What White Privilege Doesn't Mean

I feel compelled to make this post because there are lots of straw men arguments that conservatives have been using to argue, incorrectly, that white privilege does not exist. In this post, I will identify these straw men and explain why they do not accurately represent the concept of white privilege (hereinafter WP).

So without further ado, I present a list of things that the concept of WP does not mean:
1. "All white people are rich and successful."
Bullshit. This seems to be widespread among right-wing Internet trolls. In reality, WP refers to averages, and patterns within racial groups. These patterns establish that whites tend to have, on average, higher standards of living than do other races, and that they benefit more from certain factors outside of their control than do other races. Conversely, WP advocates are, or at least can be, aware that members of other races are sometimes economically successful.
2. "All successful white people are only successful because of their privilege."
Again, this is a completely baseless generalization which creates a giant straw man version of WP. There is no question that other factors are involved on an individual level, such that many people of all races in all countries become successful partly or mostly because of their own hard work. However, on a society-wide level, on average, whites tend to have more opportunities to be economically successful than other races, which is what WP actually means.
3. "Other factors have no effect on how economically well-off you are, only WP does! Silly leftist SJWs, why don't they understand economics? If they did, they'd know that two-parent privilege far dwarfs white privilege."
In short: we do. There are other kinds of privileges that exist as well as WP. Simply acknowledging that WP exists does not equate to claiming that no other privileges can possibly exist too.
4. "All white people should feel terrible about themselves/white guilt b/c of their privilege, which makes them successful without having to work by exploiting all other races!"
No, they shouldn't. This does not occur as a result of deliberate decision-making occurring today, but b/c of many societal factors that act to make things easier for whites than for other races. To the extent it is intentional, it is not b/c white people are conspiring to formulate an evil plot against other races, but b/c a few of the powerful ones did decades ago. The vast majority of white people have nothing to feel guilty about in this respect, as it is not their fault.

Election Dissection, Part III: Media Misdiagnoses

This is the third entry in a series about why the Democrats lost the election. If you haven't already done so, you can read parts one and two by clicking here and here, respectively.

We heard a lot about the spread of fake news prior to the election, and how this ostensibly swayed the result, after it was over. Now, there's little doubt that fake news did spread significantly during the lead-up to the election--maybe even more than real news did. That said, it's important not to lump too many websites into this category, and ensure that it only contains websites whose operators knowingly make up stories that are completely false and then try to pass them off as true (as opposed to, say, the Onion, which is already well-known for being 100% satirical, or Infowars, which pushes conspiracy theories it believes to be true even if they aren't). Why? Because this just increases the incorrect perception that progressives can't argue with the other side on the facts, so they must instead try to undermine the other side's credibility a la 1984 by accusing them of spreading "fake news".

Another point I want to make here, possibly the most important one, is that I think a lack of critical thinking, not fake news, is the real root of the problem. People shared lots of stories that were totally made up under the assumption they were true. This is also why I think one of Facebook's solutions to fake news--the one that automatically tells users if a link has been disputed by fact-checkers--ultimately misguided. I further think that this action will ultimately just further alienate Trump supporters (i.e. people who regularly read untrustworthy conspiracy websites like Infowars and Breitbart.com) from the rest of America, partly because it commits the aforementioned fallacy of lumping these websites in with hoax websites. Ultimately, gullibility is the problem we should all try to solve by not assuming whatever we read on the Internet is true, especially when it's exactly what we want to hear.

Election Dissection, Part II: Barking All the Way Up the Wrong Tree

So in my last post, I explained why I think Hillary Clinton being the nominee, not any aspect of the Democratic platform, was one of the main reasons she lost the election. In this post, I will explain another catastrophic failure of strategy--a decision that seemingly every media figure made continuously from when Trump announced he was running for president until the day before Election Tuesday. This decision is what I am referencing in the title of this post, because it is reminiscent of the expression of "barking up the wrong tree"-which means that you are trying to do something other than what you should actually do.

What was this decision? To attack Trump as being racist, sexist, Islamophobic, and every other form of bigotry in the dictionary, instead of as a loose cannon who has no idea what he's talking about and, therefore, shouldn't be trusted with the power of the presidency. Calling someone racist/sexist/etc. (especially racist), especially if that someone is not in the same political party as you, doesn't do anything except further divide the two parties, and their constituent voters, from each other. Also, it encourages those who you are accusing of supporting a racist to be pissed off at you, thereby making the odds that they will vote for your candidate even lower than they were before. It also serves up a golden opportunity to them on a silver platter: namely, the opportunity to argue that, because liberals can't address any of Trump's policy proposals, they must instead resort to engaging in ad hominem attacks. This also provides a lush, nutrient-rich environment in which the GOP's infectious agents--hatred of political correctness and the mainstream media--can flourish and grow faster than they ever would if, say, you just ignored Trump instead of giving him $2 billion in free media.

