Plan My Tourist Day In San Francisco
on 08.19.17
And then have an early dinner with me before my flight? I'm dropping Sally off in Santa Cruz on the 12th, but I'm going to sleep in Oakland and spend the 13th doing something touristy until I have to make an 11:14 redeye back home.
First, tell me what to do all day -- I'll have a car and no particular pre-existing plans. Second, who wants to meet at 6 and have dinner? I'll be able to hang out until a little after 8, I figure, although I'll be driving so I won't be able to drink.
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Tell me something good. Or bad.
on 08.18.17
I have been feeling so sad and glum about national events, and also feeling sorry for myself for dumb reasons. I could really use a thread where you tell me something great that has happened in your life, so that I can fawn over you. Or, you could tell me something unhappy in your life, and I can sympathize with you. You should tell me something about your life, and I'll focus on you, instead of either myself or national politics.
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Something A Little Uplifting?
on 08.17.17
Dahlia Lithwick on what antifa activists were doing, as described by eyewitnesses, in Charlottesville. There's not much to feel good about these days, but this article has something.
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Days Gone By
on 08.16.17
You're all too old for suggested dissertation topics (I hear L. is fifty and has grandkids now), but a compare/contrast of the ethical implications of Buddhist reincarnation and the Rawlsian veil of ignorance would be a pretty good one.
Anyway, I'm going to contact these folks to see how I can help register voters in Wisconsin. What are you going to do?
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Guest Post: Body Cavity Search
on 08.16.17
Echoes writes: I wonder how, exactly, legally, this atrocity does not amount to a criminal offense?
Heebie's take: Fits of fucking rage:
"One of the officers on the tape, he was talking to a passenger who was already in custody in the officer's car and you could hear him telling that individual 'Oh we are going to find something, even if we have to put our hands on her'," said Cammack.
And they did.
After a search of Corley's clothing turned up nothing deputies decided to take their hunt deeper.
"This same officer body slammed Miss Corley, stuck her head underneath the vehicle and completely pulled her pants off, leaving her naked and exposed in that Texaco parking lot," said Cammack.
Video at the link, but I do not watch the videos. No one found guilty of any crime.
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Gardeners, Carpenters, etc.
on 08.15.17
The premise of this book on parenting, The Gardener and the Carpenter, is that the Carpenter is the parent who thinks they can perfectly sculpt a kid, and the Gardener thinks that you just make a fertile environment and then let the kid flourish. Although I agree with the idea that it's better to be a Gardener, the interview is mostly insufferable, and I do not have any intention of reading the book.
My question: is the Carpenter is a straw man? It certainly is a type that shows up in the media a lot, but I can't think of any parents I know who are that rigid about who their kid must turn out to be. It's definitely not necessarily the same group as the Fear of Public Schools/Wrong School District group, which I see a lot of.
I have found specific parenting books helpful when there's been a specific parenting issue that I'm at a loss for, but on the whole they tend to be a tiresome genre.
The one book that I've enjoyed enough to reread is The Mother Dance, by Harriet Lerner. What I like about it is that the focus is on the mother, the adult, and how she grows and changes, without being normative or predictive about it. It's focused on mothers only because Lerner keeps it very autobiographical (and ftr, it does not feel like her other books, although I like her other books). I haven't seen any other books that that focus on parents and their growth and experience, to the exclusion of the kids.
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Guest Post - U.S. Training and Military Coups
on 08.15.17
Mossy Character writes: The connection between U.S. training and military coups:
whereas in 2011 the Defense Department directed only 17 percent of all security assistance (compared to the State Department's 80 percent), by 2015 the Defense Department's share had increased to 57 percent and the State Department's had dropped to 42 percent.I place little weight on the stats, since "in fiscal year 2015 approximately 76,400 students from 154 countries participated in U.S. foreign military training" which is to say that US training is strongly correlated with the existence of armed forces. Nonetheless interesting, especially in light of the abolition of State. Full paper here.
[...]
In more in-depth multivariate statistical analysis, we found evidence that any training leads to a rough doubling of the odds of a coup that year
[...]
These findings remained after we went to great lengths to combat possible selection effects
[...]
We argue that the social capital that comes with any kind of U.S. military training increases the temptation to carry out a coup. Instead, the United States must carefully consider whether countries should receive any training at all.
Heebie's take: Really, I'm entirely unequipped to have a take.
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Free Association
on 08.14.17
The only thing I have to post about it this thing about how there are 4000+ amputations each year due to table saws, and the technology exists to make them completely safe, but people don't purchase it because it makes the saws more expensive, but of course the price won't come down until there's a critical mass of people buying them, which is of course the exact purpose of government regulation: to solve collective action problems in a way that benefits absolutely everyone, but unfortunately we lack a functioning legislature at the moment.
It seems wholly inadequate to post about anything besides Charlottesville, though. On the other hand, we have an active Charlottesville thread. On the other hand, you weirdos are delving into the intricacies of confederate monuments. On the other hand, I don't have a new, fresh angle. I keep thinking, "I guess if I were alive during the Civil Rights Era or WWII, I now know that I would have spent it sharing memes on Facebook."
What a weird time to go to college - all the outrages of the late 90s seemed so pretend and made-up when I was in college (partly due to my own ignorance, partly due to the nature of college activists) - but now, now if you went to college? You'd be fighting actual fucking Nazis. You would be called on to leave your dorm room and counterprotest, and you'd see someone from your math class on the Nazi side of the protest. Un-fucking-real.
Here's the perfect illustration: I saw Higher Learning when I was in college, and it rang very, very phony. I wasn't blind to racial tension at the college level, it just wouldn't have played out like that in 1995. It has become a spot on documentary over the past 20 years. (As best I can remember, I haven't actually rewatched it.)
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