The Demographics False God

We all live in bubbles now. I thought my bubble had grown slightly bigger than their bubble and would continue to do so indefinitely because of age and demographics. The polls seemed to support that idea. I was wrong. I still think that will eventually happen, but it hasn't happened yet. And in the long run, we're all dead. The only way to make a dent in this is to organize and engage on the ground in boring every day ways in republican dominated areas to convince more people that liberal and progressive ideas are good ones. This will require hard, boring work, like actually going down to your party office and getting involved, showing up to boring meetings, phone banking, door knocking, running for office, or volunteering for non-partisan organizations that engage people in the real world with phone calls and face-to-face meetings and recruitment.. It will require the long slow process of re-invigorating the labor movement in the the U.S. service sector. These things are hard for liberals because they require subverting individual needs to the needs of the organization. They require working with people you might not like very much and talking to people who might not like YOU very much. They require compromise and negotiation and, yes, politics.

Clictivism isn't going to do the job, because it just maintains the bubble. Voting alone isn't going to get it done. (We have to stop patting ourselves on the back for voting, which is actually the bare minimum of what makes for good citizenship). I'm not sure any of this will do any good either; could be that people's ideas are set, and demographic change really is the only hope. But it's the best chance there is.

I'm probably not going to do any of that, because I am neurotic and lazy and hate participating in organizations. I hope somewhere in places like my home, there are people who are braver and tougher than me so we don't have to wait for the demographic bubbles to do the work for us.

And now I'll stop with the "Big Lesson" crap because there will be plenty of that going around and honestly, doing it all via social media feels like the height of futility.

God Bless Hillary Clinton

Hillary Clinton is a calculating, pandering, triangulating dissembler who has long since decided that political power is more important than observing everyday moral compunctions like honesty and transparency. She worships at the same third-way, neo-liberal economic alter her husband made popular, which contributed mightily to the staggering levels of inequality, wage stagnation, and economic busts under which we have been suffering for 25 years. She is a de-regulating, contracting out, technocraticlly-minded, corporatized Larry Summers-disciple elitist. She has hawkish foreign policy instincts and was complicit in the dominoes of shitstorms in the middle-east that started with the invasion of Iraq.

She is, in short, a pretty run-of-the-mill politician and a pretty standard product of the Democratic Party political establishment.

And my holy God, I will be voting for her with the enthusiasm of a fat kid in a donut shop, because a President Trump would be the stuff of nightmares. And this is coming from a guy with a needlepoint portrait of Michael Myers from Halloween in his kitchen.

Even if the modern office of the Presidency weren't so weakened by the realities of polarization and the modern media landscape, I wouldn't expect huge changes from a Hillary Clinton presidency. She has neither the temperament nor the desire nor the ability to enact them. But, I expect that she will probably 1. maintain and possibly improve the gains in healthcare coverage achieved by Obama. 2. Fight to maintain gains in gay rights. 3. appoint non-crazy people to Federal judicial positions, including probably the Supreme Court. 4. Not try to deport millions of people. 5. take some action on mass incarceration/aggressive policing. 6. Not totally ignore global warming or the need for new sources of energy 7. Not cut budgets for major social welfare programs. 8. probably not wake up pissed off at Putin for making fun of her hair and decide to start a nuclear war.

In short, she'll probably do a pretty good job as a manager-in-chief and will more or less support the policies I support and probably won't actively promote many of the policies I don't support.

I don't trust a President Trump to do any of those things. He is a terrifying person. A mean, stupid man-child with no ideology, no conscience, no policy goals other than whatever happens to occur to him in a given moment and a vague desire for attention. His instinct for demagoguery would be impressive if it weren't so frightening. It's hard for me to imagine somebody I would less like to be in control of nuclear weapons.

If you are unenthusiastic about Hillary, I suggest you get enthusiastic now, because a stale, day-old quarter pounder and fries is still better than a steaming bowl of cyanide. Faced with that choice, I'll take gross fries for $1000, Alex.

This has been Today in Clictivism with Joe.

The Purpose of Higher Education: Different Models

There is no consensus about the purpose of higher education, and these different goals make for a confusing and often frustrating public dialog. People with different mental models talk past each other in fruitless arguments, and internally inconsistent individuals fail to see the fault lines in their own opinions. In this post, I'd like to bring into relief these different operating normative models for the purpose of higher education.

