Joan — An Old Name For a Young Pelvis

November 30, 2017
Posted by Jay Livingston

What to name a mechanical vagina? It’s not a question most of us have to deal with on a daily basis. Or ever. But then, most of us are not trying to learn how to insert an IUD.

For her Vox podast “The Impact” Sarah Kliff recently visited a Delaware clinic for doctors and nurses who would be mastering the art of LARCs (long-acting reversible contraceptives). Inserting an IUD properly is an acquired skill – even gynecologists may be clumsy at first –  so the learners practice on artificial vaginas.  Ms Kliff, in the spirit of participatory journalism, was taking a stab at it. Here’s a brief excerpt from her attempt.  The “robotic pelvis” she was trying her hand on was named Joan.



LARCs are effective. After Colorado offered them free of charge in 2009, the rate of births and abortions among teens decreased by more than 40%. Among women 20-24, the decrease was 20%. (Source: https://www.colorado.gov/pacific/cdphe/cfpi-report)

The dramatic changes occurred mostly among Colorado’s youth. Very few of them were named Joan. Joan is not the name of a teenage girl. Teenage girls are named Emily, Hannah, Elizabeth, Taylor, Hannah. Among the young named Joan, boys outnumber girls by at least five to one. Joan used to be popular for girls. In the 1930s, it was consistently among the top ten. In her heyday, Joan accounted for 1-2% of all births, more than the most popular girls names today. Take that, Emma.

(Click on an image for a larger view.)

That was the. For the past quarter-century, Joan hasn’t been in the top 1,000. The most common age for women named Joan is 78. Joans who might need an IUD or other LARC (green in the graph below) are far outnumbered by the Joans whose childbearing days are behind them. (I drew the fertility line at the generous age of 55.)

So why did the clinic in Delaware name their robotic pelvis Joan rather than Ashley or Madison (both in the top six among today’s 15-year olds)? I have no idea.

Special People

November 28, 2017
Posted by Jay Livingston

I never thought that Trump’s “Pocohantas” joke was offensive. In fact, the first time I heard it, I thought it was pretty good. It made fun of Elizabeth Warren’s claim to some slim strand of Cherokee lineage.

It’s as though, after one of Trump’s many statements about being highly intelligent (“I’m, like, a really smart person”), Sen. Warren had referred to him as “Einstein.” The slur is not against physicists. It’s against Trump for claiming to be something he is so obviously not.

At the ceremony to honor the Navaho code talkers yesterday, Trump hauled out the Pocohantas dig again though it is long past its use-by date. The truly appalling part was that he used the ceremony as an occasion to make a personal derogatory remark about a political enemy. Is that what the Navahos came for? Appalling, as I say, but not unexpected. And no doubt, Trump supporters will see it as more evidence that Trump is their kind of guy.

The more offensive line from Trump is what followed.

You were here long before any of us were here, although we have a representative in Congress who, they say, was here a long time ago. They call her “Pocahontas.” But you know what, I like you because you are special. You are special people. You are really incredible people. And from the heart, from the absolute heart, we appreciate what you’ve done, how you’ve done it, the bravery that you displayed, and the love that you have for your country.

Trump is being complimentary. But underlying the praise is the assumption that the Navaho are not like regular Americans. Imagine a politician addressing a gathering of Jewish leaders and saying, “You know, you Jews are special people. You’re incredible people.” My guess is that the Jews being honored might suddenly get kind of interested in their shoelaces.

“Special-needs” kids, “special ed” – we recognize these as euphemisms. But even when “special” is supposed to designate something positive, it still draws the line between “you” and “us.” And it’s “you,” you special people, who are different.

When In Urfa . . . (Culture and Meaning)

November 25, 2017
Posted by Jay Livingston

A culture is a “meaning system.” A language gives meaning to sounds. A culture gives meaning to actions. What something means is a matter of interpretation. The same sound means different things in diferent languages. Ditto behavior.

When Elif Batuman walked around in Urfa, Turkey without a headscarf, she thought she was expressing her preferences in dress and perhaps her opinion about individualism, feminism, and the Turkish president. (See my post from earlier this week, “How Culture Works.” For Batuman to have worn the scarf would have meant that she was abandoning her ideas. That’s what it would have meant to her. To the people of Urfa, it would have meant only that she was exercising normal politeness.

Batuman herself eventually came to share this view, but only after she had been clued in by someone else – a woman of Turkish origin who was similarly secular, Westernized, and professional. Her mother.

Here is Batuman on “Fresh Air” describing the conversation.


Here’s the transcript.

The thought that I had in Urfa was what am I trying to show by going without a headscarf given that the people who see me without the headscarf have a completely different interpretation? Like, they don't know my ideas. They just know, oh, this is a person who is here and doesn't respect the way that we do things enough to, like, put this thing on her head. Like it - and then it was funny because actually after I wrote that piece in The New Yorker, my mother read it. And I think of my mother as such a, like, a proud secularist person. And she's a scientist. And her mother studied literature. And I'm just so proud of her and of her mother. And she was like, I can't believe I didn't tell you to just wear a headscarf in Urfa. And I was like, really? And she was like, of course. It's just - it's a common politeness. It's - they're people from the countryside. When you go there, of course you wear a head[scarf]. It's just a nice thing to do. And for her it was this thing about, like, niceness. And it wasn't this, like, anguished political thing that I'd been making it into

What does wearing a headscarf mean? Does it mean that the woman has abandoned her feminist beliefs, supporting the patriarchy, and endorsing a repressive, dictatorial president? Or does it mean that she’s just being nice?

Jon Hedricks 1921-2017

November 23, 2017
Posted by Jay Livingston

Others before him had done “vocalese” – instrumental jazz solos transcribed, set with lyrics, and sung. The best known was Eddie Jefferson’s “Moody’s Mood for Love” – James Moody’s solo on the Dorothy Fields - Jimmy McHugh song. But these were rare, almost novelty items. Hendricks took it to a new level.  His vocal trio – Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross – recreated entire arrangements with lyrics to the entire recording

Here is Hendricks’s adaptation of Duke Ellington’s  “Cottontail,” the 1940 recording featuring Ben Webster on tenor. The title – I have no idea why Ellington chose it – pretty much forced Hendricks into Beatrix Potter territory. But Hendricks put a hip musician frame to the tale, transforming Peter Rabbit into sort of a druggie.

Way back in my childhood
I heard a story so true
’bout a funny bunny
Stealing some boo from a garden he knew.

“Boo” is 1940s slang for marijuana.

Out in the garden where carrots are dense
I found a hole in the fence.
Every mornin’ when things are still,
I crawl through the hole and eat my fill.
The other rabbits say I’m taking dares,
and maybe I’m wrong but who cares?
I’m a hooked rabbit! Yeah I got a carrot habit.

My favorite part in the Ellington recording is the chorus by the sax section (at 2:04 in the original recording). In the LHR version above, it starts at 1:54, and the voices are in unison rather than the close harmony of the Ellington’s sax section. 

