Here it is, our regular Friday diet of suggested readings for the weekend:
Live long and prosper: how Star Trek challenged racial and gender stereotypes.
What do you really want? And how do you know that?
The persistence myth, despite evidence, of the placebo effect.
Whole Foods and the failure of (libertarian inspired) so-called conscious capitalism.
The complicated history, and potential current relevance, of the Frankfurt School.
Frank Bruni gets it exactly right on the latest instance of “campus inquisition.”
Footnotes to Plato 
On the Bruni article, I know I am going to draw the ire of some here by ssying this, but I am going to say it anyway: We may have to accept that writing indignant articles in the New York Times is not going to make this problem go away.
Maybe the next time someone writes on this subject they could begin ¤
“Here, in detail, is what we should do and how we should do it…”
LikeLike
Star Trek piece repeats a myth. It was NOT the first interracial kiss on TV. In America? Yes. But the British were first overall. http://www.cnn.com/2015/11/20/world/first-interracial-kiss-on-tv/index.html
And, I remember how shocked liberals were to find Whole Foods’ head is libertarian.
LikeLiked by 2 people
I didn’t understand the article on Placebo. If giving someone sugar pills is no better or worse than surgery, then give them sugar pills. At least they won’t get an MRSA infection. I agree that there are a million ways to screw up a clinical trial and it’s very difficult to prevent patients from figuring out they’re getting placebo.
Consider this recent article about “financial toxicity” where cancer patients use nostrums of minimal efficacy and not only do they have to deal with the noxious side effects, but they’re driven into bankruptcy:
https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/managing-care/financial-toxicity-hp-pdq
It should be up to the Pharmaceutical Companies to prove that their products are better than placebo, not the other way round.
LikeLike
It’s ironic — or perhaps typical — that just as the left should be the naturally dominant party in the US, due to demographics, it is so busily engaged in simultaneously alienating and destroying its natural allies that it has rendered itself unviable in national politics. Combine that with the tendency to cluster in metropolitan areas and our electoral system — which isn’t going anywhere — and Democrats may find themselves in the electoral wilderness for a generation.
They’ve certainly alienated me, and I’m a classical liberal.
LikeLike
I’m not surprised that Whole Foods is failing. It had a good number of missteps along the way. It was accused of overcharging customers in a number of states. In California, e.g., it was guilty of the following: “Problems included failing to deduct the weight of containers when ringing up fresh food, putting smaller amounts into packages than the weight stated on the label, and selling items by the piece instead of by the pound, as required by law.” No wonder it was renamed “Whole Paycheck”, and consumers have begun to take their grocery shopping else.
A term like “conscious capitalism” is just another meaningless euphemism, akin to Bush’s “compassionate capitalism”. Mackey’s “virtuous feedback loop” sounds suspiciously like Alan Greenspan’s “self-correcting [financial] markets”, which were only “corrected” after taxpayer funded massive bailouts of the U.S. banking system. We might as well get rid of all criminals laws, because of the self-correction built into society..
I fear that some of the so-called capitalist “solutions” to climate change will fail because they they rely on capitalist mechanisms (taxes, cost, markets, etc.) rather than challenge the system itself. I know many think that a little capitalism is a good thing . . . but it doesn’t stay little, or strive for symbiosis.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Bruni wrote “Weinstein said in an email to an event organizer that he saw ‘a huge difference between a group or coalition deciding to voluntarily absent themselves from a shared space in order to highlight their vital and underappreciated roles’ and that same group ‘encouraging another group to go away.’
‘The first is a forceful call to consciousness,’ he wrote. ‘The second is a show of force, and an act of oppression in and of itself.’ He added that ‘on a college campus, one’s right to speak — or to be — must never be based on skin color.'”
