Scrupuli

Congress is full of sex maniacs

by Scrvpvlvs
Jun 16, 2011 12:25 PM– … because Congress is full of people.

In the wake of the Weiner scandal, I keep seeing comments that Congress is full of “sex maniacs” and we need to get them all out.

Well, duh! We are the most sexual animals on the Earth. People have huge sexual appetites. The problem isn’t sex, it’s religion. Religion tells us, wrongly, that our sexual appetite is bad, so we’d better repress it – or at least hide it.

This combination means we want lots of sex, and we want to know what kind of sex other people are having, and hypocritically we want to crucify them if we catch them at it.

No wonder sex makes liars out of politicians. Who can choose between sexual repression and public humiliation? It’s an impossible choice.

A pretty young lady from Norway Hung by her heels in a doorway. I heard her shout, “Sven! Let’s do it again! I think I've discovered one more way!”

Labels: Congress, humiliation, politics, religion, scandal, sexism, Weiner

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How A Representative Can Use Surveys To Good Advantage [link]

by Scrvpvlvs
Mar 19, 2010 5:43 PM–A friend forwarded an e-mail from U.S. House Rep. Dr. Michael Burgess (R-Texas). Dr. Burgess represents a district my friend left some time ago. But Rep. Burgess is still seemingly interested in his opinion of a health care reform bill up for vote this weekend, and sought to have him complete a short survey.

This e-mail survey is a delightfully clever bit of misdirection and propaganda. Let’s see how it works.

Misdirection: inviting you to tell more about yourself than you realize

The e-mail baits you into action. It calls the bill a product of corrupt acts: “secret negotiations, sweetheart deals for certain Members, and rule-bending procedural gimmicks”. This will delight or antagonize you, depending on whether you agree or disagree with the Republican Party position on this bill.

Having gotten your attention (the bait), the e-mail then immediately invites you to click a link (take the bait) to complete a survey. You are primed by your enthusiasm (or indignation) to do so.

The link you click is the hook. It doesn’t go straight to the survey.

Here are some of the links which take you to Rep. Burgess’ survey. Notice each one has a different ID:

http://burgess.house.gov/Components/Redirect/r.aspx?ID=50286-00000001
http://burgess.house.gov/Components/Redirect/r.aspx?ID=50286-00000002
http://burgess.house.gov/Components/Redirect/r.aspx?ID=50286-12345678
http://burgess.house.gov/Components/Redirect/r.aspx?ID=50286-99999999
[...]

When you see a system like this, it generally means each copy of the e-mail has a different ID. That lets your e-mail address be linked to your survey results.

The survey comes up on your screen, with two questions: (1) Email Address for future email updates (more spam), and (2) are you opposed to the bill (Yes/No/Unsure).

Still enthusiastic, you answer.

Remember: even if you do not give an e-mail address on the survey, your original e-mail address can be linked to your survey response. So Rep. Burgess can know how you voted.

You now enthusiastically forward the original e-mail to your like minded friends. Some of them vote. Some of them give Rep. Burgess their e-mail address on the survey. Now, Rep. Burgess can know not only how you voted, but who your friends are, and how they voted.

But that’s only half of the fun.

Propaganda: using the results for greater influence

For more delight, let’s look at the first question of the survey itself: the Email Address for future email updates. The first question of a survey is the one that is most likely to be answered. So a survey will put the most important question first. Why is this question the most important to Rep. Burgess?

It’s important because it influences you. If you oppose Rep. Burgess, or if you support the bill that he opposes, then you won’t want his e-mail updates. So the first question of the survey deflates a lot of your enthusiasm for completing the survey. In other words, people who agree with Rep. Burgess are more likely to complete the survey.

This is an example of what is called self selection bias. Rep. Burgess’ survey responses will lean towards people who agree with his position. Therefore, so will his survey results.

One way Rep. Burgess can capitalize on this situation is to influence other House members. He could claim he surveyed my mailing list and found that the results were strongly against the bill, more strongly than you would expect if only Republicans opposed it.

Another way is to influence voters at reelection time. He could claim voters can trust him to listen to his constituents, pointing out that he voted against the health bill after surveying his mailing list and finding mostly opposition.