Thirty years later, Hendricks was still on his game, putting lyrics to one of the most famous jazz recordings, “Freddie Freeloader” from Miles Davis’s “Kind of Blue.” Writing lyrics to a John Coltrane “sheets of sound” solo is no easy task. Neither is singing it. But Hendricks does it, leaving the easier solos to singers who are technically better – Bobby McFerrin, Al Jarreau, and George Benson. It runs to nine minutes but it’s well worth listening to (here), especially if you’ve heard the original so many times over the years that you know every note

How Culture Works

November 22, 2017
Posted by Jay Livingston

Some sociology profs give an assignment that requires students to go out and prank someone. It’s called a “breaching experiment,” but basically, it’s pranking. And as I said in the two previous posts (here and here), despite the reasons professors give for the breaching assignment, it doesn’t really offer a lot of insight into the process of norm breaking and social control.

In the real world, culture and social control are much subtler and more powerful. Look at the experience of journalist Alif Batuman. Her parents are Turkish, but she grew up mostly in the U.S. She goes back to Turkey, and true to her Western ways, she does not wear a head scarf. That’s OK, sort of. Turkey is not Iran. There are no religious police enforcing some law about head scarves. But . . .

Because I spoke Turkish imperfectly, smiled a lot, and often travelled alone, I got a lot of lectures from men, particularly taxi-drivers. Some were secularists; others, those with the most religious paraphernalia in their cars, didn't try to make conversation. That still left many outgoing, casually Muslim drivers who took the time to explain to me how great the head scarf was — how it was “actually a beautiful thing.” For a woman to cover her head, they said, was in fact a feminist gesture, because it made clear she was demanding respect. There weren't the same misunderstandings as with a woman whose head was uncovered.     I usually didn’t reply. . . But once, when a driver pressed me particularly jovially for an opinion, I said something like “I think all women should be respected. It shouldn’t depend on their hair.”     The driver replied that I was absolutely right, that of course women should be respected, and that the head scarf was the best way for women to remind men of this necessity for respect. Men, after all, were worse than women: they could sometimes forget themselves, and then unfortunate things could happen, “even”—he said in a hushed voice, adding that he didn’t like to mention such things in front of me—“even rape.”

The driver probably does not see himself as an agent of social control, a head-scarf cop. He’s just offering – along with his view of what the scarf means – a bit of advice. She is breaking a cultural norm, and he is advising her about the ways of the local culture.

Batuman continued to go without the headscarf, mostly because of her feelings about the Erdoğan, the president of Turkey, and his religious anti-feminism. “Patriarchy — I could never forgive Erdoğan for saying those things about women. And, because he said them in the name of Islam, I couldn’t forgive Islam, either.”

Later, Batuman goes to an archeological site in Urfa. Again she encounters those little questions and comments that let her know she is breaking the norms.

I seemed to be the only unaccompanied woman at my hotel. When I told the clerk I was staying for six days, he almost had a heart attack. “Six days?” he repeated. “All by yourself?” . . . All the time I was in Urfa, whenever I saw any member of the hotel staff in the halls or the lobby, I always received the same greeting: “Oh, you’re still here?”

She is a walking insult to the local culture. It’s not a huge insult, but it’s more than a “micro-aggression.” Her intent is not to insult; she just wants to be herself. The local people for their part are tolerant – or at least not repressive. But they are also not helpful, warm, and accommodating to this stranger. (Sort of like Parisians back in the 20th century.) In the gender-segregated restaurant, the waiter watches the TV and seems to ignore her. When she smiles and waves to the women at another table, they do not wave back.

But culture is not just a matter of negative sanctions. A smile too is a form of social control, positive and pleasant. It tells us we’re doing the right thing. And because it is pleasant, it nudges us to want to continue doing right things. 

One day, when I had been visiting Abraham’s cave, I forgot to take the scarf off. Walking back through the park, I almost immediately felt that something was different. I passed two beautiful young women in scarves, walking arm-in-arm and laughing about something. When I looked at them, they looked right back into my face and met my eyes, still smiling, as if we were all in the presence of a great joke. I realized that no young women had met my eyes or smiled at me in Urfa till then. As I walked on, I felt a rising sense of freedom, as if for the first time I could look wherever I wanted and not risk receiving a hostile glance. So I kept the scarf on. And then I went back into the city. This isn’t a scientific study; I didn’t try it multiple times, or measure anything. All I have is my subjective impression, which is this: walking through the city with a head scarf was a completely different experience. People were so much nicer. Nobody looked away when I approached. I felt less jostled; men seemed to step aside, to give me more room. When I went into a store, a man held the door for me, and I realized that it was the first time anyone had reached a door before me without going in first and letting it shut in my face. Most incredibly, when I got to a bus stop shortly after the bus had pulled away, the departing vehicle stopped in the middle of the street, the door opened, and a man reached out his hand to help me in, calling me “sister.” It felt amazing. To feel so welcomed and accepted and safe, to be able to look into someone’s face and smile, and have the smile returned — it was a wonderful gift.

This is how culture works. And we are all its agents, gently steering people into doing things the right way.

--------------------------------
The quoted passages are from Batuman’s article “Cover Story” in The New Yorker, Feb. 8 and 15, 2016.

Once More Unto the Breach

November 19, 2017
Posted by Jay Livingston

The previous post was about those “breaching” experiments some instructors assign their students. Here’s an example:

For this assignment, you will hypothesize the existence of a rule or expectation . . . and then break it in the presence of at least one naïve subject. You may do your breaching in cooperation with classmates. Possible topics of the breaching exercise include clothing, grooming, conversational topics/styles, shopping behavior, and romantic behavior. The breaching activity must be something you do not regularly do. Possible naïve subject(s) include parents, siblings, roommates, boy/girlfriend, and strangers. Describe the reaction of the naïve subject(s) to your breaching exercise and any interaction you had with them.

My point was that they’d chosen the wrong “naïve subject.” Forget about how other people react.  Students would learn a lot more about norms if they thought about their own reactions to themselves as deliberate norm-breakers. Lesson #1 in that post was that the norms are very powerful. When we think about it in the abstract, breaking a norm doesn’t seem like such a big deal. But in the specific situation, it becomes something much larger. But why?

Lesson #2: When we think about breaking a norm, our anticipatory anxiety is highly exaggerated and not rational. When you ask people why they can’t, just can’t, break the norm, they imagine consequences far out of proportion to what might happen. When Stanley Milgram (see the previous post) told his students to go into the NYC subway and ask people for their seats, one student said, “You want to get us killed?”  When I’ve asked students about doing the breaching experiment, they imagine offended strangers raining mayhem upon them. But even as they say it, they know that it’s preposterous. Which leads to . . . 

Lesson #3: We follow the norms not out of some rational cost-benefit calculation. We follow them because we have internalized them. Society is not just “out there”; it’s “in here,” inside us, as well.

Lesson #4: Because reactions are so mild (a puzzled look, a question), with each incident, breaking the norm becomes easier. Norm-breakers therefore can eventually arrive at a rational, cost-benefit perspective. The student whose breaching consisted of offering to pay less than the price of an item might find that in some stores, you can actually bargain down the price. She then decides to try it as a general practice, not just as an assignment for her sociology class.

Lesson #5. Norms are not absolute. No behavior is always and essentially a breach of the norms. Harold Garfinkle, who invented the breaching experiment, found that his students, no matter what the behavior, could come up with some story or invent some context that “normalized it.”

