The Need to Quantify

Today, I have a couple of slightly disparate media recommendations that fit together in my head.

First, a Science Friday segment from last week. The guest was C. Thi Nguyen, a philosophy professor at the University of Utah. His book is called The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game, and he and host Flora Lichtman were discussing how metrics — I would call this quantification – are, essentially, bad. 

At one point early in the conversation, he said, 

One of the core experiences I had in my life was this kind of drift in my values, where I started doing things, like starting to diet, trying to get better at rock climbing, trying to get better at philosophy. And at first, there was a scoring system nearby, and I could mostly ignore it and be like, what I cared about is the interesting questions, is feeling better in my body. And over time, there’s this drift.

What happens with the drift is that I started caring deeply and immediately about the metric. So I’ve been calling this value capture. And value capture is what happens when your values are rich and subtle and then you get put in a setting, typically an institutional setting, that presents you with some simplified and quantified version of your values. And then that starts to take over. You start caring immediately about getting more likes or ... getting higher in those rankings.

The whole discussion has more nuance than my brief description, and Nguyen (being a philosopher) wouldn't say something as simple as "metrics are bad," of course. 

This conversation confirmed a lot of my priors — since I am a person who has resisted the whole "quantified life" trend since it began. I admit that. 

Second is a recent edition of the education podcast "Have You Heard," called The Curious Case of Kindergarten. It's about an upcoming book whose author visited American kindergarten classrooms across the country. Part of the discussion is about how metrics and the supposed acceleration of K–12 curriculum have damaged kindergarten and, therefore, children. 

It's Not Policy, It's Performative Cruelty

The battle of Minneapolis (and beyond, here in Minnesota) goes on, despite how Tom Homan fronts and the national media moves on. 

There was a letter to the editor in the Star Tribune today that captured my point of view well:

IMMIGRATION ENFORCEMENT

The political theater is the goal itself

Commentary writer Matt Dowgwillo (“Minnesota deserves good policy, not political theater,” Strib Voices, Feb. 6) urges Minnesotans to drop the heated rhetoric and focus on goals — as in, a discussion of what the Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol surge is trying to accomplish, what should it cost and how we would measure outcomes.

Here’s the problem. The policies that are tearing our state apart were cooked up by an aging narcissist who brags about his wildly inconsistent dictates (President Donald Trump); lying, amoral opportunists who embrace cruelty (Vice President JD Vance and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem); and a trio of jingoist sadists who proudly trumpet their hatred of nonwhite immigrants (White House adviser Steven Miller, Corey Lewandowski and Border Patrol Cmdr. Greg Bovino). Oh, and then there are the “influencers” who alter video and post laughable lies (whistles are a dangerous weapon, etc.). They are all united by a lust for absolute power and the corruption that goes with it.

The “policy” is to grow their power by whipping up a MAGA base with fear and hatred of immigrants. That’s the reason for the nonstop repetition of the mantra “rapists, pedophiles and murderers.” That’s the reason they’ve loosed barely trained officers armed with military-grade weapons. That’s the reason the Whipple Federal Building resembles a gulag-style prison. The surge’s only purpose is performative cruelty.

Since the Republican Party of Minnesota dare not confront the whipped-up MAGA base, there is no chance for a rational discussion of goals for immigration policy. The only way out of this is for Minnesotans to fight back by supporting our neighbors and documenting the abuses; it will take way too long, but in the end, kindness, compassion and the truth will win out.

Philip Deering, Minneapolis

I don't know Philip Deering, and from a quick search I see nothing about him and I don't think I know anyone who knows him. So it's not such a small town around here. Lots of people agree with what he said.

Too bad about the people who still believe the Trump and Miller's goons are after "the worst of the worst." The only way you could still think that is if you are paying no attention, or you think worst = anyone who isn't white. But given Trump's recent foray into simian slop, that isn't much of an assumption. 

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

I've been brushing up on my NATO Phonetic Alphabet, the better to be able to call out license plate numbers. I was rusty, despite being raised in a radio ham household. 

There were a good dozen letters I could never seem to bring out of my memory.

So this card, which I saw on BlueSky a few days ago, has been handy to bring it all back into short-term recall:

Oscar is the only one I haven't had much use for. I guess states don't use O very much on license plates because it would be too easy to confuse with 0. 
  

A Red Hat

While doing an ICE school patrol shift today, I saw a parent walking a kid home who had on a cute, cat-eared knit hat. The hat was red. The child was about 7 years old... and a child of color.

Maybe the child has been wearing that hat all this season. Or maybe the parents got the child the hat so that in case they're snatched by agents of the state, the photos that are taken will be more likely to engender sympathy from strangers.

It's a strange country we live in, that I had to wonder such a thing about a kid's hat.

Not Gonna Lie

At a coffee shop yesterday, there were a young man and woman sitting together, planning an event. A couple of times, the young woman started something she said with the words, "I'm not gonna lie..." 

I know that's a common phrase these days, occurring often enough that it has an abbreviation in text-speak and on social media: NGL. I hadn't thought about it before that moment, but those are words I would never use in a spoken or written sentence.

