Author Archives: Frank Moraes

About Frank Moraes

Frank Moraes is a freelance writer and editor online and in print. He is educated as a scientist with a PhD in Atmospheric Physics. He has worked in climate science, remote sensing, throughout the computer industry, and as a college physics instructor. Find out more at About Frank Moraes.

Saint Winifred and Cadfael

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Saint WinifredI’m a big fan of the Cadfael television series. It is about the 12th century Welsh monk, Brother Cadfael. He came to the church late in life after having been a soldier. So he is pretty much the only monk who knows the ways of the world. And his position at the abbey is as an herbalist. But his position in the series is as Miss Marple—an amateur sleuth who solves the murders that inevitably happen during each episode.

The other night, I watched the episode, A Morbid Taste for Bones, which is based upon the first novel. It involves Shrewsbury Abbey’s acquisition of the bones of Saint Winifred. It’s a fabulous episode because there is much about the general corruption of the church. And most other episodes make at least some reference to the bones of Saint Winifred and the fact that pilgrims come to the abbey to be healed by the saint. The only problem is that it ain’t Saint Winifred’s bones that are in that ornate box.

I won’t “spoil” the episode for you, because the plot is rather clever. But it is interesting that throughout the rest of the series, Cadfael is the only one that knows this secret. And he’s fine with it, because from his perspective, Saint Winifred’s magic or whatever doesn’t need to be constrained by distance. You also get the impression that Cadfael think it is all a bunch of hocus pocus anyway. That’s the great thing about such stories: the anachronisms. So we can all feel very good about ourselves that we don’t believe in trial by ordeal. Throw a suspected witch in a lake with a millstone around her next and if she sinks, “Witch!”

After watching the episode, it got me wondering if there really was a Saint Winifred. And not only is there, she appears to have been an actual person. If you’ve spent any time studying the saints, you will quickly find that a lot of them are nothing more than folklore. And it is getting kind of pathetic as more recent saint candidates like Pope John Paul II and Mother Teresa have what can only be termed “coincidences” in place of “miracles.”

Saint Winifred was probably a Welsh nun who lived in the 7th century. And according to legend, when she was young and nubile, a man by the name of Caradoc wanted to marry her. But when she told him that she was going to be a nun, he raped her and cut off her head, because nothing says “Can we still be friends?” like a good decapitation. Her head rolled down hill and where it stopped St Winifred’s Well sprung up—kind of the Welsh equivalent of the Fountain of Youth. After the incident, he uncle, Saint Beuno put her head back on her body and she came back to life. And there are other stories like her pilgrimage to Rome.

The only actual writing about her occurred four hundred years later. In it, there is much said about a scar on her neck. Now that could mean that the basic story is correct, but she was only wounded an survived. Or it could be that since the writers took it as a given that she had been decapitated, they figured she would of course have a scar. You can imagine a Welsh man seeing the decapitation and thinking, “Oh, that’s gonna leave a scar!” Although you would think that if God could heal a decapitation, he could manage to do it without a scar.

Regardless, I thought it was pretty interesting that Edith Pargeter introduced this historical character into her novels. But it apparently isn’t the only one. The two abbots were actual people, as was the corrupt and power-hungry Prior Robert. None of this is a reason to watch the series or read the books. Mostly it is all interesting because the Cadfael character is so great. But the historical setting adds a great deal to the enjoyment.

Modes of Bill Evans

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Bill EvansOn this day in 1929, the great jazz pianist Bill Evans was born. Yes, I know: I wrote about him last year and yesterday I wrote about another great jazz pianist Oscar Peterson. What can I say? I really like both men.

Listening to Evans is a lot like listening to classical music. He was very modal in his harmonic structure. As a result, a lot of his stuff sounded like Debussy. But Evans owed a great deal to his early work with the jazz composer George Russell. Regardless, Evans work was the basis of Miles Davis’ greatest album (and arguably the greatest jazz album ever), Kind of Blue. It is an album that continues to inspire after decades of listening. It is also, one of those albums that I’ve had to buy repeatedly over the years.

