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The Justices instead ruled narrowly that under the Court’s precedents the MRT is constitutional. “It has gone without serious question in both Congress and the federal courts that Congress can attribute the undistributed income of an entity to the entity’s shareholders or partners, and tax the shareholders or partners on their pro rata share of the entity’s undistributed income,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh writes. He was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and the three liberals.
The Chief and Justice Kavanaugh seem to have heeded arguments that ruling for the Moores might put other tax provisions in legal jeopardy. But the opinion leaves open the door to taxing asset appreciation, including unrealized capital gains—and that’s what makes this ruling so dangerous for liberty.
The majority could have followed the logic of Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s concurrence (joined by Justice Samuel Alito) that agreed on upholding the MRT but didn’t shrink from the issue of whether Congress can tax the appreciation of property. “The answer is straightforward: No,” she writes.
Mr. Winger says CNN’s ballot-access requirement is “irrational” because Mr. Kennedy has filed signatures in states with 310 electoral votes and is almost certain to make all 50 state ballots. Mr. Winger adds: “Actually, Trump and Biden aren’t currently on any state ballots because they haven’t even been nominated yet.”
Mr. Kennedy has filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission arguing that the debate violates a regulation requiring organizations that host debates among candidates for federal office to use “pre-established” and “objective” criteria to determine candidate participation. Failure to use objective criteria renders the debate a campaign contribution, subject to strict donation limits. Mr. Kennedy has quipped that “CNN is at risk of prosecution, as happened to Michael Cohen, for knowingly and willfully violating campaign finance laws.”
CNN contends that Messrs. Biden and Trump are their parties’ “presumptive nominees.” The now-sidelined Commission on Presidential Debates, which ran every general-election presidential debate between 1988 and 2020, disagrees: “Until the conventions take place, we don’t know who the official nominees will be.”
Donald Trump stormed onto the scene in 2015 promising to punish America’s enemies, and he largely succeeded. First, he stepped up and carried through the campaign against ISIS. He then initiated a "maximum pressure" campaign against Iran, including killing Iranian general Qassem Soleimani. He was the first president to forthrightly confront China, and despite some dismaying remarks about Vladimir Putin, he also armed Ukraine with defensive weapons and killed hundreds of Wagner mercenaries that attacked U.S. troops in Syria.
Bazookas can do a lot of damage to their target when they score a hit, but their back-blast is guaranteed to wreak havoc close to the launcher. Trump was just as determined to get even with the allies that he perceived to be taking advantage of the United States as he was to push back against the dictators. In addition to his trade war with China, Trump also levied tariffs on both of America’s neighbors, Canada and Mexico, along with the European Union and the most capable U.S. ally in Asia, Japan.
MANHATTAN—The Manhattan district attorney's office, led by anti-Trump prosecutor Alvin Bragg, dismissed trespassing charges against 30 Columbia University protesters who were arrested for occupying a campus building.[...]Inside the courtroom—where audio and video recording is not allowed—a prosecutor in Bragg's office argued that the defendants should not face criminal penalties, citing their lack of criminal histories and arguing that the protesters will face internal discipline at Columbia.
The prosecutor also argued that Bragg's office lacked evidence to land convictions in the cases, given those who occupied Hamilton Hall wore masks and covered up surveillance cameras. New York City police arrested the occupiers while they were inside Hamilton Hall.
https://www.racket.news/p/bring-back-capitalismWe’ve told you about the White House’s $7.5 billion electric car charging station plan, which, after more than two years, has installed a whopping seven charging stations. Well, now I bring you the White House high-speed internet infrastructure plan. I’ll let the senior Republican of the Federal Communication Commission, Brendan Carr, explain the situation:
“In 2021, the Biden Administration got $42.45 billion from Congress to deploy high-speed Internet to millions of Americans. Years later, it has not connected even 1 person with those funds. In fact, it now says that no construction projects will even start until 2025 at earliest.”
Some government-run internet installations have gone through, FCC Commissioner Carr said, just none from this particular $42.45 billion cash pile. The Biden admin has imposed onerous rules on states that try to install new internet with these funds: climate change mandates, DEI requirements, and union hiring preferences. Likely also needed is a proportionate mix of star signs among the installation team; two Geminis stringing up internet wires could cause a tectonic event.
Seeing Chase CEO Jamie Dimon issue a smiling clarion call in Fortune for higher taxes and massive government intervention via a “Marshall Plan for America” was a major tell that something even worse than what he called “free-for-all capitalism” was being contemplated. Dimon’s pledge was in line with outgoing World Economic Forum chief Klaus Schwab’s “stakeholder capitalism,” which purports to end the idea of corporations existing to “maximize their profits,” and make business leaders “trustees of society,” leading efforts to address “social and environmental challenges.”
For those who aren’t fluent in rich-person bullshit, what Schwab and Dimon (and a long list of others, like Apple CEO Tim Cook and BlackRock’s Larry Fink) were proposing was that we take the same people who spent the last twenty years devouring Fed rescues and converting the savings of the middle class into Jackson Hole villas, and instead of hurling them off cliffs, put them in charge of society. They would additionally like taxpayers to fund a big enough safety net to guarantee the next generation of customers for, say, a depository bank. As in: “We screwed things up so badly, you need to give us even more leeway to make things right.” It’s enough to make the most mild-mannered person reach for something sharp.
Most of the nightmares I covered after 2008 had little to do with true free enterprise. The real story of the bubble era was and is the fusing of state and corporate power. Waves of bailouts created a class of predatory “Too Big To Fail” super-firms that could siphon off massive profits without exposure to market risk, while repaying political partners in both parties with financial backing. The resultant incestuous jumble has been an economy led by a handful of market-immune actors suckling a never-emptying teat of public subsidies, while squeezing an expanding population of everyone else, i.e. the ordinary people and small businesses forced to stare down both barrels of capitalism’s business end.
https://x.com/EricRWeinstein/status/1803112282257609034In the West, they've got a movement called Wokeness, where you are super sensitive about other people's issures and you become hypersensitive when other people somehow or other say things or mention things or refer to you without the respect which you or your super subgroup feel you are entitled to
It leads to very extreme attitudes and social norms, particularly in some academic institutions, universities
You talk about safe spaces, you talk about appropriate pronouns. YOu talk about how "I'm about to say something which may be offensive to you; if you don't want to hear it, perhaps you would like to leave now".
And life becomes very burdensome. And I don't think we want to go in that direction. It does not make us a more resilient, cohesive society with a strong sense of solidarity. We must be more robust.
One question I get a lot is "What explains your asymmetric focus on Democrats and the Left?"
The short answer, after some soul searching and introspection, is simply this: "The Gaslighting of Experts."
I see the Republican party fighting the experts they oppose. I don't see them trying to gaslight them much.
Let's say you are an economist who believes that higher taxes spent on infrastructure would be good for the nation. The right may fight you. They may call you a name like "Libtard" or "Commie". And that is absolutely awful behavior to me. Truly. But they aren't nearly as likely to coordinate behind the scenes in emails to be discovered later and all agree to pretend, seemingly independently, that as a former expert you have committed some unclear moral crime that means you can never be empaneled or invited onto a commission. They aren't immediately going to treat you like a mental patient, a con-artist, or threat to society. They are just going to be asses. That's the dopey game they love: "Happy Warriors" is what they call it.
“Misinformation” is another term that’s undergone a sneaky makeover. While “disinformation” was an intelligence-themed word meaning deliberately incorrect propaganda (often pushed by a nation-state), “misinformation” has always carried the connotation of false, inaccurate, or wrong information, just of a type that may be transmitted unintentionally. Now, {misinformation} is often defined as false “or misleading” information, which is how Jean-Pierre is able to call unaltered video “misinformation.”
It got worse, however, when Jean-Pierre dropped in “we’re seeing these deepfakes.” In this way, “manipulated” or ungenerously edited videos became, in the words of the White House spokesperson, {deepfakes}. Not true-but-unkind, but outright deceptions, intentional digital lies. The staccato use of the meaningless term cheap fake is what made this remarkably dishonest switch possible.
Islamism is winning a global publicity battle partly because it has found an ally in a phenomenon that was born in America: a phenomenon we call {le wokisme}. For the last few years, I’ve been tracing the links between these two ideologies, trying to understand how wokeism, which purports to have noble aims, has ended up enabling violence.
Both ideologies, for one, routinely use the word {Islamophobia} as a way to silence their critics. Researchers have also found that Western Islamists “speak the language of discrimination, anti-racism, internalized oppression, intersectionality, and post-colonial theory,” so that all acts perpetrated by a “marginalized” group can be justified as “acts of resistance,” reinforcing the view that Islam cannot and should never be criticized. Though they claim to defend Muslim minorities, some of their arguments are stunningly ironic. There are feminists, for instance, who claim that it is “Islamophobic” to suggest the hijab may contribute to the oppression of women.
In a letter to Komsomolskaya Pravda from 1990, for example, a reader decried the “ghastly and tragic. . . loss of morality by a huge number of people living within the borders of the USSR.” Symptoms of moral debility included apathy and hypocrisy, cynicism, servility, and snitching. The entire country, he wrote, was suffocating in a “miasma of bare-faced and ceaseless public lies and demagoguery.” By July 1988, 44 percent of people polled by Moskovskie novosti felt that theirs was an “unjust society.”
Look at the most recent Gallup surveys of American opinion and one finds a similar disillusionment. The share of the public that has confidence in the Supreme Court, the banks, public schools, the presidency, large technology companies, and organized labor is somewhere between 25 percent and 27 percent. For newspapers, the criminal justice system, television news, big business, and Congress, it’s below 20 percent. For Congress, it’s 8 percent. Average confidence in major institutions is roughly half what it was in 1979.
In the Soviet Union, the great lies were that the Party and the state existed to serve the interests of the workers and peasants, and that the United States and its allies were imperialists little better than the Nazis had been in “the great Patriotic War.” The truth was that the {nomenklatura} (i.e., the elite members) of the Party had rapidly formed a new class with its own often hereditary privileges, consigning the workers and peasants to poverty and servitude, while Stalin, who had started World War II on the same side as Hitler, utterly failed to foresee the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, and then became the most brutal imperialist in his own right.
The equivalent falsehoods in late Soviet America are that the institutions controlled by the (Democratic) Party—the federal bureaucracy, the universities, the major foundations, and most of the big corporations—are devoted to advancing hitherto marginalized racial and sexual minorities, and that the principal goals of U.S. foreign policy are to combat climate change and (as Jake Sullivan puts it) to help other countries defend themselves “without sending U.S. troops to war.”
In reality, policies to promote “diversity, equity, and inclusion” do nothing to help poor minorities. Instead, the sole beneficiaries appear to be a horde of apparatchik DEI “officers.” In the meantime, these initiatives are clearly undermining educational standards, even at elite medical schools, and encouraging the mutilation of thousands of teenagers in the name of “gender-affirming surgery.”
As for the current direction of U.S. foreign policy, it is not so much to help other countries defend themselves as to egg on others to fight our adversaries as proxies without supplying them with sufficient weaponry to stand much chance of winning. This strategy—most visible in Ukraine—makes some sense for the United States, which discovered in the “global war on terror” that its much-vaunted military could not defeat even the ragtag Taliban after twenty years of effort. But believing American blandishments may ultimately doom Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan to follow South Vietnam and Afghanistan into oblivion.
As for climate change, the world is now awash in Chinese electric vehicles, batteries, and solar cells, all mass-produced with the help of state subsidies and coal-burning power stations. At least we tried to resist the Soviet strategy of unleashing Marxism-Leninism on the Third World, the human cost of which was almost incalculable. Our policy elite’s preoccupation with climate change has resulted in utter strategic incoherence by comparison. The fact is that China has been responsible for three-quarters of the 34% increase in carbon dioxide emissions since Greta Thunberg’s birth (2003), and two-thirds of the 48% increase in coal consumption.
Just after Floyd loses consciousness—at 8:25:20 p.m.—bodycam video shows that Chauvin’s attention is drawn away from Floyd and to a hostile crowd member wearing a boxing hoodie who yells “I’m not scared of you, bro. You’re a fuckin’ pussy-ass dude, bro”—words that indicate a possible imminent attack. Chauvin responds “Don’t come over here! Don’t come over here!” (The moment is best viewed from both Thao’s and Lane’s bodycams.) Clearly, Chauvin and the other officers were worried about the crowd encroaching on the scene and potentially attacking them—minutes before the paramedics arrived. The scene was not Code 4 even then.
Finally, there is the argument that MRT requires the use of the hobble—a device that restrains a prone suspect by connecting their hands to their feet—which Chauvin did not use. But the reason why Chauvin did not use the hobble was both straightforward and defensible. Part of the tragic bad luck of the George Floyd arrest was that a freak miscommunication led EMS to arrive several minutes later than they typically would. Floyd was placed on the ground at 8:19 p.m. and EMS was called by 8:21 p.m. As one of the prosecution’s witnesses (herself a firefighter and EMT) explained, a normal EMS response time would have been three minutes or less—putting medics on the scene by 8:24 p.m., when Floyd was still breathing. The fact that EMS didn’t arrive until 8:27 p.m., she explained, was “totally abnormal.” In fact, it was so abnormal that she literally couldn’t believe it at the trial.
Over my senior year of college, that began to change. Not surprisingly for an English major, it started with a class on medieval mysticism that exposed me to works by Augustine and Aquinas and—my favorite—Julian of Norwich’s stirring, beautiful Revelations of Divine Love. It ended with an internet pile-on.
In the spring of my senior year at the University of Virginia, I published a controversial guest essay in The New York Times about college students’ experiences of self-censorship in the classroom. The piece went viral, and in the course of a few short hours, my life was turned upside down. I went from an unknown college student to the subject of a multi-day Twitter meltdown. At one point my first name was trending, and I had racked up condemnations from a bevy of well-known journalists.
Becoming part of a religious institution also allows members to get outside of their own age-segregated bubbles. After Mass, I can count on talking to elderly parishioners and hearing the babbles of babies and toddlers—something that would be unlikely to happen at a bar or concert.
Multnomah County passed a $4 billion budget for the coming fiscal year after a final session that featured fights—some of them personal—over fentanyl, ambulances and leaf blowers.
Half the country has been conned into looking at the recent lawfare craze in isolation, not as the last stages of a long-developing drift toward autocracy started decades ago by Wilson’s former boss. The twist that sent the Dick Cheney revolution to new heights was a rebrand. When we switched post-9/11 focus from Islamic terror to Trump and “Domestic Violent Extremism,” left-liberal America suddenly embraced every form of overreach it once opposed. Now, chickens are coming home to roost. Once we started ignoring laws to pursue terror suspects in the early 2000s, it became inevitable the reflex would return to infect domestic politics. Trump accelerated that process, and if the cackling of someone like Wilson doesn’t remind you of how this authoritarian slide started, nothing will. It’s a straight line from there to here:
Half the country has been conned into looking at the recent lawfare craze in isolation, not as the last stages of a long-developing drift toward autocracy started decades ago by Wilson’s former boss. The twist that sent the Dick Cheney revolution to new heights was a rebrand. When we switched post-9/11 focus from Islamic terror to Trump and “Domestic Violent Extremism,” left-liberal America suddenly embraced every form of overreach it once opposed. Now, chickens are coming home to roost. Once we started ignoring laws to pursue terror suspects in the early 2000s, it became inevitable the reflex would return to infect domestic politics. Trump accelerated that process, and if the cackling of someone like Wilson doesn’t remind you of how this authoritarian slide started, nothing will. It’s a straight line from there to here:
Democrats denounced Cheney as a threat to the Bill of Rights and the architect of a dangerous form of government built on secrecy and concentrated presidential power. His ideas were even called un-American. As Conor Friedersdorf put it in The Atlantic, Cheney “advanced a theory of the executive that is at odds with the intentions of the Founders.” It was no accident liberals in 2008 rallied around constitutional lawyer Barack Obama, marketed as a “transformative” figure who’d reverse Cheney’s vision and reinvigorate our ideals.
When Obama won, though, appointees quickly indicated they may not “change the status quo immediately,” as White House counsel Gregory Craig euphemistically put it. When the “transformative presidency” vanished like a silverware-stealing houseguest, sad-trombone headlines ensued (“Obama’s War on Terror May Resemble Bush’s in Some Areas,” sighed the New York Times), and Democrats plunged into disillusionment. Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan said a person suspected of funding al-Qaeda and caught in the Philippines could be considered “part of the battlefield” and subject to indefinite detention without trial, which sounded a lot like Bushian legal theory. Similarly, when new Attorney General Eric Holder was asked if he agreed that a person who “commits to going to war against America” should “be held off the battlefield as long as they're dangerous,” Holder answered: “I do.”
Those protesting that Bannon is going to jail because he’s lawbreaking scum and deserves it never spent time in an autocracy, where political prosecutions /{always} involve a legal violation, often even a real one (see below). An enormous number of Americans have defied congressional subpoenas dating to the fifties and not gone to jail. The group includes former Attorney General Eric Holder, current Attorney General Merrick Garland, Hunter Biden, former Trump Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, Congressman Scott Perry, and countless others, in both parties. No one disputes Congress has the power to issue subpoenas, or that it’s a crime to refuse them. But fear of abuse and bad memories about where aggressive use of these tools leads have kept us from taking this extreme step for about 70 years.
In 2008, during a San Francisco rally in support of Gaza, I was approached by a news reporter who asked for an interview. She wanted my thoughts on rockets being fired at Israeli targets. I made it very clear that I didn’t support Hamas, and that I believed the random violence against Israeli citizens was abhorrent and wrong. After the interview, I was taken aside by one of the rally’s organizers, who chastised me.
“/{Never} talk about the rockets,” she told me. “You always pivot. If they ask you about Hamas, bring it back to the Israeli occupation.”
“But my family is there,” I insisted. “I don’t think either side should be killing civilians with rockets.”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Stay on message.”
https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/gaza-chiefs-brutal-calculation-civilian-bloodshed-will-help-hamas-626720e7The biggest blow to my faith in the hard-line pro-Palestine movement came in 2015, when I tried (and ultimately failed) to lobby for a Gaza airport. An internationally run, Israeli-approved airfield in Gaza wasn’t going to end the fighting, but it might give people the option to go in and out of Gaza and provide some freedom of movement for Palestinians trapped by the blockade in the Strip.
I had detailed plans: the location, flight plans, the radar coverage, destinations, aircraft type, security, and robust outreach to all relevant parties. I was having productive talks with senior Israeli government officials and the Israel Defense Forces, and used intermediaries to obtain approval and support from the Palestinian leadership. The project received immense interest from the people of Gaza. What I didn’t have was the support of pro-Palestine activists.
They opposed my efforts, because cooperation would just make Israel “look good, if only parts of the blockade are addressed and not all of it.” That wasn’t acceptable to them, even if the Palestinian people stood to benefit. Some believed that with freedom of movement, many Gazans would choose to leave, thereby fulfilling the “Zionist plot” to empty the Strip of its inhabitants, essentially arguing that imprisoned Gazans were better for the greater cause.
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Trapping people in Gaza was okay because that made it easier to “expose” and attack Israel? What kind of a cause relies on forcing its people to stay in perpetual misery so that Western activists can have an easier time condemning their adversaries?
He received multiple life sentences for murder and spent 22 years in prison before being freed in a swap along with a thousand other Palestinians in 2011 for Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit.
In 2018, Sinwar supported weekly protests at the fence between Gaza and Israeli territory. Fearful of a breach in the barrier, the Israeli military fired on Palestinians and agitators who came too close. It was all part of the plan.
“We make the headlines only with blood,” Sinwar said in the interview at the time with an Italian journalist. “No blood, no news.”
In 2021, reconciliation talks between Hamas and Palestinian factions appeared to be progressing toward legislative and presidential elections for the Palestinian Authority, the first in 15 years. But at the last moment, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas canceled polls. With the political track closed, Sinwar days later turned to bloodshed to change the status quo, firing rockets on Jerusalem amid tensions between Israelis and Palestinians in the city. The ensuing 11-day conflict killed 242 Palestinians and 12 people in Israel.
https://www.thefp.com/p/i-went-to-cover-a-protest-i-was-mobbedArab mediators hastened to speed up talks about a cease-fire, and on Feb. 19, Israel set a deadline of Ramadan—a month later—for Hamas to return the hostages or face a ground offensive in Rafah, what Israeli officials described as the militant group’s last stronghold.
Sinwar in a message urged his comrades in Hamas’s political leadership outside Gaza not to make concessions and instead to push for a permanent end to the war. High civilian casualties would create worldwide pressure on Israel, Sinwar said. The group’s armed wing was ready for the onslaught, Sinwar’s messages said.
“Israel’s journey in Rafah won’t be a walk in the park,” Sinwar told Hamas leaders in Doha in a message.
I had been at this particular protest in Union Square for about 45 minutes, watching and taking notes, when a man wearing a neck gaiter, sunglasses, and a Hezbollah flag fashioned as a headscarf suddenly pointed at me. “She’s a Zionist!” he shouted. “Get her out of here.”
Immediately, dozens of protesters swarmed me, hoisting their keffiyehs high in the sky and boxing me in to block my view. Many of them were completely shrouded in keffiyehs and masks. A chorus of voices surrounded me, shoving me. “Get the fuck out,” a woman yelled into my ear. “The people are saying we don’t want you here.”
A man holding a sign that declared “Long Live October 7th” shouted over the crowd, “Get in her face, make her leave.”
One man fired an air horn into my ears. A girl lurched at my notebook, grabbing it and ripping apart the metal spine. “You’re not writing anything down,” she said, tearing the pages and throwing them into the air. “Get the fuck out—get the fuck out!”
The hospital unwillingly backed away from the treatments under pressure from the Texas governor and attorney general. But Haim found not only were the treatments continuing—the program appeared to be expanding. He recorded several online presentations by medical staff encouraging the transition of children—one social worker described how she deliberately did not make note of such treatment in the medical charts of patients to avoid leaving a paper trail. Haim told me, “They were talking publicly about how they were concealing what they were doing. You can’t take care of your patient without trust. For me as a doctor, to not do something about this was unconscionable.”[...]Haim says there was no immediate aftermath: “Everything went quiet. I was anonymous and went on with my life.” Then June 23 of last year, the day Haim was to graduate from his residency, two federal agents from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services showed up at his house to have a little chat. Haim’s wife, an assistant U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Texas, a different division of the U.S. Attorney’s office than the one that has indicted her husband, advised him not to talk. [...]Haim was indicted last week, but, as of this writing, he and his attorneys do not yet know the precise nature of the charges. One of his lawyers, Mark Lytle, told me it’s very unusual to bring felony charges for an alleged HIPAA violation unless there is a significant underlying crime, such as a hospital clerk selling a celebrity’s medical records. He said the indictment of Haim seems politically motivated. “The government is entering into the town square on the culture wars and didn’t like what Eithan had to say,” said Lytle. “I think they are looking to make an example of him.”
Three teenagers in Spokane, Washington, are facing up to five years in prison for creating skid marks on an LGBT-themed crosswalk mural. Last week, the Spokane Police Department arrested and charged 19-year-old Ruslan V. V Turko and two unnamed minors with first-degree malicious mischief.[...]Despite photos of the mural demonstrating minimal vandalization, the release described the scuffing as “widespread damage” with many claiming the act was motivated by homophobia.
“Officers observed widespread damage as black scuff marks consistent with scooter wheels were observed across the entirety of the mural. The area is clearly marked to keep traffic away as it was just [repainted] to repair previous damage.”[...]On June 6, Washington State’s updated hate crime law came into effect, making it a felony to deface Pride symbols. Anyone found guilty of damaging public LGBT landmarks could face up to five years in prison and be fined up to $10,000.
https://www.thefp.com/p/when-hostages-come-homeRemember, {folx}, what’s most important is not whether someone threatens to kill Jews. What matters is who is issuing the threats.
If there’s a lesson from the orgy of hatred that we witnessed outside the White House this weekend—“Hezbollah, Hezbollah, kill another Zionist now!” the masked, keffiyeh-wearing activists shouted—it is that.
Recall August 2017, when several hundred alt-right chumps, in their pleated khakis and white polo shirts, descended on Charlottesville with tiki torches, vowing, “Jews will not replace us.”[...]These are the people who dressed up as jihadists and defaced statues and screamed “Piggy! Piggy!” and “Fuck you, fascist” at the park rangers and held up a fake bloodied mask of Genocide Joe Biden. The New York Times, like CNN and The Washington Post and most every major outlet, made a big point of how the demonstrators really, really just want a ceasefire. There was no mention of Jews or antisemitism.[...]Most everyone else stressed that the only people who detected any antisemitism were the Jews, and that that wasn’t the point, and that the anti-Zionists, the people screaming at the park rangers and defacing statues and LARPing around like wannabe terrorists—who specialize in murdering and raping Jews—don’t hate anyone. Except Israelis.
“Many protesters chanted slogans that some Jewish groups have said incite violence against Jews,” the Times explained. “That some Jewish groups have said.”
Because—remember!—it’s never, ever about whoever dies. On the contrary, it is always about who can be blamed for that death. That is how one furthers the agenda.
https://x.com/AvivaKlompas/status/1799444052577771666Pundits on CNN talked about the “released” hostages. But they were not released. They were liberated. They were saved in a daring daylight operation, the details of which are still emerging.
https://www.thefp.com/p/why-we-shouldnt-trust-the-facts-comingGANTZ POSTPONES NEWS CONFERENCE AFTER HOSTAGE RELEASE
Imagine, if you will, living during the Iranian hostage crisis in 1979. You come upon an article in a small progressive newspaper, describing how the CIA had a plan to poison the water supply in Tehran. Later, you learn that the reporter who wrote that piece was one of the people responsible for keeping U.S. citizens hostage at the embassy. You’d probably start doubting that reporter, his outlet, and whether news can actually be reported from inside the Ayatollah’s Islamic Republic.
Well, that’s pretty much what happened in Gaza.
Walter Kirn: It’s not the first president ever to commit a felony. It’s the first one to ever be convicted of one. And that actually means the opposite of what you think when you realize what presidents have done in the past-
Matt Taibbi: All sorts of presidents, good presidents, bad presidents. Right? I mean-
Walter Kirn: Hell, we could have convicted presidents of international war crimes, had we wanted to, let alone felonies, little old state felonies.
Matt Taibbi: Yeah. What about bombing Cambodia? The internment camps? There’s a million things you could think that would become crimes, but also personal crimes. You think about Kennedy having his Dr. Feelgood following him around, and operating the presidency under the influence, and having his Secret Service agents standby while he’s having affairs.
Yeah. Iran-Contra. There’s so many different things, but this, this is ... It’s below nothing, and it’s the kind of thing that the ordinary person is going to think about, not because anybody should sympathize with Donald Trump, who has a gazillion dollars, and started off with a huge starter kit of money from his real estate slumlord dad, and borrowed lots and lots of money, probably on false pretenses many times. Right?
Walter Kirn: But look at the Kennedy family history. Come on-
Matt Taibbi: Oh, yeah. Bootlegging. Right?
Walter Kirn: Look at Lyndon Johnson in Texas. How can I put it? The American ruling class, such as it is, that has filled the presidency for the last 100 years, 150 years, is not exactly a spotless group of Boy Scouts.
As I say, to look at the first felony that any president has been convicted of, and find out it’s this, it’s astonishing when you think about what it could have been.
Matt Taibbi: We dumped Agent Orange on a whole country practically. We had generations of kids born with arms coming out of their heads, and stuff like that, and absolute horrific, awful crimes. We’ve had a generation now since 9/11 of, basically, unsanctioned assassinations using drones, and things like that, and torturing people. We don’t talk about this, but the so-called enhanced interrogation is so much worse than the public generally accepts.
It wasn’t just waterboarding. It was all kinds of horrific things that we did to people for days, and weeks on end, over and over and over again. One of the defendants had to appear in court on a special pillow, because he couldn’t sit correctly, because he had been rectally fed for years, kept alive, so that he could undergo more torture. We arrested people without warrants.
Just all kinds of horrible things, and then this, this is the first thing we arrest a president for. Are you kidding me? I don’t know. I also think we went through this a little bit during the summer of George Floyd when people realized they got a little bit of an education into how police operate, and they learned that if you watch anybody long enough, there’s something you can ring them up on. I forget the name of the woman who committed suicide in prison, but, basically, they waited until she made a lane change without signaling, and that was the predicate for bringing her into jail in Texas.
But you can do that kind of thing. There are ordinances against obstructing pedestrian traffic. Right? That was the thing that they stopped Michael Brown for originally. Now forget whether or not he was guilty, what they stopped him for was a totally bogus offense.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/in-a-competent-administration-hunters-trial-wouldnt-happen-715122a2Matt Taibbi: Yeah. Everybody knows this by now, the discussion has been had, but Hillary was fined, or her campaign, and her law firm, they were fined by the Federal Election Commission for an almost exactly similar offense, covering up the fact that they funded the Steele dossier, which did have a real impact on the election, and on politics after that going forward. In addition to the news stories that came out, it was an element of an intelligence community assessment that Putin was helping Trump get elected. It was serious stuff. They covered it up, they paid a fine for it. It didn’t come out until October of 2017, and they never admitted it. That only came out due to a Congressional investigation.
So, in a way, there’s a way to trace this back, and say, “Actually the Trump case doesn’t happen without that,” because the original search warrant that produced the evidence for the Trump case came out of the FBI investigation of Trump’s Russia stuff.
Hillary Clinton and the media kept calling Donald Trump an “illegitimate president” because of alleged Russian meddling in the close 2016 race. But Mr. Biden’s win was even narrower, just 44,000 votes in three states in the Electoral College. It’s far from provable that 51 former officials lying about the Hunter Biden laptop didn’t affect this outcome.
Last week, in convicting Mr. Trump, a Manhattan prosecutor argued that 2016 voters had a legal “right” to know about his Stormy Daniels affair 10 years earlier. Hiding the affair amounted to possible “theft” of a close election under New York law, the prosecutor said.
Really? How much more did 2020 voters have a right to the evidence about Biden family influence peddling during Joe’s vice presidency, which went directly to his fitness for office? Even more so after Mr. Biden (or somebody) was willing falsely to embroil a foreign power to cover up this family scandal, to portray a sitting U.S. president as the beneficiary of a corrupt Russian plot when Mr. Biden knew the laptop was genuine, to prostitute the U.S. intelligence community to sell his lie to the public?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MugwumpsThe Half-Breeds were a comparably moderate group, and were the opponents of the Stalwarts, the other main faction of the Republican Party. The main issue that divided the Stalwarts and the Half-Breeds was political patronage. The Stalwarts were in favor of political machines and spoils system–style patronage, while the Half-Breeds, later led by Maine senator James G. Blaine,[6] were in favor of civil service reform and a merit system. The epithet "Half-Breed" was invented in derision by the Stalwarts to denote those whom they perceived as being "only half Republican".[7]
Whether you love, hate or merely tolerate Donald Trump, you should care about due process, which is fundamental to the rule of law. New York’s trial of Mr. Trump violated basic due-process principles.
