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0190888040
| 9780190888046
| 0190888040
| 4.19
| 215
| 2019
| Aug 01, 2019
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liked it
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I don’t quite know what to make of this book. I read it because I now live in a state a large portion of whose population is deluged with far right TV
I don’t quite know what to make of this book. I read it because I now live in a state a large portion of whose population is deluged with far right TV and talk radio. A large number of people do not have broadband and therefore often do not know there are newspapers and TV stations which make an effort to substantiate news. There is a disparity in information: the rural areas have been kept the equivalent of “barefoot and pregnant” by a state legislature that couldn't figure out how to fund failing schools and provide broadband. This book is a study of Jennifer Silva’s time interviewing residents of a former coal town in Pennsylvania, finding out what their lives are like, how they see their personal and professional trajectories, and who they vote for and why. Not being a social scientist, I found the stories Dr. Silva shares with us confounding. Maybe someone can come up with solutions for these folks, but the reason they don’t vote is that they basically don’t trust anyone after the life they’ve led. In one of the first couples described to us, Silva writes, “They are not single-issue voters who prioritize social issues such as abortion or fund control over economic interests, not do they place themselves into clear-cut categories of Republican or Democrat, liberal or conservative. Most of the time, as they attempt to come to terms with their past traumas and future anxieties, they do not think about politics at all.” Right. Silva’s mentor/thesis advisor might have anticipated this and suggested a less-stressed environment. If Silva was just wondering what was going on in towns like Coal Brook, I would understand that, too, but she admits she’d been hoping to find out what white rural conservatives were thinking about politics when she began. Soon enough she found out her interviewees were unschooled and inarticulate on the subject of “politics.” She did hear, though, these white residents’ dissatisfaction with Black and Latin “newcomers” to the coal region, former city dwellers and immigrants. So she changed her focus a little to include the newcomers. That was smart, and refocused this work into something approaching Arlie Russell Hochschild’s award-winning Strangers in Their Own Land. Maybe someone, after reading outcomes for poor white folks who grew up in an abandoned coal town or poor city dwellers who moved in to live inexpensively and get away from inner-city violence, will figure out a way to point these folks in a different direction, in the direction of a life that is more fulfilling and less crushing. But this is way outside my wheelhouse. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Mar 12, 2022
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Mar 21, 2022
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Mar 12, 2022
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Hardcover
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1631495755
| 9781631495755
| 1631495755
| 4.37
| 226
| Mar 17, 2020
| Mar 17, 2020
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really liked it
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David Daley wants us to feel good about ordinary citizen attempts to push back on states and national political parties for constraining our voting ri
David Daley wants us to feel good about ordinary citizen attempts to push back on states and national political parties for constraining our voting rights, documented in so many states across our Union. But in doing so he also shows us how the fight in many states has become more and more bitterly partisan, particularly when savvy grassroots organizing leads to galvanizing wins…and then to resurgent attempts by a weakened party apparatus to find legal grounds to reject the changes sought, reneging on promises made. A win in this climate is not really a win. It is a way station on a mountain path, a peak not yet crested. Perhaps that is the lesson of this endeavor: we never arrive but must fight for our democracy every. single. day. Daley has an entertaining style that distracts little from technical, tactical battles being fought in each state. New Voter ID requirements, hurdles to ballot initiatives, restrictions on voter registration or absentee balloting, egregious gerrymandering: these are the things voters around America are worked up about, and fighting against. Each state has different objective conditions, but in each it appears that the popular resistance is fighting a statewide battle while legislators seeking to preserve their position are receiving instructions and money from their national party. The fight is unequal in funding and reach but also unequal in ingenuity and persistence. It is heartening to see that better funding is not always the sign of a winning hand. The gerrymandering battle fought in deep-Red Utah resulted in a win for the ballot initiative in 2018 but in 2020 the legislature forced Better Boundaries, Utah’s anti-gerrymandering group, to accept a compromise solution that allows incumbent information to be used when creating maps, and instituting the requirement that legislators do not have to accept proposed maps. This shows the weakness of ballot initiatives. They are easier to pass…and easier to repeal. In Michigan the redistricting reform petition led by a youthful reformer profiled in the recently released documentary Slay the Dragon got onto the ballot in 2018 and passed with some 61% of the vote. Since then however, the Republican-dominated legislature first tried to defund the commission and then filed in federal court declaring the commission unconstitutional. A call went out early 2020, nonetheless, to all eligible voters in Michigan to apply to become a part of the new redistricting commission. As of this writing in April 2020, over 6,000 citizens have responded to the call to establish a 13-member commission. Applications close in July. Daley shows us that “when voters are given a choice, fairness wins…more than a three-quarters of the congressional seats that changed hands in 2018 were drawn by either commissions or courts. Fairer districts led not only to more competitive races, but also to election results that were responsive to a shift in public opinion.” Missouri voters initiated a constitutional amendment mandating fair maps and the state legislature immediately proposed an amendment to disarm the citizens’ initiative. New commission requirements adopted in Ohio continue to give a role to legislators, and to require a role for judiciary if commissioners cannot agree. At the risk of sounding despairing, I will note that I am a member of the rebellion…in Pennsylvania…to end partisan gerrymandering. We were in the last four months of an accelerating squeeze on the state legislature to pass legislation that will allow us to create an independent redistricting commission based on the California model: eleven commissioners randomly-selected from a vetted pool of regular PA citizenry. The corona virus stopped us cold. Daley mentions Pennsylvania among his descriptions of states fighting back against legislative overreach, describing the astounding win handed to anti-gerrymandering forces by the State Supreme Court in 2018 who ruled that the 2010 congressional maps and the remedial fix were badly skewed to protect ruling party interests in the state. A special master from out-of-state drew new maps used in the 2018 election for congressional districts, leveling the playing field a little. The fix was temporary and left legislators free to do it all again in 2021. The fight for fairer state legislative district maps continues in Pennsylvania and that is where we left it in early March when corona came calling. At least now we have time to look around at the changes elsewhere and see where we stand. Zachary Roth of the Brennan Center thinks states are winning the fight against gerrymandering, and I want it to be true. It is a never-ending battle, and we need all those who value liberty to stand with us and demand protection for our rights. The end of Daley’s book leaves all of us reformers across the country in the same unsettled place. Daley interviews conservative, former Republican writers and pundits and comes to the conclusion that the party is so changed and susceptible to authoritarianism that it may not survive its own evolution. Our democracy probably won’t survive their evolution, either. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Apr 02, 2020
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Apr 05, 2020
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Apr 07, 2020
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Hardcover
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0761870261
| 9780761870265
| 3.71
| 7
| May 04, 2018
| May 18, 2018
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None
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Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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not set
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Jul 28, 2019
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ebook
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1316590666
| 9781316590669
| B01CJUV4XK
| 3.88
| 16
| unknown
| Apr 04, 2016
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really liked it
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This academic look at gerrymandering—how to measure it, how one does it most effectively, and what exactly are its effects—was published in 2016 by Ca
This academic look at gerrymandering—how to measure it, how one does it most effectively, and what exactly are its effects—was published in 2016 by Cambridge University Press—yes, the British one. One author, Anthony McGann, is from Glasgow. The other three authors, Charles A Smith, Michael Latner, and Alex Keena, are all professors from CA institutions. For someone new to the term gerrymandering, this definitely won’t be the easiest entry, but to someone more familiar, it has enlightening bits. They talk quite a lot about Pennsylvania, one of the worst gerrymandered states in the country. You may have heard the State Supreme Court in PA deemed the congressional maps so egregiously gerrymandered they ended up providing a new map to a recalcitrant state legislature in 2018. After 2011 redistricting, though Democrats had won over 50% of the votes for congresspeople in the state, they managed to win only 5 of 18 congressional seats. After the Supreme Court passed down the new maps in 2018, Democrats won 9 of 18 seats. Actually, depending on where Democrats reside, there is no reason why 50% of votes should necessarily translate into half the seats. No one really cared if they didn’t. It was the relative skew that was offensive, and the ugly fact that the state legislators in office did nothing with their supermajority but pass innocuous resolutions, e.g., Dec 12 is Polar Bear Day, and Sept 13 is Healthy Heart Day, and avoid talking about the 18 cities in PA, including Pittsburgh, with lead levels higher than Flint, Michigan. In Pennsylvania (and Wisconsin and Michigan and…) today, voters must face the horrible problem of having their state legislative districts so gerrymandered that no one will even run against incumbents. We can’t even vote the crooks out. After the June 2019 SCOTUS decision not to deal with any more gerrymandering problems in federal courts, disenfranchised voters will be forced to bring maps redistricted after the 2020 Census through the state courts again. Meanwhile, nonpartisan volunteer organizations are blanketing the state with petitions to urge legislators to “do the right thing” and voluntarily give up their constitutional right to draw district lines, for the sake of fairness and democracy. So far, legislators haven’t shown interest in anybody's constitutional rights beyond their own. Claims have been made by some that the sorting voters do along partisan lines into cities and rural areas is responsible for the bias in results, not the intentional gerrymander. However, these scholars have concluded self-sorting is not responsible for the extent of the bias in results, and gives examples of several states also with city/rural dichotomies that do not exhibit partisan bias. Many states exhibit extreme partisan bias, Pennsylvania among them. There is a trade-off between seat maximization and incumbent protection. Regions with competitors packed into one district have extraordinary non-responsive voting blocks in the surrounding districts. "Put bluntly, if you can pack your opponents into a single district where they win 80% of the vote, you can create [surrounding] districts where you have a 7.5% advantage. It is notable that the number of “incumbent protection” districting plans declined sharply between 2002 and 2012. It seems that more states are districting for national partisan advantage, even though it makes their incumbents slightly more vulnerable."The authors make a distinction between partisan bias and responsiveness. “If there is partisan bias, then one party is advantaged over the other…If a districting system has high responsiveness, then it gives an advantage to the larger party, whichever party that happens to be.” Worst of all, in reviewing what I wanted to say about the pitiable position Pennsylvania’s manipulative legislators have left us in, near the top of the Top Ten Exhibiting Partisan Bias… worst yet is that the states above Pennsylvania in #4 place are states we never hear anything about. No, they are NOT Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin North Carolina, or Maryland. They are Alabama, Mississippi, Missouri, states with large populations of black voters so used to being beat up and beat down they don’t even protest anymore. Of course the government is going to steal their vote. Oh, it is enraging. “…districting is mathematically a very, very difficult problem.”The California independent redistricting commission may have been partly modeled on the British iteration, called Boundary Commissions. Boundary Commissions are explicitly forbidden from considering partisan data when deciding their maps. This has actually led, in CA as well, to skews that were unintentional but partisan in fact. As a result, CA commissions have made the unusual request that they must consider partisan data in order to avoid it. A summary of the difference between Boundary Commissions and U.S. election districts and commissions: 1) Britain is not two party, which makes a huge difference in the attempt to gerrymander. People have been known to calculate their vote in order to stymie any gerrymander. That is, there is tactical voting. 