For the breaching exercises, the simplest, all-purpose normalization is “This is an experiment.” As one of my professors once put it: If you go up to someone and say, “Lie down,” they’ll look at you funny and probably demand an explanation, and if they don’t get one, they might refuse. But if you say, “This is an experiment. Lie down,” down they go.            

All this is about social control – how a society gets people to do what they’re supposed to do. Even these mild reactions to norm-breaking are forms of social control. The raised eyebrow, the questioning look, or an actual question (“Why are you wearing that?”) tip the person off that they are breaking a norm. These are sanctions – negative sanctions. If that’s all we say about social control, we’re missing at least half of the story – positive sanctions as a form of social control. These may be even less noticeable than negative sanctions, but they may also be more important, as I try to show in the next post.

Gimme a Breach

November 18, 2017
Posted by Jay Livingston

For the unit on norms, some sociology teachers have their students do “breaching” experiments – those exercises where you break some norm, observe how people react, and write up your results. (Nowadays, you add a video.) The norms broken vary widely. Stand too close to strangers, face the wrong way in an elevator, wear the wrong clothes (street clothes in the gym). In this one a girl goes up to random boys and kisses them. (So much for her career in the Senate.)

Some are more elaborate.  A guy wears football pads to the super market and does push-ups in the middle of the canned vegetable aisle. A student dresses up in a mascot costume and dances through the quad. Some of these scenarios get into Candid Camera territory, like this girl who, wearing her bathrobe and carrying a basket of laundry, went to the washing machine section in the appliance store.

It’s all good fun, but I’m not a big fan. I don’t ask students to breach. My impression is that the intended lessons are fairly obvious

• All situations are governed by norms. In any situation you can imagine, there’s a way to do something that breaks a norm.
• The variety of reactions is narrow and predictable. Some people ignore, some look quizzically, some guess correctly that it’s some kind of stunt, a few ask the norm-breaker what she’s doing.

The trouble with these breaching exercises is that the assignment and camera are pointed at the people who are reacting. If you want more interesting findings, focus instead on the reactions of the person doing the breaching.

Lesson #1: Norms are powerful – a lot more powerful than you think.

Few people realize how hard it is to deliberately break a norm. It’s so hard that some students cheat on the assignment. They turn in a paper describing their breach and the reactions, but it’s fiction; they never really did the experiment. It was lack of lack of time or imagination that prevented them. It was lack of courage.

When Stanley Milgram assigned his seminar to ask strangers on the New York City subway for their seats, he was disappointed at how few students completed the task. Wen they explained how nerve-wracking it was, Milgram decided to show them. He, along with clipboard-bearing student who would do the observing, went down into the subway, and got on the train. And Milgram couldn’t do it. He couldn’t ask a stranger for their seat. The student had to give him a pep talk, boost his courage. Meanwhile, the train had gone several stops. Finally, Milgram picked out the most unthreatening looking person in the subway car and approached. What he felt was akin to panic – the sudden warmth at the neck and head, the sweat, the tightening of the throat. Finally, he mumbled, “ExcusemecanIhaveyourseat?” “What?” said the woman. “Excuse me, but could I have your seat?”

The woman got up. But it’s not her reaction that’s interesting or unexpected; it’s Milgram’s. And those of his students. As one man said later, “I was afraid I was going to throw up.” None of them foresaw how difficult it would be.*

(For more lessons drawn from breaching experiments, see the next post.)


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* Milgram, of all people, should have foreseen the power everyday norms. Only a few years earlier, he had shown that people would choose to electrocute a stranger rather than break the norm, tell the man in the lab coat he was wrong, and ruin one trial of the experiment.                                            

Still Funny After All These Years. . . and News Stories?

November 11, 2017
Posted by Jay Livingston

It’s the celebrities and politicians that we hear about – all these stories of men behaving badly, sometimes very badly. More troubling is that far too many non-celebrities – men without the power of a studio head or highly successful comedian or office holder – do the same things. The very powerful can make or break careers, lives. Director James Toback would tell an aspiring actress who he had more or less forced to undress that he had mob connections and that if she reported the incident, he would have her killed. It sounds like yet another male fantasy, but how could she be sure it wasn’t true?
                               
Victims of sexual harassment, sexual assault, and rape, as we well know, often don’t report the offense. Surveys provide some alternative data, but those surveys too may be inaccurate. What about less dramatic sexual piggishness? It’s less serious, but probably far more common. Here’s a tweet I saw today (HT: Gwen Sharp).

Asking for retweets can’t even be called methodology. Still, nearly 200,000 in two days is a lot. I was reminded of this Seinfeld episode from 1994 and wondered if, in the current climate, it’s still funny.

I do think it’s still funny. The writer of this episode (“The Stand In”) was Larry David, though Carol Leifer is listed as story consultant. I just wonder whose idea it was. Who would know that this is the sort of thing that can easily happen, and often does happen, on a date?*
-------------------------
                           
* Some incidents of exposure are not sexual; they are purely for the purpose of aggression and intimidation. When Janis Hirsch, a TV comedy writer, was working on Garry Shandling’s show, the other writers, all male, began to exclude her, possibly because her work was better than theirs.

The guys started excluding me from meetings: “Oh, we couldn’t find you”...at my desk. Then they started excluding me from the table, instead assigning me “the slit scenes” to write. Even though these scenes were the ones that featured the only female cast member, it didn’t occur to me exactly what slit they were referring to until one day in the ladies room. One day, I was sitting in Garry’s office across the desk from him. A few of the writers and one of the actors were in the room, too. I felt a tap on my shoulder, I turned, and there was that actor’s flaccid penis draped on it like a pirate’s dead parrot. Riotous laughter ensued from all but one of us. [The full story is in The Hollywood Reporter ]

This happened in 1986. The term microaggression had not yet become current. Too bad. She would have had a great comeback line.

Another Round of Cosmopolitans

November 11, 2017
Posted by Jay Livingston

Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between good journalism and sociology. One obvious difference is in the data. Social science data has to be thorough and sysematic. A journalist can merely talk to a cab driver or report on how a friend reacted to a sandwich menu that offered a “Padrino” or “soppresssata.”

If you’re a journalist, you also don’t have to worry much about antecedents. You can put your ideas on display as something totally new, like fidget spinners. But if you want to pass as a scholar, you have to do your homework.

British journalist David Goodhart in his recent book on populism and politics in the UK has created two types he calls Somewheres and Anywheres to explain what’s happening. David Brooks yesterday borrowed the terms and applied them to US politics.

Somewheres are rooted in their towns and have “ascribed” identities — Virginia farmer, West Virginia coal miner, Pennsylvania steelworker. Anywheres are at home in the global economy. They derive their identity from portable traits, like education or job skills, and are more likely to move to areas of opportunity. Somewheres value staying put; they feel uncomfortable with many aspects of cultural and economic change, like mass immigration. Anywheres make educational attainment the gold standard of status and are cheerleaders for restless change.

