The Defuser-In-Chief, Ctd

John McWhorter reflects on Obama’s impromptu Trayvon Martin speech:

[T]he perception of black men as inherently criminal is what most black people really mean by “racism” when they talk about its prevalence. Most can discuss more statistical manifestations on reflection, but what really sits in the gut is cases like Amadou Diallo, Sean Bell, Oscar Grant, and now Martin. Or, the related experiences that black men have that Obama mentioned having had himself, such as being trailed in stores or watching white women tensing up as they pass.

This stuff is real. It’s raw. Testament to this daily kind of racist dismissal of black men is considered an urgent task of public discussion of the black condition. No one who understands this could possibly condone, for example, the vastly overreaching policy on stop-and-frisks in New York City. Should the police pay as much attention to the Upper East Side as Bedford-Stuyvesant? Of course not. But should most brown-skinned adolescents in a neighborhood expect to be stopped by usually surly cops for no reason? Say yes and you have no right to wonder why you get generation after generation of young men who feel alienated from their own society–which in fact makes Obama’s consideration of Ray Kelly to lead the Department of Homeland Security decidedly more ungainly at this point.

Ta-Nehisi applauds the speech:

I have had my criticisms of this president and how he talks about race. But given the mass freak-out that met him last year after making a modest point about Trayvon Martin, it must be said that it took political courage for him to double down on the point and then advance it.

No president has ever done this before. It does not matter that the competition is limited. The impact of the highest official in the country directly feeling your pain, because it is his pain, is real. And it is happening now. And it is significant.

Bouie doubts the speech will change much:

It’s asking Americans to empathize with Martin—to put themselves in the shoes of a black teenager, walking alone, at night, being followed by an older man—and try to see the circumstance as he would have experienced it. Other presidents have spoken frankly about the challenges faced by African Americans—Lyndon Johnson’s speech on the anniversary of Gettysburg (he was vice president at the time), stands as an excellent example—but no president has ever asked Americans to try to imagine the perspective of a black boy. It’s a powerful appeal, and my hope is that the public will take it seriously. My actual expectation, however, is that they won’t.

Ezra notes how Obama’s rhetoric on race has changed:

In 2008, Obama seemed to believe that with the right leadership, America was ready to move forward on race. “We are the ones we have been waiting for,” he said. In 2013, he seemed to believe political leaders might simply make matters worse, and that, on this issue at least, we are not the ones we have been waiting for. The ones we are waiting for, he seemed to say, are still coming.

Chait thinks Obama’s speech was intended for future audiences:

Obama understands that interjecting himself into a racialized controversy carries risks, but he also believes that the electorate of the future is on his side. His remarks are probably aimed not at the present but at posterity.

My thoughts here.

When The Military Gaffes

It’s usually about Israel – and the way in which recently it has truly hurt US foreign policy and interests:

Recently retired US Central Commander General James Mattis warned yesterday that if Secretary of State John Kerry’s attempts to broker a deal between Israel and the Palestinian Authority failed, Israel would be exposed as an apartheid state … Speaking July 20, at the Aspen Institute’s annual Security Forum, Mattis said that as a result of Israeli intransigence and the US special relationship with Israel, he and his troops have “paid a military security price.” His comments echoed those of his predecessor, General David Petraeus, who told the Senate Armed Service Committee in 2010 that “enduring hostilities between Israel and some of its neighbors” had damaged US interests in the region. Petraeus was hammered by pro-Israel forces for his remarks – Abe Foxman called him “dangerous” — and wound up walking them back.

But Mattis wasn’t silenced:

I paid a military security price every day as a commander of CENTCOM because the Americans were seen as biased in support of Israel and that moderates all the moderate Arabs who want to be with us because they can’t come out publicly in support of people who don’t want to show respect for the Arab Palestinians.

Yes, Junkies

Maria Popova digs up Hunter S. Thompson’s warnings about the dangers of being a political junkie:

Not everybody is comfortable with the idea that politics is a guilty addiction. But it is. They are US-TAX REFORM-NORQUIST-ALLENaddicts, and they are guilty and they do lie and cheat and steal — like all junkies. And when they get in a frenzy, they will sacrifice anything and anybody to feedtheir cruel and stupid habit, and there is no cure for it. That is addictive thinking. That is politics — especially in presidential campaigns. That is when the addicts seize the high ground. They care about nothing else. They are salmon, and they must spawn. They are addicts. …

Anything that gets the adrenalin moving like a 440 volt blast in a copper bathtub is good for the reflexes and keeps the veins free of cholesterol … but too many adrenaline rushes in any given time span has the same effect on the nervous system as too many electro-shock treatments are said to have on the brain: after a while you start burning out the circuits. When a jackrabbit gets addicted to road-running, its only a matter of time before he gets smashed — and when a journalist turns into a politics junkie he will sooner or later start raving and babbling in print about things that only a person who has Been There can possibly understand.