The Exchange Model

In the exchange model, students exchange money for subject-specific knowledge and skills. They pay money for services rendered. In this model, students are looked at as autonomous, rational adults, and instructors as professionals performing a skilled service (teaching). While the relationship between instructor and student should be professional and civil, emotions and relationships are quite beside the point. The key is the exchange of substantive course content.

The Certification Model

In the certification model, the instructor's and the institution's duty is to the public (and particularly for state-funded institutions, to the government). The goal is to ensure that students who have received the certification of a credit hour/grade/G.P.A./degree actually earned it and possess some stock of knowledge as a result.

The Incubator Model

In the incubator model, college students are seen as fragile, still-developing adolescents, and the role of the institution is to successfully cultivate that development to move the fragile student to a more robust place, ready to enter the "real world." In this model, subject-matter content is only one element of a young person's development, and perhaps not the most important one. In the incubator model, the practices and norms of the institution are intentionally, avowedly different from the practices and norms of "the real world." The goal is to create a safe, hyper-nurturing environment in which healthy development can occur. Somebody following this model might emphasize, for instance, a strong mentoring relationship with students, or be very careful to avoid "triggering" language in the classroom. There might be a major emphasis on student life outside of academics.

The Simulation Model

The simulation model says that the college experience should be a dress-rehearsal for a student's work life. Much like the incubator model, this is a holistic model that sees content-specific knowledge as only one (and perhaps not the most important) element of a young person's education. However, unlike the incubator model that expressly creates an alternative reality, the simulation model wants to create a simulacrum of reality, with the teacher taking the roll of the "boss," coursework taking the role of work assignments, and fellow students taking the role of coworkers. The idea in this model is to inculcate the norms and practices of professional life to facilitate the student's transition into the workplace.

There are of course other models of higher education's purpose as well, including the "alumni satisfaction model," and the "promote the administrator's reputation and resume" model and the "money generation model" and the "resorts for rich kids" model, but these aren't generally very likely to receive much vocal support in the cold light of day.

The thing to note is that these models will often lead to very different policy prescriptions. How should teachers grade students? How much time should teachers spend trying to mentor students outside of class? How should teachers respond to failure? How merciful should the institution be? How should the institution handle controversial speech? Different normative models are likely to yield different answers to these and other questions. As long as education policy leaders embody these different models, they are likely to continue talking past each other in the quest to improve the state of higher education in the U.S. And individuals are likely to find themselves exasperated by particular teaching and policy quandaries if they fail to delineate between these different mental models in their own thinking.

Why Mike Pence is right about RFRA....

I do not like Mike Pence. I do not like the Republican party. But I dislike wrongness more than either of them, and the collective outcry about Indiana's RFRA law is based on a misunderstanding of the law. In fact, Pence's explanation of what the law does and does not do in the press conference he gave and in his Washington Post editorial are correct. Why? Here is why Pence was right.

1.Sexual orientation is not a protected class under state law for purposes of public accommodations

Therefore, businesses in most of Indiana (land-mass wise) can already refuse service to gay people. The law would do nothing to change that.

2. The text of the RFRA law specifies that religious liberty CAN be burdened by laws that further a compelling state interest and which promote that interest through the least restrictive means

This language is explicit in the RFRA law, Section 8 (read it here) Yes, the law makes it easier for people to assert a religious freedom claim against state laws, but those claims are explicitly limited to laws that fail to meet these two standards of a compelling government interest + least restrictive means. Together, these two criteria are referred to in legal jargon as "strict scrutiny." So, even under RFRA, laws can still trump religious freedom if they pass the strict scrutiny standard.


3. In municipalities that have local ordinances banning discrimination against gay people, the RFRA law would not provide a religious exemption, because courts have consistently found that anti-discrimination laws DO in fact meet the standard of strict scrutiny

Racial discrimination in public accommodations was banned in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In legal challenges to that law, businesses asserted their right to freedom of association. The court found that burdening freedom of association was permissible in this case, because ending discrimination constituted a compelling state interest imposed by the least restrictive means. Case law has consistently backed this interpretation of anti-discrimination laws.

There is no reason to believe that courts would not continue to rule that local anti-discrimination ordinances meet the strict scrutiny standard. RFRA is useless if the law burdening religious expression meets that standard.