Rep. Burgess should be careful not to point out that his mailing list is not limited to constituents, and that his e-mail could and probably was forwarded to many people not on his list and living outside his district. The e-mail specifically says, “health care reform will affect every single American, so I want to hear from you”—inviting responses from people outside his district.

I do not in any way mean to single Rep. Burgess out for criticism. The e-mail and survey system he uses is the regular House Of Representatives system. It is designed to be used the way he did. Therefore I have no reason to doubt that his survey is a fair example of what all our Representatives from all political parties are doing as a matter of routine.

Delightful, isn’t it?

Labels: Burgess, e-mail, health reform bill, influence, misdirection, politics, propaganda, reelection, Republican Party, self selection bias, survey, Texas

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Obama Because He Is Black

by Scrvpvlvs
Nov 4, 2008 3:05 PM–I voted this morning to make Sen. Barack Hussein Obama our next President. I have been endorsing him because:

He is not white.

He has an “Arab sounding” name.

He is otherwise qualified to serve as President.

I want to write today about racism. And if Sen. Obama had not won a very close primary race, I would have endorsed Sen. Clinton because she is a woman. So I want to write about sexism, too—about prejudice.

People keep telling me that age, ethnicity, religion, parentage, sex, and sexual preference are not what qualify someone to be President, therefore I should not consider them.

I have been told that voting for Sen. Clinton or Gov. Palin as women is sexist (as much as voting against them as women would be). That voting for Sen. Obama as a black is racist. That voting against Sen. McCain as a senior is ageist.

In short, I have been told that I should vote without prejudice. But I cannot, and pretty much nobody else can.

Almost all people have prejudice and believe that they don’t. America prefers whites, men, Protestants, straights, and tall, pretty, young people. We prefer them in daily, practical ways that matter: acts of friendship, trust, pay, and performance evaluation. And we act this way not realizing that we do. These facts have been so well proven that even a habitual skeptic like myself cannot really doubt it.

There is a test for automatic bias, developed at Harvard, called the Implicit Association Test. You can go to <https://implicit.harvard.edu/> and measure your own automatic bias for race, skin lightness, sex, sexual preference, age, weight, and political party. Even if you are black, your test will probably show an automatic bias for whites, and if so, the smart money says you have been giving whites preferential treatment, whether or not you believe it.

But it has also been proven that we are not born with these biases. We take them from our culture, and we can relearn them pretty easily once we know the trick. You cannot beat the Harvard race test by mere will power or wishful thinking. Even the authors of the test cannot beat it that way. But they learned, it turns out, that you can beat the race test by thinking about black heroes—Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., for example, or Olympic athletes—black people who achieved great things.

Here is another example. The proportion of women hired to play in orchestras is steadily rising. It was 10% in the 1970’s, and more than 35% in the 1990’s. The cause was a screen put up between the judges and the performer during the audition. Judges no longer knew if women were auditioning. But the screen itself is responsible for only a third of the difference. The other two thirds is due to a change in bias. The experience enlightened judges. Now, when they audition women, they are not made deaf by their bias. They can see greatness.

There is no screen hiding the candidates from us. We cannot pretend we do not know that Sen. Obama is black, Sen. Clinton is a woman, and Sen. McCain is a senior. It is too late. Our biases are already in play. But like the orchestra judges, our biases are shifting. Every time we gain a new hero who contradicts our culture’s automatic bias, we change. Every time a schoolteacher introduces a new generation to one of these heroes, we change.

A President is more than an executive officer and a diplomat. A President is a hero.

So, thanks to courageous activists who blazed a trail, and thanks to our teachers who preserved it for us, we are at the point of recognizing a new hero. A hero who will challenge our false implicit biases about people with dark skin and “Arab sounding” names. Who will help us see more clearly the greatness of all people. Who will help us to act more like we mean it when we say that we are created equal.

I am grateful for my small role in this as a voter, but I do not take any credit. It was the American thing to do.

I just wish he weren’t a lawyer.

Labels: ageism, arab, association, barack, black, clinton, hero, hillary, hussein, implicit, john, mccain, obama, politics, prejudice, president, racism, sexism, vote, woman