2) A source of bias is not a gerrymander but is caused by differential turnout. “Labour tends to win when fewer people vote.” 3) Districts are not the same size nor same population as is required in U.S. congressional and legislative districts. This presents a small bias towards Labour. 4) The authors are not sure what the last advantage is: “If there is something about geographical distribution of support that has given Labour an advantage, it is not clear what it is.” One explanation…is that Labour appears disproportionately successful at winning close races. Anyway, they conclude there was a partisan bias for whatever reason after 2010, but it seems to have disappeared by 2015. The Boundary Commissions have no real effect at preventing partisan bias because it explicitly cannot take partisan bias into account: “Fairness between the political parties is not a factor that can be considered.” ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jul 26, 2019
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Jul 31, 2019
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Jul 26, 2019
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Kindle Edition
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0761870253
| 9780761870258
| 0761870253
| 3.71
| 7
| May 04, 2018
| May 18, 2018
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really liked it
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Franklin Kury is a former member of the Pennsylvania State Senate, serving 1973-1980. Just last year he published a book about Pennsylvania’s bout of
Franklin Kury is a former member of the Pennsylvania State Senate, serving 1973-1980. Just last year he published a book about Pennsylvania’s bout of gerrymandering after the 2010 census, documented as one of the worst in the nation. The League of Women Voters challenge to the maps yielded a win for voters. In 2018 the state Supreme Court handed down what has turned out to be a landmark ruling: “For the first time, those seeking a new Congressional districting plan went to the state courts and relied solely on state law.”SCOTUS relied on this ruling as they looked at gerrymandering in their decision handed down at the end of June 2019. SCOTUS said it would not decide gerrymander cases through the judiciary at the federal level because it is inherently political. They cited the PA decision to show that state courts can decide these things, effectively handing the fight back to the states. Right now, Pennsylvania and other gerrymandered states wonder what exactly that means. If the judiciary at the federal level can’t make the call on what is a gerrymander, why can the state courts decide these things? This is the source of the disagreement between the assent and dissent on the latest SCOTUS decision concerning gerrymandering. Kury’s book came out before the latest SCOTUS decision, so is merely speculative on how the court would weigh in. Meanwhile, he describes the problem Pennsylvania continues to have with gerrymanders in the electoral districts for state legislative offices. According to the PA constitution, “municipalities and counties should not be divided more than is required by population plus one.” By that criterion, Pennsylvania’s Butler County should have three state house members, but has seven. It also has three senators, when it should have only one based upon population. Montgomery County should have 13 state house members but it has 18 and twice as many senators -- 6 v. 3. The list goes on. And that doesn’t even touch the problem of cities, chopped to bits, pieces of which are roped in with their rural surrounds. Pennsylvania’s legislative electoral maps effectively shut out all but one party in power. That party, the Republicans, have such a firm hold on their caucus they don’t even primary their candidates. They hold private local meetings wherein they choose who will go on the ballot. There is only one candidate per office when it comes time to primary. And of course the general has that same single candidate once again. The minority challenger party can have a raft of candidates to choose from, but because they are not using ranked-choice voting, sometimes a less desirable candidate comes up higher on the list than anyone wants. And since Republican ballots are single candidates, Dems with more than one candidate per office will suffer the count. Don’t even mention Independents or third-party voters: they can’t vote in primaries unless they register with one of the major parties. Kury’s book explains where the term ‘gerrymandering’ comes from and moves quickly to discussing RedMAP and the Republican attempt to take back the House of Representatives, which they calculated might be done by focusing on ‘cheaper’ state races and controlling redistricting. By ‘cheaper’ they meant less expensive purchases of advertisements, events, and media influencers than trying to put in national candidates the same way. They were right about that. What is riveting about gerrymandering is that it is so clearly unfair. Pennsylvania is a state that used to take its fairness and integrity seriously. Once awakened to partisan gerrymandering, it is difficult not to see it everywhere. Even states who have tried to fix the problem by instituting an independent citizens redistricting commission have been accused of gerrymandering because of their mapping choices. Kury writes up a few of the more famous instances of independent commissions, which it turns out, come in many different sizes and with a wide range of decision-making authority. Best of all, Kury’s book lists resources that will help any individual struggling with redistricting issues in their own state to find what happened elsewhere. He discusses redistricting software and some of the issues that arise when one tries to map districts from scratch. That’s the thing with gerrymandering: one wants to see how others dealt with it to see if it will work in one’s own state. For Pennsylvania, the struggle to claw back voters rights continues. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Mar 26, 2019
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Jul 25, 2019
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Mar 26, 2019
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Paperback
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B00JD3ZL9U
| 4.42
| 92,111
| Oct 14, 2014
| Jul 02, 2015
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really liked it
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I listened to this remarkable story, read by Josie Dunn and published by HarperCollins Publishers UK, with a degree of disbelief. Certain parts of the
I listened to this remarkable story, read by Josie Dunn and published by HarperCollins Publishers UK, with a degree of disbelief. Certain parts of the story agree with what I’d learned already about the lives of North Koreans, the general trend of their escapes, and their orientation in South Korea as refugees. The author was young, seventeen, when she decided to cross the frozen Yalu in winter and go see her relatives in Shenyang, China. She’d had no idea where Shenyang was—that I actually could believe. And as a privileged (for North Korea) teen, she was accustomed to getting her way or being ignored. Certainly maps were not easily found, just as they weren’t in China, either, thirty years ago. The period in this book covers approximately 2000-2012, a period when Hyeonseo Lee spent ten years in China working then flew to South Korea to request asylum. Her own path to freedom was relatively smooth; she’d learned to be wary of revealing much about herself from childhood and was not easily deceived. Being young and attractive gave her the benefit of the doubt in China, and she wasn’t able to escape every attempt to corral her into exploitative jobs. But she lived on her wits and managed, eventually, to eventually pass as Chinese-Korean. With this identity she was able to procure a passport (and a new name). She lived in China ten years. I don’t want to spoil the adventure for those who aren’t familiar with her story, but it is a doozy. Her family in North Korea had a good songbun (status or name) which they exploited to bring goods in from outside the country. An uncle actually sold heroin. Her mother brought in all manner of household goods and occasionally even methamphetamines! Hyeonseo’s brother began doing much the same illicit and illegal trade work, bribing border guards, etc. after Hyeonseo left. Apparently her departure was officially overlooked, perhaps as the result of a bribe. The story rings true, and she’s told it so many times by now that there are all kinds of suggestive chapter endings which propel one to turn to the next chapter. Apparently Ms. Lee met with President Trump with some other defectors in the White House in January 2018 before the president’s departure to Singapore to meet Kim Jong Un. She has given many talks around the world about her experience and that of her family, including a TED talk I have linked to on my blog. The audio of her book is not read by the author, which is good because Ms. Lee’s heavily-accented English from 2013 is a little difficult to understand. I'm sure she is better now. The memoir is clearly and ably written, and I can see no credit for a translator. This is a defector story you probably haven’t heard, and since she has spoken around the world on this topic, you might want to see what everyone is so excited about. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Sep 13, 2018
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Sep 18, 2018
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Sep 11, 2018
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Kindle Edition
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0807047414
| 9780807047415
| 0807047414
| 4.17
| 166,070
| Jun 26, 2018
| Jun 26, 2018
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it was amazing
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The provocative title of this book is a draw. What are we doing, saying, thinking that is unconscious and yet still brings out some kind of anger or f
The provocative title of this book is a draw. What are we doing, saying, thinking that is unconscious and yet still brings out some kind of anger or fear response in us when challenged? I am constantly learning how much I don’t know about race in America and much more there is to know. DiAngelo is also white, by the way. She, too, makes racist mistakes, though more rarely now, even years after immersing herself in how it manifests. We can’t escape it. We have to acknowledge it. That is basically what this book is about. How we must acknowledge our race, that we do in fact see race, that we make assumptions about people based on race, how we need to disrupt habitual patterns of interaction, and then consciously try to put ourselves in the way of disrupting the patterns of racism which are literally claiming the lives of too many people of color for reasons we would never recognize as legitimate in our own lives. It’s been—give or take—one hundred and fifty years since the Civil War. Sometimes it feels as it hasn’t been won by anti-slavers. Shame on us. The first part of the book is a slow and careful baby-steps leading to a hot-button topic, giving readers/listeners time to blow off their indignation and stop being surprised that yes, she is going to talk about white supremacy in American life and how this consistently sidelines the needs, emotions, and opportunities of people of color. She is going to talk about the ways white people consistently deny this truth, do not recognize it applies to all white people, all of whom benefit from the system as it operates in the United States. But the best part comes at the end, when she cites people like me who have said, "Yeah, but I know this already," or "But I’m not racist," or "I have friends who are black," or "I’ve lived overseas," etc. DiAngelo talks about white solidarity: "The unspoken agreement among white to protect white advantage and not cause another white person to feel racial discomfort by confronting them when they say or do something racially problematic…Why speaking up about racism would ruin the ambiance [at the dinner table or in a social situation] or threaten our career advancement is something we might want to talk about."and "meritocracy is a precious ideology in the United States, but neighborhoods and schools are demonstrably not equal; they are separate and unequal."and "We are taught we lose