If Weinstein really thought the campus was a shared space, he’d have no problem with one part of the sharers using the campus for a day. The Day of Absence was about a day dedicated to discussion of racism by the people most directly affected. Weinstein’s conviction the proper course was for them to leave really does imply he doesn’t see them as sharing the campus. The only real questions about the event is whether this kind of symbolic event is genuinely useful, and whether there really has been intimidation. I find it hard to believe that there really were students upset over a good excuse to blow off classes, although I am afraid I can believe there are students—and faculty like Weinstein—who are upset at the prospect of “them” taking over “our” campus, even if only for a day. And frankly, the likelihood of the “equity/justification explanation” providing a serious obstacle to fairness seems negligible. It really sounds as though Weinstein feels awfully sensitive about reverse discrimination against white people. I’m not so sure the students don’t have Weinstein’s number. Which I suppose asks the third question, is this kind of thing really an effective way of dealing with reactionary professors?
There’s a phrase, “moral panic,” about something everyone is supposed to get all in a frenzy about. In times past, it’s been about witches, or Communist subversives, or Satanic cults sacrificing babies, or pedophile rings with vast conspiratorial powers to cover up their crimes. The reasonable question here, is this a moral panic about Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution student “inquisitions?” Bruni, who thinks it’s Weinstein who’s being reasonable, gets it wrong.
On another note, attributing the placebo effect to a confounding correlation between improved behavior motivated by positive feelings induced by the placebo, and better health, does present the problem that there are widespread social prejudices that blame the ill for their illness (whether a punishment from God or Nature,) and specific economic interests on the part of insurers. The article is suspiciously vague on whether it’s pushing the confounding correlation explanation, or whether it’s really committing to the nonexistence. The thing is, you can’t do both. If the placebo effect does not exist, there is no positive behavioral effect either.
LikeLike
Steven,
I think the point was that the students were pretending white students and faculty leave the campus, essentially kicking them out for a day. That’s not sharing, and it’s entirely uncalled for. Not to mention that it backfires because you alienate strong allies.
LikeLike
The idea that anyone thinks it’s a good idea to categorically request that an entire racial group — “whites” — should leave campus in a liberal society is so bizarre, so wild, so far out, that it just amazes me.
Talk about Exhibit A. Keep going on like that and you won’t win a national election for 50 years.
Wow. Just wow.
LikeLiked by 1 person
And calling Weinstein a “reactionary” is like a weird parody. If you’ve watched any interviews with the man, you’d know he was a pretty far left progressive.
Talk about eating your own. Are you actually interested in having any allies at all? Or do you just want to posture and virtue signal for its own sake?
The most right wing reactionaries couldn’t invent a parody of a leftist that would be more outlandish than the self-image these people are projecting now.
LikeLike
One point about the Star Trek piece and the kiss between Kirk and Uhura–in the context of the episode aliens controlled their actions through a kind of telepathic puppeteering, thus forcing the kiss. No doubt that made it easier for network censors, and may even have been seen as a political backlash statement about civil rights legislation “forcing” interracial relationships.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Exactly what Dan says, and why I think Bruni has got it right. Calling people on your side “reactionaries” and engaging in actions and talk that alienates the people on your side is extremely unwise, to say the least.
LikeLike
Alan,
Indeed, I had the same thought when watching that scene again a few years ago. The fact remains, though, that Star Trek was groundbreakingly progressive in its time, and by design. Gene Roddenberry was trying to imagine a better society at the same time as using many episodes to caricature the negative aspects of our own.
LikeLiked by 2 people
The video which was linked in the article has been taken down so I can’t get a feel of how many students we are talking about here. The video of the Yale incident is described as dozens of students encircling Christakis, shrieking. But actually there is just one girl who is shrieking, the rest seem to be milling around, coming and going. So I wonder about exaggeration here. “The Left” are not the Borg, there is no hive mind. These are college kids who will graduate, get good jobs and probably start voting Republican soon.
The college themselves say that Weinstein’s employment or right to speak out have not been infringed and deny that any white person has been asked to absent themselves from the campus. Here is their statement on the matter: http://evergreen.edu/news/update-safety-equity-and-free-speech-evergreen
LikeLike
I am not sure how Weinstein’s reaction and it was a reaction (doesn’t that make him “reactionary”) to this helped. How was his language any less alienating? It is a problem as soon as we talk about us vs. them. I also notice that he went on Fox News and wrote and op-ed in the WSJ. If there are sides, whose side is he really on?