“No principle of procedural due process is more clearly established than that notice of the specific charge,” the Supreme Court stated in Cole v. Arkansas (1948), “and a chance to be heard in a trial of the issues raised by that charge, if desired, [is] among the constitutional rights of every accused in a criminal proceeding in all courts, state or federal.” In in re Winship (1970), the justices affirmed that “the Due Process Clause protects the accused against conviction except upon proof beyond a reasonable doubt of every fact necessary to constitute the crime with which he is charged.” These three due-process precepts—notice, meaningful opportunity to defend, and proof of all elements—were absent in Mr. Trump’s trial.
To make matters worse, Judge Merchan instructed the jury: “Although you must conclude unanimously that the defendant conspired to promote or prevent the election of any person to a public office by unlawful means, you need not be unanimous as to what those unlawful means were.”
Due process demands that felony verdicts be unanimous, but in Schad v. Arizona (1991), a murder case, the high court indicated that there need not be unanimity regarding the means by which a crime is committed. But a plurality opinion by Justice David Souter cautioned that if the available means of committing a crime are so capacious that the accused is not “in a position to understand with some specificity the legal basis of the charge against him,” due process will be violated. “Nothing in our history suggests that the Due Process Clause would permit a State to convict anyone under a charge of ‘Crime’ so generic that any combination of jury findings of embezzlement, reckless driving, murder, burglary, tax evasion, or littering, for example, would suffice for conviction,” Justice Souter wrote.
A group backed by Wall Street heavyweights BlackRock and Citadel Securities is planning to start a new national stock exchange in Texas, aiming to take on what they see as onerous regulation at the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq.
The Texas Stock Exchange, which has raised approximately $120 million from individuals and large investment firms, plans to file registration documents with the Securities and Exchange Commission later this year, CEO James Lee told The Wall Street Journal. The goal is to begin facilitating trades in 2025 and host its first listing in 2026.
The exchange is aiming to tap in to disaffection with increasing compliance costs at Nasdaq and NYSE and newer rules like one setting targets for board diversity at Nasdaq. Backers of the TXSE, as it is known, pledge it will be more CEO-friendly.
https://www.wweek.com/news/schools/2024/06/03/portland-teachers-union-publishes-handbook-on-teaching-and-organizing-for-palestine-in-the-classroom/A chorus of Jewish leaders, teachers and parents are expressing outrage with the Portland Public Schools teachers’ union for hosting a pro-Palestinian advocacy meeting last week where organizers encouraged teachers to display Palestinian flags in their classrooms, wear T-shirts emblazoned with a pro-Palestinian message highly offensive to Jewish communities and lead lessons on Gaza that critics say are misleading and antisemitic.
In a statement to WW, Bonilla says the union “is a diverse organization that values multiple and varied thoughts, perspectives, and beliefs of our members. Like many other labor organizations, PAT has a history of speaking out against injustices taking place both locally and globally. We are a union deeply committed to social justice, and to fighting for schools and communities that are free from antisemitism, Islamophobia, and other forms of discrimination. And we will continue to ensure our members are aware of their rights when they are teaching about polarizing topics like the current humanitarian crisis in Gaza.”
The handbook itself instructs teachers on how teaching pro-Palestinian materials and lesson plans fits into the union’s contract with the school district. The handbook makes the case that such lesson plans are allowed under contract language.[...]“When students ask your opinion: Root your answer in facts and ask them more questions to help them develop their own opinions,” the handbook reads in one section. “Remind them that what we are seeing is not a long-standing hostility between Jewish and Arab or Muslim people. Palestinian resistance is a political struggle for self-determination against colonial and apartheid rule that has roots in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.”
For nearly ten years—almost as long as they’ve been married—professor Joe Gow, 63, and his wife Carmen Wilson, 56, have been videotaping their sexual escapades, largely filmed while on vacation in spots like Los Angeles and Mexico. Wilson, a former university administrator, sometimes demonstrates how to cook vegan meals, like a “sweet and smoky soy curl vegan pizza,” in the presence of adult film stars before they both take turns bedding each other.
But it wasn’t until this past fall, when Gow says he was planning to step down from his job as chancellor of the University of Wisconsin–La Crosse, that the couple decided to upload their videos online.
“Let’s try something a little unusual,” Gow remembers telling his wife. “Let’s put some videos online and see how they’re received.”
He says the university has hired “a machine” of at least three lawyers to build a case against him. But Gow is representing himself. “I don’t have a lot of money to go out and hire the kind of lawyers that the system did,” he says.
Since being put on paid leave this past winter, he said he’s spent most of his time working on his opening statement and reviewing the university’s report.
It’s an ironic predicament for Gow: even though he works in academia, a field that has championed sex positivity for decades, he could find himself out of a job for being /{too} sexually positive. He says there are academics at his own college who specialize entirely in sex positivity, and there’s even an option to major in Race, Gender & Sexuality Studies. And like many institutions—including Brown, Northwestern, and Harvard—the University of Wisconsin–La Crosse hosts an annual sex week, which includes an event called “condom bingo,” a trivia game that rewards students with “fun sex-based prizes.” The university’s outward commitments to sexual expression are one of the reasons he calls their treatment of him “a major hypocrisy.”
The West’s inheritance springs from a peculiar confluence of habits and customs that had been practiced for centuries before anyone branded them as “ideas.” But they are principles—radical ones—that have given us the most tolerant, free, and flourishing societies in all of human history.
Among these principles are the rule of law, a tradition of liberty, personal responsibility, a system of representative government, a toleration of difference, and a commitment to pluralism. Each of these ideas might have been extinguished in their infancy but for the grace of God and the force of their appeal.
Demoralization is the first stage and requires the subverters’ greatest investment of time and resources. Bezmenov claims the process of demoralization can take between 10 to 30 years, because that is the amount of time it takes to educate a new generation.
The demoralization process targets three areas of society: its ideas, its structures, and its social institutions. The targeted institutions include religion, education, media, and culture. In each realm the old ways of thinking, the old heroes, are discredited. Those who believed in them come to doubt themselves and their ability to discern reality itself.
Think of the cynicism and selective truth-telling young Americans encounter in most classrooms. {You know Jefferson owned slaves, right? You know Columbus killed millions?} Again, never mind that Jefferson set us on the path to emancipation, or that Columbus knew nothing about epidemiology. A little learning, as the saying goes, is a dangerous thing.
Once inside, it is very difficult to escape the mosh pit of civilizational self-loathing. Maybe you can climb to the top for a while by being the white person who hates white people most loudly, or the straight person who goes to the most debauched parades. But most people give up.
Last week, a DC judge sentenced Paulette Harlow, an elderly woman with a debilitating medical condition, to two years incarceration after blocking teh entrance to an abortion clinic, where Harlow prayed outside the door. Turns out she violated the FACE Act, a 1994 law that "prohibits threats of force, obstruction, and propety damage intended to interfere with reproductive health services." Yes, disorderly conduct and false imprisonment have been on the books for decades, but lol those laws can't be enforced without putting an end to things like BLM riots and Hamas parades. So a new law had to be invented specifically to punish old Christian women. A sad, farcical series of legal convolutions, but at least we found a solution to the road blockades. Next time I'm trapped on the Golden Gate Bridge, I'm telling the cops I was trying to get to my abortion. Clink, clink.
Last January, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg summed up his case against Donald Trump this way: "We allege falsification of business records to the end of keeping information away from the electorate. It's an election interference case."
That gloss made no sense, because the records at the center of the case—11 invoices, 11 checks, and 12 ledger entries that allegedly were aimed at disguising a hush-money reimbursement as payment for legal services—were produced after the 2016 presidential election. At that point, Michael Cohen, Trump's lawyer, had already paid porn star Stormy Daniels $130,000 to keep her from talking about her alleged 2006 sexual encounter with Trump, and Trump had already been elected. The prosecution's case against Trump, which a jury found persuasive enough to convict him on all 34 counts yesterday, was peppered with temporal puzzles like this one.
If Trump had been willing to concede some of the prosecution's allegations, his lawyers could have focused on the shaky legal argument for charging him with felonies. They not only failed to do that in a cogent way; they insisted on jury instructions that ruled out convicting Trump of misdemeanors rather than felonies.
"Instead of telling a simple story, Mr. Trump's defense was a haphazard cacophony of denials and personal attacks," defense attorney and former federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti observes. "That may work for a Trump rally or a segment on Fox News, but it doesn't work in a courtroom. Perhaps Mr. Trump's team was also pursuing a political or press strategy, but it certainly wasn't a good legal strategy. The powerful defense available to Mr. Trump's attorneys was lost amid all the clutter."
The department had much more ideological diversity when Mr. Mansfield arrived at Harvard as an undergraduate in 1949. Then, “1 out of 3 professors would have been Republican,” he says. His mentor was Samuel Beer (1911-2009), “my big teacher all the way through from undergraduate to Ph.D.” Beer was an expert in British government, “as no one is anymore.”
Beer was also a Democrat. He wrote speeches for Franklin D. Roosevelt, advised John F. Kennedy, and served a term as president of Americans for Democratic Action. But he “made no attempt to impose a partisan view, or even a view,” on his students, Mr. Mansfield says. He would talk about “the Ds and the Rs,” rarely even naming the political parties.
By 1969, when Mr. Mansfield was appointed as a full professor, political liberals were beginning to pack the department with their own kind. But “those were still liberals,” he says, “who were willing to appoint somebody like me, who was an opponent of what they believed.”
“Conservatives believe in propriety,” he says. “We don’t demonstrate in the streets and occupy campuses. There are no conservative tantrums.” (For that reason, he says, “Donald Trump is not a conservative. Propriety is something he violates, or seeks to impress people by violating.”)
Conservatives may not be numerous enough to make a difference, but they’re unusual enough to get their way. At Harvard, Mr. Mansfield might as well have been a unicorn. He earned scornful national headlines for championing “manliness” and opposing grade inflation, affirmative action and feminism. In 1986 he opposed the introduction of a major in women’s studies. “This was just feminist studies,” he says. “These were the views of a certain group of women claiming to speak for all women.” Witnessing what he saw as a cowardly kowtow to faddishness at the faculty council meeting, he told the council at the time: “Girls of America, if you want a husband you can push around, marry a professor.” That did have an effect, he now says: “There were some people on the fence before I spoke. After hearing me, they voted in favor of Women’s Studies.”
He remembers a different Harvard, more than four decades ago. In 1982 conservative journalist William F. Buckley debated liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith in front of 1,200 people on Reaganomics. “Sanders Theater was full,” Mr. Mansfield says, “and I came out feeling tested and impressed, thinking this was a country worth living in.” Students were eager for an intellectual challenge. Today, they “are not tested, and are not interested in being tested. And the professors don’t have the interest they once had in causing that feeling to appear.”
He sums up the problem as an inversion of authority: “The less wise, who are the students, rule over the more wise, the professors.” This leads to what he calls “the most nagging of my lost causes, which is grade inflation.” The most common grade in a course at Harvard is likely to be an A or an A-minus. Mr. Mansfield thinks that explains the encampments—and much more.
He first observed grade inflation as a young professor during the Vietnam era. “When I started to call it out, I didn’t think it was that important. I thought it was just a symptom. But not now.” Thanks to grade inflation, “a professor is unable to pass judgment on a student. And what that turns into is a desire to be rid of judgment altogether and to pass judgment against those who pass judgment. The result is an aggressive relativism.”
As Mr. Mansfield tells it, grade inflation had two causes in the late 1960s. “One was the Vietnam War, when a criterion for being drafted was how you stood in your class.” Professors, “out of opposition to the war and sympathy for the students, kept grades high.” The other cause was the arrival of academically unprepared black students. “Nobody wanted to give a C to a black student,” he says, “and if you didn’t do that, then you couldn’t give a C to a white student.” These two factors caused an “upward draft that raised grades. Then after a while it became routine, because everybody likes it. Students like it, parents like it.”
The corrosive effects are evident. “If you’re going to give almost everybody an A, you can’t ask them to do a lot of work, because you’re going to give them an A anyway.” Courses become less demanding: “Three papers in a semester becomes two, the reading goes down, and students realize that they’ve got a lot of extra time. Suddenly, their lives become filled with extracurricular activities, which explains the present glut in activism.”
The road to the encampments “passes through relativism into the opposite of relativism, the willingness to denounce without seeking evidence.” The grade-inflated young embark on an intense search for “commitment, by which you embrace a position without reasoning your way to it.” The mobs who set up encampments “don’t make suggestions, they make demands,” and that is “a consequence of progressivism. When you make progress, you foreclose the questions that you’ve decided.”
Mr. Mansfield also argues that the ills of grade inflation have seeped into wider American society. “One of the things grade inflation does is to rob students of knowledge of what they’re good at, and not so good at.” Ostensible success in school “doesn’t tell employers whether the graduates of college are good at something. It robs us of necessary information.”
That’s bad for democracy, Mr. Mansfield says, “because it makes society attempt something—or satisfy itself that it’s done something—that is impossible, which is to do away with human inequalities.”
The trial became a landmark in American law by establishing that every criminal jury has the power to acquit, even if the presiding judge wants a conviction. Even if a jury engages in “nullification” by ignoring a trial judge’s pro-conviction instructions, no judge, at trial or on appeal, can undo the acquittal. Retrial would be double jeopardy, a constitutional no-no.
The reason why Zenger walked out of his trial a free man and Trump walked out a felon is that Zenger’s jury voted to acquit and Trump’s jury voted to convict. This simple fact refutes most of the complaints that the former president made to reporters immediately after the verdict on Thursday.
https://www.racket.news/p/ding-dong-the-witch-still-leads-theTrump’s lawyers do have serious arguments that can be raised on appeal, including First Amendment arguments about campaign-finance rules and federalism arguments about state-law overreach. Some of these issues could reach the U.S. Supreme Court, which includes three justices Trump himself nominated. But most of what Trump said after his conviction was pure spin, unlikely to persuade any sober appellate tribunal.
No part of the “emotions of it” discussion touched on how many Americans who don’t even like Trump might now be tempted to vote for the guy, given how obvious a snow job the case was. The New York indictment was a bespoke prosecution designed specifically for Trump, a Falsifying Records in the First Degree charge that required the “intent to commit another crime.” According to prosecutor Joshua Steinglass, the other offense was New York Election Law Section 17-152, “Conspiracy to promote or prevent election,” defined as “Any two or more persons who conspire to promote or prevent the election of any person to a public office by unlawful means.”
Even Maddow’s MSNBC called this legal theory of District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s “eyebrow-raising” and “novel,” which should tell you a lot. The notion that paying hush money to a porn star (which you are legally allowed to do, irrespective of whether your spouse should let you get away with it) constitutes “conspiring” to “prevent the election of any person” is the Mother of All Stretches.
Hillary Clinton got mere fines for a far more serious records offense in an almost exactly similar context: calling the funding of the infamous Steele dossier “legal and compliance consulting.” That’s hiding a role in an electorally significant public fraud, and though I’m not sure that offense warranted jail, it’s certain Trump’s “crime” didn’t, if Hillary’s doesn’t even go to court. This was one non-crime, serving as the predicate for conspiracy to commit another non-crime, which incidentally was artificially split in pieces to add years and penalties. The 34 counts are another absurdity, one reporters continually forgot yesterday to cover up by pretending the case was about multiple acts and not one deal (the Globe and Mail: Trump convicted of trying to “hide a US$130,000 payoff to porn star Stormy Daniels”).
Matt Taibbi: [...] And that’s why a couple of weeks ago, the thing that triggered this discussion between you and me was a sudden wave of editorials by all the biggest news organizations saying that we have to make free speech a rallying cry again. The Washington Post did this remarkable editorial about diversity statements being compelled speech, which I thought was obvious years ago, but people in mainstream press haven’t been able to talk about these things for a long time. The New Yorker, which has been an absolute bastion of campaigning for speech codes and a more stifling atmosphere, has suddenly come out with headlines like, The Radical Case for Free Speech. And this is what got us talking about this idea of idea, well, maybe they’re stepping away from the line a little bit in the more extreme cases. And I think diversity statements are an extreme case. You can’t just make... It’s like black-letter First Amendment laws, you can’t force somebody to say something.
Walter Kirn: Come on, that’s the most disingenuous thing I’ve seen. Everything in the last few years has been about making people say things and criticizing them if they fail to say things voluntarily. In other words, we’ve got more complex speech codes than ever in my lifetime, and we’ve got penalties attached to failing to live up to them, sometimes legal penalties, but certainly institutional and social penalties all over the board. Compelled speech has been the name of the game as much as censorship and disinformation patrolling has been the other side of it.[...]Walter Kirn: When newspapers take what to me is the bedrock morality of American journalism that you are free to speak, you allow others to speak, and you don’t spend your time patrolling violations of speech in your stories, you don’t actually make yourself into an affirmative enforcement body against free speech, which they also did. Because they started running editorials, I remember the one in the Atlantic which said the admiring of the Chinese system and so on.
Matt Taibbi: Oh, my God. Yeah, that one was great.
Walter Kirn: You don’t get to go back. That’s my rule. Once you have offended against the basic tenet of your endeavor, your cultural endeavor, you can’t have it back. You eat the pie, you can’t throw it back up and have it again.
Matt Taibbi: I know Walter, but I’ll take it. I will. I would take it. Would you take it?
Walter Kirn: No. No.
So my mother was a nurse and she worked with a Nigerian man who was another nurse, and his specialty was, he was six foot eight or something, and he could lift people out of beds. He could do all the real strong nursing that has to be done with male patients. And he used to give her Nigerian wisdom. And he gave her a saying that she would repeat to me ad nauseum because my mother was very old world kind of person. She said. This is a Nigerian saying supposedly. “The flea cools the bite so it can bite again.” In other words, and that’s a Nigerian saying because a flea will create a little anesthesia after it bites you, so you kind of forget the bite so it gets another shot.[...]They spent all their fricking chips. They made a stupid bet on betraying their own fricking founding principles, and now they want us to give them back some chips so they can keep playing.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, joined by 22 fellow Democrats, sent a letter on Thursday to the Justice Department accusing U.S. oil producers of colluding to keep prices high and inflate their profits. “Only the DOJ can prosecute and fully redress the alleged anticompetitive behavior in the oil sector,” the Senators write.
On what evidence? Their letter cites the Federal Trade Commission’s recent allegation that former Pioneer Natural Resources CEO Scott Sheffield attempted to collude with the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries to restrain production. We explained recently how the FTC twisted Mr. Sheffield’s public statements that producers would show “capital discipline.”
His 23-page response this week makes the agency’s blackball look even slimier. The FTC claimed that Mr. Sheffield had regular contact with OPEC through which he learned the machinations of OPEC and gleaned insight to non-public information regarding the existence of internal OPEC deals. His putative OPEC contact? A U.S. analyst who studied the industry.[...]FTC Chair Lina Khan claimed in a press release to have “uncovered troubling evidence” of Mr. Sheffield trying to “persuade his rivals to join him in colluding to restrict output and raise prices.” The two communications the FTC cited were redacted. Mr. Sheffield says one was with his son and the other was with a small producer who wished him well upon his return as CEO in 2019.
A help to Mr. Bragg’s prosecution is that the jurors were instructed that as long as they were unanimous that Mr. Trump was guilty of falsifying business records to aid or cover up an illegal conspiracy to get him elected, they didn’t all have to agree about which theory of the “unlawful means” they found persuasive. Perhaps this will be taken up by Mr. Trump on appeal. He will almost certainly argue, too, that the Stormy payoff wasn’t a campaign expense, as Brad Smith, a former chairman of the Federal Election Commission, has been arguing all along.
We don’t doubt the sincerity of the Manhattan jurors, but many voters will digest all of this and conclude that, while Mr. Trump may be a cad, this conviction isn’t disqualifying for a second term in the White House. Judge Juan Merchan tolerated Mr. Bragg’s legal creativity in ways that an appeals court might not. What if Mr. Trump loses the election and then is vindicated on appeal? If Democrats think that too many Republicans today complain about stolen elections, imagine how many more might next year.
The Portland Bureau of Transportation considers an outside facilitator necessary to keep a lid on meetings of the Northwest Parking Stakeholders Committee. For the past two years, PBOT hired a consultant whose apparent main function was reminding when it was time to move to the next agenda item.
Last month, she was replaced by Dr. Christine Moses, a higher-powered personality who ran the meeting and would not proceed until all participants did deep-breathing exercises and agreed to abide by rules of conduct. Members were required to take turns reading aloud her recipe for positive interaction. [...]Moses’s website describes her as “a biracial cisgender woman whose goal is to eradicate racism” and whose practice is about “diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging coaching.” She is being paid $241 an hour under a $98,000 two-year contract approved behind the scenes without the SAC’s knowledge.
That process contrasts with transportation projects requested by the SAC that are slow-walked and delayed for years by complex procurement rules that supposedly protect taxpayers from corruption and incompetence.
Here’s where the story gets strange. Although todco’s nonprofit status is predicated on helping poor people afford housing, todco lobbies incessantly to prevent the construction of affordable units in some of San Francisco’s most expensive neighborhoods. In 2018, todco sued to prevent the construction of a mixed-use building on the grounds that it would cast “new shadows” on a community garden; todco then agreed to drop this lawsuit after the building’s developer paid them $98,000, raising questions as to whether todco was merely using San Francisco’s byzantine permitting process to extract a bribe from another developer. In another case, todco lobbied to block a 495-unit housing development that would have included over a hundred affordable units. In other words, an affordable housing nonprofit has repeatedly sued other developers to prevent the construction of the same affordable units that it is supposed to be working to provide.[...]To understand todco’s behavior, you need to know something about the business model of affordable housing nonprofits. An affordable housing NGO makes more money as rents rise in the area where its buildings are located. Government subsidies make up the difference between what the NGO’s tenants are paying and what they /{could be paying} if the building charged them the market rate. This means that a nonprofit, despite its name, has the /{same profit incentive} as any other landlord, in that a lack of housing construction increases its profit margins by driving up rents. The only difference is that a nonprofit benefits from high rents through government subsidies instead of from directly charging its tenants.
At the start of this piece, I said that “the act of naming is a form of propaganda,” an aphorism which applies to nonprofits because the name they’ve been given is a marketing device, rather than an objective representation of their conduct and behavior. It’s important to recognize, though, that nonprofits aren’t the only group relevant to this story that has been given an inaccurate name as a marketing ploy. The political ideology that supports the nonprofit industrial complex is generally referred to as “progressivism,” which calls to mind the socialist-leaning Progressive movement of the early twentieth century. In spite of sharing a common name, however, today’s “progressivism” has nothing in common with the Progressive movements of the last century, is not socialist in any real sense, and is, if anything, an extremist libertarian movement that destroys the ability of the government to function, rather than using state power for the betterment of the poor.
Once you start digging into the evidence, you find that the places where “progressives” wield the most power are some of the least socialist governments in the country. In 2022, San Francisco spent $5.8 billion on private contracts, over 40 percent of all city government spending, while the entire budget of Houston, a city 2.5 times as large, was only $5.7 billion. It is a strange form of socialism that runs more than two-fifths of its government through private contractors, instead of using publicly owned developers and social housing.
Portland, Oregon, meanwhile, has been suffering from a serious trash crisis for the past several years, due both to the city’s soaring homeless population and the government’s refusal to enforce antidumping laws. Portland’s response to the festering trash piles now blighting a once-beautiful city has not been to dramatically increase the government’s capacity to pick up and process garbage; instead, Portland, in conjunction with the state of Oregon, has paid millions of dollars to nonprofits to deal with the trash problem.
Nor are the problems that cities like San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle have with falling population unrelated. By funding inefficient nonprofits instead of more centralized, accountable government initiatives, progressive cities have high /{taxes} but poor /{services}; residents receive nothing in return for the taxes they pay. Portland has one of the highest municipal income tax burdens in the country, but is forty-eighth out of the fifty largest cities in police staffing, has piles of festering, uncollected garbage littering its streets, and only has two thousand shelter beds for a homeless population of 6,300, requiring four thousand homeless Portlanders to sleep outside even if every one of them wanted a bed.
There are several problems to consider. Siege and blockade are legitimate acts of war so long as the aims are military. They become unlawful, in accordance with the 1977 protocol to the Geneva Conventions, when the aim is not the destruction of the enemy’s fighting capacity, but rather the deliberate starvation of civilians as a method of warfare. But for a war crime to occur in the juridical sense, an international conflict—that is, a war between states—must exist. The ICC sees Hamas not as the legitimate government of a Gaza state separate from Palestine, but as a well organised, non-state actor. To get around this legal problem, Khan argues that there are two conflicts taking place. The first, he says, is a “non-international conflict between Israel and Hamas.” The other, he claims, is “an international conflict between Israel and Palestine.”
The manipulation of obvious facts here is stunning. To its north, Israel faces a shooting war with Hezbollah, which, like Hamas, directs its rockets at Israeli population centres. On 13 April, Israel survived a substantial attack by Iran. Khan is mute on both, suggesting instead that the second conflict is a non-existent shooting war between Israel and Palestine. It is only in the nexus of this particular “international conflict” that Khan can charge Israeli leaders with the war crime of starving Gaza’s civilians. With his notion of a “common plan,” Khan suggests that Israel has used Hamas’s massacres of 7 October as a pretext to kill other enemies entirely.
The other obvious factual problem concerns Israel’s compliance, and Hamas’s unambiguous noncompliance, with the 1977 Geneva requirement that belligerents provide and distribute relief to civilians.
There is another odd aspect to the warrant. Khan charges Netanyahu and Gallant with the war crime of “intentionally directing attacks against a civilian population.” This charge surely refers to Israel’s heavy air and ground attacks against rocket sites as well as civilian buildings believed to shelter weapons, fighters, and tunnel shafts. In her preliminary report of 2019, Fatou Bensouda noted evidence of something that everyone already knew—that Hamas uses Gazan civilians to shield its fighters and its ordnance. Use of civilians as shields constitutes a war crime according to the Geneva Conventions and the Rome Statute. Yet when listing possible charges against Sinwar and other Hamas leaders, Khan omits Bensouda’s arguments concerning human shields. Why has he done this? It is no secret that Hamas has continued to use hospitals, mosques, apartment buildings, and other civilian structures in this way. It is also no secret that Israel warns civilians through innumerable leaflets, texts, and phone calls to flee certain areas and even certain buildings before attacking them.
There were a few false starts: the human resources department was later run by a woman whose résumé included a long stint as vice president of HR for Harvey Weinstein. But by the end of my tenure with the company in 2023, as Vice was careening toward a financial cliff, the office had been radicalized, transformed into a sort of political reeducation department. It was no longer run by a human resource director but a shockingly well-remunerated “Chief People Officer” who, when not laying people off, issued various joyless partisan diktats. (As Howard Zinn, North Korea, and various terrorist groups have taught us, be wary of anything promising to service the “people.”)
There were plenty of individual moments that precipitated Vice’s demise, but one frequently overlooked was this drive toward professionalization and respectability. None of the founders had graduated college, but the misfit autodidacts were gradually overtaken by business school drones and J-school bores, all of whom assumed that great power demanded social responsibility.
The boozy parties became less frequent, the content increasingly dreary and humorless, marked by undergraduate ideological obsessions. Vice was slowly transforming itself from the publication that gave America articles about “donkey fucking” and “piss dungeons” to a billion-dollar college newspaper.
There was, it seemed, no place for someone from the old Vice. A panel show I hosted was, in 2016, given the green light for a second season, until I was abruptly disinvited from further preproduction meetings, explicitly told that, while everyone liked me and the show was doing good numbers, it was determined that a more “diverse” host was required.
This would happen again four years later, at the start of the Covid pandemic, when Vice jettisoned a political satire pilot I was shooting that skewered both the vulgar populist right and the humorless woke left. The cancellation was never conveyed to me by management—who I didn’t speak to until almost three years later, when negotiating my severance. Meanwhile, those working with me were quietly relocated to a different opinion show, something I discovered from an article in a TV trade journal. That show, called A Seat at the Table, was hosted by a Harvard-educated millionaire whose latest book advocated the abolition of billionaires. The show would “offer regular people a chance to discuss the major issues of the day.” The first episode featured interviews with AOC and Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane. It was canceled after three months.
In an organization governed by subtle intimidation, it was impossible to tell what anyone really believed. Countless executives and management types privately agreed with me that a lunatic strand of activism was destroying the company and driving away our previous audience, only to, sometimes just days later, deliver some Zoom call incantation about Vice’s commitment to correcting all manner of historical wrongs.
But for Vice’s corporate quislings, the disappearing viewers and readers didn’t really matter. Their fat paychecks just got fatter. And as the layoffs mounted, their already obscene bonuses started looking almost pornographic. After all, it wasn’t their money they were setting on fire.
After the 2021 Atlanta massage parlor shootings, which killed six Asian women though local authorities determined it was not motivated by racism, an email asked Vice journalists to “take caution with language in news coverage that could fuel the hyper-sexualization of Asian women, which has been linked to violence and discrimination.” In other words, if the massage parlor was doubling as a brothel, best not mention it.
A 2022 shooting in the immigrant-heavy neighborhood of Sunset Park, Brooklyn, elicited an email from CEO Nancy Dubuc offering counseling services. When the shooter was revealed to be a mentally unstable black man who spent his free time posting uncharitable views of white people on Facebook, the issue was never mentioned again.
So, I don't think I'm qualified to write that book, and if anything I'm less qualified now than I was twelve years or so ago, since it's been a long while since I've brushed up on the source material. But I think I'm better versed in what went into it than most people, and I'm prepared to at least take a stab at a substack comment on the subject.
My impression, as of around 2009, before people identified "woke" as a thing, and before the social justice subculture that gave rise to the term had really solidified, but at a point when it was distinctly trending in that direction, is that the movement was essentially a result of academic ideas filtered through a specific, mostly online social context. While a lot of people, especially back then, would argue that the academic basis of the movement was sound, but often interpreted poorly by radical ideologues, my impression, as someone who read a lot more of the actual academic work than most, is that this was a mistaken interpretation, that the academic work actually *was* written largely by radical ideologues in the first place, and simply dressed up in language suited to an academic audience.
I still identify as much more left wing than right wing, and this was even more the case at the time, since the far left end hadn't moved nearly as far away from me at that point. But, my impression is that at least as far back as the aftermath of the Civil Rights Movement, there was a balance between the left and right wings on issues of racial and gender justice etc. where both sides essentially held to the norms of trying to enact their desired changes via collective political action and measured civil disobedience, with the left wing making more or less continual progress against the right, until the left wing decided to defect first.