nothing of value through racial segregation."Racism is systemic, institutional, omnipresent, and epistemologically embedded in our reality, according to filmmaker Omowale Akintunde. It is not like murder: we don't have to "commit it" for it to happen. It can be unconscious. The best argument I have ever heard for why we falsely assume racism doesn’t exist when we don't mean to do something racist is this: a woman married to a man would never say, "Because I am married to a man, I have a gender-free life." Even a married woman will carry prejudices with her about men. Di Angelo insists we do not set up a false binary: racism is bad, non-racists are good. It is probably better to think of ourselves on a continuum. With effort, we can improve our understanding but because the system operates without our consent, we will never escape it. We are reminded that the white identity needs black people in order to exist. Around blackness we have created certain myths (about dangerousness, laziness, etc) which we may have thought we’d eradicated until some stray incident makes them come flooding back to consciousness. Whiteness is then a false identity, of superiority. A black person who steps out of their ‘place’ and demands to be treated equally, as in sports stars or popular singers, may trigger a backlash. DiAngelo gives a brilliant exegesis of the book/movie The Blind Side about a poor black high school football player adopted by a rich white family, and how it perpetrates dominant white ideologies. That book came out to great acclaim only in 2007. It seems like a lifetime since then, but it is only ten years. Race and racism are emotional subjects. We may discover the ways whites have perpetrated a system of injustice against people of color out of ignorance, but ignorance is no longer a good excuse. We have work to do disrupting what we see as race bias in America today, making sure our kids are educated in a way that improves their understanding of conscious/unconscious race bias, and making sure they understand their lives will be deficient without interaction with and understanding of black lives. We must work to widen our circles so that people of color are a part of our worldview, always remembering we are doing this for ourselves, not for the benefit of people of color. We are not being generous; we are seeking justice. Ask for feedback, but don’t be overly sensitive when people respond. Feedback is useful. Make sure to keep the focus on learning, not on one’s own fragility. And remember, one doesn’t have to intend to be racist to act in a racist way. It’s the water we swim in. I listened to the audio of this, narrated by Amy Landon, and had access to a paper copy. DiAngelo gives a terrific short ‘Continuing Ed’ bibliography in the back, sharing other excellent titles. There are sure to be a couple of articles or books or podcast you still haven’t seen. There was only one book I admired that I did not see listed there: Good White People by Shannon Sullivan, out of the University of North Carolina. DiAngelo makes note of the terrific podcast, Seeing White, put together by a team headed by John Biewen out of Duke University. All of it is worthwhile. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jul 28, 2018
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Aug 02, 2018
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Jul 27, 2018
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Paperback
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0062319752
| 9780062319753
| 0062319752
| 4.11
| 1,373
| Jan 01, 2015
| Jul 14, 2015
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liked it
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It could have been I first ran into Arthur C. Brooks in the NYT where he is apparently a regular columnist. Something he said about the Dalai Lama int
It could have been I first ran into Arthur C. Brooks in the NYT where he is apparently a regular columnist. Something he said about the Dalai Lama intrigued me; I wondered how he was connected to NYT conservative columnist David Brooks and went looking online. A couple of years ago the two men spoke together in Aspen and the difference between the two was immediately apparent. This book sketches Arthur Brooks’ growth from college dropout and musician to head of the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute whose attendant scholars have included Dinesh D’Sousa, Irving Kristol, Jeanne Kirkpatrick and Antonin Scalia. We learn what Brooks perceives as influences on his thinking as he moved from liberal to conservative. “I believe that poverty and opportunity are moral issues and must be addressed as such.” and “We know that human dignity has deeper roots than the financial resources someone commands. We may wear the rhetorical uniform of materialists, but conservatives at heart are moralists.”These are troubling statements from Brooks. One wonders what he meant. It was my understanding that conservatives are always belittling liberals for being bleeding hearts and politically correct. Liberals are particularly keen on the morality of fairness. In wages and opportunity. Could we actually be closer in [unexamined] attitudes than we think? Brooks focuses on the dignity of work, welfare reform, poverty in his comments, and goes after Barak Obama pretty hard, all the while never acknowledging race when talking about poverty. “Welfare spending also massively increased under the Obama administration…More important than anything else, though, the administration was turning its attention away from poverty per se and instead toward the old progressive bogeyman of income inequality.”Brooks felt the president was attacking “wealthy people and conservative Americans.” He’d explained earlier that conservatives give more to charity than do liberals. Brooks and fellow conservatives “were indignant at the president’s ad hominem attacks.” But Brooks and his fellow conservatives saw themselves in the president’s remarks. Obama did not point them out specifically. I think I see where the problem might lie: conservatives, patting themselves on the back for being generous, are willing to give back via charity whatever money they collect in an unequal system that may give a little too much to business owners and high-level managers and may give too little to the people actually working the business. Of course, these generous wealthy donors decide which charities they will support, and so steer society. So those that have…perpetuate their havingness and the rest of us don’t really have much say. Does this sound healthy to you? Brooks claims to be an economist. He must be being disingenuous then when he crows, “…inequality actually increased over the course of the Obama administration…Consider the facts. The top half of the economy has, in fact, recovered from the Great Recession in fine style…a whopping 95 percent of the real income growth from the economic recovery flowed directly to the much-regretted ‘1-percent.’…And how about the bottom 20 percent of U.S. households? That group of earners was hit the hardest during the recovery. Their real incomes fell by 7 percent on average from 2009 to 2013, the largest percentage decline of any group.”Yes, Obama tried to save the global economy from tanking as a result of conservative economic policies. I think Brooks and I can probably agree that if Obama weren’t blocked in Congress, he would have done more to fix the inequality that came as a result of repairing the mess Republicans left him. Maybe Obama should have let the ship sink instead? Brooks is getting no buy-in from me for dishonest arguments like these. Chapter Three has a subtitle: “How Honest Work Ennobles and Elevates Us.” Finally, Brooks and I can agree on something. We agree that work can be a source of happiness, wealth, and meaning. But Brooks is being disingenuous again, talking about putting a broom in the hands of the homeless and enlivening them with the dignity of work. It infuriates me that he can trivialize the discussion of the enormous national problems we have with inequality in our society. If he put a broom in the hands of every homeless person in the country we would still have a serious problem with our economy. Let’s be frank. When work is not acknowledged by all parties to be worthwhile enough to pay a decent living wage, we run into problems. Either the work is important for a company or it is not. Don’t tell me companies will look after the concerns of their workers because it is in their best interests. No. They won’t. We have centuries of evidence that corporations hold workers over a barrel and maximize profits at the expense of workers. Human labor is expensive. It should be expensive. I should be honest about my own prejudices. I distrust charity because I distrust the organizations handing it out. I don’t want Brooks to feel good “lifting people up.” I just want what I earned in a system that is fair. I expect many women and people of color in America today would say the same. Kind white men dispensing charity but who have also been part of a system structured to offer unfair wages to the majority of “workers” would do well to take note. Just give me what I deserve, what’s fair (hint: you may need to listen to someone besides yourself and your peer group), and then we’ll talk about who gets charity. It may be me, giving to you. Think how happy it will make me, to give you uplift. To be fair, when Brooks discusses social justice, he says liberal efforts to attain this include redistributive taxation (oh yes) and social welfare spending. To conservatives, a social justice agenda …means improving education (for everyone, or just those who can afford to pay for K-12?), expanding the opportunity to work (no objection there…if only resumes from black-sounding names weren’t weeded out at the start of the process), and increasing access to entrepreneurship (don’t even get me started on who gets loans and at what rates). Of course, Brooks adds “true conservative justice must also fight cronyism that favors powerful interests and keeps the little guy down. (Tell me more about that please.) A few pages later, Brooks is comparing parents experiencing poverty to children: “…moral intervention must accompany economic intervention for the latter to be truly effective…I’ve never met a parent who believes that their kids have to receive their allowance before it is fair to ask them to behave decently. It’s the other way around! So way are these values good enough for our children, but not good enough for our brothers and sisters in need? When we fail to share our values with the poor, we effectively discriminate against them. And that hidden bigotry robs them of the tools they need to live lives of dignity and self-reliance.”Brooks undoubtedly means well, but it sounds to me like he will withhold assistance unless we go along with his beliefs and values. Would be that we all had the same opportunities he did/does. I am all for behaving well and being socialized to be better people. But where is the open-handed generosity Brooks was talking about earlier, when he led by example instead of by punishment? What do our Christian teachings say? Wait until someone is behaving well to help or to wash the feet of prostitutes and criminals? Anyway, the problems of poverty are very difficult to resolve and we need people who think, hope, and try, like Brooks. All these years and we haven’t resolved them yet. But my guess is treating everyone with dignity and paying them well for their contribution to society, maybe even at the expense of one’s own take-home pay, may move the ball down a field a little faster. I mean, if you’ve got all the values and stuff, you can show us how it is done when you start with nothing. This book is an attempt to show liberals how conservatives have areas of overlap with them and really do have compassion they claimed in the label Compassionate Conservatives…until that was thrown under the bus in the last election. It is a feel-good attempt to show crossover values. And I am picking apart about the ‘other side’s’ notion of social justice. Let’s face it: We need all the social justice we can get. And we do not need to convince anyone to begin using it ourselves right now. Give me what you’ve got in terms of social justice. I’ll work with that. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jul 31, 2018
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Aug 02, 2018
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Jul 16, 2018
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Hardcover
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0393635201
| 9780393635201
| 0393635201
| 4.12
| 742
| Jul 10, 2018
| Jul 10, 2018
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it was amazing
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This is the perfect book to give someone trying to understand what exactly happened in Wisconsin over these past thirty-or-so years so that a staunchl
