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...jordan peterson.
for some reason, youtube keeps recommending to me videos featuring professor peterson, a controversial figure who is lauded by MRA/incel/alt-right types for being an advocate for masculinity - perceived to be under siege by an onslaught of leftist, feminist, radical extremists bent on the complete destruction of patriarchal hegemony.
to my mind, the destruction of patriarchal hegemony is a laudable goal, but methinks the professor doth protest too much.
i am of course a nobody opining on the internet (perhaps in a venue guaranteed to have the smallest possible audience, aside from google+), however professor peterson can rightly claim at least the bona fide of having earned the title of professor - which carries with it some sort of authority regardless of whether or not peterson knows what the fuck he's talking about.
in one video that i forced myself to watch (in a private browsing session) he pontificates on the impossibility of humanity to ever be able to tackle global warming or climate change based on his cynical view that, as a whole, people are too selfish, short-sighted, greedy, myopic and lazy to come together in a meaningful or productive way.
professor peterson, a doctor of clinical psychology, should recognize in himself some degree of projection in this case. psychologist, heal thyself!
the next video in line featured imminently punchable douchebag benjamin shapiro arguing that white privilege doesn't exist. his opening salvo, and where i stopped the video, was, roughly, "first of all there is no such thing as white privilege because race doesn't exist, the problem is social."
shapiro's assertion about race is technically, scientifically true: white, black, brown, red or yellow, regardless of one's stated racial or ethnic identity, humans are humans and we are all one race - homo sapiens.
the assertion is also false. the distinctions, while artificial, or more to the point, societal constructs, exist. more specifically, skin color, eye color, hair color, texture, et cetera are not deterministic for mental or physical accuity - yet the color of your skin is a determining factor in how you will be perceived by others, treated by others.
in a perfect world, and emphasis on this, all things being equal, a black person, white person, male or female, are born with the same guts, the same brain, and should be equally able to accomplish the same things.
that would be a perfect world - where everyone who is born with the same innate potential can rise to the same level of accomplishment, regardless of "race", gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, and so on.
it's easy to say "i don't see race" when you are a member of the race that experiences institutionalized, societal preference.
the other argument against "white privilege" is that there are whites who experience disadvantages. there is a name for these disadvantaged white people: poor.
and, to throw red meat at shapiro and his acolytes, (or not, because i suspect shapiro has little sympathy for the socialist or communist stripe), the disadvantaged people of color and the disadvantaged whites have poverty in common - if only they could find common cause, yet race exists as a seemingly insurmountable wedge.
for now, the united states of america is the most powerful empire in the known history of humanity. to be born white and male in the united states of america automatically means you are better off than 90% of the population of this planet.
to be born other than in the united states puts you against a metric president johnson spelled out in the quote "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."
in other words, white (especially males) born in the united states either have actual advantages or perceived supremacy - more importantly, until very recently there was no societal signaling to persons of color that their existence had any intrinsic value overall.
when persons of color have been valued, it has been on the terms of empowered whites pantomiming slave trade era valuations of persons - as sports athletes or minstrels, but rarely for contributions in law, science, medicine or public service.
to prove this point, i challenge anyone reading this to name well known boxers, basketball players, football players, jazz musicians and hip hop artists. then name the persons who: invented the traffic signal, peanut butter, helped the development of the first successful human heart transplant, fabricated the first x-ray machine, invented the lawn mower, invented the home security system, invented the touch tone telephone, caller-ID and fiber-optics.
shapiro would accuse me of being unfair here - of course everyone can name entertainers and athletes. surely everyone who has heard of robert johnson knows billy joel, and if you are woke enough to be hip to nina simone, of course you know who joe cocker is, right? of course, were it not for african slaves and the music they created, billy joel and joe cocker would probably not be household names. the reason being that both joel and cocker, if not implicit in co-opting art forms created by slaves and their descendents, are at least tacitly complacent.
and most people can rattle off a list of white, male scientists and inventors from before da vinci to after alexander graham bell. almost no one knows garrett augustus morgan, the inventor of the traffic light.
not to detract from the contributions of women, which is a whole other, much bigger, bag of worms.
