No offence intended, but ... (2 of 3)

Last time, we looked at the claim that Political Correctness is a "system of left-wing ideological repression" that prevents a free and open discussion of real issues concerning certain groups of society. In this discussion, we will continue to look at cases where it is possible that important issues involving immigrant groups were ignored out of a fear of offending or appearing to be racist. But first, I would like to take issue with the assertion that it is specifically left-wing ideological repression. I agree that most of the times when the term Political Correctness is used concern what might be termed liberal issues, but I contend that the same type of repression happens on the right, but we call it Patriotism rather than Political Correctness.

Turning Political Correctness on its head

We love our outrage. Social media teems with instant outrage over a number of issues. Let's look at a recent case. On 27 August, photographer Jennifer Lee Chan tweeted an image of the San Francisco 49ers standing during the national anthem—all except reserve quarterback Colin Kaepernick. The image was picked up by several news outlets, and quickly became a huge story. His remaining seated was, to him and others, a way of protesting racial injustice in USA; but many saw it as a sign of great disrespect. In particular, coming as it did after a string of incidents where white police officers had killed unarmed young black men, the gesture was seen, and meant, as an indictment of police brutality towards people of colour. The gesture of kneeling during the national anthem in protest has spread to other people and other teams, even a team of 11- to 12-year-olds. This team has received death threats as a result of the protest.
In the New York Times, Wesley Morris provides an outstanding discussion of the Kaepernick issue: Colin Kaepernick and the Question of Who Gets to Be Called a 'Patriot'. Notice how it is being addressed as an issue of patriotism, but I argue that the negative response could equally be called an issue of political correctness. The same people who complain that they are, in the name of PC-ness, required to be careful not to say something that might offend some (minority) group, will be quick to call foul if someone (particularly a minority person) says or does something that offends them or is disrespectful of one of the patriotic idols—the police force or the military. Kaepernick was being politically incorrect, because he was offending patriotic Americans, the police force, and the military—our heroes.

"Soldiers died for his freedom"

Many of the rebukes directed at Kaepernick invoked a common theme: "soldiers [our heroes] died to support your freedom, so you should not be showing them disrespect". I have a problem with this sentiment. The last war in which the U.S. military fought to provide or defend freedom for Americans was the (American) Civil War. There will be some who say that we defended ourselves against the Japanese and the Germans in the Second World War (see the bumper stick above).  But I think this is an exaggeration: Hitler was anxious to keep the U.S. out of the war, so that his planned expansion into the east could proceed without interference. Similarly, Japan had no intention of invading, or reason to invade, the U.S. mainland. You will find propaganda that it was only the perceived difficulty of quelling a nation where so many citizens carried guns that inhibited the Japanese from invading, but it is only propaganda. The intention of the attack on Pearl Harbor was to prevent the U.S. fleet from interfering with Japan's attempts to expand their influence in the western Pacific. So if we accept that the last war fought for Americans' freedom was the Civil War, then we must accept that about half the American soldiers fighting and dying were doing so to prevent the freedom of people like Kaepernick.

When the oppressed want privilege

Recently a colleague was commenting that he was offended by the way various minorities were demanding more and more rights—that they were asking to have more privilege than the majority. We talked more to help me understand why he saw their demands this way, and the graph at right emerged from that discussion. On the left side, we see the level of privilege enjoyed by the majority (conveniently shown in white): most have a medium level of privilege (B); and few have a lot of privilege (A: think "the 1%"), and there are some who are struggling (C & D). On the right, we see the level of privilege for minorities (black, but could equally well be immigrants (both legal and illegal), or LGBT). There are a very few with a lot of privilege (E: currently, the Obama family, for example), and a fair proportion with a medium level of privilege (F). But there are a lot with very low levels of privilege (G), and they are asking to come up to a reasonable level, near to a par with the majority of the "whites".

Here we run into an issue of anchoring bias (Kahneman, Slovic, & Tversky, 1982). For example, in an experiment Group 1 was asked whether the percentage of the proportion of African countries in the UN was more or less than 10%, then asked to estimate the actual proportion; Group 2 was asked whether the proportion was more or less than 65% before being asked to estimate the actual proportion. The median guess for the actual proportion in Group 1 was 25%, and in Group 2 was 45%. (The current actual proportion is 28%, if you must know.) Each group unconsciously anchored on the cue value (10% or 65%) and adjusted up or down from there. In the case of the privilege question, those of us in the majority (the B group in the privilege figure above), when considering the under-privileged, tend to anchor on our own level of privilege and adjust down a bit, because this is what we know. We are likely to arrive at a level corresponding to group C or D, so the increase in privilege being asked for by group G would appear to take them above our own level, since we are starting from an artificially high level for the group. We have no experience of having as little privilege as the G group, so we have no good reference point. This helps explain why so many of us, when considering whether gay and lesbian couples should be allowed to get married, felt that it would diminish the meaning of our own heterosexual ("normal") marriages: it looked to us like the same-sex marriages were achieving a level of importance higher than our own.

Political Correctness Gone Silly

On reading the first in this series on Political Correctness, a friend expressed curiosity about where the discussion was going, because he had recently had a discussion about whether it was okay to say "coloured person". His friend maintained that the "[politically] correct" term is "person of colour," This is an interesting discussion: why is there a "correct term"? Why might one be considered demeaning, when the other isn't?

