Echo Chamber or Just Unified Disgust?

While I have largely failed to develop a distinct twitter voice from my blogging voice from my facebook voice, I have tried to avoid creating an echo chamber on twitter.  I follow people who often/always see things differently.  On facebook, I have muted or unfollowed people as it is a space where I don't mind having an echo chamber--I don't want to get into emotional and potentially angry debates there.

In the past few days, I have to say I am pretty pleased with the echo chambers in both spots.  I have seen no critical updates/comments on facebook and no negative reactions to my various comments/tweets about Charleston and all that.  Indeed, my tweets have gotten far more retweeted/favorited on this stuff than on anything since the week Canada's parliament was attacked last October.

 I am not surprised that my friends and family on facebook are fairly unified in their disgust of what happened and the view that we need to challenge the symbols and actions of racism.  I am a bit surprised at my twitter followers since I don't curate/block to create homogeneity.  I do block some people and do mute others, but it is not aimed at creating an homogenous feed/audience, but to keep things respectful. 

Maybe it is just that acts these are so far beyond the pale of what can be debated that the only people on the other side are so far away that I don't hear them or see them.  During days like this, I am ok with the echo chamber, as I have nothing to say to those who might excuse the actions of racist murderers or who suggest that there is nothing we can do. 

Sexual Assault Is ....

The story of the week in Canada is Jian Ghomeshi--the CBC radio host who was fired for ... apparently having an extensive record of sexual assault.  This is one of those things that turned out to be an open secret, best explained at here.

Ghomeshi, being the media guy that he is, tried to get in front of the story by claiming CBC was upset about his kinky sex life and by arguing  on facebook that it was an ex-girlfriend and some of her friends trying to tarnish his name.*  He launched a huge lawsuit, probably mostly to make him immune for libel as he trashes his accusers.

*  He must not be checking his facebook page because it has stuff like this on it now

This story is raising all kinds of questions.  The most obvious and important is: how many women does it take for it not to be just he said, she said?  The answer seems to be eight, as last night was the turning point with eight women (all but one anonymously) coming forward to The Star.  That one of these happened to be an actress in a prominent Canadian TV show might have also swung public perception.  But this speaks to a broader issue--yes, Ghomeshi should be considered innocent by Canada's courts before being proven guilty, but we probably should not take that to mean we should presume that his accusers are lying until proven otherwise.  Indeed, the first few days of this demonstrated quite clearly why women tend not to report sexual assaults.

The bright side of this is events like this help to reveal who is truly stupid: Shelia Copps, who was once Deputy Prime Minister, tweeted:

@jianghomeshi The state (and the CBC) have no place in the bedrooms of the nation. Good luck and stand tall!
— Hon. Sheila Copps (@Sheila_Copps) October 27, 2014

I responded to her thusly:

.@Sheila_Copps sexual assault is sexual assault whether it is in bedroom, Kitchen, alley, tent, street, classroom, studio, office or space
— Steve Saidemonster (@smsaideman) October 30, 2014

The dark side is ... very, very dark.  This guy preyed upon young, vulnerable women.  I was sad to learn of this twitter account @bigearsteddy, as it was created months ago (April), by someone associated with Carleton's journalism program:

Hi there @jianghomeshi. Remember louring me to ur house under false pretences? Bruises dont lie. Signed, every female Carleton U media grad.
— Sidnie Georgina (@bigearsteddy) April 10, 2014

I have met several students in Carleton's journalism/media programs as they need to interview "experts" for their assignments, and we happen to be in the same building.  So now I am concerned that my school has one or more students (current or former) who probably need some help and probably needed it a while back.  Indeed, I am now thinking it would be nice for the programs that send students out to do for the students what the folks in the media did for their friends: do you know about Jian?

When predators engage in bad behavior, they often get away with it because the people that know something are reluctant to say aloud what they think they know.  If you don't have proof, you can fear being accused of libel.  You can fear professional consequences.  The same is true in academia as it is in the media.  One can hope that the students gossip amongst each other to say that a certain professor has a history of sexually harassing their students, but that telephone game can go awry and can certainly fade over time.  I am certainly less shy now than I was before about naming the predators that worked at my previous places of employment--but am not sure of the legal consequences of saying online who did what.... [if you apply to graduate programs where I have worked, I will tell you in person who to avoid but not online]  In my last job, I was part of an elite cabal aimed at diverting students away from the serial harasser.  Now that I am no longer there, I can only hope that the same system is in place.