LikeLike
Valerian: “We might as well get rid of all criminals laws, because of the self-correction built into society..”
An excellent and concise expression of conservative voodoo.
“I know many think that a little capitalism is a good thing . . . but it doesn’t stay little, or strive for symbiosis.”
We’ve gotten so used to the communism/capitalism dichotomy that we tend to treat them as somehow parallel, equivalent, and rival political/economic systems. Communism was invented by Marx et al as a theory, but capitalism just grew, over a period of centuries. Perhaps it would be better just to call it “economics” and define it as “what works,” so that attempts to modify the procedure wouldn’t be regarded as heretical.
LikeLiked by 2 people
This reminds me of the hysteria of the word ‘nigger’. People (e.g., my step granddaughter) get up set if you say even something like ‘Mark Furman called OJ a nigger’. Saying “Mark Furman called OJ the n-word’ seems silly and does not get across what a racist he was and why you might not trust his testimony.
You should never call anybody a ‘nigger’, but making it forbidden to even say it gives the word too much power.
I avoid saying ‘fuck’ too often, so it retains its power when I say it.
There was a book called ‘the student as nigger’ that made the rounds on the ‘left’. That was an inappropriate use of the word — it’s like call every right-winger a ‘Hitler’. The history of ‘nigger’ is nothing like the annoyances ‘suffered’ by college students from in loco parentis.
https://smile.amazon.com/Student-as-Nigger-Jerry-Farber/dp/0671772384/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1497027401&sr=8-1&keywords=the+student+as+nigger
Calling angry over-the-top protest an ‘inquisition’ is over-the-top too. Being yelled at by a bunch of students is not comparable to being tortured or burned to death by the Inquisition.
LikeLiked by 2 people
I have seen about three videos so far. Weinstein actually gets quite a lot of time to talk. At one stage he says “Don’t you want to hear my answer?” and maybe three or four say “No”. Some gets the chant going about racist professors have to go, but there are maybe six or seven voices joining in. You can see other students’ lips aren’t moving.
In general the meeting with the President is pretty calm – some raised voices but not more than you would expect with a group interaction where some feelings are running high. They are college kids.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Alan: Even as it was, the episode was banned throughout the South. So they were absolutely right to soften it a bit. No point in pushing the message in a manner that makes it impossible for anyone to hear it.
LikeLike
The Frankfurt School left behind a mixed legacy, especially because of Marcuse’s involvement in the Cultural Revolution of the ’60s. But they also were capable of brilliant insights, brilliantly written, and proved prophetic of the coming of what we now experience as the Post-Modern. Certainly having a Reality TV host as President realizes all of their worst fears and validates many of their social criticisms.
Walton’s essay works as a pretty good post-card introduction to the school and its legacy.
LikeLike
Might Daniel Kahneman been wrong about something? Very interesting. Perhaps, in sports, the “hot hand’ actually exists. http://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/page/presents-19573519/heating-fire-klay-thompson-truth-hot-hand-nba
LikeLike
Michael,
I wrote an editorial for the WSJ recently: http://tinyurl.com/y8ndg5p5. Does that put me on the “wrong team”?
LikeLiked by 1 person
Massimo, I completely agree on Star Trek’s cultural influence under Roddenberry’s guiding hand. It’s not unlike the pop culture influence Will and Grace had in pushing LBGT issues into a more normalized moral terrain.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I used to use Barry Bonds an example of regression to the mean. Turns out he was taking steroids — so indeed the hot hand exist in situations.
LikeLike
Hi Bradley,
Sugar pills should not be compared to surgery, at least in the context of most surgeries. If you have cholecystitis (= inflamed gallbladder), no amount of sugar pills nor “positive thinking” can substitute for a laparoscopic surgery — cholescystectomy — removal of the gallbladder.