This began in academia, with writers who framed the issue of racial justice essentially in terms of existential warfare. Basically "we are opposed by a group of ideological enemies who are trying to destroy us and everything we represent. The mechanisms of gradual change collective political action and measured civil disobedience are fundamentally aligned against us in the favor of our ideological enemies, thus we have to break away from those and fight with tools which fundamentally favor our cause in order to be able to effectively defend ourselves." Because the writers in question were academics with cushy university positions, their actual mechanism of political action was writing books arguing people ought to do these things, which were mostly only read by other academics and ignored by the general populace. But when social justice started becoming a major component of the online subculture which was incubating in the mid to late 2000s, although only a minority of people actually read the work of actual academics on the subject, people who did were extremely influential in the movement, and ideas which originated in academia propagated to fixation through it.
In the earlier days of the social justice movement, there were separate strains which cooperated on object-level goals, but disagreed over big-picture questions like "should we frame social agendas in terms of Us vs. Them conflict drawn around identity groups, or in terms of alignment with philosophical goals?" and "should we attempt to move towards progressively more colorblind ideals of egalitarianism, or ones which consciously privilege minority groups?" The identitarian strain eventually became more or less hegemonic over the movement, partly I think because it's an easier sell based on ordinary patterns of human thought (we've been engaged in identitarian tribal conflict for the entirety of human history,) and partly because almost all the academic underpinning behind the movement actually argued in support of the identitarian strain.
I personally started to distance myself from the social justice movement around 2009, while remaining broadly aligned with its object-level goals, in large part because I started reading enough of the academic philosophy behind it to realize that the academics other people were treating as foundational figures (even if most of them didn't actually read their work) were essentially arguing that we needed to abandon the societal institution of liberalism because it was fundamentally aligned against the goals of social justice, while failing to acknowledge that the mechanisms of liberalism had been producing consistent incremental gains for social justice for the last several decades.
This is also how I remember things. The part that seems mysterious to me is how the left defected from pre-existing norms so successfully - or rather, if defection gave such an obvious advantage, how the pre-existing norms had stayed in place before.
naraburns writes:
> Anyway, I would argue that "woke" does not begin with civil rights law, but rather that both are the result of the same intellectual tradition. "Woke" attitudes are basically analogous to what was called "cultural Marxism" decades ago (see e.g. Weiner's (1981) "Cultural Marxism and Political Sociology"), but since "Cultural Marxism" has been retconned as an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, people needed a different name for it. The linguistic treadmill is merciless, especially when dealing with political movements attempting to escape accountability for their past failures (or successes).
I agree that there’s a crappy trick that goes:[1. Take a thing that you don’t want people to be allowed to talk about. For example, maybe Coca-Cola doesn’t want people to talk about how soda makes you fat.
2. Find some schizos saying a much stronger, extremely offensive thing. For example, “the Jews are adding obesity-promoting chemicals to Coca-Cola in order to destroy the white race”.
3. Get a bunch of “disinformation researchers” to make a huge deal about the schizos and say things like “The MAGA phenomenon is largely fueled by white resentment over the Great Enfattening conspiracy theory”.
4. Now nobody can talk about how Coca-Cola makes you fat, because people will say “That’s the discredited racist Great Enfattening conspiracy theory, shame on you for platforming that kind of stuff.”]…and that all the current debate around “Cultural Marxism” is downstream of people pulling off this trick very successfully, so it’s become pretty hard to understand the history.
Leah Libresco Sargeant (blog) writes:{Helen Andrews is also pretty strongly against civil rights law, and has an interesting piece about union-flavored workplaces vs HR-flavored ones: https://thelampmagazine.com/issues/issue-21/against-human-resources
» “There is a masculine alternative to H.R. It is called a union. In any given workplace, H.R. ladies and union reps perform many of the same functions. If you have a conflict that needs adjudicating, you want to make sure the company gives you all the vacation days you’re entitled to, or you have a complaint about workplace conditions, you go to them. Underneath this functional similarity, however, the two models of workplace relations rest on very different assumptions.
» The idea behind unions is that workers and bosses are fundamentally in conflict. They don’t have to hate each other, by any means, but their interests diverge, and the best way for them to reach agreement is to have a fair fight by clearly defined rules. This is the opposite of H.R.’s ethos, which is all about denying that conflict exists and finding win–win solutions—or at least solutions that everyone will pretend are win–win after they have been badgered into accepting the consensus.”
I am more in favor than she is of pursuing some of the goods of civil rights law, but I agree strongly with her about the benefits of openly acknowledging that workers and bosses have conflicting interests and need to negotiate the middle ground. I really really dislike the "only fight obliquely"/doublethinky mode that she and Hannania identify. I think it does create a culture against truthspeaking.}
Thanks, I had never thought about HR as an “alternative” to unions before, so this was an interesting comparison.
Also, I find it interesting that everyone, even in this politically correct age, agrees to call human resources staffers “HR ladies”. I haven’t worked at enough corporations to have much personal experience of this - why should it be such a universal phenomenon?
https://reason.com/2024/05/23/american-manufacturers-need-tax-and-regulatory-reform-not-tariffs/The Biden Administration is showering far and wide more than $1 trillion in climate largesse from the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). Still, who could have thought that taxpayer funds would flow to a left-wing group that thinks “climate justice” involves everything from freeing Palestine to dismantling capitalism?[...]What else does Climate Justice Alliance do? Last November it helped to coordinate a “March on Washington,” where protesters waved the banner “Free Palestine Is a Climate Justice Issue.” Other slogans included “Our Government Funds Palestinian Genocide” and “Only Socialist Revolution Can Stop World War III.”
The group’s website includes a “Free Palestine” section, with a video that uses “an anti-colonial framework to show how Climate Justice and the liberation of Palestine are connected.” It doesn’t disappoint. “Climate change did not begin with the burning of fossil fuels,” the narrator says. “It began with settler colonialism, imperialism and extractivism.” He asks viewers “to demand that we cut military funding to Israel and begin the process of demilitarization, so that we can all be free.”[...]Climate Justice Alliance’s website says that “more than $3 trillion will move through federal agencies” from the IRA and Congress’s 2021 infrastructure law, and “now is the time for grassroots organizations to influence the direction of, and step into governance of, these monies.” It’s no surprise that radicals are trying to get the money, but it’s disturbing that the Administration would give it to them.
In a recent paper titled "Industrial Headwinds: Reducing the Burden of Regulations on U.S. Manufacturers," published in the May 2024 Club for Growth Policy Handbook, economist Daniel Ikenson writes, "For manufacturing firms, the cost of federal regulations in 2022 was roughly $350 billion, or 13.5% of the sector's GDP—a burden 26% greater than the inflation-adjusted cost of regulatory compliance in 2012."
He adds that while the average U.S. company pays a regulatory compliance price of $13,000 per employee, large manufacturers shoulder a cost more than twice as much—$29,100. However, even some small-sized manufacturers face annual compliance costs of $50,100 per employee. This helps explain why manufacturing automation is so popular and why our fastest-growing companies are in service-sector tech, not manufacturing.
One wonders how small manufacturers even stay in business.
And yet, this much is sure: U.S. manufactures are still successful. This is remarkable given that they're so heavily encumbered by government regulations. Ikenson reminds us that "despite the varied accumulating impositions thrust upon US manufacturers…in 2022, 'real manufacturing GDP' reached a record high of $2.28 billion. Sector value added per worker also reached a record high of nearly $142,000, which was 50% more than South Korea, who landed second for that metric."
→ Covid origins cover-ups are so sloppy: You would think that when you’re working to hide details about Covid from the American public, you wouldn’t discuss it on your government work email. But it turns out Fauci’s crew discussed the logistics of hiding information from their government emails. . . on their government emails. Like the Boomers they are. And now it’s all been revealed to a congressional subcommittee through subpoena and published in the New York Post:
Here is NIH senior adviser Dr. David Morens in April 2021: “. . . I can either send stuff to Tony [Dr. Fauci] on his private gmail, or hand it to him at work or at his house. He is too smart to let colleagues send him stuff that could cause trouble.”
The next month, David writes: “I suggested Arthur try to interview Tony directly and connected him to our ‘secret’ back channel.”
He brags about learning “how to make emails disappear” after journalists requested them.
Or my favorite: “We are all smart enough to know to never have smoking guns, and if we did we wouldn’t put them in emails and if we found them we’d delete them,” from a June 16, 2020, email sent two months after Wuhan’s grant was initially suspended.
On one level I’m charmed. This reads like my dad trying to commit secret crimes. It’s like when the cops catch someone for murder because their browser history is all “how much fentanyl to kill my wife” and “how to carry 152-lb woman into car very heavy bad back.” It’s funny. But read these emails and remember: The Washington Post and The New York Times told us that all of this is a “conspiracy theory.” They stand by that! There’s been no retraction! There never will be. Fauci must be remembered as the nation’s beautiful doctor, and our mainstream media will never back down on that. So we’re all stuck with one true paper of record: the New York Post.
It was a bracing and painful read just weeks after being raped, and I frequently had to put it down. Paglia self-identifies as a feminist, but much of her book seemed to be an attack on conventional feminist ideas, particularly the notion that the oppression of women is a consequence of misogynistic social conditioning. The years I’d spent absorbing feminist scholarship had taught me that rape occurs because men have been socialized by our patriarchal culture to consider their toxic actions permissible or even laudable. But Paglia argues that it is human civilization and not the untamed natural world that offers salvation:
> Rape is a mode of natural aggression that can be controlled only by the social contract. Modern feminism’s most naive formulation is its assertion that rape is a crime of violence but not of sex, that it is merely power masquerading as sex. But sex is power, and all power is inherently aggressive. Rape is male power fighting female power. It is no more to be excused than is murder or any other assault on another’s civil rights. Society is women’s protection against rape, not, as some feminists absurdly maintain, the cause of rape. Rape is the sexual expression of the will-to-power, which nature plants in all of us and which civilization rose to contain. Therefore the rapist is the man with too little socialization rather than too much.
These felt like dangerous ideas, and they were upsetting at first. I even wrote witheringly about Paglia in my journal. But I found her arguments impossible to dismiss and I kept returning to them. Her vision of the scope and magnitude of the eternal conflicts between civilization and the natural world made sense to me and were both awe-inspiring and comforting. I preferred to know what storms and pitfalls I might encounter so I could properly prepare. I found myself reconsidering much of what I had understood about the world from my feminist viewpoint. For example, the denial of biological differences between men and women, foundational to my understanding of human nature, now seemed flimsy and unrealistic, and the conclusions that followed from that denial began to seem foolish.
I reject this entire approach as unserious. I reject the refusal to acknowledge that women are capable of making reckless decisions and that noticing such recklessness somehow diminishes the moral responsibility of her attacker. I reject the idea that the definition of rape lies in the eye of the beholder—violent rape and reluctant acquiescence in the face of persistence or pressure are obviously vastly different. I reject a system of mob justice that relies upon the power of rage, public shame and stigma, the loyalties of a large social-media following, and the intimidation of employers to dispense retribution. And I reject the idea that advising women to be active advocates for their safety and well-being is restrictive.
https://www.wsj.com/tech/personal-tech/middle-schoolers-academic-success-innovation-40e8456dAt the start of this school year, the students seemed much better behaved, leading Rutherford and fellow teachers to think they had finally turned a corner. But the students’ quietude masked deeper discontent.
Students would put on headphones in class and tune out, saying it helped ease their anxiety, he says. “There was this low-energy apathy and isolation.”
By October, half his students were failing his class. They didn’t want to be at school, they told him, and didn’t care about their grades. Rutherford himself grew anxious and depressed. “I was beginning to think I was the problem,” he says.[...]Banning phones outright would require school board approval and parent buy-in. Parents in many districts have been pushing back against phone bans.[...]Before the detox Isabel Richey, a senior in Rutherford’s AP biology class, was spending six hours a day on her phone, most of it watching TikTok. “I would go on my phone at the beginning of every class and never get off,” she says.
She’s now down to about an hour a day, and has read nine novels since starting the detox. She’s also been doing homework in long chunks, without breaking to watch TikTok every 10 minutes. She says she’s in a better mood and feels less stress.
“I can completely understand why Mr. Rutherford is tired of trying to get through to students,” she says. “I’m surprised more of my teachers haven’t been pushed to that point.”
https://www.wsj.com/tech/personal-tech/boys-think-schools-favor-girls-schools-are-trying-new-tricks-to-change-that-2b9e4934The roots of boys’ problems are complex. Things that once benefited boys in school, including male teachers, recess and vocational classes, have dwindled in recent years.
“It seems like pretty significant mission creep for us to comment on the hiring practices of private companies when our mission is to combat disinformation,” Kasparov wrote, regarding proposals to “remake media” and police workplace diversity. Then, in a comment that strikes at the heart of the problem with the content moderation era, Kasparov said deploying a commission on disinformation to settle an issue as distant as workplace diversity recalled an earlier memory:
> If I’m being honest, having a Commission on disinformation determine acceptable levels of diversity reminds me of home. This type of approach was common practice in the USSR.
The Soviets used everything from worker and peasant inspectorates (e.g. {Rabkrin}) to psychiatric bodies to punish suspect political behavior. The Commission similarly imagined using the narrow remit of “disinformation” to reach into remote political corners, subjecting would-be offenders to everything from advertising bans to denial of services to revocation of medical accreditation. Kasparov’s observation was sadly prescient.
Bernie Sanders praised Fidel Castro’s literacy program on 60 Minutes. The candidate’s remarks have been justly criticized, for all the obvious reasons. One defense that has been made is that Sanders is factually correct. The line goes that the Castro regime, for all its evils, made great strides in improving education, and also health care, for Cubans.
Is that so? Justin Trudeau made similar claims after Castro died in 2016, and Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post fact-checked them. He gave Trudeau three Pinocchios (four would have been the worst rating), concluding:
> Trudeau appears to accept outdated Cuban government spin as current fact. The reality is that education and health care were already relatively vibrant in Cuba before the revolution, compared with other Latin American countries. While the Castro regime has not let that slip — and given greater access to the poor — it is a stretch to claim Castro was responsible for “significant improvements,” especially more recently.
> Many other Latin American countries made far more dramatic strides in the past six decades, without the need for a communist dictatorship; Cuba simply had a head start when Castro seized power.
> Moreover, the focus on health care and education should not detract from the fact that overall living standards, as measured by gross domestic product, calorie consumption and other measures, have declined significantly under communist rule. . .
https://www.thefp.com/p/israel-is-not-equivalent-to-hamasThe defects in the ICC’s allegations against Israel are many. Prosecutor Karim Ahmad Khan alleges “starvation of civilians as a method of warfare.” Hamas lists 31 Gazans whom it claims died of malnutrition and dehydration in seven months of war. That’s out of 2.3 million whom Egypt won’t let out over its border.
Israel has facilitated the entry of 542,570 tons of aid, and 28,255 aid trucks, in an unprecedented effort to supply an enemy’s civilians, even while Hamas steals the aid and tries to frustrate delivery. Israel has begged Egypt for two weeks to let in aid at Rafah, while Egypt refuses. Is this the behavior of an Israeli government bent on starving Gazans?[...]The ICC also lacks jurisdiction. Israel, like the U.S., never signed the treaty that created it. To permit prosecutions of Israel, the court twisted its rules to summon a State of Palestine, with borders defined by fiat, which it could call a member state.
The ICC is supposed to intervene as a “court of last resort,” in the absence of national judiciaries able to hold leaders to account. Think of Hamas, whose courts are rubber stamps. Israel has an independent court that is renowned for its activist, antigovernment tilt.
Then there’s the fact that Israel is not a party to the treaty that created the International Criminal Court, or ICC. Blinken said that “the United States has been clear since well before the current conflict that ICC has no jurisdiction over this matter.” Finally, Blinken noted “deeply troubling process questions.” Israel has said it was willing to cooperate with the court and that Khan had been due to visit Israel next week. Instead he abruptly announced his application for a warrant, which “call[s] into question the legitimacy and credibility of this investigation,” Blinken said.
But even assuming Khan is waging a credible, legitimate prosecution, there is another problem with the case. Khan’s central accusation against Israel is that the Jewish state has “intentionally and systematically deprived the civilian population in all parts of Gaza of objects indispensable to human survival.” That is a crime under international law. And Khan argues in a press statement that Israel has used “starvation of civilians as a method of warfare” to collectively punish Gaza’s 2.3 million people and to pressure Hamas to release the hostages it captured on October 7.
The manuscript of Basic Economics sat around for about a decade. From time to time, something that I saw in a newspaper or magazine or on television would set me off and I would see an economic principle that it illustrated or a fallacy that needed to be corrected—usually the latter. But, once I had written whatever it took to deal with that particular issue, I felt no compulsion to continue writing Basic Economics. Only after the manuscript had grown to a considerable size over the years did I start re-organizing it and filling in the missing subjects that would turn it into an introduction to economics for the general public. During this long span of years, many dramatic illustrations and quotations turned up from time to time and were added to spice up the discussion at the places where they fitted in.
It's not often that I agree with Daring Fireball about an issue with Apple. I tend to be more critical of Apple than the Apple Apologia Squad. But this time John points out a major issue with Apple Macintosh development and what I think developers are (correctly) presuming: that Apple is only moments away from taking a 27% cut of all Macintosh software sales, regardless of which platform you sell it on. Apple is in the unique position to ask for this because Apple owns the entire ecosystem from the hardware it runs on to the software it'll accept. Folks in the Free/Open Source community have been crowing about this for years but apparently it takes a hit to the bottom line of developers to get their attention.
My modest proposal is this: "start targeting Linux".
The 14th Amendment contains multitudes, but get a load of this: It requires West Virginia’s Medicaid plan to pay for transgender surgeries, at least under the recent 8-6 en banc ruling by a federal appeals court. The health program as it’s written “covers mastectomies to treat cancer, but not to treat gender dysphoria,” the majority says, and thus it’s unconstitutional.[...]Or consider that West Virginia pays for male mastectomies if there’s a diagnosis of gynecomastia, or enlarged breast tissue. The differing coverage, the judge says, “is rooted in a gender stereotype: the assumption that people who have been assigned female at birth are supposed to have breasts, and that people assigned male at birth are not. No doubt, the majority of those assigned female at birth have breasts, and the majority of those assigned male at birth do not. But we cannot mistake what is for what must be.”
Judge Gregory cites and echoes Justice Neil Gorsuch’s logic in the High Court’s 2020 Bostock ruling. The 1964 Civil Rights Act bans employment discrimination by “sex,” and Bostock held that to include gay and transgender status. Justice Samuel Alito warned that the decision, with humane intent, was rewriting the law and inviting chaos: “The entire Federal Judiciary will be mired for years in disputes about the reach of the Court’s reasoning.” And here we are.
Treating different things differently doesn’t violate the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause, and jurists aren’t supposed to ignore the obvious. Writing in dissent at the Fourth Circuit, Judge Julius Richardson struggles to contain his exasperation. “The states,” he says, “have chosen to cover alterations of a person’s breasts or genitalia only if the person experiences physical injury, disease, or (in West Virginia) congenital absence of genitalia.”
MMT is firmly part of the Master All Knowledge in Five Minutes starter kit that’s armed millions of social media users to argue almost any subject with startling assurance, a fit for the personality that feels certain enough about other things to, say, hurl soup at a Van Gogh. Right-wingers often fall into the trap of scoffing at MMT because of its simplistic X = X sales pitch (I saw one “Austrian school” podcaster warn that MMT proponents often “lead with their tautologies”), but MMT isn’t stupid. It’s just been rebranded to appeal to the one-note thinker, a demographic unfortunately growing at an exponential rate, giving the theory a huge political boost of late as young people especially embrace its simplicity.
In 2008 I was assigned to write about the causes of a financial crash and learned quickly that America had suffered through a series of disastrous speculative manias, each triggered when finance-sector lunatics discovered what they thought were Rumplestiltskin-style magic money machines. In the eighties, financiers like Mike Milken convinced everyone who mattered on Wall Street, including ratings agencies, that they’d discovered a way to turn straw (junk bonds) into investment-grade securities. Heretofore worthless high-yield corporate bonds financed takeover sprees, leading to a historic bull market, then a crash.
Then came the Internet boom, when Fed chairman Alan Greenspan agreed Galileo was wrong and technology created a new economics where growth without inflation was not just possible, but proven (“New Paradigm here to stay” the Independent cheered in 1999) and companies didn’t need records of profitability, or records at all, to be sound investments. When that bubble burst, bankers ran the junk bond con again, nearly blowing up the universe when they somehow convinced even each other that straw (subprime mortgages) could be turned into gold (investment-grade securities).
Matt is confused again. MMT is not in itself political. It is intellectual. It explains how money works and corrects some widespread misunderstandings about that. What you do with the correct understanding may or may not be political.[...]You should bone up on what MMT involves. It is a politically-neutral descriptive and empirical theory. A lot of people elaborate from that to say what should or should not be done politically but that's literally a different discussion. If you can't separate the theory from the attendant noise then you don't understand the theory and you're contributions will likely be adding to the noise.
> Lol, this is on the level with "socialism isn't political, it is the scientific application of the new and eternally correct Marxist discoveries about economics"
Exactly. God how I hate being lectured about how something as basic as, “We need to decide what’s too rich” isn’t political.
Don't be so sure she's wrong. MMT is actually a sophisticated theory that does two things neoclassical and "liberal" economic theory don't. It describes how money is truly created in the fiat world, and why in fact the selling of bonds to "raise" money to spend is a misunderstanding of how the monetary system actually functions.
MMT does not say that govts can simply print money all day long with no worries about inflation. It points out that it can print money for the needs of the nation, which under a responsible govt include building/rebuilding infrastructure, education, funding of projects that will either raise GDP directly or indirectly -- facilitate real growth: not growth in speculation and asset prices and other corrupt practices that are wrecking our country now.
The fact is our govt has been practicing a Frankenstein form of MMT for some time by having the Fed simply buy many of the bonds it sells (have you seen the Fed's balance sheet over the past 15 years?) and then using the money it "raises" that way to bailout banks, finance wars and funnel money to cronies.
Another key point about MMT is that this printing without selling bonds (which we already do when the Fed buys the bonds - just with a fig leaf over the whole thing to pretend that's not what we're doing) can only be done in a nation's own currency, and that if a nation holds tremendous amounts of foreign debt printing this way can be deadly - Zimbabwe style.
The US owes dollars and so it could simply print $35 trillion tomorrow and buy back every bond it has ever sold to anyone and poof no more national debt. Now that would destabilize the banking (at least temporarily) and stop the govt from being able to control interest rates (which is the only realy reason it sells bonds) so that's not on, but the point is the debt, in our own currency, is not the real problem in the US.
My big problem with MMT is that it has one fatal flaw that economics do all the time. They have a self-aggrandizing joke (they love those) which is basically "assume a hammer" (like a hammer can be conjured without a factory to make them). In this case it's "assume a responsible and uncorrupted government". Assume away, but we've been "doing" MMT since at least 2009 and giving all that money to the financial system which includes private equity and every other powerful player in DC and it's gotten us houses we can't afford, medical care prices that are truly insane, rent, gas, cars, education, and every other damn thing Americans need to shoot up in price, finally including food.
This misallocation of resources will haunt us now but honestly it could be fixed quickly if we just ripped off the fig leaf, reimposed a new form of Glass-Steagall (the old one simply won't work in this brave new world of securitizing and selling everything) and a shit-ton of other reforms that would be on the level of FDR's New Deal financial changes that stabilized the financial system for over 3/4 of a century until they broke Glass Steagall and passed the Commodities Futures Modernization Act - and corrupted GAAP practices and a bunch of other things.
The task would be Herculean and I don't see those dumb bastards in Congress who were insulting each other's hairdos and bodies yesterday as up to it. So the fact is we're fucked until we fix our education system, get serious about governing the country again, and take the vampire squid from around the neck of Congress, said squid being the big banks, private equity firms, foreign corrupting nations from China to Israel to Qatar to you name it, big pharma, the military industrial complex, etc. In other words we need a miracle. A Teddy Roosevelt type to rip the trusts apart and that's only the beginning. I'm not holding my breath.
Poison ivy’s unambiguous potency made it a subject of interest to pharmacists in an era when most drugs were derived from nature. Soon, extracts hit the market.
By 1936, poison-ivy extract was being used to prevent annual summer outbreaks of exposure to the plant at a New Jersey state-run boys home. In 1954, a randomized, double-blind experiment found that 94 percent of Coast Guard personnel given poison-ivy-extract pills received “full protection” from the vine-choked banks of the Mississippi River, demonstrating the treatment’s efficacy “with a very high and conclusive level of statistical significance.”
By that decade, a raft of poison-ivy-extract pills and shots could be purchased from companies including Merck Sharp & Dohme and Parke-Davis, a major American drug company later incorporated into Pfizer. The makers of one poison-ivy pill, Aqua Ivy AP, advertised “season-long immunity to poison ivy and poison oak.”
In the late 1970s, when the federal government began scrutinizing old “grandfathered” drugs, a Food and Drug Administration advisory panel noted that oral urushiol treatments had been “tested and proven to be effective.” Pharmaceutical manufacturers could continue to sell them, so long as they could demonstrate an ability to produce functional doses of consistent strength.
The drugmakers never did, despite repeated FDA extensions to file the data. The FDA’s history office said it was unable to pull records on the process. Representatives of Merck and Pfizer said they couldn’t find records relating to predecessor companies’ decisions around the drugs. [...]Most contemporary researchers on poison-oak and poison-ivy rashes whom I contacted were unfamiliar with the history of desensitization.
“I may not be of much help when it comes to folk remedies and their efficacy,” one wrote curtly, ignoring my follow-up emails.
The scientists who had performed the research I’d been steeping myself in were mostly dead, and efforts to build upon their work had gone with them. Then I found Mahmoud ElSohly, a pharmacologist who was working to develop an injectable drug containing urushiol with the biotech startup Hapten Sciences. After clearing early safety trials, Hapten said it is a couple of months away from commencing a new trial to identify the correct dose. If all goes well, a drug could be on the market by 2026.
Despite its recent double-digit decreases, the Portland metro area had the 11th highest vehicle-theft rate per 100,000 residents in 2023, according to the latest available data analyzed by the NICB. That is down from the fifth highest theft rate in 2022.
“Two years ago, you couldn’t turn a corner without having a stolen car in the vicinity,” Crawford said. “And now it’s nice to have to go out and actually have to try hard to find them.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_famine_of_1921%E2%80%931922According to Sheldon M. Stern, Stalinist propaganda later portrayed the Allied intervention as a U.S. military invasion of Russia while denying or minimizing the American famine relief effort that saved millions of Russian lives during 1921–1923.[171]
Winston Churchill, who had been the most prominent supporter of a campaign to remove the Bolsheviks from power, long lamented the Allies' failure to crush the Soviet state in its infancy. This was especially the case during the breakdown of western-Soviet relations in the aftermath of World War II and the start of the Cold War. In 1949, Churchill stated to the British Parliament:
> I think the day will come when it will be recognized without doubt, not only on one side of the House, but throughout the civilized world, that the strangling of Bolshevism at its birth would have been an untold blessing to the human race.[172]
In a further speech at the National Press Club, Washington D.C., in June 1954, Churchill lamented:
> If I had been properly supported in 1919, I think we might have strangled Bolshevism in its cradle, but everybody turned up their hands and said, "How shocking!"[173]
In January 2010, the court itself became the target of a presidential declamation. “With all due deference to separation of powers,” President Barack Obama said, “last week the Supreme Court reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests—including foreign corporations—to spend without limit in our elections.”
As Democratic lawmakers arose behind the justices and clapped, TV cameras caught Justice Alito shaking his head and mouthing the words “not true.” He was right, as even the New York Times’s Linda Greenhouse acknowledged. Citizens United v. FEC didn’t touch the Tillman Act of 1907, which to this day prohibits corporate campaign contributions. It struck down provisions of a different law, enacted in 2002, and overturned precedents dating only to 1990 and 2003.
Justice Alito was surprised by Mr. Obama’s error. “I imagine the State of the Union speech is vetted inside out and backwards,” he told us. “Somebody should have seen that this statement was inaccurate.” He also failed to realize he was on camera: “My mistake was that I didn’t think about the fact that the text is distributed to the media ahead of time. They knew that the president was going to talk about the Supreme Court, so they had their cameras on us. . . . That’s why it’s a sore point.”
Justice Alito isn’t the first member of the court to shun the State of the Union. John Paul Stevens never attended. Antonin Scalia last went in 1997, Clarence Thomas in 2006. “It has turned into a childish spectacle,” Scalia said in 2013. “I don’t want to be there to lend dignity to it.”
Chief Justice Roberts was only a little less pointed in March 2010, six weeks after the Obama-Alito kerfuffle. “The image of having the members of one branch of government standing up, literally surrounding the Supreme Court, cheering and hollering, while the court, according to the requirements of protocol, has to sit there expressionless, I think is very troubling,” he told students at the University of Alabama Law School. “To the extent the State of the Union has degenerated into a political pep rally, I’m not sure why we’re there.”
Professor of political science James Scott agreed with Campos, adding that while all Ivy League schools are subject to similar levels of government regulation, Yale still leads the group in manager to student ratio.
“One [cause] is the tremendous increase in revenue generated by these universities that more or less has to be spent,” Campos said. “This means that as revenues go up, there has to be found ways to spend them. And one of the most natural ways to increase spending is to increase administration, the size of it and the compensation of the top administrators in particular.”
Since 2003, the University’s operating revenue has jumped 200 percent from $1.5 billion to $4.6 billion.
Campos argued that federal regulations stand as an excuse for, not a driver of, the expansion. He said the administration sets out to grow in power and influence, and that administrators point to issues such as federal regulatory compliance as a justification for growing and extending their power.
Our discussion was supposed to center on a paper I wrote with Luana Maroja for The Skeptical Inquirer, ‘The ideological subversion of biology“, which dealt with the distortion of six areas of evolutionary biology by well-meaning people whose ideology did not comport with biological reality. It had nothing to do with war in the Middle East.[...]Here is the official cancellation:
> Hi NAME REDACTED,> I’m sorry to inform you that unfortunately we will have to cancel the event on Friday. I’m sorry it’s so last minute, but in light of the information from Dr. Boudry, many of the members in the committee did not feel comfortable giving Dr. Coyne and Dr. Boudry a platform given their stances on the Palestine/Israel conflict. Another fear is how it would reflect on us as a committee and that we might be blackballed at UvA/AUC. We understand the irony of this considering this is the very issue that Dr. Coyne wrote his article about, however the group decided we can’t host this event given the current political climate. Again, I’m very sorry that we have put so much time and effort into organizing this for nothing, I’m disappointed as well.
If you look at the Coyne/Maroja article (link is above), you’ll see it’s all about science, so “the very issue” of our article is not the war in the Middle East, but about the danger of distorting science by infusing it with politics.
