Category: The Dish

Philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel refines his earlier “theory of jerks”:

I submit that the unifying core, the essence of jerkitude in the moral sense, is this: the jerk culpably fails to appreciate the perspectives of others around him, treating them as tools to be manipulated or idiots to be dealt with rather than as moral and epistemic peers. This failure has both an intellectual dimension and an emotional dimension, and it has these two dimensions on both sides of the relationship. The jerk himself is both intellectually and emotionally defective, and what he defectively fails to appreciate is both the intellectual and emotional perspectives of the people around him. He can’t appreciate how he might be wrong and others right about some matter of fact; and what other people want or value doesn’t register as of interest to him, except derivatively upon his own interests. The bumpkin ignorance captured in the earlier use of ‘jerk’ has changed into a type of moral ignorance.

One of the jerk’s defining features is hypocrisy:

He might rage against the smallest typo in a student’s or secretary’s document, while producing a torrent of errors himself; it just wouldn’t occur to him to apply the same standards to himself. He might insist on promptness, while always running late. He might freely reprimand other people, expecting them to take it with good grace, while any complaints directed against him earn his eternal enmity. Such failures of parity typify the jerk’s moral short-sightedness, flowing naturally from his disregard of others’ perspectives. These hypocrisies are immediately obvious if one genuinely imagines oneself in a subordinate’s shoes for anything other than selfish and self-rationalising ends, but this is exactly what the jerk habitually fails to do.

Reviewing a new memoir by Rob Lowe, Heather Havrilesky finds that the actor has pulled off the near-impossible – a celebrity book with some humility:

[H]e makes up for … egocentric passages with lovable Diary of an Emo Kid interludes in which our hero is overcome by his surging emotions. On a flight to visit his son during his freshman year at college, for example, Lowe is forced to wear sunglasses and hide behind his newspaper to mask his copious tears. “I am amazed that so much water can come out of the eyes of someone who dehydrates himself with so much caffeine,” he writes, wryly deprecating his sentimental foolishness while also indulging a telltale celebrity Angeleno focus on maximal body maintenance.

Throughout Love Life, Lowe seems attracted to his most demeaning stories:

Jewel wipes her mouth with the back of her hand after she’s forced to kiss him while shooting the short-lived drama The Lyon’s Den. He dresses up as Bigfoot to scare his kids while camping, and ends up getting kicked in the balls. He visits Warren Beatty’s house with his girlfriend; Beatty lightly informs him that he’s been sleeping with her.

Mostly, though, Lowe’s books are a great example of the power of confounding expectations. You wouldn’t think a face off the pages of Tiger Beat magazine would revel in his own humiliation as much as Lowe does. When, in Stories I Only Tell My Friends, a young Lowe goes to a screening of The Outsiders and discovers that his central role in the film has been reduced to an afterthought, it’s impossible not to feel sad for this needy teenager, who desperately hopes for some proof that his big dream hasn’t been a waste of time. Instead, he is humbled, truly.

 

A new survey indicates that out-of-work Americans are twice as likely to suffer from depression as their employed peers. And the long-term unemployed appear to be the worst off:

Gallup also finds that the long-term unemployed spend less time with their family and friends, potentially contributing to those higher rates of depression. The survey notes that we cannot identify causality: “These results don’t necessarily imply unemployment itself causes these differences. It may be that unhappy or less positive job seekers are less likely to be able to get jobs in the first place.” That’s true, but these findings are also consistent previous academic evidence.

Rebecca Rosen mulls over the findings:

[Gallup’s Steve] Crabtree cites a 2011 study by the Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University which found that long-term unemployed people were much more likely to report that they had spent two hours or less being social the previous day.

“Again,” Crabtree writes, “these results don’t necessarily imply unemployment itself causes these differences. It may be that unhappy or less positive job seekers are less likely to be able to get jobs in the first place—if, for example, employers are looking for more upbeat workers. It is also possible that those who spend less time with family and friends are therefore less able to draw on their social networks for employment leads.”

