Shock Doctrines and Hurricanes

The “Shock Doctrine” is a term coined by Naomi Klein in the book of the same name. It’s basically the idea of using (or even fabricating) crisis situations to push through privatization and other neo-con reforms that wouldn’t be possible in situations when people are less scared, less panicked, and more in control of their political process. The book mostly focuses on the big instances, generally when governments are overthrown (Chile’s military coup, the fall of communism, the end of Apartheid, and more recently, the abduction of the Haitian president by the US and France and installation of an Interim Government that was meant to (but failed) push through a lot of privatization before a new democratic government could be elected).

However, the Shock Doctrine can be used on a smaller scale, and without a government collapse, as well.

The largest current example would be the Debt Ceiling clusterfuck, in which the Tea Party basically squeezed a ridiculous amount of concessions out of the Democrats, because previously they had managed to scare a country in a recession into believing that increasing the debt ceiling without making significant cuts (or, in some instances, raising the debt ceiling at all) would make the recession worse. the attacks on Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare are also more of the same: a nation traumatized by a massive recession being pushed into fucking themselves over even more. same with the stripping of union-rights in many states in the name of budget-cuts. More localized uses of the Shock Doctrine can also be found at the city level: first in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and now increasingly in other cities as well, assorted real and manufactured crises are used as opportunities for selling off public schools; after NO, the other city suffering the worst of this is Detroit, where an “emergency manager” (a state appointed local dictator with the power to override city government decision in the name of protecting the budget) has been on a cutting-spree destroying what’s left of Detroit’s public education (this included a highly successful school for teen mothers, which had been originally scheduled for closure and will now be operated as a charter school).

And now, with two disasters hitting the East Coast one after another, they’re doing it again: Eric Cantor holding earthquake relief hostage, Boehner and Cantor holding hurricane relief hostage, and Ron Paul saying there should be no federal aid for places devastated by the hurricane at all. And while Paul’s comments are really just the equivalent of Bachmann’s statements about not ever voting for raising the debt ceiling (meaning, they won’t affect policy this time, but they do tug at the Overton Window), Cantor and Boehner may well get the cuts from a Democratic party and president very used to caving to Republican demands.

And here’s the thing: the near future holds a lot more such “opportunities”. Not only are all these cuts going to continue giving the US economy shock after shock, there’s a long list of natural disasters (made worse and more frequent by AGW) waiting to happen and be exploited. already on the horizon are, for example, spikes in food prices as this year’s crop has been killed off by floods and drought. And the 2011 hurricane season, predicted to be even worse than 2010, is only half done, as well. It will be followed by blizzard season, flood season, tornado season, fire season, and again another hurricane season.

And each one of those is another opportunity to cut and privatize public services.

Inequality in science, race edition

I’m surprised none of the science-related blogs I read have picked up on this story yet(which has been reported by the NYT, as well as Democracy Now), so I guess I’ll have to do it myself. From a study just published in Science showing that black scientists less likely to receive NIH-funds than white scientists:

Although proposals with strong priority scores were equally likely to be funded regardless of race, we find that Asians are 4 percentage points and black or African-American applicants are 13 percentage points less likely to receive NIH investigator-initiated research funding compared with whites. After controlling for the applicant’s educational background, country of origin, training, previous research awards, publication record, and employer characteristics, we find that black applicants remain 10 percentage points less likely than whites to be awarded NIH research funding.

That’s unfortunately unsurprising, but sad nonetheless. If I understand the paper properly (and there’s no guarantee that I have, so take the following discussion with all the skepticism it’s due), it seems to indicate that a lot of the discrimination isn’t directly related to bias in the selection, but to bias in career advancement elsewhere (access to resources). That’s probably a large chunk of it, and certainly racial discrimination as well as cultural hurdles aren’t improbable. But AFAICT from the study, even taking into account all of these, there’s still a remaining bias. So is it possible that there’s bias in the selection process itself?

My main question, which the article doesn’t answer, is how the NIH would know the race of their applicants; and if it doesn’t, what the factor that leads to this discrimination could be. A particular focus in the research? Maybe it’s not so much the race of the scientist that’s being discriminated against; minority researchers often try to fill the gap of lacking research about the special circumstances of the groups they belong to, so possibly it was the “race” of the proposal that was being discriminated against (I hope that sentence makes sense; obviously proposals don’t have a race, but may have a “non-standard” (AKA non-white) focus that could be identified as less-than by subconscious bias or even outright bigotry). This may also explain the much lower citation count (but doesn’t explain the much higher citation count for Asian and Hispanic authored papers; it would be necessary to see whether Black, Asian, and Hispanic authors are comparably likely to focus on minority-relevant research topics, and whether minority-focused subjects correlate with citation count to figure out what’s going on there). If the bias is indeed related to research topics, it would be very difficult to circumvent subconscious bias, since there would be no possibility of blind applications for obvious reasons.

