Cobb

My Black Life Doesn't Matter

My life matters. That should be obvious. How could it not? But I'm not representing myself as having a #BlackLife that matters. I'm not that kind of commodity. I own my own blackness and it's not up for symbolic manipulation. There is no victory in that game. People might think it's not the same old skin game, but I think it is. Either way, my investment is particular, nominal and minimal.  

It wasn't always that way. I can remember when Debra Dickerson wrote a book called The End of Blackness. The very idea got on my nerves. That's because I was making a name for myself as a black blogger, and in particular as a black conservative Republican blogger. Maybe her blackness didn't matter, but mine did, and I resented her representation. I might have come to some arcane cul-de-sac of black cultural significance which might seem like a dead end, but I always found a way, back then, to invest in a new path. 

For most of my adult life, I wrestled with my own blackness. Mostly because it was so easy for me to be black. I had no Duboisian dual-consciousness dilemma. I struggled to understand other black American struggles and find common ground. So I'd find myself writing essays about my own identity that I had to write and rewrite. The essay was always entitled 'The End of My Blackness' and I first wrote it somewhere around 1986 when I started working full-time at a Fortune 50 company that had already awarded me three summer internships. I was in Corporate America in a technical job that was not an Affirmative Action hire. I worked in the executive suite of division headquarters, had my own large office with two desks and got along with all my non-black peers. I didn't have to shave or even explain to my boss why black men can't be expected to be clean shaven every day. I did watch the Cosby Show and I did walk, talk and dress like them. For many people in America at that time, my life seemed unreal. Unreal for a black man. So while there were still plenty of things I enjoyed about being black and being me, I was gradually experiencing a gulf between the reality of my life and what people commonly called 'the black experience'.

Writing the essay was just another thing that I did, more often than not, just to mark the passing of time. But in fact it was always true that there was some conventional barrier I passed that seemingly vaulted me into some area of unreality. These days I would have to look back to find something that I might still resonate with emotionally. I'm perfectly happy being considered unreal, a unicorn. I don't get upset by other people's failures to see me for who I am. 

What I say these days is that "I'm from a small town called Black". I 'never forget where I come from' but that never determined my aim. I can't go home again, and I don't need to. I don't need to hear it every time the Grammys are awarded, that Clifford Brown was a great black musician. It doesn't bother me that I can't hear him on the radio when I turn to the (ahem) Urban Contemporary station. I already fell in love to Clifford Brown's music. I already married that woman, and I own the album for myself. Whatever is said about 'black culture' today is not something I need to squabble about. That's what it's like to come to grips. I embody all the blackness I ever was, good, bad or indifferent. If Chaka Khan is every woman, I'm every black man I ever needed to be. I have that dignity; I'm shamelessly self-possessed and I don't particularly care that I am. I am what I am. Sobeit.

That sense of well-grounded confidence is not negotiable. Not with the 'white world' nor with the 'black world'. These are oligopolistic markets for dignity and certain fingers are on the scales of #BlackLives. So I'm not going to stand in line and weigh in. I don't need the drama, or the approval. I'm not defensive or offensive about it. I've solved my own race problems. I guess I always have, which is why I struggle with the idea of Blackness which is mired permanently in the zone of, well, The Negro Problem.  

 Have I transcended race? No. I haven't transcended humanity so I don't expect to transcend human folly. I could be shot dead tomorrow by a Klansman, run over by a drunk driver, drop dead of a stroke or fall off the beach facing balcony of my house. Everybody with a racial theory will figure out some racial proximate cause for my demise. I don't get to argue with the chorus of "I told you so" after my death. While I'm alive, it's a different story because it's my life as I define it. Mine is not your life, certainly not your vision of blackness or #BlackLife.

Some people will read this and think it must be awfully difficult for me to find my way in America, given this country's history (whatever they interpret that to mean). I've come to expect that sort of thing. Call it 'racism' if that makes you feel comfortable, but don't try to tell me that you're fighting on my behalf in the streets because you know my #BlackLife matters. Don't try to tell me what wall my back is up against, or what demons I must face. 