I realize they're just filler, an updated version of "honestly," but I would never use them. Come to think of it, I also never use the word "honestly" in that way. 

I do use "really" — probably way too much. And "actually." But those are not statements making a claim about the internal truth of what I'm saying: they're attempts to attest to the external veracity of an aspect of something I'm saying. 

According to a 2024 post on the University of Pennsylvania's Language Log, "not gonna lie" began to enjoy its rise in usage after 2000, with a big ramp-up after 2010. 

That big increase begins to look small, however, when compared to the much more common phrases/words "honestly" and "to tell the truth":



It's notable that all three usages have experienced significant increases in this era when overt lying by public officials is the hallmark of our age.

Rosa Lee Ingram

Today I learned at least these two things.

This is the 100th anniversary of Black History Month. That's something to celebrate!

The other one, a part of Black History, is not something to celebrate, though its aftermath has elements that are. 

The Equal Justice Institute posted that on this day in 1948, a Georgia woman named Rosa Lee Ingram was convicted of killing a white man who owned the farm where she was a sharecropper. He had hit her in the head with his rifle and threatened to rape her. 

Her two sons, 14 and 17 years old, came to her defense, and in the struggle, one of them killed the man. 

Even though the local sheriff admitted that the sons acted in defense of their mother, all three family members—Rosa, Wallace, and Sammie Lee Ingram—were sentenced to death by electrocution. Their execution was scheduled for February 27, 1948. Though Wallace and Sammie Lee were both minors, they were eligible for execution under the law at the time; the U.S. Supreme Court did not ban the execution of children until 2005.

Because of pressure from nascent civil rights organizations, their death sentences were changed to life in prison, and eventually they served prison sentences until 1959. 

But I never heard of this gross injustice until today, did you?

I also learned, via prison abolitionist Mariame Kaba, that it was a main cause of one of the earliest marches on Washington, in fall 1951, The Sojourners for Truth and Justice, who issued a Call to Negro Women. 

Kaba created a limited-edition anthology called No Selves to Defend in 2014 to put the Marissa Alexander case, then happening in Florida, "within a historical context that criminalizes and punishes women (particularly of color) for self-defense and survival." 

Rosa Ingram is just one of the women covered in the anthology. I am familiar with two of the names listed, Joan Little and Cece McDonald, and what happened to them. 

I looked up Lena Baker, and after reading her story, I'm afraid to see what happened to the other women included in the anthology: Inez Garcia, New Jersey 4, Cassandra Peten, Bernadette Powell, Juanita Thomas, Yvonne Wanrow, and Dessie Woods. It's all too predictable, though.

As I said, the story of Ingram and these other women are not something to celebrate, but Kaba's work — both in the anthology and in bringing the 1951 march back into view — is an important part of Black History Month.
 

All in a Day

I woke up to the University of Illinois College Republicans "Only traitors help invaders" vile graphic story, and their attempt to back-pedal on it. 

As I write this, I'm seeing the Montreal Canadiens hockey team — who are in the Twin Cities to play the Minnesota Wild — have been told to stay in their hotel, only go out on the team bus, and make sure they have their passports on them. Sure, the U.S. can host the World Cup and the Olympics! That's how international sports events work. 

Later this morning, I read this post by local writer Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl, who happens to live in the middle of South Minneapolis. She describes what it's like to live within an economic blockade in 21st century America. And what it's like right on her own block, day after day. The broken glass of car windows everywhere.

The supposed pivot we've all heard about from national media pretending to be duped by the thinnest of head fakes it is not real. 

ICE/CBP, as Dara says and I heard from several other people, was at the Powderhorn Park building yesterday (Sunday), "throwing tear gas where we used to do Family Pottery and the kids would smoosh clay into lumpy adorable cups." I took DN3.1 there for an art activity during preschool. It's next to a playground. 

And ProPublica has revealed who shot Alex Pretti: CBP agents with years of experience. Between these two and Ross, who shot Renee Good, they have 40 years among them. So it's not training. It's bad culture, bad at the root, and it starts at Customs and Border Patrol. 

They operate like this all the time at the border. "Regular" people didn't realize it before now, and didn't care. But CBP has expanded the behavior into the 100 mile perimeter within any border, including all the oceans. And somehow now, that watery edge includes the Great Lakes all the way to Chicago... and mysteriously, the Twin Cities, too.   

CBP is lawless and this government appears intent on destroying this country. 
 

On a Lake

A college friend of mine and his husband were just part of the Bay Area's large-scale Abolish ICE lettering formation that was done a few days ago.

Locally, people made letters out of candle-lit luminaries, reading ICE OUT, on Lake Nokomis, near the Minneapolis-Saint Paul airport to be seen by people flying over.

Then other people assembled on Lake Bde Mka Ska in Uptown, South Minneapolis, to spell out SOS, and photographer Jeff Schad managed to take drone photos, creating these bits of beauty in the face of this ongoing federal attack:

Send help. standwithminnesota.com  

BlueSky, January 2026, Part 2

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