Election Dissection, Part I: Kill the Messenger

This will be the first in a series of posts looking at why Democrats lost last year's presidential election--an election that many had assumed they were inevitably going to win.

The reason the Democrats lost the election was that Hillary Clinton won the nomination. This, in turn, meant that she did worse than Obama, which was all Trump needed to win. In 87% of counties, she got fewer votes than Obama did four years ago, and she did particularly worse than Obama in heavily Democratic counties. Ultimately, however, the main reason for her defeat was that she did significantly worse than Obama did in Republican-leaning counties, getting only 84% as many votes as Obama did there in 2012. Why did this cost the Democrats this election? I think there are two main, and very broad, reasons.

Before I explain those reasons, however, I should make it clear that the messenger, not the message, was what went wrong here, so long as by "message" you mean defining policy proposals rather than what some members of the party may have said on occasion about Republicans. Some people have been arguing that the Democratic message is too cultural-centric and not focused enough on what people in the heart of America care about, but I don't buy that. There's little doubt that multiple Democratic proposals, especially expanding Obamacare, reducing income inequality, and raising the minimum wage, are plenty appealing to members of the heartland, especially working-class people.

First, people hate Clinton and perceive her as corrupt, dishonest, and untrustworthy. There are many reasons for this, including the "vast right wing conspiracy" that has tried to portray her as all these things and more for more than two decades. This means people have been throwing as many scandals at her as possible for this entire time in the desperate hope that at least one will stick. Her emails have, of course, been the stickiest of these scandals, as there is little question that 1) she didn't handle her emails right while she was secretary of state and 2) she didn't tell the truth about everything she did in regards to her private email server. Even before everyone started focusing on the conclusions that she violated protocols in using a private server, there was a lot of mainstream media coverage of her emails in mid-2015, some of it inaccurately claiming she was the subject of a criminal investigation. This seems to have been a major reason her popularity abruptly dropped that summer. Of course, she was not indicted for any of this, but the two points I just made are still enough to convince us that she cannot be trusted, and of course her not telling anyone about her having pneumonia didn't help. Another major reason is that people believe her to be untrustworthy is that she is the epitome of the political establishment, which carries with it lots of dubious links to large corporations, especially Wall Street banks. Given that many Americans don't like the excessive influence such businesses have over American politics, this leads to her being perceived as merely doing the bidding of the huge corporations that financially supported her campaign. This image is only reinforced by the fact that she seems to rely on aides and focus groups to decide everything she ever does or says.

Second, throughout her campaign, she seemed to be "more of the same", a continuation of the default, and she never really explained how her presidency would not just be "four more years of Obama". This led to people often comparing her to boring things, like vanilla ice cream and Wonder Bread. This, too, was reinforced by her lack of an exciting message (or Trump's abundant charisma) and a focus on the boring, difficult aspects of being President. Her being part of the establishment also meant that when the mainstream media tried to explain why the scandals surrounding her were bogus, non-Clinton supporters ignored this message, believing it to be the work of the same corrupt government/business establishment in which Clinton was so entrenched. Ditto her lack of a crazy temperament problem like Trump's. This, in turn, led to a huge enthusiasm gap that the Clinton campaign and her supporters desperately tried to close by having famous celebrities perform at rallies and idealizing her as an awesome, rebellious feminist hero.

No True Scotsman

So this is a more opinionated post, but I feel this topic should be addressed, and that those who have already done so have not done it in the best way it should/could be. The topic is the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, and the issue of police brutality in America (or, if you prefer, the non-issue thereof). I will discuss how the "No True Scotsman" argument--that no "true" member of a group, as opposed to a traitor to the group, would do a bad thing that a claimed member of the group recently did--can be applied to these issues.