Have I written before about the issue of blue ink? I can't remember. There was a period when official signatures could not be in blue ink, especially in the UK. Here, we tended to say they had to be in black ink, but in the UK they could be in any colour other than blue. Why? Most of us didn't know; we just knew that we couldn't sign in blue. The actual reason derived from the use of real ink (in fountain pens—not ball-points or, as we called them in England, biros) and could be seen on the label of the ink bottle. Every colour other than blue was labeled permanent: Permanent Black, Permanent Red, even Permanent Blue-Black (my favourite colour). But the only true blue one could buy was Washable Blue. No-one could make a permanent blue ink, it only came in a variety that was water-soluble. And we didn't want official signatures to be lost in the event of accidental wetting. So blue was a forbidden colour. Then, suddenly, there emerged a requirement that all signatures had to be in blue. This time the reason was photocopiers: early photocopiers used a light source that would not copy a pure blue image, so we could tell if an official document had been copied because the signature would not appear. Both reasons are now obsolete: ball-point blue ink is permanent (as anyone whose pen has leaked onto their best dress shirt knows), and almost all photocopiers copy in colour, and will happily copy blue. But we remembered the rule, with no understanding of the reason for the rule.

I bring this up because I think the same thing applies in many of these cases of the "[politically] correct" term. We know the rule, but we have little understanding of the rationale behind the rule. Why is person of colour preferable to coloured person? I'll tell you. The term "person of colour" puts the person first: we concentrated on the person-hood, and the skin tone (colour) is merely a characteristic. But the term "coloured person" seems to diminish or alter the person-hood: this is not a "real" person, it is a "coloured" (and therefore lesser) person. But in the end, why do we have to mention the skin-tone of the person whom we are discussing anyway? More on this issue next time. Let's look at some other terms that have become Politically Incorrect for, in my not-so-humble opinion, silly reasons.

Handicapped and Retarded

Recently, a colleague in the office where I used to work was bemoaning various ammunition-handling regulations, repeatedly asserting that the regulations were "retarded". Meanwhile, in her recent book In Trump We Trust, Ann Coulter (2016) writes that Trump was not making fun of a disabled reporter during one of his stump speeches: actually he "was doing a standard retard, waving his arms and sounding stupid." She has since gone on to say that she can prove that the press lied when they accused Trump of the mockery. There's no fun in, or skill needed for, rebutting Ann Coulter; what interested me was that she felt it less problematic that a presidential candidate was "doing a standard retard".
The term retarded, or mentally retarded, is actually a very good term. In the literal sense it means to "make slow or late, delay progress or development or arrival or accomplishment" (Sykes, 1976, p. 960). So a person who is (mentally) retarded has delayed progress in mental development, an apt and appropriate term. The problem is when we fail to show compassion for those who are mentally retarded, and regard them as stupid and worthy of mockery (as, apparently, does Ann Coulter).Then we start using the word as a term of rebuke: to call someone or something "retarded" is to say that he or it is worthy of contempt. Now we can no longer use the term mentally retarded, because we can't tell whether it is being used in its technical, and appropriate, sense, or as an expression of contempt. The term has become Politically Incorrect, so we have to say mentally handicapped instead. But it was never the term that was inappropriate: it was our misuse of the word that brought it into ill repute.
And then there's the word handicapped. This word has a fascinating etymology starting with the game hand-in-cap (not cap-in-hand as social media likes to report). The game involved an exchange of items, with the difference in value of the items being made up by a cash addition. (Interestingly, cap-in-hand appears to be a form of the Prisoner's Dilemma.) As time progressed, the word contracted to handicap while it expanded in meaning to include races and other sporting events where the chances of the competitors are evened in some way, such as allowing a head start (foot race), adding weight (horse race), or conceding a number of strokes (golf). From here it came to mean any "hindrance, thing that prevents one from doing something" (Sykes, 1976, p. 487). Finally, it was applied to people who had a natural hindrance, such as a physical abnormality. Again, it strikes me as being an entirely appropriate term. A person in a wheel-chair, for example, is able to do almost anything a fully mobile person can do, but he is hindered—he carries "extra weight". Once again, however, through lack of compassion the term came to be used as one of abuse. In England when I was growing up, the term spastic was similarly misused to accuse people of being uncoordinated. So rather than referring to people who have a hindrance to physical activity as being handicapped, we now say disabled. In its literal sense, this is a worse word, because it implies that a disabled person is unable to accomplish, rather than hindered in accomplishing, which resulted in a brief flirtation with the ridiculous phrase "differently abled".
Here is Political Correctness gone silly. Just like we should prosecute criminals who abuse guns rather than removing guns (a position with which I do not fully agree), we should correct people who abuse terms like retarded and handicapped rather than removing these perfectly appropriate words.

Words change meaning

Words, like retarded and handicapped, change meaning and acquire different nuances over time. My favourite example is the words clown and fool. When Shakespeare writes about a fool, he means a type of clown—a jester, whose job is to entertain, often by making politically incorrect comments. (This kind of edgy humour is still used by many stand-up comedians.) But when Shakespeare has a character call someone a clown, he is using the word as an insult, accusing the person of muddle-headedness. So the words clown and fool have, since the 17^th century, swapped meanings.
During a recent discussion at church, one long-time member expressed dismay at the criticism of evangelical Christians, saying that the term evangelical was being misapplied. This word, which should be an easy term, has in recent years gained new meaning because it represents an important voting block in elections, thanks to Jerry Falwell (Banwarth, 2013). The meaning should be easy: an evangelical is a "(member) of the Protestant school maintaining that the essence of the gospel consists in doctrine of salvation by faith in Atonement" (Sykes, 1976, p. 358). The National Association of Evangelicals provides a four-point test of belief to define an evangelical. And yet, the term has become confused over the years, often confounded with political and racial divisions. The topic has often been debated recently, for example in The Atlantic, in Christianity Today, and on National Public Radio. "It has been said the most segregated hour in America is from eleven to twelve o'clock on sunday mornings" writes Lisa Sharon Harper (2008). Race divides us in religion, and in political affiliation, and as a result many pollsters include only white evangelicals in their response group "evangelical Christians" to make a cleaner political distinction. To a liberal, therefore, the term evangelical has become abhorrent, representing conservative white paternalism, despite the fact that one of the most prominent American evangelical Christians was Jimmy Carter!
Even the term Politically Incorrect has changed meaning over time, as we've been discussing here.