We were wrong. Scientists both inside and outside the academy were among the first to begin politically purging their fields by misrepresenting or even lying about inconvenient truths. Campaigns were launched to strip scientific jargon of words deemed offensive, to ensure that results that could “harm” people seen as oppressed were removed from research manuscripts, and to tilt the funding of science away from research and toward social reform. The American government even refused to make genetic data—collected with taxpayer dollars—publicly available if analysis of that data could be considered “stigmatizing.” In other words, science—and here we are speaking of all STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics)—has become heavily tainted with politics, as “progressive social justice” elbows aside our real job: finding truth.
In biology, these changes have been a disaster. By diluting our ability to investigate what we find intriguing or important, withholding research support, controlling the political tone of manuscripts, and demonizing research areas and researchers themselves, ideologues have cut off whole lines of inquiry. This will decrease human wellbeing, for, as all scientists understand—and as the connection between heat-resistant bacteria and PCR tests demonstrates—we never know what benefits can come from research driven by pure curiosity. But nourishing curiosity has a value all its own. After all, it doesn’t make us healthier or wealthier to study black holes or the Big Bang, but it certainly enriches our lives to know about such things. Thus, the erosion of academic freedom in science by progressive ideology hurts us both intellectually and materially.
A Guardian exposé yesterday identified former University of California, Irvine lecturer Jonathan Keeperman as the man behind the popular pseudonymous Twitter persona “Lomez” and the dissident-Right publishing house Passage Publishing. Far from a niche internet story, however, the investigation highlights a significant shift in this age of extremely online political discourse, which is itself increasingly indistinguishable from real-life political discussions.
It’s too late for Lomez, who must now deal with his own minor media circus, but for other influential online Right-wing figures, shedding anonymity could be a strategic move towards spreading their views while reducing the impact of adversarial attacks. Their brands are now too big and their balmy days of forum shitposting are long gone: it’s high time for them to step out of the shadows and engage openly, lending their real names to the causes they champion. This transparency might not just advance their public standing, but also encourage a more substantive and less sensational (and immediately dismissive) discussion about their ideas.
President Biden is trying to create a brave new U.S. green economy, but his political problem is that China wants to supply most of it. Solution? Slap new and severe tariffs on Chinese goods that far surpass Donald Trump’s. Welcome to what could be the Sarajevo of the global green trade war.
As an MBA I've always been curious what PhD students do, so I decided to sit in on one of your classes. The experience has convinced me your degree is a total joke.
The professor started by writing a bunch of Greek letters on the board. Form my frat days, I recognized that he wrote one alpha and a lot of betas, which I found amusingly appropriate, seeing as how I'm an alpha male and everyone else in the room was obviously beta.
Next he started talking about a dataset about which are important to car customers. I raised my hand and asked who were the CEOs of the major auto companies at the time of the case.
He said he didn't know.
Dumbfounded, I asked how he could teach us about the auto industry without even knowing who was running the companies.
He got annoyed and said his expertise is method logical, not focused on any particular industry, or some bulls**t like that. I decided to let it slide.
As he droned on, I started thinking about how I had gone out drinking the night before and the hot chicks my buddy and I had almost scored. That's what an MBA is all about -- having awesome experiences with other future CEOs, not sitting around with your nose in a book all day.
When I finally started paying attention again, the professor was saying something about the method of the moment. I decided that was the moment for me to drop that class faster than girls drop their panties when they come to my apartment.
I wanted to put those nerds in their place before I left, so I stood up and said loud enough for everyone in the room to hear, "Any approach that claims to recover the distribution of individual utility parameters from aggregate data based on arbitrary distributional and functional form assumptions is dubious at best," and walked right out the door.
The Federal Transit Administration last week announced a $500 million down payment for the project and is expected to finalize a $6 billion award later this year. This new underground line will extend the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) through San Jose and Santa Clara, which are already served by the region’s Caltrain and public buses.
A decade ago, the duplicative subway was estimated to cost $4.4 billion and open in 2026. Local transportation planners wanted BART to “ring” the San Francisco Bay. Estimated costs have since ballooned to $12.75 billion—$2.1 billion a mile—owing to inflation and engineering changes. Now service isn’t expected to start until 2037.
A local project manager blamed soaring costs and delays on “a shortage of skilled labor in the Bay Area and the country.” Perhaps more construction workers would be available if the Administration weren’t splashing around hundreds of billions of dollars on green energy and public works like the Silicon Valley subway.
A January audit skewered the local transit agency in charge of the project for a lack of transparency about its costs. Note also that BART ridership is running 50% below pre-pandemic levels owing to a population exodus and more remote work. Crime and vagrancy on trains have also scared away riders.[...]The train’s first 170-mile leg between Merced and Bakersfield isn’t expected to be done for another nine years at a cost of $35 billion. NASA’s Mars rover will return to earth before the 500-mile train—with an estimated $128 billion price—is finished, if it ever is.
Undaunted, the Administration recently awarded $3 billion to a bullet train from Las Vegas to Rancho Cucamonga (population: 176,336), an hour east of Los Angeles. The project’s developer says round-trip prices may run around $400—more than twice as much as a plane fare. Biden officials hope the train will be a re-election ticket for Nevada Sen. Jacky Rosen, who has repeatedly boasted about her role in promoting the Vegas train.
Resident Physicians’ Exam Scores Tied to Patient Survival
The anti-Israel protests on college campuses present a puzzle for observers of academic norms and mores. Today, even relatively minor linguistic infractions, like the failure to use someone’s preferred pronouns, are categorized as abuse at many elite institutions, some of which even define potentially offensive speech as “violence.” One need not even speak to run afoul of campus speech codes; I recently participated in a training in which we were warned of the consequences of remaining silent if we heard someone “misgender” someone else.
Definitions of “harmful” speech have become so capacious that one assumes they include antisemitism. In some cases, they surely do: A university wouldn’t take a hands-off approach to a student or faculty member who expressed prejudice against Jews in the manner of Archie Bunker or the Charlottesville marchers. Yet that’s what many of them have done when faced with protesters’ speech that is offensive to Jews, even when it crosses the line into threats, intimidation and harassment.
https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/opinion-potomac-watch/joe-biden-withholds-weapons-from-israel-during-a-war/bb26fc87-49f8-4097-b2dc-267aab8c9a78Call it what it is: a U.S. arms embargo against Israel. That’s the astonishing story this week as the Biden Administration confirms it is blocking the delivery of weapons to its main ally in the Middle East.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/senate-resolution-israel-arms-embargo-joe-biden-lindsey-graham-0be4de23Mike Johnson: He's defying the will of Congress and he's defying what his own top officials in the White House assured me in writing and verbally before that supplemental was passed, and even in the day since. This idea of withholding weapons to Israel as a condition of somehow Joe Biden wanted to micromanage their war effort over there, their defensive effort, is catastrophic policy. It would be devastating to our closest ally in the region and it would go directly against the will of what the members of this body voted on just several days ago. So they have got to answer to the American people and answer to us and we're on that right now.
Chinese authorities accused Siwei of illegally crossing the national border, an offense punishable with fines and a jail sentence of up to one year. He was later released on bail. Prosecutors haven’t proceeded with the charge and no trial has been set. Siwei, now 51, believes that authorities left the charge in place as a way to keep him in check.
But in another way, the academic Left’s enthusiasm for Hamas /{is} remarkable. The enthusiasm of leftist professors and students for the Islamic Resistance Movement in Gaza is unprecedented in the history of modern leftism. Scepticism and even outright rejection of what Marx called “the opiate of the people” has been a salient theme of leftist sensibilities since the French Revolution. Yet Hamas’s punishing fundamentalism has not deterred the secular American Left from embracing what I have called “fascism with a religious face.” Over the past decade, I have drawn attention to the emergence of the pro-Hamas Left, and to the bizarre fact that secular intellectuals and students are now supporting an organisation that grew out of the Muslim Brotherhood and Nazi collaborators. Today, the Islamisation of the Left has become unignorable on college campuses.
The anti-Zionist Left in British and American universities contended that the Zionist project and the state of Israel were ethno-religious anachronisms in a modern multicultural world—relics of a racial nationalism that prevailed in a less enlightened era. For the leftist academy, the Arab leaders of the PLO were Leninist comrades comparable to Che and Castro and Mao, not Muslim Brotherhood fanatics or followers of Islamic Jew-haters like Haj Amin el-Husseini and Sayyid Qutb. The embrace of Yassir Arafat by East Berlin and Moscow—not to mention the flood of PLO-sympathetic UN resolutions denouncing Israel—conveyed that the PLO and its global supporters were part of a secular modern revolutionary movement.
Western anti-Zionists refused to call on Hamas to surrender or even to release the civilian hostages it had seized—acts that, as US Secretary of State Antony Blinken pointed out, would have ended the war and spared the lives of thousands of people in Gaza. Through both its statements and its omissions, the pro-Hamas Left has effectively endorsed Hamas’s ruthless strategy of maximising Palestinian civilian casualties so that Israel is condemned in the court of world opinion.
The rhetoric and conduct of the pro-Hamas Left in April 2024 are plainly as historically significant and newsworthy as those of the white nationalists rallying in Charlottesville. Anti-Zionists do not refer—as paranoid right-wing extremists do—to a nonexistent strategy by which powerful Jews are conspiring to replace native whites with immigrants. The genocidal chants of anti-Zionists, on the other hand, celebrate a real, ongoing war against the Jews in Israel. These are not “anti-war” protests. In the short term, they are defiant expressions of support for the terrorist combatants that launched the war in Gaza and refuse to bring it to an end. But in a longer view, these chants are displays of solidarity with the eliminationist campaign that Hamas has been waging against Israel since 1988. Such words and images belong in the pages of major newspapers, and in television broadcasts.
Gail Hamilton, the school’s construction manager who has worked for the university for 21 years, said he’d never seen anything like the damage caused.
Occupiers had blocked below-basement, manned tunnels beneath the library that hold mechanical systems, pipes and water lines.
“This is too big for us to handle,” he said, adding that the school will be hiring a contractor to help clean up the mess. “It’s just ugly.”
n an article in the American Political Science Review that was based on her dissertation, Gay set out to investigate "the link between black congressional representation and political engagement," finding that "the election of blacks to Congress negatively affects white political involvement and only rarely increases political engagement among African Americans."
To arrive at that finding, you might assume that Gay had done the hard work of measuring white and black voting patterns in the districts she was studying. You would assume wrong.
Instead, Gay used regression analysis to estimate white voting patterns. She analyzed 10 districts with black representatives and observed that those with more voting-age whites had lower turnout at the polls than her model predicted. So she concludes that whites must be the ones not voting.
She committed what in statistics is known as the "ecological fallacy"—you see two things occurring in the same place and assume a causal relationship. For example, you notice a lot of people dying in hospitals, so you assume hospitals kill people. The classic example is Jim Crow laws were strictest in states that skewed black. Ecological inference leads to the false conclusion that blacks supported Jim Crow.
If bloat doesn’t work, what is the explanation for higher costs in education? The explanation turns out to be simple: we are paying teachers (and faculty) more in real terms and we have hired more of them. It’s hard to get costs to fall when input prices and quantities are both rising and teachers are doing more or less the same job as in 1950.
Some universities have chosen to block encampments from forming at all or ended them within an hour or so. We had the means to do so. Immediate intervention is consistent with enforcing reasonable regulations on the time, place and manner of speech, and it has the advantage of minimizing disruption. Yet strict adherence to every policy—the suppression of discord to promote harmony—comes at a cost. Discord is almost required for the truth-seeking function of a university to be genuine.[...]Why then didn’t we reach a resolution? Because at the core of the demands was what I believe is a deep disagreement about a principle, one that can’t be papered over with carefully crafted words, creative adjustments to programming, or any other negotiable remedy.
The disagreement revolves around institutional neutrality—a foundational value to the University of Chicago. It is a principle animated by the idea that authority can’t establish truth for an entire institution dedicated to truth-seeking; rather, it is the imperative of individuals to seek truth without being limited by authority. Institutional neutrality vests freedom of inquiry and speech directly in faculty and students, where it belongs.[...]As the depth of this philosophical difference became clearer, I decided to end the dialogue. I yielded on some time, place and manner policies and allowed some degree of disruption in favor of protest, regardless of viewpoint; engaged in dialogue with those who were disrupting the university so long as they were prepared to face discipline. But there is no way I would ever compromise on institutional neutrality.
Kamala Harris looks like a vice president—or at least, like Hollywood’s platonic ideal of one. You know the type: physically fit, undeniably photogenic, but masculine enough to command attention and middle-aged enough that nobody is calling her “sexy,” at least not to her face. With a smile on her face and her hand resting on a Bible at Biden’s inauguration, she was a picture-perfect vision of the second-in-command, ready to reluctantly but competently take charge after the president had been abducted by aliens or taken out by terrorists. On television last week, she beamed and nodded on Drew Barrymore’s morning chat show as the actress held her hand and quaveringly declared that the vice president needs to be “Momala” to the United States of America.
But in the past four years, Harris has proved there’s a difference between looking the part and actually playing it.
Here, it is important to remember just what things were like the last time Harris was on the ballot, in 2020, during the nation’s all-consuming racial reckoning. This was the year when friendships were shattered and livelihoods ruined because someone didn’t post a black square on Instagram; when every suburban wine mom was frantically reading White Fragility for her anti-racist book club; when members of Congress posed for an absurdly self-serious photo shoot draped in kente cloth. It was the year when representation mattered—to the exclusion of basically everything else.
This miasma of liberal white guilt and frantic, performative virtue-signaling was the birthplace of many a bizarre cultural artifact, like the anti-racism research center for which Ibram X. Kendi received (and squandered) $43 million, or the $250,000 “Woke Kindergarten” program that taught five-year-olds in San Francisco to “disrupt whiteness.” But its most lasting legacy, arguably, is Kamala Harris, who ended up a skipped heartbeat away from the top job for reasons that were primarily aesthetic: once Biden promised to pick a woman of color as his running mate, her selection was all but guaranteed.
In 2020, any cynicism about Harris as VP pick was eclipsed by manufactured excitement, reminiscent of the hype machine that Hollywood once employed to turn ordinary people into stars. At one point, in a remarkable instance of horseshoe theory in action, Harris’s most avid fans and rabid detractors alike were openly speculating that the then–78-year-old Biden might step down at his own inauguration ceremony and simply hand the presidency to her—a sort of affirmative action on steroids. The focus was not on her accomplishments or her goals; it was all about what she represented. The first vice president to be female, of color, Indian American, black.
And then there’s her legal war against the founders of Backpage.com, a classified ads site with a robust “Adult Services” section. Harris charged Michael Lacey and James Larkin with conspiracy to commit pimping back in 2016. This eight-year effort is the clearest manifestation I have ever seen of the phrase “the process is the punishment.” In August 2023, on the eve of yet another court battle, James Larkin committed suicide. In reaction to this news, {Reason}s Matt Welch noted: “You will see 100 times more ink spilled this year on chimerical right-wing book bans than you will on the vice president’s scapegoat blowing his brains out.” He was right, sort of; the actual ratio of book ban coverage as compared to Larkin’s suicide was more like 10,000 to one.
First, that woman is visibly Jewish. Second, beard, black hat, and tzitzit isn't "an Annie Hall scene", it's standard dress code for orthodox Jewish men that was parodied in Annie Hall. Third, how can you possibly come out against people calling out what is obviously not only hate speech (by even the most strict definition) but also clear calls for violence? You object to calling out hatred and horror because this or that political party has supposedly changed its tune about free speech and censorship? This sounds like another version of "orange man bad".
Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see the purpose of this article, other than possibly to insinuate in some subtle way that the writer isn't entirely fond of Jews, or to declare in bolder terms that he isn't understanding of and sympathetic to the obvious perilous explosion of antisemitism occurring in our country right now which is actively aided and abetted by the Democratic party, the isolated President Biden notwithstanding.
A police officer who pulls over speeding black motorists—and only black motorists—isn’t protecting “law and order.” He’s engaging in invidious discrimination. So too the university administrators who suddenly discover they are free speech absolutists only when student protesters call for the death of their Jewish classmates.
On campuses that have—for a decade or more—repeated ad nauseam that priority one was the creation of a “safe, inclusive, supportive, and fair” community, the pro-Palestinian demonstrators wave Hezbollah flags, wear Hamas headbands, and conceal their faces with masks. They ignore all time, place, and manner restrictions on student demonstrations set by their schools, and refuse all demands from the universities to take down their tents or to move their protests elsewhere. And at Columbia, until April 30, when protesters took over Columbia’s Hamilton Hall and the NYPD was at last called in, they almost got away with it.
Consider how racist speech (or even racially insensitive speech) has been received on virtually any major American campus for decades.
In 2017, an anonymous jerk put flyers up around American University’s campus. The flyers displayed a Confederate flag, a stem of raw cotton, and read “Huzzah for Dixie” and the like.
American University immediately launched into emergency response mode, treating the flyers as a criminal threat. It published CCTV video and solicited help from the public in identifying the man who posted the flyers. An all points bulletin called “CRIME ALERT” went out for the man’s arrest. {The New York Times} covered the incident; the words “free speech” do not appear once in the article. Instead, it approvingly noted that in a previous incident—when bananas were found hanging from nooses around campus—the FBI had been called to investigate.
Nor could I find any evidence of any free speech organization rushing to defend the man who posted the flyers—nor the racist provocateurs in any of dozens of similar incidents. No prominent “free speech absolutists” appear to have considered the expressive value of “Huzzah for Dixie” worth defending. Nor did pundits claim that inviting law enforcement to investigate such acts of hate—i.e., “calling the police on your own students”—was in any sense inappropriate or disproportionate. In almost every single case—at schools like Stanford, Johns Hopkins, Michigan State, University of Florida, Duke, and American University—where a symbolic noose was discovered on a campus, it was treated as a criminal threat, never as speech.
Today, in the face of months of bloodthirsty cries aimed at Jewish students (“globalize the Intifada”), university presidents line up to assure the protesters of their right to free speech.
In the abstract, if “Huzzah for Dixie” is worth the full mobilization of university resources and law enforcement, then waving the flag of a terrorist group, or writing “burn you filthy zio” to a student chat, or telling Jewish students to “go back to Poland” where millions of Jews were murdered in gas chambers, or pulling down the American flag over a statue of John Harvard and replacing it with the Palestinian flag, or painting “Ziosgetfuckt” on UPenn’s statue of Ben Franklin, or calling Jews “Hitler’s children”—all insults hurled at Jews on campus—are at least as menacing.
The point is the protesters who descended on the Maidan in the winter of 2004 did something the American protesters on college campuses in 2024 could not conceive of: they put themselves at risk in a serious way, and they made demands that were not dissimilar to the demands made by civil rights leaders in the United States in the 1960s—demands that were rooted in the law, the history, of their own country, that insisted that their country live up to its own stated ideals. They wanted to do what the Americans had always done, which was to govern themselves. They could not have imagined hiding behind masks.
The protesters in the encampment at Cal Poly Humboldt, like so many protesters at UCLA or Columbia or MIT or all the other encampments, were trapped in a miasma of confusion—about why Israel existed, and why Hamas attacked it on October 7, and why it was waging war, and why it might be an odd thing to superimpose alien ideas about “settler colonialism” on a conflict thousands of miles away. No one I spoke to had been to Israel or the West Bank or Gaza, or could define Zionism. Trillium said: “I don’t think anything started on October 7—October 7 is when it started getting media attention, but the conflict, the /{genocide} in Palestine, has been going on since the state of Israel was founded.”
When I mentioned to another student that the Arab population in the territories had actually grown since Israel’s 1948 inception, that this suggested Israel was not trying “to genocide” Palestinians, she rolled her eyes. “You believe that?”
Krugman backpedaled slightly, but couldn’t help himself and went back month after month to argue the numbers were better than they seemed. In January, he posted the “NY Fed measure of underlying inflation” to confirm “the war is over, and we won.” In February, for instance, he posted a chart reminding us that “if it weren’t for owners’ equivalent rent, a price nobody pays, nobody would be talking about inflation.”
All this came a year after he had to write a column called “I Was Wrong About Inflation,” admitting to being on “Team Relaxed” when it came to the potential downside impact of a massive monetary rescue plan. One of the reasons for his miscalculation? “A big piece of the plan was one-time checks to taxpayers, which we argued would be largely saved rather than spent.”
Krugman calculates consumer prices without housing or food and assumes people in the middle of an economic crisis won’t spend six hundred bucks, but thinks /{other people} are guilty of magical thinking on inflation?
One last note. Krugman rails against Trump’s reported plans to expand tariffs. This is interesting because when Joe Biden told the World Trade Organization to shove it a year and a half ago after the WTO declared Trump’s last tariff regime (which Biden was continuing) illegitimate, Krugman declared, “It’s up to America to determine whether its trade actions are necessary for national security,” and “an international organization has no right to second-guess that judgment.” This came in an article showing Biden speaking sternly into a microphone with a big ‘Murican flag in the background, titled, “Why America is Getting Tough on Trade.”
I’m not endorsing any of Trump’s economic ideas, but the issue here is the naked partisanship of Krugman’s act. When Trump was in office, he was writing articles like “Why is Trump a Tariff man?” and declaring that his tariffs were about “rewarding his friends,” “power,” and “cronyism,” rather than any kind of populist policy (because Trump voters are “driven more by animosity toward immigrants and the sense that snooty liberals look down on them than by trade policy”). When Biden’s in office, extending the exact same tariffs, Krugman waves the flag and hums Lee Greenwood for his “tough America” columns. Now we’re back to worrying about Trump’s “magical thinking” and “petty strongman” tendencies.
Neither of these templates apply to my story, which is one of unmitigated failure. My story might be told in one of two ways. The safer way to tell this story would make repeated reference to the matrix of oppression into which poor, disproportionately Black, children are born. This is a story of deprivation that centers on the culpability of all those who live outside the sacrifice zones into which these children are released and where they will remain entrapped for the rest of their lives under the watchful eye of agents of the carceral state. It is especially about history and the unbroken line that gets drawn from a failing city school to the racist crimes of the American past.
I happen to agree with this story. But this is not the story I want to tell. I lived a different story, whose terrifying immediacy held at bay the grand abstractions through which we are urged to interpret our lives. When a second-grader’s grandmother sent him to school with a loaded gun because he was being bullied, I didn’t see a vestige of white flight. I saw a second grader bringing a loaded gun to school at the direction of his primary caretaker. When Kenyon was transferred into my class mid-second year with an enormous file explaining how his gross-motor problems were in part the product of his mother holding a curling iron to his feet as a baby to stop him from crying, I did not experience that as a consequence of redlining, whiteness, or bourgeois complacency. And when I learned soon after that Kenyon could not read past kindergarten level, nor write his name properly, I did not process these things as the byproducts of America’s system of funding schools through property taxes. I processed these things as horrors.
“I ain’t reading this baby shit no more,” he yelled. The class erupted in laughter.
This earned a call to his mother, a stout, boisterous woman who often volunteered at the school. Unlike Shawn, Brandon feared a phone call home. The last time I’d called his mother, she’d told me that I had her permission to slap him if he acted up, a privilege I never exercised. This time she had simply asked when quiet reading time was.[...]“Come here,” she said, more forcefully. When he didn’t come, she walked over to his desk and pulled him out of his seat by the collar. She stood him up and slapped him neatly across the face, not nearly as hard as she could have, but hard enough to make the tears flow. Then she dragged him by the collar into the hallway, where she screamed at him loud enough for the neighboring classrooms to hear, and slapped him a few more times.
I don’t think I ever called his mom again. When I’ve told this story before, people were usually shocked at this brazen act of child abuse. They are missing the point. The real tragedy is not that a mother would come to a school and beat her child in front of his classmates. Brandon’s mother worked in the schools. She knew what happened to boys from that neighborhood who didn’t learn to read. If there was any chance that slapping him could scare him into making progress, you’d have to admit that there was a logic to it. The real tragedy, as well as the real reason I never called her again, was that it probably didn’t make a difference what she did.
Justin’s absence was a striking testament to the outsized effect one student can have on the behavior of others. His return had an even larger effect than his absence. Students who had never had behavioral problems began acting out. Destiny was a bright and cheerful girl from a very religious household. Her greatest offense up to that point was humming gospel songs too loud during lessons. If I asked her to pick up a pencil, she’d say “Yes, Mr. Evans” and smile. A month after Justin’s return, when I yelled at her for interrupting a lesson, she yelled back, “Who you talking to white boy?!”
https://www.governmentjobs.com/careers/portlandor/jobs/4410479/equity-and-inclusion-manager-manager-iWould you rather the city spend $163,000 of your tax dollars:1. Hire two people to fill potholes/repair roads full time2. Hire one office worker who finds ways that swings, slides, and trees are perpetuating racism
Primarily, the Equity and Inclusion Manager leads a dedicated equity and inclusion team, focusing on underserved communities, specifically Black people, Indigenous people, people of color, immigrants, and refugees, LGBT2SQIA+ people, people with disabilities, youth, older adults, and people living with low incomes. This involves coordinating various internal and external committees and workgroups, such as PP&R's Diversity and Equity Committee, City affinity groups, and supporting the development and implementation of strategic plans and policies. Supporting the implementation of PP&R’s strategic plan, Healthy Parks, Healthy Portland, is an example of this work.
The ideal candidate for this position will have these attributes:
* Lived Experience: You have direct experience working with marginalized communities, particularly communities of color and persons with disabilities.* Experienced Equity Practitioner: You have a proven ability to perform advanced equity analysis and a deep understanding of anti-racist principles and of intersectional approaches.
The archaic Proto-Indo-European language (4500–4000)[note 4] had a two-gender system which originally distinguished words between animate and inanimate, a system used to separate a common term from its deified synonym. For instance, fire as an active principle was *h₁n̥gʷnis (Latin ignis; Sanskrit Agní), while the inanimate, physical entity was *péh₂ur (Greek pyr; English fire).
In 2020, the Associated Press Stylebook stated that “homeless” is “generally acceptable as an adjective to describe people without a fixed residence,” but it should be avoided in “the dehumanizing collective noun ‘the homeless.’” Since then, “unhoused” has continued to gain steam, though as one advocate told the Guardian, “Most homeless people still say ‘homeless.’” It remains to be seen whether “unhoused” will displace “homeless” and earn a permanent home in the lexicon.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4842424/list-of-ansi-color-escape-sequencesLooking forward, our stack opens up the ability to realize our full vision of what Warp can be. By choosing Rust and building a UI framework that is rendering-platform agnostic, we can easily scale to other platforms and even the web by compiling to WASM (a mistake we made was to not think about which crates will and won’t compile to WASM early on) and rendering with WebGL.
A retired law enforcement official who has helped advise the federal government on issues of national security told The Free Press that groups egging on this movement “root themselves by and large on college campuses, because their greatest and most impressionable audience is the students.” And their organizing powers can be seen in the encampments—which have matching tents, identical chants, and shared tactics and guidelines at universities across the U.S.
Though I’ve been told everyone is invited to the revolution, that’s not entirely true. On Sunday night, when there were “Zionists who have entered the camp,” James, the spokesperson for the group, directed his fellow protesters to link arms and push them out.
“We are going to create a human chain where I am standing,” James shouted to participants, who repeated his words back in unison. “So that they do not pass this point and infringe upon our privacy and try to disrupt our community.”
I’m speaking with a student from the Sustainability Management program, who tells me in a British accent that she’s here for “the sense of community,” when a reporter from Japan crouches down to speak with us.
“So, I’m curious why there is nobody condemning Hamas,” he says, squinting to keep the sun out of his eyes. “It needs to be said, right?”
Another student pipes up: “It’s been said.”
“No, it hasn’t been said,” the reporter says, shaking his head.
The students stop speaking, then look down at the mat, and after a few seconds, the reporter gets up and thanks them for their time. Once he’s gone, one of the students rushes to go “talk to someone about him.”
“That was weird,” she says, as she brushes dirt off her jeans. “The organizers need to know about him.”
After four years studying at Southern Miss, Miles said he has encountered some racism—he’s heard the occasional slur or has been confronted in bars by white patrons, who’ve accused him of stealing his own cell phone—but he also discovered a culture unlike anything he’d experienced in the Midwest. His brothers at Omega Psi Phi, an African American fraternity, love to hunt, for example, he says. “They’ll take dogs and go out into the forest. And they’re not into partying all night. They’d rather sit around a campfire, in their cowboy boots, and tell stories. I’ll go home and tell my friends back in Chicago, ‘The South isn’t anything like you think.’”
Southern colleges also offer something Northerners rarely find at elite schools: an introduction to people who don’t think or behave exactly like them, but are welcoming nonetheless. When visiting her son Scott, a student at Elon University since 2022, Francine Katz’s interactions with students and teachers has changed her entire perspective on Southerners. “I might not agree with the politics in the South, but Northerners could really learn a lot from Southerners on how to treat people,” she says.
Walter Kirn: But not just institutional America, the institutional America that deals with international relations. And I find curious that her experience is all with international global institutions, but her job now is to pipe that sensibility into a domestic theater as though somebody who thought mostly about the world is now going to administer the United States. It’s as though somebody who comes from an imperial outside set of powers has been given a governorship over a local area.
Matt Taibbi: Yeah, she’s a viceroy.
Walter Kirn: Yeah. See, it’s the opposite of how the news used to work, Matt. So, let’s say you finally got to the New York Times or whatever. Often, that’s because you started at the Knoxville, Tennessee local paper, and you covered the city and the police beat for the local paper.
Matt Taibbi: Exactly.
Walter Kirn: And then, you moved up and you went from more local institutions to more general institutions, and finally you received the crown and got a job at a national one. This is the exact opposite. This is somebody who worked at the most abstract synthetic, global and international boards, and then moved down to focus on one particular area. And as I say, the latter comes down from heaven rather than going up from the ground, which means to me that she was given this job in order to take a point of view that was developed outside the United States and stick it in the United States.
Walter Kirn: Right. But this is this new religious belief that through confession or self-criticism, you can exempt yourself from the crimes of your class and your race and so on. I mean, at some point in history, if the history keeps getting written by people rather than AI or wiki processes, we’re going to look back and say, how interesting was it that the greatest foes of whiteness were the whitest among us? How interesting is it that the people who wanted to see justice for the oppressed were the most privileged of all, and all they had to do was mouth some words and use a certain kind of rhetoric and verbiage, and they were exempted from all the implications of these group identities. And then not only that, they entitled themselves as prosecutors of others for the crimes that they’re exempt from. So no, in the day that Katherine Maher spends every day where she goes around experiencing microaggressions and seeing injustice and so on, she’s never the perpetrator.
She’s always somehow the symbolic victim merely by adopting this vocabulary when in fact, sometimes I want to say to my friends who are big revolutionaries and social justice people, look at the folks who are sponsoring you and attack them because they’re the enemy. The people who are funding you and sending you out and heading the NGOs that support you are the actual enemy, and you’re being trained on the wrong victims. And I’m sorry to say that if Katherine Maher wants to make an issue of whiteness, an issue of privilege and an issue of race, then it’s almost too funny that she is the paragon of all that she pretends to critique.
