Blade Killer

      Oscar Pistorius— famed Olympic athlete. Paralympic hero. Murderer.

I’m sure that if you have the capacity to access this relatively small blog, then you’ve probably read about the Blade Runner tragedy. He was arrested about a week ago on the account of the premeditated murder of his 29 year old girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, an aspiring model and actress. But as I went through the case, I couldn’t help but think, where’s the preferential treatment?

The justice system is supposed to be of equality and fair representation, especially in particularly developed systems like the American justice system and South Africa’s— yet we find individuals placed above it all the time (if you want to read about South Africa’s Justice System, follow this link, there are many differences in this case proceeding).

The example that you can’t miss: O.J Simpson. He was held on trial on account for the murder of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend, Ronald Goldman— facing a potential death sentence. Yet, he was found not guilty in a case that seemed to have insurmountable evidence piled against him, including a pair of his socks with Nicole Brown’s blood spattered on them. Upon his acquittal he wrote a book titled “If I Did It”, outlining the steps he would’ve taken had he committed the murders. Celebrity won big in a place where fame has no place— the justice system.

       And there are a number of examples that follow the same storyline— Ray Lewis, the Baltimore Raven’s star was charged with double murder and walked. Leonard Little, a St. Louis Rams linebacker was actually convicted with the DUI-murder of Susan Gutweiler, because he rammed into her car after running a red light under the influence.  And it seems that Pistorius’s case might just be taking the same turn.

           

    Analysts and experts have taken a close look at the evidence and the stories, and although there is always room for debate, an ostensible glance at the forensics doesn’t bode well for Pistorius. New York City Attorney Tom Harvey said, looking just at the forensic evidence, that the guy is guilty as hell.” His story sounds pretty incredulous— that he shot her through a door because he feared it was an intruder that had come through an open window and locked them self in the bathroom (here’s more for a better understanding of his story). First, for someone who claims that they’re incredibly paranoid of neighborhood crime, why would the door be open? Second, how could you not know that your girlfriend was no longer in your bed next to you, the place that both sides stipulated she was moments before the murder? And third, why would he have any reason to believe that a thief would hide in a bathroom, and not even look to make sure it was his girlfriend? And whether you side with me or not, there’s clearly not enough evidence for him to put grant him the bail he just recently received.

            Ultimately, we can only hope that justice is served, whatever way that may be— but without a bias for the Olympic hero, or for that matter, although unforeseeable, against him. Although, as the proceedings look now, it seems that the special treatment world class athletes receive in the courtroom hasn’t lost its touch in South Africa. 

Sports, A Man's Game?

Athletic competition, a widely touted vanguard for equality— every individual can compete as long as they have the physical capacity to succeed. For many, it’s seen as the equalizer in societies. We’ve heard it a billion times; a talented kid grows up in an impoverished ghetto and eventually makes millions of dollars doing what he loves whether it be soccer, basketball, or baseball, you name a sport and this story has a place in it.

However, is this image of sports really as true to its appearance as it should be? Take race for instance. Racism is talked about as an artifact in so many sports— Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in the MLB (Major League Baseball Association) nearly 60 years ago, and Jeremy Lin has infiltrated the NBA (National Basketball Association) for Asian Americans everywhere. But is it really gone? In perhaps, the most global sport of all— football, or as Americans refer to it, soccer, racism is a very real problem. Players are forced to walk-off of fields in the midst of competition due to the physical and verbal abuse they face on a daily basis (you can read more here). And sometimes racist sentiment in the sport leads to even more, recently resulting in an arson attack against recruited Arab players in Israel.

However, there exists an even greater gap of inequality for a different group of people. Today I want to focus on a bias towards roughly 50% of the world’s population: women. To begin, the amount of sports made available to women are just recently catching up to the number available to men. Professional parallel organizations like the WNBA and the WLS (Women’s League Soccer) weren't created until very recently— the WNBA in 1996 and the WLS in 2010. And believe it or not, but the 2012 was the first Olympics in which women were allowed to participate in every sport.

