According to this 2016 Pew Research, racial discrimination is far more nuanced that one would assume based on the rhetoric from recent protests. This study contains nuanced stats on gender too. Many charts to consider in this article, including this one:
Cognitive linguist Steven Pinker has had an illustrious career as a teacher and prolific author. His politics have often leaned to the left. None of this immunizes him from baseless attacks by hundreds of people who apparently don't see any value in Pinker's willingness to contribute his expertise to national conversations on critically relevant issues. They are unwilling to give fair readings to Pinker's statements. They also appear to be threatened by Pinker's use of germane statistics in order to shed light on complex claims involving police behavior and racism.
Here is the opening paragraph of a recent letter signed by almost 500 people, many of them grad students and undergrads, then sent to the Linguistic Society of America:
In reaction to this letter, Jerry Coyne, eminent Professor of Professor of Ecology & Evolution, concludes as follows at his website: "I’m really steamed when a group of misguided zealots tries to damage someone’s career, and does so dishonestly."
Linguist John McWhorter has also indicated his enthusiastic support of Steven Pinker:
Here is Jerry Coyne's full blog post, setting forth the numerous false accusations against Pinker coupled with the evidence clearly demonstrating that these accusations are false. Coyne's post is titled "The Purity Posse pursues Pinker."
I invite you to read both sides of this dispute. I suspect you will be outraged at the way Pinker is being treated. You might also wonder how it is that hundreds of people who claim to be highly knowledgeable in linguistics are such inept readers. The phrase "social conflagration" might come to mind as you review the evidence. The name Robespierre might periodically pop into your thought process.
Celebrating our freedom while 41 people are shot in one night in NYC.
The headline from the Daily News: "41 shot overnight in NYC with at least 4 dead in citywide explosion of gun violence." Then I noticed this headline: "16 Dead, at Least 67 Wounded in Chicago Shootings This Weekend."
Maybe the headlines should include the phrase: "Bullets: The other Pandemic." Epidemic shootings are terrorizing numerous city residents and this is absolutely unacceptable. Do our politicians not care or is the problem that they are pretending that there are no solutions?
There is a cycle of violence in many cities that begins with financially struggling families who are forced to send their kids to shitty schools. Then the cycle moves to 1.3M students who drop out each year. Stir in the lack of comprehensive and free birth control so that people can plan when they want to have families.
Unplanned pregnancy and childbearing are also implicated in the failure of many young women to finish their college education. Research shows that 61 percent of women who have children in community college don’t finish their degree, and less than two percent of teen mothers who have a baby before age 18 get a college degree by age 30.Then comes street violence and deaths and then to prisons, where we've decided that the best thing we can think of doing is to park people in prison for 10 or 20 years each, before we dump them onto the streets, insisting that they can fend for themselves even though many employers want nothing to do with people with criminal records, especially violent criminal records. Our politicians claim that it would cost too much money to improve things, even though the prison-industrial complex is extraordinarily expensive: $33K per year per prisoner on average.
I cannot think of a better formula for hurting adults and children than the above formula.
There doesn't seem to be any political will to fund new creative types of interventions into any of these steps. It's especially frustrating that we won't fund (and in fact, we've been cutting) interventions at the early childhood step even though that is the best place to invest. That, in fact, was one of the first posts I wrote for Dangerous Intersection. Still true today and still being ignored today. Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.
"Black Lives Matter" is a simple looking phrase, but it functions as a Trojan Horse. Many people don't understand that there is a big difference between A) stating the obvious fact that Black lives do, indeed, matter and B) embracing the controversial political agenda of the Black Lives Matter organizations. Just because one believes A doesn't necessarily mean that one believes B, but this conflation flies under the radars of many people who embrace both A and B even though the only part that they have carefully considered is A.
Consider this excerpt from a recent news article about Nick Buckley, a man who has spent many years of his life helping desperate others through a charity he founded in 2011, Mancunian Way, based in Manchester, England. The problem started when Nick dared to write an article:
In the article the 52-year-old started by saying: “Of course black lives matter. Let’s get this obvious point over and done with at the beginning”, but went on to criticise the political agenda of the organisation BLM which sought to repudiate the values expressed by Martin Luther King.
I am sympathetic to Nick Buckley's clearly stated concerns. Like Buckley, I am concerned that some of the political ends of BLM sharply conflict with the wisdom of Martin Luther King. The fact that Nick Buckley dared to speak up about this critical issue cost him his job and that is a tragedy.
In some circles, the phrase "Black Lives Matter" has taken on the status of an unassailable fundamentalist religion, which is extremely unfortunate. Whenever this phrase is uttered, we should be asking whether the speaker is asserting A, B or both A and B. Whereas A is self-evident truth to me, B is a complex set of ideas, many of them ill-defined and/or problematic.
Every idea, especially every political idea, should be open to vigorous criticism and discussion. There should be no exceptions, for the reasons carefully stated by John Stuart Mill in his work, On Liberty. To every claim I respond: "Let's test it." To the extent that any ideas are declared to be sacrosanct, off-limits to discussion and criticism based on science, statistical analyses and the diverse wisdom collected by thinking people from the beginning of time, our democracies are dead.
Today I first learned about proto-feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. I can barely fathom how any person could muster the courage to take such a strong moral stand in 1792. You don't need much imagination to understand the abuse she took as a result of writing her book. History is filled with many such "insane" ideas that eventually become common sense. From Wikipedia:
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects (1792), written by the 18th-century British proto-feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, is one of the earliest works of feminist philosophy. In it, Wollstonecraft responds to those educational and political theorists of the 18th century who believed that women should not receive a rational education. . . . Wollstonecraft maintains that women are human beings deserving of the same fundamental rights as men, and that treating them as mere ornaments or property for men undermines the moral foundations of society. . . . She launched a broad attack against sexual double standards, indicting men for encouraging women to indulge in excessive emotion. Wollstonecraft hurried to complete the work in direct response to ongoing events; she intended to write a more thoughtful second volume but died before completing it.