It’s not the policy, it’s the racism

Byoliveridley

Articles on people of colour and voting patterns in the recent US election don’t touch on the racist rhetoric that the right has used for years. People of colour are frequent recipients of racist actions against them and the right’s use of racist language is completely internalized into their discourse and worldview. Just look at what Bill O’Reilly said post election:

“Obama wins because it’s not a traditional America anymore. The white establishment is the minority. People want things.”

The republican party thinks hispanics are not part of a traditional America. People of colour tend to notice these things. Obama has deported way more hispanic people than Bush ever did, and has not used his executive discretion to slow down enforcement till the DREAM act deferrals. But the democratic party has not been captured by the ugly racism that pervades  anti-immigrant rhetoric in the US.

So, change positions all you want, and help pass real immigration legislation that helps the millions of Americans living a difficult undocumented life get documented. But, the right needs more than that. It needs to convince its supporters that racism is unacceptable and to punish, not reward people for saying racist things and acting in racist ways.

The attorney general of Utah, Mark Shurtleff, a conservative Republican, said he was part of an “education campaign” to persuade Republican officials that “they need to reject the run-’em-out, deport-’em, enforcement-only approach that people think is the only voice of the Republican Party.”

Republicans Reconsider Positions on Immigration

Update: Mitt Romney’s post election statements where he labels everyone other than White people “special interest groups” are yet more evidence.

Photo courtesy Lorenzolambertino photostream used under a creative commons licence.

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    Two differing views on the Pakistani Army

    Byoliveridley

    Apparently, this blog is now all Pakistan all the time. But these two articles caught my eye this morning, the first one from a writing fellow in the U.S.

    The Pakistani military, as is the case with most armed forces in the Muslim world, is the citadel of the country’s modernity, its most significant secular institution and protector not only of the modern nation state but the idea of the nation state itself.

    The case for standing by Musharraf. – By Lee Smith – Slate Magazine

    And this one from an ex-Pakistan army cadet and current reporter for the BBC Urdu service.

    Within months there were other changes: evenings socializing to music and mocktails were replaced by Koran study sessions. Buses were provided for cadets who wanted to attend civilian religious congregations. Within months, our rather depressing but secular academy was turned into a zealous, thriving madrassa where missing your daily prayers was a crime far worse than missing the morning drill.It is this crop of military officers that now runs the country. General Musharraf heads this army, and is very reluctant to let go.

    Pakistan’s General Anarchy – New York Times

    Now who’s right, I wonder? The guy who’s from Pakistan and was actually in the army when it was transforming from a secular to a religious organization, or a writing fellow who despite an impressive Arab resume does not actually know any Urdu.

    It’s Western “experts” like these that fuel this idea of Musharraf being some kind of secular bastion against anarchy in Pakistan. It’s under Zia ul-Haq and Musharraf that the Islamic fundamentalists in Pakistan made greater inroads because the Pakistan intelligence service (ISI) and the army are full of people who support and propagate extremist agendas.

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  • Varanasi hit by blasts

    Byoliveridley

    VaranasiBBC NEWS | World | South Asia | Indian temple city hit by blasts

    The first explosion took place in the major Sankot Mochan temple dedicated to the Hindu God Hanuman at about 1815 local time (1245 GMT). At least 10 people were killed and a number of others injured in the blast, Uttar Pradesh officials said. An eyewitness, Siddharth Suri, told the BBC that thousands of people were at the temple at the time of the blast. Tuesday is a special day at the Sankat Mochan temple and the explosion took place just minutes before the main worship.

    It’s so friggin’ easy in India, so many targets, so many people, so much activity. The motive is obvious, to incite a hindu reprisal on muslims that can ratchet up the tension even further. Don’t worry, the BJP-RSS-VHP troika is more than willing to play the game…

    The BJP has already given a call for a Varanasi bandh while the VHP has gone a step further to call for a statewide bandh in UP. The BJP has also given notice to suspend Question Hour in Parliament tomorrow. On its agenda: the blasts and the alleged ‘‘competitive minorityism’’ that has encouraged ‘‘jehadi terrorism’’ to flourish, party leaders said.

    While that was for the record, Sangh Parivar insiders view the latest development as an opportunity. Their calculation is that the BJP, which has declined considerably in UP over the last few years, would benefit from a communal polarisation in the state.

    A similar polarisation in the early 1990s helped Hindutva forces transcend the differences of caste that lies at the root of UP’s politics of identity. The party has not been able to revive that ‘‘Hindu unity’’ since, but is now hoping that a replay of the ‘‘Mullah Mulayam’’ theme could work.