Pardon me, but this sounds awfully similar to a typology offered sixty years ago by sociologist Alvin Gouldner in his Administrative Science Quarterly article. “Cosmopolitans and Locals.” The terms give a fairly good picture of these two types, the one more mobile and oriented towards a profession, the other rooted to a place or a company. Here’s a quick version:

Locals:         high on loyalty to the employing organization,         low on commitment to specialized role skills         likely to use an inner reference group orientation.      Cosmopolitans:         low on loyalty to the employing organization         high on commitment to specialized role skills         likely to use an outer reference group orientation

I haven’t read Goodhart’s book; maybe he does credit Gouldner. In a Financial Times article (here) he describes himself as a “post-liberal,” and perhaps he avoids cosmopolitan because he is familiar with the alt-right and their use of cosmopolitan as a pejorative synonym for Jew. (See my earlier post on this.)

I had the impression that David Brooks took some sociology courses at Chicago, but I guess cosmopolitans and locals never came up.

The Fault in Our Polls

November 8, 2017
Posted by Jay Livingston

A year ago, the polls predicted that Hillary would win. They were wrong. They also predicted that she would get about 3 percentage points more votes than Trump. They were right.

This year, the polls – nearly all of them – predicted that in gobernatorial election in Virginia, Ralph Northam would beat Ed Gillespie. They were right. They also predicted, on average, that the winning margin would be 3.3%. They were wrong. Northam won by more than 8 points.

RealClearPolitics published this table of poll results. (The last two rows are my own addition, based on stories at The Hill.)Bad calls – mostly results falling outside a poll’s margin of error – are in red.

(Click on the image for a larger view.)

In general, the polls

• called the winner (only three got it wrong)
• nailed the Gillespie vote
• underestimated the Northam vote
• underestimated the winning margin

Some polls came closer than others. Quinnipiac had the margin right but lowballed the percents for both candidates, especially Gillespie. Rasmussen’s usual rightward bias led them to miss what most got right – the winner. Of the major polls, the farthest off was New York Times / Siena, though it showed no liberal bias in its errors. It underestimated the Republican vote by 5 points, the Democratic vote by 10 points.

I have no good explanation for these results. I leave that to people who know something about polling and voting.

Addicted

November 7, 2017
Posted by Jay Livingston

Addiction is not irrational. It’s just destructive. It has its own logic and reasoning.  For the heroin addict, another shot of smack really will relieve the misery of withdrawal. . . till the next time.

The compulsive gamblers I studied long ago often said that their gambling debts had become so large that the only solution was to gamble even more. Otherwise, relying on their ordinary income, they would never get out of the hole. But then gambling led to more losses and even larger debt, whose solution in turn was still more gambling.

Addiction is trying to solve a problem by doing more of what caused the problem in the first place. It’s basically the NRA/John Lott position on guns. (See the previous post.)

Guns in the Israeli Playbook

November 6, 2017
Posted by Jay Livingston

After mass shootings that make the national news, The Onion regularly reposts this headline.

As if to prove The Onion right, Fox News came in on cue with an article by John Lott.

Lott, whose research and ethics have come in for much criticism,* actually makes a valid point here. Mental health screening can never find in advance the extremely rare individual who will commit a mass murder.

But Lott avoids discussing the one obvious liberal proposal – ban assault weapons. Devin Kelly used an assault rifle at the Sutherland Springs church, leaving 26 people dead, 20 others wounded. Apparently, just about anyone can buy this kind of deadly weaponry in Texas and in many other states. Yes, it’s possible to kill a couple dozen people with only a handgun (also easily available in Texas and elsewhere) or rifle. But by letting killers buy an assault rifle we make their job so much easier.

Lott also repeats the gunslinger line that the only way to stop mass killings is to have more people carry guns. That “good guy with a gun” was not ignored by the liberal media. NYT, WaPo, NPR, CNN – they all mentioned him and said that it’s possible that his bullets may have hit the mass shooter. They also reported, however, that the good guy with his gun arrived on the scene after the killer had left the church and was heading to his car.

Lott continues:

If the media and politicians want to do something effective, they could take a page out of Israel’s playbook. When there is a surge in terrorist attacks , Israeli police call on permitted civilians to make sure that they have their guns with them at all times.

Lott picked the wrong country to use as an example. Take another look at that phrase “permitted civilians.” If you had an image of Israel as a Middle East Jewish version of Texas, where anyone can walk into Guns Galore and walk out armed to the teeth, think again. It’s hard, really hard, to get a gun permit in Israel.

Only a small group of people are eligible for firearms licenses: certain retired military personnel, police officers or prison guards; residents of frontier towns (in the West Bank and the Golan Heights) or those who often work in such towns; and licensed hunters and animal-control officers. Firearm license applicants must . . . establish a genuine reason for possessing a firearm (such as self-defense, hunting, or sport), and pass a weapons-training course. Around 40% of applications for firearms permits are rejected. [Wikipedia. Emphasis added.]

Less than 3% of the population has that license, which must be renewed every three years. It’s almost impossible to own more than one gun. Guns in the home must be kept unloaded. And civilians are not allowed to buy assault weapons.

The Israeli playbook sounds like a very good idea. If we had taken the whole book, not just a page, a Devin Kelly or Stephen Paddock would probably not have qualified for a gun permit. And if he had been able to get a permit, he would have had only one gun. And many more Americans would still be alive.

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* The cat-ate-my-homework dodge when other scholars asked to see his data. The sock puppet he created to lavish praise at Amazon on his book and his teaching. More here. He’s also very litigious, threatening his critics with lawsuits. I think he even threatened me once; no target is too small. He may do so again.
 

Witches, Bitches, Sluts

October 31, 2017
Posted by Jay Livingston

Speaking of Halloween costumes for women (as I was a few days ago – here), consider this observation and fill in the blanks, all with the same word. Here’s a hint: it has something to do with Halloween costumes for women.

criteria for applying the ___________ label were not widely shared. There appeared to be no group of women consistently identified as ___________ s. . . . . Everyone succeeded at avoiding stable classification. Yet the  stigma still felt very real. Women were convinced that actual ___________ s existed and organized their behaviors to avoid this label.

The word could have been witch, but the setting is not 17th century Salem. It’s a Midwest university dormitory (one known as a “party dorm”) in the early 21st century. The word is slut.

There are a few ways that sluts are like witches. The Halloween connection might be a clue. Halloween is a holiday of release, a time when we can play at roles that are usually forbidden and act out desires that we must usually keep hidden under the cloak of propriety. The usually suppressed themes that the witch and the slut are expressing are things that make men fearful or uncomfortable. The core of the witch is her power, a commodity rarely held by women. It’s the power to do ill – putting curses on people, transforming them into lowly animals – but hey, power is power. What the slut is enacting is undisguised lust. The “nice girl” accommodates men’s demands but makes no demands of her own save those that men feel comfortable with. The woman who openly demands her own sexual fulfillment, may be tempting to men, yet also dangerous.

The passage about sluts is not about men and their reactions to women. It’s about women and their use of the term slut. It’s from the 2014 article “Good Girls” by Elizabeth Armstrong and Laura Hamilton. They and their research team lived in the dorm as ethnographers, listening to the girls. And they often heard the word slut. But that usage was unusual in two ways. First, sluts, like witches, are not real. Instead the term is a Weberian ideal type, used for marking a moral boundary. Second, sluttiness is not primarily about sex – what a girl did in private and who she did it with. Instead, what made for sluttiness was “public gender performance.”

 The categories on either side of that boundary were different depending on class and status of the girls. For working-class girls, sluts were “bitchy” in contrast to “nice” girls like themselves. For the upper-middle class girls, sluts were “trashy” while they themselves were “classy.”

