Tag Archives: America

A Neutral Observer Might Detect a Pattern Here

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Ijeoma Oluo, a Seattle writer, has been tweeting “Don’t Do That and They Won’t Kill You” advice since yesterday. New York Magazine helpfully provided an annotated list of the fatal encounters she’s described.

Much too often, the apparently dangerous and criminal behavior at issue seems to have been “Being in Public While Black”.

Do many cops really see black Americans as so much more lawless and threatening than the white Americans they meet up with?

Today I saw a link to the video below. It shows how unreliable direct perception can be. It’s called the McGurk Effect in honor of the scientist who discovered it. From Wikipedia:

The effect was discovered by accident when McGurk and his research assistant … asked a technician to dub a video…. while conducting a study on how infants perceive language at different developmental stages. When the video was played back, both researchers heard a third phoneme [a perceptually distinct unit of spoken language] rather than the one spoken or mouthed in the video.

A couple weeks ago, in Cleveland, two cops responded to a 911 call, which can be heard here. The person who called 911 said that someone in the park (“probably a juvenile”) was scaring people with a gun (“probably fake”). 

It isn’t clear yet what the 911 dispatcher told the two officers to look for, but the black 12-year-old with the authentic-looking pellet gun was shot as soon as they arrived on the scene. From the New York Times:

Tamir Rice was killed by a rookie Cleveland police officer who quit a suburban police force after his supervisors determined two years ago that he suffered a “dangerous loss of composure” during firearms training and was emotionally unprepared to cope with stresses of the job. The officer, Tim Loehmann, 26, shot the child within two seconds after his patrol car pulled up next to the boy.

The Cleveland police said the child, who had what turned out to be a replica gun that shoots small plastic pellets but looks like a semiautomatic pistol, was told to raise his hands, but instead reached to his waistband for the object. Surveillance video of the killing that was released last week showed, however, that the shooting happened so fast it was hard to know whether the officer issued any real warnings or whether the boy could have understood them if he did.

I wonder what the young cop who had been fired by another police department saw when he and his veteran partner drove into that park. I wonder what the more experienced officer saw. It’s possible, even likely, that they didn’t see the same thing. Whatever each of them saw, however, it’s clear that one of them shouldn’t have arrived in that park with a gun in his hand, ready to use it, given what he apparently perceived.

Republicans Are Evil (Blogging Made Easy)

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The Guardian reports:

Ohio Republicans push law to keep all details of executions secret.

They don’t want anyone, not even the courts, to know how executions are carried out in Ohio, because the gory details make capital punishment look bad.

Political Postmortem and Forecast

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Like many of us, I read some articles analyzing the recent election. None of them were very surprising. It was noted that, of the one-third of the electorate who voted, many were angry, scared old white people who don’t mirror the electorate as a whole and especially dislike our first black President; our midterm elections favor Republicans, and the electoral map was especially bad for Democrats this year; Americans insist on reelecting their own Senators and Representatives even though they hate Congress as a whole; the average voter is quite ignorant; negative advertising works; and 2016 will be better.

Of the articles I read, I thought this analysis by Andrew O’Hehir was worth sharing. It’s called “Democracy on the critical list: How do we escape this toxic political cycle?” After some painfully entertaining discussion of the election, O’Hehir concludes that “the upshot of all this is that nothing got done in the last Congress and nothing will get done in the next one, but this time the nothing will be a lot scarier to watch”.

He then asks:

Is there any plausible way out of this obsessive, recursive cycle, in which we can expect to see President Clinton 2.0 take office in January of 2017 with a feeble and ineffective Democratic majority, only to be punished for her feminist acts of treason by the resurgent angry white men in 2018, and so on, ad nauseam?

He considers four scenarios:

First, a charismatic, transformational leader will come along who can bring us together, much like some Democrats (apparently including Barack Obama himself) believed President Obama would do. You may remember this scenario from The Day the Earth Stood Still, in which the transformational leader came from another world.

THE_DAY_THE_EARTH_STOOD_STILL_SCREENSHOT_3

Second, the opposition will see the error of its ways and realize the other side was right all along. This is even less likely than scenario #1.

Third, our changing population will move our politics to the left. O’Hehir recognizes that American society is changing, but isn’t convinced our politics will change as a result. As more Hispanics do better economically, for example, they may move to the right. The same thing may happen with today’s younger voters as they grow older. (Personally, I wouldn’t rule this out. Politics tends to run in cycles and there may yet be a progressive reaction to the Age of Reagan.)

Fourth, some cataclysm will lead to the current system collapsing, leading to martial law, mass incarceration, revolution and so on. I think he’s joking when he mentions Senator Ted Cruz losing the Presidency and getting the South to secede. He also considers natural disasters and financial collapse. (One possibility he doesn’t mention is a really bad virus, like the one Obama was supposed to do something about. Its name eludes me.)

Instead of any of these alternatives, O’Hehir thinks it’s more likely that our democracy will simply fade away, as “tiny cadres of the ultra-rich squabble over control of the economy, [while] electoral politics is angrily contested over a narrow but contentious range of lifestyle issues, [driving] away all but the most committed culture warriors on either side….In due course the political stalemate between Republicans and Democrats stops mattering, stops existing and is gone with the wind”.