Past, the technical restrictions on women— the culture surrounding their competition is also unsettling. Women’s sports are often given a lack of credence and written off as a joke— it’s not uncommon to see a ton of remarks and posts in the same vein as this:

Furthermore, girls are dropping out of sports as they hit their teens at twice the rate of boys, and according to the Women’s Sport and Fitness Foundation, it’s because sports are perceived as unfeminine— an unfriendly misconception to further integration and equality of the realm of physical activity. Especially when physical dominance is a cornerstone of the machoistic male figure, this only leaves more room for divisions.

All in all, I guess it’s a question of how much we’re willing to change as a society— organizations are doing their part, creating women’s groups and professional leagues, but how accepted and popular they become is up to the culture they’re competing for. 

The Movie Festival

            When we’re presented with the concept of inequality our minds usually don’t arrive at Hollywood— perhaps, the most profitable film industry in the world with the likes of Universal Studios, Paramount Pictures, Disney and Miramax.  Raking in millions upon millions of dollars, some of the wealthiest individuals on this planet call Hollywood home, and the poor are all too few. But in the hyper competitive industry of film, not every film maker has the capital to throw 300 million dollars towards movie production like Disney did for Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End. The majority of directors and producers have to make do with significantly less, and still attempt to reach levels of success.

            With the upcoming Academy Awards, February 24^th, and the recent showing at the Golden Globes and SAGS (Screen Actors Guild Awards), awards season has hit its stride. And although a few low(er) budget films have snagged awards, most notably, The Iron Lady at last year’s Globes for Meryl Streep’s performance as Margaret Thatcher, which cost just about 13 million dollars to produce in stark contrast to the winner of best picture this year: Argo, which was produced with a 45 million dollar budget. But it’s not the only one that cost massive amounts of money to create— most films at this level do, so how do “cheaper” films compete? And the answer is they don’t.

            Well not in the conventional sense anyway. Many producers and directors opt for alternative methods of showcasing their work— you probably won’t see most of these movies in your local theater, but you will see them at The Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah and The Cannes Film Festival of Cannes, France— two of the largest independent film festivals in the world. They’re famous for showcasing international films, documentaries and the beginnings of many incredible filmmakers who would’ve otherwise fallen into the depths of obscurity.

            Now film festivals are usually placed in small towns and cities, they’re a place where independent filmmakers can have their work judged by a number of professionals and prominent members of the film industry. A notable success is the movie Once, directed and written by filmmaker John Carney which cost less than 160,000 dollars to make, but ended up making just about 21 million— this movie, showcased at the Sundance Film Festival, and ultimately winning the Academy Award for Best Original Song and a nomination for a Grammy.

            Robert Duvall, famous actor most known for his role in The Godfather, once said that “Hollywood is still the mecca for good or bad, but it isn't the beginning or end for filmmaking.” And that’s certainly something to hold on to for many aspiring and independent filmmakers. 

Lines

            From our artistic beginnings, we learned how to draw lines. Straight lines, crooked lines, black lines, white lines. And we still do— except today, we use them among people. We divide and group individuals in our mind, and even if we don’t overtly stereotype, we all hold certain assumptions and jump to conclusions about others based on certain characteristics like their race, dialect, appearance, etc.

Even men as great as George Clooney are offenders:

            And it’s more than that. The consequences of how we think about individuals, are far reaching— they determine how we act towards them and ultimately who they are relative to ourselves. And often times we don’t recognize this, but these thoughts ultimately end up as a self fulfilling prophecy.

Let’s look at an example:

Let’s say Timmy is a fourth grader and accidentally bumped into a fifth grader in the lunch line. Now Timmy thinks that this big bad fifth grader is going to retaliate because that’s what fifth graders do. So he turns around and gives the fifth grader a good taste of his fist to land the first hit, which obviously angers the older child who returns the favor, a punch he wouldn’t have thrown had Timmy not preempted a nonexistent fight.

