Showing posts with label underdog. Show all posts
Showing posts with label underdog. Show all posts

White Liberal Checks Privileges by Bicycle

Two friends shared a link to a blog by Michigan preacher and blogger JDowsett, who hit the Facebook lottery with a blog last week, "What My Bike Has Taught Me about White Privilege".   It is well written.

Liberal white privilege college students 1981
It has been one of those months when a lot of social and racial soul-searching is going on in the USA.  The mysterious shooting of Michael Brown of Ferguson, Missouri...  Without going into a lot about that case here, I'll just put this link to Cracked.com "7 Important Details that No One Mentions about Ferguson" (my Facebook status for much of the week).  The language is salty, but I think Cracked has definitely evolved from a Mad Magazine rip-off in the 1970s to some of the best editorial writing on the web today.  Here's a shot of my status, including a snippet of the article.
Dudes... Cracked.com has grown into something, like... way different from "Mimic MAD". I've actually considered quitting to go work for Cracked, it's today's editorial.
Robin Ingenthron BTW It's a longer article than usual in Cracked and the language is quite quite salty. But there are some great points made, e.g.: "Aside from protesters throwing rocks and things at police, you've probably heard reports that LOOTERS and RIOTERS were at the protests, and that is true, .... There were people at these protests who got out of hand (some from out of town, some not), and the community paid for it. But small groups of drunken youths do not a riot make, especially when it's surrounded by much larger groups of completely peaceful protesters. Most of them are just like any average citizen in America. If you have to, just imagine that all of these protesters also happen to be white. Hope that helps."

Note the distinction the author Cody Johnston makes about how a mass protest gets labelled as a "riot" less easily in our minds if we "just imagine that all these protesters also happen to be white".   It's much the same point I make ad nauseum about TV repair... people perceive an African TV repairman as a little more dangerous, a little more criminal.  #HurricaneJoeBenson did not get six bullets like Mike Brown, but the time they took to defame him and prosecute him was a slow motion train wreck.

Hey Yah...Teach me lies...

Even as UN reports surfaced showing 91% reuse, and the original source of the "ewaste hoax" statistic ("80% dumping?") mumbled away a denial of ever having stated otherwise, the prosecution of Joseph Benson and BJ Electronics plodded away, taking a note of none of it.  It's harder to assess, perhaps, a mistaken snap judgement made by a Ferguson MO policeman in seconds.  And Trayvon Martin's killer was acquitted based on the quickness of the killing (and prosecuted in the press for the number of minutes he spent stalking trouble).  Benson was FRAMED over a course of years, and apparently no one ever thought he was worth the time to check that Greenpeace and Basel Action Network were full of @#$*.

Yep, the biggest thorn in Jim's side is indeed a liberal environmentalist, a college chum of Puckett's chums.

Yearbook got us liberal Minnesota PIRGs (leaning left) mixed up with sparse Black Christians in Asia?  

Term Paper: Poorly Defined Problems, Rules, and Bias

The Term Paper Theme in the blog (past 3 months) has been a real stretch.   I'm just not able to write a Ph.D thesis from the coffee lounges of hotels, at least not writing which is accessible to non-academic readers.   But I write on.  If there is something "breaking" I think industry should know, I promote it so it gets the 500 page reads.  But the goal is not to have every post widely read.

The biggest problems in the E-Waste and WEEE research-osphere have been from documents like West's of MIT which are written densely but don't define what they are researching sufficiently enough to escape the gravity of bias against trade between Rich and Poor.  Two examples in the past 4 months actually reprint the "80-90% export to primitive recycling" statistic which even BAN.org has abandoned after the UNEP duplicated previous research (Peru) showing only 15% of the exports are for primitive recycling.

Why the stubborn belief that Externalization of toxics from rich to poor describes most of the trade?  In my previous "@term paper" blogs I showed how enforcement does police higher property values, which is why you can't mine gold in the Cleveland Heights OH... and I've written how ROHS inadvertently externalizes a very very small risk (leaded solder) from rich people landfills by destroying coral reefs and creating more toxics in Indonesia (where tin, the non-toxic replacement, is found).   Externalization does happen.  But the fact it happens should not make it believeable that poor people in developing nations pool their money to buy  e-waste and pay thousands to transport it across oceans, through customs, to burn it.

My company ships TVs to our Fair Trade Recycling operation, Retroworks de Mexico.  We pay the transport there.  But that is rare.   Most exports are paid for by the buyers.  We've pretty much proven they have no interest in the junk (unless it's mixed in as TAR), that they have high reuse.  But even a big name consultant like DSM Environmental reprints the fake 80% statistic in a report less than a month ago.

Why the persistant belief in false risks?   Muggings do happen in Harlem, but 80% of Harlem residents are not muggers.  Today's thesis:  Opinion favors the concept of "underdogs".  That is probably genetic ("won't someone please think of the children").  And it is marketed to by all sides, conservative and liberal.  People are more likely to interfere in the marketplace if they believe one of the two parties is an underdog.

Case Study:  Arkansas vs. Florida, Maryland vs. Duke (NCAA basketball)

Humans have an innate or genetic trigger to prefer "Underdogs".   I explained to my youngest son last night why his older brother and I were rooting for Maryland in the final minutes of the NCAA game vs. #2 Ranked Duke.   I'm a fair weather NCAA basketball fan... when my hometown Arkansas Razorbacks beat previous #2 Florida a couple of weeks ago, it got my attention, and I started watching games again.

Export Trade Bracket:  The Externalization Tournament