Even at the time of the recording, Evans was in the process of forming his own trio with Scott LaFaro and Paul Motian. It is considered one of the great jazz trios. Unfortunately, I can’t find any live footage of them together. So here is “Waltz for Debby” off the album of the same name:

Sadly, just ten days after the performance from which this song was taken, Scott LaFaro died in a car accident. It wasn’t until five years later that he met Eddie Gomez, who Evans played with pretty much to the end of his career. Here he is with drummer Marty Morell, who he worked with for a long period, doing Miles Davis’ “Nardis”:

Just ten years after this performance, Evans died of various ailments related to his lifestyle. I try not to talk too much about his drug use because it really isn’t what defined him. But it is what deprived us of him for the last three and a half decades. Maybe he wouldn’t have made it that long, but we certainly should have gotten another decade. He was only 51 when he died.

Happy birthday Bill Evans!

Technical Changes at Frankly Curious

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As many of you surely noticed, the blog was down for about six hours today. It was quite a complicated problem that more or less required that I create a whole new database and import the old data back into it. I’m happy it is back up. These experiences are frightening, because Frankly Curious uses Nucleus for its blog, and Nucleus is no longer supported. What’s more, the word is that once we upgrade to PHP 5.4, it won’t work at all. This thought weighs heavily on me.

The fact is that Frankly Curious has really been taking off. Its three-month Alexa rating is about 1.3 million right now, but its monthly and weekly rating are quite a bit lower still. That may not seem that great, but there are roughly a billion websites on the internet. Even if you take the active websites, our little site is well inside the top 1%. What it means in people terms is that the site tends to get about 500 people per day reading. (And about 1,500 spammers.) I think this is due to the fact that I create an enormous amount of content—roughly 3,000 words per day—a novel per month. And that means almost by random chance, there will be things that attract some attention. It also means that people know they can always stop by and I will be ranting about something—maybe even something they’re interested in!

As a result of this, I do not like down time. And the thought of the site being down for a few days is horrifying. But we are going to have to move to a different blogging platform. The problem is how I can do this while retaining the links that currently exist to the site. And I have an idea for how to do that! I think we will moved to Word Press. And I think I can move all of the current blog’s articles and comments to it. Once that’s done, I’ll create a simple PHP script that will detect whether an old style (Nucleus) or a new style (Word Press) request has come in. If it is the old style, it will change to the new format and send it to the Word Press blog. Otherwise, it will pass it straight through.

So this weekend, I am going to experimenting. But not on Frankly Curious. Andrea, who is very hot to move to Word Press, has graciously offered to left me monkey with one of her blogs, Nice Atheist Girl. That is much more manageable. And far less harm can be done. And if all goes well, next weekend, we may put Word Press up here. If everything works as it should, there really shouldn’t be any down time. Of course, my idea may not work out. If that happens, well, I’m sure other things will occur to me. I will be providing updates.

Update (15 August 2014 8:40 pm)

I’ve been working nonstop on this problem and it looks like my basic approach will work. I will be able to keep the old Nucleus stuff around as it is. This will probably require that I update to a new flavor of of Nucleus that doesn’t have many of the plugins that this version has, but at least will continue to work. All of these articles will be transferred over to the new Word Press site, but they won’t include the comments because that is just way too complicated to make it work. And then we will be running entirely on Word Press. This should allow us to add some things that people have requested like email alerts when comments have been made and maybe threaded comments. This will probably happen over the course of next weekend.

Oscar Peterson

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Oscar PetersonOn this day in 1925, the great jazz pianist Oscar Peterson was born. He has an amazing back story. When he was very young, he played the trumpet. But he caught tuberculosis and so concentrated on the piano. Not that it matters. Had this not have happened, I probably would have started this article, “On this day in 1925, the great jazz trumpet player…” Because the instrument doesn’t generally matter.

He was trained classically, but naturally gravitated toward jazz, especially boogie-woogie. At the age of fourteen, he won a nationwide music competition put on by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. After that, he quit school and went to work as a musician.

I learned something new and charming about Peterson. I’ve always associated him with Art Tatum. Lot of people have. The influence is clear enough. But apparently, when he was still a kid, Peterson’s father introduced him to Art Tatum and the boy became depressed, thinking he could never be as good. He and Tatum later became friends, but Peterson would never play the piano around the older musician, such was his reverence and insecurity toward the older master.

