Weekend Longread

This is a really wonderful article. First is Fred Cruz, an inmate-turned-legal-scholar trapped in the Texas prison system in the 60s:

On another occasion, while picking cotton, Cruz had asked a guard for water with the words "no water, no work." For that he received a week in solitary. Then there was the time he received the punishment of standing on a rail, which meant standing for days at a time on a six-by-two plank turned sideways. The offense that day: "inmate started chasing an armadillo."

The infractions went on and on: "unsatisfactory work" ... "creating a disturbance" ... "impudence" ... "refusal to work" ... "disobeying a direct order" ... "disrespectful attitude" ... "insolence" ... "insubordination" ... "insubordination."

Cruz always lost, but with each encounter he learned a little more about the nature of the Texas Department of Corrections. He learned it the same way someone can learn a great deal about the nature of a grizzly by poking it with a stick.

Next up is Frances Jalet:

So, late in the summer of 1967, she packed her car and set out on the long drive to Austin. After a difficult marriage and two decades of motherhood, she was suddenly off on a new adventure. She drove west and south, through the August heat and thunderstorms. She was 56 years old.

A few days after she got to town, the Austin American-Statesman ran a short profile of this peculiar woman who had moved from the East Coast to Texas to help low-income plaintiffs. The writer of the story called her "Portia for the Poor," after the heroine in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice--a rich heiress who dresses up as a man and fools everyone into believing she is a competent lawyer.

The next week, she received a letter from a prisoner named Fred Cruz. He'd read the article, he said, and wondered if she could help him with his case. Jalet had never set foot in a prison, never handled a criminal complaint--never headed any type of litigation, for that matter. She had yet to pass the Texas Bar. Helping a prisoner was also outside the bounds of her job description at the Legal Aid and Defender Society of Travis County. She was supposed to stick to predicaments in the lives of poor locals: evictions, consumer credit, and unfair debt collection. But Jalet decided she could make the visit on her own time. She called the prison to schedule a visit, and a couple of weeks later, on a breezy and cool late October day, she got into her car and drove the 160 miles to meet Cruz.

and finally, there are many, many villains. For example:

McAdams was another big man. Chinless, with a large gut, the warden had a reputation for brutality. His lumbering girth belied a capacity for sudden ferocity. Prisoners whispered stories of his ability to silently walk up on a man and lay him out with a roundhouse kick to the head. One Houston Chronicle reporter described McAdams as a "big man with a velvet voice, a cherub's face," who, "despite the paunch," could "move like a mongoose when there is trouble brewing." From later interviews, it seems McAdams disliked Jalet at first sight. He recalled that her skirt was far too provocative for a prison visit and that her mane of graying blond hair was only partially tamed into a bun. "If you dreamed of a witch," McAdams told a video crew, "that's exactly what she looked like."

Ironically, two of the main players in this story are named Beto and Cruz.

What to buy

This isn't exactly surprising, but it does contradict/refine the studies we've all heard about buying experiences over things:

In a series of studies, researchers Jacob C. Lee of Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST), Deborah Hall of Arizona State University, and Wendy Wood of the University of Southern California found that only individuals who were relatively higher in social class showed the well-known effect of greater happiness from purchasing experiences, such as going to a concert or the movies, compared with purchasing material goods, such as a pair of shoes or accessories.

Lower class individuals, on the other hand, did not show the same pattern - in some cases, they reported the same degree of happiness from experiential and material purchases, whereas in others they actually reported that material purchases made them happier.

Off the top of my head, ISTM that there's two different effects of wealth on your time:
1. Filling your time with activities that cost money
2. Outsourcing your least-favorite jobs to someone else, to free up time.

I do remember hearing about a study that basically claimed that "everybody's got too much to do, and not enough time to do it!" is class-linked. That poor people, with erratic work schedules and not being able to afford tons of extracurricular activities for their kids, do spend significantly more downtime around the house.

"For lower-class consumers, spending money on concert tickets or a weekend trip might not result in greater happiness than buying a new pair of shoes or a flatscreen TV," Hall explains. "In fact, in some of our studies, lower class consumers were happiest from purchasing things, which makes sense given that material goods have practical benefit, resale value, and are physically longer lasting."