(Photo: Mike Allen of Politico, by Jim Watson/AFP/Getty)

Does Bad Art Grow On You?

James Cutting’s “exposure effect” claims that, through repeated exposure, viewers of inferior art come to rank those works more highly than canonical “great” art. A team of scholars reached a different conclusion:

We reported findings suggesting that increased exposure to art works does not necessarily make DCF 1.0people like them more. Instead, the quality of an art work remains at the heart of its evaluation. We repeatedly exposed study groups to two sets of paintings (by the English Pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais, and the American ‘Painter of Light’ Thomas Kinkade) before asking them to express a degree of liking for them. Although Millais is a well-respected artist, Kinkade’s work has been described as “a kitsch crime against aesthetics” and “so awful it must be seen to be believed.” We found that people liked Kinkade’s paintings less after they had been exposed to them. This was not the case with the Millais paintings. In our view, this suggests that exposure does not work independently of artistic value.

So are these works of art on Tumblr bad?

In one sense, this is a really tricky question. There might be a whole bunch of different reasons someone tags a particular piece as bad art. For example, a work might fail to conform to ordinary expectations about art. Or it might be morally challenging, disturbing, or even ethically questionable. Labelling a picture bad may not be a simple matter; many different kinds of things might be meant by displaying a work as ‘bad’ art. But in another sense, the question is pretty straightforward. Is the picture any good?

A reader sends the above image:

I give you: The Museum of Bad Art. Not only are the pieces classic unto themselves, but the commentary is invaluable:

In this complex narrative, the artist addresses how we perceive and the fear of how we are perceived. The faceless female form hesitates. Terror grips the little dog. His left paw pushes, as if to say “you go first.” The largest figure lurks behind, holding his pet, but not his mate. The choice of spectacles is confirmation that the artist is conflicted at the prospect of emerging. Yet when the hinged door is opened, we find he has nothing to hide.

The MOBA collection of “bad” art isn’t just stick figures and other poorly rendered art; it’s art that aspires to greatness and perhaps achieves it, but not in the way intended. Really, take a minute and stroll through the collection online. It’s definitely worth it.

“Meat Cleavers Work” Ctd

A reader sounds off on a recent post:

Will Wilkinson’s idea that the government is doing just fine with the sequestration made my blood boil. I understand his point about the government being forced to cut and refocus, but the problem is that not all agencies were as bloated as others. Some were better managed than others, and others were already pretty lean after Congress had cut and cut year after year.

Congress and the President completely failed us, though I blame Congress more because at least Obama tried to fix things as the deadline loomed. Congress abdicated its responsibility to make tough budgetary decisions based on reasonable goals and compromises. Wilkinson’s approval of sequestration is approval of a Congress that decided to bury its head in the sand rather than do its job.

I work in law enforcement for a Federal agency, and I have been furloughed. Prior to sequestration’s going into effect, my agency’s budget was already pretty lean, since Congress had already cut billions out of the budget in the preceding years. Those cuts resulted in reduced training and hiring, meaning there were few of us to complete more work with less know-how. The sequestration cut into that budget further still. But nothing else is left to cut except my hours. That doesn’t make us leaner and more streamlined; it just makes us less efficient.

In a law enforcement agency, when there are fewer resources on hand, we take on fewer cases and drop more cases instead of developing them. More people are absolutely getting away with breaking the law because of sequestration.

Also, we are putting off making important investments for future work in the hope that we might have a bigger budget next year. This is not effective management, and it is being forced on us by people who clearly do not care whether government is effective.

Congress is obviously free to find that law enforcement has enough funding to do its job and can redirect money to where it is needed. But that’s not what happened here. My agency was treated exactly the same as the VA, the Department of Education, the DoD, and everyone else. Maybe the DoD needed cuts. That would be a reasonable thing to find, but it is Congress’s job to decide to make those cuts. It is also their job to look at other agencies and increase their funding where appropriate. They didn’t do that. They don’t do anything.