As for legal authority, the department refers to a section of the Higher Education Act that supposedly lets Mr. Cardona “craft ‘an alternate repayment plan,’ under certain circumstances.” But it omits that the law specifies that this authority is to be exercised “on a case by case basis” to “accommodate the borrower’s exceptional circumstances.”
The Administration is making millions of borrowers eligible for forgiveness and zero payments no matter the circumstances. Even the Obama Administration in a 2015 rule-making disclaimed the authority to relax repayment terms as Mr. Biden has done because “such a change would require congressional action.”
The Education Department now says there’s no limit to how much debt it can forgive since the secretary has “discretion as to how much a borrower must pay.” Under this view, as states argue, there is nothing to prevent the secretary from limiting debt repayment to “0.01% of income over $1,000,000 for 1 year only” with the rest forgiven.
The states make a compelling legal case that could result in a preliminary injunction. Yet the department is already forgiving debt, perhaps to get ahead of the law. An injunction could result in borrowers having to make payments on loans they believed forgiven.
And what is it that these parents are objecting to? The ALA’s own press release states that Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe—number 1 on its list—is “banned” because of “LGBTQIA+ content,” but parents and school board members tell me their concerns have nothing to do with the book’s “queer” author or characters and everything to do with its explicit sexual content, including the graphic sketches of oral sex found on page 167, something the ALA doesn’t acknowledge or address.
This is plainly inappropriate for children. The book’s stated reading age is “18 years and up” on Amazon, and 15 at Barnes and Noble.
According to the ALA, This Book is Gay—number 3 on the list—is also being targeted because of its “LGBTQIA+ content,” yet their list neglects to tell the full story: in addition to a chapter entitled “The Ins and Outs of Gay Sex,” the book explains how to upload photos to adult sex apps (pg. 156).
While legislators have not abandoned the idea of repaying all the debt, they are making decisions that will eventually make it much more difficult. Further, since the Great Recession, emergency spending financed with debt hasn't spurred the creation of fiscal surplus to repay it. A look at the debt-to-GDP ratio since 2008 shows an upward trajectory with no plans to return to pre-2008 levels.
In addition, after the roughly $6 trillion in COVID emergency spending—and unlike the Obama administration post–Great Recession—the Biden administration has not acknowledged the need for austerity. Debt-service costs are going through the roof, with interest payments growing to $1 trillion a year and eclipsing defense and Medicare spending, yet the administration shows no notable willingness to course correct. In fact, as McArdle notes, "President Biden isn't talking about fiscal sanity; he's talking about massive child-care subsidies" and about more student debt forgiveness.
Walter Kirn: I want to know what is the polluting act in medicine? What are they doing that’s causing all this climate change in medicine? This is probably the last industry I would think of as belching out gases. But anyway, I’m going to also say just to be a wise ass, if they have been trying to get less white, that was the whitest damn thing I’ve ever heard in my life.
Matt Taibbi: That was Martin Mull white.
Walter Kirn: Yeah. That was pass the margarine on cucumber sandwiches white. And then let’s go out and play with the beach ball at Kennebunkport white. Maybe NPR should just admit they can’t diversify, because they set a tone, which everything has to come back to. Like, 98.6 is the temperature of the human body, we might have fevers, we might get cold, but we always return to it, and they always return to the voice of that lady, and wow.
Walter Kirn: I completely get what you’re saying in terms of this specific story, but in terms of the larger question of why NPR is losing audience and whether Berliner is right to say that they’ve gone astray, let’s think about what news used to be, when you made news or when you broadcast news, or you wrote news stories, you said, “What would the audience be interested in and how can I provide that?” Now, they just came up with something that only they are interested in, and they’re telling the audience to be interested in it, which is this deadnaming angle on murder, which most people didn’t even know existed, and isn’t what they’re interested in. And they’re saying we should be and it turns out we aren’t. And they do that with story after story.
Walter Kirn: Do we believe that there’s a murder out there in America that went unsolved, because the cops, when they went out and canvassed the neighborhood and interviewed suspects, refused to use the name of the victim that most people knew that victim by?
Matt Taibbi: I think it’s very unlikely. I think it’s possible that things were slowed a bit.
Walter Kirn: Dude, if you’re known as Harry Balls, the police will ask around in the bars, “Does anybody know Harry Balls?” They don’t go and say, “Do you know Roderick Johnson III?” And somebody goes, “Oh, you mean Harry Balls?” And they say, “We don’t call him that. We’re going to call him Roderick Johnson III for the purposes of this investigation.” What?
Matt Taibbi: Right, right. No, and-
Walter Kirn: Cops suddenly won’t use the actual names of people in investigations, right.
Matt Taibbi: No, and in fact, if you’ve ever spent any time around cops, cops know that nicknames are crucial. And just to be clear, I’m not talking about trans people. I’m talking about street names that they have to learn them. The legal name will maybe get you an address, but it won’t tell you much-
Walter Kirn: Well, because they deal with crime, and you know what criminals do? They have aliases.
Walter Kirn: Let’s say I’m the editor. Let’s say they rescind their diversity and let middle-aged white guy rule for a day. I would say just as in this other story, the murder of transgender people is something we should be covering first and then maybe next, the problem of what name we shall refer or the cops use for them.
I would say, wow, the story here is that the women in Ukraine all want abortion suddenly? That’s depressing. That’s harsh. Okay. Then there’s a problem getting them abortion pills. Okay. But they’re telling me that by a multiple, the women of Ukraine suddenly want abortions. That hit me. I went, “That’s news”.
But this story is a footnote. See, that’s what NPR specializes in. Taking footnotes and making them novels and taking the novel and turning it into a footnote.
Matt Taibbi: And when I heard that, I thought, wow, I’d like to understand that better. Is that because they feel hopeless? Because there’s no connection to the other parent? What’s going on there that’s driving that?
Walter Kirn: The father’s are all at the front. The medical care has deteriorated to the point that nobody wants to have a baby or be pregnant, who knows?
Fixing the problem will probably involve changing the business model, including taking steps that would increase the prices of generic medicines so sales can support manufacturers and attract additional companies, according to researchers and policymakers.
The White House earlier this month proposed spending between $3.26 billion and $5.11 billion over a decade to help address shortages. The plan would include linking Medicare payments to hospitals in part on whether hospitals do a good job buying drugs from companies that demonstrate quality over the long term, rather than just the cheapest price. The proposal would need approval and money from Congress.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-the-deep-state-and-the-new-york-times-ce3dc55eThe facts are these: Ms. Daniels has said that in 2006 she and Mr. Trump had one, er, intimate encounter. A decade later, as the 2016 election neared, Mr. Trump’s fixer Michael Cohen paid Ms. Daniels $130,000 to keep quiet. A nondisclosure agreement isn’t illegal. Mr. Bragg’s complaint is about the paperwork. Mr. Cohen was reimbursed through 2017 via a monthly retainer “disguised as a payment for legal services,” the DA said. He padded his indictment by separately charging each invoice, check and ledger entry to get 34 counts.
Falsifying business records in New York can be a misdemeanor, but the statute of limitations on that has expired. Mr. Bragg therefore must charge felonies, which under New York law means showing that Mr. Trump cooked the books with “intent to commit another crime or to aid or conceal the commission thereof.”[...]Mr. Bragg didn’t charge the second crime and didn’t clearly identify it in last year’s indictment. His court filings since have advanced four theories of what that crime might be, three of which the judge blessed.
One theory is that the Stormy payoff was effectively a donation to Mr. Trump’s campaign, in excess of federal limits. Two, he says the payment broke a New York law against promoting a candidate “by unlawful means.” Yet this loops back to No 1., since the “unlawful means,” Mr. Bragg said, include busting the federal donation cap.
It’s a dubious argument. Is paying a mistress a bona fide campaign expense? Brad Smith, a former member of the Federal Election Commission, has argued persuasively that the answer is no.
> Even as president, Donald J. Trump flaunted his animosity for intelligence officials, portraying them as part of a politicized “deep state” out to get him. And since he left office, that distrust has grown into outright hostility, with potentially serious implications for national security should he be elected again.
> Citing his belief that his 2016 campaign had been spied on by the intelligence community, Mr. Trump on Wednesday urged his House allies to “kill” a bill that would extend an expiring surveillance law that national security officials say is crucial to their ability to gather foreign intelligence and fight terrorism on behalf of the country. The House approved the legislation on Friday only after Republicans revised it to ensure that Mr. Trump would get another crack at shaping it to his liking if he wins the presidency again.
His belief? Not only did federal officials repeatedly mislead the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to gain and maintain the authority to spy on Trump campaign associate Carter Page, it was the Times itself that reported in 2019—in a story co-authored by Mr. Savage—that a government lawyer named Kevin Clinesmith falsified critical evidence.
Speaking of the Clinton campaign’s role in fueling the Russia collusion hoax that poisoned our politics for years, a 2023 Journal editorial had more on the special counsel’s findings:
> The report lays out numerous examples of the FBI ignoring evidence that it was being used by the Clinton campaign to execute a political dirty trick. This included intelligence the government received in July 2016 alleging that Mrs. Clinton had approved “a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisors to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security services.”
> Former CIA director John Brennan briefed this material to President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, Attorney General Loretta Lynch and Mr. Comey, yet the FBI ignored it. It did the same when it learned that collusion dossier author Christopher Steele was working for the Clinton campaign and that Mr. Steele and oppo-research team Fusion GPS were spreading disinformation to the press. And it ignored exculpatory statements made by Messrs. Page and [unpaid Trump adviser George Papadopoulos] in secret FBI recordings.
Christopher Steele and Hillary Clinton also do not appear in the new Times report, which spends a lot of the reader’s time warning about the target of the intelligence community’s abuse.
To its credit, the Times does provide some comic relief at the end of its long warning about the alleged Trumpian destruction to come in the intelligence community when it notes the actual results of his presidency:
> …former officials note that during his first administration, Mr. Trump attacked intelligence leaders but did not interfere with intelligence collection. Under Mr. Trump’s second C.I.A. director, Gina Haspel, information-gathering capabilities about Russia appeared to improve, setting the agency up, for example, to warn accurately in early 2022 that Mr. Putin was about to invade Ukraine.
If only Mr. Trump’s successor hadn’t chosen that moment to suggest that Russia might be able to get away with a “minor incursion” without triggering a strong, united response from the U.S. and its allies. Even the NPR gang noticed the colossal blunder by our 46th president.
By that time I was 47, which suddenly no longer felt young. I’d spent all those years learning two concepts. One, all true stories are newsworthy, a corollary being there’s no true story that’s not newsworthy. The other was the audience decides what to do with information, not us. This system simplified work and made audiences feel respected. It took years to learn to see and appreciate the beauty of the arrangement. All of the sudden I was pushing 50 and told we had to learn a new ethos. I wouldn’t do it, arguing among other things it would backfire even as short-term political strategy, and soon was out the door.
City journalists now barely visit the rest of America, but when they do, they’re no longer conscious of the difference between visiting a place and living there. If you live somewhere long enough to see the former “downtown” disappear and be replaced by a Wal-Mart or Costco two miles away, or watch the plant that was the county’s main employer shutter, rust, and grow over with weeds, or if you can remember when the pill-popping streetwalker who works casinos in Biloxi on weekends was your science teacher or chair of the PTA, you’ll feel different emotions than someone merely told those facts.
So I rage against this demonization of the working class because it’s a very dangerous cop-out. The Democrats had this term to essentially enact the kind of New Deal reforms that might’ve been able to save what’s left of our very anemic democracy. And they didn’t. And why didn’t they? Because figures like Biden, Pelosi, and Schumer would not have political power but for their corporate backers. I mean, nobody wants Biden. Nobody wanted Biden in the primaries. It took the Democratic establishment to force everyone else out. The guy’s not even sentient. But they don’t want to lose their positions of privilege and power, and they’re really willing to take the country down because if they pushed for these kinds of reforms, then Goldman Sachs and Raytheon - and let’s not forget the Israeli lobby - wouldn’t fund them. They are creatures of this system, so that’s the problem. They will blame people who don’t rush out and vote for them.
My grandfather was very bright. Intellectually, very gifted. But his sister’s husband died when he was a senior in high school, and she had three kids and he had to drop out of school and work the farm.
When you’re poor in America, you don’t get another chance. So I got a scholarship to these horrible boarding schools and was going to school with the Buckleys and the elite, the Mellons and so on. And I watch these mediocrities get — Bush is a classic example — chance after chance, after chance, after chance, after chance.
People forget, before the 1929 crash, the Nazis were pulling in single digits, 2%, 4%. And then what happens? They have to borrow internationally, and in order to pay the interest, they sever unemployment insurance in Germany. I don’t remember the figure, but tens of millions of workers suddenly couldn’t even get unemployment insurance. Well, what do you think they did? Right? We’re in a very similar situation. And the danger ultimately is not Trump, although I’m frightened of a new Trump administration. The danger is essentially a ruling elite. And remember, we have one ruling elite because the establishment Republicans have now become honorary members of the Democratic Party.
And we were told that NPR itself was part of the problem. In confessional language [CEO John Lansing] said the leaders of public media, “starting with me—must be aware of how we ourselves have benefited from white privilege in our careers. We must understand the unconscious bias we bring to our work and interactions. And we must commit ourselves—body and soul—to profound changes in ourselves and our institutions.”
But the role and standing of affinity groups, including those outside NPR, were more than that. They became a priority for NPR’s union, SAG-AFTRA—an item in collective bargaining. The current contract, in a section on DEI, requires NPR management to “keep up to date with current language and style guidance from journalism affinity groups” and to inform employees if language differs from the diktats of those groups. In such a case, the dispute could go before the DEI Accountability Committee.
There’s an unspoken consensus about the stories we should pursue and how they should be framed. It’s frictionless—one story after another about instances of supposed racism, transphobia, signs of the climate apocalypse, Israel doing something bad, and the dire threat of Republican policies. It’s almost like an assembly line.
The mindset prevails in choices about language. In a document called NPR Transgender Coverage Guidance—disseminated by news management—we’re asked to avoid the term biological sex. (The editorial guidance was prepared with the help of a former staffer of the National Center for Transgender Equality.) The mindset animates bizarre stories—on how The Beatles and bird names are racially problematic, and others that are alarmingly divisive; justifying looting, with claims that fears about crime are racist; and suggesting that Asian Americans who oppose affirmative action have been manipulated by white conservatives.
The laptop was newsworthy. But the timeless journalistic instinct of following a hot story lead was being squelched. During a meeting with colleagues, I listened as one of NPR’s best and most fair-minded journalists said it was good we weren’t following the laptop story because it could help Trump.
In February, our audience insights team sent an email proudly announcing that we had a higher trustworthy score than CNN or The New York Times. But the research from Harris Poll is hardly reassuring. It found that “3-in-10 audience members familiar with NPR said they associate NPR with the characteristic ‘trustworthy.’” Only in a world where media credibility has completely imploded would a 3-in-10 trustworthy score be something to boast about.
https://www.thefp.com/p/mass-general-brigham-antiracism-maternityBingham told me she wants the activists to think about the message they’re sending the kids who actually live in Kensington.
“You’re in one of the poorest neighborhoods in the city, you’re gonna walk past a child who probably didn’t have a hot meal, right? You’re gonna go right past them, and you’re gonna give it to some junkie on the ground? Like, what do you think your seeds are planting in the minds of our young people of their value and worth?”
She says after three years of cleaning up her block, picking up needles, and calling in hazmat teams to clean up feces from the street, her little stretch of Kensington is finally turning around. And when addicts wind up on her corner, she picks up a bullhorn she keeps by her window to yell, {You can’t be here!}
“I can hear the kids playing again,” she says. She can hear them pedaling their bikes down the street. “And that’s why we do what we do.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/joe-biden-student-loan-forgiveness-karine-jean-pierre-supreme-court-7e74383fMass General Brigham has decided to conceal potentially valuable health information from medical professionals in the name of social justice. In doing so, it may end up disproportionately compromising the well-being of black women and babies. The success of this new policy should be judged by whether it improves health outcomes for all, not because doctors drug-tested fewer black patients.
Mr. Biden’s new loan forgiveness is still illegal. The High Court stressed that student loan forgiveness is a major question that requires clear authorization from Congress. But Mr. Biden seems to believe he can jam the courts by automatically forgiving debt before a judge has time to stop him.
The White House says most borrowers won’t even have to apply for loan relief. Sometime before the November election, Mr. Biden will simply declare their debt forgiven. That means a future Congress and a President Trump might be unable to undo the lawless act. Where are the press scolds who warn about a President who threatens democracy?
https://twitter.com/jessesingal/status/1773762892480835768IQ is 60-80% heritable. Among scientists who study intelligence, this is a completely unremarkable and uncontroversial finding.
The New Yorker, on Jon Haidt: "He has been beset by a troubling fixation on the heritability of I.Q.—a contention widely dismissed as scientific racism"
This is completely false. The heritability of intelligence is accepted by mainstream researchers. The debate is over *race*.
I don't understand how something like this gets through fact-checking. It's quite frustrating. Spreading misinformation about the present state of intelligence research doesn't help anyone.
> He has been beset by a troubling fixation on the heritability of IQ-- a contention widely dismissed as scientific racism-- and the purported accurracy of stereotypes.
https://quillette.com/2024/03/25/banning-puberty-blockers-bernard-lane/Puberty blockers have been very commonly used for gender-dysphoric children, the idea being that it gives children the ability to stave off puberty, and a little more time to decide whether to fully medically transition. But in March they were fully banned by England’s NHS, which has been prescribing them after basically cursory visits to the clinic by uncomfortable kids. The next question is: What have these blockers done to kids’ brains? Because the reality is, we have no idea! Adolescence brings huge brain changes—do those come later when the kid eventually takes cross-sex hormones? Are they the same as they would be unmedicated? There is the horrifying potential reality here that these children’s brains will never exactly develop into what we think of as adulthood. They might! But they might not. (Read this from Quillette on the possibility.) And a couple weeks ago, at a conference for clinicians to discuss these issues among themselves, protesters disrupted the event, blocked attendees, and threw smoke bombs.
Gender clinics from Stockholm to San Francisco, from Florence to Melbourne, have been running an uncontrolled experiment on children, while cloaked in the mantle of human rights and denouncing any critics as hateful bigots. It will take time to understand the implications of this experiment. Even those gender clinicians who sold blockers as safe have generally acknowledged one dangerous side-effect: low bone density. Hormone-suppressed teenagers are unlikely to get full benefit of the surge in bone mass that comes with puberty; as a result, they may be prematurely exposed to the brittle bones and fractures normally seen in the elderly. And there is another lesser known but potentially more profound risk: the effects of blockers on the brain.
So far Democrats have gained more than they’ve lost by this strategy, even if in the process they’ve given Mr. Trump, whose re-election Democrats claim to fear above all earthly evils, greater leverage over his party and a better shot at retaking the White House. And that is the most important thing revealed by their meddling in GOP primaries: They aren’t all that worried about a Trump victory in November. I suspect, if I could speak uncharitably, that many Democrats secretly miss the Trump years.
Leave political principles out of it. If Mr. Schumer and other Democratic power-brokers truly thought, as all their campaign verbiage indicates they do, that Mr. Trump would abrogate the Constitution and bring about an autocracy in which dissent is criminalized, they wouldn’t give him a boost for the sake of marginal political gain. They are willing to give him a boost, again and again, because they don’t believe their own predictions about a second Trump term. They rather enjoyed his first one.
The Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings stand out, and not only for the defamatory allegations about the nominee’s teenage years. Left-wing protesters obstructed the proceedings at regular intervals by screaming indecipherable slogans. That was only a foreshadowing of the Black Lives Matter protests and riots of 2020, which Democratic decision-makers mostly encouraged and lovingly embraced in their 2020 convention.
None of this is meant to suggest that Democrats are uniquely guilty of rule-breaking and incivility. Whether one side was worse than the other is a separate question. I am attempting, rather, to account for the difference between Democrats’ dread-inspiring words about Mr. Trump’s re-election on the one hand and their insouciance about it on the other. They predict the end of democracy if he wins and do every nonverbal thing possible to make it happen.
President Biden is proposing a bevy of tax increases, and his State of the Union address included the familiar call for the wealthy to pay their “fair share.” He should examine the Internal Revenue Service data. Recently released figures for 2021 show that the top 1% of Americans reported 26.3% of the country’s adjusted gross income, while paying 45.8% of total income taxes.
Cue the moral outrage. On Sunday Chuck Todd, former host of “Meet the Press,” delivered an on-the-air jeremiad against his employers for engaging Ms. McDaniel. He and his colleagues were upset because “many of our professional dealings with the RNC over the last six years,” Mr. Todd explained, “have been met with gaslighting.”
“Morning Joe” hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski added their disapproval on air. Ms. Brzezinski insisted their objection wasn’t to a conservative Republican but to the hiring of an “anti-democracy election denier.” MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow devoted half an hour to the subject. It’s not about whether Ms. McDaniel is a Republican or Democrat, she said, “it’s about our system of government and undermining elections and going after democracy.”[...]If these harrumphing stars felt so strongly that challenging election results is unforgivable, they wouldn’t have given respectful, at times fawning, interviews to Stacey Abrams, long after she refused to concede the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial race, which she lost by 54,723 votes. We don’t recall hearing these defenders of democracy criticizing Democrats, including Hillary Clinton, for denying that Donald Trump was the legitimate winner in 2016, or the 31 Democratic House members who, on Jan. 6, 2005, attempted to stop certification of Ohio’s electors and so deny George W. Bush re-election.
Several of these 31 “election deniers,” to use Ms. Brzezinski’s term—Sheila Jackson-Lee (D., Tex.), Barbara Lee (D., Calif.), Ed Markey (D., Mass.)—have appeared many times on NBC and MSNBC and been treated with deference.
https://www.thefp.com/p/ex-google-employees-woke-gemini-culture-brokenThe ideology of “diversity, equity and inclusion” is dangerous everywhere, but especially in medical education. Its influence has become entrenched nationwide. Accrediting institutions are pushing all of America’s 158 accredited medical schools to train future physicians in political activism, wasting precious time and resources that could be spent on rigorous coursework and preparation for medical practice. The result will likely be future physicians less qualified to meet patients’ needs.
To restore medical education to its life-saving mission, Congress should ensure that taxpayer dollars don’t fund its decline. One of us, Rep. Murphy, will introduce the Educate Act on Tuesday. It would eliminate all federal funding, including student loans, for medical schools that engage in the worst DEI practices.
Paranoia is my birthright, as it is for anyone born in the Soviet Union. But the official Kremlin story line is already a shambles. In one of the most surveilled cities on earth, where you can be arrested in 30 seconds for whispering “no war,” the terrorists continued their attack for more than an hour and then simply drove away.
The FSB, Russia’s state security service, claims to have arrested four suspects near Ukraine, at one of the most fortified borders in the world. Or did the suspects actually drive to Russian ally Belarus, as that nation’s ambassador to Russia said? Considering the amount of materiel and preparation required to do so much damage to a venue the size of a small village, it’s odd that the terrorists would suddenly turn into bungling amateurs by carrying their Tajik passports and heading to a militarized border.
Twenty-five years ago, when then-Prime Minister Putin needed a platform for his presidential campaign, a series of terrorist apartment bombings in Russia launched the Second Chechen War. I laid out the copious evidence that these were false-flag attacks, staged by the FSB, in my 2015 book, “Winter Is Coming.” It’s a deed so shocking that it is difficult to believe—until you realize what sort of man Mr. Putin is. He has no allergy to blood, Russian or any other kind, if spilling it furthers his goals.
Twenty-five years ago, Mr. Putin grabbed power by committing mass murder in Chechnya. Today, in hope of staying in power, Mr. Putin is committing mass murder in Ukraine.
On Friday the Financial Times reported that the U.S. has pressured Ukraine not to attack Russian oil infrastructure for fear of raising global gas prices—which might harm President Biden’s re-election chances.
In 2022 they applied to renew their license, which expires every three years. During the process, they learned about new regulations requiring foster parents to “support a foster child’s SOGIE”—an acronym for “sexual orientation and gender identity/expression”—“by using their pronouns and chosen name, and respecting the child’s right to privacy concerning their SOGIE.” The regulations also direct foster parents to “connect a foster child with resources that supports and affirms their needs regarding race, religion, culture, and SOGIE.”
The Washington Department of Children, Youth and Families’ draft home-study practice guide illustrates how the department interprets its requirements by giving examples of supportive behavior: displaying “Pride flags and similar indicators,” having “LGBTQIA+ authors, musicians and artists in your collections” and seeking “affirming medical care” for the child or youth.
In their application, the DeGrosses explained that while they would love and support any child, they couldn’t say or do anything that they felt would violate their Christian beliefs. That wasn’t good enough for the state, which rejected the application, citing the new regulations. The state invoked the blanket rule not only to prevent the DeGrosses from fostering gay or transgender youths but to disqualify them from fostering any child. The DeGrosses want to provide respite care—short-term home stays—but the state won’t even allow them to foster a toddler for a few weeks.
This is a risky, controversial position to take in a city like Portland, as it’s often a progressive reflex to want to deflect responsibility away from individual people, especially vulnerable or marginalized people, and find fault instead with The System. The kind of morality behind this, which is pervasive in Portland, is principally organized around the degree to which a person is vulnerable or marginalized: the more vulnerable or marginalized, the more moral status this person (and their allies) have. For people who have these reflexes or follow this moral order, the mere /{mention} of treatment or transitional housing before permanent housing is suspect, because it suggests that houseless people might not just be victims of systemic injustice, but also participants in their own unsheltered circumstances. It asks not just the system to change, but the people who are living outside, especially those addicted to drugs or alcohol, to change too.
Political peace—none dare call it conspiracy—broke out this week as California and Stellantis struck a deal, which they said was “in the interest of avoiding potentially costly litigation, among other reasons.” The 35-page legal contract binds Stellantis to follow California’s EV mandate even if it is blocked by a court or future Trump Administration. In return, Stellantis will get regulatory flexibility similar to the other auto makers.
Philotheoparoptesism. Philotheoparoptesism refers to the practice of disposing of heretics by burning them or boiling them in oil. Another judge challenged Selya to include this word in a decision, which resulted in its sole reported usage (in secular courts, at least). For the record, Selya declined to consign a misguided prosecutor “to the juridical equivalent of philotheoparoptesism.”
Maguire, who is now a partner at Sequoia Capital, is the most high-profile ex-Googler we spoke to in the wake of the Gemini launch. In the summer of 2016, he joined Google’s investment wing, Google Ventures—an offshoot of the company that managed a multibillion-dollar fund to invest in promising start-ups. By that time, he had already had a hand in building two successful companies from the ground up—one of which he later sold for over $1.5 billion. He had also earned a Joint Meritorious Unit Award from the Secretary of Defense for his work on a technology program to help the United States military in the Afghanistan war.
He said he accepted a job at the company as an investing partner at Google Ventures because he was offered a part-time gig with “a good salary” that allowed him to simultaneously finish up his PhD in quantum gravity at Caltech. Plus, the company’s CEO assured him that within three years, he would be promoted from an investing partner to a general partner, which is among the most senior positions at the firm.[...]But, Maguire said, within a year Ventures’ CEO, “like all of the senior leadership across Google, proved to be spineless in the face of these employee threats. Within a year, he hired a new female general partner, who was really smart but who wasn’t qualified for the job. Because of her lack of experience, she was never treated on the same level as the other general partners, which I believe was ultimately unfair to her.”
“Meanwhile, over the next two years, I started to notice the dynamics of our team change. Instead of highly experienced founders and seasoned investors, young people from minority backgrounds were coming in with virtually no investment experience whatsoever,” Maguire recalled. “In this time, Ventures promoted a 25-year-old black woman to investment partner—the same position I held at the time—who had not yet made a single investment decision in her entire career.”
When asked for comment, a Google Ventures spokesperson told The Free Press: “These claims from Sequoia Capital Partner Shaun Maguire regarding his time at GV from 2016–2019 are baseless and factually inaccurate. GV’s decisions around hiring and promotion are solely based on merit and ability.”
Three years after he started at Google, he said the company’s DEI policies affected his own advancement. In January 2019, he said he remembers walking into the office of Google Ventures’ CEO prepared to ask for a promotion to general partner—the position he was promised when he first accepted a job at Google, which he thought he had “rightfully earned.”
“By that point, I was one of the company’s top performers, having personally led some of the firm’s most successful investments over the past few years,” he said.
But then, “as the CEO sat me down in his office, I noticed the strangely serious but sad expression on his face.”
“He told me, ‘Shaun, I’m really not supposed to tell you this. It could get me fired.’ Then he told me I was one of the highest performing people at the company but: ‘I can’t promote you right now because I have a quota. You’ll get the next slot. Please be patient. I’m really sorry.’ He kept saying, ‘My hands are tied.’
Responding to Maguire’s comments, a Google spokesperson told The Free Press: “These claims are completely unfounded. Neither Google nor GV have quotas, and all of our HR processes, including hiring, are designed to be fair for everyone.”
Democrats are denouncing the House GOP investigation into the weaponization of government, but maybe that’s because Republicans are getting somewhere. That includes new evidence that the Internal Revenue Service may be targeting a journalist who testified before the weaponization committee.
House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan sent a letter Monday to IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen seeking an explanation for why journalist Matt Taibbi received an unannounced home visit from an IRS agent. We’ve seen the letter, and both the circumstances and timing of the IRS focus on this journalist raise serious questions.
Rutenberg and Lee Myers imply Benz influenced a change in my personal reporting, since I didn’t discover “evidence of direct government involvement” in the first installment of the Twitter Files about the Hunter Biden laptop story:
> The author of that dispatch, Mr. Taibbi, concluded that Twitter had limited the coverage amid general warnings from the F.B.I. that Russia could leak hacked materials to try to influence the 2020 election. Though he was critical of previous leadership at Twitter, he reported that he saw no evidence of direct government involvement.
> In March 2023, Mr. Benz joined the fray. Both Mr. Taibbi and Mr. Benz participated in a live discussion on Twitter, which was co-hosted by Jennifer Lynn Lawrence, an organizer of the Trump rally that preceded the riot on Jan. 6… As Mr. Taibbi described his work, Mr. Benz jumped in: “I believe I have all of the missing pieces of the puzzle.” There was a far broader “scale of censorship the world has never experienced before,” he told Mr. Taibbi, who made plans to follow up.
Nice try. Though I didn’t find “direct evidence” of government involvement in censorship programs in the first Twitter Files piece, we did discover it, on a grand scale, almost immediately after. Subsequent Twitter Files reports reflected this, including “Twitter, the FBI Subsidiary” from December 16th, 2022, including the “Twitter and Other Government Agencies” story published on Christmas Eve of 2022, the day the IRS opened a case on me.
