At that point, I’d stopped thinking about her until she rapped on the glass of her porch.
1) This happened a few months ago: Getting out of church, I had just missed the previous bus home by seconds, and I had a 20-minute wait, so I sat to read a newspaper in the bus kiosk. There’s a young woman sitting nearby, 20ish, reasonably attractive, and either Hispanic, light-skinned black or maybe Italian.
This young white guy comes over to her, detailing some mournful story of woe, noting how he “needed” someone to talk with. “Could I talk with you?”
“My boyfriend wouldn’t like that.” “We’d just be talking.” But she shut him down, harshly, and he walked to the other end of the kiosk.
Then the boyfriend arrives, and she tells him, in great deal, what had just transpired. Pointing to the guy, “You mean that white n***** over there?”
After she confirms, he goes at it verbally with the other guy, whose apology goes unheeded, until his bus finally arrives.
Wow. An unnecessary escalation of the situation, AND a totally different understanding of the N-word from mine.
2) This happened a couple of weeks ago.
Going to work, I rode my bike from my house to a place I catch a bus. As I approach the stop, I see a bus go by. Is it my bus to Corporate Woods, or the other bus that goes in a different direction?
My ride leaves downtown at 8:03, but takes a few minutes to get to where I am. I ride onto the sidewalk and straddle my bike while getting my cellphone from my backpack. It’s off – it’s almost always off unless I’m using it – so it takes a few seconds to warm up.
The woman from the doorway of the front enclosed porch, who is black, yells to me, “Get off my sidewalk with that bike.” “I’m just checking the time.” “Get that bike off my walk, b****!” I repeat my response, but she escalates hers.
So now I know I haven’t missed the bus – it’s only 8:05, so I get off my bike and start walking, maybe 0.3 mph, to just past the property line, where the bus stop is, and I stop and wait, while she’s busy screaming at her two kids, a girl maybe 10 and a boy perhaps seven.
At that point, I’d stopped thinking about her until she rapped on the glass of her porch and gave me the middle finger salute, which I ignored, as my bus pulled up. She watched me as I put my bike on the bus before it took off.
I’d been to the stop before and never encountered that person. I went back the next day but didn’t see her. Did she even live there, or was she some crazy relative who was just visiting?
Was she really upset that I had the bike nowhere near either the walkway or the driveway, or was something else was afoot? Maybe she thought I was a drug dealer (the gray-haired guy on a bike) or she didn’t like my red and white striped shirt, which looks pink at a distance. I’m just spitballing.
In June 2015, Kimberly Jean Bailey Davis was an obscure elected county clerk for little Rowan County, Kentucky, population of less than 24,000. Now she’s a lightning rod in the culture wars. She “defied a U.S. Federal Court order requiring that she issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples following the Obergefell v. Hodges U.S. Supreme Court case that legalized same-sex marriage in the United States.”
Four couples [have] sued Rowan County and its clerk, Kim Davis, for refusing to issue marriage licenses because of Davis’ religious objections to the U.S. Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage.
Davis is obligated by law to issue a marriage license to all qualified applicants, which now includes same-sex couples, the plaintiffs said. By “promoting a particular religious belief” at the Rowan County courthouse, Davis has “acted maliciously, with callous disregard for, or with reckless indifference to, the clearly established rights” of the plaintiffs, they said.
The argument that an elected official could not be allowed to ban the registration of a gun because weapons are against his or her religion, or keep women from driving on the same grounds, is a compelling point. This great West Wing clip frames the argument well. That she’s been married four times – she remarried husband #2 – and therefore is a hypocrite, is true – as the evil Westboro Baptist church has pointed out – though it is rather beside the point, as a matter of law.
She has been held up as some sort of martyr for “oppressed” Christians, more so since she was temporarily sent to jail. Judge David Bunning, son of baseball Hall of Fame pitcher and former US Senator Jim Bunning, explained why he rejected her argument. “The [marriage license] form does not require the county clerk to condone or endorse same-sex marriage on religious or moral grounds. It simply asks the county clerk to certify that the information provided is accurate and that the couple is qualified to marry under Kentucky law. Davis’ religious convictions have no bearing on this purely legal inquiry.”