Christmas is Coming, and Outrage Is in the Air

This time of year, it is politically correct to say "happy holidays" rather than "Merry Christmas" to prevent offending atheists and non-Christians. In my parallel blog Reflecture, I mentioned that I had heard people saying that, now that Trump had won the election, they would be able to say "Merry Christmas" and not care who was offended. The war on Christmas, lovingly reported on Fox News, is a popular instantiation of the conservative Christian persecution complex. And so we see stories of countries banning Christmas lights, or that notoriously"anti-Christian" President Obama banning Christmas cards to servicemen overseas, or that the Post Office won't issue new religious Christmas-themed stamps because they are politically incorrect, and the famous crisis last year of the plain red Starbucks cups for the holiday season, representing the liberal company's attempt at "Christian cleansing". Political correctness is seen as attempting to annihilate Christmas, or at least remove Christ from the holiday, despite the fact that commercialism accomplished that many years ago, and we might just have to accept the fact. Sometimes, however, it just gets silly: in a small town recently, the ACLU filed suit on behalf of a single person in the town charging that the cross on the top of the Christmas tree on town property violates the establishment clause of the First Amendment. While the complainant has a valid point, it does seem to be an extreme measure to handle something that should really be a matter for a town-hall meeting.

More Dangers of Political Correctness

Last time we examined whether zeal for political correctness ever caused the truth to be suppressed. This time, we look at cases where political correctness, specifically the desire not to interfere in communities of an immigrant (especially Muslim) culture, allowed crimes against people to go undetected.

Under-age Prostitution in the North

For many years, there have been large concentrations of South Asian Muslim populations in the north of England. Last year there were reports of police "no-go" areas in this region, although these reports only appeared in papers that carry sensationalist headlines and are prone to right-wing conspiracy theories (the British equivalent of the Washington Times), and fact-checking repeatedly reveals the reports to be false.
However, there actually were several towns in the north of England where Pakistani men were exploiting under-age white girls in prostitution rings. It is likely that one of the reasons the police were hesitant to look more deeply into the matter was that they were concerned about being seen to be stigmatising a group based on race: they wanted to be Politically Correct.

Muslim Misogyny in The Netherlands

I recently finished reading the book Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali (2007). In this autobiography, she documents her young life in Somalia and Saudi Arabia, where in her teens she became a devout Muslim through the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood. But then she was forced into a marriage against her will. While travelling to Canada to be with her new husband, she escaped and sought (and was granted) refugee status in Holland. As she experienced freedom, she abandoned her religion. She became a translator for the local authorities, and in that capacity saw many examples of abuse of Somali women. The government were hesitant to interfere, because there is a strong streak of liberty of the individual in Dutch culture, and there was no desire to rob the Somali immigrants of their individual culture by forcing Western practices on them. Three passages help to summarize Hirsi Ali's thesis:

"The Dutch adopted these policies because they wanted to be good people. Their country had behaved unspeakably in Indonesia, and didn't (much) resist Hitler; in Holland, a greater percentage of Jews were deported during the Second World War than in any other country in Western Europe. Dutch people felt guilty about this recent past. When massive immigration began in Holland, which wasn't until the 1980s, there was a sense among the Dutch that society should behave with decency and understanding toward these people and accept their differences and beliefs." (Hirsi Ali, 2007, pp. 245-246.)

"This compassion for immigrants and their stuggles in a new country resulted in attitudes and policies that perpetuated cruelty. Thousands of Muslim women and children in Holland were being systematically abused, and there was no escaping this fact. Little children were excised [that is female genital mutilation] on kitchen tables—I knew this from Somalis for whom I translated. [...] And while the Dutch were generoously contributing money to international aid organizations, they were also ignoring the silent suffering of Muslim women and children in their own backyard." (ibid. p. 246.)

"People accuse me of having interiorized a felling of racial inferiority, so that I attack my own culture out of self-hatred, because I want to be white. This is a tiresome argument. Tell me, is freedom then only for white people? Is it self-love to adhere to my ancestors' traditions and mutilate by daughters? To agree to be humiliated and powerless? To watch passively as my countrymen abuse women and slaughter each other in pointless disputes? When I came to a new culture, where I saw for the first time that human relations could be different, would it have been self-love to see that as a foreign cult, which Muslims are forbidden to practice?" (ibid., p. 348.)

