Month: August 2014

The Social Segregation Of Whites

by Dish Staff

Social Networks

Robert Jones highlights it:

Drawing on techniques from social network analysis, PRRI’s 2013 American Values Survey asked respondents to identify as many as seven people with whom they had discussed important matters in the six months prior to the survey. The results reveal just how segregated white social circles are.

Overall, the social networks of whites are a remarkable 93 percent white. White American social networks are only one percent black, one percent Hispanic, one percent Asian or Pacific Islander, one percent mixed race, and one percent other race. In fact, fully three-quarters (75 percent) of whites have entirely white social networks without any minority presence. This level of social-network racial homogeneity among whites is significantly higher than among black Americans (65 percent) or Hispanic Americans (46 percent).

The Other Shooting In St. Louis, Ctd

by Dish Staff

This video of police shooting and killing Kajieme Powell has been making the rounds. Conor Friedersdorf can’t help but wonder whether deadly force was necessary:

A police officer might retort that law enforcement shouldn’t be obligated to take on any extra risk to their own lives in a dangerous situation wholly and needlessly created by a person menacing them. A citizen deliberately baiting police with a deadly weapon cannot expect restraint. Even a small knife can be deadly.

In the abstract, I can’t disagree with those principles—and if questionable police killings were confined to such circumstances, there’d be less cause than now to complain about overzealous law enforcement. Yet watching this video, it seems certain in hindsight that the threat could’ve been stopped with force short of at least nine and as many as 12 gunshots; and again, if they’d kept more initial distance between themselves and a man they knew to have a knife before they even arrived, perhaps no deadly threat would’ve materialized. If they’d stood well back and engaged, perhaps Powell would’ve kept coming with a knife until stopped.

But Beutler expects that you “won’t find many police who’ll say that what the police did to Kajieme Powell is a great or unjustifiable departure” from normal police protocol:

And if that’s a shock to you, then you’re a newcomer to a very basic argument: That if this is proper protocol, then the protocol is bad.

Powell had a knife — Police Chief Sam Dotson described it as a steak knife. But he was not wielding it in the way officers claimed (or in the way it may have felt to them in the moment). He was not two or three feet away, but perhaps eight or nine. He wasn’t charging hard or issuing threats. To the contrary, he was demanding to be shot.

But that doesn’t mean the police needed to oblige him. It’s hard to watch the video and not conclude that there should’ve been some safe way to preserve his life.

A reader agrees that there was another option:

With the growing examination of how the St. Louis police behaved in shooting Powell after he was wielding a knife, I thought that this video from a 2011 incident in London involving a man trying to attack the police with a machete could illuminate how this situation could have been handled differently.

Instead of calling in armed police and opening fire on a troubled man, the Metropolitan Police consistently retreated – or approached him from behind a wheelie bin – before eventually seizing their chance and disarming and arresting the man.

Along the same lines, Ambinder wants to train officers “to account for differences in the type of threat posed, and even differences in the aim points”:

Not a liberal complaint here: Cities themselves are asking the Justice Department to review use of force training. The shoot-to-kill and shoot-when-threatened-at-all training has resulted in a number of innocent people’s being killed. Mentally ill people have it worse.

There are ways to resolve violent conflicts without killing people. Figuring out how to more rapidly defuse dangerous scenarios and training officers to distinguish between scenarios are not easy, but they seem worth trying, no?

Dreher is conflicted:

[L]ooking at it cold, it’s clear that the cops badly overreacted. But trying to think through it dispassionately, it’s a lot murkier than it seems. Is it really fair to expect cops to do a mental health exam of a man with a knife stalking around the street with people all around him, acting bizarrely, and refusing orders to drop the knife? I don’t know. If the cops had a taser, would they have had time to deliberate and get it out to use it, given how close the man was, and how irrationally he was behaving? I don’t know that either.

Allahpundit is sympathetic to the cops’ predicament:

The objections to what the cops did have less to do with legal culpability than with ways they might have avoided killing Powell. What about a taser? The problem there, said the police chief, is that Powell was wearing a sweatshirt. True, it was open at the chest, but that’s a small target to aim at. If they had hit him with the stun gun while he was advancing and the probes ended up embedded in his clothes rather than his skin, he might have kept coming with no time for the cop with the taser to reach for his gun. Okay, but there were two cops there; if the taser didn’t drop him instantly, the other officer had his gun already trained on Powell and could have taken him down. (If neither cop had a taser handy, why didn’t he?) …

My weak, easy hope when faced with a moral quandary like this is that technology will help solve it. Tasers will be refined, they’ll become cheaper and more reliable, and more cops will have them as a means to stop a violent perp without killing him. Of course, that’ll end up posing a different problem, as some irresponsible cops end up overusing the new technology. Better that than overusing a gun, though.