Bitchy/nice, trashy/classy. It’s the latter distinction that is the basis for all those “sexy” (i.e., slutty) Halloween costumes you may see tonight. You won’t see working-class girls taking advantage of this one day to dress up as upper-middle-class bitchy sorority sluts.  But as one of the higher status students told the researchers,

[Halloween is] the night that girls can dress skanky. Me and my friends do it. [And] in the summer, I’m not gonna lie, I wear itty bitty skirts. . . . Then there are the sluts that just dress slutty, and sure they could be actual sluts. I don’t get girls that go to fraternity parties in the dead of winter wearing skirts that you can see their asses in.

The quote illustrates both of Armstrong and Hamilton’s observations: first, that overt sexiness is something that girls must keep in check unless they have some excuse like Halloween; and second, that “actual sluts,” like actual witches, may be something nobody has actually seen.

Debbie Does Durkheim

October 27, 2017
Posted by Jay Livingston

Remember “profiling” in the 1990s – “Silence of the Lambs” (1991) and then the TV series “Profiler” (1996 - 2000). It seemed like half the students in my crim courses were there because they wanted be profilers,* untangling the twisted psyches of serial killers, figuring out where they would strike next, and nabbing them just before they killed again. What a disappointment my course must have been.   

They’re baaack. Not my students. Profilers on TV. The show is “Mindhunter.” It’s on Netflix, it’s set in the late 1970s, and it has some big names attached – David Fincher and Charlize Theron are producers, and Fincher directed some of the episodes. And another big name: Emile Durkheim.

In the first episode, the central character Holden Ford, in a loud and crowded bar (there’s a rock band playing), finds himself standing next to Debbie Mitford, an attractive young woman. They step outside to continue their conversation. That’s when she utters the kind of pick-up line that’s become such a tired cliche these days.

(Click on an image for a larger view)

Debbie is a graduate student in sociology. He’s a hostage negotiator for the FBI, but his boss has just assigned him to the classroom – to teach agents hostage negotiation. He confesses his ignorance about Durkheim, but the flirtation continues.

This struck me as not quite right. Alas, I was not called in as a script doctor on this show. I know something about theories of deviance. On the other hand, I know little about bar conversations. Anyway, once Debbie has lured him this far, she adds, with a twinkle in her eye,

I haven’t seen the rest of the series, but it looks like the Debbie-Holden thing will have a life beyond this one meeting in a bar. The relationship will probably hinge on some underlying and never-resolved sexual tension  – a flat, humorless version of  Cybil Shepard and Bruce Willis in the first seasons of “Moonlighting.” Just a guess.

The sociology lesson ends with this:

And my point is that the ideas she attributes to Durkheim might be ideas you could derive from Durkheim. But they are not what he actually said. The key passage is the one in The Rules of Sociological Method (here), where Durkheim says that even in a society of saints there will be crime. It won’t be the crime of the unsaintly world. But the norms for acceptable behavior will be raised so high, that actions that are unremarkable in our world will be treated as criminal.

Over a half-century later, this passage became the cornerstone of labeling theory – the recognition that deviance is a not a thing but a process. It is the interaction between those who make and enforce the rules or norms and those who break them. But Durkheim himself never used the word labeling, nor did he take the more conflict-based view that criminality is a response to “something wrong” in the society.

Sociological script consultants – never around when you need one.

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* My inner dyslexic always wants to read “profilers” as “prolifers” – not exactly the same thing, though perhaps not entirely different. 

HT: Max for alerting me to this scene.

Halloween – When It’s Not About Sexiness

Oct 26, 2017
Posted by Jay Livingston

Halloween’s just a few days away, and I still haven’t come up with a costume. I could do the same thing as the last few years and again opt for Slutty Max Weber. But it’s getting old.

OK, that was a joke. But for women, especially young women, deciding on a costume is no joke. A USA Today article on the topic quotes sociologist Lisa Wade*: “All of our choices are bad.”

The choices are bad because it’s about sex. Or rather, sexiness. As Alia Dastigir, author of the USA Today piece, puts it,“Dress sexy on Halloween and risk being judged or harassed, or forgo the fishnets and risk being ridiculed or ignored.” Note the passive voice. Judged, harassed, ridiculed, or ignored but by who? By men of course.

Because men have the power in these situations (and in most), women orient themselves to men’s ideas, hence the two unsatisfactory alternatives. The hegemony of men’s way of looking at things is especially acute in settings built on the expectation of male-female pairing. That setting, typically, is a party – a Halloween party.  And the expectations or hopes can range from “meeting someone” to all the different levels of  “hooking up”  or even to something like romance.

In places were the underlying idea of Halloween is not about male-female relations, women turn out in a variety of costumes, and the dimension they are judged on – by others and by themselves – is not sexiness. When my son was in college, his group went as Clue. Nobody, even Miss Scarlet, was trying for sexy. (My son, for his part, went to Goodwill and managed to find an actual green suit.)

In the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade, participants seem to be striving for not for sexiness but for creativity and humor, often as a group effort.  The Thriller group is a great example, though its numbers make it a bit of an outlier – 200 or so ghouls and zombies with a handful of Michael Jacksons.



The Village Parade is an exception. Many paraders, perhaps most, make their own costumes. In the rest of America, we buy our costumes, and the costume companies cannot very well sell creativity. So most of what they sell for women is sexiness.

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* Lisa was the founding editor (along with Gwen Sharp) of Sociological Images, which for a while was by far the most visited sociology blog on the Internet. Maybe it still is.

Risk and Blame Again – Ms Bialik, Meet Mr. Trump

October 25, 2017
Posted by Jay Livingston

As Mayim Bialik discovered from the reaction to her op-ed, it’s hard for most of us to untangle the strands of risk and blame. Bialik explained why her appearance and demeanor put her at less risk of sexual harassment in Hollywood. People accused her of blaming the victims of sexual harassment and assault. (See my previous post here.)

A few days later, Bialik had unexpected company in the same boat – Donald Trump. The widow of a soldier killed in Niger reported that Trump, in phoning her to offer condolences, said, “He knew what he signed up for.”

Trump’s critics inferred that he was in effect blaming the victim for taking the risk. Not just any victim and any risk, but a victim whose risk was to defend our country (assuming that’s what our soldiers are doing in Niger). Nobody said that Trump was factually incorrect, but even though what he said was a change from his usual tenuous relation to the truth, it was still unwelcome. His remark about risk wasn’t inaccurate; it was “insensitive.” It demonstrated his insensitivity, especially to people of color (so what else is new?)

Unlike Bialik, who basically recanted, Trump, as usual, attacked. He said that the widow and her Congressional representative Frederica Wilson, who had also heard the phone call were lying about what he had said. They weren’t. He made another false accusation against Ms Wilson. Then he tried another of his favorite strategies, attacking Obama. Obama and other previous presidents, said Trump, had never called the families of fallen soldiers. They had.

Trump could have avoided this mess if he had issued a statement to the effect that pointing out risk is not the same as blaming. “I meant to thank her and her husband for the great risks he took – the risk that all our soldiers take – in defending us.” Instead, he went on the attack, coming out with at least three falsehoods, mostly false accusations against African American women. So it probably won’t cost him any points in the approval polls. 

