Random Blogging – Page 101

Building Barriers

February 17, 2022

A few months ago, I came across an article by an anthropologist who was trying to make sense of the enthusiasm people displayed for Trump’s border wall. If I were still teaching, I’d have used the article to reinforce a couple of important lessons: (1) most issues are more complex than most of us realize, and (2) cultural attitudes are the product of multiple elements that may seem unrelated but really aren’t.

We need to connect those dots.

The anthropologist’s investigation was triggered by a conversation at a trade show.

The border’s like our back door,” a concrete salesman named Chris told me in January 2017. “You leave it open, and anyone can walk right in.” It was the day of Trump’s presidential inauguration, and we were chatting on the exhibition floor of a trade show in Las Vegas, called World of Concrete. Circular saws, cement mixers, gleaming new trucks – it was an unusual place to talk about the politics of immigration.

But the simple promise of a concrete wall between the US and Mexico had flung a business tycoon into the White House, and I wanted to understand what this was about.

Chris was a millennial from a small town in western Ohio. With a trim beard and short, sandy hair, he projected an air of casual self-sufficiency. “I don’t really like neighbors,” he quipped, speaking with a dose of wry humor about how far he chose to live from other people.

The author was perplexed by the appeal of what he termed “the fantasy of sealing off the country with a stark, symbolic barrier.” What he discovered in his subsequent investigation was that walls and barricades appeal to so many Americans because they “resonate with familiar boundaries in their daily lives.” He concluded that cultural and economic forces have operated to divide insider from outsider, fueling political polarization in ways we don’t always realize.

He focused especially on America’s ubiquitous gated communities. And when I say “ubiquitous,” the data bears me out: one out of every six American houses in a residential community is secured–gated– by community walls or fences.

Contemporary gated communities build on a century of intentional segregation and suburban white flight. Suburban interiors were designed as “escape capsules to enable their independence from the outside world”, architectural historian Andrea Vesentini has shown, built as shelters from the unpredictability of urban life. The pandemic has magnified the appeal of such distance and defense, with more features like security cameras, video doorbells and HEPA air filters built into new houses than ever before.

These histories have profoundly reshaped how Americans live in relation to each other, as much as where. So much of everyday life and leisure now takes place in secluded spaces. The front porch sessions with neighbors and passersby that once epitomized American social life have given way to more private gatherings on the backyard deck, or time with the television and other screens indoors. These changes lessen the chance for happenstanceconversation with neighbors and strangers.

There’s much more in the article, detailing the various ways today’s Americans wall themselves off from their fellow citizens. (Drive a Hummer?? Talk about separating yourself…)

I was particularly struck by the discussion of gated communities, because early in my academic career I became fascinated by the literature about social capital–especially the distinction between bonding and bridging social capital.

Social capital refers to the networks of relationships among people who live and work in a particular society. Bonding social capital contributes to the “us versus them” phenomenon so pronounced in today’s America–it refers to the “bonds” formed within a group or community. Bridging social capital–essential in a diverse society– refers to the weaker but extremely important connections between people in different social groups.

I wanted to research a “chicken and egg” question: did the people who chose to live in gated communities make that choice because they had already developed “us versus them” tendencies, or did the experience of living in such a community inculcate such attitudes? Unfortunately, I discovered there was no intellectually-honest way to conduct such research. Too many variables and much too much subjectivity…

The author of the article notes that our fractured media has deepened the existing fissures of American society, helping to shield us from exposure to uncomfortable ideas, unfamiliar people and perspectives. As he says,

There’s a deep and pernicious history at work here. Longstanding patterns of neighborhood racial segregation have inflamed the prejudice against outgroups, bolstering stereotypes…. When such divisions are reproduced at an everyday scale, the gulf between self and other widens even further, and everyone becomes a potential outsider.

As my architect husband has taught me, the built environment matters, not just aesthetically. It profoundly shapes–and reflects–the culture.

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Get Off The Couch

February 16, 2022

Today, I’m speaking to a group of women students at IUPUI. I was asked to address civic engagement. These are the remarks I plan to share….(longer than usual–sorry about that.)

