Archive for September, 2006
Can you guess who these people are?
And no, it’s not Charlie Manson and Joni Mitchell.
Campus Discrimination?
One of my law professors raised an interesting, practical issue the other day. She realized that many of the campus bars, including Joe’s Brewery, C.O. Daniels, and Canopy Club, have dress codes. I have yet to investigate this myself, but I’m told that these dress codes are not what you might expect. They prohibit things like sweat pants, white t-shirts, athletic jerseys, and do-rags. What do all of those things have in common? They are all things frequently worn by young, African-American males.
I have yet to look into the laws regarding stores, but under the Fair Housing Act no racial factors are allowed to be considered by a landlord when searching for tenants. It is illegal to even imply a preference in advertisements or notices; the standards are harsh and severe, as they should be. Furthermore, it doesn’t matter if the landlord has a legitimate, non-racist intention, he would still be violating the Fair Housing Act. So if similar laws apply, it would not matter if the bar owners had the intention of keeping out customers who were more likely to “cause trouble” or to start fights, that is if there was a high correlation between race and the people they wanted to keep out. All that would matter is what a reasonable person (and possibly a reasonable black person) would think when looking at the dress code notice. Would they think that the owners intended to keep out a particular race or class of people? It seems that here that is the case. It’s likely that the owners are trying to keep out young black males who are not students, but live in Champaign/Urbana. If that is their intention then their aim would likely violate federal and state law.
There is also the question of selective enforcement. The evidence in favor of a systematic attempt to exclude young black males would be even more tangible if the bars failed to exclude a white alumni who comes in after a football game wearing a jersey and sweat pants, but then did choose to exclude a young black male wearing similar attire, perhaps just baggier.
I am considering doing more investigation on this topic for a Daily Illini column. Until then, I am curious whether anyone has any suggestions or evidence in favor of or contrary to my suspicions. I’m also curious what people would think of a dress code that intended to exclude people who are more likely to “cause trouble” when there is a high correlation between that group and race…Is that a legitimate use of a store owner’s ability to exclude?
Leave of Absence
My sister, to my great delight, is getting married on Friday, and I am consequently leaving this afternoon for St. Louis and will be gone until Sunday. I’m a groomsman, so if you’re a praying man, pray that I don’t somehow ruin my sister’s wedding by tripping in the aisle or starting something on fire.
In any case, I won’t be posting until I get back, so hopefully Billy has enough to say to keep you entertained until then.
Why Your Vote Matters in Champaign County
~Published in the Daily Illini on September 12, 2006
On Quad Day this year, I manned the student ACLU booth and shouted at passersby, asking them if they were registered to vote. Most of them avoided eye contact with me and for that they should be punished somehow. Many students came up and willingly registered. But there is a third group that would tell me they were registered “at home,” as in, not in Champaign County. And it is this group of students I urge to reconsider before it is too late.
There are arguments to be made that as a student, spending at least nine months of your year in this district, you should always be registered to vote at school. I can take or leave that argument, depending on how connected one feels to one’s home district.
But in this election year, the point is a lot easier to make given the existence of the state senate race in this district between Democrat Mike Frerichs and Republican Judy Myers.
Oh, yeah, and Socialist Equality Party member Joe Parnarauskis, an ultraliberal third party candidate who will likely siphon votes away from Frerichs. Way to put up a fight getting on the ballot, Joe. The Republican Party is proud of you.
Anyway, these three candidates are locked in battle over the 52nd legislative district, which since 2003 has been occupied by Republican Rick Winkel. The district is traditionally Republican, but it has always been closely divided, and Frerichs has an excellent chance at winning this time around.
That is, if students register to vote here and do their civic duty when Election Day rolls around in November. The race is going to be close, and regardless of your politics, your voice in this election will probably matter a great deal more than any local race in your home town.
The 52nd district spans segments of both Champaign County and Vermilion County, both of which are largely Republican. But in the 2002 general election between Winkel and former Champaign mayor Dan McCollum, McCollum lost by just 620 votes in a race in which over 57,000 votes were cast. That’s just one percent of the vote.
Frerichs, a Yale graduate, has run for the General Assembly before, when he ran against Tim Johnson, who was then a state representative and now sits in the U.S. House of Representatives. Johnson had never received less than 61 percent of the vote until he garnered only 53 percent when Frerichs ran against him.
