How We Talk, and What It Means

 Slate has a long interview with someone studying Black American accents, how they vary from place to place and in time. 

Anyone who's seen My Fair Lady is likely to be interested in the subject.  Apparently it's harder to nail American accents down to a locality than English English, or maybe the parties to the interview weren't Professor Higgins.

I remember telling an employee back in the 1970's that her occasional use of black English might limit her promotion opportunities.  I think it was a true statement at the time, but over the years I've felt guilty about saying it.  

Toward the end of the interview they get into a discussion of trials, like George Floyd, in which interpreting the language of the black victim was at issue.  There's some skepticism over whether the defense attorneys were honest in their misinterpretation of what was recorded. Perhaps I'm insufficiently cynical but I can accept that in the instant a policeman could interpret what he/she heard as being white English words, rather than black English language. It's problematic, but just an instance of how difficult it is to bridge social and cultural issues.

The Scourge of "Usism"

 Some writers use "racism", some use "tribalism", some use "colorism", some use "ageism", some use "ableism"...  Here's the first result when I googled "what 'isms' are there?" 

The bottom line is, I think, we love to define "us" versus "them", or "others".   It's natural to do so, because that's how we think--defining what something is by what it is not. When we do it to people, it's a problem. 

The United States of Excess

 This is a 2015 small book by Robert Paarlberg, subtitled "Gluttony and the Dark Side of American Exceptionalism.". Its thesis is that the US stands out for its obesity and its per capita greenhouse gas emissions, both of which are based in America's:

• material and demographic conditions
• political structure
• culture.

I found it interesting, specifically:

• the importance of geography in American politics in contrast to European countries--our politicians do "earmarks", bring home the bacon for their constituents while EU pols are more bound to a party platform.
• the distinction between "mitigation" and "adaptation" as applied to climate change and obesity.  Mitigation means changing the causes of the problems; adaptation means dealing with the results.  He argues that the US will go for adaptation in both instances.  

The Reality as Humans Perceive It Is Fractal

 What I'm trying to get at is a phenomena I think I see.  Scientific theories, or at least stories, prevail for a time, then get trashed.  But years or centuries later the new theory circles back to the old, at least in some respects. Two examples:

• Lamarckian theory of evolution said changes due to the environment can be passed down to the offspring.  A giraffe would extend its neck reaching for foliage, and the slightly longer neck could be passed on.  With Darwin this was thrown out. But recent genetics seems to have found cases where the first sentence is true.
• An article, I believe in Wired, I read today but didn't get the url.  It was a long piece on aerosol transmission of covid, a story of scientists researching and upsetting a long-established belief that droplets bigger than 5 microns were the key.  The scientists believe that much smaller aerosols are key in many viruses.  They have echoes of the long disdained "miasma" theory of the 19th century--the idea that cholera, yellow fever, etc. were transmitted by "bad air". 

The moral for today might be: take care in totally dismissing established theories--an element of truth may be hiding below the surface.

Cancel Culture Changing--Metaphor

 Yesterday I wrote on what I see as changes through our/my history of what is "canceled" and what is not.

I've a metaphor: 

Think of society in history as being reduced to a map in some way.  Then the boundaries of what's included and what's not can be represented by a low resolution magnifying glass help over the map, a glass which brings some aspects to the fore and doesn't recognize other aspects.  But over time the glass moves around, adding and subtracting things to look at.

Cancel Culture Changing

 I'm taking "cancel culture" as a generic process of society expressing disapproval of certain things, putting things outside the bounds of what used to be called "polite society".  There should be a term for the opposite phenomena; society changing boundaries to bring things inside--in other words inclusion versus exclusion.

In my youth, Carlin's seven words were excluded.  Judging by the NYTimes some are excluded because obsolete, some are no longer excluded.

References to certain sex acts (or maybe all acts outside of "missionary position") were excluded.  Now all are included, as are all sexual propensities. 