This is the perfect book to give someone trying to understand what exactly happened in Wisconsin over these past thirty-or-so years so that a staunchly progressive and friendly state who looked after their own fell prey to a group who wanted to break that sense of community and, as Scott Walker told the national Republicans, “divide and conquer” the unions. Well, that they did, and a whole lot more and now the state is so heavily gerrymandered even majority Democrats don’t have a chance to elect their preferred candidates. Kaufman manages to get us up to date on the state of the economy there, the threat of environmental degradation, and the lack of funding for public projects like universities. We learn which candidates who have run in the past and who is running now, including Braveheart Randy Bryce in District #1 who took on the “head of the snake” Paul Ryan and managed to slay Ryan's political future. Bryce still has a battle with Steil, Ryan’s handpicked successor, but he’s got national support and attention for his fight. What Kaufman does particularly well is the backstory—why certain candidates ended up on the ballot, what they bring, and who supports them. Norwegians instilled a kind of communitarian ethos in the area southwest of Milwaukee where they settled in the mid-nineteenth century, moving up from Chicago. At the same time northeast of Madison abolitionists gathered and decided to call themselves Republicans after the Latin for “the common good.” How much has changed! in the years since. Chippewa Indian tribes, also called Ojibwe, who have retained some land rights in Wisconsin, have been strong proponents of environmental conservation and preservation. This has put them at loggerheads with people who call themselves conservatives but who have supported open-pit mining in the headwaters of Indian land, a poor site that had been rejected many times over by previous prospectors looking for good sites. One of the more heartbreaking stories Kaufman tells is that of the tar-sands pipeline that crosses under the free-flowing Namekagon River in northern Wisconsin. Owned by the Canadian company Enbridge, it was responsible for several hundred spills in the past decade, including one in 2010 that counts as the largest and most expensive inland oil spill in American history. Like the Keystone pipeline, Enbridge’s pipeline carries tar-sand, which needs to be mixed with chemical solvents so that it will flow. When exposed to air, these chemicals release a toxic gas, and the sticky tar sands sinks in the river & requires dredging to remove it. Here we have proof that tar-sands pipelines invite environmental disasters and we are still hearing about that will not happen with Keystone because of all the protections. We really must place that particular lie where it belongs and expose the damage this absurd refusal to see alternatives is leaving us. Very quickly Kaufman sketches the strong progressive values inculcated in state residents since the earliest days and draws a line to present political incumbents. Despite Paul Ryan being a native son growing up in Janesville, he calls progressivism “a cancer.” Scott Walker’s family moved in from Colorado by way of Iowa. He was a religious crusader who felt God had given him a mission in Wisconsin to break the unions. Randy Bryce, a veteran and cancer survivor, on the other hand, became a strong proponent of the labor movement just at the time Walker was looking to cripple it. For years before Scott Walker came to office, there had been an assault on public institutions in Wisconsin, including universities and public schools. Walker instituted Act10 in 2011, which limited the right of public employees to collectively bargain, and then in 2015 attempted to change the mission statement of the university system from “to educate people and improve the human condition” to “meet the state’s workforce needs,” showing us the limits of his imagination. We do not know why Walker appears to have failed out of Marquette University, but we can see that he appears to fear what comes and so looks backward, to what he learned in childhood--not facts perhaps, but beliefs. No soaring rhetoric for him, by God. The portraits of individuals becoming desperate to put up a fight against the prevailing winds in Wisconsin are both heartening and discouraging. National opposition parties to the GOP, like Democrats, have their national goals wound so tightly around their axle they can barely cast a glance at states not putting up a good fight on their own. Which is why, once Bryce broke a certain level of consciousness nationally, the Democrats were willing to contribute some money and some people. But Bernie Sanders recognized a fellow traveller in Bryce, someone whose values are in line with Wisconsin’s historical Scandinavian ethos of progressivism and in contrast to his states’ current conservative climate. Finding and funding candidates is a huge step towards putting up a good fight in Wisconsin. I used to be disappointed well-trained and -spoken lawyers didn’t make more of an effort to help lead, but no more. Voters in Wisconsin are going to have to fight for what they want, and one of the first steps to effective forward movement is a fire in the belly and an awareness of history. Kaufman does a brilliant job of making key elements of this history come alive with personality and human foible. We can, we must fix this. Wisconsin is not just the heartland, it is our heart. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jul 17, 2018
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Jul 20, 2018
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Jul 11, 2018
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Hardcover
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0525509712
| 9780525509714
| 0525509712
| 3.95
| 81,912
| Mar 15, 2016
| Jun 26, 2017
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liked it
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This was a stressful read for me and it may make your stomach ulcer bleed a little. I became anxious contemplating the poor choices the characters fac
This was a stressful read for me and it may make your stomach ulcer bleed a little. I became anxious contemplating the poor choices the characters faced, and picked out things I would have done differently, given the constraints. A man from Cameroon overstays his visa in the United States, invites his girlfriend and their baby to come from Africa, then seeks an immigration lawyer to plead a case of asylum for him. This is a story of immigration, illegal trying to be legal. It is a story that puts the reader in the awkward position of caring about a person in a difficult position and still not feeling obligated to help them evade a law designed to protect said reader. The author wanted us to feel that tension and to recognize the strain under which many immigrants operate. It is almost unimaginable—the pressure under which people of conscience live. Americans still have not had that conversation we really need to have about immigration. Of course people want to live in America. Although sometimes our nation does not live up to its promise, it is still a land of laws, democratic elections, enormous resources, and relative peace. One of the things that makes us special are laws, agreed upon and enforced, that benefit citizens. People from other countries are welcome to visit and perhaps even stay, if they follow the law. The point of this story is that visitors and/or immigrants must decide what kind of life they want to lead. If they come illegally over the border or refuse to leave when their lawful documentation expires, they must decide if they want to spend psychic energy evading the law in the future. I couldn’t, and wouldn’t, live a life of evasion, less because of any moral stand but simply because I couldn’t take the uncertainty and inability to live openly. But I don’t have the difficult life in the home country that awaits those whose plea to stay in the U.S. is rejected. These immigrants are from Cameroon. They could just as easily be from South America. Difficulties exist in the home countries of immigrants. Does that mean we must take them because they would rather be here than there? Most of us would probably agree that we do not. On the other hand, natural disasters, massive corruption, or political upheavals do seem to influence Americans’ attitudes, as they should. What should our policy be towards climate-related migrants? War-related migrants? Surely we cannot refuse them entry. That would be unconscionable. Mbue’s novel raises questions. It seems an opportune time to discuss these issues. Add the complication of a black man immigrating to a country who has not yet solved their race prejudices: “You think a black man gets a good job in this country by sitting in front of white people and telling the truth? Please don’t make me laugh.”This novel is set in the run-up to Obama’s historic election, which was also the run-up to the financial crisis. “The only difference between the Egyptians [during the Bible’s Old Testament calamity]… and the Americans now, Jende reasoned, was that the Egyptians had been cursed by their own wickedness. They had called an abomination upon their land by worshipping idols and enslaving their fellow humans, all so they could live in splendor. They had chosen riches over righteousness, rapaciousness over justice. The Americans had done no such thing.”Near the end of the book two characters discuss a choice the illegal immigrants are considering so that they can stay: to divorce & marry someone else for a green card. Only they cannot figure out if it is right or wrong to consider this choice. The person to whom they speak quotes Rumi: “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.”I have always interpreted that phrase in a different way than Mbue tells us here it can be interpreted. She says Rumi means ‘Let’s not dwell too much on labeling things as right or wrong.’ Which means, doesn’t it, that rightdoing and wrongdoing are relative? I always thought it meant something like ‘Let’s be bigger than our differences.’ If anyone knows the heart of Rumi, please let me know. Anyway, I spent a great deal of this book gnawing the inside of my cheek. That generally tells me how anxious I am getting. When I draw blood, I have trouble getting past it. Let’s just say I would try my best to be more strategic in decision-making so that I wouldn’t end up in the situation experienced by the characters in this novel. It wasn’t a pleasant read. But I suppose it comes close to the truth for some immigrants. If you want to know what it is like to be them, try this. ...more |
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1
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Jul 02, 2018
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Jul 07, 2018
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Jul 02, 2018
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Paperback
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1541644883
| 9781541644885
| 1541644883
| 4.15
| 404
| May 15, 2018
| May 15, 2018
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it was amazing
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America is an advanced democracy. It is imperative we the citizenry recognize our responsibilities and make use of our rights. “Impeachment is neither
America is an advanced democracy. It is imperative we the citizenry recognize our responsibilities and make use of our rights. “Impeachment is neither a magic wand nor a doomsday device.” It won’t fix the problems that brought a failed real estate magnate and showman to power. Moreover, calling for impeachment may have deleterious consequences which serve to rally the tyrant’s support. The best thing about this book for me is that it lowered my blood pressure. I am not going to deny I have been distressed for…more than a year now, and severely low in the past couple months. This book reminded me that there are smart, educated people thinking about how best to deal with a liar whose proclivities border on fascism. Impeachment, these authors argue, may not be the best way to address this threat. “When our democracy is threatened from within, we must save it ourselves…We must draw together in defense of a constitutional system that binds our destinies and protects our freedoms.”Calls for impeachment have been increasing over the past decades, but this pair of authors thinks that is a sign of the divisiveness of our politics rather than realistic means of addressing things we don’t like about the other party’s president. We reached a new low when, even before the last presidential election in 2016, promises were made by each side to impeach the winner. The authors stress that loose talk of impeachment may become as desensitizing as crying wolf when even the public begins to mistrust the options for curbing bad behaviors in a sitting president. Our elected officials must think strategically about what they are planning to achieve especially when they do not control enough seats to initiate impeachment hearings. Hot air is not helpful in educating the public in a time of crisis because it inflames the citizenry’s baser instincts. We must work together if we are going to govern. The authors quote Lincoln at a time our country was more divided than now: “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies.”Yes, exactly. We clearly have not seen the existential threats coming down the road or we would be a lot more circumspect about calling hatred down on fellow citizens. Good grief. If we can’t work together despite living in the most resource-rich and abundant country on earth, we’re gonna lose it. But the people that made us this angry will all be dead and we and our children will have to deal with the problems that come. If everybody’s happy with that, let’s prepare well. “In our experience, one of the main obstacles to an even-keeled analysis of impeachment under Trump is the fear and fury that he inspires in many of his political opponents.”Don’t be a part of the problem. Educate yourself. It turns out that the most reliable way to deal with a pedant ideologue is to sideline him…in our case, by voting him and his supporters out. Not easy. But neither are any of the alternatives. This state of affairs was a long time developing into toxicity. It may take some time to rid ourselves of it. This book is worthwhile. Time to take a deep breath and think before you speak. ...more |
Notes are private!