The Tea Party Ponzi Scheme

by Dish Staff

Tea Party

Tom Dougherty exposes it:

The problem is evidence indicates some Tea Party groups care far less about your ideals and far more about your money—taking it and making it their own. They’re an ideological Ponzi scheme; they use donations to generate more donations, by creating sensationalistic ad campaigns to persuade donors they’re getting value, and to scare or guilt them, and new donors, into sending more donations.

Does Personality Peak?

by Dish Staff

Christian Jarrett looks at research that finds “the stability of personality increases through youth, peaks in mid-life and then gradually reduces again into old age”:

The questionnaires measured the Big Five traits (extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness to experience) and also an honesty-humility factor. The researchers then looked to see how the “rank-order stability” of people’s traits (how their scores ranked compared to other people’s) varied across that two-year gap, and how this stability varied as a function of age.

The participants’ personalities showed “impressive” stability, as you’d expect since personality is meant to be a description of people’s pervasive traits. Extraversion was the most stable trait, and agreeableness the least. However, the key finding was that personality stability varied through the lifespan, increasing from the 20s to the 40s and 50s, and then declining towards old age, up to age 80. This broad pattern was found for all traits, except for agreeableness, which showed gradually reduced stability through life. For conscientiousness, openness to experience, and honesty-humility, trait instability had returned at the oldest age to the levels seen at the youngest age.

For the five traits that showed an inverted U-shape pattern of changing stability through life, [researchers Peter] Milojev and [Chris] Sibley found that the specific point of peak stability varied – extraversion and neuroticism showed highest stability in the late 30s, while the other traits (openness, honesty-humility, and conscientiousness) showed peak stability in the late 40s, early 50s.

 

Face Of The Day

by Dish Staff

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A model wears a Phoenix costume during the 13th annual Jember Fashion Carnival on August 21, 2014 in Jember, Indonesia. This year the carnival’s theme is ‘Triangle, Dynamic in Harmony’ and consists of ten parades: Mahabharata, Tambora, Phoenix, Pine Forest, Apache, Borobudur, Flying Kite, Wild Deers, Stalagmite, and Chemistry. The street carnival is claimed to be one of the biggest in the world and comprises more than 850 performers parading along 3.6 km of road, which is treated like a catwalk. Photo by Robertus Pudyanto/Getty Images.

“No. No. No.” Ctd

by Dish Staff

A reader writes:

Like many others, I was simply floored by the post in which a woman bravely details her experience of being raped and dealing with its aftereffects. (A college friend who was also raped forwarded me the story – it came with the subject line “oh my God.”) Never before has someone – even the two therapists I have seen since my rape, not even novelists, and I’ve read a few – crystallized those feelings, that experience, that shame, so powerfully and so accurately. It was all the things I’ve wanted to say for years but for which I’d never been able to find the exact right words. And then there they were.

I was raped my freshman year of college, within two weeks of having arrived at my school.

Initially, I didn’t tell anyone what happened. I just couldn’t. I had just started. I just wanted to be a normal student like everyone else. And that’s what I tried to be, even though I barely stayed above water. That is until I noticed how differently my friend was behaving when she returned from her junior year abroad. I recognized her symptoms immediately because they were the same symptoms I had been suffering from for the past few years. So I flat-out asked her if something had happened while she was abroad. She told me that yes – something did happen. We then confided in each other and spent our senior year trying to help each other feel a little bit less alone. We even gave ourselves the name “the rape sisters.”

That was years ago, and we have both since moved on. But you never move past. It’s always there. Whether it’s how you can never go into that deep wonderful sleep again the same way you used to, or the way someone brushes up against you in public, there’s always something to trigger that memory that never leaves.

I wish I knew who this author was so that I could give her a hug and tell her thank you. I wish they would hand her story out to incoming freshmen at every college and university in the country and make them read it. It is quite simply the best account of what rape does to a woman’s heart, mind, and soul that I have ever read.

And thank you for posting it. Stories like that, like ours, need to be told.

Another adds:

One thing that really brought home the reality of rape and assault to me was the Unbreakable Project. Survivors write down the words their rapists used and (sometimes) pose with them.

The Twice-Displaced Palestinians

by Jonah Shepp

Alice Su highlights the peculiar predicament of Palestinian Syrians, who unlike other displaced people looking to flee the civil war don’t have the right to seek refuge in neighboring countries:

Amid the millions of refugees from Syria flooding into neighboring countries like Lebanon and Jordan, a minority group is being quietly denied entry, detained, deported, and pushed out in any way possible: Palestinians. They are refugees who literally have nowhere to go.