Risk and Blame

October 18, 2017
Posted by Jay Livingston

Tweeters were throwing shade at Mayim Bialik this week for her op-ed in the New York Times. In that article, Bialik said that in her Hollywood career she had never encountered the kinds of sexual predation and harassment that Harvey Weinstein’s victims are reporting. The reason, she said, was that she was not as physically attractive.

I have also experienced the upside of not being a “perfect ten.” As a proud feminist with little desire to diet, get plastic surgery or hire a personal trainer, I have almost no personal experience with men asking me to meetings in their hotel rooms. Those of us in Hollywood who don’t represent an impossible standard of beauty have the “luxury” of being overlooked and, in many cases, ignored by men in power unless we can make them money.

The charge leveled against Bialik for this was victim-blaming. 

(Click on an image for a larger view.)

Bialik also had many supporters who said that her accusers had misread the Times column. But she quickly came around and issued a statement (on Twitter I think) that sounded as though she had cribbed it directly from Eve Ewing (Wikipedia Brown)..

God forbid I would blame a woman for her assault based on her clothing or behavior. . . .How you dress and how you behave has nothing to do with being assaulted. Assault and rape are acts of power, they’re not acts of sexual desire. There is no way to avoid being the victim of assault by what you wear or the way you behave.

The amazing thing about the dispute is how civil it was. Yes some comments were foolish or fallacious. But there was little of the snark ranging from snide to vicious that plagues so many Internet conflicts. (I wrote a blogpost a while ago called  “The Tragedy of the Comments.” The title said it all.) And nobody, as far as I know, mentioned Hitler. Nor has Bialik (again AFAIK) gotten any death threats. Maybe that’s because the participants were mostly women. But maybe it’s also because most of the participants on both sides share the same politics and the same general outlook.

The apparent conflict arises because they cannot separate the empirical from the moral. What can a woman do to change her risk of victimization? That is an empirical question. Who is to blame for sexual harassment and assault? That is a moral question.

Bialik’s critics seem to think that you shouldn’t even ask the empirical risk question, for to do so leads to the wrong answer on the moral blame question. They also think that they already know the answer to the empirical question. As the chastened Bialik says, echoing the views of her critics, “How you dress and how you behave has nothing to do with being assaulted. . .  There is no way to avoid being the victim of assault by what you wear or the way you behave.” This is just a few days after she said that she avoided sexual harassment and worse by the Harvey Weinsteins of Hollywood precisely by how she looked and behaved. 

She was right the first time. It seems obvious that when male predators have a choice – and men in positions of power, men like Weinstein, Trump, Ailes, et al., do have a choice – they choose victims who are physically attractive. In the wider world outside the corridors and hotel rooms of power, not all women are equally likely to be victimized. Data from the national victimization survey by the Bureau of Justice Statistics shows that age, marital status, and income make a difference.

Bialik’s statement can be true only if when she says “there is no way to avoid being the victim,” she means one hundred percent certainty. Yes, some women will be victimized regardless of appearance and behavior. As the BJS survey shows, even among women 65 and older, 2 in every 10,000 reported being victims of rape or sexual assault.* But younger women face a far higher risk of victimization. Does that mean we blame rape victims for being young? Or poor? (Unfortunately, some people do blame them for being unmarried.**)

Or perhaps Bialik means that once a predator has decided to victimize a woman, his power (physical, economic, social) may make it nearly impossible for her to avoid the assault.

In an ideal world, a woman’s appearance and behavior would make no difference in her risk of being a victim of sexual assault. In an ideal world there would be no sexual assault. The way that both Bialik and her critics would like to move towards that ideal is by men changing their behavior. How that is to be accomplished is a huge empirical question. The good news is that the BJS survey also shows that rates of rape and sexual assault have decreased greatly over the past quarter century.

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* This estimate is based on a very small number of cases, ten at the most. But while the estimate may be unreliable, the point is that at least some older women were victims.

** See this post from 2014 on the idea that part of the marriage contract is the protection of the woman from sexual predation. The post ends with a quote from Philip Slater: “Before long, of course, every protection contract becomes a protection racket: ‘Give me what I want and I will protect you against me.’”

Thelonius Monk – born October 10, 1917

October 10, 2017
Posted by Jay Livingston

Happy 100th Birthday!

Musicians often refer to songs by jazzers as “tunes.” Whose tune is that?” one musician might ask another who has just played something that’s not entirely familiar?  Standards (by Porter, Gershwin, Rodgers, Arlen, et al.) can be “songs,” maybe because they come ready-made with lyrics. But  numbers by jazz musicians are usually “tunes” – Bud Powell tunes, Bird tunes.

The works of a few jazz greats are spoken of as not just tunes but also as “compositions.” Ellington, of course, who wrote works that lent themselves to full arrangements for his orchestra.  But also Monk, even though most of his compositions were originally vehicles for a trio or quartet or even just solo piano. Most of these are in the standard 32-bar format, but, for some reason I cannot quite explain, while Dizzy’s “Night in Tunisia” is a tune, “Round Midnight” is a composition.

It’s fairly easy to understand why a tune is a composition when all the notes, not just the single line of notes that are the melody, are essential. “Ruby My Dear,” “Crepuscule With Nellie,” “Monk’s Mood,” and others. But even Monk’s tunes that can be written as a single-line lead-sheet are thought of as compositions. “Well, You Needn’t” is a 32-bar AABA tune, and the A section has only two alternating chords, F and G-flat. Yet it’s a “composition.”

Here’s “Crepuscule With Nellie,” recorded in 1957.

The album is “Monk’s Music” – Coltrane and Coleman Hawkins on tenor, Gigi Gryce alto, Ray Copeland trumpet,Wilbur Ware bass, Shadow Wilson drums. I wish I knew more about this recording date. Except for Coltrane and perhaps Shadow Wilson, these were not people Monk was playing regularly with.

Connie Hawkins — 1943 - 2017

October 8, 2017 
Posted by Jay Livingston

(Click for a larger view. You can’t really tell from this picture, 
but it’s just possible that Clyde made the shot.)

The opening chapter of  Pete Axthelm’s  The City Game (1970) is about the Rucker Tournament in Harlem – playground basketball at its best. Even NBA (or at the time ABA) players would show up. Julius Erving, Nate Archibald, Wilt. The chapter is also about Connie Hawkins

Axthelm was an excellent sports journalist, and it’s a wonderful chapter. At the risk of tl;dr and copyright violation, I’m going to quote a fair amount of it.

Axthelm’s informant is Pat Smith, who had played at Marquette. As they walk by the playground where Rucker used to take place, Smith points to a tree. “When I was a kid, I’d climb up into that tree. I’d stake out one of the branches early in the morning and just sit there all day.”

“It was the kind of game that established citywide reputations. Clinton Robinson was playing. Jackie Jackson was there. So was Wilt Chamberlain, who was in his first or second year of pro ball at the time....” He savored each name as he spoke it; this was a very special honor roll. Some of the names, like Robinson’s and Jackson’s, would be familiar only to the ghetto kids who once worshiped them; others, like Chamberlain’s, would be recognized by every basketball fan. But to Smith and many others they were all gods, and their best games were Olympian clashes. “Chamberlain and Robinson were on the same team along with some other greats, and they were ahead by about 15 points. They looked like easy winners. Then, up in the tree, I heard a strange noise. There were maybe four, five thousand people watching the game, and all of a sudden a hush came over them. All you could hear was a whisper: ‘The Hawk, The Hawk, The Hawk is here.’ Then the crowd parted. And the Hawk walked onto the court.”