Last year, I presented Peterson playing his own composition, “The Cakewalk.” I don’t want to repeat myself, but you really owe it to yourself to click over and listen to it. It includes Joe Pass on guitar, who is a marvel himself. Here Peterson is all by himself doing a beautiful version Thelonious Monk’s “Round Midnight”:

Happy birthday Oscar Peterson!

StarPower: the Game That Shows We’re All Doomed

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StarPowerA couple of years ago, I wrote, Inequality: the Monopoly Analogy. It involved a social psychologist’s experiment where he had people play Monopoly. But instead of the usual rules, some players were “rich” and so got twice as much money as the players who were “poor.” And what he noticed was that the “poor” players got discouraged and the rich players exhibited feelings of entitlement and felt happy about the the poor players bad “luck.”

I was over at Digby’s Blog today, where I found a fabulous article by Batocchio, Lucky Duckies and Fortunate Sons. I recommend reading the whole thing, because it is rather wide ranging. But it introduced me to the game StarPower. It was invented in 1969 to study exactly these kinds of class issues. Based upon how they start, people are placed into one of three groups: Square, Circle, or Triangle. These correspond to rich, middle, and poor.

The structure of the game is such that if you are a Triangle, you’re going to stay a Triangle. If you are Circle and you get lucky, you might make it into the Square group. Similarly, someone in the Square group with bad luck might fall into the Circle group. At least, that’s the case for the first half of the game. But then, the game allows the rules to be changed by the Square group. It should come as no surprise that the people playing the game don’t choose to make the game more fair; they change the rules to give themselves even more advantage.

Donella Meadows described her experiences playing the game all over the world, Why Would Anyone Want to Play StarPower. And she described one incident that actually did shock me, but I don’t know why:

Those few who don’t [act according to their “class”] are easily handled. Once I watched a Square try to convince her fellow-Squares to even up the rules. “This game is unfair, and unfair games are boring,” she pleaded. The other Squares appropriated her points and demoted her to a Triangle. They weren’t mean people, they were just Squares.

I think the reason I found this shocking is that you would think that in a game, a rational appeal like this would work. But if it doesn’t work there, how can it possibly work in the real world with actual money. I hate to think that it requires revolution, but it is true that in the real world, there are a whole lot more Triangles. Meadows deals with the real world consequences:

Who wants to play that kind of game? The Squares, maybe, but even Squares discover that games where the score is not occasionally set back to 0-0, where the starting line is not even, where the outcome is always predictable, and where winning is no sign of real merit, are deeply unsatisfying.

The wise Squares whom we call Founding Fathers, who set up the rules of our national game, knew that. They invented ingenious devices for giving everyone a chance to win—democratic elections, universal education, and a Bill of Rights. Out of their structure have come further methods for interrupting accumulations of power—anti-trust regulations, progressive taxation, inheritance restrictions, affirmative action programs.

All of which, you might note, have been weakened over the past decade or so. We have moved a long way toward a StarPower structure.

She wrote that in 1986. In the 28 years since then, it has gotten so much worse. And along with that, we have gotten a class of Squares who have convinced themselves, not that the game is fair, but that it is unfair—to them. It’s frightening to think about. But it ought to be even more frightening to them. They are living in delusion. And I hate to think what the Triangles might do if all the rhetoric about “job creators” starts to sound as hollow as it actually is.

We are all doomed.

Fox News Not Interested in Ferguson

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Fox Not NewsI just got to spend about a half hour watching Anderson Cooper, Chris Hayes, and Bill O’Reilly. Actually, only Chris Hayes was on his show. It was that old white guy on CNN and one of the blond women on Fox News. But it was striking. I don’t mean the tone of the shows; I mean the content. Not surprisingly, MSNBC is doing blanket coverage of Ferguson, where things look almost celebratory now that law enforcement duties have been taken over by the Missouri State Highway Patrol. But CNN is doing the same thing, in their tired way.

So the liberal and centrist cable news networks are paying a lot of attention to the situation in Ferguson that has been getting international attention. But for Fox News, it is pretty much a non-story. Or rather, the murder of an unarmed teen was a non-story. The many peaceful protests was a non-story. Militarized police use of excessive force against protesters was a non-story. Pretty much everything about Ferguson was a non-story except for some looting that took place Sunday evening.