Without Parnarauskis in the race, one might even argue that Frerichs is the favorite to win this election. With Parnarauskis, it’s anybody’s race to win. And by anybody, I mean only Frerichs or Myers. If Parnarauskis wins, I will eat not only my hat but my entire wardrobe. And the wardrobes of my immediate family.
But Parnarauskis is in the race, and it’s a free country, so there he should remain. It shall be left up to the voters of this district, and that’s where you come in.
I recently noticed a group on Facebook called “If this group reaches 100,000 members, my girlfriend will have a threesome.” It reached its mark in a little over three days. If such a thing is possible, then surely enough students on this campus can register to vote to ensure more than the 55 percent turnout that Champaign County enjoyed in the last midterm election year.
This is where your vote will actually count, unless you live in one of the relatively small number of other competitive districts across the country. Voter registration closes on October 10th. If you want your vote to mean something, if you want to direct the power of your voice to the achievement of some tangible goal, then register in Champaign County and vote in the race between Mike Frerichs and Judy Myers.
And that other guy.
The Faith in Free Markets?
At times I have heard that secular, free market conservatives and libertarians may not have a faith in God, but that we do have a faith in the free market. This is true…except for the nearly infinite amount of data and examples to the contrary. Thanks to my good buddy and U of I alum, Josh Rohrscheib, for the link to the CNN article entitled, “Windows HS: Microsoft designs a school system.”
It’s just another small example of the power and ability of the market to solve nearly any problem. Microsoft is using its corporate structure as the model for the school. I hope with intense sincerity that the teacher’s unions in the cities hate this proposal. I hope that it gives them nightmares. There are few institutions in this country which do more to harm people living in urban and racial poverty than the teacher’s unions. Their waste and corruption amount to hatred and racism.
But can we really blame them for acting as they do? No. We shouldn’t expect them to act altruistically. Teacher’s unions exist to better the conditions of the teachers, not the students. Their leaders are charged with this responsibility, and this responsibility alone. The problem is that there is no alignment, no synchronization between the interests of the teachers and the education of the students. Teachers are self-interested, self-serving human beings just like everyone else. A system more reliant on the free market would include the looming threat to teachers that if they do no perform well they will be fired. The question of their performance is essentially reliant on how well they educate their students. Therefore, in that type of system the self-interest of the teachers in retaining their jobs aligns and correlates with the interests of children (and society) in getting a great education.
Do urban minority children have hopes and dreams when they know that they are attending a public school? If they have dreams before going into school, then they are surely tortured once in them. At least now a few of them have the means to throw their dreams in front of their eyes, into reality:
About 170 teens, nearly all black and mainly low-income, were chosen by lottery to make up the freshman class. The school eventually plans to enroll up to 750 students.Sabria Johnson, a 14-year-old from West Philadelphia, said she is excited to be attending the school.
“We’re getting a chance to do something new,” said the freshman, who hopes one day to go to Harvard or to the London College of Fashion. “We don’t get a lot of opportunities like the suburban kids.”
Faith?
Moral Progress Through History
For those interested in Billy’s previous post discussing the immutability of human nature, here is an interesting segment of an interview with Steven Pinker, one of the authors Billy uses to defend his position. Pinker discusses the moral progress mankind has made throughout history. Also relevant to Billy’s discussion is this segment on “goodness without God.” The whole interview is really very interesting, but those two segments seem to relate directly to Billy’s post. There are also lists of other interviews with other speakers that might be of interest.
I would be interested in hearing Billy’s thoughts on who he thinks were the ones advocating all of the moral progress Pinker cites in the first segment I link to, liberals or conservatives? It seems to me those who campaigned against Draconian laws and against torture and for just war practices were always the liberals of their time, and they succeeded despite Billy’s view that human nature cannot be changed.
What’s at the Core of Conservatism and Liberalism?
Conservatives and liberals are pessimistic about human nature when designing the foundations of a country or constitution. However, conservatives would be more likely to favor institutional checks on human nature because we recognize its evils. But notice that this response accepts human nature, rather than trying to fundamentally alter it. The liberal response to human nature is to also recognize its evil or greedy proclivities, but it then seeks to force humanity into a “better” mold. This is the pernicious and noxious foundation of socialism/communism, which is an extreme incarnation of American liberal views, but still runs in its vein. It is the underlying and often unspoken thesis behind American, even more moderate, liberal policy.