The surgeries the article does mention are arthroscopic surgeries for osteoarthritis. Osteoarthritis can’t be cured — it is just “wear-and-tear” on the joints. Sometimes a knee arthroscopy does relieve some pain. But consider another common orthopedic surgery — ACL (anterior cruciate ligament) reconstruction. The only way to treat or cure the instability of the knee joint is through use of a graft to reconstruct the ACL. Again, sugar pills and/or positive thinking will not produce any benefit to someone with a torn ACL.
Infection rates for most surgeries are around 1%. The risk is clearly worth the benefit in most surgeries. VRSA — vancomycin resistant staph aureus displaced MRSA infections some time ago. And some newer bug may have replaced VRSA by now. Bacteria keep evolving.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Wow, you guys live in a different universe than the one I occupy. No wonder our politics is so divided. We literally perceive the world entirely differently.
Robin, I’ve been teaching since 1993. Your perceptions of what’s going on on campuses and the claim that it’s exaggerated is simply and categorically contrary to my own experience, and I have taught in schools from inner city New York to the lower Midwest, with probably close to 10,000 students passing through my classrooms in that time.
What is going on now has not been seen since the 1960s. Unlike the 1960’s, however, the students today are a thousandfold more privileged. They do not face being sent to Vietnam. They are not being shot dead at Kent State. They are not having the crap beaten out of them at Stonewall. They are decades and decades beyond the race riots, assassinations, and social turmoil of that decade. The legal segregation. The busing. The days when the only women in offices were secretaries.
Frankly, they are a bunch of entitled brats trying to relive the glories of revolutionary times about which they are almost entirely ignorant and which they should be grateful not to have to endure themselves. And the pathetic, weak, cowardly reaction of administration — the failure to protect their own employees from these screeching child mobs is just sickening. Please, come and try and do what you did to Weinstein outside of my office. See what happens to you.
Oh, and Evergreen is about to have its funding eviscerated by the state legislature. That can’t happen soon enough either. You can act like a spoiled brat on your own dime. There’s no reason why some waitress in a diner should have to pay for it.
LikeLike
I wrote an editorial for the WSJ recently: http://tinyurl.com/y8ndg5p5. Does that put me on the “wrong team”?
= = =
Oh, yeah! Didn’t you know you’re a “reactionary” Massimo?
These people just want to lose elections. It would be hilarious if it wasn’t so pathetic.
LikeLike
Well Left isn’t liberal, nor are all liberals or leftists the same, and those certainly don’t equal the Democratic Party. I think I’m pretty self-critical of the political groupings I associate with but I’m seeing some exaggerating in the comments above. The idea that the American Left has a unique problem with free speech is a myth, a perpetuated message also exists on the Right, if not even more common in some respects. In fact, as Pew Research Center shows, American liberals are more tolerant of free speech quite literally than those everyone else in the world, including liberals in European & Asian countries. So let’s try to be both critical and be careful not to repeat Fox News talking points.
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/10/12/americans-more-tolerant-of-offensive-speech-than-others-in-the-world/
LikeLiked by 3 people
Saphsin,
I don’t think anyone is suggesting that (some parts of) the American Left has a unique problem with free speech. A lot of the Right is much worse. But I’ve seen this sort of close minded groupthink all the way back in high school in Italy, by self professed “Marxist” collectives, and I see nothing new under the Sun here, though certainly something to worry about.
LikeLiked by 2 people
The Right is a thousand times worse. But I am not a member of the Right. They need to police their own. I am talking about my own. And they are behaving in an appalling fashion. One that I am ashamed to be associated with. And which, politically, is a loser.
LikeLiked by 2 people
You’re right that I see nothing new under the Sun and that’s what I want to emphasize, I don’t see what in particular that needs to be complained about in this way. Acting like something is new as if we’re under a crisis that needs to be addressed and harshly criticized is effective and instrumental to a degree, but it also loses perspective. Let’s be critical of flaws in our society, do more advocacy, and hopefully that’ll lead to changing norms.
LikeLiked by 1 person