I'm pretty happy with my life. Clap along. 

The Limits of Moral Proxies

Is it ever proper for the law to support capital punishment? The short answer is yes, but I've got a nuance I've been thinking about. It is found in the recourse for suicide.

The death penalty is an institutionalized form of revenge. From my perspective, the question boils down to whether or not society, through its institutions has the moral imperative to take life. The simple answer is yes.

The reason is simple, which is that human beings in and of themselves have the moral imperative to take life. It is relatively simple to illustrate this moral imperative: kill or be killed. It is morally right to kill in defense of your own life. Very specifically, it is morally right for a human being to use violence in order to defend his peace, given that violence is proportional to the threat against his peace. If the threat is absolute, then the violent defense can also be absolute. Now if you have a problem with this principle, just hold on. I think I’ve got you covered. Read on.

It's easy to see for the individual, but for society things are not so clear. Now in looking at the moral justification, there is a difference between self-defense and justice. Justice is the application of defense or retribution by an institutional third party, so let’s talk about police and the justice system.

I think this justification should bear a bit more scrutiny. In one way, society and its institutions rightly inherit this proxy of the individual. This is, after all, the social contract of our society. We proxy our defense to police and to soldiers but the way we have done so over time has changed. Originally constituted to ‘provide for the common defense’ militias and police forces have evolved their role in our protection and the social contract is viewed now similar to the way, if we are children, our parents defend us. We are assumed to be incapable of our own self-defense, but this assumed incapacity is new. We all draw some measure of defense against our persons and our property via this social contract, but some of us (especially those vocally critical of the Second Amendment) assume that the taking of life should be in all cases off the table as a moral right.

For such people, there must be a different sort of proxy in mind. I think this different sort of proxy is, in fact, irrelevant and actually should be, but let’s get down to cases, shall we?

First let’s dispatch with the simple case. Most people are familiar with the argument militating against capital punishment owing to the corruption of the institution. The institution that carries out justice can become flawed to the extent that it does not serve the public trust in its execution of the law.  Wrong suspects can be convicted.  Executions can be cruel and unusual. Clemency can be granted to the guilty. All undermine public trust.

But I see more than one asymmetry here.  Because what one finds morally acceptable for the proxied institution depends upon what one generally finds morally acceptable. So let's get busy with examples, but first to the ground rule. We will stipulate that in all three of these examples, that the attacker is of a particular stripe, namely that he is evil, relentless and implacable. He will kill, for immoral purposes, cannot be dissuaded, and cannot be stopped without being killed. Let us remember one more thing which is in fact the general law states that police should not lose in violent encounters, so they are trained and authorized to bring to bear one greater level of force than any attacker. In short, police bring guns to knife fights. 

All of these example people, being in America, are part of the social contract. But they proxy different levels of moral authority to the government and police on their behalf.

Let’s call the first person Miss Jane. She is old and feeble, but made of stern stuff and takes no guff. She will give you the stink eye if you even curse in her presence and is the very picture of dignity. However, when faced with the attacker, she stands no chance of defending herself. So she proxies her moral authority to the police. She has no choice and basically wants no choice.  

The second person, is the one closest to my position. Let’s call him Malcolm, who says ‘an eye for an eye’. Like Miss Jane, he insists on his full dignity, but is actually capable of defending himself. Whatever violence you might try upon Malcolm, he’ll do right back to you. In fact, Malcolm might even pre-empt your attempt. He’s vigilant and standing in the window looking for the trouble that’s looking for him. Malcolm would train himself to be like the police officer, ready to bring a gun against a knife raised against his person or property. But Malcolm knows he can’t be alert everywhere all the time. So he proxies his moral authority to the police as well, albeit with some reluctance.