___________________________–

In the blurb I sent as an introduction to this talk, I wrote that “America is in the throes of a not-so-cold Civil War. Political participation and activism have never been more important—but what do those terms mean? What is required of women who want to secure the progress that has been made, not just for women but for the diverse citizens who make up our “body politic”? What is our obligation as citizens to return the political process and government to something resembling sanity?”

Let me deconstruct that paragraph, and explain what I meant by each of those assertions.

When I say we are in the midst of a “civil war,” isn’t such an assertion hyperbole, a wild exaggeration? Actually, I don’t think so. The American Civil War was fought to defend the institution of slavery, an institution that rested upon a belief that Black people were inherently inferior. The slave owners and their White apologists may have been defeated, but their very pernicious bigotry still motivates far too many Americans.

Today, a resurgent White Christian Nationalism is driving a wide variety of destructive behaviors and encouraging the increased expression of racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia and misogyny. You can see it in the ridiculous argument that teaching accurate history is Critical Race Theory—a subject these folks couldn’t define if their lives depended on it—and can’t be allowed. We see it in efforts to bans books and in fights over what can be taught—or even discussed—in our public schools.

The progress that has permitted Blacks, women, and other minorities to advance—to take more visible seats at the civic table—has been met with grievance and hysterical resistance. The election of a Black President was a catalyst for more overt expressions of deep-seated bigotry. A significant number of White Christians tell pollsters that only White Christians can be “real Americans” and that the rest of us are here on sufferance. The people marching and chanting about being “replaced” are telegraphing their fear of losing social dominance.

Although it’s true that only a few people are actually shooting at each other—I think it is not inaccurate to say that we are engaged in a civil war over very different visions of what it means to be an American.

We women have a critical stake in this fight. Patriarchy is part and parcel of what is really an effort to resist modernity and social change, and the assault on reproductive rights is best understood as an attack on women’s equality and autonomy. You need not be “pro- abortion” to understand why the decision to carry a fetus to term must be made by the individual woman, not by the government. (As a lawyer and former ACLU director, I can tell you that the constitutional issue is not whether a woman can legally abort: the issue is who has the right to make that decision—the individual or the state?

The current use of “my body, my choice” by anti-vaxxers who are anti-choice would be humorous if it wasn’t evidence of incredible civic ignorance. In fact, the anti-vaxxers have it exactly backward: Government has an affirmative obligation to protect public health and safety—to prevent some citizens from harming others. Courts have long held that public health restrictions are legitimate and appropriate. A pregnant woman, however, poses no threat to her neighbors.)

Whether a woman calls herself pro-choice or pro-life, she needs to understand that a government that can control her body considers her a second-class citizen. Once women lose the right to make their own reproductive decisions, they open the door to loss of other hard-won rights.

America is really at an inflection point. We are experiencing an extreme relapse into tribalism, and at the same time, a number of longstanding government structures are showing their age or are otherwise under assault. The Electoral College and the filibuster have outlived any utility they may once have had; the Supreme Court has been turned into a political rather than a judicial body; gerrymandering has allowed both parties to carve out districts perceived as so safe for one party or the other that people stay home because they figure their vote doesn’t count. There is so much about our current government—not to mention our politics—that cries out for repair.

Speaking of repair–you all have a choice. You can tune in to Dancing with the Stars or the Kardashians while the planet warms, racism thrives, and American government is gridlocked and impotent. If enough of you do that, my advice would be not to reproduce, since the world your children will inhabit is likely to be a chaotic hellscape. Or you can get off the couch and engage—become an activist, and work to make things better for your children and my grandchildren.

What would that look like?

Well, you don’t have to run for office or even work on a campaign, although that would be great. There are plenty of other ways to be civically active.

One thing you can do that would make an enormous difference is helping to get out the vote. You know those gerrymandered districts I talked about? The data used to draw district lines is turnout from the preceding election. But previous turnout has been depressed by the widespread belief that the game was fixed, so that casting a dissenting vote wouldn’t make a difference. I’m here to tell you that a number of supposedly safe districts wouldn’t be safe if turnout substantially increased.

You can also work on the campaign of someone you believe is honorable, someone whose positions include fixing these systemic problems and working for a fairer, more open and inclusive society. Or you can do general “grunt work” for the political party of your choice.