if i were to go on for another 20,000 words i would not even be able to scratch the surface on why being born white puts you at an advantage over being born a person of color in the united states.
my point here is that peterson and shapiro are assholes, arguing about the non-existence of their advantages from a position of privilege.
so let me whitesplain it to y'all: white privilege is real. i should know, i'm white.
my dad made the grave error recently of forwarding me one of those apocryphal chain letter meme things that, you know, baby boomers are susceptible to forward. worse, it was about legal decisions - in this case almost entirely fictional - that intended to show how out of control litigators and complatants have become in the modern era.
the letter forwarded was titled "the stella awards".
my dad is, in fact, a sworn officer of the court in the state of ohio. he possesses a juris doctorate, the highest academic degree one can attain in the field of law. his career spanned 5 decades, a highly successful and highly regarded attorney, a senior partner prior to his retirement and a person who continues to use his professional skills as a volunteer for any number of laudable causes.
"the stella awards" are named after stella liebeck, who successfully sued the mcdonalds corporation for $3 million dollars after suffering third degree burns from spilling mcdonalds coffee in her lap.
tort reform advocates enjoy lampooning this case as an example of egregious abuse of the civil litigation process by money hungry complantants and their lawyers.
most people will read the lede - woman spills coffee, sues mcdonalds for $3 million - and conclude that this case must be frivolous and the settlement excessive. few people know the actual details of the case. this is what i sent my father:
"The trial took place from August 8–17, 1994, before New Mexico District Court Judge Robert H. Scott.[17] During the case, Liebeck's attorneys discovered that McDonald's required franchisees to hold coffee at 180–190 °F (82–88 °C). Liebeck's attorney argued that coffee should never be served hotter than 140 °F (60 °C), and that a number of other establishments served coffee at a substantially lower temperature than McDonald's. They presented evidence that coffee they had tested all over the city was all served at a temperature at least 20°F (11°C) lower than what McDonald's served. Liebeck's lawyers also presented the jury with expert testimony that 190 °F (88 °C) coffee may produce third-degree burns (where skin grafting is necessary) in about 3 seconds and 180 °F (82 °C) coffee may produce such burns in about 12 to 15 seconds.[2] Lowering the temperature to 160 °F (71 °C) would increase the time for the coffee to produce such a burn to 20 seconds. Liebeck's attorneys argued that these extra seconds could provide adequate time to remove the coffee from exposed skin, thereby preventing many burns. McDonald's claimed that the reason for serving such hot coffee in its drive-through windows was that those who purchased the coffee typically were commuters who wanted to drive a distance with the coffee; the high initial temperature would keep the coffee hot during the trip.[2] However, it came to light that McDonald's had done research which indicated that customers intend to consume the coffee immediately while driving.[3]
Other documents obtained from McDonald's showed that from 1982 to 1992 the company had received more than 700 reports of people burned by McDonald's coffee to varying degrees of severity, and had settled claims arising from scalding injuries for more than $500,000.[2] McDonald's quality control manager, Christopher Appleton, testified that this number of injuries was insufficient to cause the company to evaluate its practices. He argued that all foods hotter than 130 °F (54 °C) constituted a burn hazard, and that restaurants had more pressing dangers to worry about. The plaintiffs argued that Appleton conceded that McDonald's coffee would burn the mouth and throat if consumed when served.[18]
A twelve-person jury reached its verdict on August 18, 1994.[17] Applying the principles of comparative negligence, the jury found that McDonald's was 80% responsible for the incident and Liebeck was 20% at fault. Though there was a warning on the coffee cup, the jury decided that the warning was neither large enough nor sufficient. They awarded Liebeck $200,000 in compensatory damages, which was then reduced by 20% to $160,000. In addition, they awarded her $2.7 million in punitive damages. The jurors apparently arrived at this figure from Morgan's suggestion to penalize McDonald's for one or two days' worth of coffee revenues, which were about $1.35 million per day.[2] The judge reduced punitive damages to $480,000, three times the compensatory amount, for a total of $640,000. The decision was appealed by both McDonald's and Liebeck in December 1994, but the parties settled out of court for an undisclosed amount less than $600,000.[19]"
(taken from the wikipedia page, look it up yourself.)
not able to leave well enough alone, i followed up after my dad weakly acquiesced with this rejoinder:
"Not to drive the point waaay into the ground, but I found this on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9DXSCpcz9E
This case was actually something we studied at Shaker Heights High School (so, it's on *you* for raising us in a public school system that, in hindsight, was our introduction to radical liberal indoctrination... and where I met and chatted with Angela Davis!).
