i don’t want to get into the realities of maldivian politics and the clearly corrupt and illegal shit going down with the courts in this post. not because i don’t think it matters, but because other people who know much more about it than i do have written better stuff about it than i could.

this blog is kind of an esoteric endeavor anyway. we fit best in the weird little gaps. today’s weird little gap is the concept of a punitive justice system at all. punitive, or punishment-oriented, as opposed to rehabilitative and restorative justice. this isn’t a full argument because, again, there are great full-on essays out there arguing the case for restorative justice far more eloquently than anything i could put together.

this is just about stuff from a couple studies of behavioral economics.

there are (american) studies showing judges give much harsher sentences in cases heard before lunchtime than after. there’s another recent study, which found that immigration judges were much likelier to allow immigrants to stay in the country on warm days than very hot or cold ones.

so, sentences are very much not just an impartial execution of the written law, which would give an objectively identical result for any given case regardless of the environment. that’s the implicit promise of the law: in its application, it is both fair and equal. we’re already aware that a corrupt judicial system is neither fair nor equal, but this raises questions about how to build any judicial system at all, even in a future scenario where our politics are going perfectly. but we see here that in reality, a lot of it is judges going by their moods, whether its hungry or overheated. and often, being in a bad mood amplifies subconscious biases because the conscious part of the brain that would normally put it aside isn’t in great shape right then.

these are people’s entire lives, around the world. even in america, where these studies were done: whether you get an 11am court appointment or a 1pm one shouldn’t be the difference getting you several years more on a sentence than otherwise, or getting imprisoned instead of fined for a minor crime. a random heatwave shouldn’t decide whether a refugee has to leave her family behind and head back to a country where she’s in danger.

humans are fallible. humans are deeply flawed. a purely punitive justice system administered by judges flattens human nature, both that of the defendants and the judges. the belief  that you yourself are too rational for this to apply, that it’s just other people being stupid and weak-willed, would be a lack of self-awareness that raises questions about your judgement. it probably does apply. do we still feel comfortable with human judgement administering life-altering punishment?

[everything in this post relates back to our post about religious law and human fallibility, and everything there relates to here]

p.s. if you’re curious about how rigorous these studies are (as you should be, always, with any study): the dates were made by appointment weeks in advance with a fixed number of appointments at fixed times per day. this was to control for confounding factors like the possibility that judges just wanted to get through the day faster when it was uncomfortably hot, or defendants with better lawyers also having arranged timing for best results, or other possible confounding factors.

there’s even a biological pathway described for the results of the first study: low blood glucose levels affect the ability of the brain to consider complex factors, which makes people, even trained and experienced judges, more likely to take “shortcuts”. this makes judges less likely to consider details or to do the emotionally taxing work of empathizing with a defendant, and more likely to resort to shortcuts based on heuristics like racial stereotypes or personal assumptions. sufficient glucose levels, like after a meal, maintains the ability for those complex thought processes.

Content warning: some of this article discusses sexual assault in conversations about speaking up about assault in universities.

A welcome change I’ve seen on the internet recently is an insistence on finally, fucking finally, calling conservative, “anti-PC” doublespeak what it is. That Chrome extension which replaced “political correctness” with “treating people with respect” was a good start, but I’ve noticed this recently: naming the absurdity of people that start a furor over a Facebook status telling women calling out harassment that they’re easily offended crybabies.

It’s something we need to start collectively doing, because honestly, seeing the state of the national conversation right now makes me feel like I’m going insane. Do words not have meanings anymore? Did we just get so used to abuse that we just never bothered to tell these people that what they’re saying about us makes no fucking sense? Does nobody really how fucking bizarre it is to have people so clearly projecting onto us, and why don’t more people call it what it is? The people that can’t handle a hashtag on Twitter without completely losing their shit are the ones talking about feminist women having thin skins, talking about how the world isn’t a safe space, and that in the real world you have to face opinions that you don’t agree with.

Please stop leaving this unchecked and just accepting this as normal, instead of calling it what it is: complete nonsense.

In this weird fucking universe, people using their freedom of speech to criticize racism and misogyny are told they’re shutting down free speech, and people try to “defend free speech” by shutting down or punishing this criticism. Minorities using the platform of the internet to amplify their speech are doing a great service to democracy, in expanding discourse in the public sphere to people for whom establishment mouthpieces have long been denied. They’re broadening the marketplace of ideas, so that what we all say has to stand up to stronger scrutiny in order to survive as defensible. Why can’t we say so? If you need protectionism to survive in the marketplace of ideas, your arguments need to either evolve and get stronger and engage with those critiques, or they’re just not very good.

