The quality of science is not strained

Ingrid Robeyns at Crooked Timber illuminates another reason to support open access of scientific journals:

[O]pen access could, at least in the long run, contribute to closing the global inequalities in access to education. And it can also help to improve the quality of the papers being produced by scholars living and working in the South, which in turn increases their chance of being published in what we consider quality journals, which would be good not just for their careers, but also for global dialogues.

Pretend you’re a scientist in a developing country. You’re doing experiments in a lab where the electricity goes out regularly, you’re trying to stay up-to-date with other scientists’ work but you can’t afford to subscribe to the journals, and when you submit your own articles you don’t get published because your write-up doesn’t sound the right flavor of “professional.”

Open access wouldn’t solve all of your problems, but it would certainly help. Not to mention helping the rest of us, who need science to move forward based on everybody’s best thinking, not just the folks with lots of money.

My own true love

Being home in bed with the flu has allowed me to rewatch Gone With the Wind, which I first saw as a young teen. It is an incredible story, but what struck me was how much less I would enjoy it if I had seen it for the first time as an adult.

Watching it now, it’s hard to scrub your mind of the context of what was going on in the late 1930s when the movie was made. Eleanor Roosevelt and civil rights leaders were trying desperately and unsuccessfully to get anti-lynching legislation passed. President Franklin Roosevelt and Senate Democrats blocked it repeatedly: too divisive an issue, and they had other priorities.

To repeat: For Congress to condemn the kidnapping, torture, and murder of U.S. citizens by gangs of vigilantes was seen as divisive.

GWTW is an apologia for slavery in the sense that it doesn’t even bother to make excuses for it. It’s as natural and accepted as pretty dresses, marriage proposals, and dozens of beaux — that is, a backdrop. Slaves are referred to by the euphemism “servants,” and despite the Academy Award-winning performance of Hattie McDaniel, there is no awareness that the black characters may have lives or histories of their own.

When Scarlett comes home to a ruined plantation and the death of her mother from typhoid, we see the sympathetic faces of the few remaning slaves. But the movie does not betray by so much as a twitch of a camera that the slaves themselves may have suffered the loss of their own parents, far earlier and in much more brutal ways.

The movie isn’t about the slaves, of course. It’s about Scarlett, and it’s a darned good story about her. But the lush romance of the music, the beautiful sweep of the camera across the land — these are seductive distractions from the fact that while millions of Depression-era moveigoers basked in the nostalgia, we were failing to live up to the sweetest, strongest promise of the American dream: Equal protection under the law.

Don’t worry your pretty little head

Once upon a time, we fought a war over taxation without representation. The idea that a faraway king could just take our money, and not let us have a voice in how that money was spent, made a lot of people angry.

Today, we still have taxation without representation. If you’re 14, 15, 16, or 17 years old, you are legally allowed to work, but you’re not allowed to vote. You may earn money, and if so you will pay taxes, but you cannot vote for the representatives who will decide how that money is spent.

There is no good reason for this. Young people are no more likely to make dumb decisions than adults. (Yes, their brains are still maturing, but our brains are changing all the time. Does anyone seriously propose that we should bar people with traumatic brain injury, or mental illness, or Alzheimer’s from voting?)

No, the usual arguments are that young people’s political interests can be represented by their parents, that they aren’t responsible enough, that not very many of them will bother to vote, that they don’t understand how government works, that they will be swayed by politicians’ promises.

These are insulting and paternalistic arguments, ones that have been used in the past against women and racial minorities. They are no more (and no less) true of teenagers than of their parents. If a politician promises a special benefit to teens, is that different from a benefit for the AARP?

At some future day, people will look back on the voting age of 18 as flatly discriminatory, even quaintly incomprehensible. But to get to that day, a lot of us will have to stand up and say what should be clear: Everyone who contributes to a society should have a say in how that society is run.

(Inspired by this rather lame op-ed.)

No, you can’t live there

Do you have somewhere to sleep tonight? I do. It’s clean, safe, and well heated. If your place is too, we’re both lucky.

But for other folks, the ripple effects of the Katrina catastrophe just keep on spreading. I can’t pretend to be able to give you a full recap, but this holiday season, 4000 homes and apartments are being demolished. Here’s the deal (Terrific short video, with music, at that link).

Get daily updates at Justice for New Orleans. And listen to presidential candidate John Edwards:

Edwards said there is a lack of affordable housing in New Orleans and that the crisis is a result of government policies that have failed Gulf Coast residents since Katrina and Rita struck in 2005.