    The Indian voting population has so far tended to vote more on bread and butter issues and caste/community lines than on religious lines, which makes for a fragmented voting pattern that is harder for the political parties to manage. But the forces of Hindutva would like nothing better than to polarize the electorate on religious lines, it would make the system much more “efficient”. I guess “either you’re with us, or you’re against us” is easier to manage than “either you’re with us, or you’re with them, no, you’re with the other them, no wait???” – See US of A for classic two party “efficiency”.

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    India Debates Fitness of Woman Set to Be President

    Byoliveridley

    I remember her vaguely from being immersed in Indian politics a lot more in the past than I am now. She’s just another politician, member of the Congress Party, the corruption, nepotism, etc., well, par for the course. Just because she’s a woman does not make her immune. There’s a long history of corrupt politicians becoming president of India (See Singh, Zail!). Indira Gandhi started the rather convenient process of hiring pliant presidents, it was in general a good power consolidation move. It just so happened that the outgoing president, Dr. Abdul Kalam was a nuclear scientist and technocrat, not a career politician.

    It looks like the Congress party’s just returning to its politician president ways!

    India Debates Fitness of Woman Set to Be President – New York Times

    India’s first female president is likely to be voted into office on Thursday, but this milestone event has been overshadowed in recent weeks by an unusually savage debate over whether she is fit to become head of state.

    When the leader of the governing Congress party, Sonia Gandhi, announced in June that Pratibha Patil, 72, was her party’s official choice for the post, she added that to have a woman president would be a matter of “great pride” and a “historic moment in the 60th year of our republic.”

    But Gandhi’s attempt to promote this as a triumph for gender equality has won Ms. Patil little support.

    Instead, the pre-election campaigning has been dominated by a series of vitriolic attacks on Ms. Patil’s credentials.

    The opposition has alleged, among other things, that she shielded her brother in a murder investigation, protected her husband in a suicide scandal, and was herself involved in numerous financial irregularities.

    And then there are Ms. Patil’s own peculiar statements — most notably, her revelation that she had heard the voice of a dead guru predicting she would rise to power.

  • Ah, Propaganda

    Byoliveridley

    Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found.The effort, which began with the buildup to the Iraq war and continues to this day, has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air.

    Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand – New York Times

    Of course, the word “propaganda” is first used on page 4 of the article, long after most people stopped reading. Not that I am surprised or shocked or anything, it was clear that all those military suits on the screen were spouting propaganda from the very beginning. They said the same things, used the same words, it was always well timed and planned, but apparently, no one in the media bothered to ask them about it. The media must have thought “very patriotic folks them, they wear a lot of lapel pins!”

    I fail to see how this meticulously detailed story will have any impact on anything that happens in the States. What would John McCain’s reaction be to this news? Will anyone actually ask him if he would have done the same thing? Will there be any protests, calls for resignations, impeachments, court martials, media boycotts? Maybe a shocked letter to the editor or two, maybe a million blog posts like this one, nothing more.

    God Bless America, it has lived up to all my expectations finally!! Pravda, Xinhua and Goebbels have nothing on these guys. It looks like all the president’s people and all the mass media colluded to sell this war to the American people and make each other very rich. Wonderful! Note that a small part of every dollar spent on cable and newspapers goes to support this war effort. Note that a small part of everyone’s taxes go to support this war effort.

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    Fun with maps: BC Smart meters and the 2013 election

    Byoliveridley

    SmartMeterVotingMapI have been MOOC’ing this summer and learning how to do maps. Geography as an adult is much more fun than my 10th grade geography class.

    Chad Skelton over at the Vancouver Sun intrigued me with his data retrieval and mapping of British Columbia’s Smart Meter uptake. if you’re not from BC, here’s a short intro (#BCpoli-aware feel free to skip the next two paragraphs).

    BC Hydro is the government owned (Crown Corporation) utility that produces and distributes electricity for the province of British Colombia in Canada. In 2011, BC Hydro announced its intention to spend $$$ upgrading all its electricity meters to “smart meters”. These meters are capable of being read via wifi by meter readers, and potentially also give BC residents the ability to monitor their electricity usage in near-real time.

    Many concerns were raised about the smart meters. One was about the costs of the program vs. perceived benefits. The others, which gained traction were around an emerging movement in BC connecting wifi, cell signals and wifi-enabled smart meters with a whole variety of health effects. While few, if any of these health concerns have been actually causally linked to smart meters, or even to the amorphous descriptor “wifi radiation”, these health concerns have gained traction even among official bodies such as the Union of BC Municipalities, municipal councils and school boards. The BC provincial election in 2013 was a chance for people to voice their concerns. The opposition parties all brought the issue up during canvassing.