The most powerful argument for the necessity of freedom of speech in a functioning democracy is that only speech which can stand up to criticism will end up being accepted. If the criticism is valid, the thinking goes, then those in the public sphere will see it and take it on board- if the criticism is valid and discrediting, the original idea will end up being discredited. On the flip side, if the criticism is poor, then people will be able to judge that for themselves and discard it- and people are free to argue why that criticism is poor, and so on.

Things are no better in academia, among the very same people claiming to stand up for clear and rigorous thought. The bodies of academic thinking which to critique establishment ideas and question fundamental assumptions- feminist and postcolonial interpretations and reinterpretations, their questioning of methodologies, their examining of possible biases and blind spots- are reframed as the academic establishment. Having students consider a plurality of views, learn different perspectives from which to challenge the ideas they learn, is framed as brainwashing. The reassertion of unquestionably following historical establishment in academic fields, is reframed as not just brave but intellectually rigorous, as what’s actually in the spirit of inquiry. this is pushed by folks so coddled they’re threatened by having to face critiques that may challenge the ideas they’re comfortable in, that may ask of them to look at things from other perspectives unfamiliar to them.

“Safe spaces”, a concept to ensure an environment conducive to talking about controversial things like misogyny or racism or the institutional and cultural enabling of sexual assault by ensuring that students are given a forum to discuss them in a space moderated to remove obstacles that aim to shut down such speech, is reframed as people being unable to deal with the difficulties of reality. (And yes, talking about the misogyny or racism of our society and institutions is controversial in our society, and something that invites a lot of defensiveness and pushback, which is something everyone who has ever talked about them knows. the only way you could believe that speaking up about misogyny or racism or rape culture faces no pushback from society is if you live in a right-wing filter bubble where you think that the real world is a much nicer place, united around the condemnation of things that should be condemned, than the very sexist, racist, rape culture promoting place that it actually is.)

A powerful accessibility tool like content warnings to allow the full participation of people who may suffer from PTSD, allowing them to mentally prepare so as to engage with material instead of marginalizing them by ignoring the possibility of something physically distressing being sprung upon them, is reframed as a way for people to just avoid challenging things. taking it away is framed as boldness when in fact the conservatism of institutions in refusing to embrace inclusion is as old as academia itself, and smirking agreement to keep things as they are between self-satisfied professors to wealthy donors is framed as courageously standing up to- what, the powerful establishment of poor undergraduate women? Universities ignoring criticism of their intellectual traditions or their pedagogy by their students is many things, but brave and bold isn’t one of them

People in the position of privilege have been allowed to co-opt the language that criticizes the softness and fragility of privilege, absolutely unchecked. Women taking on certain professional censure and harassment to call for inclusion in their video games aren’t the ones that are soft, men for whom two hundred games with male central characters every year isn’t enough to feel secure against the possibility of any women in their spaces are. Black and brown people jostling for recognition in a country clearly not centered around them aren’t the ones showing fragility, people so threatened by the presence of minorities that they feel their entire culture, way of life, and western civilization itself are at risk from plurality or multiculturalism are.  That we don’t acknowledge this is, I repeat, fucking insane.

Every time you hear any of the following words or phrases: “coddled”, “easily offended”, “silencing free speech”, “the world isn’t a safe space”, or anything about “the real world”, stop giving it a free pass. Don’t just let it fly, shut it down right there. Call out the absurdity and hypocrisy. It’s poor speech, and it deserves the level of scrutiny that will show it to be poor speech. Our public discourse deserves that.

technology in schools is good. it’s a great aid for teachers. but wait, asks the greatest minds of silicon valley, why have teachers at all? let’s disrupt education with technology. it sounds great. it sounds cool as shit. but:

digitizing education would be one thing if we hadn’t learned by now how dangerous the idea of technology and its application as apolitical and ideologically neutral is. everything is political, including knowledge. what we learn, what we don’t learn, and how we learn it shapes everything we know, everything we think we know, and everything about how we see the world.

