Freddie deBoer Vanishes

I was greatly disturbed to see that Freddie deBoer has purged all his old tweets from Twitter (without, so far, eliminating the account) and has removed the entire contents of his blog. I am very much saddened by this. We disagreed deeply about many things politically: he is an unalloyed socialist at heart, his views on the intersection of copyright and the Internet are deeply naive, as is his odd belief that Kickstarters are inevitably scams. Despite these differences, he was also honest about the increasingly neglected work of convincing others politically, and knew how to craft a well-assembled argument, even if you disagreed with key parts of it. His refusal to engage in snarky personal attacks, the house style at Gawker and so many other Internet-era publications, set him above all of them and made his writing worth reading. I'll miss him, and I hope he finds another online home soon.

Saturday Bullets

• Hey, didja know that penises and vaginas are a social construct?
  

  Fine is a sure guide to the science, building up complexity without sacrificing clarity. By the time she’s finished, any lingering confidence that hormones exert a simple dose-response influence on our behaviour is thoroughly done for. Instead, testosterone works in intimate concert with relationship structures – a blow to its dignified reputation as the singular, commanding “male hormone”. Even something as incontrovertibly binary as our male and female genitals is shown to be part of a complex cultural system. As Fine says, “it’s the genitalia – and the gender socialisation this kicks off – that provides the most obvious indirect developmental system route by which biological sex affects human brains”.

• Now that Trump is president, even journalists can apply critical thinking skills again.
• Editors, please.
• Econ 101 still works, no matter how much "living wage" advocates wish otherwise.
  

  The real impact of the minimum wage, however, is much less clear than these talking points might indicate. Looking at historical experience, there is no obvious relationship between the minimum wage and unemployment: adjusted for inflation, the federal minimum was highest from 1967 through 1969, when the unemployment rate was below 4 percent—a historically low level.

  If you use general unemployment as a basis for your comparison (the real problem is specific unemployment among the low-skilled), you've already failed to address the argument.

The Empty Trend Story

The trend story is a particularly noxious form of journalism, making broad claims about society while eschewing anything resembling data collection beyond the anecdotal. Every now and then, you find one so egregiously bad, it exerts a strange sort of fascination — as this New York Times thumbsucker from Anemolla Hartocollis, "On Campus, Trump Fans Say They Need ‘Safe Spaces’". This graf:

Conservative students who voted for Mr. Trump say that even though their candidate won, their views are not respected. Some are adopting the language of the left, saying they need a “safe space” to express their opinions — a twist resented by left-leaning protesters.

Okay, so we're going to get an example of this soon, right? Well, not so much, and in fact nowhere in this piece is a single conservative person or group interviewed claiming they need such a thing. The closest it comes to that destination is this passage:

Ibtihal Makki, a self-confident senior in a pink hijab who is studying biopsychology and neuroscience and is chairwoman of a student government diversity committee, objected to conservatives on campus saying they needed safe spaces to express their views.

“To turn around and say that they need safe spaces after their candidate won I think is ironic and hypocritical,” Ms. Makki said.

Could we maybe actually quote those people making those demands? Or is this a whole-cloth fabrication of Ms. Makki's? Were the demands made ironically (i.e. is she omitting crucial context)? We certainly wouldn't know from the article. Speaking of fake news...