It's a delicate balance between showing appropriate cultural sensitivity (i.e. being politically correct), and failing to uphold the fundamentals of our own society regardless of culture. Many European countries are struggling with this currently, especially regarding the attire of Muslim women. Four things can help:

1. Be aware of our inherent racism. By admitting that we will are prone to judge and act out of racism, we can carefully assess our reactions to determine whether we are being racist or not. We must ask ourselves "would I be reacting the same way if the person in front of me was white? Christian?" This applies equally to sexism, by the way.
2. Be very clear in our minds on the fundamental rights and requirements of society, always ensuring that they are based on human dignity, rather than racial dignity. This can be troublesome. For example, why is it acceptable for a Jew to practice male genital mutilation (aka. circumcision) on religious grounds, but not for a Muslim to practice female genital mutilation on religious grounds?
3. Base our judgment on facts (such as under-age prostitution rings run exclusively by men of Pakistani origin) rather than on rumour, innuendo, and conspiracy theories (such as Sharia law being implemented in Dearborn, Michigan).
4. Ask ourselves whether we are we acting out of compassion, or out of a misplaced sense of superiority.

I wish this were easy, but it isn't. There will always be tensions, there will always be a balancing act. Next time, we'll examine how to practice "good" political correctness, which may require us to use a different term, since the original has acquired such a bitter taste.

References:

• Banworth, Doug. Jerry Falwell, the Rise of the Moral Majority, and the 1980 Election.Western Illinois Historical Review 5, Spring 2013.
• Coulter, Ann H. In Trump We Trust: E Pluribus Awesome! New York: Sentinel, 2016. 
• Harper, Lisa Sharon. Evangelical does not equal Republican ... or Democrat. New York: New Press, 2008.
• Hirsi Ali, Ayaan. Infidel. New York: Free Press, 2007.
• Kahneman, Daniel, Paul Slovic, and Amos Tversky (eds.). Judgment under uncertainty: heuristics and biases. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.
• Sykes, J. B. (ed.). The Concise Oxford dictionary of current English: based on the Oxford English dictionary and its supplements (6th ed.).  Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976.

No offence intended, but ... (1 of 3)

Readers may have noticed that I admire Fred Rogers. In many ways, I think he would be a prime candidate for sainthood—except for the tiny issue of being an ordained Presbyterian minister, rather than a Roman Catholic. Oh well, nobody's perfect. (In case you wondered, the rumours that he was a SEAL sniper, and always wore long sleeves to conceal the tattoos on his arms are false.)
Several months ago, I was extolling Mr. Rogers' virtues in Sunday School, and commented how he managed to spread the Gospel without once mentioning Jesus or religion, which allowed him to be very ... Then my 50+ year-old brain did what it does best, and denied me the word I was looking for. Someone suggested "politically correct". That wasn't the word I was looking for; but it is the topic I would like to discuss today. (In case you wondered, the word I sought was "inclusive".)

When did being Politically Correct become a bad thing?

The term Politically Correct has a long and checkered history, and it's meaning varies with the times. In a Washington Post article, Caitlin Gibson notes that the phrase originated in the American Communist Party. Originally meaning adherent to Party orthodoxy, it gradually grew to be more generally associated with the moral mandate of left-leaning policies, although it was also briefly used to describe (pejoratively) the journalists in Nazi Germany who displayed "appropriate" opinions. However, Gibson notes that "by the mid-’80s, “politically correct” was being leveled by some conservative critics with heavy doses of irony against what they viewed as feel-good liberal pieties." Since then, the term has become a way to ridicule one's opponents (especially one's progressive opponents), and Gibson concludes that the term is unsalvageable. If you are interested, Jesse Walker provides a more complete history of the term in his blog.
Certainly, there are many who feel, as Jonathan Chait wrote in the New York Magazine, that political correctness is a "system of left-wing ideological repression" that threatens the "bedrock liberal ideal" of a "free political marketplace where we can reason together as individuals." It is seen as a means to suppress the truth for fear of offending. Recently, the New York Times showed video of unfiltered voices from political rallies, voices of people who have decided not to continue to let the truth be suppressed. (I would strongly warn you about offensive language, but that would require me to be politically correct.) To be fair, Trump supporters quickly responded with their own collection of offensive speech by anti-Trump supporters.

Does Political Correctness Suppress The Truth? And What Is The Truth?

Let's talk about suppressing the truth. A friend of mine posted a review on Facebook of Michelle Alexander's book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. The premise of the book is that, denied the ability to discriminate directly against black Americans by the civil rights laws of the 1960s and the abolition of Jim Crow laws, society has responded by shaping the justice system to ensure the incarceration of blacks at astounding rates. The U.S. has a higher incarceration rate than any other country. Yes: ANY other country. And black people are disproportionately represented in the prison population, as I discussed in an earlier posting. The result, Alexander suggests, is "millions of African Americans locked behind bars and then relegated to a permanent second-class status—denied the very rights supposedly won in the Civil Rights Movement" including the right to vote.

In response to my friend's post about the book, one of his friends (a Franciscan friar, no less) commented that this simply reflected the truth that black people commit crimes at a much higher rate than white people. Definitely not a politically correct comment. But the good friar felt compelled to tell what he knew to be the truth. (Interesting that the incarceration rate of black people in the U.S. exceeds the rate of incarceration of black people in African countries—so apparently it is not merely the fact of being black that leads to this supposed criminality.)

At a later time I want to talk about the difference between truth and facts.  But for now, I would suggest that "the truth" being suppressed by political correctness is often simply the prejudices which we believe. We have seen, from the candidate who is running on the platform of destroying political correctness, some wonderful examples in the election rhetoric recently, such as the "truth" that illegal immigrants are rapists and criminals. Such claims about immigrants were fact-checked by the Washington Post, which cites reports showing that rates of criminality among immigrants are no different from native-born Americans. This article also contains a wonderful quote: “I can never apologize for the truth. ... I said tremendous crime is coming across. Everybody knows that’s true." The phrase "everybody knows that's true" is usually a good indicator that we are discussing prejudice, not evidence-based reasoning.