Tort and litigation abuse is real, of course, but like other tropes like "welfare queens", "voter fraud" and, recently, the imaginary invasion of criminally minded immigrants over our southern border, abuse of the courts is paraded as a wedge issue scare tactic before naive voters by cynical interest groups with ulterior motives.
These days you will find that those lobbying for "tort reform" (in other words, legislation designed to limit the ability of regular citizens to bring suits against corporations like McDonalds, or worse, RJ Reynolds, ConAgra, Monsanto, GE, etc, etc) to be well funded astro-turf campaigns orchestrated by organizations like ALEC - the American Legislative Exchange Council.
The goal is to weaken the court's power to find these companies at fault or levy punitive damages; and more and more recently a lot of what would have been prosecuted or adjudicated in civil court is now relegated to arbitration, which disadvantages the complantent in almost all cases.
I heard a joke recently that went something like "you hear there's been an uptick in people applying to law school? Apparently any idiot can be a lawyer..." (this was on the heels of the Cohen indictment, and Giuliani's various televised gaffes, flying in the face of the conventional wisdom that to become an officer of the courts one needed some degree of gravitas, intelligence and some kind of ethical or moral center).
Having said all that, now I'm going to look into the cases you cite in this year's Stella Awards - cases given with no context other than someone's disregard for the outcome - to see if the claims of the frivolity of those decisions hold up to reality.
Hopefully I will have gainful employment soon, so I will have less time to be a pain in your butt about matters in which I am very much a lay person :)
Love you!"
in other words... tort reform is bullshit.
for some reason, youtube keeps recommending to me videos featuring professor peterson, a controversial figure who is lauded by MRA/incel/alt-right types for being an advocate for masculinity - perceived to be under siege by an onslaught of leftist, feminist, radical extremists bent on the complete destruction of patriarchal hegemony.
to my mind, the destruction of patriarchal hegemony is a laudable goal, but methinks the professor doth protest too much.
i am of course a nobody opining on the internet (perhaps in a venue guaranteed to have the smallest possible audience, aside from google+), however professor peterson can rightly claim at least the bona fide of having earned the title of professor - which carries with it some sort of authority regardless of whether or not peterson knows what the fuck he's talking about.
in one video that i forced myself to watch (in a private browsing session) he pontificates on the impossibility of humanity to ever be able to tackle global warming or climate change based on his cynical view that, as a whole, people are too selfish, short-sighted, greedy, myopic and lazy to come together in a meaningful or productive way.
professor peterson, a doctor of clinical psychology, should recognize in himself some degree of projection in this case. psychologist, heal thyself!
the next video in line featured imminently punchable douchebag benjamin shapiro arguing that white privilege doesn't exist. his opening salvo, and where i stopped the video, was, roughly, "first of all there is no such thing as white privilege because race doesn't exist, the problem is social."
shapiro's assertion about race is technically, scientifically true: white, black, brown, red or yellow, regardless of one's stated racial or ethnic identity, humans are humans and we are all one race - homo sapiens.
the assertion is also false. the distinctions, while artificial, or more to the point, societal constructs, exist. more specifically, skin color, eye color, hair color, texture, et cetera are not deterministic for mental or physical accuity - yet the color of your skin is a determining factor in how you will be perceived by others, treated by others.
in a perfect world, and emphasis on this, all things being equal, a black person, white person, male or female, are born with the same guts, the same brain, and should be equally able to accomplish the same things.
that would be a perfect world - where everyone who is born with the same innate potential can rise to the same level of accomplishment, regardless of "race", gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, and so on.
it's easy to say "i don't see race" when you are a member of the race that experiences institutionalized, societal preference.
the other argument against "white privilege" is that there are whites who experience disadvantages. there is a name for these disadvantaged white people: poor.