digitization opens the educational system up to coming under dictatorial or corporate control. like media monopolies right now, or even ideology based school franchises, or countries with full propaganda education systems). there is very little in existence that’s more attractive for unaccountable self-interested power seekers to co-opt than technology which will have mass usage, especially when education is one of the subtlest possible ways of control. an asshole principal is one thing, one unaccountable official or billionaire controlling everything millions of kids learn is another. school boards and education departments are dysfunctional but are at least partly accountable to parents and voters.

removing teacher labor while increasing tech isn’t an original concept, but something that’s been tried dozens of times to detriment of students (and is just an extension of replacing human workers with automation, like many other industries). and there’s no real control group for “no teachers, all tech”, which means there’s almost no evidence for a huge restructuring of society.

removing the human element ignores all the literature and research on how kids learn. there’s plenty of that research out there, but education policy is too often dictated by outsiders who believe that anyone could do it. there’s a reason why an entire field of academia devoted to education exists, and that’s because it’s not that easy. you need to at least be familiar with the research on pedagogy and child development. on which note, removing the human element also ignores a lot of neuroscience, especially about early childhood development, particularly about the necessity of human contact and interaction to avoid severe developmental issues into adulthood. and that’s without considering that most students aren’t going to get the same attention and time from their families to supplement their education that, say, even home-schooled students get, so they’re just going to have a complete dearth of human interaction altogether.

there’s also the practical issues. most education isn’t as easy for a computer to teach and correct as a student learns as, say, coding is. most subjects from humanities to arts to prose/poetry to sport to philosophy, require human coaching and feedback to complex ideas that not even the most powerful AI today can handle.

all in all, most arguments against teachers work better as ones for higher standards for teachers. the problems with education that are most discussed as needing improvement are problems that could be solved where teachers are to have rigorous training, regular professional development, and are compensated accordingly as professionals. places without these often don’t value teachers and make it a low-value job, which is self fulfilling.

Here’s my hot take, which honestly should be an ice-cold take by now, what the fuck:

People dismissing social justice folks for being angry need to get some empathy. It’s understandable to be angry or even overreact sometimes when society’s constantly shit to you. Being able to either be unaffected or have the fortitude to be calm shouldn’t be a prerequisite for your thoughts to be valid.

If anything, the framing should be the other way around: if “SJWs” are angry, the response should be wanting to understand what about society is that upsetting for a given person and how being upset is a normal reaction. We should be listening to the angry, period. We should be listening to the hurt, we should be listening to people who feel oppressed and try to understand what’s causing it and trying to find a way to make it better.

People don’t like being angry. People don’t like having to speak up about things that, more often than not, will get them flooded with both well-meaning condescension and outright harassment. There may be a few exceptions, but assuming that everyone that’s upset about the way things are are just those exceptions is an extremely uncharitable view of humankind: odds are, for any group of people, they’re fundamentally just like you, and that includes the vocally angry and the outspoken.

If a group of people in society is upset about something that they experience, it’s callous to demand that every one of them meet a certain standard of calm and respectable. People that can remain calm are the exceptionally reserved. People who remain calm are going above and beyond what we should expect of them so they can try to politely convince everyone else. That shouldn’t be the expected standard, that should be seen as a gesture of politeness.

Even within movements, even among people who share the same goals, there seems to be this expectation: the idea that those in a movement that are angry or upset are embarrassing and counterproductive and a hindrance to achieving your goals, that they are people you need to quickly disavow so that the people you’re trying to convince will take you seriously.

I understand that impulse. It can be frustrating. But it’s still kind of a shitty thing to do. Abandoning the parts of your movement that express themselves in less “acceptable” ways is starting from weakness, already ceding ground. You shouldn’t play along in invalidating your movement. You should demand that their anger be taken seriously, explain that it’s a valid response. If I’m part of a movement and I’m calm enough to be identified as a “reasonable” social justice person, why the fuck would I embrace being used as a bludgeon to discredit the valid anger and reasoning of people who believe the same things? My calmness wouldn’t refute their anger, it would complement it.

Not a long post, just dropping a few screenshots from a study of internet trolls:

Note: the asterisks show that the result was statistically significant, as in, the relationship definitely exists and it’s very unlikely that they got the results they got out of pure chance. Here you can note that all these factors are definitely linked with trolling, and barely if at all linked to the others (aside from a subset of people that primarily debate online having a mildly statistically significant relationship with vicarious sadism, those small numbers could be just random errors). You can get a better idea of it by looking at the original graph and seeing where the values and those brackets marking the range of error are.