Ultimately, this stuff is hard.  What we need are for institutions to do the right thing and flush the awful people out.  The CBC can be seen as weak or brave in all of this--that they got rid of Jian because they feared lawsuits or that once they had enough evidence (which we don't yet know what that might be), they got rid of an employee who was damaging pretty much any female in the neighborhood.  It is actually possible to do that in academia, but institutions tend to prefer to protect themselves rather than their students.  

 Update: I got this email from Carleton, which they sent to all faculty, staff, and students:

Dear Members of the Carleton University Community,

 

Carleton University is aware of allegations about former CBC Radio host Jian Ghomeshi that may involve a Carleton journalism student or graduate.

 

The university is reviewing its records about field placements that our students have done at CBC Toronto and whether there were any at the Q program in particular. We have no information at this time that any of our students have been victims.

 

We encourage any member of our community who requires support to reach out to resources on campus or in the community. Resources on campus include Carleton's Sexual Assault Support Services and Health and Counselling Services.

 

Sexual Assault Support Services

http://carleton.ca/equity/sexual-assault

613-520-5622

 

Health and Counselling Services

http://carleton.ca/health

613-520-6674

 

 I am glad to see that Carleton is taking this seriously.  The @bigearsteddy tweets did indeed raise some alarm bells, so it is good that the school is responding.

Academic Failure: Where is the Dataset?

Gawker ran a piece on the absence of a dataset on police violence.  Brian Burghart, the author, blames the police departments in the U.S. for not providing such data.  That the federal government does not collect such data despite collecting nearly all other info about crime in the U.S.  What Burghart does not mention but could have/should have: the academic absence.

To be clear, I am not a scholar of crime.  I have no idea if there is a dataset that has been collected by academics.  But I think Burghart would have found it by now.  The strange thing is that we scholars get money, sometimes heaps of it, to build datasets about war, about political systems elsewhere, civil wars, and on and on.  But there is no dataset for police violence in the U.S.?  Where are the sociologists?  Where are the political scientists who study U.S. politics?

There seems to be a huge gap that is dying (oops) for a grant application.  This is the kind of thing that the National Science Foundation funds when it is not been ... micromanaged by Congress. 


In the principal-agent language of all of this, the principals (voters/politicians) seem not to be paying attention to what the agents (the cops) are doing, which means that they can do less or more than we want.  The fire alarm is ringing (this article and others like it), but no one seems to be answering.  Crap.


So, my academic friends, is Burghart wrong?  Or have we academics failed our city country?

Not Retribution

Yesterday was an awful day in many places.  In Santa Barbara, it was especially awful.  I am both too lazy and not brave enough to read the killer's manifesto.  Thankfully, Daveed Gartenstein-Ross did so, and I storified what I could (I am not a genius at storify) of his analysis of the Misogynist's Manifesto.

There are lots of reactions to have, and confirmation bias will shape many.  We can blame our gun culture, we can blame our rape culture, we can blame the poor mental health care system, and we would be right....

I just one to pick on one thing.  We should immediately and clearly reject the label the killer* gave to his video.  This is not about retribution.  Why?  Because retribution tends to be defined as a just, moral, proportional response to an injustice or crime:

1:  recompense, reward

2:  the dispensing or receiving of reward or punishment especially in the hereafter

3:  something given or exacted in recompense; especially :  punishment

From Merriam-Webster

Forget about the just/moral/proportional part.  Focus on the injustice or crime.  The killer seemed to think that girls and women owed him attraction, affection, love, sex, whatever.  His rage was aimed at females because he felt that they had wronged him by not giving him that to which he was entitled.  But since no individual female nor the available pool of females in the killer's life has a responsibility, a debt to service this killer's needs (or anyone's), there can be no retribution.  There is no crime or injustice that one must punish.

Sure, it can be frustrating to see those that you are attracted to choose someone else.  I was incredibly frustrated in my teen years due to my failure to attract the opposite sex.  It was crushing to my self-esteem.  But that is what happens one when reeks of desperation.  It was not a musk I wore well or that anyone does.  That this guy had no success with females clearly shows that the females in his life demonstrated excellent judgment.  I am sure they could sense the desperation, the neediness, the narcissism (as a narcissist, I resent him making the rest of us look so bad).

I am glad to see that today's CNN story got scrubbed a bit last night, as it used his preferred word, retribution to describe his actions.  No, it is the label of his video, and he surely imagined he was engaged in restribution.  But this was not retribution.  It was madness, it was rage, it was awful, but it was not punishment, it was not compensation.  I don't know to react to this except to deny the killer what he wanted. I am deliberately not naming the killer since I want to deny him fame and agency and his preferred label for his crimes.  Which is what he wanted as the extreme narcissist the demonstrated in the manifest that I did not read myself.*

*Yes, the old "something I read but not read myself"). 