This is an interesting contrast with the Bundy ranch crisis where the story got blanket, hysterical coverage. But it also got pretty much blanket coverage on the other two stations. What I think we are seeing is that if a story can’t be molded to a conservative narrative, Fox News just isn’t interested. I’m sure that in their story meetings, executive producers have said, “Unless there are a bunch of black people breaking windows, none of our viewers will care!” And maybe they are right, but it seems to me that the basic narrative is of wide interest: police shooting a young man about to enter college when he had his hands raised above him.

It would have been different if it had been a white suburban boy killed by a black officer in a police force that was over 90% black with a history of harassing whites. Then they could rant about “black anger” and the “out of control” government, but also regular things like actual news sources are discussing about the Michael Brown murder. When it comes to a black or brown skinned person, however, it just isn’t interesting to Fox News. Their key demographic—The median age is 68 years old!—might be upset to hear any news that conflicted with their belief that racism was solved in 1865.

So what was Fox News offering up instead of details about the Michael Brown murder and the situation in Ferguson? Well, they had a sequence about the supposed fight that’s going on between Obama and Clinton. And there was speculation about Robin Williams. And I’m sure they had a segment on Ferguson earlier on; I didn’t get to a television until a bit into the hour. I mean, Fox News can’t be that bad. Well, maybe it can.

Dog Whistle Politics

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Dog Whistle PoliticsI recently read Ian Haney Lopez’s excellent Dog Whistle Politics. The subtitle of the book is, “How coded racial appeals have reinvented racism & wrecked the middle class.” It is an important book because it gets at the fundamental political problem in America: how is it that white middle class voters continue to vote against their long term interests in so much of the country? Thomas Frank tackled this question in What’s the Matter With Kansas? So it isn’t surprising that Lopez deals with a lot of the same issues. But whereas Frank saw no racism, Lopez sees plenty.

Based upon things that Frank has written since Kansas? I suspect that his thinking has changed. But in that book, he dismissed the idea that racism wasn’t the reason that people were voting Republican. He based this on the fact that the people he interviewed and observed were not racists. But as I discussed recently in Modern Racism, racism is always changing. It bugs me that people make such a big deal when someone says, “Let me tell you about the negro.” Because that isn’t where the power of racism is.

Lopez sees two kinds of racism: common sense and self-interested (although that may not be the term he uses). What’s surprising is that he doesn’t shy away from the latter. He fully admits that whites have something to lose with racial equality: as bad as a white man’s life may be, at least he is still white—still a member of the ruling race. And I do think that is something that we should talk about more. Of course, it is common sense racism that is most pernicious. It is the kind of racism that everyone has that is based upon historical racism and its continuing effects. It is what made Reagan’s “welfare queen in a Cadillac” work as a racial appeal—everyone knew he was talking about a black woman, because everyone “knew” that blacks are on welfare.

Parts of the book are downright encouraging. For example, he discusses polling of the Bush-Dukakis campaign. When the Willie Horton ad came out, there was a quick shift of support toward Bush. But after Jesse Jackson publicly pointed out that the ad was a racist appeal, the polling went back to where it had been. Racial appeals are only effective as long as they remain hidden. Just the same, it can be difficult to call such things out. As it was, when Jackson pointed out the racial appeal in the ad, the right pushed back—of course Jackson would see it that way! But in that case, people thought about it and decided they knew how it had effected their thinking. (Or non-thinking.)

As much as parts of the book are optimistic, the overall story it tells is deeply troubling. What we see is that every generation comes up with new racist appeals. It is like a human with a disease that has a certain symptom. We treat that symptom but then a different symptom shows up, because the underlying disease hasn’t changed. And what is especially bad here in the United States is that the racist appeals work largely because of the economic inequality we have in this nation that is very clearly racial in its makeup: if you want to be rich, it is a very good idea to be born white. At the same time, we can’t do anything about the economic inequality because of how well the racist appeals work.

