Grey Matters

In the last few days, the Obama administration over-reacted to a video on the web and is blaming it on a blogger.

The video showed Shirley Sherrod addressing the NAACP’s 2010 Freedom Fund Banquet. She related a story of how, years ago, she had not done all she could to help a “white” farmer. At that point in the video, the audience responds favorably to that remark. That is, they seem to approve of Shirley Sherrod’s handling of this farmer.

Now, when this video was posted by a blogger, Obama administration folks saw it and fired Shirley. They didn’t take the time to find out the context of what she said in her address to the NAACP audience and assumed that Shirley Sherrod was behaving in a racist manner in her position as an employee of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. That assumption was incorrect.

Had she actually behaved as suspected as a U.S.D.A employee, she should have been fired, but she was relating a story from years ago when she did not even work for the U.S.D.A. and  the story she told was intended to show how she had grown as a person and put racist things behind her. It “… opened my eyes …” she said. Inspiring stuff.

The Secretary of Agriculture fired Shirley Sherrod without getting the facts. That’s not the fault of the blogger.

The blogger who posted the video is accused of “taking her words out of context.” That’s nonsense. The video he posted is not about Shirley Sherrod. It’s about the audience reaction to her statement that she did less then she could have to help a white farmer.

The NAACP, you see, claims to be free of racism. The blogger noted that the NAACP had made unsubstantiated claims of racism against the Tea Party movement. The blog post was about the NAACP and the context is perfectly clear to anyone watching the video in the context of the blog post.

As the blogger wrote: “Sherrod’s racist tale is received by the NAACP audience with nodding approval and murmurs of recognition and agreement.” That’s all the context necessary to make his point.

That he included the later part about how the incident had opened her eyes was going beyond the point he needed to make. When the Obama administration chose to ignore the point he was making, it chose its own context.

Lest I too ignore the point that the blogger was making, I would point out that the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) claimed that two members had gone into a Tea Party crowd and been subjected to fifteen (15) instances of “the ‘n’ word” from fifteen separate people. The point of the accusation was that the Tea Party movement is racist.

Despite having found four videos of the incident, none of which include the ‘n’ word in the audio portion, and despite having been challenged to substantiate their version of the incident, the NAACP continues to use this alleged name calling as “proof” that the Tea Party movement is racist.

So, in case you missed it, the blogger’s point is that the NAACP are the real racists for alleging racism where there is none and for their apparent approval of giving a white farmer less than all the help Shirley Sherrod could have given him.

Another interesting note about this story: the Secretary of Agriculture told Sherrod that he had received pressure from the White House to fire her. The White House said that the secretary fired Sherrod on his own and it learned about the incident only after the fact. Once the Obama administration reversed itself on Sherrod’s firing, it was the agriculture secretary who took the blame.

Ironically, Shirley Sherrod is now some kind of poster child for… something, I’m not sure what, and this former racist is being pressed into service fighting racism within the agriculture department. She’s also thinking about suing the blogger.

(If I were a stand-up comic, this would be my bit on procrastination.)

Been meaning to write this for years, finally got around to it.

I’m a bit of a procrastinator. Let me amend that: I am quite the procrastinator. OK, OK, truth is, I’m a world-class procrastinator. There are few people on the face of this Earth that can put things off like I do.

In fact, if procrastination were an Olympic event, I’d be the reigning gold medal holder. Providing, of course, I’d gotten my application to join the team in on time, which, of course, I wouldn’t have done.

What would that look like? Olympic procrastination competition — bunch of people standing around with their hands in their pockets, doing nothing? Maybe sitting on a sofa… watching the game… having a brew? That’s weird. I procrastinate all the time but I’ll be darned if I can figure out how I do it.

My wife understands that I have a procrastination problem and, hoping to cure me of this debilitating condition once and for all, she bought me a cassette tape for Christmas: “Conquering Procrastination” by Dr. somebody-or-other, PhD of, I dunno, procrastination, I guess, if he knows enough about it to make a tape.

Listening to this cassette is supposed to help change who I am, make me more un-procrastination-y. Trouble is, the tape can’t help if you don’t listen to it and I haven’t listened to it. Yet. I’ll get around to it one of these days. If I can find it.

Did I mention she got me this tape for Christmas? When I say Christmas, I mean Christmas of, oh, ’91 or ’92 maybe. If she’d gotten it for me recently, It’d be in mp3 format and I’d be ignoring it on my iPod. Hey, I know, if I can find the tape, I’ll convert it to mp3 for my iPod. Gotta remember to put that on my to-do list.