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May 31, 2018
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Jun 30, 2018
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May 27, 2018
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Hardcover
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0525558640
| 9780525558644
| 0525558640
| 4.11
| 2,310
| May 22, 2018
| May 22, 2018
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liked it
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James Clapper has had a very long career in intelligence collection and he goes through it all for us here. He’s had practically every job out there i
James Clapper has had a very long career in intelligence collection and he goes through it all for us here. He’s had practically every job out there in leadership in this field, capping his career as Director of National Intelligence. The DNI serves as head of the now seventeen U.S. intelligence collection agencies, and advises the National Security Council which advises the president. Listening to Mark Bramhall narrate the audio of this autobiography, it is easy to see why Clapper had such a long and successful career in government. He gets along well with others. Most others. Clapper freely coruscates Congressional Republicans who used government policy or intelligence outcomes to lash out politically at their opponents (Democrats in office), and he spares no pity for Snowden, Poitras, and Greenwald in their pursuit of borderless-ness in secrets uncovered during surveillance. Which led me to a queer insight: Greenwald as a journalist does as much spying on government as it does on him. Both want the other side’s secrets uncovered and their own preserved…(“only I can preserve individual liberty…”) Snowden was most outspoken about individual rights, and therefore on the far right of America’s political spectrum, and yet he chose a far-left journalist to reveal his secrets to. Strange bedfellows. I was never completely onboard with Snowden or Greenwald but I think Clapper does himself and his agency a disservice by not acknowledging that these folks provided a corrective to potentially invasive intelligence collection, a fact he does in fact make near the end of this very long book. I picked up this book because I read a coupe of interesting conclusions he’d come to in his nearly sixty years in office, but i wasn’t expecting such a long recitation of every job in his long career. It struck me at the start that an intelligence chief is an unlikely one to write a tell-all. By the end of his career Clapper acknowledges that the secret aspect of intelligence doesn't have as much cache as it used to, and agrees that it is probably for the best that their activities are out in the open. If you don't mind my saying, this is a result of those men and women who forced this information to be revealed, and yes, it probably is for the better in some ways. Clapper doesn’t seem to hold back on describing the reporting responsibilities and personalities in the agencies he headed, which should save foreign governments time trying to work it all out. Clapper claims one reason he wrote this book is to want to encourage interested young people to join the intelligence community. The other reason would undoubtedly be countering the criticism he has gotten as a critical person in major intelligence successes and failures of the past forty years. His last posting as Director of the Office of National Intelligence sounds kind of a bum job: no power but lots of responsibility to make sure all intelligence departments are singing off the same sheet of music. That’s the kind of job they give you if you last long enough in a sea of sharks. Big enough to blame, old enough to bury. There is no doubt that Clapper had a congenial personality and was able to hold his own among those who did not self-destruct over the years. Anyone’s career that lasted sixty years is worth listening to, I reckon. In my opinion, he gave himself more credit than he should have for allowing gay and trans individuals to serve in the military and intelligence services--after all, this was a very long time coming and too late anyhow. It was a real shock to most Americans not directly attached to the military to discover how many individuals had been undergoing sex-change treatment before Chelsea Manning put a spotlight on the fact. This book is necessary for anyone interested in intelligence as a career, or anyone who wants to know how we got from there to here. I listened to the audio, read by Mark Bramhall and produced by Penguin Audio. Viking produced the hardcover. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jun 02, 2018
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Jun 11, 2018
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May 25, 2018
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Hardcover
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0393652106
| 9780393652109
| 0393652106
| 4.15
| 8,276
| Apr 24, 2018
| Apr 24, 2018
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really liked it
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Who could have known Ronan Farrow would develop into such a remarkable thinker? He credits his mother, of whom he speaks with genuine awe in his voice
Who could have known Ronan Farrow would develop into such a remarkable thinker? He credits his mother, of whom he speaks with genuine awe in his voice. Not only has 30-year-old Ronan Farrow been a diplomat, in his early twenties working closely with Richard Holbrooke, special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan in the midst of American’s longest war, but just last year he broke the story published in The New Yorker which set America on a new trajectory for gender relations. War on Peace is an examination of American foreign policy in the last two decades, though Farrow occasionally wanders further afield to highlight a trend or to stress a break in continuity. Did we have a foreign service in the past two decades that was not consumed by military matters? Believe it or not, we had a robust diplomatic core who was toiling away unsung, trying to wrest decision-making from generals focused on anti-terrorism and counter-insurgency. Richard Holbrooke was one of these. Holbrooke wasn’t well-liked in Washington, but was effective in his role in the Bosnia peace talks. He was hard-headed, obsessive, egotistical. He’d wanted to be Secretary of State during President Clinton’s administration but the job went to Madeleine Albright. He was Secretary of State Clinton’s choice for envoy to the Afghanistan war zone. It was a bum job, but Holbrooke was happy to get it. Ronan knew Holbrooke as a family friend and was invited onto Holbrooke’s team. We get a view of Holbrooke from someone who knew his gifts and his faults. Ronan has a disarmingly frank manner. For this book he interviewed on the record every living Secretary of State, and just about every other Washingtonian who had anything to do with international work. What he charts herein is the militarization of the diplomatic corps, starting way back in Bill Clinton’s presidency through Bush and Obama, neither of whom did anything to slow or halt the trend. Farrow does talk about the current president, but only to highlight how diplomacy has become a dirty word in D.C. Most interesting for me was the access that Farrow had in talking about American foreign policy in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and how we never seemed to actually get anywhere. In Pakistan especially we never seemed able to take advantage of cooperation with the people who could bridge the trust gap. Farrow makes it sound like we were so close to better, more cooperative relations but the ship of state is hard to steer. Our relationships with other countries tended to impact our relations in Pakistan, to say nothing of the assassination of Bhutto, the misuse of aid funds, and bin Laden living in hiding there. Farrow gives some idea how DJT is playing in Europe at the moment, as if we didn’t know. He quotes Merkel's dry and damning statements about "we really should all be trying harder to work out problems with our allies..." But when this 30-yr-old says we must stay engaged in the leadership of the world because if we don’t, someone else will, we understand and we believe him. When Clinton said this during the campaign, actually answering a question I’d posed about America’s role in the world, I was resistant. I am still working through disappointment that she couldn’t manage to make even her countrymen want her to be that leader. Our dysfunctional relationship with Colombia is spelled out in painful detail. How stupid and disrespectful has America ever been in South America? America’s war on drugs became a sordid saga of the U.S. training drug runners. Towards the end of Farrow’s book, this story is just so sobering and souring. Perhaps we come off looking like the buffoons we are because of the unending corruption in every single South American country. It is just exhausting and hard to believe an honest person cannot rise to the top anywhere in South America. But we just keep playing out the worst examples of bad behavior, on both sides of the border. In the end this book is an impassioned call to young people to create the change they want to see. Farrow is trying to gin up some enthusiasm for a diplomatic corps who can think, talk, and make treaties around the world rather than militarize our relationships. It is obviously true that if you start with a gun in your hand you are going to have a very different mindset about solving disagreements. Diplomacy is long, frustrating, and often useless seeming…until it isn’t. Great book. The inside scoop on how the Department of State functions is worth the price of admission. I listened to the audio of this, read by Farrow himself and it was terrific. Produced by Audible. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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May 26, 2018
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Jun 2018
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May 25, 2018
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Hardcover
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3.97
| 14,666
| Feb 06, 2018
| Feb 06, 2018
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it was amazing
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This book seems too small for all it accomplishes. The quiet watchfulness and introspection of the Prologue tamps down opinion before it develops. We
This book seems too small for all it accomplishes. The quiet watchfulness and introspection of the Prologue tamps down opinion before it develops. We are here to listen, to understand. It is such a quiet read, immediately alert to the tension inherent in a grandson of immigrants policing the border. This is a beautiful book, a beautiful physical object. Riverhead Books formatted the inside to be a kind of art, using gray pages to separate the sections and lines to guide our eye, delineate our thoughts. We recognize we are privileged to see what an American thinks of the border, an American with reason to care about the migrants, who shares our history and theirs. The real terror that migrants bring or flee is not hidden; it is one of the first things the border guards encounter. A drug capture is a feather in one’s cap. The people ferrying the drugs are not as important; they are allowed to struggle back to where they came from, or continue onward if they dare. Not much thought is expended in their direction. Before long, Cantú becomes aware of his own muted, muffled response to the hideousness of the choices facing his human captures. The job itself appears to be a reason why he cannot envision himself in their place. Then we discover Cantú’s stress is coming out by a grinding of his teeth when at rest. He dreams of captures—his response and theirs—and how it could be different. He moves to a different job, a different state. He watches, in a computer lab, movements in the border area. He researches reasons for population movement, drug dealing, gang murders, a capture’s history. This knowledge does not abate his nighttime fears. He starts to try to imagine the humanity behind the statistics, quoting the historian Timothy Snyder, “Each record of death suggests, but cannot supply, a unique life….it is for humanists to turn these [deaths] back into people.” He goes back to El Paso and the Rio Grande and finds himself more confused than ever. “…studying…and reading…international affairs…I had the idea that…the patrol…would somehow unlock the border for me…but…I have more questions than ever before.” Exposure to the violence of the border region gave him a kind of moral injury: “Moral injury is a learned behavior, learning to accept the things you know are wrong.” In contemplating the migration of individuals from Mexico and Central America to North America, Cantú must examine the horror facing those migrants in their own countries. He gives us a taste of it, leading us to question our own understanding of government, laws, fairness, money, profit, coercion, protection. We realize we do not know the answers to the questions these migrants raise: How are we to live? What do we have to lose? Cantú leaves the border patrol to think, write, read, study. In trying to make sense of his own history, his recent past, and his future, he takes a job in which he meets a man who becomes his friend. That man, it turns out, is what Americans call an illegal, though he has lived and worked more than thirty years in the United States. All the understanding Cantú learned at the border is put into practice now as he couples his sensitivity and sensibility with experience. This gorgeous, thoughtful read is replete with references to poets and novelists, as well as to those who write history, philosophy, international affairs. Cantú took time and had the resources to assimilate his feelings about illegal border crossing—the indignity, the futility of it—and he is eloquent in his expression of it. What I came away with, putting financially-motivated drug traffic aside, was that the movement of individuals is migration, something that is not going to stop because we disapprove. When things get bad enough, people move. Cantú’s title alludes to the water-like quality of the stream, and the possibilities for growth. Flood. We, and the people of other great nations, should think about restructuring our attitudes to accept the reality of a world in crisis and how that affects us whether we want it to or not. We must look at ourselves and the world, ourselves in the world, to see what we need to do to keep ourselves from moral injury. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Mar 03, 2018