and, to throw red meat at shapiro and his acolytes, (or not, because i suspect shapiro has little sympathy for the socialist or communist stripe), the disadvantaged people of color and the disadvantaged whites have poverty in common - if only they could find common cause, yet race exists as a seemingly insurmountable wedge.
for now, the united states of america is the most powerful empire in the known history of humanity. to be born white and male in the united states of america automatically means you are better off than 90% of the population of this planet.
to be born other than in the united states puts you against a metric president johnson spelled out in the quote "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."
in other words, white (especially males) born in the united states either have actual advantages or perceived supremacy - more importantly, until very recently there was no societal signaling to persons of color that their existence had any intrinsic value overall.
when persons of color have been valued, it has been on the terms of empowered whites pantomiming slave trade era valuations of persons - as sports athletes or minstrels, but rarely for contributions in law, science, medicine or public service.
to prove this point, i challenge anyone reading this to name well known boxers, basketball players, football players, jazz musicians and hip hop artists. then name the persons who: invented the traffic signal, peanut butter, helped the development of the first successful human heart transplant, fabricated the first x-ray machine, invented the lawn mower, invented the home security system, invented the touch tone telephone, caller-ID and fiber-optics.
shapiro would accuse me of being unfair here - of course everyone can name entertainers and athletes. surely everyone who has heard of robert johnson knows billy joel, and if you are woke enough to be hip to nina simone, of course you know who joe cocker is, right? of course, were it not for african slaves and the music they created, billy joel and joe cocker would probably not be household names. the reason being that both joel and cocker, if not implicit in co-opting art forms created by slaves and their descendents, are at least tacitly complacent.
and most people can rattle off a list of white, male scientists and inventors from before da vinci to after alexander graham bell. almost no one knows garrett augustus morgan, the inventor of the traffic light.
not to detract from the contributions of women, which is a whole other, much bigger, bag of worms.
if i were to go on for another 20,000 words i would not even be able to scratch the surface on why being born white puts you at an advantage over being born a person of color in the united states.
my point here is that peterson and shapiro are assholes, arguing about the non-existence of their advantages from a position of privilege.
so let me whitesplain it to y'all: white privilege is real. i should know, i'm white.
my dad made the grave error recently of forwarding me one of those apocryphal chain letter meme things that, you know, baby boomers are susceptible to forward. worse, it was about legal decisions - in this case almost entirely fictional - that intended to show how out of control litigators and complatants have become in the modern era.
the letter forwarded was titled "the stella awards".
my dad is, in fact, a sworn officer of the court in the state of ohio. he possesses a juris doctorate, the highest academic degree one can attain in the field of law. his career spanned 5 decades, a highly successful and highly regarded attorney, a senior partner prior to his retirement and a person who continues to use his professional skills as a volunteer for any number of laudable causes.
"the stella awards" are named after stella liebeck, who successfully sued the mcdonalds corporation for $3 million dollars after suffering third degree burns from spilling mcdonalds coffee in her lap.
tort reform advocates enjoy lampooning this case as an example of egregious abuse of the civil litigation process by money hungry complantants and their lawyers.