In 2006, ten years before his death at the age of 87, the legendary epidemiologist D.A. Henderson laid out a plan for how public health officials should respond to a major influenza pandemic. It was published in a small journal that focused mainly on bioterrorism—and was quickly forgotten.
As it turns out, that paper, titled “Disease Mitigation Measures in the Control of Pandemic Influenza,” was Henderson’s prescient bequest to the future. If we had followed his advice, our country—indeed, our world—could have avoided its disastrous response to Covid.
Last year, Dr. Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health during the pandemic, said at a conference, “If you’re a public health person, you have this narrow view of what the right decision is. . . . you attach infinite value to stopping the disease and saving a life. You attach zero value to whether this actually totally disrupts people’s lives [or] ruins the economy. This is a public health mindset.”
Riley Gaines and Kaitlynn Wheeler, two more plaintiffs who both swam for the University of Kentucky, said they first discovered that Thomas, who is more than six feet tall, had access to the women’s locker room when Thomas walked past them as they changed into their racing suits. The suits are so tight they “require 15–20 minutes to put on,” the lawsuit states.
“While you’re doing this, you’re exposed,” Wheeler said. “You can’t stand there and hold a towel around you while putting the suit on at the same time.”
The suit says NCAA’s eligibility requirements are “dramatically out of step” with international standards. It claims the association’s rules on “Transgender Eligibility in Sport” rely on an “an outdated, non-peer reviewed, two-and-a-half-page statement issued by the participants in an International Olympic Committee (IOC) organized meeting in 2015,” which has since been replaced. Furthermore, it says the NCAA does not comply with the rules set by World Aquatics, the international governing body for swimming and diving, which bars any athlete who has experienced male puberty from competing in womens’ sports.
Thomas is currently appealing to an international sport governing body in a bid to compete at the 2024 Olympics in Paris. Thomas argues that the World Aquatics’ rules, adopted in June 2022 after the 2022 NCAA Championships, which prohibit Thomas from participating, “are invalid and unlawful as they discriminate against her.”
Mr. Biden as President is supposed to represent the national interest, and maintaining America’s reputation for inviting foreign capital really is a “vital” interest. So is treating allies well, and mistreating a Japanese firm as hostile won’t make friends in Tokyo. Mr. Biden has already jolted allies with his recent decision to stop approvals for liquefied natural gas export projects. Barring Nippon Steel for political reasons sends a rotten message to friends—especially since it would be a boon to Chinese steel makers that compete with Nippon.
Mr. Biden’s rhetorical intervention is also a bad look because his government’s Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States is reviewing Nippon Steel’s bid. His comments look like an attempt to tilt the committee, which is composed of executive branch agencies, against the acquisition. It’s the kind of thing you’d expect from Mr. Trump.
I only have two minor critiques of the film. The first is that I would have liked to see more time spent naming and shaming the adults who are responsible for this epidemic. Perhaps Ted can produce a sequel on all the DIE commissars like Gay, Kendi, and thousands of others who have destroyed higher education and student mental health while lining their pockets. The second is that no Christian, conservative, straight white or Asian males were featured. It would have been interesting to hear the perspective of students who are facing real systemic racism and discrimination.
This movie has a happy ending. The students resolve to change their emotional frameworks from “social justice” to kindness. They seek the discomfort of disagreement and exposure to different opinions. Shedding wokeness removes fear and anxiety, while restoring energy and endurance. You can see it in their eyes and smiles. In a beautiful cathartic moment, Kimi compares it to taking the knives out after stabbing yourself. They know they have switched from a dark path to a bright one. All of them are now confidently navigating adult life. Perhaps they will help us all swing the pendulum back to sanity.
A healthy emotional life involves a certain amount of repression. How is a child supposed to get through a day of school if she’s never learned to put aside her hurt feelings and concentrate on the lessons in front of her? How will she ever be a good friend if her own feelings are always front and center? How will she ever hope to function at work? She can’t. She won’t. They aren’t.
Instead of obsessing over the happiness of our kids, which pushes them to overvalue their own emotions, we can encourage them to set goals and take risks. The world outside of their own heads turns out to be a worthy distraction from the turbulent gloom of adolescence. It may also contain the cure.
This week, the leading organization for doctors who perform gender transitions on minors is reeling from a major leak of internal documents, emails, and conference calls. What the leak mostly shows: doctors really had no idea about a lot of the long-term impact of these interventions. Would the kids put on blockers and then cross-sex hormones ever be able to orgasm? Wow, we’re finding out that they can’t, because they’re saying they can’t. Will puberty blockers followed by cross-sex hormones (the yellow brick road of medical transition) stunt a kid’s growth, one clinician asks? Answer seems like yes: “Blockers, by suppressing puberty, keep growth plates open longer, so younger teens have a potential to grow longer, however their growth velocity is typically at prepubertal velocity, without typical growth spurt.” Or watch this video of clinicians trying to figure out how to get their 14-year-old patients to do informed consent to lifetime sterility (often starting at age 9 with puberty blockers). From the video: “It’s a real growing edge in our field to figure out how we can approach that. I’m definitely a little stumped on it.” I am also stumped on how to get gender-dysphoric children to consent to sterility—maybe we can wait till they’re 18? Just an idea.
Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.
No serious person bothers reading past the headlines of NAMBLA essays because we know no matter how flowery the rhetoric, the endgame is a stranger jonesing to bugger your 13-year-old. As anyone who’s raised children knows, leaving kids to “the hazards of their own free will” is a completely unworkable concept, apart from its outrageousness and moral insanity. The editors of New York should have reached the “Sorry, that’s just fucking stupid” stage one paragraph in. The American intellectual mainstream is now so infected by cowardice before academic shibboleths that it kowtows to ideas the average kindergarten teacher would flunk without a thought.
Chu won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism last year, putting her in the middle of the middle of current ideological orthodoxy. The New York essay perfectly captures the lunatic nihilism American academics have fanned into a mass movement by granting the most idiotic forms of teenage self-absorption the status of wisdom and insight. This has had disastrous consequences, both for society and its ballooning population of over-encouraged young pseudo-intellectuals like Chu. We love our kids and are appropriately fascinated by everything they do, but we don’t put their filled diapers on walls as art. That’s bad parenting, and the editors at New York are guilty of something similar when they give this piece top billing.
https://dailycaller.com/2022/03/30/absurd-hyperbole-jon-stewart-white-supremacy-shouting-match/Jon Stewart’s insistence that Americans had never robustly debated race before 2020 is also, well, deranged. Americans have been loudly debating it for centuries. There was something called a Civil War over it. His claim that white America has never done anything in defense of black Americans (until BLM showed up, of course) requires him to ignore more than 300,000 white men who /{gave their lives} to defeat the slaveholding Confederacy. It requires Stewart to ignore the countless whites (often Jewish) who risked and gave their lives in the Civil Rights Movement. It requires him to erase the greatest president in American history. This glib dismissal of all white Americans throughout history, even those who risked everything to expand equality, is, when you come to think about it, /{obscene}.
Stewart’s claim that whites never tried to ameliorate black suffering until now requires him to dismiss over $19 trillion of public funds spent in the long War on Poverty, focused especially on black Americans. That’s the equivalent of /{more than 140} Marshall Plans. As Samuel Kronen has shown, it requires the erasure from history of “the Food Stamp Act of 1964, the Child Nutrition Act of 1966, the Social Security Amendments of 1965, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, the Social Security Amendments of 1962, and the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, and on and on.” To prove his point, Stewart has to pretend LBJ never existed. That’s how utterly lost he now is.
https://www.reddit.com/r/samharris/comments/tsbujy/comment/i2qyoh6/?context=3“I didn’t say that racism doesn’t exist. I said the term ‘white supremacy’ is an absurd hyperbole,” Sullivan pushed back. “For most people, that means the KKK, it means no rights for minorities. And this has been used simply to avoid an argument.”
Stewart pointed to historically racist policies including redlining, loans being denied to black people, and the Homestead Act. (RELATED: Juan Williams Says ‘Parents’ Rights Is Code For White Supremacists)
“You’re a bright guy, like, what the fuck are you talking about?” he asked. “You’re not living on the same fucking planet we are.”
“I think you are not living on the planet most Americans are, which is why this kind of extremism — this anti-white extremism — is losing popular support, is creating a backlash, is going to elect Republicans, and undo a lot of the good you think you’re doing,” Sullivan said.
He then called Stewart’s opening statement the “biggest reductionist, one-sided, completely biased position.” Steward then angrily said Sullivan can love the place he lives in and acknowledge the evils of its past.
“Do not tell me who I am or what I believe, motherfucker!” Stewart said.
Jon Stewart is not very thoughtful. Like most of the people on this subreddit, I grew up listening to him and like most of liberal America, I saw him as a critical light in the stupidity of the Bush-era media landscape.
What's become clear over the last decade and a half is that Jon Stewart's intelligence was only ever impressive /{relative to the standards of the 2000s infotainment business}. His talent consisted primarily in picking apart the inane commentary of such leading lights as Steve Doocey, Nancy Grace, Sean Hannity, and Jim Cramer. He was quick-witted, and he could hold his own in a televised conversation against the sorts of talking heads whose schtick was shouting vitriol off a teleprompter at anyone who questioned a list of Reagan-era pieties. But he was never a particularly deep or clear thinker, which was manifest in his inability to provide any critical insight or commentary during the Obama years.
I have just listened to Stewart's interview with Spencer Jakab on the subject of the WallStreetBets $GME short-squeeze, which Stewart thinks "exposed the corruption of Wall Street." It is striking how much difficulty Stewart actually has defining "the corruption of Wall Street," when challenged to do so by a financial journalist who has a basic command of the facts. Jakab keeps on pressing Jon to explain what corruption, precisely, WallStreetBets has unmasked, and all Stewart can do is wildly gesticulate at the "rigged system." You get the sense, at the end, that Stewart's mode of thought is extremely vague and impressionistic, and that he forms his opinions primarily in the language of a few, extremely simple committments: bank bad, underdog good, elite corrupt, rich greedy.
The lionization of Stewart as a political voice is symptomatic of America's overdependence on entertainers and artists for intellectual guidance. He's politically informed as far as /{artists} go, but not as far as /{political thinkers} go. The PMC's affiliation with the political views of artists is similar to the working class's affiliation with the political views of sports stars, and is just as misguided. If you want political enlightenment, read economists, policy wonks, philosophers, IR specialists, historians, and so on. Do not place your faith in the judgments of people who write jokes for a living.
No one in the family blames Tesla, according to a person familiar with the situation. Breyer and his wife had three Teslas and loved them, and often spoke about how electric vehicles were good for the planet. Breyer considers himself a friend of Elon Musk’s.
This writer doesn’t run a help line for businesses under siege from Washington, but it can sometimes feel that way. I almost laughed out loud when I opened an email Wednesday from a source flagging “a little known and economically disastrous regulation.” Not because it was funny, but because I had received similarly worded emails about two other regulations within 24 hours.
> “We’ve heard that cliché that diversity is inviting someone to your party and inclusion is asking them to dance. My problem with this metaphor is that by asking someone to dance you are still the one with the power, as the host. You determine the music, the venue, the context, the rules. If they don’t adhere to the rules, you always have the power to kick them out. So, to me, if you’re being inclusive then you’re not changing power.”
The rest of her speech is gold too, I’d highly recommend it. It refocuses the problem so clearly, relating it right back to power dynamics. It’s about who has the power to impose their norms as the status quo, which places pressure on others to conform to that status quo. I’m not sure what the solution is, but I imagine it involves guiding those in power to intentionally, willingly give up that power. Not gonna lie, it sounds really hard, but I don’t see any shortcuts here.
Every two or three days here in Congress, we're taking these votes. A lot of what's in the resolution is just obvious and doesn't need to be stated. It's kind of like Black Lives Matter. You have to say "black lives matter." They're doing the equivalent with Israel. Now Israel matters. I agree that Israel matters, but we don't have to take all these votes. And some of them are going into campuses and trying to limit free speech by withholding federal money if you allow things that are considered antisemitic.
By resolving a question it did not need to reach, "the majority attempts to insulate all alleged insurrectionists from future challenges to their holding federal office," Sotomayor et al. say. "It reaches out to decide Section 3 questions not before us, and to foreclose future efforts to disqualify a Presidential candidate under that provision. In a sensitive case crying out for judicial restraint, it abandons that course."
Justice Amy Coney Barrett also wrote a separate opinion concurring in the judgment. "I agree that States lack the power to enforce Section 3 against Presidential candidates," she says. "That principle is sufficient to resolve this case, and I would decide no more than that. This suit was brought by Colorado voters under state law in state court. It does not require us to address the complicated question whether federal legislation is the exclusive vehicle through which Section 3 can be enforced."
At the same time, Barrett implicitly rebukes Sotomayor et al. for "amplify[ing] disagreement with stridency." The Court "has settled a politically charged issue in the volatile season of a Presidential election," she writes. "Particularly in this circumstance, writings on the Court should turn the national temperature down, not up. For presentpurposes, our differences are far less important than our unanimity: All nine Justices agree on the outcome of this case. That is the message Americans should take home."
A much more useful analysis would focus on changes in climate from the recent past that living people have actually experienced and then forecasting the foreseeable future—the next several decades—while accounting for changes in technology and resilience.
In the case of my recent {Nature} paper, this would mean considering the impact of climate change in conjunction with anticipated reforms to forest management practices over the next several decades. In fact, our current research indicates that these changes in forest management practices could completely negate the detrimental impacts of climate change on wildfires.
This more practical kind of analysis is discouraged, however, because looking at changes in impacts over shorter time periods and including other relevant factors reduces the calculated magnitude of the impact of climate change, and thus it weakens the case for greenhouse gas emissions reductions.
If a student tried to commit genocide in my class, I’d call the police. I’d do the same if he urged his classmates to kill Jews, Palestinians, Ukrainians or Russians, because inciting people to commit genocide is also a crime. If that is what “advocating genocide” means, then yes, genocide isn’t allowed in my classroom.
But arguing that genocide shouldn’t be a crime is allowed. You want to say that acts widely considered genocide can be legally justified? Say more. That killing Armenians in 1915, Bosnian Muslims in the 1990s, Ukrainians or Israelis or Palestinians in 2023 isn’t genocide? Discuss. I’ve argued similar positions myself, and my university neither would nor should punish me for it.
What about advocating that a group should be targeted for genocide? As long as a student isn’t directly inciting others to violence, I’ll listen and raise questions. I’ll ask the student to elaborate, and urge others to comment.
I require my students to speak “respectfully.” They must be civil. They shouldn’t direct foul language or racial epithets at their classmates. I don’t outright ban profane, vulgar or racist words, given that we study the reasons people kill each other, but I limit their use. Respect also means not interrupting others and avoiding theatrical disapproval—rolling eyes, hissing. But vigorous disagreement through reasoned argument is encouraged. That’s why we’re there.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/gays-ouster-may-prove-a-pyrrhic-victory-harvard-university-dei-isnt-dead-social-media-ddb8ca09Often people worry about the effects of speech on others, especially on those without economic or political power. That’s a great topic for class discussion, but ideas aren’t violence. Discussing diverse views on genocide, racism or human rights can make students uncomfortable, but ideas alone don’t create a hostile environment, legally or logically. Allowing one viewpoint to dominate can discourage students from speaking up, however, so it’s my job as a teacher, and the university’s as an institution, to ensure no ideology closes the space to all others.
I feel for Claudine Gay. A forced resignation after a brief tenure and under challenging circumstances isn’t something we should wish on anyone. But on an organizational and cultural level, it’s easy to overestimate the significance of Ms. Gay’s resignation.
In the wake of the congressional hearings, a social-media mob created the critical mass to push Ms. Gay and Harvard to act. But it remains to be seen whether her resignation will lead to other reforms or be an isolated event reinforcing the status quo. Making too much of the resignation could make us think that all is well. Therein lies the danger of this particular “win.” If we want to change Harvard and other institutions, we need a measured, persistent approach. Outrage alone won’t get it done.
I am, as you know, opposed to Jewish nationalism, for a fairly direct and basic reason - I am opposed to nationalism generally and religious and ethnic nationalism specifically.
It would be pointless for me to deny that I’m a beneficiary of affirmative action, because I am. But I’m not ashamed of it. The lives and careers of millions of men and women—many of whom, such as Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, have shaped the course of American history—were products of affirmative action.
It’s easy to forget that the America in which {Bakke} was decided was very different from the America of 2024. Affirmative action wasn’t an attempt to tilt the playing field in favor of non-White people, so much as it was an effort to level it at a time when discrimination was still egregious and rampant. Twenty-four years earlier, the Court’s decision in {Brown v Board of Education} had outlawed public-school segregation. But {Bakke} took things a step further by allowing public institutions to take diversity into account when admitting students or recruiting employees.
By the time I applied to Princeton University in 1984, it was well-known that elite schools were competing for diverse candidates—students who not only excelled academically but were also well-rounded, and boasted unusual or under-represented backgrounds. Being “diverse” could mean having a musical talent, standing out as a great athlete, speaking multiple languages, enjoying an esoteric hobby, being a young entrepreneur, hailing from a foreign country, displaying artistic flair, or coming from a single-parent household. When applying to an Ivy League school, it could even mean growing up in the Bible Belt.
Which is to say that being “diverse” meant providing a unique lens through which to view the world. The collective experiences of an authentically (which is to say, intellectually) diverse student body were (rightly) seen as contributing to a more richly textured academic experience for all—one that inspired curiosity and critical thinking.
https://thecritic.co.uk/the-female-body-is-the-new-short-skirt/One of the oddities of trans healthcare is that it masquerades as progressive despite having evolved from — and continuing to rely on — an understanding of sex difference which is regressive, male-centric and superficial. Because no one wants to admit it, this has led to a plethora of articles along the lines of “Here’s Why Human Sex Is Not Binary” and “Sex Redefined: The Idea of 2 Sexes Is Overly Simplistic”. While these claim to be adding extra detail and nuance to our understanding, what they do in practice is revert back to privileging the male default. Sex is all so varied, all so different, they tell us, we might as well not bother setting any standards for what counts as “femaleness”. We’re all just human, aren’t we? Only some bodies have tended to be considered more human than others. Rebranding “the male default” “the sex spectrum” is a sneaky way of insisting, once again, that female people are nothing more than males with a few minor tweaks.
Now, I am not so sure. ‘Who’s afraid of Liv Hewson?’ asked Teen Vogue in a piece from last year, which recounted how Hewson’s anorexia was “in part a result of gender dysphoria” — that is, Hewson had been foolishly starving markers of femaleness away instead of sensibly having them surgically removed.
We can therefore say that we are under-measuring the real value of output and so under-measuring productivity. As Google’s own economist, Hal Varian, has put it, “GDP doesn’t deal well with free.”
The ultimate example of this is WhatsApp. When I checked it all a few years back Facebook told me it had a “couple of hundred” engineers working on it. That’s a cost; that’s labour hours on one side of our productivity calculation. At that time there was no fee to use WhatsApp, nor did it carry advertising. There was no recorded output, at all, in GDP. WhatsApp appeared in the economic numbers as a decline in productivity — labour in, no measured output; that’s a loss, a decline. This is, of course, insane for something one billion people get free telecoms from — but that is the way these economic statistics work.
“Abortion: Augustine, in common with most other ecclesiastical writers of his period, vigorously condemned the practice of induced abortion. Procreation was one of the goods of marriage; abortion figured as a means, along with drugs which cause sterility, of frustrating this good. It lay along a continuum which included infanticide as an instance of ‘lustful cruelty’ or ‘cruel lust.’ Augustine called the use of means to avoid the birth of a child an ‘evil work:’ a reference to either abortion or contraception or both.”
According to a spokesperson, the public official’s “views on when life begins were informed by the views of Saint Augustine, who said: ‘the law does not provide that the act (abortion) pertains to homicide, for there cannot yet be said to be a live soul in a body that lacks sensation.’” (Saint Augustine, On Exodus 21.22) Clearly Augustine believed, according to the science of his day, that the “body” of a pre-born child “lacked sensation” and from this he concluded that the child likewise lacked a human soul. Since the creature in the womb of its mother seemed to lack both sensation and soul, at least until the 40th day after conception, he had questions about the full humanity of the child. If Augustine had access to ultrasound images or if he had seen the film, “Silent Scream,” he would have had no doubt about whether the child “lacked sensation.”
Lecturers whose intellectual ambitions have never risen beyond the pages of “best practice” handbooks clone closed-minded functionaries for middle management. Wealthy dullards from credulous abroad pay eye-watering sums to carry off a “vanity Masters” to embellish gaps on their walls and CVs.
And a self-satisfied chorus of overpaid administrators clap like seals, drowning out the protests of dispirited academics and an increasingly bemused public. Whatever this is, it is not what universities were, and it begs the question: should the people paying for it continue to do so?
Students are not the problem. For all the talk of trigger warnings, safe spaces, therapy puppies and micro-passive-aggressive behaviour, the young are as curious, clever and determined as ever. The problem is that higher education institutions, by endorsing so many facile and patronising measures, harm their charges’ prospects.
Giambona also routinely runs interference with kids’ teachers on kids’ behalf. “My teachers have special training in working with individuals with behavior needs and mental health needs,” he told me. “And we meet weekly, and we talk about what’s going on with each student and how we can approach them and support them when they need it.”
There’s a problem with in-school therapy, an ethical compromise, which arguably corrupts its very heart. In a remarkably underregulated profession, therapists still have a few ethical bright lines. And among the clearest is—or was—the prohibition on “dual relationships.”
“The relationship in the therapy room needs to be its own, distinct and apart,” psychologist and author Lori Gottlieb explains in her book, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone. “To avoid an ethical breach known as a dual relationship, I can’t treat or receive treatment from any person in my orbit—not a parent of a kid in my son’s class, not the sister of coworkers, not a friend’s mom, not my neighbor.” This ethical guardrail exists to protect a patient from exploitation. A patient may reveal her deepest secrets and vulnerabilities to her therapist, who could then rule over her like a czarina does her kulaks. Anyone possessing this much knowledge of a patient’s private life may be tempted to exert undue power. And so the profession makes “dual relationships” off limits.
Except that school counselors, school psychologists, and social workers enjoy a dual relationship with every kid who comes to see them. They know all of a kid’s best friends; they may even treat a few of them with therapy. They know a kid’s parents and their friends’ parents. They know the boy a girl has a crush on, what romantically transpired between them, and how the relationship ended. They know a kid’s teammates and coaches and the teacher who’s giving him a hard time. And they report, not to a kid’s parents, but to the school administration. It’s a wonder we allow these in-school relationships at all.
The American Counseling Association appears to have noticed the obvious problem. In 2006, it revised the ACA Code of Ethics. While still prohibiting sexual relationships with current clients, it decided that “nonsexual” dual relationships were no longer prohibited—especially those that “could be beneficial to the client.”
Ever since her school adopted social-emotional learning in 2021, Ms. Julie routinely began the day by directing her Salt Lake City fifth graders to sit in one of the plastic chairs she’d arranged in a circle. “How is each of you feeling this morning?” she would ask, performing a more intensive version of the “emotions check-in.” One day, she cut to the chase: “What is something that is making you really sad right now?”
When it was his turn to speak, one boy began mumbling about his father’s new girlfriend. Then things fell apart. “All of a sudden, he just started bawling. And he was like, ‘I think that my dad hates me. And he yells at me all the time,’” said Laura, a mom of one of the other students.
Another girl announced that her parents had divorced and burst into tears. Another said she was worried about the man her mother was dating. Within minutes, half of the kids were sobbing. It was time for the math lesson, but no one wanted to do it. It was just so sad, thinking that the boy’s dad hated him. What if their dads hated them, too?
“It just kind of set the tone for the rest of the day,” Laura said. “Everyone just was feeling really sad and down for a really long time. It was hard for them to kind of come out of that.”
A second mom at the school confirmed to me that word spread throughout the school about the AA meeting–style breakdown. Except this AA meeting featured elementary school kids who then ran to tell their friends what everyone else had shared.
In 1900 the population of 'Palestine' comprised separate communities of Bedouin, Druze, Kurds, Jews, Maronite and Assyrian Christians, Turcs, Bahai, Armenian, and imported militery personnel from Circassian and Balkans regions. The Jewish community was among the few most numerous. The Balfour Declaration and the Mandate refer to the non-Jewish population as "the non-Jewish citizens" - not as a general misnamed "Arabs". In 1900 and during the Mandate period Arabs (correctly named) were not the majority population.
If you showed episodes of The Simpsons from 1993, Season 4, to somebody in 2023, they would understand them and laugh because they speak to universal human issues. But if you could have shown the 2023 episodes to a viewer even in 2013, they wouldn’t understand what was going on. Somehow soon-to-be obsolete tech gadgetry and momentarily fashionable bad ideas about social justice at the schools that feed The Simpsons writers’ room came to dominate the town that, previously, everyone in the world could relate to.
The longer I live here, the more I realize that you actually don’t need to be particularly observant or insightful to figure out why things in America are as fucked up as they are. You don’t need to be an academic anthropologist or a trained statistician. You just need to be in the mix, on the ground. Then it becomes plain that three factors account for almost all of the misery in this city and, more broadly, in this country.[...]Second, virtually everyone that lives here seems to be either overweight or obese, a reality encouraged by a state-subsidized food complex that actively contaminates everything we eat. It’s truly appalling how little media attention this crisis receives: Far more Americans died of obesity-related illnesses last year than from COVID-19.
American Presidents may not like Supreme Court decisions, but most since Andrew Jackson haven’t bragged about defying its rulings. Not even Donald Trump. Then there’s President Biden, who, while canceling more student debt this week, boasted about ignoring the Supreme Court’s landmark 2023 ruling that his previous loan forgiveness plan was illegal.
Speaking in Culver City, Calif., on Wednesday, Mr. Biden said his original plan to “provide millions of working families with debt relief for their college student debt” was derailed by “MAGA Republicans” and “special interests” who challenged the plan in court. “The Supreme Court blocked it,” Mr. Biden added, “but that didn’t stop me.” He apparently thinks defying the law is a virtue.
Under the threat of force, city mayors are appointing gang members to local treasury offices, said two former mayors in Mexico’s state of Guerrero. Those jobs effectively give cartels control over contracts for municipal construction, procurement and other public services. Killings of government officials, candidates and political party members rose to 355 in 2023 from 94 in 2018, said Sandra Ley, a security expert at the México Evalúa research center. “It’s not just violence,” she said. “It is political, social control.”
In Delaware, Chancellor Kathaleen McCormick of the Court of Chancery ordered the unwinding of five years of Mr. Musk’s incentive-based compensation at Tesla, which had been approved by 80% of the company’s shareholders. The plaintiff, Richard Tornetta, held nine shares in 2018—worth about $200 then and $2,000 today, after the execution of the compensation plan that supposedly injured him.
Half of College Grads Are Working Jobs That Don’t Use Their Degrees
Choice of major, internships and getting the right first job after graduation are critical to career paths, new data show
Coming from a family where some relatives didn’t finish college and later struggled to get promotions or better jobs, Wolfe thought his degree would help him dodge those kinds of career roadblocks.
Instead, Wolfe, whose integrative studies major combined his credits in education, history and psychology, has held a string of jobs in sales, retail and food service, including one that ended in a layoff. Looking back, he said he wishes he’d taken time off before college to explore potential career options, and worries his interdisciplinary degree doesn’t stand out in the job market.
Biden correctly understood that people were sick of the chaos, and “returning to normal” became his most effective calling card during the 2020 campaign. And, at least in one respect, he delivered; the current president has certainly run a tighter ship, without the leaks and constant departures that characterized the Trump White House.
But Biden has nonetheless been a chaos agent too—just one of a different sort. Domestically, the president’s policies on migrants—particularly his decision to end the “remain in Mexico” requirement for asylum seekers—has led to the de facto loss of control of the southern border, as millions of undocumented migrants have entered and stayed in the U.S. Meanwhile, many cities around the country are increasingly being overwhelmed by these same migrants, who arrive in need of food and shelter. And all this comes alongside spikes in homicides and other crimes that have occurred over the past three years.
Setting aside policy and politics, the fact that the last two administrations have been so chaotic speaks to how much more performative the presidency has become in recent years. Since we don’t have a monarch, presidents have always been more than mere chief executives. But the Trump and Biden administrations have taken to new heights the prioritization of superficial gestures and pandering over the sound execution of sound policies.
Trump, of course, ran against elites, and so whenever he appointed people with any demonstrated competence and experience, he soon unceremoniously dumped them or humiliated them until they left in anger and frustration. It’s clear that providing bread and circuses to his supporters trumped doing his job.
Meanwhile, Biden has pandered to the far-left wing of the Democratic coalition, which helps explain his border and Middle East policies. To put it another way, he’d rather fail to advance vital American interests than be called a xenophobe or an Islamophobe.
Politics is like evolution: constantly mutating in response to changes in the environment. So while the prospect of another Trump-Biden contest may prompt us to think we’ve reached some painful status quo, change is coming. Someone, in either or both parties, will eventually find a way to effectively run against the chaos and imbecility of the last two administrations.
Humans have been doing something like city planning for millennia, though it hasn’t always been called that.
In the West, our city-planning tradition traces its roots to Hippodamus of Miletus, who laid out the ancient-Greek port of Piraeus in a rectangular grid expanding outward from an agora. The Romans replicated this model in colonies across the Mediterranean, adding sewers and stormwater infrastructure. They so loved their sewers, in fact, that they designated a goddess to preside over them.[...]The American colonial period marked a renaissance in city planning, as settlers inspired by Enlightenment ideas platted hundreds of street grids on dispossessed land, each testing new designs. In 1682, the surveyor Thomas Holme laid out a rectangular grid connecting the Schuylkill and Delaware Rivers, with four parks of equal size orbiting a central plaza—the basis for Philadelphia. In 1811, surveyors divided a largely uninhabited Manhattan into 155 streets and a dozen grand avenues, laying the groundwork for New York City.[...]Divinity aside, there was good reason to love grids. As Alain Bertaud—a former city planner for the World Bank—points out, planning a grid in advance of growth allows surveyors to demarcate the public and private realms, reserving space for necessary infrastructure and ensuring that future expansion follows a coherent pattern. That might sound restrictive, but the result is a blank canvas that empowers cities to grow and adapt.[...]A young City Beautiful movement carved grand boulevards and civic plazas out of capitals such as Denver and Washington, D.C. Transit companies blanketed metropolises such as Los Angeles and Chicago with networks of streetcars and commuter trains. Without ever using the phrase city planning, Americans had, by the dawn of the 20th century, perfected a formula for planning cities.
And then we invented city planning.