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Mar 12, 2018
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Feb 02, 2018
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Hardcover
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041592913X
| 9780415929134
| 041592913X
| 4.23
| 2,690
| Jan 01, 2000
| Oct 26, 2000
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it was amazing
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bell hooks shares her upbringing and personal history with us in this book, and for that reason it is worth savoring. She has a very conversational st
bell hooks shares her upbringing and personal history with us in this book, and for that reason it is worth savoring. She has a very conversational style in this book; she is not writing a polemic. But she is teaching. This book reminds us that America does indeed have a class hierarchy, and indicates how that plays out for citizens. hooks reminds us that in a culture where money is the measure of value, it is believed that everything and everybody can be bought. But money is not the standard where other values are more important: “Solidarity with the poor is the only path that can lead out nation back to a vision of community that can effectively challenge and eliminate violence and exploitation.”Acquiring wealth or items of value make us fearful that someone will take those things away from us. hooks herself had such an experience, having bought a fancy car she found herself being less generous. A material object with which she identified altered her relationship to others. She caught this recognizable mindset exactly: human beings do this. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t admire or have lovely things. We just have to acknowledge they change us and our relationship with others, and find a way to compensate for this. Money or beautiful things is not the point, not the point of our existence. We have to look harder, deeper for that. This book was published in 2000, shortly after hooks’ prolific period studying, writing, speaking in the 1990s. The push for more—more money, more power—has always been with us but hadn’t infected the vast middle class, perhaps because it was unimaginable, until this period when unheard-of wealth was within reach for many in the middle class. hooks is just reminding us not to lose our sensibility to the false god, gold. Chapter Five, called “The Politics of Greed,” is just as relevant now as it was when written twenty years or so ago, perhaps more so. That’s the thing with bell hooks: she seems to have sprung full-grown from the head of Athena or whomever. She is grounded in a way we can dream of, finding her way to answers some of us will only discover in old age, if at all. She talks about addiction in a way that hurts, it seems so familiar to many now. “Those who suffer the weight of this greed-based predatory capitalism are the addicted. Robbed of the capacity to function as citizens of any community (unable to work, to commune with others, even to eat), they become the dehumanized victims of an ongoing protracted genocide. Unlike the drugs used in the past, like marijuana and heroin, drugs like cocaine and crack/cocaine disturbed the mental health of the addicted and created in them cravings so great that no moral or ethical logic could intervene to stop immoral behavior.”We recognize this language today, though the drug choice has changed to opioids. In her chapter entitled “Being Rich,” hooks explains that the poor and working class have been taught by mass media to think like and aspire to the values and attitudes of the rich ruling classes, ideologically joining with the rich to protect their class interests. We are all taught to believe that the wealthy have earned their right to rule because they are rich, without examination into the sources of that wealth and the exploitation it may represent, and we therefore often abandon any political commitment to economic justice. In the old days of an emerging Christian ethic, the disciples were puzzled to learn from Jesus that the rich must work harder for grace because they will be tempted to hoard their wealth and exploit others to increase their wealth. “Nowadays much new age spirituality attempts to undermine traditional biblical condemnation of the greedy rich by insisting that those who prosper are the chosen, the spiritual elect. But there is a great difference between celebrating prosperity and the pursuit of unlimited wealth.”In later chapters hooks addresses the new wealth of American blacks and how allegiance to the new class interests of successful black people may supersede their racial solidarity. We must be mindful that an exploitative rule set allowed certain talents to break barriers most cannot and this should not be taken as the kind of success any of us consider complete. In general and from the outside, it does not appear that successful blacks are ignoring their brethren, but I do not think the same can be said of white citizens. hooks actually addresses this in her chapter entitled “White Poverty: The Politics of Invisibility.” While the black poor were ostracized in the larger society, they managed to stick together, live together, worship together. In some ways, this was unavoidable where the society was segregated. But poor whites lived everywhere, and because of segregation, had no common cause with poor blacks, and were not accepted by wealthier whites. Doubly despised, we could say. It is not so far from that time to today, when poor whites embarrass their wealthier brethren. hooks is saying that we must bridge this divide and recognize the basic humanity we all share, across race, class, sexuality, and national origin. We have to surrender our attachment to material possessions, eliminate the false hierarchies based on wealth, color, sex, etc. and interact based on more lasting values. A final few chapters suggest ways for us to ease into new relationships with one another. hooks is indispensable as a thought leader. ...more |
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Mar 2018
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Mar 21, 2018
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Jan 22, 2018
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Paperback
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3.93
| 403
| 1965
| 1965
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really liked it
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How the world turns. Lorraine Hansberry’s second play featuring a loose gang of liberal strivers and losers who struggle to make their voices heard po
How the world turns. Lorraine Hansberry’s second play featuring a loose gang of liberal strivers and losers who struggle to make their voices heard politically, just might be, if viewed through a reducing lens, the grudging voices of enlightened conservatives in a disintegrating GOP. A creative conservative playwright—if such a person existed (how would we know, there is no proof)—could adapt this quietly devastating but ultimately fierce and brave and humane play to reflect conservative’s acknowledgement that their adherents are composed of just this diverse band of individuals working together for governance that works within law and without corruption or favor. It is Black History Month and PBS recently aired an American Masters special retrospective on the life of Lorraine Hansberry, playwright forever famous for her universally-loved play, A Raisin in the Sun. Hansberry was friends with James Baldwin and Nina Simone, and suffered along with them the ignorance and backwardness of the stodgy thinking among white Americans, both liberals and conservatives, at the time. Hansberry was only thirty-four years old when she died, shortly after her second play opened to mixed reviews on Broadway October 14, 1964 for one-hundred-and-one performances. Earlier that same year Hansberry had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and she was struggling to write and revise the play through her disorientation and pain. Within a few short months of the October opening she would be dead, on January 12, 1965, and that day her play closed on Broadway for good. When I picked this play up recently, I struggled with the 1960s-scent of it, despite its superficial relevance to now: a diverse and politically active group of people agitate to find, field, and elect the candidate of their choice in an important local election. Sounds like a play that could live forever, right? Hansberry’s instincts were so spot-on. My initial recoil from the datedness of the play began to change near the end of Act Two when things start to unravel for real, paying bare the true heart of things and the work’s universality. Act Three is icing on the cake. So it is that first act that was the problem all along, I guess. The play has three acts and a cast of nine. Each of the characters seems to represent a larger group; there is a mixed race man, a prostitute, a gay man, a Jewish man…you get the picture. Each of their difficulties in society needs addressing, and is the reason they band together politically to elect someone they believe will look after them. Each of the characters has high ideals but don’t necessarily treat others within their diverse group with the dignity they demand for themselves. The person they elect to represent them politically uses their support to get elected and then sells them out to monied interests. The play could be a total bummer, but it is strangely lit from within by the naïve voice of a failed actress who, despite her lack of education and her inability to act, can see beyond what people say to what they do. She can see, for instance, that her husband cares more about helping people he doesn’t personally know rather than caring about the woman he is married to. To her he is dismissive, condescending, paternal. The mixed-race character has attitudes every bit as narrow, prejudiced, and cruel as those that had persecuted him his entire life. There is a supporter of Goldwater in the mix: she is intelligent, compassionate, and brave but also an anti-Semite and racist. In other words, people are complicated, and Hansberry allows us some time to digest that before suggesting we get up because we have work to do: “Yes…weep now, darling, weep. Let us both weep. That is the first thing: to let ourselves feel again…Then, tomorrow, we shall make something strong of this sorrow…”We can’t just lie around bemoaning our foolishness and inadequacies but must make something of the hurt it causes us. “…people wanna be better than they are…and I hurt terribly today, and that hurt is desperation and desperation is—energy and energy can move things.” I am not a believer in the conservative political or social platform. However, I am not wholly on board with liberal political groups either because they appear to be tone deaf and righteous and sometimes wrong. I believe the best solutions for government are often forged in the fire of differing opinions. We need a strong confident conservative voice in this country, not crazy far right closed-mindedness, to keep the left from blowing up their own side. Therefore I hope conservatives pull themselves together and remember what they believe. The edition of this play I am reading has a Foreword written by a show-goer at the time the show played Broadway, John Braine, and an Introduction written by Hansberry’s former husband, the Jewish song writer Robert Nemiroff. I could not read these sections first—I had to go directly to the play, of course, or I wouldn’t know whereof they spoke. It is with some frustration I ask publishers to explain why these detailed examinations and discussions of the play are not placed at the end of the book in an Afterword or an Epilogue. That is where we want to read them. Those later sections are generally written by the play’s author, I realize, but convention sometimes needs to be shaken up. Anyway, I read them after the play and was glad for them. Braine is convinced the play is a great one which was damned, not because of Act One which I have suggested, but because of the ending: the play acknowledges the inadequacies of each of the characters and does not condemn nor moralize. The affirmation and acceptance of man’s failures was the greatest sin, no matter that the idea was to do better tomorrow. Braine suggests a different age or a different country, perhaps, would find a public more at ease with what the brilliant and forward-thinking Hansberry had given us. I felt similarly, my mind going directly to moderate conservatives who are being pushed around so they no longer know what they believe. Principled conservatives have gay people and black people and Jews in their ranks and somehow still manage to classify themselves as conservatives first. Hansberry’s friend James Baldwin tried to explain his ‘troubling ambivalence’ after seeing it—until he realized that what made him uncomfortable was Brustein’s ‘particular quality of commitment.’ In other words, Brustein continued to believe in commitment to our ideals, even when people let him down. For Baldwin, the play became an experience in soul-searching. Ex-husband Nemiroff, for his part, thought the play brilliant, so full of ideas it couldn’t be easily classified or digested. Apparently the play’s only ‘rave’ review was from the Wall Street Journal correspondent: “…The taste left in the mouth after then final curtain is both bitter and good. For the playwright herself has taste, of the best kind.” But Hansberry never counted on plaudits. “…if there was one thing Lorraine Hansberry did not believe, it was that talent will ‘out’ in the end.” She herself thought the play was good, with lots of funny lines of which she was inordinately proud. ...more |