Lopez makes one really important point that I think liberals need to think a lot about. That is that we can’t sit back and let demographic changes sweep liberals into power. And the reason for this is that who is defined as “white” changes over time. At one time in this country, Italians weren’t considered white, but they sure are now. Think of Antonin Scalia. So eventually, the conservatives will go about defining Latinos, for example, as white and crafting their language so that the Latinos know which group it taking what’s theirs (as opposed to which group is really taking it). And given the shocking success of the conservative movement over the last five decades, I see no reason to think that they won’t succeed.

But I think that Lopez offers us, especially those of us who are white, with some good advice moving forward:

The most basic step is to consciously consider race. The research is clear that colorblindness does not help us overcome racism; on the contrary, colorblindness as a strategy (rather than as a goal) forms part of the problem. Attempting to ignore what one has inevitably already noticed only makes it more difficult to recognize and thus control internalized racial stereotypes. Likewise, averting one’s eyes to how race might be operating only makes one more susceptible to dog whistle manipulation. The racial subterfuge of coded appeals that has done so much to wreck the middle class is easy to pierce, but only if one consciously mulls over how race might be involved.

Once the basic step of watching out for race is taken, the next is to raise one’s voice. Rightwing racial attacks on liberalism depend on cowing into silence those opposed to continuing racial demonetization, thus allowing dog whistle calumnies to spread unchallenged. Connected to this, colorblindness also operates as an etiquette that treats talking about race as impolite and even racist. Those who discuss racism are accused of being the real racists—again, as if pulling a fire alarm means one set the fire, or dialing 911 means one committed the crime. Refusing to be silenced, to defeat dog whistle racism and restore government to the side of the middle class will require as many of us as possible to go ahead and sound that alarm.

The claims that the United States is post-racial (or anything even close to it) are as absurd as the Stephen Colbert claim that he doesn’t see race. In the early 1960s, when blacks were murdered with impunity and widely denied the right to vote, 80% of white people claimed there was racial equality. This is always the claim. So don’t be afraid to raise your voice. Those claiming the only racism is against whites will all be proven wrong within a generation. Just like always.

Afterword

Many of the reviews of the book on Amazon are like this one, “The author of this book actually is beating the drum for reverse racism, and not equal opportunity.” It doesn’t help that such people have not actually read the book. Anyone bring up these issues will be blasted by the right in this way, because the right understands that dog whistle racial appeals are their primary weapon.

A Soul Is Not a Personality

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Matt WalshChristians and other theists believe in the soul. Or at least they claim to. But even fairly sophisticated believers have what is an incredibly simplistic idea of the soul. One of the most extreme ideas of this comes from the Jehovah’s Witnesses who believe that there will be heaven on earth (quite a reasonable reading of the Bible), with everyone living in the idyllic conditions we know so well from The Watchtower. But it is just silly to suggest that the essence of our being is our personality. How can it be when chemicals can fundamentally change how people behave?

This came up this morning when I read Andrea’s article at Nice Atheist Girl, Suicide Deconstructed. It is a response to Matt Walsh’s incredibly presumptive article, Robin Williams Didn’t Die From a Disease, He Died From His Choice. Andrea does a good job of dealing with him on the issue of suicide. I just want to talk a bit about this bit about his simplistic theology:

I can understand atheists who insist that depression must only be a disease of the brain, as they believe that our entire being is contained by, and comprised of, our physical bodies. But I don’t understand how theists, who acknowledge the existence of the soul, think they can draw some clear line of distinction between the body and the soul, and declare unequivocally that depression is rooted in one but not the other.

This is offensive on so many levels. For one, the implication here is that Robin Williams died because of a defective soul. But it doesn’t matter. Walsh is a small minded commentator whose brain was apparently born without much in the way of empathy, who writes articles like, “I’m Spoiled and Lazy but Walmart Should Pay Me More Money Anyway!” What does matter is that he thinks there is that secret sauce of the “soul” that makes us who we are.

The Greek idea of a soul was that it was our essential nature. But when added to the idea of immortality, the idea get distorted. It is the thing that will live forever if one is a good little girl or boy. But how can that have anything to do with personality? People can be given drugs that totally change their personalities. People can be given experiences that totally change their personalities—for example, childhood abuse. Just on the simplest level, nice people are sometimes turned mean when they drink.