Not only is the "truth" that is suppressed by political correctness  too often not actually true, but we continue to it believe despite contrary evidence. In fact, we don't even perceive the evidence against it. In The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul—Douglas Adams' second book in the Dirk Gently series—Norse gods (including Thor) roam the streets of London. But the general population do not see them because they do not fit in the common person's world view. In the same way, we cannot see evidence that contradicts the prejudices we hold to be truth. And when someone tries to confront us with evidence, we reject the evidence as lies, and lash out at the confronter. This is why the Southern Poverty Law Center receives daily death threats, such as "We are going to blow you ... straight to hell in the near future for all of your lies, propaganda, and hate that you spew out."
But there can be occasions when we fail to draw attention to a problem out of a fear of appearing politically incorrect. Those of us in the U.S. Navy remember a period of time when some black Sailors would say that they were being given less favourable tasks because they were black, and it was hard to know how to handle that because we were afraid of appearing racist. We were fortunate if we had a black chief at the command who could look at the situation to determine whether or not there was bias involved, and if necessary correct the complaining Sailor. NPR reporter Michel Martin investigated whether concerns about Maj. Nidal Hasan, the army psychiatrist who went on a shooting rampage at Fort Hood, had not been expressed out of fear of political incorrectness. Similarly, Martin wondered whether the Muslim community hesitates to report members who appear radicalized out of fear of offense. She brought together two reporters who cover the military closely, and two people from the Muslim community, to discuss the issue. "The conversation was so intense, our guests literally took it outside."
But this is exactly the kind of conversation that we need to continue to have as we struggle with this issue. We need to try to be able to look at the world from the other person's truth.
Maybe reading the prayer of St. Francis will help us remove the bitter taste in our mouths from watching the video of people at political rallies:

Lord, make me an instrument of Your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
where there is sadness, joy.

O, Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console;
to be understood as to understand; 
to be loved as to love;
For it is in giving that we receive;
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
it is in dying that we are born again to eternal life.

When we resume this discussion, we will turn political correctness on its head (which should prove amusing).

O. M. G.

Well, it happened again. Just before the second presidential debate, a video was released showing Donald Trump talking about how he can do just about anything with a woman and get away with it. In case you are among the very few who hadn't heard the it, here is John Oliver showing both the tape and Trump's apology, on his show Last Week Tonight. I must warn you that there is a considerable amount of vulgar dialogue both by Trump and by John Oliver.

To be fair, I will give Trump credit for actually apologizing for what he said, rather than apologizing for the offence others might have taken--an issue to which I will return in the final part of a three-part post on political correctness that had to be delayed to post this. But in the debate, he excused his comments as being just "locker room talk" and went on to say that he was going to "knock the hell out of ISIS." I'm a little confused about the connection between his bragging about the sexual assault of women and the defeat of a terrorist uprising, except that both involve testosterone (and, frankly, narcissism).

Heart of Gold, or Has God Turned His Back on America?

 In The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy (specifically, the BBC radio version, which is the original format), Arthur Dent finds himself dragged from Earth onto a Vogon spaceship, from which he is flung into empty space, only to be rescued in the nick of time by the star-ship Heart of Gold, by a miraculous coincidence. This ship is powered by the new Infinite Improbability Drive, and because it was operating at the time at infinite improbability, the ship made the rescue all by itself. But there was one more amazing coincidence waiting for Arthur Dent when he got to the bridge of the Heart of Gold. I won't tell you what it was: you'll have to listen to the story.
Similarly, a series of coincidences happened recently which ended in a similar way. A friend from choir, named Davis, has taken up the french horn again after a gap of many years. A month ago he was at the International Horn Symposium at Ithaca College, NY when he met a fellow horn player named Barbara. They got to talking, including the standard "where are you from?". When Davis said that he was from the Norfolk area, Barbara mentioned that her son, Bill, is in Norfolk. Davis asked whether he was in the Navy--a really good guess, in general--and Barbara said that he is, and is a submariner. So Davis mentioned that he sits next to a submariner in choir, and Barbara asked the name of this submariner. After protesting that she wouldn't know him, Davis finally said "Robie ..." at which point Barbara finished his sentence "Armbruster. He's a really good friend of my son's." So they talked about me for a while, and Barbara gave Davis presents to bring to both Bill and me. I was finally able to set up a meeting at our house to make the introductions. Bill was the first to arrive, with his wife and son Ian. When Davis arrived, I started to introduce him to Bill when Ian asked Davis "what are you doing here?" The final coincidence was that Davis and Ian had been in sight-singing class together!
There have been other coincidences recently. For example, my wife decided on a whim one day to have lunch at the Norfolk Botanical Gardens and invited me to join her. There, we ran into our old Tai Chi instructor. It was almost as if it had been planned.