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Feb 02, 2018
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Feb 12, 2018
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Jan 19, 2018
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Hardcover
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1438451687
| 9781438451688
| 1438451687
| 3.81
| 123
| May 14, 2014
| Jun 01, 2014
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it was amazing
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In a way I wish this book weren’t as dense with ideas as it is, but it shows us that this race stuff is not simple or easy. The struggle to understand
In a way I wish this book weren’t as dense with ideas as it is, but it shows us that this race stuff is not simple or easy. The struggle to understand what it will take to fix this messy problem should make pessimists of us but indeed Sullivan’s book is so thoughtful and addresses so many aspects of American race issues that we also have reason to hope—that people like this will guide a new generation forward with new tools. Shannon Sullivan's Introduction alone made me want to recommend this book to every well-intentioned white person who thought they want to convey their ‘wokeness.’ Basically she is saying, and I agree, that it’s not going to be so easy as that. We’re going to have to be the handmaidens of this movement, not the tip of the spear. Ain’t nobody so woke they cain’t learn a few new lessons. When Vance came out with his autobiography Hillbilly Elegy, some critics pointed out that he was tentatively making a larger point about the American political system and poor white country folk but ignored the issue of race. Sullivan dives right in and seizes that nexus of class and race and explains why middle class white folks, the “good white [liberals]” of the title feel more comfortable with middle class black folk than with ‘poor white trash.’ It is because 1) poor white folk embarrass them and fracture the rules of white social etiquette; and 2) the white middle class like to believe they are openminded and that opportunity for black people exists. At the end of this chapter she makes the point that white supremacists cannot be sidelined if we are to move forward in a democracy. They must be engaged. It is too much to expect that black people would have to engage these folks and still preserve their sense of self, so this may be the role that well meaning white “allies” might have to play: engage these folks. Not what we would have chosen for ourselves, but undoubtedly necessary. The second point Sullivan makes is that white people cannot wish away their white ancestors, or declare them anathema. We must recognize that those folk operated under different social, political, and economic conditions and that we may have done what they did in the same circumstances. What they did perpetuating slavery was undoubtedly wrong, but we can’t just say, “that’s not us.” We have to concede that it indeed might have been us, and we still benefit from the privileges granted us from that time, e.g., money, status, opportunity. etc. This point is one white folk want to shy away from, but in fact black writers on race have been saying this for awhile now. We have to acknowledge slavery in the United States damaged the prospects for black folk, and that while we did not do these things, to this day white folk benefit. There are only four points in this book, but they are very carefully looked at from several directions so that our confusion, fears, or objections, should we have any, are carefully answered. Other reviewers have said Sullivan’s third issue, discussing the “disease of color-blindness,” has been the most influential one in the process of teaching and raising their children. White people have to start talking about race, which for many of us growing up was something well-brought-up people did not do. Talking about race was done by white supremacists or white trash. That’s over now because it is necessary to talk about race, our own race, in order to acknowledge that our own race is not neutral. It also has cultural habits and color. And in many cases, it comes with its own assumed ‘rightness,’ or first place in a hierarchy of correctness. Black folk, it appears, would prefer we do talk about race because otherwise it is the elephant in the room. They have to deal with the consequences of race daily. It seems right to them that we do, too. So what Sullivan is able to do is to suggest ways to discuss race and color and the history of privilege with children at an early age. Her researches show, and we ourselves know very well, that children pick up unspoken cues from our behaviors even if we never say a word. She suggests we steer the learning process by discussing race openly, recognizing how it plays out in our neighborhoods and playgrounds, and address it head on. This is especially true if very few black individuals live in our neighborhoods, which can lead to early learning about why that would be so. Sullivan’s last point addresses white guilt, which is tied in with acknowledgment of the wrongs perpetuated on black folk in American history and abroad. We, good white people all, have guilt. But that guilt is not useful when talking about racial justice. We must jettison the guilt, and/or shame; Sullivan argues that “a critical form of self love is a more valuable affect to be cultivated by white people who care about racial justice.”Why? White guilt can be a paralyzing emotion that can impede racial justice. White guilt can inhibit action but also judgment. Racial justice needs people who have some moral authority and can respect people of color enough to disagree with them. James Baldwin hoped that black people would not retaliate against white oppressors for one reason only: that it hurts twice. Once when the aggression is perpetrated, and again when it is retaliated against. Religious leaders who were also victims of oppression have been saying this since the beginning of time. ‘Love thine enemies.’ It is what black Christians did after the nine Dylan Roof killings in Charleston, South Carolina at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. White people were shocked. Real Christian values? How can it be? White evangelicals appear to have lost their connection to Christianity a long time ago. “People of color have long been aware of the toxicity of white people’s affections and emotions…Love has not been the dominant affect that characterizes white people.”In her conclusions Sullivan warns good white liberals not to expect intimacy. The white gaze can be like white noise: it obliterates other creative expression. The book is dense with insight, much more than I reproduced here. It should be on everyone’s list of must-reads, along with bell hooks, whose writing you are sure to encounter when you have begun investigating race. Sullivan writes in the Introduction that “perhaps in the future racial categories will not exist.” In the future, augmented and non-augmented humans may be the critical divisors. Skin color would be just another descriptor. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jan 13, 2018
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Jan 22, 2018
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Dec 24, 2017
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Paperback
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1788160606
| 9781788160605
| 1788160606
| 4.03
| 35,510
| Nov 02, 2017
| Nov 02, 2017
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really liked it
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This book is two lectures modified and dispensing the understanding of a classicist with regard to “The Public Role of Women,” the very title of the f
This book is two lectures modified and dispensing the understanding of a classicist with regard to “The Public Role of Women,” the very title of the first lecture. My markers are all in the second lecture, delivered in March 2017 and titled “Women in Power.” Mary Beard applies her knowledge of ancient languages and civilizations to uncover for us the origins of our notions of sexuality and power. It is not all she knows. It is merely her opinion of what she knows. As though in a long, amusing conversation with a friend, Beard argues and then changes her mind as she makes her argument, rethinking her earlier teaching of Aristophanes’ comedic play Lysistrata as not just about girl power—“though maybe that’s exactly how we should now play it.” I have recently found myself willing to modify my thinking on #MeToo: I opposed young women deciding, precipitously I thought, which behaviors went too far when some we clearly agreed did meet criterion for harassment. Those younger women will probably succeed in modifying men’s behaviors when earlier generations did not. They are the ones who have to live with success or failure of their guidelines. The conclusions Beard shares with us at the end of the second lecture are especially trenchant: that power should be recognized as within each of us—within our reach—if we would only seize that power and exercise it. Power exercised does not have to be attached to celebrity, and perhaps is best if it is not so glorified and so removed from each of us. Beard gives an example of this non-celebrity notion of power by pointing to the three women (whose names many of us still do not know) now credited with beginning the #BlackLivesMatter movement. If power is attached to celebrity, it is interpreted narrowly, circumscribing and controlling that power. The current structure of public prestige is male-dominated and will forever resist the fundamentally different understanding of power as collaborative and diffuse—not a possession but an attribute or a verb. I am excited by Beard’s acknowledgement of power as something quite different than what we have come to accept, for power is individual, and within each of us. The dignity we gain in light of that realization is very affirming. It entirely works when thinking of oneself in a democracy, for instance, but also as an employee, family member, a member of any group, sect, or religion. Individuals hold the actual power in a society, and it is only our transfer of attention and currency to celebrities that gives them power. When we notice and state publicly “the emperor has no clothes,” well then…it’s over for the emperor. Beard wishes she'd had the foresight to defend women's right to be wrong without collapse of women's privileges and rights as leaders, spokespeople. This notion parallels the notion of acceptance of people of color as described by Ibram X. Kendi in his groundbreaking work, Stamped From The Beginning: "Kendi himself has concluded the only way black people would not be discriminated against in some way is if everyone recognize that blacks are at least as talented or flawed as whites and should be treated accordingly, that is to say, with the same amount of attention and acceptance of their potential talent, as for their potential for error. Anything less is racist."There is more in Beard's manifesto, for instance “if women are not perceived to be fully within the structures of power, surely it is the power we need to redefine rather than the women.” We are reminded that the structures of power may need modification if not dismantling. Beard reminds us there will be winners & losers in this scenario, but these concepts have been a long time coming. I won’t be sorry to see the old ways go. I loved the little joke Beard included in her discussion of current female leaders being heralded early in 2017 in a headline, “Women Prepare for a Power Grab in Church, Police and BBC.” Beard reminds us that only Cressida Dick, the commissioner of the Met, actually succeeded, surely a comment on who is perceived to have the equipment to lead. Beard begins her first lecture with a reminder of the earliest example of a man exerting control over the right of women to plead her case or to speak in public: a teenaged Telemachus silencing his mother Penelope in the beginning of The Odyssey. The view of women in the western world has followed on from those earliest myths. Subtle differences in interpretation of the language of those myths is now giving us new ways to look at sexuality, at women and power. That ancient text has been recently translated by a woman, Emily Wilson for the first time, and the resultant work has differences from earlier versions. It is wonderfully accessible and thrilling to read, so make sure you give it another go round with this new version. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Mar 10, 2018