Axthelm interweaves Smith’s account of the game with backstory about Rucker and about Hawkins – Brooklyn Boys High, U of Iowa, the scandal and suspension, the Globetrotters (for godssake, the Globetrotters – thanks NBA), the lawsuit against the NBA. You can read about all that in the obits today. (Try Richard Goldstein in the Times.)

Then back to the game.

“The crowd was still hushed as they called time out,” Smith continued. “They surrounded the man. They undressed the man. And finally he finished lacing up his sneakers and walked out into the backcourt. He got the ball, picked up speed, and started his first move. Chamberlain came right out to stop him. The Hawk went up-he was still way out beyond the foul line-and started floating toward the basket. Wilt, taller and stronger, stayed right with him- but then The Hawk hook -dunked the ball right over Chamberlain. He hook -dunked! Nobody had ever done anything like that to Wilt. The crowd went so crazy that they had to stop the game for five minutes. And I almost fell out of the tree.”

But, Smith says, one move, no matter how spectactular does not close out a game. It takes it up a level.. Chamberlain, 7' 1" and strong, stuffs two-handed over Hawkins.

“By then everybody on the court was fired up-and it was time for The Hawk to take charge again. Clinton Robinson came toward him with the ball, throwing those crazy moves on anyone who tried to stop him, and then he tried to loft a lay-up way up onto the board, the way he had done before. Only this time The Hawk was up there waiting for it. He was up so high that he blocked the shot with his chest. Still in midair, he kind of swept his hands down across his chest as if he were wiping his shirt-and slammed the ball down at Robinson’s feet. The play seemed to turn the whole game around, and The Hawk's team came from behind to win. That was The Hawk. Just beautiful. I don’t think anybody who was in that crowd could ever forget that game.”

“Contracts Freely Entered Into” or “An Offer He Couldn’t Refuse”?

October 6, 2017
Posted by Jay Livingston

On Monday, the Supreme Court heard arguments about arbitration clauses in the contracts that consumers and employees sign. I don’t know how many times I have clicked on “I agree,” but one of the things I’ve probably agreed to was arbitration.

Imagine that a company is adding a small and almost hidden fee to the bills of all its customers. If I notice it, and if I complain, the company might give me back the few dollars it has scammed me out of over the past several months. But they’ll keep the money that thousands of less vigilant customers have paid. Or maybe they won’t do the right thing. I could file a lawsuit. But even the cheapest lawyer would cost far more than the amount of money I might get back.

The way to stop the scam is for some ambitious lawyer to file a class-action suit on behalf of all the victims. But it turns out that all of us have clicked “I agree.” We will each have to settle the dispute in individual arbitration. No class action. Me vs. Wells Fargo. Guess who’s going to win.
       
It’s the same for workers whose employment contracts have arbitration clauses.

Earlier this year, Susan Fowler sparked an uproar in the technology industry with allegations of sexual harassment and gender discrimination at Uber. An internal investigation led to more than 200 employee complaints and at least 20 terminations. But Fowler may not be able to sue Uber in court. When she joined the ridesharing company, Uber required her to resolve any disputes through private arbitration and waive her right to participate in a class action. (Wired)

Sunday night at 10:00 – just a few hours before the Supreme Court heard the oral arguments – “The Deuce,” had a memorable scene about individual arbitration. The show has several interwoven plot lines, all set in the grittier regions of the 1970s New York City ecosystem. In the blue-collar biota, Bobby is in charge of paychecks at a construction site. His brother-in-law, a sleazo named Vinnie who knows some mob guys, suggests that instead of handing out paychecks they become in effect a check-cashing service. The worker signs over his check and receives cash minus a 5% cut. The workers will be OK with it. Pay comes at the end of the day on Friday, the workers want cash for the weekend, and the banks are closed till Monday.

Except one of the workers, Bill Schmidt, wants his check for the full amount. Word of this gets around to the mob guy. He comes to the construction site with his enforcer, has Schmidt called aside, and supervises the mob version of individual arbitration – the goon beats Schmidt brutally.

I doubt that Justices Gorsuch or Roberts or any of the others were watching “The Deuce,” and if they were, I doubt that they saw a connection. After all, there are obvious differences between Uber and the Gambino family. MasterCard is not the Mafia. Wells Fargo didn’t beat up their employees who were reluctant to join in the company scams. Wells Fargo just made it impossible for them to get jobs in banking.

We all know the most famous case of a contract signed under a power imbalance.

The important similarity is the discrepancy in power. At some point, that power difference makes it ludicrous to talk about “contracts freely entered into.”

When there are only one or two providers or credit card companies, and they all have the same provisions in their contracts, how meaningful is “I agree,” especially when these companies have armies of lawyers? They also have the Republican-appointed majority of the Supreme Court.

The Vast Majority of Gun Owners

October 5, 2017 

Posted by Jay Livingston


I heard a guy on the radio arguing against any new gun laws. He said that he himself owns many guns, maybe forty (roughly the number owned by the Las Vegas shooter, though the guy on the radio didn’t phrase it that way).. His personal arsenal includes a few assault rifles. He likes to go out to the shooting range and open fire. That’s what the vast majority of gun owners do, he said. Plus self-protection. 

So I’m reposting what I wrote a few days after the Orlando nightclub massacre. And I may repost it yet again after the next massacre. Of course, it will probably have to be a record breaker to make the news. Your run-of-the-American-mill mass shooting, with its paltry three or four victims – that happens just about every day, so it doesn’t even make the news the way it might in most other countries. 

When Guns Do What Guns Are Designed to Do

An assault rifle is designed to kill – to kill a lot of people, and quickly. That’s why it was created. That’s its primary function. For soldiers in combat, it’s a very good thing to have. If it could not kill lots of people, nobody would want it.

Manufacturing assault rifles in pink and posting pictures of young girls holding them doesn’t alter that basic purpose. Neither does the statistic that nearly all civilians who own them use them for fun. What that statistic means is that we as a nation have decided through our legislators that the fun of those gun owners is more important than the lives of 50 people in Orlando or 20 schoolchildren in Sandy Hook.

Here’s an analogy. Suppose that the military developed small bomb, something like a hand grenade but much more powerful. It easily blows up a building and kills anything within a 50-yard radius. Soldiers find them to be very effective in combat.

The companies that manufacture these bombs also sell them to the public. Lots of people buy these bombs. Bomb stores spring up next to gun stores. They have names like Bombs Away or It’s Da Bomb – all in good fun. And in fact, nearly all of the buyers use them for fun – tossing them into empty fields. People go to bombing ranges that have small buildings put up so that patrons can blow them sky high. Of course, there are accidents. Bomb owners sometimes blow up themselves. Or their own houses with their children inside. 