4. So if this law doesn't create a legal right for businesses to discriminate against gay people, does it do anything? What was the point if not that?

Indiana's RFRA, like other states' RFRAS and the Federal RFRA, are designed to make it easier for people to win court cases where they assert a religious liberty claim. People have always been able to argue in court that certain laws are unconstitutional because they violate an individual's free exercise of religion (remember that thing from the 1st Amendment?). Legislatures thought the courts were not giving enough deference to religious liberty in these cases, and they did an end-run around the judicial branch by creating a new law (RFRA) that imposed this strict scrutiny standard of review in these religious freedom cases.

The point of these laws is that strict scrutiny is a difficult standard for laws to meet! Many if not most laws will fail to meet the strict scrutiny standard. That means that it's very possible that a person who would have lost a religious liberty 1st amendment challenge would now be able to win in court by instead suing on the basis of RFRA. So, that's the point. It was probably inspired by the Hobby Lobby case, where Hobby Lobby used the Federal RFRA to nullify the part of Obamacare that required them to cover birth control in their health insurance packages.

5. But wait...you said anti-discrimination laws meet strict scrutiny, AND you said it's really hard for laws to meet strict scrutiny

That's correct. I sure did. Because that's the truth. Despite the fact that many laws won't meet the two strict scrutiny criteria, anti-discrimination laws almost certainly DO.

6. Is it possible a court will overturn precedent and rule that local anti-discrimination ordinances do NOT meet the strict scrutiny criteria?

Sure, it's possible. It's also possible that monkeys will fly out of my butt. There is a lot of legal precedent that suggests this is very unlikely.


7. But doesn't Indiana's RFRA differ from the Federal RFRA and other states' RFRAS?

Yes, it does differ in several ways, but it doesn't differ in any way that's material to this analysis. It expands the law to include corporations' religious expression. It expands the protections to private civil suits that might invoke aspects of the law. But none of that has anything to do with the only question that matters here, which is whether anti-discrimination laws meet the strict scrutiny criteria, because if they do, then the law just doesn't apply, period.

8. Is it possible that Mike Pence knew it didn't allow for discrimination, but wanted people to think it did, so the conservative religious base would like him?

Sure, I guess that's possible. If so, that symbolic gesture certainly turned around and bit him in the ass.

9. Are you saying, Joe, that you think this law is good?

No. I think it's going to lead to a lot of lawsuits and uncertainty, with people trying to avoid following laws they don't like. How bad that will be, I don't know. I just don't think the law has anything to do with public accommodations for lgbtq folks.

10. Is the language being added to the law going to change anything, or is it clarification?

Pence was right that the law didn't give anybody the right to discriminate, so yes, the new language will be a clarification of what the law already does.

11. Shouldn't Indiana pass state-wide civil rights legislation for gay people in employment, housing, and public accommodations, so they would be protected everywhere?

Absolutely! Indiana should absolutely do this, as should the Federal government! But that really has nothing to do with this law, because the law doesn't create a right to discriminate.

12. Can I still hate Mike Pence?

Sure! The Glenda Ritz fiasco is, in my opinion, borderline criminal, and you should hate him for that alone!

Offendedness: The Most Useless Emotion

Being offended is a useless emotion. If somebody meant to offend you, then your being offended is exactly the outcome they were trying to achieve. Congratulations, they win! If somebody was not trying to offend you, then they said something because they believed it to be true. To them, it makes no sense that you were offended by the truth. The truth is neither offensive nor inoffensive; it just is. While they may have said something untrue, the proper response to somebody hearing something untrue is to correct the misunderstanding, not "be offended."

Erego, claiming that a statement is "offensive" is totally pointless. It's either true, or it's not true. If it's not true, either take the time to explain why it isn't true, or ignore it and go about your business. If it is true, then you need to accept that your revulsion at the truth is your problem, not anybody else's.

Gender and The Master's Tools

When it comes to gender, I start with the assumption that people's behavior, tastes, interests, and, overall, their personality, have no necessary relationship to which sex organs they possess. Whether there is a de facto correlation between type of sexual organs and personality/behavior in society at large is irrelevant; whatever statistical central tendency may exist in a population between sex organs and any trait or behavior is belied by tremendous variation. Any personality trait or behavior you can come up with that supposedly "belongs" to males or females, I can very easily find members of the opposite sex who display it.