It’s hard to be optimistic about America’s future. O’Hehir certainly isn’t. The only answer I see is that more people have to start caring enough to pay attention to politics and actually vote. The system still allows for the government to represent the majority of Americans, but only if the majority of Americans wisely choose who their representatives will be.

To Vote Or Not To Vote – An Easy Question

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I always vote and plan to keep voting until the Republicans find a way to stop me. It’s not that I think my single vote will make a difference. It’s almost guaranteed not to. But voting is a ritual of democracy – something we do to participate in and demonstrate our support for our (ailing) system of government. Even though it’s very likely a waste of time.

From Wikipedia:

A ritual “is a sequence of activities involving gestures, words, and objects, performed in a sequestered place, and performed according to set sequence”. Rituals may be prescribed by the traditions of a community, including a religious community. Rituals are characterized by formalism, traditionalism, invariance, rule-governance, sacral symbolism and performance….

The field of ritual studies has seen a number of conflicting definitions of the term. One given by Kyriakidis is that a ritual is an outsider’s … category for a set activity (or set of actions) that, to the outsider, seems irrational, non-contiguous, or illogical.

Nevertheless, it would be nice if we practiced more majority rule in this country. Here Ezra Klein answers the question: “How can Republicans be less popular than Democrats yet headed for a landslide?”.

A reasonable person might stay home after reading that, but Mr. Klein believes “There are 9 damn good reasons to go vote today”.

Plus there’s that other important reason he doesn’t mention: It’s a ritual of democracy!

The Criminals Who Poison Our Elections

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Anybody with the sense God gave a goose understands that Republican efforts to stamp out voter fraud are really an attempt to reduce the number of Democratic voters. Here’s what’s been happening in Georgia:

[The Republican] Secretary of State publicly accused the New Georgia Project in September of submitting fraudulent registration forms. A subsequent investigation found just 25 confirmed forgeries out of more than 85,000 forms—a fraud rate of about 3/100ths of 1 percent [in decimal terms, that’s a rate of 0.000294].

Meanwhile, a group of civil rights lawyers filed a lawsuit claiming that thousands of registration forms submitted this summer still haven’t been recorded in Georgia’s voter database, “nearly all of them belonging to people of color in the Democratic-leaning regions around Atlanta, Savannah and Columbus”. State and county officials, however, said they have already processed all of the applications sent to them by the October 6 registration deadline, and anyway, there is no state law that requires properly-submitted registrations to be processed by any particular date. A local judge has declined to intervene, citing a lack of proof that the registrations have gone missing.

Then there is this detailed report from Al Jazeera America:

Election officials in 27 states, most of them Republicans, have launched a program that threatens a massive purge of voters from the rolls. Millions, especially black, Hispanic and Asian-American voters, are at risk. Already, tens of thousands have been removed in at least one battleground state, and the numbers are expected to climb…

At the heart of this voter-roll scrub is the Interstate Crosscheck program, which has generated a master list of nearly 7 million names. Officials say that these names represent legions of fraudsters who are not only registered but have actually voted in two or more states in the same election — a felony punishable by 2 to 10 years in prison.

How does this Crosscheck program work? You can appear on the list as a suspected felon if your first and last name matches the first and last name of someone who voted in another state:

The actual lists show that not only are middle names commonly mismatched and suffix discrepancies ignored [such as Jr. or Sr.], even birthdates don’t seem to have been taken into account. Moreover, Crosscheck deliberately ignores Social Security mismatches, in the few instances when the numbers are even collected.

A statistical analysis revealed that African-Americans, Hispanics and Asian-Americans appear on the list much more often than their percentage of the population would indicate, while white Americans appear less often. The reason is that there is less variety in the names of certain ethnic groups, and among those groups are African-Americans, Hispanics and Asian-Americans, groups that all tend to vote for Democrats. (By the way, you can enter your own name at the Al Jazeera America site and see if you’re right to vote may be challenged.)

If you’ve watched enough Fox News, you might conclude that the hordes of Democrats who poison our elections by illegally voting in more than one state don’t use the same birthdates or Social Security numbers when they register to vote in this state and that, so why bother matching on those criteria?

Or you might infer that America does indeed have a criminal element bent on interfering with the electoral process. Unfortunately, the most crafty and dangerous members of this criminal conspiracy are Republican officials whose job it is to administer elections.

PS — Paul Krugman wrote an excellent column the other day called “Plutocrats Against Democracy”. I suggest reading the whole thing, which isn’t very long. It ends this way:

But now you understand why there’s so much furor on the right over the alleged but actually almost nonexistent problem of voter fraud, and so much support for voter ID laws that make it hard for the poor and even the working class to cast ballots. American politicians don’t dare say outright that only the wealthy should have political rights — at least not yet. But if you follow the currents of thought now prevalent on the political right to their logical conclusion, that’s where you end up.

The truth is that a lot of what’s going on in American politics is, at root, a fight between democracy and plutocracy.

Professor Krugman is an optimist. He thinks the plutocrats haven’t already won.