Moreover, “While religious institutions are guaranteed protections against any government regulation or involvement in their religious life, the government is also protected from religious institutions attempt to garner political power over the nation. What this means is that anyone who functions as an agent of the state must remain religiously neutral, providing equal service, treatment, and rights to all people of all religious, ethical, social, and cultural backgrounds.”
Theoretically, there should be a compromise. Under Title VII of the federal Civil Rights Act, “both public and private employers have a duty to exempt religious employees from generally applicable work rules, so long as this won’t create an ‘undue hardship’.”
This is a very important principle, which would allow a Muslim woman to wear a hijab or a Sikh man to wear a dastaar, if it didn’t interfere with the task. As an elected official, it wouldn’t apply to Kim Davis, though Kentucky’s religious freedom law might come into play.
If she is objecting to “issuing licenses with her name on them, because she believes (rightly or wrongly) that having her name on them is an endorsement of same-sex marriage,” there may be a mechanism “modifying the prescribed Kentucky marriage license form to remove the multiple references to Davis’ name,” – assuming it hasn’t already been done – “and thus to remove the personal nature of the authorization that Davis must provide on the current form.”
Just yesterday, her lawyer repeated the assertion that those licenses issued by her deputy clerks were invalid, and “those responsible for issuing the licenses without authorization could face ‘criminal penalties.'” After giving her every scintilla of the benefit of the doubt, this position proves to me, without question, that the issue is not really about the religious freedom of Kim Davis, but rather the religious tyranny of her and her followers.
The larger point is that the system, as it has, must continue to allow couples in Rowan County, KY the opportunity to marry, which the Supreme Court declared is a fundamental right as early as 1888.
Related: this pictured quote attributed to Donald Trump about Kim Davis is untrue. HE DIDN’T SAY IT, and in fact, was largely unaware of the issue until very recently. The Donald makes many inflammatory statements but does not need to be defamed by Facebook pranks.
“Conversely, highly skilled individuals tend to underestimate their relative competence.”
You may have noticed this: most people think THEY are smarter, more often correct, more honest, better drivers, et al. than the “average” person. This is called illusory superiority, “a cognitive bias whereby individuals overestimate their own qualities and abilities, relative to others… Other terms include superiority bias, leniency error… and the Lake Wobegon effect (named after Garrison Keillor’s fictional town where ‘all the children are above average’). The phrase ‘illusory superiority’ was first used by Van Yperen and Buunk in 1991.”
But why is it that on a scale of one to 10, you probably think you’re a seven? According to “David Dunning, a psychologist at Cornell who has studied the effect for decades: “We realize the external traits and circumstances that guide other people’s actions, ‘but when it comes to us, we think it’s all about our intention, our effort, our desire, our agency — we think we sort of float above all these kinds of constraints'”
From here: “A closely related bias is the Dunning-Kruger effect, where incompetent or unskilled people fail to recognise their own incompetency (of course, I’m sure you’re not incompetent or unskilled, so this one doesn’t apply to you…)”
Dunning-Kruger has another aspect, however. “Conversely, highly skilled individuals tend to underestimate their relative competence, erroneously assuming that tasks which are easy for them are also easy for others.” This, actually, was the phenomenon I am most fascinated by.
I shared an office with this library colleague when I first started working as a librarian, and when I had a question I could not figure out, I’d ask for help. She would say, a lot, “Oh, that’s EASY.” It drove me crazy on two levels: 1) obviously, it wasn’t EASY for me, because I needed help, and 2) she was constantly diminishing her own expertise in this manner.
So, some of us aren’t as smart as we think we are. Others of us are actually smarter, but pshaw it off. *** TED talk – Kathryn Schulz: On being wrong
Ken Levine, the “Emmy winning writer/director/producer/major league baseball announcer” wrote about other guys named Ken Levine. That was such a swell idea that I thought I’d follow suit. Well, not EXACTLY; I thought I’d use my OWN name instead. Let’s start with Wikipedia:
Roger Green, the Welsh professional rugby league footballer of the 1930s, was born before 1915, which makes him very old.