I think this idea that one’s consciousness will be transported to heaven on death is simple wish fulfillment. It is the basis for most religious belief: people are afraid of death. But this is religion as comforting fairy tale. It provides no kind of insight into the nature and paradox of existence. That is bad enough.

But Walsh’s argument curses not only the vagaries of brain chemistry but also the vagaries of the soul. This is an implicit indictment of God. Why did God give Williams’ that soul? And the Bible-as-user’s-manual doesn’t work either. I don’t know Williams’ spiritual thinking, but I assume he was not a Born Again Christian. So why did God give him a soul and brain chemistry that didn’t allow him to find comfort in the One True Word™? This leads us to issues of free will that I absolutely don’t have time to go into, other than to say that I don’t believe in free will and I don’t understand why anyone does.

The thing is that I don’t think Walsh has ever thought much about what the soul is. He’s just a typical cultural Christian who knows his side is right and when he dies he’ll go to the nice place with all the candy and ice cream he can eat. And that’s fine! I hope he’s happy. The truth is that I don’t think he has any more choice about being a shallow arrogant jerk than Robin Williams had with being depressed and finally killing himself. But that doesn’t take away from the fact that Williams’ death was sad and Walsh’s thinking is childish.

Howdy, Howdy, Howdy Gary Larson!

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Gary LarsonThe great The Far Side cartoonist Gary Larson is 64 today. He has an absurdist sense of humor. Good examples of this are the boneless chicken ranch and the polar bear disguised as a penguin, And now Edgar’s gone. And he has a unique cartoon style. Certainly he is no Bill Watterson (Who is?) but his work is immediately recognizable. And it rather suits his sense of humor.

Because he wrote so much about science kinds of things, I think he has probably had a bigger positive impact on science than Neil deGrasse Tyson. It’s not that anyone learned science from him. In fact, as we see with his combining penguins and polar bears, he was often wrong. But he normally dealt with science related stuff. And his portrayal of scientists themselves was always charming, as in the comic of all the scientists running outside for the ice cream truck.

All there is left to do is present to you my very favorite The Far Side cartoon, “Hey! Look at me, everybody! I’m a cowboy! … Howdy, howdy, howdy!”

Vulture Cowboy - Far Side

Happy birthday Gary Larson!

Michael Brown Murder Uncovers Deeply Flawed Local Policing

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Michael Brown Protesters - Hands in the Air - Don't Shoot

I have worked very hard to avoid dealing with the Michael Brown murder in Missouri. I feel helpless. This kind of thing happens all the time. Last year, in my hometown, Andy Lopez was killed by a police officer who mistook his toy gun for real. The officer shot Lopez seven times in six seconds. The authorities looked into it and decided that the office acted appropriately. And if you check the internet about the killing, most of what you will see is that Lopez was high on cannabis, as though that has anything to do with the situation.

At this point, it seems that the police can kill anyone who isn’t white, and somehow it will be decided that the murder was proper. There is apparently an unwritten law against living in the United States with a dark skin color. And the maximum penalty is death. So when I heard about the murder of Michael Brown, I just turned away. Yet another example of what probably happens all the time. It is just that most of the cases get no coverage.

In the case of Brown’s murder, I suspect that the officer will get at least some punishment. He might even go to jail. But this won’t work as any kind of deterrent. Police officers will just see that whether their bad behavior is punished or not is just a question of bad luck; most of the time nothing at all happens. So what does it matter? Will anything change? I don’t really think so. As a nation we have decided that the police have a job that is so dangerous (it isn’t) that they can do anything they want. It’s actually funny in a way, because all their violence and body armor and tanks just show that they are a bunch of wimps. Does a real man panic and put seven bullets in a boy because he doesn’t immediate respond to the officer’s command? Of course not.

I’ve been very pleased to hear how people are protesting by putting their hands in the air and saying, “Don’t shoot!” Of course, the reaction of the local police to the protests have shown that the entire force is made up of a bunch of fearful white people who are afraid of the scary blacks. Is that too much? Of Ferguson’s 53 police officers, 48 are white, and only three are black. According to The Los Angeles Times:

Blacks make up 65% of Ferguson’s population, yet they accounted for 86% of traffic stops, 93% of arrests after stops and 92% of searches after stops in the city last year, according to a racial profiling report by the Missouri attorney general.

