All Thoughts Being Equal

My scientist friend Jay recently shared a Business Insider article on Facebook. In that, ah, interesting headline style of the late twentyteens, it proclaims: "The US just sent 10 new scientists to Congress, including an ocean expert, a nurse, and a biochemist. Here's the full list." Great, isn't it? And the good news continues into the article body: A record number of women are in the ranks [of the 116th Congress, just convened in 2019] — 127, according to Rutgers Center for American Women and Politics. They include the first Muslim women, the first Somali-American, and the first Native American women. There are more scientists too. Diversity in our representative legislature can be good; our motto is E pluribus unum , after all, and the legislature should be representative of the plurality. Last November, 10 new science-credentialed candidates were elected: one senator and nine members of the House. But now "scientists" have become "sc...

This post is a follow up to the AS Elections series: Part 1 , Part 2 , and Part 3 . This post series of posts is going to be a rather odd one. The first few sections I wrote under the intended title of "AS Elections 2015: Representation Without Representation," addressing the initial mascot stupidity and the messaging of the WWU Associated Students. Then some shit went down, and things became, well, problematic . I can't in good conscience keep the rest of my thoughts under the same title, so I'm adding this intro by way of disclaimer. Yes , I have another post about the racist pricks who decided it would be "top kek" to "joke" on anonymous social media about lynching people. I also have some criticism of the WWU AS, though, and more importantly I don't want one criticism obscuring the other. Since the AS did some questionable things first (and I'll make a hub post with a timeline, maybe) this critique comes first. Here we go: I. ...

This post is a follow-up to AS Elections 2015: Why Do We Even Bother , and a partial follow-up to Western Washington University: "diversity" = "anti-white"? , AS Presidential Debates: Shit Gets Real , and Inappropriate I. When 6 out of 7 positions on the WWU Associated Students board are uncontested in the 2015 elections , and only 7% of students voted in the 2014 elections , that's an embarrassment and the AS should feel bad. If only this hasn't been a recurring theme, with the same problems and platitudes traded back and forth, for—at the very least— fifteen years ... But that was the last post. Now we're in case-study mode. This past academic year, what did the AS Board, they of the 7% voter turnout, actually do with their newfound powers? Let's start with what they wanted to do, as documented by this strangely titled AS Pravda Review (yes I will make that joke again) article, "What Have the AS Board Been Up To?" Given th...

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...

It's time again for some musings on social justice, culture, and the culture wars. Where did we leave off...

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.