The third man declares himself non-violent. Like Malcolm, he is capable of asserting ‘an eye for an eye’ but instead chooses to ‘turn the other cheek’ instead. Let’s call this man Martin. If someone is out to hit Martin with a baseball bat, Martin personally would turn the other cheek. However Martin would have no problem with police using the necessary violent force to strike that batter out. On the other hand, Martin’s philosophy would have him take a bullet, than he allow some police officer take the life of the attacker. He reluctantly proxies his moral imperative to police officers who would violently intervene but withdraws it at the point of taking a life. Similarly, he would not support capital punishment by the state if our attacker murdered his child. For him, all killing is equally wrong.

Now of course we have all sorts of people in America who fit these three examples and others. But we have to face the question of equality.  No matter what your personal philosophy, the principle of equal protection under the law compels our justice system to accept the full moral proxy. In particular, this principle asserts that it is in the full interest of society to defend all lives equally whether or not they value their own lives equally. The police therefore have to go out, fully armed, fully prepared to accept the full moral proxy of any citizen at any time. The justice system must be fully prepared to accept the proportionate response to absolute destruction of life with absolute destruction of life.

So now we bring to mind what objections are raised in the public sphere over police homicides. In particular, I have heard it argued that in the case of the homeless and /or mentally ill, that police should be disarmed when intervening against attackers when they fit that profile.

I see the problem with that. Do you? We cannot have special police dispensing special justice for special groups. No matter how special your moral code, you must concede to the prerogatives of your state’s constitutional mandate to defend the general welfare. To do otherwise is to undermine the social contract and the principle of equal protection under the law.

Still, there is no recourse for suicide.

Giuliani v Obama

Former NYC mayor Rudy Giuliani doesn't like Obama. Recently he's been telling folks that Obama ought to be more like Bill Cosby and take a lot of black Americans to task for their self-evident distance from the norms of civil society. Specifically single parent families and anti-police politics. What gives?

I understand and resonate with Giuliani out of respect for what prosecutors do and the codes of honor that law enforcement has to uphold. What's particularly interesting is the extent to which Americans expect a bully pulpit and the special regard for which the character of elected officials is fungible in our democracy.

Giuliani, more than any single individual I can think of, personifies and is responsible for the idea of a 9/11 patriot. There are few documentaries as compelling as those showing what his office and the municipality of NYC did in coordination with fire, rescue and police during that tragedy. Rudy Giuliani put 'first responders' into America's consciousness, as straight out heroes. 

His failure to convert that halo into the brass ring of a presidential nomination has not daunted him. He will always be to me, the man who stared down the Mafia and beat them. Exactly what he is to his political opponents is probably some form of 'arrogant'. (Arrogant is what you call intelligent people you disagree with when your arguments don't persuade them.) But he gets to talk about America and patriotism in that vein. 

I'm not particularly fond of the fact that since the evisceration of the Social Register, the counter-cultural warriors of the Boom generation has not replaced it with anything particularly inspiring. I can't decide whether it's Paul Schaffer or Larry David that I think best represents that generation, snarky, laid-back, casual, skeptical and reverent of nothing but their right to be just that unleashed from any concept of selfless duty to God and Country. 

As popular as Obama is and as populist as he attempts to be, at no point has he ever personified the virtues of selfless duty to God and Country. He's the guy who will never live down his choice to remove the American flag lapel pin in his campaign. You can't make that up. Obama doesn't get to talk about America and patriotism in that vein because he doesn't want to. Obama is not that kind of America's Dad. So in that respect, the President is not using that side of the bully pulpit - it has been empty for years.

Obviously one can be an effective President without being America's Dad. I'm not sure you can be anything approaching a great one without being the proper kind of moral scourge. Like I say of so many other incidents in which Barack Obama is being disrespected and disregarded: If he were capable of leading in that way, he would be. 