Starting with these assumptions leads me to the conclusion that there are no essential male or female traits. If there are no essential female or male traits, then the words "masculine" and "feminine" have essentially no meaning. Gender isn't a thing. There is only behavior and personality, and everybody is unique. I think this approach, for the most part, works pretty well.

One way to deconstruct this masculinity/feminity bullshit dichotomy is to construct a 3 x 3 typology of behavior/personality characteristics.



I have tried in earnest to fill out this table in the past; I failed. Try it! I think you'll find that traits quickly become impossible to categorize. It's a good exercise in seeing through the bullshittiness of the masculine/feminine dichotomy.

If you subscribe to my point of view that gender is essentially meaningless, it's easy to criticize social conservatives' "traditional family values" approach to gender roles. It's easy to identify why they are wrong, and politically, other gender critics in the culture tend to be on board with the criticism.

What's harder from this "gender is meaningless" perspective is to call out people who try to use essentialist language to advocate sex equality. For instance, an argument I see used frequently is that women are better suited for leadership in the modern economy because they have better social instincts (or some such nonesense). Or that women need special treatment from Paid Family Leave law because they are more suited for nurturing babies (putting aside the breast feeding issue). While I certainly agree with the goals of empowering women in the workplace, these arguments are still based on an underlying masculine/feminine essentialist dichotomy that ultimately reinforces the underlying ideological problem.

To quote Audre Lorde, "the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house."

Gender isn't a thing; if your argument assumes that it is, then winning the argument is a pyrrhic victory at best, no matter the end result.

Joe Reviews The Walking Dead

After several aborted attempts, I finally managed to get hooked on Walking Dead, and I'm now caught up on the episodes. Keeping with my absurd practice, I will now review it, even though I know logically that my opinion about it isnt important to anybody at all on the face of the planet! But, I have these thoughts, man....they gotta go somewhere! They gotta go somewhere!!!!!! Otherwise my brain is gonna blow up!!!

I'll lead with the punchline; Walking Dead is worth a watch, and it has a handful of genuinely fantastic episodes, but it's quite uneven. From about the middle of season one through the middle of season two (basically the entirety of the Rick/Shane/Lorrie melodrama), it's a hard show to get through, but it improves markedly after that. The plot arc of The Governor and Woodbury offers a significant jump in quality, due in large part to the jaw dropping acting chops of David Morrissey, who really knocks that role out of the park. The post-Governor plot lines are still strong, but they lack the more engaging political nuances that the audience gets to experience with The Governor plot and are more of a return to the basic themes of danger, hopelessness, and survival that dominate the early seasons. If the show's plot doesn't go somewhere interesting fast in the 2nd half of season 5 (starting in February), I very well may lose interest again, not because the show is poorly executed, but because it appears to be so committed to a "realistic" portrayal of a post-collapse world that it induces a strange combination of states in the viewer: horrified boredom. There are only so many times one can watch a group of people be ambushed by zombies or marauders before it just becomes old hat. We get it; it's a dangerous place, and people we like are going to die, and it probably isn't going to get any better. Artistically, I can respect that. That probably is what it would feel like to live in that world, but as far as entertainment goes, it's just not my cup of tea. Despair and escapism are strange and, for me, nearly incompatible bedfellows (though obviously a LOT of people like it; the show's ratings are huge).

There are a lot of things I like about the show, which I'll mention here in no particular order. The actors are mostly quite good. The sundry ethical dilemmas presented by the show offer insightful social commentaries and critiques for our pre-collapse society. The show highlights, for instance, the absurdity of our obsession with material things, while simultaneously highlighting the absurdity of how taken-for-granted they are. As the show progresses, it becomes clear that the zombies are merely an environmental danger that can be managed with enough planning and ingenuity. The real drama of the show becomes the problem of social interaction in an anarchic, dangerous, and materially scarce environment (basically the Hobbesian state of nature, if that nature had mindless reanimated corpses that wanted to eat people). These are classic political problems. How do groups build trust? Why do neighboring groups (or countries, or what have you) go to war? Why do leaders so often seem to become dictatorial and corrupt? How should groups distribute scarce resources? How do we resolve collective action problems? How do groups create and then enforce laws? How can we pursue compassion and mercy when resources are so scarce and the world so dangerous?