In recent months, Jordanian and Lebanese authorities have acknowledged that Palestinians from Syria are not welcome to asylum in the same way that other Syrian refugees are. Jordan and Lebanon have respectively been barring Palestinians from entry since January and August 2013, in contrast with the treatment of some 600,000 Syrian nationals in Jordan and 1.5 million in Lebanon, according to Human Rights Watch. The organization has also documented forcible deportations of Palestinians—women and children included—from both countries.

I touched on this issue last week, and I’m glad to see it’s getting some more press. This is another example of the many ways Palestinians suffer for having no state of their own and no genuine acceptance in the countries where so many of them ended up after being displaced in the 1948 and 1967 wars.

I’m somewhat agnostic on how best to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (more on that later), but the severe impact of Palestinian statelessness on the lives and welfare of Palestinian refugees and their descendants is—or at least ought to be—beyond dispute. Israel is the primary agent of this problem, but it’s worth remembering that most Arab states have not exactly been kind to the Palestinians either.

It’s also an example of how the Palestinian experience in the Arab Middle East since 1948 replicates with eerie similarity the experience of the Jews in Europe in the bad old days. Imagine living your entire life in a country where the majority of people look pretty much the same as you do but consider you foreign, undeserving of the rights of citizenship, and somehow a threat to them for reasons they can’t really articulate. Imagine being in perpetual danger of expulsion or worse at the whim of an autocrat or a populist mob, and having no place to go where you know you will be safe from that danger. One would think that two peoples having both been through such a harrowing experience would be able to find more common ground than they do, but perhaps the fearful worldview engendered by that trauma overrides whatever perspective it might provide.

How Dangerous Is Police Work?

by Dish Staff

Police Fatalities

Daniel J. Bier goes over the statistics. He finds that, “In 2013, out of 900,000 sworn officers, just 100 died from a job-related injury. That’s about 11.1 per 100,000, or a rate of 0.001% 0.01%”:

Policing doesn’t even make it into the top 10 most dangerous American professions. Logging has a fatality rate 11 times higher, at 127.8 per 100,000. Fishing: 117 per 100,000. Pilot/flight engineer: 53.4 per 100,000. It’s twice as dangerous to be a truck driver as a cop—at 22.1 per 100,000.

Another point to bear in mind is that not all officer fatalities are homicides. Out of the 100 deaths in 2013, 31 were shot, 11 were struck by a vehicle, 2 were stabbed, and 1 died in a “bomb-related incident.” Other causes of death were: aircraft accident (1), automobile accident (28), motorcycle accident (4), falling (6), drowning (2), electrocution (1), and job-related illness (13).

Even assuming that half these deaths were homicides, policing would have a murder rate of 5.55 per 100,000, comparable to the average murder rate of U.S. cities: 5.6 per 100,000. It’s more dangerous to live in Baltimore (35.01 murders per 100,000 residents) than to be a cop in 2014.

Every Sex Worker Is Somebody’s Daughter, Ctd

by Dish Staff

The sex-worker-as-daughter debate, which Elizabeth launched, continues. Two readers cite two different missing pieces from the conversation thus far. One writes:

I am amazed by the Every Sex Worker Might be Somebody’s Daughter thread’s blind spot: not one person brought up the men who do sex work. Escorts and male performers in straight and gay pornography are all… somebody’s son.  Yet that doesn’t seem to worry anyone much. The same double-standard as always: sexually active women are sluts, sexually active men are studs.

The other sounds off:

The thread on this topic seems remarkably tone-deaf.

Should we evaluate all public policy issues through a “would you want your son/daughter to…” lens? Of course not. Is there lots of misguided, counter-productive, or irrelevant moralism and paternalism involved in some public policy? Sure. So some of the points made in the thread are well-taken, taken in isolation. But.

We also are all somebody’s child, or parent, or caretaker, or sibling, or spouse, etc. And these relationships tap into a specific part of our brain, and give us a specific set of perspectives on life. And sometimes it is positively healthy to ask ourselves to access that part of our thinking and feeling to a greater extent. At the least, speaking as if a whole realm of human awareness should be amputated from public concerns seems at best hugely unrealistic. Just think about the gay marriage issue. Homophobia was fine if you barely knew gay people even existed. Civil unions seemed OK if you knew that they existed, but didn’t know too much about their lives. But gay marriage became a moral imperative for many people because they knew and loved gay people personally, and saw them as, well…somebody’s daughter, or your own son or daughter. And that made a difference in how people saw the issue.

On another note, I think that people who want to jettison the “think about if she were somebody’s daughter” approach are just pretty naive about men. This line isn’t just a tool of patriarchal oppression. It’s used to counter-act male instincts (women have them also, but less strongly). And if you give men permission to stop asking the “what if she were…” questions, and give them free reign to assume that she might just as easily be a porn star, you might find that the results have a lot less to do with smashing the patriarchy than you first thought.