But the coincidence I want to write about today concerns a Tweet posted on Facebook recently by one of my friends. You can see it at right: "God has not forgotten about America, America has forgotten about God." It fits with a common theme among my more conservative friends: if America would just turn back to God, by which we really mean become more Christian, then society's ills would reduce.
By coincidence that night I read chapter 2 of Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan's book The Last Week: A Day-by-Day Account of Jesus's Final Week in Jerusalem. The book considers the final week of Jesus before his crucifixion, as told in Mark's Gospel. Borg, a noted New Testament scholar, emphasizes that the Gospels should not, in general, be fused together to give a blended picture of Jesus, as is done so often in school Nativity productions (the Magi and the shepherds do not appear together in the Bible), or in accounts of the crucifixion. Borg and Crossan are definitely on the liberal end of the spectrum, and their views on the historical Jesus are very controversial. But both are noted Jesus scholars; Borg has been esteemed as "a respectable scholar and valuable dialogue partner" who should not be ignored.
After reading this chapter, my conclusion is that it is at least equally, if not more, valid to say that:

God has turned his back on America

Profiling and the Reverend Thomas Bayes, a Lemma

Profiling can be an important tool in fighting crime. It has been the basis of several television crime drama series, including one named Profiler. And yet, we often express outrage when the police are accused of profiling. So what is the difference between Good Profiling and Bad Profiling? The answer is provided by a Presbyterian minister: the Reverend Thomas Bayes.
Here is an example of Good Profiling: for 16 years a bomber has been planting small bombs all around the city, hitting movie theaters, phone booths and other public areas. The police are at a loss, not sure what type of person they are looking for. Calling in a profiler,they find that most likely the perpetrator is unmarried, foreign, self-educated, and in his 50s. The question being answered is: given a type of crime that has been committed, what is the type of person most likely to have been responsible? This helps the police narrow their search.
Examples of bad profiling, unfortunately, abound. We need to ensure safe air travel, and the people who have most often presented security risks on airplanes recently have been of middle-eastern appearance. So when screening passengers, we pull out every person with a middle-eastern appearance, and submit them to a full-body search. Here there is a different question being asked: given that I have encountered a particular type of person, what is the probability that they have committed (or are intending to commit) a particular type of crime?
The two questions are inverses:

1. Given crime: what type of person?
2. Given type of person: is crime likely?

Let's do the numbers

We will use an imaginary city named Theoville, with demographics roughly the same as Baltimore. Theoville has 100,000 people. 63,700 of whom are black including 30,000 black men.
There are 1,000 people in jail or prison in Theoville. It's a bit of a stretch, but we can use this to assume that if we meet a random person from Theoville, there is a 1,000/100,000 = 1% chance that the person is a criminal. (It's actually a big stretch, because of the 650 people in Theoville city jail, 90%, or 585, are pre-trial--which is to say, we assume that they are innocent. The 90% pre-trial figure is the case for Baltimore city jail: see Baltimore Behind Bars, a Justice Policy Institute Report.)
Of the 1,000 people incarcerated, 770 are black men. So, if we meet a random person who is incarcerated, the probability that he is a black man is 770/1,000 = 77%. Thus people who work around the kind of Theovillians who get incarcerated see a large proportion of black male criminals. Going back to our two types of profiling questions, this is a type 1 question:

1. Given that the person I have encountered is a criminal (actually, incarcerated), what is the probability that the person is a black male? Answer: 77%.

For nerds, we can represent this symbolically. If B is the event "Black man", and C is the event "Criminal" (again, using numbers incarcerated as a substitute for criminal), then the probability that a random Theovillian is a black man given that he is a criminal can be written:

1. P(B|C) {read as "probability of the event B, given the event C} = 77%

Now, if I am wondering the streets of Theoville and encounter a black man, what is the probability that he is a criminal?

It is very easy to make the mistake of saying that it is 77%. I've known very knowledgeable people make that mistake. But remember, this is a different question from the one we asked above. We are now asking a type 2 profiling question.

2. Given that I have encountered a black man, what is the probability that he is a criminal?

Enter Bayes

This is where the Reverend Bayes comes in, because he did the mathematics to help us answer this question. We are now looking for P(C|B): the probability of the event C (meeting a criminal) given the event B (meeting a black man). Bayes Theorem states:

	P(C|B) =	P(B|C)P(C)
		P(B)

where P(C) is the probability of event C: encountering a criminal among the population of Theoville, and P(B) is the probability of event B: encountering a black man in Theoville. We already know that P(B|C) is 77%, and that P(C) is 1%. P(B)  is 30,000/100,000 = 30%, giving:

	P(C|B) =	77% x 1%	= 2.6%
		30%

There's an even easier way to calculate this: there are 770 black male criminals in Theoville, so given that we just met one of the 30,000 black men in Theoville, the probability that he is a criminal is 770/30,000 = 2.6%.
Bottom line: even though 77% of criminals are black men in Theoville, the probability that a black man I've met on the street is a criminal is 2.6%. Profiling with a type 1 question: good odds. Profiling with a type 2 question: poor odds. And if we make the mistake of confusing the two types of questions and their answers, we treat a whole group of people very unfairly.

Why a lemma?

A lemma is a subsidiary proposition introduced in proving some other theorem. It's a result that I will probably be using repeatedly. The first use will be my next post, explaining why we could argue that God has turned his back on the United States.

Hate. And humility.

It is the fourth of July. Many today will spend the day celebrating. Celebrating what? Freedom? Family? Food? Our superiority over other nations? Tonight we will re-enact scenes of violence ("and the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air") to remember the fight to gain and protect freedom.
But in reality, we in modern America have little concept of freedom because we have so little memory of what it is like not to be free. (This omits, of course, the ridiculous number of Americans--disproportionately African-American--whom we incarcerate.) There was one American, however, who did understand.

Elie Wiesel. Credit AP.