This is a major topic of Steven Pinker’s latest book The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (Video of his book lecture). Liberals tend to see the mind more like a blank slate, it is something they can mold into a higher form with good policies. What’s ironic is that Pinker compares that sentiment with the religious right, but not with what I would consider true conservatism or classical liberalism (he has confirmed this via email). Pinker and conservatives like me agree that human nature is mostly immutable and that institutions should be erected that check it, rather than try to change it. This liberal view of human nature is beyond pessimism toward human nature, it is disdain for it. I feel that the most humanitarian way to develop societies, for both rich and poor, is to allow the natural human greed for wealth to expand…Meanwhile liberals see this greed as something to be expunged, or at the least discouraged.
How does the difference in understanding of human nature manifest itself in policy? Liberal policy recommends ever higher taxes. Why? Their implicit belief is that the innate human desire to earn more wealth for yourself is morally wrong. Their recommended solution is to forcibly take the wealth from him (taxation) and redistribute it in a way that more closely comports with their view of a moral human society, or rather, the way society would look if human nature were good. Rather than accepting the human greed instinct, they dissuade it and reject it, thereby creating disincentives to work, thereby creating unemployment and stagnant growth (i.e.
This distinction most obviously exists when it regards how free markets should be. The problem is that when you try to get humans to stop acting like humans they inevitably will, but it won’t ever produce the results desired by the central planners. Humans will change their behavior, but not in a way that is less greedy. No, it’s the opposite. They will continue to act in their self-interest, except the institutions of society will not be setup to direct that self-interest into production and wealth for society, but rather into unmotivated human capital.
It makes sense that policies should be designed with a firm grasp of the immutable realities of human nature. As Pinker and Chomsky (in linguistics) have argued, we are not blank slates. We have mental proclivities for language, good and evil, greed, and a plethora of other things.
What’s at the Core of Conservatism and Liberalism?
Conservatives and liberals are pessimistic about human nature when designing the foundations of a country or constitution. However, conservatives would be more likely to favor institutional checks on human nature because we recognize its evils. But notice that this response accepts human nature, rather than trying to fundamentally alter it. The liberal response to human nature is to also recognize its evil or greedy proclivities, but it then seeks to force humanity into a “better” mold. This is the pernicious and noxious foundation of socialism/communism, which is an extreme incarnation of American liberal views, but still runs in its vein. It is the underlying and often unspoken thesis behind American, even more moderate, liberal policy.
This is a major topic of Steven Pinker’s latest book The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (Video of his book lecture). Liberals tend to see the mind more like a blank slate, it is something they can mold into a higher form with good policies. What’s ironic is that Pinker compares that sentiment with the religious right, but not with what I would consider true conservatism or classical liberalism (he has confirmed this via email). Pinker and conservatives like me agree that human nature is mostly immutable and that institutions should be erected that check it, rather than try to change it. This liberal view of human nature is beyond pessimism toward human nature, it is disdain for it. I feel that the most humanitarian way to develop societies, for both rich and poor, is to allow the natural human greed for wealth to expand…Meanwhile liberals see this greed as something to be expunged, or at the least discouraged.
How does the difference in understanding of human nature manifest itself in policy? Liberal policy recommends ever higher taxes. Why? Their implicit belief is that the innate human desire to earn more wealth for yourself is morally wrong. Their recommended solution is to forcibly take the wealth from him (taxation) and redistribute it in a way that more closely comports with their view of a moral human society, or rather, the way society would look if human nature were good. Rather than accepting the human greed instinct, they dissuade it and reject it, thereby creating disincentives to work, thereby creating unemployment and stagnant growth (i.e.
This distinction most obviously exists when it regards how free markets should be. The problem is that when you try to get humans to stop acting like humans they inevitably will, but it won’t ever produce the results desired by the central planners. Humans will change their behavior, but not in a way that is less greedy. No, it’s the opposite. They will continue to act in their self-interest, except the institutions of society will not be setup to direct that self-interest into production and wealth for society, but rather into unmotivated human capital.