When stopped by police, blacks in Ferguson were twice as likely as whites to be arrested—even though police found contraband for 34% of whites they stopped and searched, versus 22% of blacks—said Scott Decker, a criminologist on a team contracted by the attorney general’s office to compile the data.

So Ferguson’s police department has major problems and the murder of Michael Brown is just the event that made it widely known. But as the protests go on and the police continue to act as scared bullies, I am reminded of the Bruce Cockburn song “Nicaragua.” In that, he sings, “In the flash of this moment, you’re the best of what we are. Don’t let them stop you now…” Here’s hoping things get worked out soon:

Las personas vive en la lucha por la paz!

How to Lie With Polls

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Populist LibertarianLike all of us, Jonathan Chait has written a couple of times on Robert Draper’s “libertarian moment” article in The New York Times Magazine where he claimed that young people were libertarian: socially liberal and economically conservative. The whole thing has come as a shock to those of us who know the polling data and are thus aware of the fact that young people are especially big supporters of government intervention in the economy. Chait’s article today is, How Libertarians Snookered The New York Times Magazine. I just want to write about a small bit of the article.

Much of Chait’s article is about Draper’s dependence upon a poll by the libertarian Reason Magazine. In the past, Chait has rightly referred to it as “advocacy polling.” The pollster, Emily Ekins, took exception to this. According to Chait, “Young voters, the poll found, favor a living wage, higher taxes on the rich, more spending on infrastructure and job training, and so on.” And Ekins ask if that sounded like a “libertarian advocacy poll.” It doesn’t, of course. And no one is claiming that people who do advocacy polling are bad pollsters.

But the whole thing shows how one can lie with polls. Imagine you were doing a poll of Democrats about government spending. You ask three questions. Do you think it is better to have a much bigger military or to have a smaller government? Do you think it is better to cut spending or provide more corporate welfare to millionaires and billionaires? Do you think the government should be involved in women’s reproductive health or that there should be a limit placed on the size and power of the government? The Democrats would obviously go overwhelmingly for the “small government” answers in each of those. But it would be totally deceptive to publish your poll results as, “Democrats Overwhelmingly Prefer Smaller Government.”

This is what Ekins did. The poll asked if people “prefer a smaller government with fewer services or a bigger government with more services.” The under-30 set preferred the bigger government choice by a large margin. But the poll also asked if people “want bigger government with high taxes or smaller government with low taxes.” Not surprisingly, this pretty much reversed the answers. I’m not fond of either of these questions. The size of government doesn’t really mean anything to people. But the first question does get to the heart of libertarian thinking: small government is good as an end in itself. There is no indication that the millennials actually have a problem with big government.

An even bigger problem that Chait points out is that the Ekins poll was only of the under-30 crowd. So it was impossible to compare the results to other age groups. When Pew did such a poll, they also did Gen-X, Baby Boom, and Greatest generations. And what they found is that the millennials were shockingly more liberal than the other generations, across the board.

It all reminds me of those stupid partisan fund raising drives where they ask for your opinion and a contribution. They contain questions like, “Obama should be impeached because: (a) Obamacare; (b) Benghazi!; (c) Fast and Furious; (d) all of the above.” That’s not an exaggeration. And they are obvious. But these kind of advocacy polls are much more professional and they look a whole lot more reasonable. But there results are predetermined by who is paying for them.

Why We Homeschool

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HomeschoolingLast week, I wrote, Republicans Don’t Want Better Schools. It was based upon an insight from Digby that Republicans don’t really care about having better public school teachers because these are the same people who most pushed homeschooling, where the parent-teachers are totally unaccountable. I made one of my standard arguments that the problem was that most people homeschool for the purpose of keeping their children away from dangerous ideas from science that would conflict with their religious dogma.

