All Thoughts Being Equal

I.   My friend Jon Bash is a very talented musician/composer , so it's safe to assume that he thinks very seriously about music in general. Recently he posted this article ( "How Popular Music's Lyrics Perpetuate American Idiocy" ) from a site called The Anti-Media, about a study examining the "reading level" of Billboard Top 40 songs. Stories about the study were passed around other places too, including The Guardian ( "Hip hop ain't top: new study reveals reading levels behind music lyrics" ) and The Onion 's A.V. Club ( "Popular songs are dumb and only getting dumber, says dumb study" ), with varying levels of skepticism and/or snark. Before getting in to any substantive discussion, however, I will first make fun of The Anti-Media for writing a really dumb article. Claire Bernish (Twitter handle: @ subversive_pen — Twitter bio: a Julian Assange quote) opens her turd-de-force with the following incredible paragraph-and...

I. It's election time yet again at Western Washington University, and times are desperate. Last year, a scant seven percent of the student body voted in the election. Where did it go wrong? The last couple times I wrote about student electoral politics at WWU, things got a bit... lively. Hopefully this starts a discussion as well! The 2014 election marks the third straight year of precipitous decline , it should be noted. (The linked Western Front article implies that the decline started in 2012, but actually the turnout in 2011 was the peak.) Now we have this bizarre twist in the 2015 AS Presidential race : [AS Presidential Candidate Belina] Seare is now running unopposed after her one opponent, AS Communications Director Josie Ellison, announced the end of their campaign Tuesday, April 21. [...] Ellison attended the debate and voiced support for Seare. “The position was something that I was interested in doing, something I thought I could do well,” they said. “...

Follow-up to: Diagnosis of an overwhelming fear, pt. 1 ; Adventures in bad statistics, Big Gay edition I. So there's a video going around. A woman dresses pretty generically—jeans, a black crew-neck shirt—and walks around New York City... and experiences "over 100" instances of street harassment in 10 hours over a few days. I have a few problems with this methodology. On the one hand, it's great that people are documenting this sort of everyday experience: one's personal life history doesn't translate well over the Internet, so any little bit helps. On the other hand... The big problem is with the editing. Out of nine major online media sites who reported this— CNN , USA Today , Business Insider , New York Post , Vox , Slate , Huffington Post , Salon , and Jezebel —none of them caught this on the first go around. Then Slate and Salon realized something was up: it's almost all black and Latino men. Yikes. The Jezebel writer had this commentary i...

Note: This post was adapted from a Facebook comment I made in a closed group. In the March 2011 edition of their National Health Statistics Report , the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published results on sexual identity from the 2006-2008 National Survey of Family Growth. More recently (July 2014 edition of the NHSR) they published the results of the 2013 National Health Interview Survey[1]. This got passed around with headlines like "Gay population smaller than previously thought." According to the report, Proper counter-propaganda tactics would be to pull out other statistical nuggets for comparison. As a particularly evocative example, only 1.7% of the American population self-identifies as Mormon [1] , so they're outnumbered 2 to 1 even with this maybe-lowball stat. Similarly, the Southern Baptist churches claim roughly 16 million members, which is about 5% of the U.S. population [2] ... not all that much bigger than the LGBTQ population...

Western Washington University got launched into the right-wing (and racist ! and Glenn Beck !) blogosphere yesterday, when the conservative advocacy site Campus Reform published an article titled "University calls the amount of white people on campus a ‘failure,’ asks for ideas on how to have fewer" . Yikes! But let's dig deeper.