Now, Timmy constructed the threat that this individual posed, based off of his assumption that retaliation would be inevitable, actually leading to what he feared. Now it sounds ridiculous, but it happens more often that you’d think. And on a global scale— countries do this too, and often the conflict involves more than a few scratches and bruises, they risk war.

Let’s think about the enemies that our country has. The first that comes to mind are terrorists— a threat that’s driven our nation to an economic quagmire and military overstretch. But are they really everything that we make them out to be, do they really meet the constructed image that we've portrayed them as?

Look at Iraq. We invaded to prevent the development and usage of Weapons of Mass Destruction by terrorist groups, which by the way we still haven’t found today. And our military presence has actually incited more opposition in the region. Christopher Layne, a national editor of the Atlantic, wrote in his study, “Middle East grand strategy after Iraq: the moment for offshore balancing has arrived” that

“The US presence on the ground in the Middle East also incites terrorists to attack American interests…‘what nearly all suicide terrorist attacks have in common is a…goal: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland’

(It can be found here)

An even better example is the Cold war. Construction of threats is literally the reason that an arms race began. Our country made the Soviets an “other”, assuming that they would develop arms to harm the good people of the United States, in turn justifying their development of nuclear weapons, which just incited further justification for the Soviets to develop their weapons of which we pointed to and said we had to keep increasing our arsenal for. It’s a self fulfilling prophecy.

The moral of the story is, be careful how you think and how you group and “otherwise” different groups of people, because it’s not just a thought, it affects much, much, more.

           

TRAPPED

Inequality. We're used to thinking about it in terms of different societies, a gap between an upper and lower class. And in a global context, in terms of countries, we don't realize how large that gap really is between roughly the bottom fifth of the world and the rest. Paul Collier, a professor of economics at Oxford University, makes the argument that growth is severely stunted for the so called bottom billion of the world's population, as the rest face development, increasing and increasing the inequality gap.
(If you want to read more here's the link: http://www.amazon.com/The-Bottom-Billion-Poorest Countries/dp/0195373383/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1354637064&sr=8-1&keywords=bottom+billion)

He articulates 4 development "traps" that keep the bottom billion in the third world, some of which certainly apply to even countries he considers as part of the developed world. Today we're going to look at a country that's facing their own share of problems, Spain.

There are a couple traps that really don't apply to Spain:
First is the landlocked with bad neighbors trap. The problem with being landlocked is that it makes strong economic growth nearly impossible, because the only trading partners are your neighbors if there's no coast. That being said, poor partners means more trade and economic stimulation.

Spain is neither landlocked nor surrounded by poor neighbors-- if you don't believe me, here's a map:



Second is the natural resources trap. Collier states that an abundance of natural resources can actually have negative consequences if there's poor management. Because it makes conflict and exploitation more likely, and raises the possibility of Dutch Disease-- resource exports cause the value of the currency to go up, making other export industries noncompetitive, some of which could be more sustainable avenues for economic growth. Spain does have some natural resources (i.e. coal, iron ore, lead and zinc) however, these have all been effectively managed without any conflict or the diminishing of other industries.

Third is bad governance in a small country, which may apply to Spain in terms of the economic crisis that they're currently in- but there are more reasons to believe it doesn't: First is that Spain isn't nearly as small as the countries that Collier analyzes, second is that Spain's economic crisis is primarily blamed on the housing crisis which lay to waste the tremendous investment Spain's bank threw at the housing industry, ruining their Banks. Before the economic crisis Spain was actually running smaller deficits than Germany, and its debt was only 27% of the GDP-- making them a model for fiscal responsibility.

Finally is the conflict trap-- the one that almost makes sense in the context of Spain. The conflict trap mostly revolves around civil war, with two primary effects, the first of which is economic- wars and coups cost a lot of money and stall economic growth, second is the risk of relapse which is really high following a conflict. Right now, Spain is embroiled in the possibility of civil conflict- although there's a small risk of violent escalation, Catalonia has threatened secession on multiple occasions due to economic grievances

All in all, Spain doesn't quite fit the mold for any of these development traps-- although it is headed toward crisis in its own way, hopefully it doesn't stay there.