Surely there are people out there who are accurately described by one of those possibilities. But it’s all too easy to imagine a scenario in which all of these act together in a vicious cycle that mires a person in unemployment. That same Rutgers study found much higher rates of reporting “feeling ashamed or embarrassed” or “strain in family relations” for those for whom a loss of a job had had devastating financial consequences. As one reader wrote to The Atlantic in 2011, “I look at my peers who are getting married and having children and generally living life and it’s depressing.  They’ve got jobs, health insurance, relationships, homes; I don’t even have a real bed to sleep on.” Would hanging out with friends and family be very appealing under such circumstances? Not to me, at least. From there, it’s a pretty direct line to isolation, depression, the toll those will have on a job search, to more isolation, more depression, and on and on and on.

A reader goes out on a limb:

Never have I been more grateful for your anonymous reader-contributor policy …

George Will is wrong in many of the ways people are saying, but he does have a point that no one wants to really face: the power to silence other potential participants in a discussion is a privilege and a powerful one. In our post-Civil Rights era culture, grievance is the optimal position to be in while in argument. Victimhood is desirable when it allows you to win the narrative.

I am not saying this privilege is worth being raped for and that people are intentionally getting raped to win their arguments about gender, but given how often people are silenced by the victimhood of their verbal sparring partner (maybe I see it more because I live in liberal California?), I see why Will had this thought.

I’ll go further:

the story he excerpts, at least in excerpt form, doesn’t sound like rape. The guy is being an asshole for not respecting his recent ex’s wishes but she ultimately cooperated. It’s shitty, yes. It should be discouraged, yes. But “rape”? The point Marcotte and many bloggers make is that it doesn’thave to be “forcible” to be rape; even the absence of consent is rape. Well, okay yes but don’t be surprised when people stop taking “rape” as seriously when it is no longer defined as physically forcing yourself on someone.  I think that’s also one of Will’s two or three somewhat valid points amidst his mountain of old-school BS: the self-proclaimed fighters-of-rape-culture want us to conflate these more ambiguous “absence of consent” situations with the more conventional understanding of rape as a forcing of oneself on another. I think that’s probably a legitimate goal but I don’t think Will is out of line for calling folks on it.

The fact that there are men who are falsely accused of rape doesn’t “cancel out” that women are raped but when one considers the intense fear many men have of being falsely accused of rape, one starts to understand the origins of Will’s thinking as more than just enforcing patriarchy.

I have more on this in the form of anecdote, but I think I’ll wait to see where the discussion goes before I share it.

Another voices a very different view:

Hook-up culture IS rape culture.

There is no place on Earth more progressive than Swarthmore. Every far-left piety is accepted without question, much less criticism. (You’d think that students would be challenged with contrary views to help them burnish their intellectual armor so that when they left Swarthmore they’d be equipped to grapple with people who disagree with them, but you’d be mistaken). “White Male Privilege” means that white guys are automatically wrong, “Rape Culture” is Serious You Guys, and sex is only consensual if the woman has no regrets about it. If under these conditions, women are still getting raped – and not by the College Republicans or Future Patriarchs of America, but by members in good standing of the Privileged-Oppressed Alliance – then the fundamental underpinnings of the college model are completed fuçked, and need to be scrapped.

You want to see “Rape Culture”? Take hundreds of 17 to 22 year-olds, remove them from their parents, give them unrestricted and unsupervised access to alcohol and each other’s bodies, tell them that they’re mature enough to handle adult choices, and teach them that there’s no virtue in sexual restraint. Sprinkle some talk about condoms and consent, and send them back to their coed dorms. THAT is “Rape Culture.” Women are going to get raped, because many eighteen-year-old men aren’t mature enough to understand what “no” means or manage their urges, and many 18-year-old women aren’t mature enough to spot red flags. For all practical purposes, Hookup Culture IS Rape Culture.