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Mar 15, 2018
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Dec 16, 2017
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Hardcover
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1479849944
| 9781479849949
| 1479849944
| 3.89
| 3,623
| Feb 20, 2018
| Feb 20, 2018
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really liked it
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Noble began collecting information in 2010 after noticing the way Google Search and other internet sites collect and display information about non-whi
Noble began collecting information in 2010 after noticing the way Google Search and other internet sites collect and display information about non-white communities. Her results dovetail with other studies (e.g., Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O'Neil) positing that algorithms are flawed by their very nature: choosing & weighting only some variables to define or capture a phenomenon will deliver a flawed result. Noble wrote this book to explore reasons why Google couldn’t, or wouldn’t, address concerns over search results that channel, shape, distort the search itself, i.e., the search “black girls” yielded only pornographic results, beginning a cascade of increasingly disturbing and irrelevant options for further search. In her conclusion Noble tells us that she wrote an article about these observations in 2012 for a national women’s magazine, Bitch, and within six weeks the Google Search for “black girls” turned up an entire page of results like “Black Girls Code,” Black Girls Rock,” “7-Year-Old Writes Book to Show Black Girls They Are Princesses.” While Noble declines to take credit for these changes, she continued her research into the way non-white communities are sidelined in the digital universe. We must keep several things in mind at once if the digital environment is to work for all of us. We must recognize the way the digital universe reflects and perpetuates the white male patriarchy from which it was developed. In order for the internet to live up to the promise of allowing unheard and disenfranchised populations some voice and access to information they can use to enhance their world, we must monitor the creation and use of the algorithms that control the processes by which we add to and search the internet. This is one reason it is so critical to have diversity in tech. Below find just a few of Noble's more salient points: An early e-version of this manuscript obtained through Netgalley had formatting and linking issues that were a hindrance to understanding. Noble writes here for an academic audience I presume, and as such her jargon and complicated sentences are appropriate for communicating the most precise information in the least space. However, for a general audience this book would be a slog, something not true if one listens to Noble (as in the attached TED talk linked below). Surely one of the best things this book offers is a collection of references to others who are working on these problems around the country. The other best thing about this book is an affecting story Noble includes in the final pages of her Epilogue about Kandis, a long-established black hairdresser in a college town trying to keep her business going by registering online with the ratings site, Yelp. Noble writes in the woman’s voice, simply and forthrightly, without jargon, and the clarity and moral force of the story is so hard-hitting, it is worth picking up the book for this story. At the very least I would recommend a TED talk on this story, and suggest placing the story closer to the front of this book in subsequent editions. For those familiar with Harvard Business Review case studies, this is a perfect one illustrating issues of race. Basically, the story is as follows: Kandis's shop became an established business in the 1980s, before the fall off of black scholars attending the university "when the campus stopped admitting so many Blacks." To keep those fewer students aware that her business provided an exclusive and necessary service in the town, she spent many hours to find a way to have her business come up when “black hair” was typed in as a search term within a specified radius of the school. The difficulties she experienced illustrate the algorithm problems clearly. “To be a Black woman and to need hair care can be an isolating experience. The quality of service I provide touches more than just the external part of someone. It’s not just about their hair.”I do not want to get off the subject Noble has concentrated on with such eloquence in her treatise, but I can’t resist noting that we are talking about black women’s hair again…Readers of my reviews will know I am concerned that black women have experienced violence in their attitudes about their hair. If I am misinterpreting what I perceive to be hatred of something so integral to their beings, I would be happy to know it. If black hair were perceived instead as an extension of one’s personality and sexuality without the almost universal animus for it when undressed, I would not worry about this obsession as much. But I think we need also to work on making black women recognize their hair is beautiful. Period. By the time we get to Noble’s Epilogue, she has raised a huge number of discussion points and questions which grew from her legitimate concerns that Google Search seemed to perpetuate the status quo or service a select group rather than break new ground for enabling the previously disenfranchised. This is critically important, urgent, and complicated work and Noble has the energy and intellectual fortitude needed to work with others to address these issues. This book would be especially useful for those looking for an area in the digital arena to piggyback her work to try and make a difference. Ms. Noble gives a 12-minute TED talk here. ...more |
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Dec 06, 2017
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Feb 10, 2018
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Dec 06, 2017
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Hardcover
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0062390856
| 9780062390851
| 0062390856
| 3.91
| 40,889
| May 09, 2017
| May 09, 2017
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liked it
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Maybe everyone does lie. But they don’t lie all the time. Stephens-Davidowitz makes the good point that asking people directly doesn’t always, in fact
Maybe everyone does lie. But they don’t lie all the time. Stephens-Davidowitz makes the good point that asking people directly doesn’t always, in fact may not often, yield true answers. People have their own reasons for answering pollsters untruthfully, but it is clear that this is a documented fact. People sometimes lie to pollsters. Stephens-Davidowitz was told by mentors and advisors not to consider Google searches worthwhile data, but the more he looked at it, the more he was convinced that Google searches contained the best data for determining what people are concerned about. He has uncovered some interesting trends that are not apparent through direct questioning because people are sometimes ashamed of their fears, feelings, prejudices, and predilections. ♾ I didn’t really like this book. Partly the reason is because I listened to it, and Stephens-Davidowitz gives charts, graphs, data points that obviously cannot be represented in the audio version. These usually help me to grasp things easily and maybe bypass pages of material that is not as interesting to me. It wasn’t that his material was hard, it was that I oftentimes did not like what he was talking about. He had a tendency to focus on deviant behavior, e.g., sexual predators, abuse, porn, etc. One might make the argument that these behaviors are important to understand and therefore worth looking at. Possibly. However, if ‘everybody lies,’ one might make the argument that we do not have to look at deviance to find untruthfulness. What we discover is that to test Stephens-Davidowitz’s thesis that ‘everybody lies,’ we have to spend quite a lot of time with statistics and creating studies, or as he is wont to do, studying big data. Big data probably irons out discrepancies in the reasons for our Google searches, e.g., that it is not me that is interested in the herpes virus, it is my brother, because in the end it doesn’t matter why we did the search; what matters is that we did the search. Besides, maybe I’m lying about my brother having the virus, but my interest in the topic is not a lie. Stephens-Davidowitz has made a career so far out of the study of big data, showing us ways to slice and dice it so that it is useful to our view of the world. Only thing is, I am not as interested in what big data tells us as he is. He’d trained as an economist, and towards the end of the book he hit a couple of areas I did find more interesting, like the notion of regression discontinuity, a term used to describe a statistical tool created to measure the outcomes of people very close to some arbitrary cut-off.** S-D talks about using this tool on federal inmates, discovering criminals treated more harshly committed more crimes upon their release. But S-D also studied students on either side of the admissions cut-off for the prestigious Stuyvesant High School: those who attended Stuyvesant did not have a significant performance difference in later life than students who did not. Apparently Stephens-Davidowitz went into data science because of Freakonomics, the bestselling book by Steven D. Levitt. He believes that many of the next generation of scientists in every field will be data scientists. I did finish the audiobook, another study he took note of in the last pages. Apparently few readers finish ‘treatises’ by economists. He believes this is his big contribution to our knowledge base, and there is no doubt his contrariness did highlight ways big data can be used effectively. If I may be so bold, I might be able to suggest a reason why many female readers may not be as interested in the material presented, or in Stephens-Davidowitz himself (he was/is apparently looking for a girlfriend). Stay away from the deviant sex stuff, Seth. It may interest you but I can guarantee that fewer women are going to find that appealing or reassuring conversation or reading material. An interesting corollary to this economists’ data view is the question of whether the truth matters, which is how I came to pick up this book. Recently on PBS’ The Third Rail with Ozy, Carlos Watson asked whether the truth matters. At first blush the answer seems obvious, and two sides debated this question. One side said of course truth matters…but most of us know one man’s truth to be another man’s lie. The other side said ‘everybody lies.’ It got me to thinking…I do think the two ways of coming to the notion of lying dovetail at some point, and one has to conclude that truth may not matter as much as we think. What matters is what we believe to be true. Finally, it appears Stephens-Davidson agrees to some degree with Cathy O'Neill, author of Weapons of Math Destruction, in that he agrees you best not let algorithms run without human tweaking and interference. The best outcomes are delivered when humans apply their particular observations and knowledge and expertise along with big data. ** S-D describes it this way: “Any time there is precise number that divides people into two different groups, a discontinuity, economists can compare, or regress, the outcomes of people very very close to the cut off.”...more |
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3.93
|
really liked it
|
Feb 12, 2018
|
Jan 19, 2018
|
||||||
3.81
|
it was amazing
|
Jan 22, 2018
|
Dec 24, 2017
|
||||||
4.03
|
really liked it
|
Mar 15, 2018
|
Dec 16, 2017
|
||||||
3.89
|
really liked it
|
Feb 10, 2018
|
Dec 06, 2017
|
||||||
3.91
|
liked it
|
not set
|
Oct 23, 2017
|