    For my peer assessment mapping project, I wanted to see if areas of relatively high smart meter refusal were correlated or co-located in any way with voting against the ruling BC Liberals.

    This is the map I made, my first ever map not scrawled on paper.


    View Larger Map

    Reading the Map

    The electoral districts are colour-coded by BC Liberal Party percentage, darker means higher vote for the BC Liberals. I chose this rather than “who won” because I was looking more for an anti-BC Liberal effect. I will, at some point in time, try to overlay “who won” as well. The smart meter refusal data is in three different coloured and sized circles. Large and red means higher refusal, and small and green means low refusal. This is a hybrid of a graduated circle symbol scheme and a diverging colour scheme. Clearly, using points to represent areas is a big limitation, but it is sufficient for a quick peek.

    Anything to See?

    • An overwhelming majority of people had smart meters installed, > 90% in most places. So, BC Hydro’s brute force, no options, default installation plan was mostly successful
    • Places of higher than normal refusal tended to vote against the BC Liberals. I believe this had more to do with existing anti-BC-Lib tendencies influencing smart meter refusal rather than the other way around.
    • Urban centres like Victoria and Vancouver had relatively low rates of refusal. Is this because of higher apartment proportions, or because smart meter refusal was restricted to a small number of high information, highly motivated individuals whose number varied by location and whose numbers in places like Victoria were muted by larger populations?. Note that my home area of Victoria had the most (7300) rejected smart meters, even though the percentage is small. The ageing white (l)iberal enclave of Saltspring Island (Ganges), aka hippieville, Canada had by far the highest refusal percentage. So, is this smart meter refusal map mostly a hippie population distribution map?

    The take home message for me was that the anti-smartmeter movement had little influence on the election, which was most likely won on the usual and mundane issues of the economy, trust and corruption.

    Methods

    1. I downloaded data on smart meter refusal from the Chad Skelton’s post and Tableau public
    2. The data from BC Hydro is categorized using their division of BC into distinct geographical billing areas. I used billing area names to geotag the information. The site http://www.findlatitudeandlongitude.com/ has a feature where addresses can be uploaded in bulk via a text interface, and the site returns the place, and latitude longitude. I added province and country to the place names, and edited ambiguous names to make the search more effective.
    3. I uploaded this table to arcgis to form one layer. Arcgis is a big and expensive GIS software, with a limited free online playpen where this map is displayed. I used graduated circles and natural breaks to represent the different levels of smart meter refusal. A big limitation to this approach is that the BC Hydro billing areas are just that, areas, not points on a map. However, the area boundaries are not available as a shape file, and geographical areas vary widely. So, the points correspond to the centre of the nearest big population area mentioned in the BC Hydro billing area description
    4. I downloaded BC electoral district shape files from Paul Ramsey of Open Geo. These shape files are an improved version of those available from Elections BC, again, thanks to Chad Skelton for pointing me in this direction
    5. Elections BC lists 2013 provincial election results information by party by district. However, there is no publicly downloadable mapped source for the election data results. I used the open source GIS desktop software QGIS to open the shape file and add the attribute of BC Liberal percentage to the shape file. I uploaded this shape file to arcgis and layered it with the smart meter refusal rate graduated circles to look for patterns.

    Maps are fun to play with, and I know very very little about them, which is a great combination. Every minute I spent making this map was a learning experience. Comments and feedback, please. I think I will slowly incorporate mapping into my skill set. But I think I will use open source/free solutions in the future.

  • Take that, economists!

    Byoliveridley

    Brownlee’s mistake was to put into practice something that worked only in theory.

    Meet the economists who know why we buy what we buy | Money | The Guardian

    Buried in an excellent article introducing the field of behavioural economics to a wider audience is that one line takedown of economics theory! I happen to believe that economists just aren’t scientific enough to understand how modeling works. A well behaved, rational human being who makes every decision independently of other decisions based solely on maximizing her economic utility is like (warning, quantum theory reference) a physicist reading about the particle in a box model and deciding to predict the behavior of all subatomic particles. Yes, it is a neat theory with some neat math, but it’s only the first step!

    Scientists try to be a little more humble with their modeling. They seem to know that the chaos and probability driven events in even the simplest of real world settings make models/simulation mostly exercises in trend seeking, not deterministic end points.

    To predict the economic behavior of people, you have to include the variables that make them people! Not assume that all people will follow all your assumptions of their behavior strictly, and to not call them names when they don’t act to maximize their short term utility!

    Anyway, apropos nothing, I like to rant about economists! The article also notes that Barack Obama is a follower of behavioral economics, good for him. I wonder if McCain even knows what that phrase means.

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