The Monday Roundup: Black Reparations discount, carfree downtown, EV reality, and more

Certainly, and that does happen. I was a supervisor at a fast food joint in my early adulthood. I reluctantly weighed in on an argument between two people about a bicycle. Of all things. The young woman had borrowed it from the young man and trashed it. He wanted her to compensate him for it and I said, yeah, that’s the right thing to do. She complained to the manager and tried to get me up on sexual harassment. I negotiated the situation without a demerit.

But we’re talking about a public figure who has a bit of a track record (no pun intended) for questionable comments.

Now as far as how you addressed my question, which is to say you ignored it, I have to assume you don’t have a good answer. Here it is again. Do you think that men should be justified in saying, “it’s hard to tell in advance if my actions will be taken offensively”?

I ask that question because you said,

it makes it hard to know in advance what will get you canceled.

I think if you conduct yourself with respect to other people, there is no ambiguity as to what the outcome will be.

Simmons does not address people with a sense of respect.

I agree that the best defense is to leave no doubt about your intentions, and address people with the utmost respect. But if you set the bar such that no one on twitter could possibly be offended by what you say, you’re restricting yourself to saying almost nothing. There are better standards of offensiveness than what the least reasonable person on the internet thinks.

Then again, saying nothing on twitter is probably the best policy.

PS I am not answering your hypothetical, because workplace harassment is very different than twitter outrage, but I will say if you’re asking yourself that question, you’re probably about to do something you shouldn’t.

Your answer to my question is a milk-toast cop-out. I for one am not surprised that you pale at the opportunity to say anything substantial.

You’re missing the point. This isn’t an isolated incident and taken in the context of what was said and how Simmons replied to what was said, it was clearly incendiary. His intention was to voice his opinion against anti-racism with what is considered to be “internet blackface”.

Taken from another perspective, why was the hand brown? Simmons is not brown, why didn’t he use a white flesh tone hand?

I posit that there was a singular intent to his choice.

Just in case you missed it the first time, I am not defending Simmons. I am defending the right to not have one’s speech judged by the standards of the most easily offended listener, especially in a context like Twitter where you can’t possibly know who’s listening.

If you were honest enough to answer my question, then you would be engaging my argument.

If you let someone else dictate when you are allowed to be offended, you give up some measure of self control. We can agree that there are circumstances that, when investigated, demonstrate a lack of credibility. This does not mean however that we should take the rights away from people to determine when they are offended.

Furthermore, you seem to be arguing from the perspective of discrete, one off incidences. This was not one.

The subjective measure of something being offensive is 1) for acute instances, objectively offensive 2) for chronic instances, less objectively offensive. What I’m saying is, a one off needs to be clearly offensive whereas a pattern of abuse can be less clearly offensive and still cross the line. Simmons is the later, a chronic instigator of racial confrontations.

I agree that everyone has the “right” to be offended by whatever. But the existence of an offended party says nothing about wrongdoing on behalf of the speaker. It’s starting to sound like you agree that a better measure would be “objectively offensive”, or, as I prefer, “given the context, would a reasonable person find this offensive?”

Simmons may well be what you say, and may well have deserved his punishment. I have no way of knowing, and I consider that an issue between him and his employer, especially if his tweeting was connected to his work.

I think the right punishment was administered. Simmons has been out of line in the past, establishing a history. His conduct in this instance was very questionable. We don’t know the behind the scenes events.

I understand you to be arguing that a person’s race is an immutable, objective fact. I agree you can make objective statements like “my grandmother was born in Lithuania, and my grandfather was born in Egypt”, but birthplace (or language or culture) doesn’t well define “race” unless you are willing (as I am not) to accept highly problematic and arbitrary rules about who qualifies as what and how far back you have to go and so on.

I believe race to be more a matter of cultural identity, which, as you note, is malleable and can change to suit the situation. I’m not sure how that can be objective. It is clear that a person’s “race” is less important to me than it is to a lot of other people.

Maybe we just think about race differently.

I think for most of America it’s still the one-drop rule.

Tiger’s dad identified as “half black” so I don’t think we need to go down the racist rabbit hole of the one-drop rule.

When it comes to reparations, is it fair to only bestow a benefit to full blooded African Americans? There’s another racist notion that says, “race follows the mother”. Which allowed plantation owners to rape their slave women without worrying about losing their property to illegitimate heirs. If we suddenly said, the one-drop rule should be ignored for purpose of bestowing reparations, then all of these children of rape and their progeny would be ineligible.

Of course, white women were themselves property. I’m not as familiar with the outcome of white women who willfully slept with black slaves.

Anyway, yes, there are a lot of racist notions to our currently held standards for ethnicity. But as I say, when it comes to reparations, the criteria for granting them should be as broad as the criteria that justified subjugation in the first instance.

Side note: I have a lot of grievances with our collective understanding of ethnicity, but I recognize that my opinions get pigeonholed by the “smart” people who decide how ethnicity is described.