Certainly the name BLM seems pretty uncontroversial. But of course, the fact that they are casting a critical eye on the police and calling some actions taken by multiple individual officers into question, as well as arguing that their practices may be racially biased, is the real root source of controversy here. We have already seen the cycle occur multiple times:
1. Police officer shoots unarmed black man. This shooting can be fatal, but this is not absolutely necessary for the cycle to proceed.
2. BLM protest the shooting and, more generally, police brutality and racism in America.
3. Someone, sometimes (as in Dallas this July) motivated by these protests and criticism of police, decides to murder a (or multiple) cop(s).
4. Conservative critics of BLM pounce on step #3 as proof that BLM "hates cops" and wants them all (or at least the white ones) to be murdered. They then call on these leaders to, at least, renounce violence (as Sargon of Akkad recently did, which partly motivated me to write this post). If they are particularly radical, like Heather Mac Donald, they may demand that BLM and other "anti-cop" individuals and movements stop "demonizing police" by creating a "stream of falsehoods", and allege that these entities' statements have led to "an appalling increase in shootings and murders in many cities across America."
5. BLM and other advocates for police reform respond that theirs is a nonviolent movement.

So I'm gonna talk about the fact that BLM is a movement, not an organization, and how for this reason, anyone can identify with this movement, even if their goals or plans (e.g. murdering cops) are out of line with those that BLM was founded to pursue.

This is where the "No True Scotsman" argument comes in: if someone kills a cop, even if that person says that police brutality and BLM were their motivations to do so (as was the case in Dallas), that doesn't necessarily mean that that person is a "true" member of BLM. 

Now, you could also flip this argument around and apply it to cops, which would look something like this: if a police officer does something they definitely shouldn't have done, then they must not be a "true" police officer, but instead someone who did something contrary to what policing is really about.

So is one of these arguments more valid than the other? Yes, in my opinion: the one about BLM. I am saying this because BLM is a loosely organized movement, meaning that there is no vetting process or authority who decides who "gets in" to this movement. In stark contrast, not just anyone can be a police officer; you must first graduate from high school, pass an entrance exam, and then, among other things, undergo about 600 hours of training (though the exact amount varies from state to state). So this is why it matters more when a police officer does something he/she shouldn't do than it does when a BLM member does something he/she shouldn't do.

I will close by adding a link to an excellent blog post I recently found about this subject.

Where does "eight spiders" really come from?

For the past few weeks I have been, on and off, searching for the origin of the myth that the average person swallows 8 spiders per year in their sleep. (Note: Lemmino already did the exact same thing as me in a very well made and carefully researched video he uploaded this October, which you can watch here.) First, I should note that there is little doubt that this is a myth, and that it is not true. As Scientific American (and Lemmino in his aforementioned video) have noted, this claim "flies in the face of both spider and human biology, which makes it highly unlikely that a spider would ever end up in your mouth." So I'm not gonna focus on that. Instead I will try to find out where this myth originated. Lemmino and fellow YouTuber CGPGrey have already done that, and I think their videos, Lemmino's especially, are pretty clear proof that the source long cited by Snopes (Lisa Holst's purported "article" in "PC Professional" magazine) doesn't exist and was made up by Snopes' webmasters. So I will try to tackle a different question than either Lemmino or CGPGrey did: where did this myth come from?

So I searched a bunch of online databases, including Highbeam and the Google Books archive, to find the oldest books/articles I could regarding this claim. My searches have identified the probable origin of this myth as a 1990 article in the magazine Cornell Engineer, published by the Cornell University School of Engineering. (That said, I recognize that this may have originated earlier, but I don't think there's much of a chance.)

Here are some things that have since become even clearer than the origin of this myth as a result of these searches:
1. This claim has many variations: it seems to have originated, for example, as a claim about the # of spiders swallowed in one's lifetime. This is true not only of the original 1990 article, but also of multiple other articles repeating the myth from 1999, 1999 again, and 2002, among others. That said, there are others claiming it is "eight per year", but there is also at least one source claiming that the average person swallows 8 spiders every day. Granted, it's a fiction book, but still, I would expect published authors to be a little more careful. BTW, one of the 1999 articles cited above cites this webpage listing "useless facts" as the source for the claim, so we know this page was publicizing the claim since at least 1999.

There are also different versions of the myth with different #s of spiders other than 8. For example, alternative numbers of spiders cited include 7, 4, and 10.

2. Many articles and books cite the claim as though it were fact. (E.g. 1, 2) Others cite it more skeptically, like a 1997 Chicago Sun-Times article where a journalist actually called an entomologist at the Field Museum to ask him whether this was true or not. Also, in 2001, the LA Times reported that "The San Fernando Valley Folklore Society, which investigates urban folk tales, says it is not true that "the average person swallows eight spiders a year." Someone made up the stat as a joke, and it quickly became gospel on the Internet." Still others cite it but make it clear that it's an internet legend and/or they just read it in an email, so it might not be true: 1, 2, 3.