“Rents have doubled,” he said in a statement. “Families are being evicted from FEMA trailers and now the administration is trying to make a bad situation worse.”

Edwards said the demolition should be halted until replacement housing is ready to be inhabited.

We failed our fellow citizens miserably when the hurricane came. That’s no excuse for failing them again by letting our government officials treat people unfairly. Right now in New Orleans, the message is that if you’re black and poor, you’re not allowed home. That’s not right.

Please go watch that video. And then pick up the phone, send a donation, or get yourself on a bus.

Increase the peace

Remember being 18? Hamid Floyd does, because he is 18. He made a film about the violence that saturates Philadelphia right now, and its impact on him and others.

Hamid’s film won second place in a contest, but that’s not why you should watch it. Watch it because it’s good. And because it’s a really gutsy, brave thing for a teenager to do, and because even if there were no more murders in Philadelphia this year, we would still already have had one for every single day of the year.

Stop the violence. Increase the peace.

Watch the film.

Vindicated by DNA, but a Lost Man on the Outside

The New York Times has a tragic piece about what it’s like to be imprisoned for 15 years and then be exonerated based on DNA evidence. The article is unsurprisingly depressing, but it serves as an important reminder for us to think deeply about how we treat and prosecute citizens suspected or accused of committing heinous crimes.

I took particular note of these two paragraphs:

After repeated questioning over two months, Mr. Deskovic confessed during a seven-hour interrogation and polygraph test, telling the police he had hit Ms. Correa with a Gatorade bottle and grabbed her around the throat. In the lawsuit, Mr. Deskovic contends that detectives fed him these details, and promised that if he confessed he would not go to prison but would receive psychiatric treatment.

“I was tired, confused, scared, hungry — I wanted to get out of there,” he recalled recently. “I told the police what they wanted to hear, but I never got to go home. They lied to me.”

Next time you go to a hotel…

…remember that the folks who pick up after you are making about $8/hour, working as fast as they can in a physically brutal and demanding job. And leave a tip.

I can’t say it any better than Dr. B:

Now that travel season is in full force, this news from Salon’s Broadsheet is especially relevant.

the Jewish Funds for Justice, the Progressive Jewish Alliance, and the Jewish Labor Committee [has] collaborated to launch the Travel Justly campaign. The effort is designed to call attention to — and perhaps even improve — the relatively crappy working conditions of many hotel housekeepers. Ninety percent of these workers are women.

You can support their campaign by reading and agreeing to a pledge that you will:

- avoid hotels where workers are on strike;

- support union hotels (the site, unfortunately, requires you to enter the name of a specific hotel in a specific town; it would be a lot nicer if you could just search by city, assuming a full list would be too long to effectively navigate).

- TIP YOUR MAID $2-$5/day*

- be considerate by putting trash in trash cans, leaving dirty towels on the counter or racks so the housekeeper doesn’t have to bend over to pick them up; and stripping your own bedsheets;

- leave complimentary comment cards if you are happy with your maid service;

- keep a copy of the pledge in your suicase to remind you of it when you travel.

After you sign the pledge, you can buy a luggage tag to remind you of the pledge, plus make your luggage identifiable. 75% of the cost of the tag is tax-deductible. And maybe, if you’re lucky, occasionally give you an opportunity to talk to other travelers about the campaign.

*I always try to tip $1-2, but I often forget, and apparently I’ve been being a cheapskate. I’ll do better in the future. I find a lot of people don’t know that you should tip the maid, and I’ll always remember the woman who cried and hugged Mr. B. because, after cleaning the rooms of Mr. B.’s entire class of Air Force Weapons School guys for an entire summer, he was apparently one of the very few people who tipped her–$100. For three months of maid service.

Get out and walk around

It’s a gorgeous 85 degrees and sunny here. Yesterday I had the pleasure of walking around some particularly leafy, green parts of South Philadelphia on the ActivisTour. Our guides Ann and Ennis had mapped out a charming hour-long stroll, stopping every few blocks to discuss a person or event involving social justice.

I was pleasantly surprised that it wasn’t all historic. We heard about the recent anti-casino movement: 13,000 Philadelphians voted in an alternative election in November 2006 to draw attention to the state’s ability to summarily place casinos in residential neighborhoods. We heard about skateboarders’ problem-solving with the city over local parks, and the low-cost art classes available through the Fleisher Art Memorial. We even got a folk etymology (hotly debated) of the word “sabotage.”

The tour will be offered three more times in the next week, Tuesdays Sept. 4 and 11 at 5:30, and Sat. Sept. 15 at 11 a.m. Tickets are just $10 — come on out!