But even if you absolutely hate politics, you aren’t off the hook. In the introductory blurb, I referred to citizens’ obligations—and one of those obligations is civic engagement, making a reasonable effort to improve your community. There are lots of avenues available to channel that effort: You can volunteer for a nonprofit organization that is addressing a problem that matters to you. You can tutor kids from a poor neighborhood. You can read up on American history and the values actually embedded in the Constitution and Bill of Rights, and explain what you’ve learned to people who display a lack of civic literacy. You can speak up—nicely but firmly– when you hear someone share a bigoted statement.

We are at a pivotal point in America’s trajectory. We will either surrender to the mob that wants to take the country “back”—who want to ensure that women and Jews and Muslims and people of color continue to be second class citizens—or we will come together to breathe new life into the Declaration’s vision of a country where all people have been created equal.

My generation has really made a mess of things. Yours, unfortunately, has been handed the job of fixing it. If those of you on this Zoom call are anything like the students I taught, though, you’re up to the task.

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Hitting The Ball Out Of The Park

February 15, 2022

Despite the headline, this isn’t about George Will’s love of baseball.

I’m not a fan of Will…and that’s putting it mildly. Even when I agree with him, I find his intellectual arrogance off-putting. But fair is fair–a recent column in which he compares Trump to Boris Johnson is delicious.

As people who follow news from “across the pond” probably know, Johnson is currently in danger of losing a vote of confidence. It turns out that, at the same time he was sternly lecturing Brits on the necessity of adhering to strict COVID restrictions, he was ignoring those restrictions and partying. A lot.

Apparently, he shares Trump’s belief that rules are for the “little people,’ and don’t apply to him.

Will’s column addresses the multiple characteristics they share. Both, for example, are inveterate liars.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson might survive, for a number of reasons, one being that he, like two of the five most recent U.S. presidents (Bill Clinton and Donald Trump), has the awesome strength that comes from being incapable of embarrassment. Also, to his critics he can fairly respond: “What did you expect?”

He has never disguised his belief that in any situation, truthfulness is merely one option among many, and not to be preferred over more advantageous or just more entertaining choices. As Winston Churchill said of another politician (evidently Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin), he “occasionally had stumbled over the truth, but hastily picked himself up and hurried on as if nothing had happened.”…

Writing in the Financial Times, Rory Stewart, a former Conservative cabinet minister now teaching at Yale University, says Johnson “is a terrible prime minister and a worse human being. But he is not a monster newly sprung from a rent between this world and the next.” A majority of Conservative MPs voted to make him prime minister after “thirty years of celebrity made him famous for his mendacity, indifference to detail, poor administration, and inveterate betrayal of every personal commitment.” This, Stewart says, is because British culture “remains trapped by the idea that politics is a game.”

Will notes that “mortification loves company” so Americans should feel marginally better from the fact that England has produced a head of government as “shambolic and careless” about truth as our recent president.

However, Will identifies a “deflating difference” between Great Britain and the U.S. Johnson’s net favorability rating has fallen from +29 percent in April 2020 to -52 percent in January 2022, while those Americans who favor Trump “are bound to him as with hoops of steel, come what may.”

In a felicitous and absolutely accurate phrase, we are told that “total indifference to evidence is today’s ‘American exceptionalism.’”

There is more than a little truth to that conclusion, and it goes beyond the willingness of far too many Americans to ignore the plentiful evidence that Trump is bat-shit crazy. Faced with 900,000 deaths, including those of friends, family and neighbors, large numbers of Americans still insist either that COVID is a hoax or that vaccinations are more dangerous. Faced with rapidly escalating weather anomalies and literally mountains of scientific evidence, they continue to dismiss the “myth” of climate change. When it comes to economic policy, they cling to their belief that a higher minimum wage will depress job creation in the face of significant and growing evidence to the contrary.

Despite official FBI reports that the massive Black Lives Matter demonstrations that followed the murder of George Floyd were 95% peaceful, they continue to insist that mobs rampaged through the streets looting stores and burning cities.

Despite copious video evidence of the violence of the January 6th insurrection, they defend the lunatics assaulting police officers and vandalizing the nation’s Capitol, claiming they were engaged in “legitimate political discourse.”