It makes sense that policies should be designed with a firm grasp of the immutable realities of human nature. As Pinker and Chomsky (in linguistics) have argued, we are not blank slates. We have mental proclivities for language, good and evil, greed, and a plethora of other things.
What’s at the Core of Conservatism and Liberalism?
Conservatives and liberals are pessimistic about human nature when designing the foundations of a country or constitution. However, conservatives would be more likely to favor institutional checks on human nature because we recognize its evils. But notice that this response accepts human nature, rather than trying to fundamentally alter it. The liberal response to human nature is to also recognize its evil or greedy proclivities, but it then seeks to force humanity into a “better” mold. This is the pernicious and noxious foundation of socialism/communism, which is an extreme incarnation of American liberal views, but still runs in its vein. It is the underlying and often unspoken thesis behind American, even more moderate, liberal policy.
This is a major topic of Steven Pinker’s latest book The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (Video of his book lecture). Liberals tend to see the mind more like a blank slate, it is something they can mold into a higher form with good policies. What’s ironic is that Pinker compares that sentiment with the religious right, but not with what I would consider true conservatism or classical liberalism (he has confirmed this via email). Pinker and conservatives like me agree that human nature is mostly immutable and that institutions should be erected that check it, rather than try to change it. This liberal view of human nature is beyond pessimism toward human nature, it is disdain for it. I feel that the most humanitarian way to develop societies, for both rich and poor, is to allow the natural human greed for wealth to expand…Meanwhile liberals see this greed as something to be expunged, or at the least discouraged.
How does the difference in understanding of human nature manifest itself in policy? Liberal policy recommends ever higher taxes. Why? Their implicit belief is that the innate human desire to earn more wealth for yourself is morally wrong. Their recommended solution is to forcibly take the wealth from him (taxation) and redistribute it in a way that more closely comports with their view of a moral human society, or rather, the way society would look if human nature were good. Rather than accepting the human greed instinct, they dissuade it and reject it, thereby creating disincentives to work, thereby creating unemployment and stagnant growth (i.e.
This distinction most obviously exists when it regards how free markets should be. The problem is that when you try to get humans to stop acting like humans they inevitably will, but it won’t ever produce the results desired by the central planners. Humans will change their behavior, but not in a way that is less greedy. No, it’s the opposite. They will continue to act in their self-interest, except the institutions of society will not be setup to direct that self-interest into production and wealth for society, but rather into unmotivated human capital.
It makes sense that policies should be designed with a firm grasp of the immutable realities of human nature. As Pinker and Chomsky (in linguistics) have argued, we are not blank slates. We have mental proclivities for language, good and evil, greed, and a plethora of other things.
They’re Almost as Good as We Are!
Top Blogs Maintained by Students or Former Students of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign:
Lally Andreevna…or Gartel…or Gartel-Tkeshelashvili. Maintained by a woman of many names, but one clear voice: that of a socialist, atheist, feminist member of the Green Party. And, okay, maybe it’s less of a blog than her posting the columns she writes for the DI. But I love her anyway, and you will too.
Politics and Civics: A User’s Guide. Maintained by Jon Ozaksut, an incredibly bright guy who has commented here on occasion and who has shamelessly stolen our Respect Rankings. If he posted a little more often, I’d move him up on the list, no question. He has both humor and intellect, and what more could one ask for?
Part-Time Pundit. Maintained by fellow DI columnist John Bambenek. He is essentially crazy. But what makes him dangerous is the healthy dose of knowledge that accompanies his insanity. We give him eternal thanks for writing this generous review to help our nascent blog.
Entropic Order. Maintained by two friends of ours, Kevin Cukierski and the one who is known only as “Jaybandit.” They write on political issues, but do so with the full force of their UIUC engineering educations. Thus, unlike us, they actually have authoritative opinions. Read this post on nuclear power and you will know why it is on the list.
The TPS Report. Maintained by Kiyoshi Martinez, former Editor-in-Chief of the Daily Illini and all around kickass guy. He does things that are actually journalistic, which is pretty impressive.
And the #1 Blog Maintained by Students or Former Students of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign…
1. America vs. the World. Maintained by Buck B. and Gordon the Gnome, et al. These cats can ball.