It’s getting chilly, so Steve is spending more time in his penthouse in the cat tree:
Talk amongst yourselves.
Archives for 2014
I Got Your White Privilege Right Here
Good on this woman:
If the police were on your front lawn, questioning someone you know about a call they received, what would you do? If you’re Jody Westby, you defend your people. And you do it sternly, with an air of authority only reserved for people who perceive themselves as having as much power as the police.
It’s all on display in the above video, in which Westby comes to the aid of an elderly black man who has been stopped by a pair of police officers. The level of comfort with which she communicates with the officers due to her knowledge of the law and lack of fear of retribution offers a lesson about how the intersection of race, class and privilege can impact the interactions between police officers and some residents.
To begin, this is all taking place on Foxhall Crescent. If you’re not familiar, that’s an area of tony cul-de-sacs, tucked between the Palisades and Wesley Heights. To call it upscale would be an understatement.
This reminds me of the piece a month or so back by Emily Bazelon, in which she described why she is hesitant to call the police on black people, because a lot of the time (see John Crawford) it could be a death sentence for something innocuous. And having a command of the law is definitely an added plus, notwithstanding the fact that she has the right skin tone.
BTW- the “Now get out of our neighborhood and find the 4600 block” at the end was, I am 100% sure, accompanied by a mental “BEEOOCH!” She’s dealt with these types before. More of this, please.
Open Thread: The Dunbar Number & the Internet Village
Maria Konnikova, in the New Yorker, on “The Limits of Friendship“:
Robin Dunbar came up with his eponymous number almost by accident. The University of Oxford anthropologist and psychologist (then at University College London) was trying to solve the problem of why primates devote so much time and effort to grooming. In the process of figuring out the solution, he chanced upon a potentially far more intriguing application for his research. At the time, in the nineteen-eighties, the Machiavellian Intelligence Hypothesis (now known as the Social Brain Hypothesis) had just been introduced into anthropological and primatology discourse. It held that primates have large brains because they live in socially complex societies: the larger the group, the larger the brain. Thus, from the size of an animal’s neocortex, the frontal lobe in particular, you could theoretically predict the group size for that animal.
Looking at his grooming data, Dunbar made the mental leap to humans. “We also had humans in our data set so it occurred to me to look to see what size group that relationship might predict for humans,” he told me recently. Dunbar did the math, using a ratio of neocortical volume to total brain volume and mean group size, and came up with a number. Judging from the size of an average human brain, the number of people the average person could have in her social group was a hundred and fifty. Anything beyond that would be too complicated to handle at optimal processing levels. For the last twenty-two years, Dunbar has been “unpacking and exploring” what that number actually means—and whether our ever-expanding social networks have done anything to change it… (In reality, it’s a range: a hundred at the low end and two hundred for the more social of us.)…
As constant use of social media has become the new normal, however, people have started challenging the continued relevance of Dunbar’s number: Isn’t it easier to have more friends when we have Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to help us to cultivate and maintain them?… Yet, when researchers tried to determine whether virtual networks increase our strong ties as well as our weak ones, they found that, for now, the essential Dunbar number, a hundred and fifty, has remained constant. When Bruno Gonçalves and his colleagues at Indiana University at Bloomington looked at whether Twitter had changed the number of relationships that users could maintain over a six-month period, they found that, despite the relative ease of Twitter connections as opposed to face-to-face one, the individuals that they followed could only manage between one and two hundred stable connections. When the Michigan State University researcher Nicole Ellison surveyed a random sample of undergraduates about their Facebook use, she found, while that their median number of Facebook friends was three hundred, they only counted an average of seventy-five as actual friends…
… So what happens if you’re raised from a young age to see virtual interactions as akin to physical ones? “This is the big imponderable,” Dunbar said. “We haven’t yet seen an entire generation that’s grown up with things like Facebook go through adulthood yet.” Dunbar himself doesn’t have a firm opinion one way or the other about whether virtual social networks will prove wonderful for friendships or ultimately diminish the number of satisfying interactions one has. “I don’t think we have enough evidence to argue either way,” he said…
It’s a really interesting article and you should read the whole thing before judging it based on my clip. But I’ll offer another piece of anec-data: When the Spousal Unit asked me how many people were actually reading my posts here, I immediately replied that I recognized “somewhere around a hundred-fifty regular commentors” out of a floating pool of perhaps five hundred nyms…
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Today in Being Black in America
A teenager in Fuquay-Varina, N.C., was allegedly pepper-sprayed in the face by police Monday who mistook him for a burglar in the home of his white foster family, reported television station WTVD.
A neighbor reportedly alerted police to a break-in after seeing 18-year-old DeShawn Currie walk into the home. Currie has lived there with his white foster parents Ricky and Stacy Tyler and their three younger children since they moved to Fuquay-Varina in July, reported WTVD.
Three police officers responded to the alleged break-in and entered the home, surprising Currie.
“They was like, ‘Put your hands on the door,'” Currie said. “I was like, ‘For what? This is my house.’ I was like, ‘Why are y’all in here?'”
Currie told the TV station that he got upset when officers pointed to photos of his three younger siblings and noted that he wasn’t pictured. After arguing with the police that he was in his own home, the police allegedly pepper-sprayed him in the face, according to WTVD.
When Stacy Tyler got home, Currie was being treated in the driveway by emergency medical services. Tyler reportedly cleared up the confusion with the police officers, but the whole family has been affected by the incident.
***The police also told the TV station that the neighborhood has recently been the target of criminal activity.
And the criminal activity is armed thugs breaking into houses and pepper spraying the residents. On the upside, they didn’t shoot him.
Fresh from the “NO SCREAMING EAGLE SHIT” Files
They needed a study for this, apparently:
States that stiffened their voter identification laws saw drops in election turnout, with disproportionate effect on blacks and younger people, according to a nonpartisan congressional study released Wednesday.
As of June, 33 states had enacted laws obligating voters to show a photo ID at the polls, the study said. Republicans say that requirement will reduce fraud, but Democrats insist the laws are a GOP effort to reduce Democratic turnout on Election Day.
The report by the Government Accountability Office was released less than a month before elections that will determine which party controls Congress.
The study found that election turnout in Kansas and Tennessee — which tightened voter ID requirements between the 2008 and 2012 elections — dropped more steeply than it did in four states that didn’t change their identification requirements.
The report found that in those two states, reduced voter turnout was sharper among people aged 18 to 23 than among those from 44 to 53. The drop was also more pronounced among blacks than whites, Hispanics or Asians.
Young people and blacks generally tend to support Democratic candidates.
That’s why Republicans are moving the heavens and earth to try to pass and enforce voter id laws. Their base is shrinking and dying off, so they are trying to keep the blahs and other minorities from voting.
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Wednesday Evening Open Thread
Here’s a view from an ancient Calusa shell mound overlooking Tampa Bay.
If you squint really hard, you can just make out the Sunshine Skyway Bridge in the background. Open thread.
Ebola Patients…And Other Concealed Carriers
As of October 5 — the period covered by the World Health Organization’s latest Ebola Situation Report [PDF] — there have been 8,033 cases of Ebola identified, with 3,879 deaths. The one US Ebola death isn’t in that total yet — it will show up in next week’s report.
Using 2011 numbers (I can’t dig up more recent CDC data), forty weeks worth of gun deaths in the US would produce almost 25,000 men, women, kids, dead by homicide, dead in domestic battles, dead by accident, dead of the misery that leads to self-murder. [Trigger warning: troubling image below the fold]
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