This reminds me of something that stuck with me hard from Sideways Stories from Wayside School: Joy stealthily steals and enjoys Dameon's magnificent lunch, and no one knows where Dameon's lunch has disappeared to, and he's sad and hungry. Then Joy's mother shows up with Joy's shitty lunch, which Joy generously gives to Dameon, and everyone praises her generosity. The chapter ends with something like, "Joy had the best lunch of her life, and five minutes later she couldn't taste it anymore. Dameon had a terrible tasting lunch, and five minutes later he couldn't taste it anymore, either."

I do sometimes think about that with the weekend getaway vs. the new pair of shoes. I really like the new shoes I bought myself as a reward for surviving a particularly disciplined week recently. I would also like a weekend getaway, but it's sort of true that five minutes later, you can't taste it anymore, so to speak.

In conclusion, I like both material goods and free time.

Via Tia

Guest Post - Schism!

Mossy Character writes: The orthodox are heterodoxing!:

The Russian Orthodox Church said on Monday it had decided to sever all relations with the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople in protest over its endorsement of Ukraine's request for an "autocephalous", or independent, church.
[...]
Ukraine last week secured approval from Constantinople to establish an independent church in what Kiev said was a vital step against Russian meddling in its affairs, but that the Russian Orthodox Church lamented as the biggest split in Christianity for a thousand years.

And Putin has lost this round!:

it's as difficult for Putin as it is for Moscow Patriarch Kirill to accept an independent Ukrainian church blessed by Constantinople. It would go against his oft-repeated assertion that Russians and Ukrainians are one people. And admitting that not Moscow but Istanbul, with only a few hundred Orthodox believers, is the true seat of power of global Orthodoxy would be almost unbearable.

Of course this is all current politics, so it may well get papered over. OTOH, people must have been saying that in 1054. Personally, I'm thrilled. It has all the frisson of a genuine world-historical event, without all the inconvenience of an even more genuine world-historical event, like a nuclear war.

Heebie's lack of a take!

The NPR effect

Elizabeth Warren preoccupies us in a way that the Supreme Court disenfranchising 70,000 Native American voters doesn't, and it's not because any of us think that the latter is not extremely wrong. I'm going to call it the NPR effect: Elizabeth Warren is human, and therefore worth debating, whereas the authors of the Supreme Court decision are monsters, and therefore there's not much interesting to say about it. If you tried to use "radio time" as a heuristic for which is the bigger problem, you quickly upend yourself because we fret and wring our hands over human foibles, not clear cut monster destruction.

That was a really confusing sentence for me to write: the use of "radio time" has nothing to do with why I'm calling it the NPR effect, but I can't think of a substitute phrase that doesn't connote "air time" or "time spent discussing" or "words wasted" or something that still sounds like I'm talking about NPR.

The reason this I'm calling this the NPR-effect is that in the archives, there's a long-standing phenomenon where we endlessly criticize NPR but we don't criticize CNN, or worse, USAToday, and while we do criticize Fox News, the bar for them to clear is stupidly low. NPR is run by intelligent humans who can be expected to be thoughtful, and therefore when they aren't, it drives us crazy. It's not very interesting when the Ministry of Propaganda fails to be thoughtful.

(And specifically NPR, not the NYT. Nitpicking NPR feels different from the criticisms of the NYT, because their foibles arguably tilt elections and seem more malicious than the nitpicking we do of NPR, but lest this be deemed an analogy, I'll back out of the weeds now.)

Guest Post - Progress, Hooray!

Charley Carp writes: These flyers for our local ski hill appeared around town yesterday. Reaction was immediate, and, so far as I can see, unanimous. Within hours, the ski area denied having had anything to do with the flyer, and apologized anyway. The ad agency apologized and said it was an experiment in being edgy to appeal to the youth, and was done without the ski hill's knowledge. Not everyone believes this.

How long ago do you think something like this might have slipped by without becoming a PR disaster? I suppose answers vary by region, but pretty much anywhere one goes these days, this kind of thing is not going to attract the youth. Right?

(Updated to add: The ad people are now saying they've retrieved and shredded all the flyers. The ski area makes a genuine effort to attract women skiers -- the ski school has a terrific For Women Only program that runs for 7 Friday afternoons in the winter.)