The study shows a few other interesting things aside from that main point. For one, the ridiculously low number of Native scientists in biomedical research (only 41?! That’s fucking tragic in and of itself). Two, it seems to me from the data that the reason Asians and Hispanics don’t show the same disparities might not be because they’re not discriminated against. I can’t precisely parse what it says on this subject, but doesn’t it seem to say that Hispanics and especially Asians outperform whites on certain measures, but that those don’t translate in proportionately higher rates of proposal acceptance? It’s either that, or it says that these measures are irrelevant for proposals by non-blacks, and only seem to matter for blacks, who have the lowest citation and publication counts, and the fewest last-authored papers as well. *confused*

More short thoughts

1) Oil Rig Islands + no building codes = one storm away from societal collapse

2)I wish my fellow legal immigrants/children of immigrants would stop using the “but I/my parents did immigrated the right way and waited in line” argument to dismiss humanitarian concerns of illegal immigrants. That argument would only make sense if those who got in illegally would have gotten in legally if they just followed procedures, which is patently untrue

3)spammers are now pretending they’re pingbacks; fascinating

4)Google eBooks is evil; I’ve impulse-bought a number of books I accidentally stumbled upon while doing assorted internetty research (currently, it’s Bathsheba’s breast:
women, cancer & history)

comments about new layout go here

New layout with slightly more visually appealing comment section. Because the old one was driving me nuts, but until now there were no good alternatives.

Whining about myself

List of blog-posts which I really wish I’d finally write which are either languishing in unfinished form or don’t exist other than as vague ideas:

-A discussion of what “choice” means in our consumerist culture, and how it’s not really much choice at all.
-A discussion of assorted claims from the right (and especially libertarians) about racism in left-wing movements (specifically, in environmentalism)
-A discussion of the various kinds of feminism (especially choice feminism vs. radical feminism) in the context of the nonexistence of contracausal free will
-A discussion/dissection of my Environmental Sociology class
-A review of “Yes Means Yes”
-A discussion of the difference between a state and its citizens, and the fuckedupedness of the conflation of the two
-A discussion of the New Capitalist Class and the lack of “competition” on that level of the market
-An argument for the difference-of-kind between property rights and bodily autonomy

Whenever I sit down to write about any of these, all the relevant thoughts disappear out of my head. I’m not amused.

Warning: coldhearted cynicism ahead

I’ve been trying to read as much as I can find about the riots in Britain over the last few hours. And you know what? All I feel while reading it is cold anger and cynicism. “I told you so” never felt that shitty: I’ve been saying for years that there’s few things more dangerous to the stability of a society than bored, prospect-less youth. And lo and behold, they went and proved me right, in a rather impressively nasty way. Chances anyone is going to learn the right lesson from this clusterfuck, and try to undo the alienation, desperation, and futurelessness of British youth? Not fucking likely. What’s more likely to happen is even more criminalization of youth, criminalization of poverty, more power in the hands of police (the riots started during a march for the victim of a police-shooting, btw), longer and harsher sentencing, and certainly no end to austerity measures, now that the riots really did cause a real blow to the economy, with all the looting, property damage, and closed businesses.
Already you have politicians stating that the riots are “just” criminality “pure and simple”(because that totally makes sense, right? A bunch of people randomly decided to become criminals this weekend. There couldn’t possibly be a cause, right?), and you have people spout stupid shit like “You have a generation of kids now that don’t respect their parents or the police”, as if a lack of authoritarianism were the fucking problem (granted, plenty of people are capable of seeing what’s really going on (including a number from that article). But if those will be the people who’ll be listened to in the end, I’ll eat a broom).
And when you look at Britain and then look at the US, you gotta admire the ability of the US elite to keep the poor and disenfranchised in check. The US is so much worse than anything experienced in Britain; compare the complete non-event that was the shooting of John T Williams with this shooting. Compare the poverty in American cities; and yet, it’s been forever since anyone rioted, or even protested much. If “austerity” measures that only target the poor are turning industrialized democracies into Banana Republics, then it’s pretty clear that the US are turning themselves into one much more skillfully than Britain is, having pretty much distracted and pacified its populace despite egregious abuses.

And since I’m in a shitty, morbid mood anyway, here’s a soundtrack for this shit: The Clash — Guns of Brixton

Dispatches from an alternate dimension

1)apparently, Obama is just like Mugabe; also, “immaculate” is now a verb, with so far indeterminable meaning

2)Telling your congregation who to vote for, vilifying politicians from the pulpit, or making public statements about which politicians shouldn’t receive communion? Totally non-partisan and not worthy of removing tax-exempt status from churches. Reporting on the lies of Fox News? pure evil, AKA “unlawful conduct” meant to “‘disrupt’ the commercial interests of News Corp”.