The Dark Side of Peacekeeping

When I was on the Joint Staff on the Bosnia desk, we knew that American contractors were participating in the trafficking of women.  That would be Dyncorp, which the US still relies upon for private military contracting.  The wiki page is pretty darned instructive and refers to a woman who blew the whistle on Dyncorp, on the International Police Task Force that was supposed to be training the Bosnian police, and on the UN and NATO for ignoring the human trafficking. 

The woman, Kathryn Bolkovac, was portrayed in the movie, Whistleblower, by Rachel Weisz that I watched last night. They used a fake name for Dyncorp, but I recognized it easily enough.  The movie makes it clear that one of the consequences of deploying peacekeepers, police trainers and others to a post-conflict zone is to create a market for prostitution.  There was plenty of organized crime that developed during the war that then took advantage of the demand and provided the supply via girls and women.  Indeed, the UN Peacekeepers that preceded the NATO mission did much to enrich the criminals. 

While the UN and NATO did not deliberately support human trafficking, they tended to cover it up, apparently, so that their missions would not be tainted.   It was certainly the case that individuals serving in these missions employed the prostitutes and even abetted the organized criminals.  Truly awful for organizations aimed at helping people to tolerate and even abet the impunity of the criminals.

I guess the upside to a highly kinetic war where there is pretty strict gender segregation might mean that there is less of this in Afghanistan, but I would not bet much on it. 

Stop and Frisk Everyone?

Well said.

Real Life Poker in Quebec

Jonathan Duhamel won the World Series of Poker in 2010, but got robbed of his bracelet (what one gets when one wins an event at the WSOP] and a heap of a cash last month in his home in Montreal's suburbs.  It seems to be the case that his ex-girlfriend, Bianca Rojas Latraverse, arranged the robbery, which involved beating Duhamel up.  He is ok, bruised, but ok.  Yesterday was the bail hearing for Rojas Latraverse and her colleagues in crime.

In reading the account, where she basically says that she plans to support herself through her poker playing while out on bail and the judge looks askance and where the evidence includes heaps of text messages spelling out what she planned to do (rob her ex-boyfriend), I cannot help but wonder how well she can play poker.  Unless her courtroom appearance is an elaborate bluff, she does not seem that bright.  Perhaps she can announce as she sits down to any poker table at the Montreal casino or in the poker rooms located on the territories of the First Nations folks nearby that she is the robber of the WSOP champ and use that to intimidate the other players at the table?  Otherwise, I do not see the wisdom of the strategy of annoying the judge. 

Of course, I know of other people who show up fairly inebriated at their trials, so perhaps there is a selection effect: people who break the law and get caught may not be all that bright.  Yep, you heard it hear first.  The truly smart criminals are safe in their volcano-based lairs, I suppose.

When Good News Is Spun Badly

Crime continues to go down.  More than we expected, especially in a bad economy.  This article continues significant frustration that the models seem to be broken.  But isn't this a "good news" story?  I would think that the story would have less frustration and more, ahem, glee since fewer people are getting killed (with NY and Philly as notable exceptions).  And having the experts say:

“Remarkable,” said James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University. “Given the fact that we have had some healthy declines in recent years, I fully expected that the improvement would slow. There is only so much air you can squeeze out of a balloon.”

Um, a city or country is not like a balloon.  We are far from empty.  Yes, crime is historically low, but it is not at or near zero.  Sure, my car was not stolen this year (just rammed by a school bus), nor did I lose any computers to theft this year, but there are still thefts, rapes and murders.  Less of them, but still not close to "squeezed balloon" status.

Anyway, the tenor of the entire piece is one of disappointment that we don't know why the numbers are down rather than taking seriously a big jump in the quality of life, even during a bad recession and with stagnant wages over the past decade.  Perhaps a new model of crime might have been useful.  Surely, there must be some sociologist/criminologist that has a take on this.

Here is one theory that was not brought up: the population is still aging.  Older folks do less crime.  Plus more of our youth are in prison than ever before (more or less), so perhaps we just have fewer people in the right demographic out on the streets.  Which suggests a way to get crime even lower--let's imprison even more of the population.  Oh, we are running out of space, huh? The bright side is that with California being compelled to release tens of thousands of prisoners, we can test my hypothesis that rounding up all the young folk might be doing the trick.  If California's crime rate does not jump up after the 30k-40k jailed folks are released, then there might be something else going on. 

The key takeaway is that the NYT can depress us even with good news.  Well done.

My One Gripe with Iron Man 2

Minor spoiler