I could go on, and most of you reading this could add examples of your own.

This stubborn refusal even to consider evidence, or be swayed by it, has become the only real platform of today’s Republican Party–a party whose base has adopted as its informal motto “Don’t confuse me with the facts.”

Even the Brits who really thought Brexit was a good idea have responded to the evidence of Boris Johnson’s malfeasance. Only in America are members of one of our major political parties absolutely impervious to facts, logic and evidence.

American exceptionalism indeed…..

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Men, Women And Politics

February 14, 2022

What was that book about women being from Venus and men being from Mars? Recent polling data suggests that tongue-in-cheek title may reflect real differences. (And no, I don’t mean “differences” in the “viva la difference!” sense.)

Thomas Edsall’s columns in the New York Times are always heavily indebted to academic research. In a recent one, he considered what research tells us about the political gender gap. Here’s his lede:

In one of the most revealing studies in recent years, a 2016 survey of 137,456 full-time, first-year students at 184 colleges and universities in the United States, the U.C.L.A. Higher Education Research Institute found “the largest-ever gender gap in terms of political leanings: 41.1 percent of women, an all-time high, identified themselves as liberal or far left, compared to 28.9 percent of men.”

While there is a lot of research confirming the existence of that gender gap, a problem with surveys of this sort becomes apparent from Edsall’s description of another poll. This one asked the following question: “If you had to choose, which do you think is more important, a diverse and inclusive society or protecting free speech rights.”

Male students preferred protecting free speech over an inclusive and diverse society by a decisive 61 to 39. Female students took the opposite position, favoring an inclusive, diverse society over free speech by 64 to 35.

There are all kinds of things wrong with this question, not least the absence of a third option that would allow respondents to indicate they found these values to be equally important. But the biggest problem with using this framing to demonstrate that men and women are politically different is what we know about levels of civic literacy.

I am absolutely confident that few of those surveyed really understand how communications are protected by the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment, and against whom.

And that brings me to a persistent gripe I have about Americans’ love of labeling opinions “left” and “right” based on questions of this sort. Not only have the definitions of liberal and conservative changed rather markedly over the past decades (I have the same basic political philosophy that made people label me “very conservative” in 1980, and now I am routinely identified as liberal/pinko/socialist), but a number of policy preferences don’t neatly fall into a black and white, liberal/conservative framework.

I will concede that–at this time– there is a significant political gender gap, and it seems to be growing. Differences in party identification have been evident since the early 1980s, and as Edsall says, we can now see that “the political engagement of women is having a major impact on the social order.”

When Edsall asked a couple of scholars to be more specific about the nature of that impact, most responded that most women are less violent and warlike than most men.

“We find that the evidence is consistent with the view that the increasing enfranchisement of women, not merely the rise of democracy itself, is the cause of the democratic peace.”

Put another way, “the divergent preferences of the sexes translate into a pacifying effect when women’s influence on national politics grows” and “suffrage plays a direct and important role in generating more peaceful interstate relations by altering the political calculus of democratic leaders.”…

There are broad value differences between men and women. Women score higher on values defined by care, fairness, benevolence, and protecting the welfare of others, reflecting greater empathy and preference for cooperative social relations.

The column highlighted gender differences with respect to the use of force–differences in how the sexes approach conflict and competition, and how, as more women have entered the political realm, the lived experience of those women has contributed to what scholars term “the feminization” of government and politics.

I don’t want to quibble with the scholarship displayed in this column, which is sound, but permit me a caveat.

As with all studies and polls, these conclusions are at best snapshots–accurate (assuming that they are) at a particular point in time. As women enter more fully into national life, including political life, we tend to get more like the men with whom we interact.( I’ve run across some pretty belligerent/warlike women…)

And of course, this goes for the men, too, who benefit significantly from interacting with us. (I don’t like the term “feminize”–sounds wimpy. How about “humanize”?)

I don’t think women are necessarily more “liberal.” I think our life experiences may have made at least some of us a bit more human--and I think we’re making you guys a bit more human too.