Heebie's take: 1. Actual flier: Download file. I don't know why it's making me make the flier into a link, but I'm worried it'll be scaled gigantically. The text of the flier is:

"dear body
FAT,
you have two options: make your way into my
BOOBS
or get the
F-OUT
Savings on all season passes, now till November 11th!"

2. The actual advertisement makes no sense. It doesn't connect the body-shame to any sort of marketing or promotion, and the gimmick of making some words giant and some words tiny doesn't give any obvious second-meaning that I can see.

My guess is that someone's wife or daughter said it about themselves, and the poster-creator thought it was universally hilarious since it was self-deprecating.

Furthermore: If they'd made this a t-shirt, it wouldn't have bothered anyone (besides humorless feminists) because it'd be marketed to women who want to make the self-deprecating joke about themselves. The message is different if it's on a t-shirt vs a poster: a poster can't be self-deprecating.

3. Flyer or flier?

4. When I was a 5th year senior in college, there was a bit of a controversy over some fliers that said "Freshman girls: get 'em while they're skinny!" I found this blog post which claims it was t-shirts, not fliers, and since it was actually written in October 1999, I'll trust it over me. The reaction in the post matches what I recall as the mainstream reaction:

I think it's kind of funny, in a rude kind of way, but as I'm sure you might imagine there are some groups on campus who are outraged and offended. All kinds of complaints and protests have arisen.

This isn't funny! It objectifies women! It is demeaning! It causes self-esteem problems!

It's a bit ridiculous, in my opinion, because if you are taking a t-shirt sold at a football game that seriously, then chances are you had self-esteem problems to begin with.

But more importantly, all of this whining and moaning is counter-productive if your goal is to actually change freshman men's attitudes about women. All it is doing is perpetuating stereotypes of feminists as hyper-sensitive scowling whiny chicks with an axe to grind and no sense of humor.

I'm providing this as a reference point to ground public opinion between 1999 and 2018. So would Carp's flier have passed unremarked? I think quite possibly.

Abrams and Kemp

The situation in Georgia has me blinded with anger.

Ancestry

On Elizabeth Warren: I'm mostly glad that she took the gloves off and punched back at Trump for being an asshole. I do not have any patience for "don't stoop to his level!" in this context.

As to the concerns that she's muddling the conversation about who claims Native American heritage and what it means to claim to be Native American: this certainly seems like something she ought to address in a speech to supporters. Meet with tribal leaders, craft a statement about how while her DNA does indeed reflect something about her long ago relative, she doesn't herself have a Native American identity, but that she understands that the major issues facing X, Y, and Z tribes are this, this, and this, and she will fight for them.

Doom Is Not A Plan

Leaving aside the essential fecklessness that has brought us all together, if the Unfoggetariat all moved to Canada and pooled our labor, what would be the most likely profitable enterprise in which we could all take part? I know we have lawyers, journalists, programmers, academics and the academics-adjacent. I think Moby fixed some plumbing, once. So, what do you think? Writing Hallmark cards?

Guest Post - We're all doomed (UK edition)

Nworb Werdna writes: Until January last year, Ivan Rogers was the most important British diplomat dealing with the EU. He quit ahead of the start of serious exit negotiations, basically because he didn't think he own side was serious. And, boy, was he right.

In a lecture given apparently at Trinity College last week he lays out the problem.

Everyone will have their favourite parts, but mine are these:

This then, is a very British establishment sort of revolution. No plan and little planning, oodles of PPE tutorial level plausible bullshit, supreme self confidence that we understand others' real interests better than they do, a complete inability to fathom the nature and incentives of the ancien regime.

One reads recent tracts, like the IEA's recent one covering Britain's trading future and marvels at the sheer naïveté on every page, both about the EU and the US. As for other world players, just a couple of examples, but there are legions: we read on China that "the UK should initiate discussions with China but be clear that its requirements for a UK-China deal are likely to be difficult for China to meet in the short term." It goes on that the UK would need "progress in many areas of China's approach to trade". Good luck with that. I am sure Beijing is awaiting Dr Fox's Department's advice on how to conclude a path-breaking deal with the British.

Nearly 2 1⁄2 years on from the referendum, we are, in other words, both on the EU deal, and on other post Brexit trade deals, still lost in campaign mode on fantasy island. But the time for these fantasies is long past.

If it is true that Putin bought the referendum in KnifeCrimea he got some real value for his money.

Heebie's take: no, but really, we're all doomed.