3)and from the “alternate dimension I wish we lived in” department, Pelosi claims Democrats won’t let Republicans fuck them over like that again. ha hahahah ha haaaa…. *weep*

the 19th century vs. the 20th century

recently, I’ve encountered the odd, neo-con/libertarian meme that says that quality of life improved more in the 19th century than in the 20th century, because the 19th century was more libertarian and less socialist than the 20th. To me, that does not sound right, on so many levels. So, I went digging for some statistics, just to see what the numbers say.

The first indicator I checked was life expectancy changes in the USA. I’ll split the data by gender and race, because that’s how the data is split up, and because the numbers aren’t evenly available. Also, most of the data is unfortunately only available for 1850 and later, except for northern US white males in 1800, where the life expectancy is listed as 36 years (and judging from the data for 1750 and 1700 showing southern life expectancy to be lower than northern (tropical diseases?), I’m guessing it was still lower in 1800 as well¹. In another source², Table 5 lists the life expectancy in the US in 1820 as 39 (I’m willing to bet that’s not including slaves, though). Anyway according to available data³, in 1850, life expectancy for whites was as follows: men 38.3 at birth/48 at 10 years, women 40.5/47.2; in 1900, it was men 58.2/50.6, women 51.1/52.2; in 1950 it was men 66.3/59, women 72/64.3; in 2000 it was men 74.8/65.4, women 80/70.5 Roughly then,the 50-year-increases were, between 1800 and 1850 apparently not noticeable, as far as the available data goes; between 1850-1900, it was 20 years at birth/2 years at 10 years for men, 11/5 years for women; between 1900 and 1950 it was 8/9 years for men, 21/12 years for women; between 1950 and 2000 it was 8/6 for both men and women.
For non-whites, the data only starts at 1900. However, life-expectancy for non-white men increased from 32.5/41.9 in 1900 to 58.9/53 in 1950 and 68.3/59.6 in 2000, while for women it increased from 35/42 in 1900 to 62.7/56.2 in 1950 and 75/66.2 in 2000. For the 19th century to match those rates, all non-whites would have had to have been murdered at birth in the years 1800-1850 (for completeness sake, the only datapoint I found for life expectancy of black Americans was for 1850 and was 23 at birth, most likely due the abysmal infant mortality rates⁴)
So, to sum it up: looks like in the USA, 1850-1900 was good for white infant boys, while 1900-1950 was great for everybody else. Call me biased, but I’m handing this round to the first half of the 20th century.

Now, let’s look at Britain, for comparison. For some reason, I’ve been unable to find such nicely detailed data for Britain, but what little I did find, mirrors the story in the US: one ghastly little chart (written in Comic Sans, FFS!) for school children noted life expectancy in 1750 as 31 for men and 33 for women, and in 1900 as 45 for men and 48 for women⁵. The aforementioned table 5, being an international comparison, lists UK life expectancy as 40 in 1820, 50 in 1900, 69 in 1950, and 77 in 1999. And lastly, a government source lists the life expectancy at birth in 1900 for men at 45 and women at 49, and in 1999 at 75 for men and 80 for women⁶. So, it looks like the 20th century wins in Britain, too.

Now, let’s look at some other data:
GDP per capita (Measured in 1990 international dollars) was $1707 in 1820, $4921 in 1913, and $18714 in 1998 in Britain; in the USA, it was $1257 in 1820, $5301 in 1913, and $27331 in 1998; the average height for US men was 172.9cm in 1800, 170cm in 1900, and 177.4 in 1970 ⁷. For education in the US, data is available once again only from 1850 on. The percentages of 5-19-year-olds enrolled in school were as follows: in 1850, it was 59% for white men and 53.3% for white women, and 2% for non-white men and 1.8% for non-white women; in 1900, it was 53.4% for white men and 53.9% for white women, and 29.4% for non-white men and 32.8% for non-white women; in 1950, it was 79.7% for white men and 78.9% for white women, and 74.7% for non-white men and 74.9% for non-white women; in 1990, it was around 92% for everyone⁸.

At this point, I could dredge up statistics on other specific living conditions (which, yes, did improve some over the course of the 19th century; generally with the passage of laws forbidding some atrociousness or another) like eradication of diseases, better working hours, etc. However, I’ve now pretty much lost interest in continuing. People’s lifespans have improved, famines are unheard of, people have more money and better education. And all of it improved more in the 20th century than in the 19th. So, Libertarians and neo-cons are wrong. Anyone surprised?

a tiny little commentary on America

this is overall a funny “only in America” story, but I do want to highlight one quote from it:

“It was probably just a BB gun, and I need to see if anything is lodged in there. I can’t afford the ambulance fee.” I said.