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H8 teen girls – gasp and blush at silly sports writers

Reading the article in the Huffington Post about the two girls who made the racist YouTube video, I was appalled; not by the comments that the girls made – the sadness there would be merely that the girls believed them and found them funny – a rather common symptom of youth, rather that others showed far greater ignorance and intolerance by threatening to kill them, thus forcing them into hiding. The dismissal from school was puzzling too. As a veteran of school boards and courtrooms, I’m not quite clear what the grounds for expulsion were, nor how these could possibly meet with constitutional scrutiny, unless the girls attend a private school – something I think unlikely by the substance of their comments. But these are teenagers for God’s sake and teenagers say stupid things, most of which they learn from adults.

Speaking of learning from adults, adults say a lot of stupid things too. The same day I read the article about the comments about Nicks player Jeremy Lin and the corresponding article about the ESPN apology. Although there were a lot of upset groups, I got the strong impression that most of the trouble came from the drop-jawed WASPs who just couldn’t believe that anyone would make a joke that clearly appeared to utilize Lin’s race. I didn’t see anyone calling for the death of the sports writers at fault nor the president of ESPN or the NY Times. They were all too busy laughing at Saturday Night Live’s parody on the whole thing.

The NY Times and ESPN quickly apologized, of course they did, there’s money at stake, but ESPN’s done the very same thing before (even used an identical headline), I question their sincerity and most importantly whether anyone at ESPN really is concerned that they’ve hurt Lin’s feelings or they had actually implied that Asian superstars are really failures waiting to happen.

The girls also apologized almost immediately, they had to, they were probably forced to by adults around them. I’m also suspicious of their sincerity, but not in the same way. I think the girls are actually scared and they ought to be – though I don’t think they ought to have to be.

My friend and fellow attorney, D.C. lawyer Salsassin commented insightfully on the Huff and notably these girls say in their video (yes, I listened to the whole thing), that they have black friends. I agree completely with Salsassin that these girls were salvageable minds. Now they will likely learn to fear blacks and hate liberalism (by this I mean classical liberalism, traditionally characterized by a love for open mindedness); because clearly they should think of themselves as white trash who don’t deserve to live.

In high school I remember meeting a girl who’d moved to the area who was a real racist. She didn’t know what she was talking about anymore than these girls but she was a darn sight more serious about it. She made it clear to me that she felt sorry for me that in the National Guard I had to take showers in the same places that black people did, let alone maybe even at the same time. That was a new idea to me at the time and I asked her a lot of questions to try to figure out what the hell she was on but I could tell that she was afraid of getting the cooties I’d probably caught and I think her family soon left the area, either that or they took her out of school when they realized we thought the right side won the war. We also had a commissioner in our county who was a serious racist and made it obvious at public meetings. The girls in this video are different. They aren’t even real racists. They just need to learn some stats and history and meet some more decent folks of all races. Hell, they just need to learn to pay attention to their audiences and media and they could be decent Republicans – and I say that as one who has been one, Republican that is.

Unfortunately, the response to hate has been hate. Like the paradox of completely open minded thinking, “should we allow closed mindedness in our midst” apparently we have rejoined “Don’t be a H8er” with “H8 a H8er” at least if the H8ers are a couple of teenage girls.

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Thoughts on the NY Times opinion column “The Stone”

On 16 May, the NY Times introduced a new opinion column called “The Stone” which describes itself as “a forum for contemporary philosophers on issues both timely and timeless”.  They billed the series as “a rotating group ” of “contemporary philosophers”.  The same day, the chair of philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York and the moderator of the series, Simon Critchley, posted the inaugural entry:  “What Is a Philosopher?”  While an interesting read, somewhere between Plato and . . . well, Plato – as that seems to be his only point of reference, the author failed to mention his apparent criterion for all philosophers: a Ph.D. and chair at a prestigious university.   How exactly this becomes important, I’m not at all sure, but over the coming weeks a number of self-proclaimed, university proclaimed, Times proclaimed, or simply Critchley proclaimed, “philosophers” make a number of comments on anything but philosophy, often throwing in a comment by Plato, Kant, or (God help us) Hegel here and there to remind you that they do know something about philosophy.  I’m not sure that life in the ivory tower actually precludes one from becoming a philosopher and several of the writers take offense at the suggestion that they live in ivory towers, but those who pretend to philosophy rate a fare share from the peanut gallery and so I will comment on a few of their ramblings here, or at least I hope to, if time grants me the chance, in which I will attempt to point out the flaws in their thinking and maybe make a comment or two of my own on the underlying area of philosophy.