I am frustrated. I love my job, and I am pretty good at it. I want to be a part of the government and do my part to run this great country. The only thing I absolutely hate about this job is that it is subject to the whims of the world’s worst board if directors: the U.S. Congress. I want to work more and serve my country, but the private sector just looks better and better. (Heck, private government contractors’ salaries will go up to $950,000 next year. That’s a much better salary than my CEO – Obama – makes.)

Maybe a meat cleaver works in some places, but it doesn’t in others. And Congress clearly isn’t competent to make that determination. I wish people would not suggest that sequestration worked. It just gives Congress license to do even less.

Where Is The Midwest?

The boundaries aren’t so clear:

dish_midwestmaps

Jenny Xie took this survey and posted the above maps, which aggregate the responses of everyone who took the survey:

[I]t appears Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Kentucky, Arkansas, and Oklahoma are the states of most contention. I personally felt I had no choice but to cut some of them in half. Perhaps the correct answer is still the textbook answer: the states of most intensified yellow (at least as identified by those who’ve lived in the Midwest the longest) make up the U.S. Census Bureau’s definition of the Midwest: Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin to the east, plus Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota to the west.  (As a commenter pointed out, cartographer and historian Bill Rankin has also done a Midwest mapping project, in which he overlaid 100 different maps of the Midwest and made the confounding observation that  “no area … was included on every single map”.)

When Can A Fetus Feel Pain? Ctd

A reader writes:

I am a pediatric intensive care unit physician with 13 years experience in the field.  The idea that an organism that withdraws from something that would be considered painful in a person with an intact nervous system is therefore experiencing pain and suffering is incorrect.  The idea that an associate professor of neurobiology would make that assertion seems to smack either of incompetence or speciousness.

Withdrawing from a pinch or burn is not a decision or a response to pain, but a spinal cord reflex.  When you touch a hot surface, you don’t think “Jesus, that hurts!” and then withdraw your hand.  You yank your hand back and think “aw crap, that’s going to hurt in a second … yep, there it is!”  The nerve circuits that produce the reflex withdrawal go from the sensory apparatus to the spinal cord, and then right back to the muscle.  No brain involved.  They are also considerably faster than those fibers that go to the spine, the brain stem, the thalamus, and then the cortex to be perceived as pain.  Although the “fetal neural structures” might be in place, simple withdrawal doesn’t prove that those structures go any higher than the spinal cord.

I run into this problem about once a month when we are forced to declare “brain death” in children who are the victims of violence – car wrecks, ATV accidents, gunshots, etc.

These unfortunate people have no detectable brain activity of any kind and are legally dead.  But if you pinch their toe hard enough, you can produce what’s called the triple flexion reflex. This is not obscure knowledge – we teach it to residents all the time.  And it’s certainly something that an associate professor of neurobiology should be very familiar with.

This ultimately gets to the question of what pain is, and what suffering is.  People whacked out on dilaudid can report something as being painful, but it’s as if it is happening to somebody else and they just don’t care.  Are they still “in pain” and need more medicine, or is the fact that they’re not suffering sufficient?  I believe that the “fetal neural structures” might be in place to have the electrical activity associated with parts of the pain sensation in people with more-developed neurological systems.  I do not believe that an organism without a cortex is capable of suffering. And that’s really what we’re talking about, isn’t it?

Update from a reader:

You might find this relevant to your discussion. In my research lab we’re culturing cortical neurons in special petri dishes called “multi-electrode arrays” that allow us to record electrical activity directly from the cultures. We use this setup to study how neurons create and modify electrical connections. Typically we use cortical neurons from fetal rats. This tissue is harvested on day 18 of gestation, just three days before birth. The neurons typically culture easily and start firing right away.

Recently, however, we’ve been able to get access to some human fetal cortical tissue. These cells come from aborted human fetuses. I’m not certain of the gestation period but its almost certainly early 2nd trimester. We’ve recently started culturing these cells and we’ve discovered something amazing. Whereas the rat neurons start firing almost immediately, the human neurons must culture for close to two months before they’ll start spontaneously firing in a way that is consistent with typical normal brain behavior. This is a stunning finding and breaking news to boot; my grad student only told me about all this on Friday! It seems that neurons that are too early into the gestation cycle are not sufficiently mature to produce firing patterns that one would associate with normal brain function.

What this has to do with pain or consciousness is anyone’s guess, but it’s almost certainly an important piece of information that no one has discovered before now. We’ll be busy getting this ready for publication in the coming weeks but I thought your readers might enjoy hearing about it first.