Two days ago, Elie Wiesel died, at age 87. At age 15, he was sent to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. His father, mother, and sister died in the Holocaust. His experiences during this time are told in his book Night, the first in a trilogy. From the time of the Holocaust Wiesel was stateless, until he became a U.S. citizen in 1963. He is best known for his untiring work to keep alive the memory of the Holocaust, in order to prevent recurrence of such repression and racism. After being award the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, he and his wife established the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity to continue that work.
I'm sorry to say that until recently I knew very little about Elie Wiesel. I've not got around to reading Night yet. To prepare to write about him today, I consulted his wonderful obituary in Haaretz. On learning of his death, and preparing for our Sunday School lesson on humility, I decided to delve briefly into his writings. One of the functions of the Elie Wiesel Foundation has been to organize international conferences on "The Anatomy of Hate." In his memoir And the Sea Is Never Full, Wiesel writes (p. 369):

"Hate," the key word, describes the passions, often contradictory and always vile, that have torn and ravaged the twentieth century. Only the twentieth century? In truth, the word contains and illustrates the full recorded memory of human cruelty and suffering. Cain hated his brother and killed him, thus the first death in history was a murder. Since then, hate and death have not ceased to rage.

Hate—racial, tribal, religious, ancestral, national, social, ethical, political, economic, ideological—in itself represents the inexorable defeat of mankind, its absolute defeat. If there is an area in which mankind cannot claim the slightest progress, this surely is it. It does not take much for human beings, collectively or individually, to suddenly one day pit themselves like wild beasts one against the other, their worst instincts laid bare, in a state of deleterious exaltation. One decision, one simple word, and a family or a community will drown in blood or perish in flames.

Why is there so much violence, so much hate? How is it conceived, transmitted, fertilized, nurtured? As we face the disquieting, implacable rise of intolerance and fanaticism on more than one continent, it is our duty to expose the danger. By naming it. By confronting it.

Powerful words. Worth reading again, and after doing so I would like us—including you, gentle reader—to engage in an exercise. It is easy to picture the other fanatics, the ones who hate us. Instead, I  would like us to focus on our own hate. Whom do we hate? Hillary Clinton? Donald Trump? Nigel Farage? Sadiq Khan? "Libtards"? Fanatical Conservatives? Gays? Gay-bashers? Muslims? Christians? Hindus? Sikhs?
Think about it: whom do you hate?

Go ahead. I'll wait.

Two Black Balls

Anchor as used on the first Royal Navy
nuclear submarine, HMS Dreadnought,
at Anchor Walk, National Maritime
Museum, Greenwich, UK

Submarines have anchors. The old fleet boats carried their anchors against the bow, just like surface ships do today. But for the modern nuclear submarine which is designed to operate submerged most of the time, this would add too much drag, so the anchor is housed inside a ballast tank, and the bottom of the anchor is flush with the hull when housed.
Submarines don't like to use their anchors. They have a nasty habit of not coming back up when we try to hoist them, and since they are stored in a place we can't get to, there's nothing we can do about if anything goes wrong. On one of my boats, we were supposed to anchor overnight outside Port Said in preparation for the next morning's transit of the Suez Canal. Instead, we lowered our outboard motor, and used it to stay in the same spot. This was just as well, because a huge ship transporting new cars had trouble communicating with port control, and ended up trying to anchor where we were, so we had to scoot out of the way rather quickly.

Speaking of anchors, in the book Think, Act, Be Like Jesus, which we are using in Sunday School this year, Randy Frazee opens the chapter on Hope with Hebrews 6:19-20. In preparing for this lesson, I got to thinking about the anchor as an analogy for hope, or faith. The basic premise, as I understand it, is that when we are beset by the storms of life, we can set down our anchor of hope on the firm ground of faith, and ride out the storm.

This is an excellent analogy, so let's run with it.

Fifty hearts will pulse no more

Early Sunday morning, Omar Mateen walked into a (gay) nightclub in Orlando and opened fire. Before police were able to get into the nightclub and kill Mateen, he had killed 49 people and injured over 50. For now, it is America's worst mass shooting ever.
And so the blame game starts. Many blame the gun, and call for better gun control. Many blame Islam, and call for banning Muslims from entering the country. Some even blame the lack of prayer in schools.
All of these responses are wrong. (OK, I like the idea of gun control, but it's futile until we can convince congress that they don't have to do the politically correct thing: avoid in any way offending the NRA.)
So how are we to respond?

Anna's dilemma

One of my Christmas presents was a Downton Abbey desk calendar. What a wonderful series that was! The entry in this calendar for the weekend of April 30 is on Social Mores, Customs, and Practices, and notes that in the 1920s "a damaging theory reared its head among psychoanalysts and "sexologists," which argued that men were innately aggressive and women were innately masochistic." This theory was supported by Havelock Ellis, who was progressive enough to recognize homosexuality as a condition, rather than a disease or a crime, and who first identified the condition that later came to be known as transgender. But in supporting this theory of innate aggression and masochism, he and others of his day contributed "to a blame-the-victim mentality that kept many women from speaking up against their attackers." (Downton Abbey Color Page-A-Day Calendar 2016. New York: Workman Publishing Co.)
I am sure that fans of the series remember the terrible scene in episode three of season four where Mr. Green, Lord Gillingham's valet, rapes Anna Bates (played by Joanne Froggatt). Anna chooses not to tell her husband, for fear that he will hunt down Green and kill him, placing him once more in danger of the gallows. But this is unrealistic, because given the mindset of the day, it is far more likely that what would have held Anna back from telling Mr. Bates is that he would be likely to blame her for having been raped.
And the practice of blaming the victim is alive and well today. Several women from Brigham Young University have recently come forward claiming that, in response to their reporting having been raped or sexually assaulted, they were themselves punished for violating the BYU honor code (which stipulates. inter alia, that students live a "chaste and virtuous life").
It is for this reason that, despite many other topics I want to write about (such as understanding the scientific method, and the war on political correctness), I feel we must consider the topic of sexual assault, and rape. Just yesterday, we learned of yet another case, this time in France, of a politician who appears to view women as sex objects.
And this is a topic I feel qualified to write about.
For I have been sexually assaulted.
And raped.