Roger (Gilbert) Lancelyn Green “(2 November 1918 – 8 October 1987) was a British biographer and children’s writer. He was an Oxford academic who formed part of the Inklings literary discussion group along with C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien.”
Roger Curtis Green (15 March 1932 – 4 October 2009) was an American-born, New Zealand-based archaeologist. He was very accomplished, and I was actually sad when he died.
Roger Green (born 2 June 1943) is a Canadian former sailor who competed in the 1968 Summer Olympics.
Roger L. Green (born June 23, 1949) is an American legislator who served in the New York State Assembly for 26 years, from 1981 to 2007 (with a brief interruption in 2004), parts of the New York City borough of Brooklyn. More on him later.
Additionally, there is
Roger Green‘s Feng Shui Professional Certification Program
Roger Green founded Roger Green and Associates, Inc. (RG+A) in 1991. He serves as President and Chief Executive Officer. Over the past twenty years, Roger has worked to design marketing research methods, insights, and modeling tools that promote a greater understanding of what drives value in pharmaceutical markets.
Roger Green makes custom guns, including rifles and shotguns, does metalwork, stockwork, inletting, and sells pedigree gun dogs.
Roger Green, a co-founder of one of the first alternative medicine centers in Australia, served as director of the Australian School of Healing from 1985 to 1999.
There are more, surely.
Roger L. Green the legislator, of course, worked in Albany, which is one of the reasons I tend to use my middle name, t distinguish myself from him. Moreover, he’s black, and sometimes when I’d be introduced to people, they’d ask if I were in the Assembly; heck, no, I’m MUCH taller than that guy, by three or four inches at least.
One day, I came home from work, and there was a phone message from WCBS-TV in New York City, asking me to call them. They wanted to know if I had a comment about the death of Yusuf Hawkins in Bensonhurst. I hadn’t seen the news yet, so I had no idea who Yusef Hawkins was, quite possibly until the next morning. But, naturally, they didn’t want MY comment, they wanted Roger L. Green’s, who represented that part of Brooklyn.
Too many state legislators in New York State have been involved in illegal activities, and Assemblyman Green was no exception: “Green resigned his seat in June 2004, after pleading guilty to petty larceny in connection with $3000 in false travel reimbursement claims. As part of a plea deal, he served three years’ probation, was fined $2,000, and had to pay $3,000 in restitution. Later that same year, he ran and was re-elected to the same seat.”
But he ran for Congress a couple of years later and lost, so isn’t in Albany anymore. *** Happy half birthday to me.
It’s Labor Day weekend, so I feel no need to work too hard on this post. Yet there are a few points in Jaquandor’s piece I want to emphasize:
“Gee, I’ve never made fifteen bucks an hour.” The latter is often coupled with a description of the jobs one has done, obviously intended to make clear that my work should pay more than theirs. And these sentiments aren’t brand new, either, born of shock that burgerflippers (said with appropriate voice filled with disdain) are going to make that kind of money…
So why, then, so much resentment toward a group of workers who banded together and through various means of legal redress seem to have won a kind of victory for themselves? Why are so many people so eager to see in this another screwing of themselves by the system, instead of an example of what might be done elsewhere? If you’re so convinced that your line of work is deserving of better pay, than why not band together and do your own self-advocation?
In other words, if other people are getting less screwed over than they had been, it should be a cause for celebration, not disdain.
But THIS is the heart of the argument, for me:
After nearly forty years of unending tax-cutting and deregulating… all we have to show for it is wages that are stuck in neutral and money flowing ever, ever, ever upward in a pattern that can only be described as redistributive (albeit in the exact opposite way that that term is usually deployed by libertarian-types). The biggest problem most Americans face, economically, is not what the government is taking out of our paychecks. It is what our employers are not putting into them in the first place.
1) This happened a few months ago: Getting out of church, I had just missed the previous bus home by seconds, and I had a 20-minute wait, so I sat to read a newspaper in the bus kiosk. There’s a young woman sitting nearby, 20ish, reasonably attractive, and either Hispanic, light-skinned black or maybe Italian.