Beginning in the 1910s, the first local city-planning departments were established, not so much to plot out the physical growth of cities but to implement a novel policy: zoning. Zoning shifted the focus of city planning from stewarding the public realm to managing private development. The forebears of professional planners were unconcerned with land uses and densities, allowing mixed-use neighborhoods to emerge. But zoning remade cities into a fragmented landscape of malls, office parks, and residential subdivisions.
The shrine may be gone, but the so-called “toilet goddess” lived on in the popular imagination for centuries after. For classically-educated gentlemen, Cloacina became a way to wink at matters unmentionable. She made appearances in the works of John Gay, Alexander Pope, and Jonathan Swift, the last of whom wrote this in honor of a friend’s newly-constructed toilets:
> Here, gentle goddess Cloacine> Receives all offerings at her shrine.> In separate cells the he’s and she’s> Here pay their vows with bended knees
I don't know if they had a really tough time in high school or something, but I can't shake the feeling that the whole thing is some kind ofcoping session against anyone who was more Rich, more successful, more popular, or more attractive than them.
Either way, the attempted humor in Velma just comes across as hateful and nasty, instead of funny and insightful-- and man, what a weird Target for something like this. Like I said, the original Scooby-Doo had a pretty wholesome message about a group of friends from different backgrounds learning to work together to overcome challenges. They each had their own strengths and weaknesses, and no one member of the group could solve the mystery by themselves. It taught kids that every individual has value, that you shouldn't judge a person's worth based on superficial characteristics. But of course, this being a modern remake, produced by professional victims with ingrained grievances, the diverse female main character has to be the singular genius who triumphs against the odds; and everyone else just kind of orbits around her, entranced by her All-conquering Awesomeness. And of course, the rich white guy is always on hand to be the butt of every single joke.
Matt Taibbi: The other January 6th. It’s amazing coincidence, right? And this was the one, it was like a 30-ish page report and it said, we assess basically that Putin ordered an influence campaign to denigrate Hillary Clinton and help president-elect Trump’s electoral chances. And there was an annex to that report that included Steele dossier stuff. The four intelligence chiefs, Comey, John Brennan from the CIA, James Clapper from the DNI, and Mike Rogers from the NSA, they briefed Trump on this on January 5th, and a leak of that briefing got out to CNN. And that is how we all found out about the pee tape, because there was Steele dossier stuff in that little annex of this report.
Anyway, the main thing is this report, which concluded that there had been a Russian influence campaign specifically to help Donald Trump, was manufactured in a similar way to the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate that concluded that Saddam Hussein still had an active nuclear weapons program and was planning all sorts of things. How did they do it? They left out the dissenting analyses.
Now, there are two different methodologies in place. The 2002 NIE is a much bigger, more formal operation. It’s a product that’s been around since the Cold War. It includes input from all of the intelligence agencies. So back then it was 16, now it would be 17. This was not that. If you remember that Hillary Clinton said all 17 agencies agreed X, Y, Z. Well, it wasn’t all 17 agencies, it was three. It was the CIA< FBI, and NSA. The Intelligence Community Assessment is a smaller, what they call a more agile product that is designed to be able to respond to more current crises. And so they handpicked a team of about 24 people, all of whom were people who were basically on board with this Trump surveillance thing from the beginning. For instance, we heard that Peter Strzok, the counterintelligence agent who led the Trump investigation, that he was on this team, but they excluded dissenting opinions, including things like the Russians aren’t worried at all about a Hillary Clinton presidency. They’re very comfortable with that relationship. They see her as reflecting continuity. These were direct quotes, but they never got in the report. They just left it out. Now in the Iraq deal, it was in the classified report, but it was like in footnotes and you had to search hard for them. So if you had classified access, you could see the descent. But the public didn’t see it for a long time, in fact it was 12 years before we found out things that they had said things like Saddam Hussein, there’s no operational tie between Iraq and Al-Qaeda. If we had known that in 2002, would we have gone to war? Probably not, right? And it’s a similar thing here, but the difference was instead of burying the descent in the classified version of the document, they just didn’t allow dissenting people to participate in the process. And that’s how they did it. And even so, even doing it that way, even leaving out, for instance, the State Department’s intelligence wing, which would normally be involved and apparently had a very different opinion, they still had people on the team who didn’t buy the theory that this was done to help Trump, and they had to be overruled.
Matt Taibbi: So that’s another thing. The press continually uses the term “interference”. Now, the National Intelligence Council in 2021 defined election interference as activity aimed at the technical aspects of voting. So it’s messing with ballot boxes, messing with voter registration, hacking, stuff like that. That is why, in the Intelligence Community Assessment, you will not find the word “interference”. They say Putin ordered an influence campaign to denigrate Clinton, to help Trump. It was the press that added the word “interference”. The New York Times added it in one of their stories. The Pulitzer Committee in awarding the New York Times and the Washington Post commended both papers for their coverage of Russia’s election interference campaign in 2016. But even these dishonest CIA people never used the term “interference” for 2016. So what did they have? If you look at the report, they had a few social media accounts and a whole bunch of stuff on RT. That was basically it.
Walter Kirn: The people who could must have gone, “What is happening? An octopus is loose.”
Matt Taibbi: And this is where I think Trump’s inexperience comes into play because I think an experienced politician who knew the history of people like J. Edgar Hoover, who knew about James Comey’s admiration for the FBI past and had watched what he was clearly doing with Hillary Clinton, which was setting her up to be in his debt when she came into office. When they had that meeting and they presented him with all this stuff and promised... The steel stuff was delivered to Trump in a separate meeting by Comey after the initial briefing. The other three intelligence chiefs left, Comey, as if to be discreet, met with Trump privately and said, “Hey, there’s this thing about Russia and prostitutes, and they apparently...
Walter Kirn: I’m going to be your friend and keep it on the down low.
Matt Taibbi: He said that. He said, “We promise to keep it close hold.” It’s like grammatically incorrect. And he said, “We’re not going to give them... We know all the news stations have this.” Which they did. Everybody knew that the news agencies had the steel reports, but nobody would publish them because there was no way to confirm any of it. “We promise not to give them a news hook or an excuse to publish.” So he says that on January 5th. By January 10th this stuff is out in CNN. This is a highly classified briefing of highly classified material that magically leaks out to the entire press universe a few days later. At that moment, if I were Donald Trump, I would’ve called all those people in and said, “Okay. You’re all going to be fired within 30 minutes if you don’t start coughing up what actually happened here.” And he didn’t do it for whatever reason, but probably because he couldn’t have imagined such a thing happening. I mean, think about the seriousness of this. This is like a mutiny of your own intelligence officers occurring before a presidential campaign even begins.
[Graduate student:] "I think I see where we're headed here. Say you're an elite ruling class in a mass, urbanized society that's nominally democratic. Direct democracy isn't a live option; so to the extent that the public gets the input into public policy to which they think they're entitled, representative democracy is the best they can do. In practice, this input is limited to voting for whichever candidates for public office the public prefers, the winning candidates then conducting the actual business of government, thereby in theory representing the interests of their constituents. The question for the ruling class is, how can this process be controlled so that their own interests are served? Since people vote according to their perceptions and beliefs, which in turn reflect their understanding of the world they live in and how that world should best be navigated, the answer is simple. Gain control of the information commons; manipulate information to create mass beliefs compatible with ruling class interests; suppress any information that threatens them; market the result as in the public interest, in ways that make the public believe the ideas are their own; and you're home free."
[Despairing professor, one year from retirement:] "Yes. In my day that elementary insight would have been worth C+, but let's call it an A."
Perhaps this explains some of the obsession by the mogul-turned-President with puffing up his valuations over the decades. It’s true that Mr. Trump was interacting with sophisticated financial counterparties. But not for the first time, Mr. Trump’s casual relationship to the truth has come back to bite him.
Yet this remedy is like using a Hellfire missile to annihilate a shoplifter. Deutsche Bank made money on the loans, and its valuation teams gave a “haircut” to the numbers provided by Mr. Trump. There was no real financial victim.
More troubling is that this case was brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James, a Democrat who campaigned for office promising to find Mr. Trump guilty of something. This is choosing a target and then hunting for something to charge him with, which is an abuse of the law. Mr. Trump isn’t guaranteed a jury trial here, the judge says, because of the kind of case it is. But that’s another reason voters are unlikely to hold this judgment against Mr. Trump as he campaigns for the White House.
Voters were also misled about the reasons for the decriminalization of drugs. It had less to do with penalizing addicts and more to do with social justice. Over the last decade, there has been a movement towards recognizing bodily autonomy, A progressive philosophy that a person has a fundamental right and self-determination over their own body. Within the context of drug use, bodily autonomy gives a person a right to use and do what they want with their own body. The passage of this measure was a big win for progressives. This support, though, had severe consequences. Fentanyl flooded the streets just as Oregon decriminalized drugs and has become the deadliest, most addictive drug in history. Yes, there were fewer addicts in our jail system. They were now in our cemeteries.
we see it all the time another roadwidening project this time they'vepromised to get us moving this timecongestion will be solved but then itisn't it never is
this shouldn't be asurprise to anyone because planners haveknown since at least the 1930s that moreLanes do not solve traffic in fact theyactually create more traffic
so I wondered do I even need to make this?I mean there are already lots ofresearch papers articles and videosabout all of this all over the Internetsome by people much more educated onthis topic than me
but apparently yes Ido because cities are still spendingbillions on road widening and Highwayexpansions promising to reduce trafficcongestion despite decades of evidencethat it doesn't work plus a recentincrease in online urbanist contentlately has induced the demand for morevideos and if this video helps morepeople understand the concept then itwill be be worth it
https://youtu.be/NpBPm0b9deQ?t=971Biden was furious, and lashed out at Hur during a press conference on Friday to rebut charges that there was anything wrong with his memory. "How in the hell dare he raise that," said the president, who claimed he thought it was none of Hur's business.
There's just one problem with that: Hur did not ask Biden about the date of Beau's death, according to new reporting from NBC News. Per sources "familiar with Biden's view of the interview," it was the president—not Hur—who brought up the matter and used the incorrect date.
It was all a lie.
The Trump-Russia scandal made its formal public launch on January 6th, 2017, when the office of then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper published an Intelligence Community Assessment, or ICA, dominating headlines and upending the incoming Donald Trump administration. The report declared Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an “influence campaign” in the 2016 presidential election — they never used the word “interference” — to “denigrate” Hillary Clinton and “harm her electability,” thanks to a “clear preference for President-elect [Donald] Trump.”
It was powerful stuff. And dead wrong.
“They cooked the intelligence,” says a source close to a House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) investigation into the origins of the Trump-Russia scandal, whose full findings have until now been blocked from release. “They made it look like Putin supported Trump,” the source added. “The evidence points the other way.”
https://www.racket.news/p/why-even-democrats-should-care-aboutIn the first week of December, the CIA and FBI each gave secret briefings to the Senate. These presentations appeared to conflict so much on the question of whether or not the interference was to help Trump that the differing accounts were leaked to the Washington Post, which quickly published “FBI and CIA Give Differing Accounts on Russia’s Motives.”
A week later, on December 16th, 2016, the Post published a different story, called “FBI in agreement with CIA that Russia aimed to help Trump,” announcing the FBI's change of mind. Unnamed officials surfaced to explain that lawmakers who felt the FBI and CIA had differing accounts “misunderstood,” telling the paper, “The truth is they were never all that different in the first place.”[...]This “highest level source for the US inside the Kremlin” was deemed so important that a high-level operation was apparently executed to “exfiltrate” him from Russia, reportedly – the story was leaked to CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and others – out of fears for his life. The official was later identified by the Russian newspaper Kommersant as a mid-level diplomat named Oleg Smolenkov and was so frightened for his safety he bought a house under his own name in Stafford, Virginia, the news reaching the world via Realtor.com.
https://www.racket.news/p/many-reporters-paid-for-coveringUsing dubious foreign conclusions to buttress the initial domestic campaigns is part of the pattern. The October 2002 American report on “Iraq’s Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction” was written on the heels of a British assessment from September 24, 2002, that among other things claimed that some of Saddam Hussein’s WMDs were ready for deployment “within 45 minutes of an order to use them.” Not until a year later, in August of 2003, did reports begin to emerge sourced to British dossier scientist David Kelly that the UK assessment had been “sexed up.” British journalist Alistair Campbell described talking to Kelly, who said he’d been told a week before publication that the British report was insufficiently exciting. From the Guardian:
> "He said ‘until the last week, it wasn’t very exciting, it was transformed the week before publication.’> "I said ‘To make it sexy?’ and he said ‘Yes, to make it sexy.’”
For the U.S., the WMD story fell apart on the ground in Iraq, where searches came up empty, but it also fell apart on paper, as intelligence secrets began to leak out. On July 25th, 2003, after the invasion, a paper called “Declassified and Released Excerpts of the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq,” was released that began to hint at things the public wasn’t told in October 2002. Lines like We have low confidence in our ability to assess when Saddam Hussein might use WMD stood out.
Only in 2015, when the 2002 NIE was finally declassified, did we find out how badly our own intel had been “sexed up.” A remarkable array of crude tricks was used to manipulate opinion toward invasion. A little white-out transformed “We judge that Iraq has continued its weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs” into the far more convincing pre-invasion line: “Iraq has continued its weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3K3khsDCpBAOn their YouTube page, 60 Minutes still hasn’t corrected its headline: “President Trump repeats unsupported claim about spying.” The money exchange between Donald Trump and host Lesley Stahl:
> TRUMP: They spied on my campaign, Leslie.> STAHL: There’s no real evidence of that.> TRUMP: Of course there is.> STAHL: No.> TRUMP: It’s all over the place.> STAHL: Sir…> TRUMP: Leslie, they spied of my campaign and they got caught.> STAHL: Can I say something? This is 60 Minutes and we can’t put on things we can't verify.
This is 60 Minutes and we can’t put on things that we can’t verify! Stahl said this a year after the publication of Barack Obama appointee and Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report on the Trump-Russia investigation that described how the FBI used “intrusive techniques,” like having informants “interact and consensually record multiple conversations” with Trump aides “both during and after the time they were working for the Trump campaign.” That Horowitz report used the term CHS, or “confidential human source” — also known as an informant, also known as a spy — 1,122 times! Stahl was chastening Trump that “we” don’t tolerate wrongness, in the middle of being obviously, provably wrong in that very moment.
While certain social instincts, he says, were vital to the success of “primitive” cultures, the economist reiterates the often repeated assertion that Christian culture and the Medieval Church upheld a host of regressive moral attitudes that obstructed modern economic development for an entire millennium and stifled the emergence of free trade, commercial enterprises, and modern Capitalism. Although a number of scholars maintain that Hayek was a firm advocate for Western laws and moral behavior, what is certain is that he championed his own moral vision which he named ‘commercial morals.’ His alternative differs significantly from the classical conservative or natural law outlook.
https://www.wsj.com/business/gas-stoves-dishwashers-and-dryersthe-growing-energy-battle-over-appliances-548cec1cFor less than $500 a year, more than 700 students from tribes across the country can get a degree from Haskell Indian Nations University, a former boarding school that is now one of two tribal colleges operated by the federal government.
But Haskell, which has had eight presidents in six years, has come under fire from Kansas politicians, students and employees, who say it is poorly run and seemingly unaccountable to anyone.
The school has routinely violated students’ due-process rights, distributes financial aid months late and is plagued by incompetence that has led some to nickname Haskell “Hassle,” according to an internal report and interviews with current and former students, parents and employees.
Haskell has been accused of violating student reporters’ First Amendment rights. Federal lawyers have argued Haskell’s status as a federal agency means its students have fewer protections—specifically that the school can’t be sued for violating the gender-equity law Title IX. The school’s president since 2023, Francis Arpan, didn’t respond to requests for comment.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/energy-department-regulations-gas-stoves-ban-jennifer-granholm-biden-administration-11675457600Whirlpool’s head of sustainability, Pamela Klyn, said other appliances are approaching their efficiency limits. Reducing the electricity consumption of a contemporary microwave oven, for instance, would mean removing its clock, she said.
A Biden appointee on the Consumer Product Safety Commission ignited a firestorm last month by threatening to ban gas stoves. After criticism from West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin and others, the CPSC chairman rejected the idea, and White House officials said they didn’t support banning gas stoves.
Then why has the Energy Department proposed new efficiency standards that would ban the sale of most gas stoves currently on the market? The stated purpose of the rule-making is to reduce energy consumption and save consumers money. But these benefits are meager. The department estimates the proposed rule would reduce energy use by a mere 3.4% from the status quo, and consumers on average would save $21.89 over a cook-top’s lifetime.
For example, in 2020, when the school set out to hire a professor of National Defense/Computer Network Security, the search committee made its priority clear: each candidate’s “diversity” score—assessing how well applicants understand things like “many intersectional aspects of diversity”—was given equal weight to factors like research and teaching experience.
Another search in 2021, for a professor of Big Data/Cybersecurity, stated: “the weight of the ‘diversity’ scores were equal to the other scored areas that contributed to the candidate’s overall score.”[...]Per the college’s diversity and inclusion plan, which is still in place, the reports carry high stakes: a search that fails to show “a serious consideration” of DEI-related issues risks being canceled, resulting in no hire at all.
Sauter explained that City Hall’s security system—including security officers, security cameras and badge access—is connected and made possible by a fiber network strung above the streets like phone lines and running underground. Installing a security system in each of the new geographic districts that links back to the one at City Hall would require an intense expansion of city government’s current fiber network capabilities. (Having a linked security system ensures a quicker and more robust emergency response system.) Building out fiber network infrastructure requires city crews digging trenches in the ground.
Sauter’s team conducted a survey of 37 other cities that have geographic representation. None, she said, has district-based offices “because of the exact same reason we’re honestly not wanting to pursue them.”
Pop songs sung by women have been dismissed as “bubble gum” for decades. That might have been true in 1983, when Madonna sang “Holiday, celebrate!” or in 2010, when Katy Perry enticed listeners with the image: “California girls / We’re unforgettable / Daisy Dukes / Bikinis on top.” But today’s female singer-songwriters are crafting hit songs that convey despair, anger and bitterness. A generation ago, the queens of the pop charts—Sheryl Crow, Christina Aguilera, P!nk, Destiny’s Child—vowed to soak up the sun; asked us to come on over, baby; and said it was time to get this party started. The mood has darkened since.
Male singer-songwriters remain chiefly interested in what their forebears wrote about: seduction, occasionally with a soupcon of brooding alienation. Whether it’s Harry Styles (“I can see you’re lonely down there / Don’t you know that I’m right here”), Post Malone (“I can’t let go, it’s chemical”) or The Weeknd (“Baby I would die for you”), the singer is generally either putting the moves on a potential lover or trying to win one back. The English crooner Ed Sheeran has built a centimillionaire fortune out of simpering flattery: “I don’t deserve this / Darling you look perfect tonight,” “Well, me, I fall in love with you every single day,” or “I’m in love with the shape of you.”
Reporters from The Wall Street Journal examined some of that evidence, supplemented with interviews of first responders, survivors, families of victims and forensic scientists, to document an attack that Israeli Police Commissioner Kobi Shabtai described as “systematic and unprecedented in its cruelty.”
Forensic evidence shared with the Journal by Israeli officials shows some victims were burned alive after militants used accelerants to set fire to their homes. Photos viewed by the Journal taken by first responders on the scene show bodies were mutilated including the sex organs of both men and women. The bodies of women and girls showed various signs of sexual assault, and recently, at least three female survivors have come forward to say they experienced sexual violence on Oct. 7.
Hamas officials have denied their fighters killed children and raped women.
One scan of blackened remains viewed by the Journal revealed two spines and two rib cages belonging to a child and an adult who were bound together with metal wire and burned alive, Kugel said. He added that more than 20 bodies were found with hands bound with zip ties or electric cords, indicating execution.
Militants posted videos of some of the killings and kidnappings on victims’ social media pages, where friends and family watched. When militants forced their way into Noam Elyakim’s home, they shot him in the leg, then took his wife’s phone and livestreamed the family being taken hostage on Facebook. In another instance, Shay Shimoni saw a video posted by militants of her 75-year-old mother dead in a pool of blood. The Journal viewed both videos, which are no longer online.
To give you a sense of public opinion, once while riding an Uber from the Costa Mesa headquarters to LAX, I had a phone conversation where I mentioned being proud to work with Anduril and support the military. The Uber driver /(pulled off the highway and kicked me out of his car)/. His explanation was, “I can’t be around a person like you.”
When Anduril got unfairly maligned in the press, we would often send Slack messages to the entire team to highlight how unfair and ridiculous the attacks were. The team got in the habit of joking and meme-ing about hit pieces, to the point that external FUD actually strengthened internal resolve and morale. Even now, a key element of Palmer’s lore is that he survived multiple cancellation attempts, emerging unscathed from the ashes of a media dumpster fire like a goateed, bikini-clad phoenix.
More generally, we could say most of the money spent on these departments serves one of three interconnected purposes: (1) to provide work for activists tasked with either (2) distributing government funds to select client-constituents, incentivizing their ongoing political support or (3) manufacturing internally-directed identitarian propaganda to agitate for more government funds. We have come to call this nearly $100 million a year clientelism scheme — in which all involved actors are perversely incentivized to demand ever-increasing sums of money for themselves, and in which every dollar spent brings in more participants — San Francisco’s “DEI-industrial complex,” and outlined some of its most flagrant excesses below.
It was also difficult for liberal Jews to find their grounding in the days after the attacks. Some took to their social media to explain details of the existence of Israel that they assumed their celebrating friends didn’t know. But they did know. They just didn’t care. When rape denial was rampant, the liberal Jews sighed in relief when the New York Times finally did a deep dive into the allegations of what happened to women on Oct. 7. Now their fellow leftists will have to believe. But it didn’t happen. Dismissing Jewish pain came easily to them, leaving liberal Jews aghast. Not so aghast that they didn’t continue to post to their social media pleas to their allies to show them humanity. “I still believe in affordable housing,” went one plea. I’m just like you, I promise. Last May, peace activist Judi Weinstein Haggai wrote, “May we all be granted the right to our basic rights of home, food, shelter, and peaceful days.” She was one of the Kibbutzniks slaughtered on Oct. 7.
What these politicized Jews and Jewish institutions should have learned then is that an ally is not necessarily a friend. An ally makes a calculated decision of alignment based on mutual objectives. “Allyship,” a word the left has fetishized, is temporary by design. Political allyship is the most transient. This is why you don’t subsume your entire religion to your politics. This is why you don’t ignore thousands of years of religious thought to conform to the trendy political philosophy of the modern moment. And that is why you don’t pervert your congregation to focus on politics instead of scripture. Yet Conservative and Reform rabbis continue to do just that.
The administrator leading the session proceeded with a series of questions that undermined the necessity of collecting unbiased evidence to establish best medical practices—questions like: “Why is anything that is documented or published valued more highly than other forms of knowledge and communication?” and “Are clinical trials more valuable than patients’ clinical experiences?”
The questions suggested ignorance about the progress of modern medicine by those leading the session. The advance of medical science and therapeutics requires documenting and publishing results and conducting clinical trials, and neither conflict with nor devalue the importance of patients’ clinical experiences. And what these questions had to do with undoing racism was not at all clear.
I suggested that the term `anti-racist', though central to the mission of the school’s Racism and Bias Initiative (RBI), lacked a clear definition in their materials. The RBI discussion leader dismissively responded that “anti-racism was simply opposition to racism,” and that “anyone with a terminal degree should know that.” She then stated that the school’s anti-racism program was not about “encouraging pointless discussions of what anti-racism means.”
I couldn’t disagree more. As my friend, the physician and bioethicist Lachlan Forrow, points out, unclear terms lead to unclear solutions. If we can’t agree on what `race', `racism', `diversity', `inclusion', and `equity' actually mean, the initiatives based on these terms are likely to be ineffective. But the message of the sessions I attended was clear: much like a devotee accepting holy writ, we were to forgo questions and simply embrace the doctrine, even without knowing what it means.
But it is /(exactly because)/ the issues of racism and bias in medicine today are so important that precise definitions and rigorous critical discussion are so crucial in medical education. The training of physicians requires that they understand the scientific basis of medicine while being aware of the social determinants of disease, and exhibit the ethical, moral, and behavioral standards that constitute medical professionalism. All of these are needed to treat patients with the highest level of expertise—whatever patients’ racial and ethnic backgrounds, economic and educational status, or political and social views. Inculcating students and trainees with contestable ideological notions and bringing less rigor to the issues of racism than we bring to other serious topics makes this more difficult to accomplish.
I graduated SUNY at Buffalo Medical School in 1969. My degree was "Doctor of Medicine" and not architect of social justice. The M.D. degree required us to pronounce, and take seriously, the Hippocratic Oath, which is famous for "do no harm" but also includes the following often forgotten statement: "Into whatever homes I go, I will enter them for the benefit of the sick, avoiding any voluntary act of impropriety or corruption, including the seduction of women or men, whether they are free men or slaves."
Except for examining patients with the knowledge of genetic predisposition to certain diseases based on race, and that distinction was learned SOLELY for the treatment benefit of the patient (such as Sickle-Cell-Anemia in Black people), color of skin or sexual orientation was never a factor.
My preceptor in the clinical years, James Holland, M.D., a world famous hematologist-oncologist, insisted that every patient was addressed as Mr. or Mrs or Ms. (there were no pronoun issues in those days), and we were never allowed to use a first name. That was drilled into us to teach us that EVERY patient deserved formal respect. Another thing he insisted on was that we do not sit on the edge of the bed of the patient as we were talking to him/her, as that patient deserved their formal "space." RESPECT was taught without special courses in D.E.I.; respect was S.O.P.!!!!
Was there racism in America? Yes. Was there racism in medical research? Yes, as the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment certainly proves and that page in history also revealed a violation of standard medical ethics. Is there a racist physician in the USA? I'm certain there is but it is not prevalent in the least bit and, personally, in the 42 years I practiced Ophthalmology I intersected with hundreds of physicians and never met one who ever even expressed racial ideology!!!
Simply put: physicians treated patients with diseases (note "patients with diseases" and not just diseases). Are there outliers? If you watch any TV channel you will see ads for lawsuits against physicians who were sexual predators, so obviously there are outliers, but the outliers are rare and are seen disproportionately because of social media and class-action lawsuits. Except for dermatologists, physicians did not look at skin color.
In 2005, the State of NJ Board of Medical Examiners, required all licensed physicians to take a course in "cultural competency." Most of the contents of that course was preaching to the choir, as those in my lecture hall looked at each other in wonderment as to why are we re-inventing the wheel? On the examination I took for that course, believe it or not, there was a multiple-choice question regarding how to greet a patient who was from the Fiji Islands. So much for cultural competency courses and requirements!
Severe personality problems find *camouflage.* No one thinks "I'm a sadist" or "I'm a malignant narcissist." They find a belief system/social group that validates their most hateful, destructive impulses & construes them as virtues.
The most toxic and hateful people in the world are 100% convinced they fight for what is true and right. They find a way to give free rein to their cruelty, to attack, to treat others cruelly and viciously. *And they find allies to cheer them on* who also believe they are on the side of all that is true and good.
For colleagues looking for more theoretical explanation, the psychological processes are splitting, projection & projective identification. Splitting means not recognizing one's own capacity for hate, cruelty, and destructiveness. The person is blind to the bad in themselves.
Instead, they project the badness onto some designated other. And this other person, via the defense of projection, is now seen as the repository of all that is bad and evil and necessary to destroy. That's the projection.
The person now feels fully justified in unleashing their viciousness and hate on the other person, who is now seen (via projection) as someone monstrous who must be destroyed. If the person who is projected on responds to the provocation with anger, this is now seen as further confirmation of how hateful and destructive they are (this is what is called is "projective identification.") The end result is that the person can deny their own sadism, cruelty, and hate—while simultaneously acting it out without restraint. And feel themselves to be 100% on the side of truth and right as they do it.
It's easy to look at these incentives to get expensive, borderline-useless graduate degrees and conclude that our entire higher education system is irrevocably broken, but it's surprisingly easy to finance an undergraduate education.
For the 2021–2022 school year, the average tuition and fees at a public, four-year institution was just $9,596. The cost can be brought down even further with two years at a local community college, which averages just over $3,500 per year.
This investment tends to pay off. In 2021, the median earnings of someone with an undergraduate degree were 55 percent higher than the median earnings of those who only graduated high school. Over the course of his lifetime, a man with a bachelor's degree can expect to earn $900,000 more than a man with only a high school education; women can expect to earn $630,000 more than their uncredentialed counterparts.
Thus, getting a degree is a great idea. But there's a catch.
Those with some college education and no degree don't experience a salary bump. In fact, their earnings are virtually identical to those with just a high school diploma. The difference is that college dropouts also have college debt—on average, about $14,000.
The lesson is simple: You should go to college, but only if you are fairly certain that you have the academic chops to finish.
Unfortunately, huge numbers of students don't follow this advice. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the average six-year graduation rate at American colleges was just 64 percent in 2020, meaning that 36 percent of students took even longer to finish school or didn't graduate at all. This shouldn't be surprising. In 2021, 75 percent of high school students who took the ACT exam scored so low they failed to meet minimal college readiness benchmarks in English, math, reading, and science. But in 2021, 43 percent of high school seniors immediately enrolled in a four-year college upon graduation.[...]Universities' "incentive is to say, 'Hey, the federal government is offering all of this federal student loan and grant funding. We want to enroll as many students as possible, even if we know that they're not in a position to finish college,'" Cooper says. "'And if they drop out, you know, we're no worse off because we face no financial consequences if we fail students.'"
The Energy Department is required by law to approve permits to export LNG to countries with which the U.S. doesn’t have free-trade agreements if they are in the “public interest.” The department has never rejected a permit. But now the Administration plans to do so by redefining “public interest” to include the potential impact on the climate.
The White House says the pause will only affect a handful of projects that are currently seeking Energy Department permits, but this is dishonest. It will also freeze about a half a dozen projects seeking Federal Energy Regulatory Commission approvals and could halt another dozen or so that have been permitted by previous Presidents.
That’s because the Energy Department in December announced that projects not yet operating will have to reapply for permits if it’s been seven years since they were authorized. So projects in the works could get deep-sixed—even if they have billions of dollars in committed capital and contractual agreements with customers.
The country doesn't have to punish itself like this with political selections that come pre-rejected. Reason's Matt Welch pointed out last week that 2024 presidential ballots will feature third-party and independent alternatives for those tired of playing a dreaded game of choose-your-doom.
"Most states' ballots will feature at least five, maybe six" White House hopefuls, he wrote.
Unhappy voters could also shake things up in congressional races where, believe it or not, candidates who have yet to disappoint constituents (give them a chance) often throw their hats in the ring. Yes, 32 House seats went uncontested by either Democrats or Republicans in 2022. But that still leaves third-party and independent candidates in many cases, leaving at least some choice for the majority of congressional seats.
Except, again, Americans are most angry at everybody else's congressional representation.