And unfortunately, there’s probably not much of a gap when it comes to the ability to accurately describe the operation of the Free Speech Clause…

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Those Dueling Realities

February 10, 2022

News literacy matters more than ever–and we live at a time when it is harder and harder to tell truth from fiction.

One example from the swamps of the Internet. The link will take you to a doctored photo of actor Sylvester Stallone wearing a t-shirt that says “4 Useless Things: woke people, COVID-19 vaccines, Dr. Anthony Fauci and President Joe Biden.” In the original, authentic photo, Stallone is wearing a plain dark t-shirt.

The News Literacy Project, which issues ongoing reports of these sorts of visual misrepresentation, says this about the Stallone t-shirt.

Digitally manipulating photos of celebrities to make it look like they endorse a provocative political message — often on t-shirts — is extremely common. Such posts are designed to resonate with people who have strong partisan views and may share the image without pausing to consider whether it’s authentic. It’s also likely that some of these fakes are marketing ploys to boost sales of t-shirts that are easily found for sale online. For example, this reply to an influential Twitter account includes the same doctored image and a link to a product page where the shirt can be purchased.

It’s bad enough that there are literally thousands of sites using text to promote lies. But people have a well-known bias toward visual information (“Who am I going to believe, you or my lying eyes?””Seeing is believing.” Etc.) With the availability of “deep fake” technologies, the ability to doctor photographs has become easier, more widespread, and much harder to detect.

The Guardian recently reported on the phenomenon, beginning with a definition.

Have you seen Barack Obama call Donald Trump a “complete dipshit”, or Mark Zuckerberg brag about having “total control of billions of people’s stolen data”, or witnessed Jon Snow’s moving apology for the dismal ending to Game of Thrones? Answer yes and you’ve seen a deepfake. The 21st century’s answer to Photoshopping, deepfakes use a form of artificial intelligence called deep learning to make images of fake events, hence the name deepfake. Want to put new words in a politician’s mouth, star in your favourite movie, or dance like a pro? Then it’s time to make a deepfake.

As the article noted, a fair percentage of deep-fake videos are pornographic. A firm called “Deeptrace” identified 15,000 altered videos online in September 2019, and a “staggering 96%” were pornographic. Ninety-nine percent of those “mapped faces from female celebrities on to porn stars.”

As new techniques allow unskilled people to make deepfakes with a handful of photos, fake videos are likely to spread beyond the celebrity world to fuel revenge porn. As Danielle Citron, a professor of law at Boston University, puts it: “Deepfake technology is being weaponised against women.” Beyond the porn there’s plenty of spoof, satire and mischief.

But it isn’t just about videos. Deepfake technology can evidently create convincing phony photos from scratch. The report noted that a supposed Bloomberg journalist, “Maisy Kinsley”, who was a deepfake, had even been given profiles on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Another LinkedIn fake, “Katie Jones”, claimed to work at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, but is thought to be a deepfake created for a foreign spying operation.

Audio can be deepfaked too, to create “voice skins” or ”voice clones” of public figures. Last March, the chief of a UK subsidiary of a German energy firm paid nearly £200,000 into a Hungarian bank account after being phoned by a fraudster who mimicked the German CEO’s voice. The company’s insurers believe the voice was a deepfake, but the evidence is unclear. Similar scams have reportedly used recorded WhatsApp voice messages.

No wonder levels of trust have declined so precipitously! The Guardian addressed the all-important question: how can you tell whether a visual image is real or fake? It turns out, it’s very hard–and getting harder.

In 2018, US researchers discovered that deepfake faces don’t blink normally. No surprise there: the majority of images show people with their eyes open, so the algorithms never really learn about blinking. At first, it seemed like a silver bullet for the detection problem. But no sooner had the research been published, than deepfakes appeared with blinking. Such is the nature of the game: as soon as a weakness is revealed, it is fixed.

Governments, universities and tech firms are currently funding research that will detect deepfakes, and we can only hope that research is successful–and soon. The truly insidious consequence of a widespread inability to tell whether an image is or is not authentic would be the creation of a “zero-trust society, where people cannot, or no longer bother to, distinguish truth from falsehood.”

Deepfakes are just one more element of an information environment that encourages us to construct, inhabit and defend our own, preferred “realities.”

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