most people will read the lede - woman spills coffee, sues mcdonalds for $3 million - and conclude that this case must be frivolous and the settlement excessive. few people know the actual details of the case. this is what i sent my father:
"The trial took place from August 8–17, 1994, before New Mexico District Court Judge Robert H. Scott.[17] During the case, Liebeck's attorneys discovered that McDonald's required franchisees to hold coffee at 180–190 °F (82–88 °C). Liebeck's attorney argued that coffee should never be served hotter than 140 °F (60 °C), and that a number of other establishments served coffee at a substantially lower temperature than McDonald's. They presented evidence that coffee they had tested all over the city was all served at a temperature at least 20°F (11°C) lower than what McDonald's served. Liebeck's lawyers also presented the jury with expert testimony that 190 °F (88 °C) coffee may produce third-degree burns (where skin grafting is necessary) in about 3 seconds and 180 °F (82 °C) coffee may produce such burns in about 12 to 15 seconds.[2] Lowering the temperature to 160 °F (71 °C) would increase the time for the coffee to produce such a burn to 20 seconds. Liebeck's attorneys argued that these extra seconds could provide adequate time to remove the coffee from exposed skin, thereby preventing many burns. McDonald's claimed that the reason for serving such hot coffee in its drive-through windows was that those who purchased the coffee typically were commuters who wanted to drive a distance with the coffee; the high initial temperature would keep the coffee hot during the trip.[2] However, it came to light that McDonald's had done research which indicated that customers intend to consume the coffee immediately while driving.[3]
Other documents obtained from McDonald's showed that from 1982 to 1992 the company had received more than 700 reports of people burned by McDonald's coffee to varying degrees of severity, and had settled claims arising from scalding injuries for more than $500,000.[2] McDonald's quality control manager, Christopher Appleton, testified that this number of injuries was insufficient to cause the company to evaluate its practices. He argued that all foods hotter than 130 °F (54 °C) constituted a burn hazard, and that restaurants had more pressing dangers to worry about. The plaintiffs argued that Appleton conceded that McDonald's coffee would burn the mouth and throat if consumed when served.[18]
A twelve-person jury reached its verdict on August 18, 1994.[17] Applying the principles of comparative negligence, the jury found that McDonald's was 80% responsible for the incident and Liebeck was 20% at fault. Though there was a warning on the coffee cup, the jury decided that the warning was neither large enough nor sufficient. They awarded Liebeck $200,000 in compensatory damages, which was then reduced by 20% to $160,000. In addition, they awarded her $2.7 million in punitive damages. The jurors apparently arrived at this figure from Morgan's suggestion to penalize McDonald's for one or two days' worth of coffee revenues, which were about $1.35 million per day.[2] The judge reduced punitive damages to $480,000, three times the compensatory amount, for a total of $640,000. The decision was appealed by both McDonald's and Liebeck in December 1994, but the parties settled out of court for an undisclosed amount less than $600,000.[19]"
(taken from the wikipedia page, look it up yourself.)
not able to leave well enough alone, i followed up after my dad weakly acquiesced with this rejoinder:
"Not to drive the point waaay into the ground, but I found this on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9DXSCpcz9E
This case was actually something we studied at Shaker Heights High School (so, it's on *you* for raising us in a public school system that, in hindsight, was our introduction to radical liberal indoctrination... and where I met and chatted with Angela Davis!).
Tort and litigation abuse is real, of course, but like other tropes like "welfare queens", "voter fraud" and, recently, the imaginary invasion of criminally minded immigrants over our southern border, abuse of the courts is paraded as a wedge issue scare tactic before naive voters by cynical interest groups with ulterior motives.
These days you will find that those lobbying for "tort reform" (in other words, legislation designed to limit the ability of regular citizens to bring suits against corporations like McDonalds, or worse, RJ Reynolds, ConAgra, Monsanto, GE, etc, etc) to be well funded astro-turf campaigns orchestrated by organizations like ALEC - the American Legislative Exchange Council.
The goal is to weaken the court's power to find these companies at fault or levy punitive damages; and more and more recently a lot of what would have been prosecuted or adjudicated in civil court is now relegated to arbitration, which disadvantages the complantent in almost all cases.
I heard a joke recently that went something like "you hear there's been an uptick in people applying to law school? Apparently any idiot can be a lawyer..." (this was on the heels of the Cohen indictment, and Giuliani's various televised gaffes, flying in the face of the conventional wisdom that to become an officer of the courts one needed some degree of gravitas, intelligence and some kind of ethical or moral center).
Having said all that, now I'm going to look into the cases you cite in this year's Stella Awards - cases given with no context other than someone's disregard for the outcome - to see if the claims of the frivolity of those decisions hold up to reality.
Hopefully I will have gainful employment soon, so I will have less time to be a pain in your butt about matters in which I am very much a lay person :)
Love you!"
in other words... tort reform is bullshit.
i wanted to talk about the golden age of tv, which is traditionally roughly from the end of WWII to the early 60s... my argument is that this is not the golden age of tv at all... that the golden age of TV started with Twin Peaks and grew throughout the 90s, gradually, and is now peaking with the type of and quality of television now being produced. two words - "the wire".
but i'll have to get to that later because it's bed time.