Did Johnson & Stein cost Clinton the election?

In light of the recent and almost completely unexpected presidential election results, I've decided to see whether third party candidates were responsible for this outcome by stealing votes from Clinton.
First, I will list the margin of victory for Trump (in %) in key swing states, according to CNN (i.e. %Trump-%Clinton):
Florida= 1.3
Pennsylvania= 1.2
Ohio= 8.6
Michigan =0.3 (weird stuff is going on here, with an appeals court recently rejecting an already-underway recount initiated at Jill Stein's behest.)
Wisconsin=1
Georgia=4.7
North Carolina=3.8

Now let's compare that with the % of people who voted for Johnson (J) and Stein (S) in each of these states (in GA and NC, Stein was not on the ballot):
FL: J=2.2, S=0.7 J+S=2.9
PA: J=2.4, S=0.8 J+S=3.2
OH: J=3.2, S=0.8 J+S=4
MI: J=3.6, S=1.1 J+S=4.7
WI: J=3.6, S=1.1 J+S=4.7
GA: J=3.1
NC: J=2.8

Suppose we then divide the margin of victory in each state by the % of voters who voted for J+S combined. (Bear in mind that if the number we get is >1, there's no way third party voters could have cost Clinton the election in that state.) Then this is what we get (results rounded to 2 decimal places):
FL: .45
PA: .38
OH: 2.2
MI: 0.06
WI: 0.21
GA: 1.52
NC: 1.36

Now we can rule out OH, GA, and NC because there's clearly no way Johnson and Stein could have cost Clinton those states. So what about the four remaining states--FL, PA, MI, and WI? Well, if Clinton had won all of them, she would have gotten 75 more electoral votes than she actually did, for a total of 307, which is not only enough to win, but also even more than Trump actually got (albeit by only one).

Exit polling data give us a good idea of how third-party voters would have voted if the race was only between Clinton and Trump. According to CBS, 25% of Johnson voters said they would have voted for Clinton otherwise (C), 15% said Trump (T), and 55% said they would otherwise not have voted (O). Similarly, about 25% of Stein voters said C, 14% said T, and 61% O. So let's multiply the % of each third-party candidates' voters in each of these 4 states.

FL: J: 2.2*.25=.55% more votes for Clinton, 2.2*.15=.33% more for Trump
S: .7*.25=.18% more for Clinton, .7*.14=.1% more for Trump
FL total: .73% more for C, .43% more for Trump
So C would have been .3% closer to winning FL without J and S. But this is not enough, because she would still have been 1% behind Trump there.
PA: J: 2.4*.25=.6% more for C, 2.5*.15=.38% more for Trump
S: 0.8*.25=.2% more for C, 0.8*.14=.11% more for Trump
PA total: .8% more for C, .49% more for Trump
Again, in PA, C would have been about .3% closer to winning without J and S. But this is still not close enough, as she lost the state by 1.2%.
MI: J: 3.6*.25=.9% more for C, 3.6*.15=.54% more for T
S: 1.1*.25=.28% more for C, 1.1*.14=.15% more for T
MI total: 1.18% more for C, .69% more for T
Without J and S, C would have been .49% closer to winning MI than she actually was. Because she lost the state by only .03%, she would have won MI without J and S.
WI (all the same as in MI, weirdly enough): J: 3.6*.25=.9% more for C, 3.6*.15=.54% more for T
S: 1.1*.25=.28% more for C, 1.1*.14-/15% more for T
WI total: 1.18% more for C, .69% more for T
Without J and S, C would have been .49% closer to winning WI than she actually was. But this would not have been enough, because she lost the state by 1%.

So it looks like Clinton would only have won the ridiculously close Michigan race without Johnson and Stein. So she'd have gotten 248 electoral votes, compared to Trump's 290. But Trump would still have won because you only need 270 electoral votes to win.

So the answer to the question "Did Johnson & Stein cost Clinton the election?" seems to be "No."

I should note that Vox looked at this same subject already and concluded that the answer to the title of this post is no. The Washington Post, in contrast, concluded that without Johnson & Stein, "Clinton might have won, based upon these data, but only by winning both Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. If Trump held onto even one, he would have kept an electoral college majority." The WaPo also noted that in this hypothetical 2-candidate scenario, "In Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, Clinton and Trump would have tied at 48 percent apiece."