go home and vent to your Facebook friends. They’ll get it. They’ll appreciate your dilemma — hating White people and yet, “I am a White people.” They’ll know you don’t mean all White people, maybe not even most White people —just these Jakes-come-lately in Harlem. They’ll understand the internal conflict of the White lefty in a gentrifying neighborhood, an internal conflict that’s reflected even in the dilemma over which pronoun to use. — “can we keep them – us – out of my neighborhood?”
It’s like Chris Rock’s rant, the one where he says, “I love Black people, but I hate Niggas.” The audience laughs. They get it. But you can imagine the reaction from Breitbart, et al., — “Self-avowed Black-people-hater Chris Rock said in a racist rant. . . .”
The Internet is no place for ambivalence. The right-wing media could grasp the humor and irony. They just deliberately refuse to. College administrators seem truly incapable of even minimal subtlety. Oh well, Chris Rock won’t play colleges any more either. They take everything literally.
“There is no place for racial intolerance at Rutgers.” Apparently there’s also no place for ambivalence, irony, and humor.
---------------
* From his subsequent explanatory post on Facebook
UPDATE: September 18. The right-wing media were all over this, hollering about racism. The Rutgers administration swiftly caved. It issued a report finding that Livingston’s post on his personal Facebook page violated the university’s anti-discrimination policy and had brought “damage” and “disruption” to the school. That finding would allow Rutgers to fire him.
Livingston appealed the decision. Rutgers denied the appeal. Ten days later the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) spoke out and threatened a lawsuit. Ten days after that, late in August, Rutgers president Robert Barchi discovered that academic freedom and the First Amendment might also be at issue, and he “remanded” the report. “I...have asked the Office to more rigorously analyze the facts and assumptions underlying its conclusions.”
UPDATE: April 3, 2019. In November of last year, five months after Rutgers tried to get rid of Livingston, it reversed its decision that he had violated the school’s discrimination and harassment policy. Without the threatened lawsuit, the school probably would have gone ahead and fired him.
Feckless Bunt — The C-word at Home and Abroad
June 1, 2018
Posted by Jay Livingston
I was browsing the New Book shelf in our library yesterday and noticed The Prodigal Tongue by Lynne Murphy, about differences between US and British English
One of those differences is the word cunt, a word which, by coincidence was very much in the news that same day. Samantha Bee had called Ivanka Trump a “feckless cunt.” Conservatives especially fell into an angry swoon. But Bee’s remark was the top story in news feeds across the political spectrum.
In the US, cunt is the worst thing you can call someone. If Bee had called Ivanka a “clueless asshole” or a “heartless fuck,” I doubt that the reaction would have been as swift and strong. As for bitch and pussy, we know that Trump supporters, thanks to “Access Hollywood,” have long since made peace with those terms.
Bee’s comments would also not have drawn so much attention if she’d been speaking to a British audience. Cunt is different in the UK. As Murphy says (not in the book but on her blog), “The British can be amused by how much this word offends many Americans.”
Because cunt is less offensive in Britain, it can be used more casually and therefore more often. Even in the formal world of books, cunt appears more frequently in the UK, as Google n-grams shows (hat tip: Philip Cohen, who tweeted a similar graph).
The word is less offensive in the UK because it has a different meaning. In the US, only a woman can be a cunt. But in the UK, the term is applied to both genders, perhaps more often to males. Murphy used a corpus of Internet sources (blogs, news, etc.) and found, “two unique instances of this phrase in the American data. Both refer to women. There are five in the British data and they refer to: a male athlete, a male friend, and fans of a certain football team or football magazine.”
It’s sort of like pussy – demeaning the man’s manhood. “In the UK, the word is thrown around rather easily among men. It can be used among friends in a playful way, but more often (as far as I can tell) it is a term of abuse for men they don't like.”
In the US, if a woman is a cunt, she is a horrible person. But in the UK, the term can suggest just a general inefficacy or stupidity, not cruelty and evil. I don’t have the Internet corpus, but I do have the Monty Python Travel Agent sketch, which dates back to the 1960s.
Here’s a transcript.
No American man would refer to himself as a “silly cunt.” Or rather, a “silly kunt.”
Posted by Jay Livingston
I was browsing the New Book shelf in our library yesterday and noticed The Prodigal Tongue by Lynne Murphy, about differences between US and British English
In the US, cunt is the worst thing you can call someone. If Bee had called Ivanka a “clueless asshole” or a “heartless fuck,” I doubt that the reaction would have been as swift and strong. As for bitch and pussy, we know that Trump supporters, thanks to “Access Hollywood,” have long since made peace with those terms.
Bee’s comments would also not have drawn so much attention if she’d been speaking to a British audience. Cunt is different in the UK. As Murphy says (not in the book but on her blog), “The British can be amused by how much this word offends many Americans.”
Because cunt is less offensive in Britain, it can be used more casually and therefore more often. Even in the formal world of books, cunt appears more frequently in the UK, as Google n-grams shows (hat tip: Philip Cohen, who tweeted a similar graph).
The word is less offensive in the UK because it has a different meaning. In the US, only a woman can be a cunt. But in the UK, the term is applied to both genders, perhaps more often to males. Murphy used a corpus of Internet sources (blogs, news, etc.) and found, “two unique instances of this phrase in the American data. Both refer to women. There are five in the British data and they refer to: a male athlete, a male friend, and fans of a certain football team or football magazine.”
It’s sort of like pussy – demeaning the man’s manhood. “In the UK, the word is thrown around rather easily among men. It can be used among friends in a playful way, but more often (as far as I can tell) it is a term of abuse for men they don't like.”
In the US, if a woman is a cunt, she is a horrible person. But in the UK, the term can suggest just a general inefficacy or stupidity, not cruelty and evil. I don’t have the Internet corpus, but I do have the Monty Python Travel Agent sketch, which dates back to the 1960s.
Here’s a transcript.
| Bounder: Anyway you’re interested in one of our adventure holidays? Tourist: Yes I saw your advert in the bolor supplement. Bounder: The what? Tourist: The bolor supplement. Bounder: The color supplement? Tourist: Yes I’m sorry I can’t say the letter ‘B’ Bounder: C? Tourist: Yes that’s right. It’s all due to a trauma I suffered when I was a sboolboy. I was attacked by a bat. Bounder: A cat? Tourist: No, a bat Bounder: Can you say the letter ‘K’? Tourist: Oh yes, Khaki, king, kettle, Kuwait, Kings Bollege Bambridge. Bounder: Why don’t you say the letter 'K’ instead of the letter ‘C’? Tourist: what you mean.....spell bolor with a ‘K’? Bounder:Right. Tourist: Kolor. Oh that’s very good, I never thought of that. What a silly bunt. |
No American man would refer to himself as a “silly cunt.” Or rather, a “silly kunt.”
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