Giuliani, like anyone else, shows some cheek for suggesting that Obama in particular ought to change his stripes and deliver the sort of socially conservative message he would like to hear from any corner. Nobody likes to be lectured, especially not Boomers. Certainly not black Americans from the likes of Giuliani. Perhaps Rudy understands that the likes of Ben Carson are not, in the end, going to be as popular for delivering the messages they are already giving. People of a socially conservative bent are already responding to Carson and Allen West, et al. But everyone knows that's not a majority. 

But what is really revealing itself in this battle of blather is how much the American electorate has been reduced to bickering over symbols. I'm not sure that it is inevitable in a democracy, but I'm pretty sure that it is in our democracy, in particular, a social-media driven chatting class expanded to such dimensions of innumracy and illiteracy, not to mention irrationality. People want the White House to be both their government and their church, and your guy has no right to tell us what to do. America's problem is determining to whom 'patriotism' belongs, almost none of which has anything to do with policy.

Isn't it amazing how much of politics has nothing to do with policy?

 

Five Levels of Analytics

As 'Chief Iteration Officer' at Full360 my mantra is 'iterate to quality'. That means preserve what you know and get a little bit better every day. I have always been from the Deming School and don't often advocate the Hammer approach. I like John Boyd's OODA loop and I think it works wonders for business processes. As systems integrators, we don't always get greenfield projects. Most of the time we are given to take over systems that are broken, incomplete, poorly performing or out of date. Just having 'analytics' in place is not sufficient. The general idea is always good, but how well are you doing?

This is a guide to help describe the level of thoroughness of an business intelligence system.

Discovery - Level One

• I can use my system to know what information is available to me.

This is the broadest and most basic level. it means that as a user, you know which systems are available to you, how to access those systems and what you can expect to find in those systems. The cash flow reports are here. The current reports are here. The historical reports are there. The systems that identify operations are there. You can navigate to all of the systems relevant to your area of responsibility; you know their names, functions and update timeliness.

Clarity - Level Two

• The information available to me is clear and unambiguous.

This means that master data issues are resolved. Codes and spellings of descriptions are complete. There is no question that data is in the proper range. It is validated and audited so that there is little doubt that you are dealing with the right information at the right time. You are aware of the units of measurement and these units are converted into standardized, consistent, useable form.

Purpose - Level Three

• I understand how the information relates to the business at hand.

Purpose is achieved when data becomes information and you can describe the business in terms of that information. It might only describe the costs or staffing levels of the business, but it is specifically applicable to the operational function of the particular business unit. You may have unambiguous clarity about 'gallons of gas available' but it serves no purpose to the legal affairs office. What is measured should match what is known about the operations, whether or not the information is managed. Also, proportionality of the numbers themselves are understood at this level. One familiar with the business should know how various measures and metrics relate to each other, if at all.

Predictability - Level Four

• I can determine with precision what specific information describes business performance.

At this level of analytic depth, system users are capable of isolating that information that is a primary indicator of business performance as contrasted to those that might be trailing indicators or otherwise not driving the business. It is the difference between knowing when a small fluctuation or a big fluctuation is material to business performance. It might be something like a regulatory ratio that must be maintained, a quality control statistic for pass/fail of a manufactured lot of goods. It might be a stated performance objective like a tight budget or schedule variance. Industry standard metrics would be here.

Responsibility - Level Five

• I can accurately predict and plan business performance with my system.

The final level of analytic depth is responsibility. At this point reasonable budgets and forecasts are be made on key performance indicators. Variances are taken against actuals and not only business performance, but prediction performance is tracked. A well-managed business is data driven at this level of analysis and planning, and novel KPIs and metrics might be generated whose meaning and value are quickly evident.

A Modest Hacking Proposal

I was just involved in a discussion and meta-discussion about the recent flap over some outrageous fraternity prank in Oklahoma. I only judge it to be outrageous because clearly people who had paid attention to the details were outraged. I didn't bother to look. It was and continues to be beneath my radar. 