A to-do list is a great tool for a procrastinator. Just putting something on my list makes me feel like I’ve accomplished something, you know, like the first step of actually getting it done. (“A journey of a thousand miles begins with but a single step…”) Once I get something on my list, well, that’s progress, you know? Put it on my list, then knock off for the day. I mean, hey, made progress, right? That’s a good thing.

My to-do list is all in my head. One of these days I’ll write it all down and prioritize things. Gotta put that on my to-do list too. Oh, hey, just did.

I’m such a procrastinator that I decided to write a song about procrastination. It’s to the tune of Carly Simon’s “Anticipation” and goes like this:

<this is me singing>Procrastina-ay-tion, procrastina-yay-tion is making me late… Keeping folks way-yay-yay-yay-yay-ting…

It’s been just over a decade since I came across an interesting article about research into competence /incompetence. The article was entitled “Why the ignorant are blissful: Inept individuals ooze confidence, study finds.”

It describes research supporting what I’d long suspected: Stupid people are too stupid to realize that they are clueless, and cannot be “enclued.” The results of the research appeared in the December 1999 issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (in case you want the gory details).

The bottom line though is that incompetent people lack the skills to recognize competence itself.

So, why am I bringing this up? I subscribe to a “chat” list on line that often discusses politics and political matters. It’s obvious to me that the clueless often don’t “get it” on the chat list either. When it comes to politics, it would seem that the most clueless are most certain of what is good for the country (USA) and wouldn’t recognize bad government if it bit them on the ass. Fortunately, it’s easy to recognize such people because they’re the ones most likely to start the name calling, lacking, no doubt, competence in argumentation.

More info about the study

Dr. David Dunning, a professor of psychology at Cornell and Justin Kruger of the University of Illinois, gave tests in logic, English grammar and humor. Each test subject was asked to estimate how well he scored. Then he was given the opportunity to grade the tests of others and again estimate how he stood.

The interesting thing is, those who scored lowest on all three tests were most likely to overestimate how well they scored. The lower the score, the greater the overestimation. For example, subjects scoring in the twelfth percentile in logical reasoning estimated their scores to be in the sixty-second percentile. Subjects who scored higher tended to underestimate their scores.

Even more fascinating, after seeing the tests of others, the high scorers quickly revised their estimate of their own performance to reflect reality.

Low scorers did not, and sometimes even raised their estimates upward.

In short, incompetents are too stupid to recognize their incompetence, too stupid to learn to recognize incompetence and too stupid to learn from their mistakes.

People who do things badly are usually supremely confident of their abilities — more confident, in fact, than people who do things well.

“Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it,” wrote Kruger.

The deficiency in “self-monitoring skills,” the researchers said, helps explain the tendency of the humor-impaired to persist in telling jokes that are not funny, of day traders to repeatedly jump into the market — and repeatedly lose out — and the politically clueless to continue holding forth at dinner parties on the fine points of campaign strategy.

Some college students, Dunning said, evince a similar blindness: after doing badly on a test, they spend hours in his office, explaining why the answers he suggests for the test questions are wrong.

In a series of studies, Kruger and Dunning tested their theory of incompetence. They found that subjects who scored in the lowest quartile on tests of logic, English grammar and humor were also the most likely to “grossly overestimate” how well they had performed.

In all three tests, subjects’ ratings of their ability were positively linked to their actual scores. But the lowest-ranked participants showed much greater distortions in their self-estimates.

Unlike their unskilled counterparts, the most able subjects in the study, Kruger and Dunning found, were likely to underestimate their own competence. The researchers attributes this to the fact that, in the absence of information about how others are doing, highly competent subjects assumed that others were performing as well as they were — a phenomenon psychologists term the “false consensus effect.”

When high scoring subjects were asked to “grade” the grammar tests of their peers, however, they quickly revised their evaluations of their own performance. In contrast, the self-assessments of those who scored badly themselves were unaffected by the experience of grading others; some subjects even further inflated their estimates of their own abilities.

“Incompetent individuals were less able to recognize competence in others,” the researchers concluded.

In some cases, Dunning pointed out, an awareness of one’s own incompetence is inevitable: “In a golf game, when your ball is heading into the woods, you know you’re incompetent,” he said.

But in other situations, feedback is absent, or at least more ambiguous. And, in many cases, the feedback given by others is dismissed as simply “wrong.” I see this on the chat list all the time.

The political arena is thus perfect for the clueless and incompetent. They need only tell the clueless what they want to hear and their success is all but guaranteed.