You want to get serious about preventing rape? Single-sex dorms, no visitors after ten, doors ajar when there are visitors, room checks by RAs, consumption of alcohol banned, sexual contact beyond first base punished by warning, then formal reprimand, then suspension, then explusion. Yeah, college will be less fun. But you’ll learn more, and there’s no chance that progressive, sensitive, feminist men will ever rape you in your dorm room.

Things may change at Swarthmore. I hope rape victims get better support, because it does sound like the administration’s first instinct has been to wish the problem away when confronted with a rape allegation. (That goes for allegations that are fatuous on their faces; it’s not up to some dean to decide). Regardless, my advice to a relative or friend attending Swarthmore would be to walk down the hill to the police station, and not to trust a system designed to adjudicate academic offenses to competently handle criminal offenses.

But they’re not going to adopt my idea. In loco parentis isn’t coming back, because Swarthmore would never dream of telling eighteen-year-olds who were smart enough to be admitted that they don’t know everything (this being a campus where the prevailing belief is that someone who holds the same position on same-sex marriage that Barack Obama did until May of 2012 is too bigoted to be allowed to speak), or that they’re not yet mature enough to manage decisions about what goes into or comes out of their pelvises.

John Oliver explains why:

Bershidsky longs for FIFA to kick out Sepp Blatter, who he claims “has run soccer’s governing body like an old-school dictatorship” since 1998:

Blatter has been no visionary in sports terms. His tenure has yielded a few minor rule changes, notably one that penalizes players for pulling off their T-shirts after scoring a goal. Some changes were quickly reversed. In 2007, for example, FIFA banned games at stadiums more than 8,200 feet above sea level. It then raised the limit to 9,840 feet and was forced to grant an exception to Bolivia’s main stadium. By contrast, Blatter’s predecessor, Joao Havelange, boosted FIFA’s membership from 142 to 204 federations, and recast the rules in ways that made the game more dynamic and enjoyable to watch — and less rough.

Blatter has also done little to combat the corruption that flourished under Havelange, who was proved to have taken bribes and forced out as FIFA’s honorary president last year.

The Economist identifies deeper problems with the organization:

It would be good to get rid of Mr Blatter, but that would not solve FIFA’s structural problem. Though legally incorporated as a Swiss non-profit organisation, FIFA has no master. Those who might hold it to account, such as national or regional football organisations, depend on its cash. High barriers to entry make it unlikely that a rival will emerge, so FIFA has a natural monopoly over international football. An entity like this should be regulated, but FIFA answers to no government.

All the same, more could be done. The Swiss should demand a clean-up or withdraw FIFA’s favourable tax status. Sponsors should also weigh in on graft and on the need to push forward with new technology: an immediate video review of every penalty and goal awarded would be a start.

Catherine Addington feels the “fundamental problem is that FIFA is self-regulating, which is to say that it doesn’t self-regulate”:

The only things to keep it in check are vaguely uncomfortable sponsors and only nominally responsible participating governments. (Fans for their part have no other organization to turn to. FIFA has a monopoly on international soccer.) Even FIFA’s upcoming Congress, in which each country has an equal vote, is unlikely to make waves. With few checks and balances in sight, FIFA is under no obligation to be transparent about either its policies or its finances.

FIFA has done the impossible: they have made Brazilians hate soccer. But as Brazilians’ anti-government protests over the past few years have shown, this is about much more than soccer. That’s why this World Cup, and the inevitable spilling over of these anti-cronyism tensions, are crucial to watch, even for those uninterested in soccer. FIFA is running an experiment to find out just how many platitudes people will put up with from the crony capitalists running a global entertainment industry.

Noah Feldman eviscerates the Vergara ruling:

So how did California’s teacher tenure laws violate the state constitution? The court’s two-part reasoning was thin to the point of being emaciated. First, it observed that the state constitution guarantees a right to education and guarantees equal protection of the laws. Second, it “found” that teacher tenure laws can tenure ineffective teachers – which it said was a violation of California children’s right to education.