My guideline on this with regard to the appropriate response to the outrageous and/or sinful hinges upon whether or not a serious crime has been committed. And I generally only respond to wars and very proximate local dangerous crimes. I have a very basic libertarian reason for this which is simple. If it's not a crime, then outrage is only talk unless and until it becomes mob action. Let us recall Cobb's Wisdom

Social justice is crowd-sourced law, the whining little sister of mob rule.

What we don't want, although many will claim that we need it, is more zero-tolerance. Handing the mic over to those who cannot shut up is only a victory for oppression, because the more law you have, the more police have to do. How closely do you want to police society? Let the outraged be outraged. You can always tell them to piss off. They don't have a legal case. But if you let the meddlesome noses of  'social justice' into the tent, meddlesome laws may ensue.

I am often saddened to find so many young folks of the sort that seem to be lacking in common sense and require things like on-campus speech codes. To them the difference and the distance between rights and privileges must seem non-existent. They appear easily provoked into outrage and find interesting connections between the Nigeria's human trafficking and their inability to respect local police. Why do people who find the personal to be political get so bent out of shape about the global? Why do they fly into danger zones in order to bring attention upon themselves 'in solidarity' with 'communities' of strangers?

Let's say that I blame social media.

Social media goes hand in hand with social justice, neither of which are proper society. Nevertheless we are sufficiently immersed in quite enough improper society to stipulate the hegemony of  'crunk and disorder'. I'm sure that is what many people see through their 2x reading glasses of 'America', and we certainly have our share of domestic haters. I understand that this week some state legislators are convening somewhere to literally make an amendment in the state constitution so that students at public universities (!) cannot ban the American flag. Will absurdities never cease? 

Here's the thing. Social media makes the distant intimate. Someone tweets something retarded and suddenly it's viral. Since 'social justice' fails to distinguish the outrage of the masses from the aegis of the law (with all the intellectual qualifications required of legal standards), millions mistake this blather for the critical stuff of democracy. It is not. It is hearsay amplified by the YouTube standard of evidence. (And I have yet to hear an attorney say that a YouTube video is simply inadmissible in a court of law.) But of those barbarian fratboys and of that Japanese kid tattooed with Mentos in the Coca-Cola bathtub, and of the various McDonalds smackdowns and all other varieties of amateur voyeurisms there can be and often is backlash.

How many perpetrators of outrage have become besieged by social justice mobs? Name a 'gate' like say, Gamergate and you will uncover a tornado of vituperation. These are not mere tempests in teapots, they are Category 5 hurricanes of hatred. But has a law been broken? Not one. Try defending Bill Cosby these days. With nothing approaching an indictment, much less a trial, there is also nothing approaching civility for those who disagree. 

(Viral Tweets of 2014)

Perhaps this is exactly what we need. The poet once said that performers ultimately get the audience they deserve. For the aims of being extremely popular beyond any legal jurisdiction, people reveal themselves in ways that end up costing them all of their privacy. Once the mainstream media pick up the rumor, it becomes impossible to repair any sensible reputation one might have. Of course if one does not lament the death of actual society and all one expects is the hegemony of sleaze and scandal, one perhaps feels no loss. All publicity is good publicity, right? 

Perhaps we ought to encourage doxing and hacking of those who tweet above and beyond the bounds of civility. Perhaps it will not be until the internets' mobs have had their exploitive way with enough of their social justice mob agendas that people will start to curtail from engaging social media as they do today. Maybe it won't be until enough social activists have been bullied and burned by 'society' that they become more circumspect in their activism. Perhaps it won't be until then that they realize the difference between the personal and the political, between the social and the legal, between what they can say in public and what is properly in the public interest. 

Let us keep in mind how long it has taken (how long? not long) for gluten free everything to fleece the pockets of those who suddenly find themselves allergic to this thing they didn't know existed. Let us keep in mind how many dreams of acai berry health have been dashed. Let us remember where Occupy is occupying today. How many more need to feel the fleshettes of flash mobs until we rid ourselves of social media's pretense of democratic action? 

Many.