But occasionally, once a year or so, someone tosses a bomb into a crowd of people or into a real building. Many people are killed. Predictably, liberals say that maybe we ought not allow these bombs to be freely sold. Maybe we ought not let them be sold at all. But the bomb lobby claims that bombs are armaments and therefore are protected by the Constitution from being restricted in any way, and besides, people need the bombs for their own protection. Our legislators, a majority of them, agree. The occasional slaughter is no reason to prevent everyone from getting a bomb.

The bomb lobby and the media will invariably refer to each slaughter as a “tragedy” –  unfortunate but unavoidable. After all, the bomber got his bombs legally. And if he did get them illegally, it just shows that bomb laws don’t work.

Bill O’Reilly on Guns: Six Specious Reasons to Support the Status Quo

October 2, 2017
Posted by Jay Livingston

I figured that after today’s massacre in Las Vegas, I could count on Bill O’Reilly for some specious arguments about guns. He didn’t let me down. In a post (here) of only 270 words (237 if you leave out his recounting of some of the facts), he manages to make at least a half dozen misleading or false statements.

1. But having covered scores of gun-related crimes over the years, I can tell you that government restrictions will not stop psychopaths from harming people.

They will find a way.

This is the all-or-none fallacy. It implies that since we can’t entirely stop murderous psychopaths, we shouldn’t try.  We can’t “stop” highway deaths either. Does that mean we shouldn’t try to make make roads and cars and even drivers safer?

The killer had a lot of rifles, some of them fully automatic (probably converted from semi-automatic). He also had lots and lots of bullets. Even if he couldn’t have been stoppped, restricting the kinds of guns and ammuntion psychopaths and anyone else can get will reduce the number of victims. 

2. The issue is so polarizing and emotional that little will be accomplished as there is no common ground.

This is a variant on the first argument. Since we might not be able to solve the problem entirely, we shouldn’t bother trying. Civil rights was polarizing. Healthcare, abortion, same-sex marriage, legal weed – all have been (and in some cases still are) polarizing. Should we give up on trying to do something about these issues until we have consensus? If you don’t look for common ground, of course you’re never going to find it.

3. The NRA and its supporters want easy access to weapons, while the left wants them banned.

All-or-nothing and no-common-ground again. O’Reilly implies that there is nothing between unlimited access and a total ban on all firearms. That’s obviously wrong. O’Reilly is also factually incorrect about what NRA members and people on the left want. A majority of NRA members support background checks and some restrictions on firearms. And nobody on the left has proposed a total ban.

4. This is the price of freedom.  Violent nuts are allowed to roam free until they do damage, no matter how threatening they are.

O’Reilly plays the American trump card – Freedom. Almost guaranteed to win any argument here. But he plays it as though there is only one freedom card. Either we have it or we don’t. He’s saying that any restriction on guns will totally eliminate freedom.

Australia, Canada, the UK, Germany, and all these other well-functioning democracies – are they substantially less free than the US? Have they sacrificed all their freedom by making weapons of mass slaughter hard to get?

5 and 6. The Second Amendment is clear that Americans have a right to arm themselves for protection.  Even the loons.

The Second Amendment says nothing about self-protection. If it was so clear, would the Supreme Court have taken over two hundred years to figure it out? (DC v Heller, 2008),  Nor has the Court said that crazy people have the right to buy guns. In fact, two years after Heller, the Court said explicitly that states could prohibit the mentally ill (and felons) from possessing guns.

So there you have it – six specious arguments in favor of not trying to do anything to reduce gun violence and death. O’Reilly didn’t go the “thoughts and prayers” route. He didn’t say, “This is a time for our thoughts and prayers for the victims. It’s not a time for politics.” (It never is.) Instead, he found another way, less sanctimonious but more deceitful, to say, “Let’s not even try to think about policy, about what we can do.”

Hef and Auguste Comte

September 28, 2017
Posted by Jay Livingston

One tiny fun fact that you probably won’t find in the Hugh Hefner obituaries this week: The brains behind Playboy was a sociologist, A.C. Spectorsky.

Spectorsky did not have a sociology degree. He had a BS in physics from NYU, and he worked in media. But his writing had a sociological bent. His 1955 book The Exurbanites (he coined the term exurbs) was reviewed by C. Wright Mills.

Spectorsky (left) and Hefner, 1956.

In 1956, he became associate publisher of Playboy, and I suspect that it was Spectorsky’s ideas that transformed Playboy, surrounding the photos of bare-breasted women with pages that proclaimed the cultural sophistication of the magazine and its readers. With Hef, he moved Playboy from the nudie-mag periphery to a more central place in the culture, with circulation numbers to match.

His byline was A.C., and most people called him Spec. But the initials stood for Auguste Comte.He was named after the man often credited with coining the term sociology.

Status Politics and the NFL

September 27, 2017
Posted by Jay Livingston

Some issues in status politics have real consequences. Obamacare, for instance. For much of the opposition, Obamacare was less about healthcare than about the status of different groups. The question was not, “Who will have better health insurance?” It was, “Whose country is this anyway?”

In a blog post back in 2009 (here), I quoted a Pennsylvania protestor who shouted at her senator, “This is about the dismantling of the country.” Obamacare became a symbol. It was about how people felt morally, not physically. For the opposition, it symbolized that “their” country had been “taken away” from them. They were going to take it back. (See my post “Repo Men.”)

Republican votes to repeal, up until January 20, 2017, were also symbolic since the GOP representatives  knew there was no chance that Obama would sign the bill into law. But with Republicans in control of the White House and Congress, the consequences of repeal would be real, not just symbolic. Even so, they came very close to passing laws that would have had very real and negative consequences for millions of Americans.

There are better vehicles for status politics than issues that have real consequences, especially when the consequences harm the same people that are driving that vehicle. You want issues that are purely symbolic – issues like statues and flags or kneeling and standing. This is not the politics of who gets what and how much it costs; it is the politics of who feels how. In everything that I have read in the last few days about NFL players “taking a knee” during the playing of the national anthem, none of the arguments for or against was based on the effects their behavior might have. The closest anyone came was Jeff Sessions: “It’s a big mistake to protest in that fashion because it weakens the commitment we have to this nation.” Nor could I find any speculation on the effects that Trump’s call for the players to be fired and for the NFL to make a rule requiring players to stand during the song.

Instead, the arguments were about legitimacy and about right and wrong. So the relevant evidence is not about causes and effects but about who thinks what. In many ways the results are predictable. Republicans agree with Trump; Democrats are more likely to support the dissenting players; Independents are somewhere in between. (The data comes from a Reuters/Ipsos survey of people who have at least some interest in pro football.)

(Click on an image for a larger view.)

Overall, fans support the players right to express political opinions (49%-43%), though nearly 60% of Republicans would deny them that right. On the other hand, a majority (58%) also think that the players should be required to stand (among Republicans, 86%).

As for the president’s “You’re fired” suggestion, only the Republican fans agree. Democrats (80%) and Independents (64%) disagree. (Cato survey here )

A majority of the fans also think Trump should have kept his mouth shut on the topic, though again, Republicans sided with Trump.

It’s important to note that these are one-shot polls, at least so far. Subsequent polls, if there are any, with slight difference in wording may get different results. It’s also possible that opinion on this issue may change rapidly, perhaps in the way that attitudes towards same-sex marriage changed in recent years. The sight of several players kneeling during the national anthem may become the new normal.