Me-ta-phors Be With You

            Metaphors. We all use them more often than you may recognize. They don’t live strictly in poetry or literature; they even extend into the way we think. Take sports for example, we often think about athletics in terms of war:

The Bulls were really attacking the Piston’s defense

We need to be more aggressive on offense

We got killed last night

The coach just sent in his second unit 

(Read “Metaphors We Live By”, by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson for greater insight on the subject http://www.amazon.com/Metaphors-We-Live-George-Lakoff/dp/0226468011)

In other words, we live metaphors, and we don’t even know it. One of these metaphors is people as numbers. Numbers are beautiful because they’re so straightforward. It’s why people always ask, “On a scale from one to ten, what do you think about ­ (fill in the blank). But, by that very same quality of directness, numbers seem to make inequality inevitable.

Let’s think about it— whether we’re measuring skill, attractiveness, intelligence, etc. Numbers can reduce people to just another measurement or a mark on a scale. Now how this plays into social division is clear: people as numbers creates some that are unarguably ‘better’ than others (i.e. “That 9 is clearly better than the 7”). And because people are constantly looking at themselves through these social lenses, it’s natural to surround themselves with people of similar “rating” or stature, because people don’t like feeling inferior. This is the same way social groups and cliques form.  

           

            But let’s look even deeper. Numbers define groups of people, not just individuals. Take the 1% movement for instance. An extreme divide which essentially groups people as either part of this tiny wealthy minority, or the rest of the country. And this exposes two things:

First is the misleading nature of numbers. What about those sitting on the cusp of the 1%? Let’s say, the 2%ers. It’s absolutely ridiculous to think that they’re the same as the 90^th percentile of the nation in terms of wealth.

Second is the relative nature of inequality. Percentages inherently depend upon relative measurement, making what’s considered the top percent of a nation subjective to that society. I found an internet meme that was pretty popular as the 1% movement developed:

And it’s incredibly accurate. Poverty is a completely relative construct; it all depends on the wealth around you.

So the next time you decide to trust the absolute value of numbers, think twice, because in the end they’re just metaphors for the people that they’re trying to represent. 

Human Capital in the Election

There's been recent talk in the election about both presidents' stances on the subject of income equality. For many, our perception of Romney is found in his millions of dollars, and his involvement with Bain Capital, and his ridiculously wealth background. Now, as great as all of this, it makes talking about income a very touchy subject for him. However, he's made one of the most interesting points on the subject, and it starts with one thing: Human Capital.

Romney has made a compelling case for a reform in policy towards social equality- and it starts with looking past economic reform.

Whether you’re a student or in the workplace, we all can understand that some members of any community are valued over others. Whether that’s found in their relationships with others in the classroom or the office, or their contribution to the group, it’s clearly there— especially in business, where there’s often a bureaucratic hierarchy defined by position and payroll. He’s trying to close those gaps as best as he can.

One of his proposed policies is to reform existing government training exercises, instead of assigning strict roles and training people to jobs, the new government would assist businesses in finding ways for the business to become more productive as a group of individuals, encouraging everyone to contribute to the business in a more balanced sense. Training would take place on a more personal level for each business, finding the best fit to keep it as competitive as possible. But what this does, is grants each worker, a greater role in the production of the workforce. 

What this is supposed to do, is balance the social scale of inequality, which is not often incorporated into policy levels, because it’s not tangible like the economy or foreign policy, but a bold effort nonetheless.

How it works out, however, is going to be really interesting to follow, if he’s given that opportunity. Such is the problem with any policy proposal, in theory it may sound incredible, but application is difficult. Changing the culture of the workplace is huge, and I’m not so sure an external force can change that.