I think the show does a pretty impressive job of realistically portraying what it would be like for groups to try to solve these problems on the fly after the complete and sudden collapse of society's institutional frameworks. Its view so far seems to be pretty conservative (predominance of zero-sum thinking, that cooperation between groups is unsustainable and that war seems inevitable, that rights will collapse under the imperative of survival, that charismatic psychopaths will rise to power and become Leviathan, and that mercy and compassion must be subordinate to strength and survival).

I hope the show continues to explore these political themes in interesting ways, with fewer plot lines consisting of "somebody got lost in the woods and we need to find them" or "we need to get food. Let's go in here. Oh no, there are zombies there" or "oh no, somebody turned into a zombie...will their friend/lover be able to kill them, or will they just cry and cry until they get bit?!?!"

My problems with the show mostly have to do with its inconsistent application of realism. The show clearly wants to be unromantic about its characters' fates. It has no problem killing the darlings (though apparently fans have threatened to riot if they kill off Daryl). I respect the show's willingness to portray bleakness; not many television shows can get away with that, and it certainly bucks the general Hollywood trend of cliches, truisms, and feel-good endings. Walking Dead's problem is that it lets the pendulum swing too far in the other direction, giving the characters implausibly bad decision-making and implausibly bad luck. Of course, any horror fan knows full-well that ridiculously bad decision-making and luck are one of the engines of the entire genre, but the implausibility really stands out in contrast to the show's other attempts at realism. The effect is that the show feels sadistic; it's actually going out of its way to hurt these characters, and in turn, the audience. There were definitely a few scenes where I audibly muttered, "oh c'mon, just fuck off" to whomever was writing the script.

My other main issue is some inconsistency in the depiction of how dangerous and how ubiquitous the zombies are. Is it hard to kill 10 zombies, or is it easy to kill 10 zombies? The show seems to waffle on that question depending on that episode's particular plot requirements. Why can the characters take out 50 zombies in a prison, but they're scared to clear out one of the other thousands upon thousands of empty rural farms because the farmhouses are "overrun"? Why can the characters sometimes hear the zombies from a considerable distance away, but sometimes the zombies can sneak up on them in the woods and appear to move without making any noise whatsoever? How is it that zombies appear to be more-or-less physiologically intact, when many of them died from being eaten? Wouldn't the zombies who attacked that zombie have eaten most of their flesh, and wouldn't that make them more-or-less incapable of locomotion? The show mentions that zombies can starve, but if so, why aren't more of them starving (this is basically the plot of 28 Days Later)? The zombies always seem to stay away just long enough for non-zombie-related plot and dialog to happen, which might be 20 minutes or 2 minutes. Very convenient. Zombie pervasiveness seems to be causally related to the exigencies of human melodrama.

The show establishes that the zombies are easily led in one direction or another; they follow any significant sights or sounds. Well, why not dig a giant pit and put a loud speaker in the middle of it and lure them there and then kill them? Why not lead them off a cliff? If they are so easy to distract, why not distract them?! If they are too much for your fences, BUILD BETTER FENCES!! I understand that these are not necessarily engineers, but fence/wall building technology is not all that sophisticated! Why is nobody working on the fence?!?! Why is nobody building walls?! You took the time to find and raise pigs, but nobody stopped to say "hey, maybe this constant pressure of heavy bodies against this chain-link fence could turn into an issue at some point!" Why do the characters always act surprised when dead people turn into zombies? They have seen this occur many, many times! This should not have come as a surprise! The show has established that zombies are easily tricked by covering oneself in zombie guts; why don't the characters cover themselves with zombie guts every time they go into a dangerous area? There should be a bucket of guts and a shower waiting by the gate for everybody to use as they come and go.

Basically, I don't buy the show's basic premise that this outbreak would have been so hard to stop that it would have caused the government to collapse. The zombies aren't that hard to avoid or kill, except when the show needs to manufacture some drama. I get that without the collapse angle, it wouldn't be that much of show, but to make it plausible, the zombies should have been more formidable, which would have required fewer dumb decisions by the characters and fewer inconsistencies.

These inconsistencies bother me more, again, because in other areas, the show works so hard to be realistic. C'mon, be more consistent with your realism, show about reanimated mindless human corpses!!!