One more general comment for the time being, first I would note that at least one of the authors suggests that the fact that he has stirred up a huge volume of comments means that it has been successful, at the same time he seems quite upset at some of the comments.  Plenty of political commentary draws a lot of response but that doesn’t make it philosophy.  One’s ability to tug at heart strings and enrage or enthrall may make for good poets, musicians, and actors, and these are not at all bad skills for philosophy, but they certainly don’t define good philosophy.  If they did, philosophy would be as simple as suggesting a mosque in any US village or making an appearance on The O’Reilly Factor.

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Cancel Christmas – It’s an Inverted “U”

Paul Krugman in his recent op ed in the NY Times titled “Stimulus timing”, (@NYTimeskrugman) appears to be criticizing the administration’s stimulus package. Considering Paul has won the Nobel Prize in economics, this should be something to be concerned about, but is it really as bad as Paul suggests?

Although the timing of the stimulus package is his tag, he spends little time discussing the timing of the package relative to the real world and focuses on how the numbers graph out. First he subtracts out the underlying GDP to show the effect of the package. Although this makes good academic talking, it doesn’t take into account any possible change in the underlying real world GDP, it doesn’t even discuss it. That means it also ignores the possibility that he stimulus could, uh, stimulate and it seems to assume the money actually leaves the money supply the day after we get it.

He goes on to show how the stimulus is an inverted “U” (a somewhat lopsided one in this case) with maximum effect up front. He briefly describes the elements of his graph and then displays a nasty looking chart and comments “You can see why I and many others are worried about the second half of next year.” I’ll grant him that we are going to get less and less new benefits from stimulus from here on out but he makes it look like the world is going to end next summer. But what does the graph really show us? It shows us how horrible the day after Christmas really is.

Let’s use an example, a much simpler one but using the same numbers. Over the next 9 days I’ll buy things from you, not because I need them but because business is bad and I have cash to burn, so I just want to help you out, let’s call it a “stimulus”. I’ll spend $770, but I’ve decided you need a real boost right now so I’m not going to give it to you evenly distributed but in a sort of lopsided upside down “U” . Let’s tabulate these as PK does, P1, P2, etc. are the payments:

Rate Change Cumulative

P1 35 +35 35
P2 80 +45 115
P3 110 +30 225
P4 120 +10 345
P5 125 +5 470
P6 120 -5 590
P7 100 -20 690
P8 50 -50 740
P9 30 -20 770

I’ll try to manage posting a graph for this later but, guess what, there’s a perfect one at PK’s article and it happens to be the very graph I want to critique, so now I will borrow very liberally from that article:

“Now think about three questions you might ask. The first is, how much higher is [your income] this [day] than it would be without the stimulus? This should depend on “Rate” — on the quantity of goods and services [I am] buying right now.” In other words, your income is higher today than it would have been without the payment by exactly the amount of the payment! Amazing isn’t it, now if you really want to see something take the month of your birth and multiply by 7 . . .

“The second question is, how much faster is [your income] growth this [day] than it would be without the stimulus? This should depend on “Change” — on the extent to which [I’m] buying more stuff than [I] did [yesterday].” In other words, your income growth will be faster (or slower) than it would be without my purchases, by exactly the amount by which I change my payments from one day to the next. Some days I’m going to give you a lot of money but by showing you the change, you will be so scared you won’t spend it and if I show you this beforehand, you may even ask me not to give you the money.

“Finally, you can ask, how much of the stimulus money has been spent?” At PK’s column a Nobel laureate will explain to you how to figure this out, but here’s a test to see if you can do it on your own: take $10 to the store, pick out a couple candy bars and a bottle of soda but don’t look at the price, then hand the clerk the ten, look at what you have left and tell me how much you spent, for this example it doesn’t even matter if the clerk gave correct change. Come on PK, really?

As we’ve discussed, the “Rate” is an inverted “U”, and that PK says, is exactly his point. “The peak effect on the level of [your income] comes at the top of the curve, but the peak effect on growth comes earlier, before the curve flattens out. In the table above, [my] spending peaks [on the fifth payment], but the peak impact on growth is in the [second payment], [if we look at this at the end of day three], it’s behind us. That’s true even though by the end of [day three] less than a third of the money has been spent.”

“And when the spending begins to tail off, the effect on growth turns negative.” Uh, yep, that’s what an inverted “U” graph does, on the back end it goes down.

Another way to put this is that if I give you a present today, tomorrow you’re going to get 100% less than you would have gotten if I’d never given you anything! That’s even worse than an inverted “U”, it’s an inverted “V”! So, PK, don’t sugarcoat it, let us have it straight and stop charting change and start charting percentage change so we can see just how bad it really is. Cancel Christmas next year, we can’t possibly deal with December 26.