Profanity in its original meaning, cursing, particularly when related to Christianity, was excluded.  Profanity which might offend religious people of another faith was more borderline.  These days offensive words are excluded, though the curses which relate to Christianity (i.e., "god damn" etc.) are included.

I Remember the 1970's

 I'm not sure whether it's the Colonial Pipeline which runs through Reston, including under my garden plot.  

Apparently people are panicking about a potential shortage of gasoline, thereby likely creating the very thing they fear. 

Some of us geezers remember the 1970's, and the OPEC oil embargos, and the gas lines.  IIRC at one point we were supposed to hit the gas station on alternate days, based on license plate numbers.

Fortunately I:

• drive a hybrid Toyota Corolla
• never drove that much even when I worked
• drove much less when I retired
• drive maybe a third of the miles I used to, before covid
• just happened to fill my tank at the end of April, meaning I can go 500+ miles, which likely will cover me for half a year
• am smugly enjoying my situation.

Grade Creep and the GS- System

 This GovExec piece discusses the problem of job classification in the government, using the term "grade creep", which brings back old memories. Back in the late 1970's the Personnel Management Division (now HR) did a classification review of the branch I was heading (we had directives and records management responsibilities). They down graded the analyst positions.  

As the dust was settling, I was offered a job on the program side of ASCS, which allowed me to maintain my GS-13 grade. 

The classification standards for management analysts at the time were, IMHO, developed based on work in the New Deal days.  To get the highest grade levels you had to be creating new organizations and new processes.  I could see the logic of that.  The impact of the people involved in creating the AAA back in the 1930's was more impactful than the work of people making ASCS work reasonably well in the 1970's.  That didn't mean I liked the results. 

Note: the GovExec piece argues for using computer algorithms for job classification--I have strong doubts about that.

The Poll Tax and Race

 There was a reference in the 1942 book I finished to the impact of the poll tax on white voting. I can't find a simple reference to confirm the statement, but on skimming this old article I found references to the rise in voting participation in Louisiana when Huey Long ended the poll tax. 

In the 1930's Huey Long swept into power with the aid of the neo-populist movement in the South. In 1934 he widened his base of power with the repeal of the Louisiana poll tax. The average rate of participation in senatorial primaries increased frrom 31.2 per cent to 46.5 per cent; the increase in gubernatorial primaries was from 40.2 per cent to 60.1 per cent.

 In 1936 Florida repealed its poll tax, and as noted earlier, there was a voter turnout increase corresponding to the increase in Louisiana. In four years there was an increase of 152,688 votes in the democratic primary elections or approximately 28 per cent. At this time Florida still had a white primary. The Negro registration, however, hovered around the 20,000 mark it had been before repeal until well into the 1940's.31

Upward Mobility

 Ran across a statistic about the Forbes 400 billionaires so did a search with this result:

"When we first created the self-made score [see the article for an explanation of how they scored], we went back and assigned scores for the members of  the 1984 list. Less than half of them were self-made. By 2014, 69% of the list was deemed self-made. Fast forward to the present list, and that figure has inched up to 69.5%. All but one of the 18 newcomers this year are self-made.   [Oprah Winfrey is an example of someone who's entirely self made]

I don't know how this compares to other nations.  But China is an easy case:

The pandemic has proved no match for China’s wealth juggernaut. The total wealth of the China’s 400 Richest soared to $2.11 trillion, from $1.29 trillion a year earlier. The 64% gain was due to the easing of capital-market rules and an economic rebound that enabled China to pull ahead of the world’s other large economies in recovering from the pandemic. Nearly two-thirds of the listees saw their fortunes climb in the past year. The minimum net worth needed to make the list rose to $1.55 billion, compared with $1 billion a year ago. 

While not everyone on this list is also on the overall Forbes list, we can, I think, assume that many (almost all?) of the Chinese billionaires (I still have trouble comprehending the concept when typing it) are "self-made".  Some proportion of them are likely children or grandchildren of the bigwigs of the original Chinese communist party.