I Didn't Choose This

There has been quite a lot of news about the recall of Takata airbags--which have a nasty tendency of exploding. My airbag had been replaced, so I couldn't understand why I was still getting dire notices in the mail. The picture at left is the latest. It turns out that they had only replaced my driver-side airbag (the initial recall). This explains why Friday evening, when I went to Hall Honda to make the annoying orange light on my dashboard turn off--a process that requires me to have my oil changed--I wound up spending three hours in the waiting room while they replaced the passenger-side airbag.
I had brought a book which I needed to read, on the statistical analysis of ordinal categorical data. I haven't bothered providing you, gentle reader, a link to this book on Amazon because it is entirely as boring as it sounds. I found myself alternately falling asleep and being distracted by the blaring television. I listened intermittently to the Steve Harvey Show and to Dr. Phil. These are both shows that I generally try scrupulously to avoid. Much of the Steve Harvey show was about a case of spousal abuse. The episode of Dr. Phil concerned a mother who made the difficult choice to relinquish her teenage son into foster care because she was being repeatedly battered by him. At one point the son, who was also on the show, said with tears in his eyes: "I didn't ask to be born your son."
I am writing this week about choice; in particular, about instances where we assume people have a choice when they really don't--or sometimes, they don't yet--and instances where we don't want to let people choose. In the Dr. Phil episode, we saw two instances of choice: the mother chose to turn her son over to foster care, and the son had no choice in his birth.

The joys and sorrows of language

Last week we discussed ways to add meaning to an otherwise senseless death, and I promised to write this week about immortality. I will do that, but you'll have to hang on just a little longer because first I want to talk about language. (After all, if we're going to be immortal, we may as well settle on a way to communicate for eternity.)

Tonight we had choir practice, and it was rough. We are preparing for Easter and beyond, and are struggling with anthems in Latin and in French. The combination is particularly difficult, because we have to remember to pronounce the word "qui" as kwee in one case, and kee in the other.
Add to this the fact that two of us grew up in England, and so had to learn Latin and French for O-levels (the exams on which J. K. Rowling based OWLs in the Harry Potter series), and the pronunciation we learned in class differed from the sung forms. French in particular tends not to pronounce any of the last five or more letters in a word, except when sung, in which case they are given their own syllable and note. And then the sung form of Latin in England differs from that in the U.S.A., which led to the closest that Presbyterians come to a knock-down brawl--which is not very close--over the pronunciation of virgine.
The choir has decided they don't like French.

Eternal life; or how to leave a legacy

"Everyone ought to have a legacy, something to be remembered for." Clinton Tyree, aka Skink; in Stormy Weather, by Carl Hiaasen.

Last week--well, actually two weeks ago now--I wrote about death. Not a particularly cheery topic--sorry. And the somber mood continued through the week. On Wednesday, as we prepared for the imposition of ashes in a ceremony that was particularly poignant, we gathered in the fellowship hall for a discussion. After considering various aspects of the "I am" statements, both of God (Exodus 3:14) and of Jesus as recounted in John's gospel, we walked through the dark hallways of the church to the sanctuary, lit only by candles on the altar, having been enjoined to remain silent from the time of leaving the fellowship hall until our return. We were invited to sit and meditate, then go forward for the imposition of ashes, return to a pew and meditate, and leave when ready. Sitting silently and meditating is not a comfortable experience for many Americans, or for many Presbyterians. But I found it strikingly fulfilling. Before we left the fellowship hall, Rev. Bell asked us a question: "what do you have in your life that cannot be reduced to ashes?" This tied so well to my promise to address what we leave behind when all else is gone, that I thought maybe he was reading this blog!

Giving meaning to a senseless death

My early career in the Navy was backwards. In November, I arrived at Officer Candidate School in Newport R.I.--actually, I almost didn't, but that's a different story--and spent four frigid months there, running at five in the morning with two sets of sweats, long-johns, a scarf, woolly hat, and gloves and still freezing. Graduation day in February was incredibly cold. I spent the next summer in Orlando FL at Nuclear Power School. The uniform we wore was 100% polyester, with all the ability to breathe of a plate glass window. Every afternoon at about two o'clock it rained, which reduced the temperature not a whit, but raised the humidity back up to 100%. This was followed by winter in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., where our Chevette was buried by snowplows, then a hot summer in Virginia Beach for Guided Missile School at the Dam Neck base and a cold winter in Groton CT for Submarine School.
But it was in Orlando that this story starts. We lived in an apartment complex, the entry to which required turning left from South Bumby Avenue. I had stopped to let an oncoming car pass before turning. A boy on a bicycle was coming out of the apartment complex, saw me stopped, assumed I had stopped to let him out, smiled in thanks, and pulled out. Directly into the path of the oncoming car.