In the article, I specifically mentioned my sister Kim as an exception, writing that she was “well educated and provides the kind of learning and social environment that all but the richest of parents would envy.” In this regard, I offer the following slightly edited article, Why We Homeschool, which she originally published on her blog Adventures With ADD. —FM

There are lots of things we think we would never do, until…

Before having a child, and even when my son was young, I believed I would never homeschool. In fact, I used to be critical about parents who did. But then my son went to school, and the dread of sending him to school every day greatly overpowered any fear I had of homeschooling.

Looking back on it now, it makes me sad about how wrong it went, because my son was so excited to start school. I have a couple of photos of my adorable, bespectacled, and smiling son, standing outside the school where he’d be attending kindergarten. On that first day, we had orientation to learn about the school and the teacher to which my son was assigned. It turned out this teacher used a discipline technique that included a poster that looked like a big traffic light and clothespins with each child’s name on one of the clothespins.

In the beginning of the day, the clothespin would be in the green portion of the traffic light. If a child behaved perfectly, his or her clothespin stayed in the green zone all day, a full school day, by the way. If not, it moved into the yellow zone. After a couple of warnings, it moved to the red zone where it stayed the rest of the day without any hope of returning to the green zone.

About 70% of the time, my son would come out of the classroom at the end of the day, hunched over, with a very sad face and his knuckles practically scraping the ground, and he would say to me, “I got another red today!” He also told me the teacher said his behavior was “ridiculous.” This was because he wanted to explore the room during the first couple of days in class and wasn’t able to sit in circle time. Also, he used to be very social and wanted to chat and play with the kids in his math group instead of actually doing the developmentally-inappropriate math they were requiring him to do. My son wanted to have fun in kindergarten. Go figure!

In addition to the traffic light discipline technique, my son was forced to sit on a bench during the short recess because of his difficulty paying attention in class. Obviously this was counterproductive. After finding out about this, I went into research mode. I found information about learning styles. You know, the idea that different kids learn in different ways, kinesthetic, auditory, and visual. Keep in mind my son didn’t have a diagnosis, yet. Though I knew my son was different from most kids, I denied that my son had ADHD, despite my husband’s having taken stimulants as a child.

I tried discussing what I’d discovered with my son’s teacher. Instead of her being open-minded, she became kind of defensive. Granted, the packet of information I presented her with might have been a bit overwhelming. In any case, her response was extreme, in my opinion. She said in an unnecessarily stern voice, “I’ve been teaching for a long time. I know what I’m doing. Your son just needs to learn to sit still, be quiet, pay attention, and follow directions.”

Because I had no luck improving the situation by way of the teacher, I decided to meet with the principal and vice-principle. I told them what our experiences had been so far. Rather than trying to support my son in his education, they defended the teacher’s draconian methods. They told me that other parents would “love” for their child to have my son’s teacher. Okay, so that wasn’t helpful.

The next stop was the school psychologist. Though she was kind and sympathetic, there was no support from the teacher or the administration. In the short, two-and-a-half weeks my son was at the school, he became extremely defiant. Admittedly, he already had a stubborn personality, but it became several times worse. Not only this, he was beginning to have violent outbursts, both at home and at school. Clearly, things were getting out of control.

One day my son awoke with a mild fever and was ill for a few days. Though my son was not feeling well, physically, he actually seemed happier. As for me, I didn’t have that feeling of dread that came with taking him to school every day, wondering what would happen there. It started to occur to me that maybe the people who homeschool weren’t wrong. I knew I could look for an alternative, but we couldn’t afford a private school, and what if the next public school was just as bad, or worse? I couldn’t take that chance.

Since my son was already a good reader, and since school is not a requirement until a child turns six in our state, I figured I could homeschool him through kindergarten, at least. We also found a local charter school that had an independent study program. My son began participating in that, and we also began attending a couple of park days with different homeschool groups. It’s really amazing all the resources that are actually available to homeschoolers, now. Mostly, the academics for that year consisted of reading lots of story books, playing age-appropriate math games, and going on field trips and visits to the library.

It is surprising how quickly so much damage can happen to child in such a short period of time, but it did. After leaving school, it took many months before the violent outbursts stopped. Then it took much longer for the extreme defiance to diminish. We’re still working on the little bit of defiance here and there, but it’s pretty close to that of a typical kid. I’m good with that, for now. I find he tends to show me more respect when I show him respect and speak with him like the person he is.

—Kim