First of all, everyone of my links above dealt with percentage so my meaning was OBVIOUS to anyone who did not have a semantic axe to grind. Secondly, please stop claiming that I’m unaware of the fact that energy use has increased over time without any evidence of this.

The whole point of that comment was to point out that trend towards renewables has been deaccelerating for ~50 years and even after modest accelleration the past few decades has not come close to its peak. If that is not an indictment of ‘murrican rigged market extractive capitalism, I don’t know what is.

The growth in renewables accelerating, as your own data shows. It currently outpacing overall energy growth, which means the trend is positive. Not positive enough, but still positive.

So, this is a circular reference to the first Harvard link. Which means, you’re using a new fact to support and old fact that relies on the old fact to be true.

Come on man.

“You need a better source.”

Ummm…my original comment contained the word “likely”. This is an important word that reasonable people use when there is imperfect information. When someone disputes a “likely” statement backed up by expert analysis, the onus should be on that person to detail what was wrong with the expert analysis and/or provide a better source. You haven’t done this at all.

For the record, one of the reasons that cycling or light-weight neighborhood EV use does have potential for mitigation of emissions is that it would require shifting to a system that greatly reduces total miles traveled. I see light-weight EVs that are only used for short trips as not being too much different from cycling. Tesla 3s are not this and a transition to an Elon Musk-centric transportation system is something that I find horrifying.

As to why cycling like a USAnian is no solution to climate change one only has to imagine what would happen if the entire world started eating the meat-centric diet of the typical Portlander.

And that brings me back to my initial point about rich narcissistic nations like the USA. Some of the major reasons we emit so much CO2e is due to our transportation and consumption patterns. If we want to address GHG emissions in any kind of serious way, we need to move around and eat more like the people our military tortures, bombs, drones, and mass-murders.

I previously rejected your source on the following merits:

One, it’s a “back of the envelope” estimate.

This is a direct quote from the author.

Two, it assumes that the diet is Paleo and has embedded CO2 emissions from meat production, but PDX has a larger than average vegan / vegetarian population.

At best, PDX riders would be only an average between Paleo and Vegan. More likely that they are vegan.

Three, it’s not peer reviewed, therefor it is not science, as the scientific process incorporates peer review.

If you don’t have peer review, then it’s just an opinion.

This sealioning is tiresome. I was not submitting my “likely” comment for peer review.

However, your comment about peer review being the scientific process made me laugh out loud for real. So thanks for that in this time of little laughter.

Maybe hairsplitting? Sealioning? Sorry, I’m not a net expert. But, Jason said the scientific method incorporates peer review, not that they are the same. I think he’s right in that scientific publications today go through peer review. Any exceptions are in the popular press and not what we call journals.

Peer review is part of the process of publishing manuscripts in journals (or obtaining grants), not part of the process of science.

I won’t be reading or posting on this thread again.

I’m not harassing you.

You made a statement based on faulty evidence I said so. You then submitted a new source which was based on the same faulty information. So, I said so.

I have never demanded for you to provide a source. Rather the contrary, I read your source and pointed out it’s crap.

That is not “sealioning”. Inform yourself.

All I have done is called out that you are spreading false information. Under the pretext of “well it could be possible”. It also “could be possible” that Smurfs do indeed exist. Not likely, based on scientific evidence.

I never said, “peer review is the scientific process. I said it is a fundamental part of the scientific process. Take special note of step 5, evidence.

The evidence one uses to form their opinions is very important to accurate outcomes.

Why dabble with an argument that looks very much like the kind of reasoning a person would use to talk themself into buying a thing that they want but don’t need?

Another point that perhaps you can appreciate: a new car of any sort implies about an extra year of work time, trading life for money, to pay it off. In that space of time a person could ride a bicycle into the big part of Central Oregon about 50 times. That’s for the people who say you need a car to recreate.

Bikes, skates, boards, scooters, e-scooters, e-bikes, e-boards, and other light-weight EVs have enormous advantages over teslas due to their impact on health, use of built space, particulate pollution etc. My initial comment focused exclusively on gCO2e/p-km, not these other metrics.

A transition towards increased use of pedal-powered bikes would be one of my preferred alternatives. I just don’t think it’s going to happen in the USA in the next few decades and, therefore, I believe the anti-electrification rhetoric of some “car-lite” bike-riding climate warriors to be very unhelpful.

I think we agree at least 97%. I admit that I reacted to your first sentence waaay up above without parsing your second sentence at all.

Omitting, for now, a screed about electric CAR adoption (which you clearly do not support) here’s another reference for the hypothetical fourth person still reading:

https://phys.org/news/2020-08-electric-cars-wont-dont-upeconomist.html

Great! I don’t know why Prof. Marsden is, but I’m glad he agrees with me.

Was agreeing with you and thought you’d like the turn of phrase.