I received an invoice via email from NewEgg today. (NewEgg.com is an on-line retailer I sometimes use.) It included this text…

“Although Newegg is not obligated to and does not collect Colorado sales tax, this purchase is subject to Colorado sales tax unless it is specifically exempt from taxation. A purchase is not exempt from sales tax merely because it is made over the Internet.  The State of Colorado requires Colorado taxpayers to file a sales/use tax return at the end of the year reporting all non-exempt purchases that were not taxed and to pay tax on those purchases. Colorado law states that retailers, like Newegg, that do not collect Colorado sales tax are required to provide you and the Colorado Department of Revenue with an end-of-year report of the total amount you purchased from Newegg during the year. Further information regarding Colorado sales tax, including details on how to file a sales/use tax return, may be found at the Colorado Department of Revenue’s Web site, www.taxcolorado.com”

I find it interesting that sales tax is not collected on sales to customers outside the state wherein the sale takes place. I suspect that this practice has its origins in Article 1, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution which says: “No Tax or Duty shall be laid on Articles exported from any State.”

Decades ago, I operated a modest retail establishment as a side-line to my Day Job. One of my duties was to periodically tender to the state treasury a “transaction privilege tax” (sales tax) at the prescribed percentage for each item sold at retail.

Notably, I was required to tender these monies to the treasury regardless of whether I passed on to the buyer an amount equal to said tax. Thus, it seemed to me, this tax was not a tax on the “article” or buyer but on the seller, or, as the name implies, a tax paid for the privilege of conducting the transaction within the state. Thus, if selling to an out-of-state buyer, the tax is laid not on the “exported article” but on the seller.

Eventually, there will be some sort of “Internet sales tax.” Doubtless it will involve huge amounts of record-keeping, much like what NewEgg is required to do for the state of Colorado. But it needn’t be complicated and messy.

It seems to me (IANAL) that a tax could be so laid on out-of-state sales as to not run afoul of the Constitution’s prohibition on taxes and duties on exported articles. Indeed, tax the seller, or tax the transaction on all sales within the state regardless of whether the buyer is within the state or without.

This would be simple to implement, use existing sales tax collection/reporting/tendering mechanisms and would cover all sales, including “Internet” sales to out-of-state buyers.

But this simple solution will likely never come to pass. Why, you ask? Because it creates a system in which states with high sales tax rates would lose sales to states with little or no sales tax. It would create, in a word, “competition” in the market for sales tax. Governments hate competition. States at risk of losing large retailers would feel pressure to reduce their own sales tax rates.

On-line business of sufficient size would find it worthwhile to move to low-tax states, the better to remain competitive.

Bottom line, it would seem that a sales tax law could be so crafted as to permit taxing out-of-state sales yet avoid the prohibition on laying taxes or duties on items exported from one state to another. The big question is whether SCOTUS would overturn such a state law. Given the Supreme Court’s propensity for hair-splitting, certainly it could conclude that a sales tax on an out-of state sale did not run afoul of the Constitution. But would it?

I was in the U. S. Navy from 1964 to 1972. I’m going to tell you about two men I met while aboard ship.

The first was a Chief Petty Officer, a Machinist Mate (mechanic, essentially). He had risen to CPO fairly quickly, as such things go and, once he made CPO, he kicked back. He had no desire to rise to Senior Chief or Master Chief. CPOs, he explained, have it made. He’s high enough up in the hierarchy that he doesn’t have to do actual, physical work. He can delegate pretty much everything to the First Class petty officers below him. He spent most of his typical work day in the Chiefs’ quarters drinking coffee and BSing with his buddies. CPO was his dream job.

The second fellow was a diesel mechanic, a really good one. He was not, like the chief, a lifer. He just wanted to finish his four-year enlistment and get out so he could go home and get on welfare. When he first told me this, I had a good laugh. But he insisted, “No, really, man, I’m gonna go on welfare.”

He went on to explain that he had friends back home that were on welfare and “doing fine.” They had time to go visit their girlfriends, watch TV — do whatever they wanted to do every day. The had him pegged as a chump for working at all (by joining the navy).

His mom had been on welfare and that’s how he grew up. It was a normal part of his life and there was no stigma because all the neighbors were on welfare too. (This was back when it was actually called ‘welfare’ instead of an ‘entitlement’ and there were, in some circles, stigma attached to living at the expense of taxpayers.)

Paraphrasing: “But you’re a really good mechanic. You could make good money. Why would you want to go on welfare?”

The answer was “Why would I want a job when welfare is good enough?”

It saddened me.

Some of you doubtless thought me insensitive when, in another thread, I said that government programs put poverty within the reach of more people. But it’s true. Government programs that provide a “good enough” living rob people of any incentive to better themselves, or even pull their own weight. That’s a shame.

I mentioned the CPO not because he was on a government program or in poverty, but to illustrate that some people simply have no desire to better themselves. They find a spot that’s good enough and are happy to stay there.

My mechanic friend was satisfied with a lower standard of living than the chief. But satisfied nonetheless. I think that having to get a job would have made him a better person And society would have been better off.