The logic of this holding is pretty obviously flawed. All sorts of policies and rules affect the quality of what goes on in the classroom. Do all policies that reduce the quality of education violate the state constitution? Obviously not – or the court would have to take over the state school system and review every lesson plan for effectiveness. There was also no precedent supporting this expansive reading of the state constitution.

Eric Posner remains unimpressed by Judge Treu’s reasoning:

One of the reasons that employers – and not just public schools, but regular commercial firms, as well as universities and many private schools – offer job security is that employees value it so much. They’re willing to accept a lower salary in return for job security. The employer faces a tradeoff: it loses some ability to control employees, but it saves a lot of money, which it can use for other things. And so with the schools. If California is no longer allowed to offer job security, it will either need to pay teachers more (leaving less money to spend on students) or hire fewer teachers. Is that going to advance education? The court has no idea, indeed doesn’t seem to have given any thought to these issues.

The long and the short of it is that a judge is in no position to make these tradeoffs.

Kevin Carey – generally a supporter of education reform – argues that the courts are “an inherently problematic venue in which to resolve fundamental education questions”:

Deciding whether schools are providing children with a good enough learning environment requires us to decide what we want our children to learn and what kind of citizens we want them to be. That, in turn, flows from our convictions and values about the nature of just and civilized society. Such questions can never be resolved with legal finality. They represent the unending project of debate in an open society, the balancing of sometimes irreconcilable priorities that we manage with democratic and inherently political institutions. Which means that we should expect more Vergaras in the future – and expect to never be fully satisfied with the result.

Jill Barshay notes that the research underlying the ruling is controversial:

Many researchers are questioning whether test-score gains are a good measure of teacher effectiveness. Part of the problem are the standardized tests themselves. In some cases, there are ceiling effects where bright students are already scoring near the top and can’t show huge gains year after year. In other cases, struggling students may be learning two years of math in one year, say catching up from a second-grade to a fourth-grade math level. But the fifth-grade test questions can’t capture the gains of kids who are behind. The test instead concludes that the kids have learned nothing. In both of these cases, with top and bottom students, the teachers would be labeled as ineffective. Morgan Polikoff of the University of Southern California and Andrew Porter of the University of Pennsylvania looked at these value-added measures in six districts around the nation and found that there was weak to zero relationship between these new numbers and the content or quality of the teacher’s instruction. Their research was published in May 2014, after the Vegara trial ended.

Freddie sighs:

Teacher attrition is sky-high, with best estimates of between 40 to 50 percent leaving the profession within five years of starting. That amounts to something like a thousand teachers quitting for every school day of a given year. Anecdotally speaking, most successful, Ivy League striver-types do not consider teaching as a serious option. But why would they, when there’s so many more remunerative, less stressful, less emotionally grueling, and better respected options out there? If your argument is that a profession’s problems stems from a talent deficit, you should be doing everything to make the job more attractive, not less.

But Ed Morrissey suggests the ruling could be a mark a turning point:

Treu’s ruling does not rely on the US Constitution, and it has yet to be endorsed by a state appellate court as of yet. It is a signal, though, that people are fed up feeding tens of billions of dollars into educational systems that produce poor results, and that disgust over the priorities of the people within the system has reached a level where even the judiciary can no longer ignore it. California’s legislature had better take this lesson and apply it regardless of whether the ruling holds up on appeal.

And Eric Hanushek sees nothing but positives:

A small percentage of teachers inflicts disproportionate harm on children. Each year a grossly ineffective teacher continues in the classroom reduces the future earnings of the class by thousands of dollars by dramatically lowering the college chances and employment opportunities of students. There is also a national impact. The future economic well being of the United States is entirely dependent on the skills of our population. Replacing the poorest performing 5 to 8 percent of teachers with an average teacher would, by my calculations, yield improved productivity and growth that amounts to trillions of dollars.