The smart money says that, as disgruntled as Americans are with the country's elected officials and those officeholders' potential replacements, they're not about to look beyond their usual menu of political options. That would require changing bad habits, which is harder than complaining. Voters may claim to be tired of the grim, old political game, but they keep playing by the same rules.
https://statutes.capitol.texas.gov/Docs/EL/htm/EL.192.htmTexas Election Code s 192.031 doesn’t require that the certifications be served on the Secretary of State by that date. It says that if you meet the deadline, then you’re entitled to have your candidate’s name on the ballot. Those are two different things.
https://www.lp.org/news-press-releases-barr-campaign-statement-on-texas-supreme-court-ruling/Sec. 192.031. PARTY CANDIDATE'S ENTITLEMENT TO PLACE ON BALLOT. (a) A political party is entitled to have the names of its nominees for president and vice-president of the United States placed on the ballot in a presidential general election if: [...]
https://reason.com/2008/08/29/did-bob-barr-already-win-texas/You might remember that lawsuit Bob Barr filed a to keep Barack Obama and John McCain off the Texas ballot because both the Democratic and Republican parties in that state missed the filing deadline to make the presidential ballot. The Texas Supreme Court dismissed Barr's complaint without comment.
As it turns out, the Libertarian Party missed the filing deadline to get Bob Barr on the ballot in Louisiana, party officials say because state offices were closed the week of the deadline due to Hurricane Gustav.
Refreshingly, state officials in Louisiana cited the mulligan given the two major party candidates in Texas, noted the barrier presented by the unpredictable catastrophic weather, and said it was in the best interests of the Democratic process to include Barr on the ballot.
Just kidding. You didn't really believe that, did you?
It was made abundantly clear to all in attendance that these recommendations were “best practice” at MultiCare, and that the hospital would not tolerate anything less.
When the leader of the training brought up hormone treatments, I shakily tapped the unmute button on Zoom and asked why 70 to 80 percent of female adolescents diagnosed with gender dysphoria have prior mental health diagnoses.
She flashed a look of disgust as she warned me against spreading “misinformation on trans kids.” Soon the chat box started blowing up with comments directed at me. One colleague stated it was not “appropriate to bring politics into this” and another wrote that I was “demonstrating a hostility toward trans folks which is [a] direct violation of the Hippocratic Oath,” and recommended I “seek additional support and information so as not to harm trans clients.”
As soon as I closed my laptop, I burst into tears. I care so deeply about my clients that even thinking about this now makes me cry. I couldn’t understand how my colleagues, who are supposed to be my teammates, could be so quick to villainize me. I also wondered if maybe my colleagues were right, and if I had gone insane.
Later, my boss reached out to me and told me it was “inappropriate” of me to raise these questions, telling me that a training session was not the proper forum. When I tried to present the evidence that caused me concern—the lack of long-term studies, the devastating side effects—she told me she didn’t have time to read it.
Emily Kopp, a science and health reporter working for the public health watchdog group U.S. Right to Know, obtained and published this latest batch of documents—which she obtained through a FOIA request to the U.S. Geological Survey—on January 18. The more than 1,400 pages are communications about and early drafts of the DEFUSE proposal, a grant application seeking funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to collect and manipulate bat-borne viruses. EcoHealth Alliance, a U.S.-based nonprofit group, authored the grant, which they proposed as a collaboration between U.S.-based virologists and the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the lab located in the city where the first known cases of COVID-19 appeared. DARPA ultimately rejected the proposal as too risky, but critics like Ebright believe that the work likely continued on in Wuhan anyway.
Why don't you? As reported by Quillette (https://quillette.com/2022/04/15/why-did-harvard-university-go-after-one-of-its-best-black-professors/), Harvard's internal investigation found that Fryer had never touched or sexually propositioned anyone, and he was only guilty of telling a few off-colour jokes and flirting with a colleague. Of the 38 complaints raised against him, the internal investigation determined that 32 should be dismissed out of hand as obvious lies (https://aneconomicsense.org/2023/02/21/roland-fryer-his-life-story-his-work-on-education-and-on-police-use-of-force-and-harvard/ - section D "Consequences"). One of the complainants against Fryer later withdrew her complaint entirely, as reported by the Harvard Crimson (https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2019/4/23/fryer-mcad-investigation-concluded/). Quillette also notes that there are previous cases of Harvard professors who investigators determined committed far more severe sexual infractions than Fryer, but who got off much more lightly than Fryer's two-year suspension. For the crime of Fryer telling some off-colour jokes and persistently flirting with a colleague, Claudine Gay was calling for his tenure to be revoked, something Harvard has never done in the past century. There is no part of this story which doesn't sound like a trumped-up and ideologically motivated accusation of sexual harassment.
But I suppose next you'll tell me that Quillette, the Crimson and An Economic Sense don't meet your lofty standards of "legitimate news outlets". If you can present compelling evidence that the accusations against Fryer were well-founded, or that he is in fact guilty of far more serious sexual infractions than the internal investigation determined, I would love to see it. But we both know you can't and you won't.
Actually Karlstack (Brunet) investigated Gay over a year ago and found all kinds of damning stuff that isn't plagiarism, including apparent coverups of data forgery.
https://www.karlstack.com/p/the-curious-case-of-claudine-gay
So there was no holding stuff in reserve. They were attacking Gay from the start. Yet nobody cared. The entire thing did not go viral, did not collect $100, did not pass go. That's why you don't know about it and are over-thinking their strategy.
I think it's established beyond all possible doubt now that journalists do the bidding of academics, and the only crime academics care about is plagiarism. People can literally photoshop images and make up tables of data, entire fields can be based on nonsensical premises, and nobody anywhere gives a damn. But the moment someone copies a few sentences from another paper they absolutely ape-shit.
In this context it's entirely expected and reasonable that the Gay thing revolves around plagiarism. What was Ackman going to do, accuse her of scientific fraud, diversity hiring, incompetence and coverups? That's de rigour in academia and journalists never report on it, with the notable exception of Nature's news department (!!). But plagiarism? That gets noticed in the halls of power.
> In response, Gay said she stood behind the integrity of her work and requested an outside review of it.[77][76] The Harvard Corporation reported that the review found "a few instances of inadequate citation" and "duplicative language without appropriate attribution" in her work, but "no violation of Harvard's standards for research misconduct."[77][78][74] Analyses by The Harvard Crimson and CNN contested Harvard's statement, finding that Gay had likely violated the university's policies on plagiarism and academic integrity.[79][80][81] Gay requested seven corrections to add citations and quotation marks to her dissertation and two of her articles.[71][82][75] Academic Joseph Reagle opined that media reports that Gay "plagiarized", implied that she had stolen the central ideas in her work, saying "I don't think this is the case" but that the work "contain plagiarized prose. This is a lesser but still significant infraction."
A friend of mine with a phd in education shared the following: "Investigating non-stem academics for scholarly misconduct is like drug testing truckers for speed. It mostly isn't done or the whole industry would collapse, but its very useful when you need to get rid of someone."
Let’s explore this footnote, shall we, because it is a scandal unto itself when put into proper context. Not only does this footnote totally debunk the faulty methodology of her 2001 APSR paper, which is now automatically trash, but it also provides further evidence of a coverup. You see, when this article Logical Inconsistency in King-based Ecological Regressions was published in the AJPS, the footnote was gone. Vanished.
Poof.
Instead of calling out Gay’s faulty paper, it now described "a hypothetical study.” The fact that CG's name was not explicitly mentioned and the study was called "hypothetical" in no way exonerates the fact that her research is fundamentally flawed. Gay’s footnote was removed because the Harvard mafia pressured the AJPS editors to remove it… or so the gossip goes.
https://www.karlstack.com/p/exclusive-leaked-document-provesFast forward 20 years and Gay has ~2,000 citations — less than 100 citations per year. This is because upon achieving tenure, she immediately went full deadwood (she lacked breadth in both theoretically and methodologically skills to keep up with people who actually have talent). She produced incompetent and logically inconsistent work a couple of decades ago, refused to share her data, went deadwood for 15 years, and then is rewarded with the most powerful Deanship at Harvard. Sometimes she will post an article here or there, such as one of her recent publications is in the "Journal of Race, Ethnicity and Politics" (with 2 co-authors) where she is a member of the Editorial Board (lol).
A prerequisite for being a Dean at Harvard is having a track record of research excellence, and Claudine Gay does not have this. Again: this points to the fact that she was only promoted to FAS Dean for nefarious/conspiratorial reasons. Not merit. I feel sorry for her, I can only imagine how devastating and stressful it must be to realize that everything you have ever published is flawed.
Not only is Claudine Gay the the Dean of Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard, more importantly, she may be the presumptive next President of Harvard, set to replace outgoing President Larry Bacow. [...]I can’t stress enough how much of a tragedy a Claudine Gay presidency would be — this musn’t be allowed to come to pass. She will ruin Harvard. She’s an intellectual lightweight (her entire body of critical race theory “research” is flawed and/or fake), a far-far-far-left DEI activist, and corrupt as hell.
Asked what the Founders had accomplished at the conclusion of the Constitutional Convention, Benjamin Franklin didn’t say “a democracy—if you can keep it.” Most of the Founders equated democracy with mob rule and wanted to avoid it. For a few, notably Thomas Jefferson, the word connoted self-government and decentralization of power. Andrew Jackson and his followers used it that way. Abraham Lincoln, who didn’t often use the word, treated democracy as a positive term signifying equality and self-rule.[...]Elsewhere in the world, the word “democratic” began attaching itself to distinctly undemocratic regimes and organizations. The Bolsheviks in Russia emerged from the Social Democratic Labor Party. Postwar Romania, in which dissent was outlawed, was run by the People’s Democratic Front. In the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, known in the West as North Vietnam, a favorable opinion of America or a desire to emigrate could get you and your family “re-educated” or murdered. In America, Students for a Democratic Society stood for an array of left-wing causes, but the right of people to vote against those causes didn’t compute. In the minds of SDS’s founders, its causes were democracy.
→ Journalists are using fake quotes to push “genocide”: In order to make Israeli officials sound monstrous, journalists are gently tweaking their quotes, per a great new story in The Atlantic. An example: the Israeli defense minister said that the IDF is going to destroy Hamas. Translated from Hebrew: “Gaza will not return to what it was before. There will be no Hamas. We will eliminate it all.”
How was that quoted in the American and British press? “Gaza will not return to what it was before. We will eliminate it all.” So the media deleted the whole Hamas part to make it sound like the Israeli military leader is a genocidal maniac seeking to eliminate Gaza, which is—and this is no coincidence—the narrative they so desperately want. That Hamas-free version ran in small publications, zines really, like NPR, the BBC, The New York Times (twice), The Guardian, and The Washington Post (the writer of that piece stated that the defense minister said “the quiet part out loud,” incredibly).
→ It takes two to tango: When it comes to immigration, it’s very important to know that both sides are changing. So while liberals are becoming much more comfortable with an open border, Republicans are moving to the more extreme right. Just look at this New York Times chart showing the radical directions both sides are turning to on immigration:[...]Okay. Okay. This shows Dems getting significantly more liberal on immigration and Republicans getting. . . moderately more liberal on immigration. But do you see the downward red dotted line that some staffer drew? That line is the vibe. The vibes say MAGA. Maybe don’t look too closely at the chart.
A New Mexico grand jury has indicted Alec Baldwin on an involuntary manslaughter charge, even though previously that same charge was dropped. For those not obsessed with this case: the armorer on the set of his Western movie Rust put a real live bullet into Alec Baldwin’s gun (still unclear why and how that happened), and he then accidentally shot and killed the cinematographer. It’s obviously a horrible accident, so why are New Mexico’s prosecutors so obsessed with this case? Because they’re bored. Because it’s a lot more fun to bully Alec Baldwin than to go after random gang members. Per NBC from a couple months ago: “[A] source familiar with the case said the special prosecutors have had discussions in which they said they hope the trial will ‘humble’ Baldwin, specifically citing his run-ins with paparazzi and public comments that weren’t about the case. The source added that the intention is for it to be a ‘teachable moment’ for Baldwin.” Yes, that’s what I want from my state prosecutors, *{teachable moments} to humble celebrities. These are clowns, and Baldwin isn’t a murderer.
→ 1619 curriculum erases. . . slavery? Remember the 1619 Project, the NYT special feature that centered the story of slavery as the core of America’s story? An interesting and provocative argument. Well, here is how the new 1619 school curriculum describes Muslim conqueror Mansa Musa:
> Most influential in this regard was Mansa Musa I (r. 1312–1337 c.e.), a devout Muslim who became well known throughout Europe and the Middle East as a result of his 1324 pilgrimage to Mecca. He made the four-thousand-mile journey with an opulent personal caravan that included twelve hundred servants and eighty camels carrying two tons of gold, which he distributed to the needy along his route [emphasis mine].
Musa was a major slaver, and those lovely servants are usually described as enslaved people because they were. But for some reason, it doesn’t matter here. For some reason, the slave trade is super not centered in Musa’s story, which is about cool camels and a fun adventure. As the writer Dan McLaughlin put it: “It’s only slavery if it comes from the Slave region of Virginia. Otherwise, it’s just sparkling servitude.”
These people reordered the geography of the world, blithely moved whole manufacturing sectors from one continent to another, started moronic wars that pointlessly killed millions and created millions more refugees, bailed out corrupt banks while whole regions went into foreclosure, and failed to accomplish much but a growing sense of foreboding and decline despite decades of promises to the contrary. Still, they feel sincere rage at the idea that they should have to earn votes.
Back in 2016, when I disliked Trump enough to write Insane Clown President, I was still naive enough to puzzled by the stream of headlines describing his win as a “failure of democracy.” It was anything but. The presidency had long been stage-managed to absurdity, with candidates needing the backing of one of the two parties, the press, and corporate donors to gain the White House. The whole idea of this oligarchical ADT system was to guarantee the president arrived in the Oval Office a political debtor, while keeping anyone with aspirations to independence out. This was the clear lesson of the Nader episode.
Trump broke through all these barriers as an unapproved “fringe” candidate, making his win an extraordinary blow for democracy, or so I thought, even though I couldn’t stand him. If he could win, anyone could, and this was good news for those of us who thought the system’s corrupt features might never be fixed.
In 2004, a third party needed to collect 634,727 valid signatures in about six and a half months to get on the ballot. If you’ve ever wondered why so few third-party candidates run, it’s because this is an extraordinarily difficult logistical task, and expensive, requiring services of companies that even then charged between $1.00 and $1.50 per signature. (Ross Perot reportedly spent $18 million to get on the ballot in 1992.) The process gets more cumbersome when you’re forced to account for “spoilage,” i.e. how many signatures you’ll lose in the face of challenges from a determined opponent, in Nader’s case from Democrats and affiliated groups.
Nader lost signatures that were allegedly signed in the wrong county (an irony given recent events, as we’ll see), due to “unwritten rules” that a collector’s signature must be legible even if his or her name is printed underneath it, because signatories no longer lived at the addresses where they were registered, because signatures were printed instead of signed, because additional information like the date was included next to signatures, and so on, and so on, and so on.
For over a year, the Biden administration and its surrogates have dropped hint after hint that the plan for winning in 2024 — against Donald Trump or anyone else — might involve something other than voting. Lawsuits in multiple states have been filed to remove Trump from the ballot; primaries have been canceled or invalidated; an ominous Washington Post editorial by Robert Kagan, husband to senior State official Victoria Nuland, read like an APB to assassins to head off an “inevitable” Trump dictatorship; and on January 11th of this year, leaders of a third party group called “No Labels” sent an amazing letter to the Department of Justice, complaining of a “conspiracy” to stop alternative votes.
Authored by former NAACP director Ben Chavis, former Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman, former Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair, former North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory, and former Assistant U.S. Attorney and Iran-Contra Special Counsel Dan Webb, the No Labels letter described a meeting of multiple advocacy groups aligned with the Democratic party. In the 80-minute confab, audio of which was obtained by Semafor, a dire warning was issued to anyone considering a third-party run:
> Through every channel we have, to their donors, their friends, the press, everyone — everyone — should send the message: If you have one fingernail clipping of a skeleton in your closet, we will find it… If you think you were vetted when you ran for governor, you’re insane. That was nothing. We are going to come at you with every gun we can possibly find. We did not do that with Jill Stein or Gary Johnson, we should have, and we will not make that mistake again.
That group, which called itself the Transition Integrity Project (TIP), involved roughly 100 former officials, think-tankers, and journalists who gathered to “wargame” contested election scenarios.
Asked about that passage, Gilman replied that it was “the right question,” i.e. “Why can’t we just rely on elites to observe/enforce norms?” Noting that two-thirds of the GOP caucus voted not to certify the 2020 election, he went on: “If I had had total confidence in the solidity of the institutions, I wouldn’t have felt the need to run the exercises.”
This answer makes some sense in the abstract, but ignores the years-long campaign of norm-breaking in the other direction leading up to the TIP simulation. In the eight-plus years since Donald Trump entered the national political scene, we’ve seen the same cast of characters appear and reappear in dirty tricks schemes, many of which began before he was even elected (more on that below). The last time we encountered this “loose-knit group” story, the usual suspects were all there, and the public by lucky accident of the Smith leak gained detailed access to Democratic Party thinking about how to steal an election — if necessary, of course, to “protect the democratic process.”
> russia hacked our election
The difference between the two is rather like the philosopher Harry Frankfurt’s distinction between lying and bullshit: the liar must respect the fundamental integrity of the truth in order to lie successfully; there remains a true version of his story that he is obliged to avoid. The bullshitter, by contrast, seeks to efface the boundary between truth and falsehood for his own purposes.
https://www.originalchristianity.net/logos-is-a-commonly-used-word-in-the-old-testament/The Greek word “logos” signifies both Word and Reason. But in this passage it is better to interpret it Word; as referring not only to the Father, but to the creation of things by the operative power of the Word; whereas Reason, though it produce nothing, is still rightly called Reason. Words by their daily use, sound, and passage out of us, have become common things. But there is a word which remains inward, in the very man himself; distinct from the sound which proceeds out of the mouth. There is a word, which is truly and spiritually that, which you understand by the sound, not being the actual sound. Now whoever can conceive the notion of word, as existing not only before its sound, but even before the idea of its sound is formed, may see enigmatically, and as it were in a glass, some similitude of that Word of Which it is said, Inthe beginning was the Word. For when we give expression to something which we know, the word used is necessarily derived from the knowledge thus retained in the memory, and must be of the same quality with that knowledge. For a word is a thought formed from a thing which we know; which word is spoken in the heart, being neither Greek nor Latin, nor of any language, though, when we want to communicate it to others, some sign is assumed by which to express it. Wherefore the word which sounds externally, is a sign of the word which lies hid within, to which the name of word more truly appertains. For that which is uttered by the mouth of our flesh, is the voice of the word; and is in fact called word, with reference to that from which it is taken, when it is developed externally. [...]
In examining the Septuagint we find that the Greek word “logos” was a commonly used word, used hundreds of times, and was translated from the Hebrew “davar”. It is often translated “word” in our English versions:
* And Jehovah said unto Moses, Is Jehovah’s hand waxed short? now shalt thou see whether my word (logos) shall come to pass unto thee or not. (Numbers 11:23)
* then shalt thou inquire, and make search, and ask diligently; and, behold, if it be truth (logos), and the thing certain, that such abomination is wrought in the midst of thee, (Deuteronomy 13:14)
* And Moses made an end of speaking all these words to all Israel; And he said unto them, Set your heart unto all the words (logous) which I testify unto you this day, which ye shall command your children to observe to do, even all the words of this law. For it is no vain thing (logos) for you; because it is your life, and through this thing ye shall prolong your days in the land, whither ye go over the Jordan to possess it. (Deuteronomy 32:45-47)
I have heard some people claim that this Greek word “logos” found its way into Jewish and Christian culture from Greek philosophy. I say that the reverse is more probable, that the supernatural meanings and implications of the Greek word “logos” into Greek philosophy came from Jewish writings because of verses like Deuteronomy 32:45-47. There are elements of Jewish usage of “logos” in Platonist, Stoic and other philosophies. When you look at the context of this word “logos” in Old Testament Scriptures, it is plain that it has connotations much further than these simple definitions of word, reason, or even purpose. The way that it is used in Scripture denotes God’s activities and actions similar to the philosophical definitions that some of the Greek schools of philosophy were proposing.
The thesis and the paper claim to find that the election of black representatives causes a reduced white voter turnout. But what they show is only a correlation, not a causal relationship.
To better understand this issue, consider a simple example: the relationship between the presence of black representatives and factors such as average income, the proportion of renters, and black population density. There is also a correlation here, but it would be incorrect to conclude that electing black representatives directly causes higher population density. Instead, it is more likely that areas with a higher black population density have a greater tendency to elect black representatives.
The paper is like this, just with one extra step. In step one, Gay employs a method known as “ecological inference” to estimate white voter turnout. This estimation relies on data such as the total votes cast per precinct, as well as information about the precinct, including average income and the other previously mentioned factors. In step two, a regression shows a correlation between this estimate and black representatives. The paper concludes that black representation has a causal effect on white voter turnout, based on this correlation.
But this has the same basic problem as the simple example. Factors like black population density are likely to influence the tendency to elect black representatives. And since they, by construction, also influence the estimate of the white turnout, this leads to a correlation in the data—without any causal effect from the election of black representatives.
This is very basic. For many people who work with data, such considerations about possible alternative hypotheses are the first thing we think about. But for some reason it was not considered in the paper, which means that the conclusion it makes about causality is invalid.
Rufo: If Gay’s errors are so fundamental, how did they pass through the peer-review process? How did they earn her tenure at America’s most prestigious universities?
Pallesen: Peer review is simply not that good. There are often issues that are not caught. Even so, I am still surprised that something this egregious was not noticed. It is important that we see science as an ongoing process, and not as one that concludes with peer review.
Regarding how she earned her tenure, it is worth considering that her scientific output for tenure was thin, even when no problems had been pointed out with this paper or with plagiarism. It is well known that universities give preferential treatment to people based on their race and gender, instead of basing their selection process on merit.
It is also worth considering whether the plagiarism could be a symptom of more than sloppiness. Some scientists have wondered why she didn’t just write her own dry science prose. One possibility is that she may not fully comprehend the scientific nuances in the topics she’s writing about. In such cases, there might be a greater temptation to plagiarize, to ensure the avoidance of inaccuracies. It’s noteworthy that several of the plagiarized segments are found in sections involving statistical inferences.
Last spring, I published a whistleblower report on the secret sex-change program at Texas Children’s Hospital. The hospital had promised to stop such procedures, which included the administration of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones—but in fact, it continued to perform transgender medical interventions on children as young as 11.
Following the story’s publication, Texas legislators passed Senate Bill 14, banning all child sex-change procedures statewide, angering left-wing activists and officials at TCH, who had opposed any restriction on transgender medicine.
Then the plot took another turn. Federal agents, presumably having reviewed forensic information from TCH’s internal servers, tracked down the whistleblower, and Assistant U.S. Attorney Tina Ansari threatened him with prosecution.
https://vinnews.com/2024/01/10/jewish-doctor-targeted-by-doj-after-blowing-whistle-on-kids-transgender-clinic/you're talking about precocious puberty right?> yeah exactly yeah so when you give them this medication, right you take them from a state of disease (like over production of a hormone) to a state of health, or one that more closely resembles their natural physiology. But when you have a kid without hormonal abnormalities and you give them these medications, by definition you take them from the state of health and then you put them into a state of disease. It would be like giving someone with normal blood pressure a bunch of medications that lower their blood pressure.
On Dr. Haim’s legal defense fund page, he wrote the following:
“…on June 23rd, 2023, a few hours before my graduation from surgical training, two federal agents showed up to my apartment in a highly atypical, unexpected, and aggressive show of force. Despite their best attempt at launching a surprise interview, I insisted on having an attorney present. Before leaving, however, I was given a target letter signed by a federal prosecutor that stated I was being criminally investigated for a case regarding “medical records.”
Since no laws had been violated (no personally identifiable patient health information was disclosed), this was nothing more than a blatant attempt at political intimidation. We believe this case is being driven by a highly ideological division within the Department of Health and Human Services that aims to silence whistleblowers who expose institutionalized medical corruption and the dangers of these hormone-based interventions for confused, adolescent children.”
The New York Times, while reporting how Gay had been “cleared” of misconduct allegations (not exactly), wrote, “Not all instances of potential plagiarism are equal, particularly when they do not reflect any intention to deceive, some scholars said.” That suspect definition of plagiarism was made even more absurd by the fact that the “some scholars” were not even quoted.
On Monday, Sibarium published a new investigation in the Free Beacon about a complaint sent to Harvard detailing six further charges of plagiarism. While we don’t know the motives of that source, described as an anonymous professor at another university, the Free Beacon corroborated the allegations with supplemental reporting. This is journalism.
But the reaction to this sorry episode further exemplifies the rot in not just our elite academic institutions, but in our journalistic ones too. In the Times piece on Gay’s resignation, the quadruple-bylined article identifies the Washington Free Beacon as “a conservative online journal that has led a campaign against Dr. Gay over the past few weeks.”
It must be “conservative,” to diminish its credibility, and not even described as a media outlet, but an “online journal.” And classifying the act of journalism as “led a campaign” is corrosive and ridiculous.
The Associated Press, once considered the gold standard for boringly objective journalism, went with this jaw-dropping headline: “Harvard president’s resignation highlights new conservative weapon against colleges: plagiarism.”
Then there’s Politico. “How the right toppled Harvard’s president,” is the headline of its Nightly newsletter, which quotes Sibarium defending his reporting as not “the right” trying to “topple” anyone, but as the literal definition of journalism. “I got a tip and I tracked it down,” he said.
The legacy media doesn’t like when reporting is aimed at a subject previously immune from journalistic scrutiny. It’s the Hunter Biden laptop New York Post story all over again — the media’s original sin of the Biden era. When the targets are the protected class, journalists suddenly begin to look askew at journalism.
There’s a quote about journalism that is relevant, and particularly ironic given the context of this column. It has dubious origins, with attribution ranging from George Orwell to William Randolph Hearst. But the point is an important one: “Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed; everything else is public relations.”
Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.
In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.
Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been over shadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.
The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.
First, I’m as pro-biotech as it gets. If you want legacy credentials, I have them. I hate listing this stuff, but here goes: I’m a Ph.D. who taught bioinformatics at Stanford, was named to MIT’s TR35, published 20-plus papers in genomics, co-founded a successful diagnostics company, and have profitably backed a wide variety of biotech companies from tiny startups to multibillion dollar unicorns.
Moreover, I was sticking my neck out to raise the alarm on COVID back in early 2020 when establishment journalists were appealing to authority and calling anyone who even mentioned it paranoid racists. I was calling for funding vaccines before most people even saw the coronavirus as a problem. And I believe that the mRNA vaccines used for COVID are an incredible technical achievement.
The third approach isn’t to blindly “trust the science” nor to distrust science, but to replicate the science. Here’s what an imaginary vaccine debate might look like, between a vaccine proponent and skeptic, from the perspective of a proponent.
1. First, review the so-called observational studies. These are population-level studies where you compare the health outcomes of vaccinated and unvaccinated people across different cohorts (by age, gender, ethnicity, vaccine type, virus strain, and the like) and see what the graphs look like. The data should show better outcomes for vaccinated people relative to the nonvaccinated. It should be explained in the simplest possible language. And all raw data should be made publicly available for reanalysis, perhaps with suitable anonymization which is actually supposed to already be scientific convention.
2. Then, if people still disagree, maybe you can conduct what’s called a challenge trial, where group A opts in to being exposed to live virus and group B to getting the vaccine. Of course, this involves risk, but (a) this is actually what science is [namely controlled experiments] and (b) this is already being done de facto at the level of society as a whole, with millions of people exposing themselves to a live virus. So for those who truly believe that exposure to the vaccine is worse than exposure to COVID itself, this would be the experiment to resolve it. Just as military volunteers take calculated risks for society’s defense, the people volunteering for a challenge trial would take a risk for the benefit of society’s health.
But the official, buttoned-up version of the freakout was articulated by Obama himself. Less than a week ago in a speech at Stanford University, the former president warned that it’s necessary to impose more regulations on the internet, in order to prevent toxic disinformation from destroying American democracy by eroding citizens’ trust. “Once they lose trust in their leaders, in mainstream media, in political institutions, in each other, in the possibility of truth, the game’s won,” Obama told the audience at the Silicon Valley hub. “As Putin discovered leading up to the 2016 election,” Obama said, “our own social media platforms are well designed to support such a mission.”
The Stanford speech was a nearly perfect encapsulation of what is so corrupt about the disinformation discourse—which is, at this moment, frantically being redirected against Musk to force him into playing ball or being painted as a Russian stooge. In the same speech where he made the case for more censorship, even while hollowly proclaiming his commitment to free speech, Obama could not stop himself from echoing the single most destructive piece of disinformation of the modern political era—the establishment’s “big lie” that Russia swung the 2016 election for Donald Trump, a claim that has repeatedly been proved false but is kept alive because it makes such an effective political weapon.
Perhaps the biggest labor market issue is that in the last half century the share of less-educated men not in the labor force increased dramatically as immigration grew. Among U.S.-born men ages 20 to 64 with no education beyond high school, the share not in the labor force—neither working nor looking for work—increased from 7% in 1960 to 25% in 2023. These men do not show up as unemployed because they are not actively looking for work.
In turn, the rise in non-work is associated with a host of profound social pathologies, from crime and social isolation to overdose deaths and welfare dependency. At a time when many businesses struggle to find workers, it may seem desirable to simply use immigration to fill jobs. But continuing to bring in millions of less-educated immigrants effectively allows business interests and the state to ignore the huge deterioration in labor-force participation and all the accompanying social problems that large-scale immigration creates among poor Americans of all races and social backgrounds.
A hint to what’s going on comes from this New York Times op-ed from a few years ago, by a high school girl about to go off to college, about how obsessively colleges trumpet their similarity to the imaginary wizards’ school Hogwarts:
> I was surprised when many top colleges delivered the same pitch. It turns out, they’re all a little bit like Hogwarts — the school for witches and wizards in the “Harry Potter” books and movies. Or at least, that’s what the tour guides kept telling me.
> During a Harvard information session, the admissions officer compared the intramural sports competitions there to the Hogwarts House Cup. The tour guide told me that I wouldn’t be able to see the university’s huge freshman dining hall as it was closed for the day, but to just imagine Hogwarts’s Great Hall in its place.
> At Dartmouth, a tour guide ushered my group past a large, wood-paneled room filled with comfortable chairs and mentioned the Hogwarts feel it was known for. At another liberal arts college, I heard that students had voted to name four buildings on campus after the four houses in Hogwarts: Gryffindor, Ravenclaw, Hufflepuff and Slytherin. Several colleges let it be known that Emma Watson, the actress who plays Hermione Granger in the movies, had looked into them. I read, in Cornell’s fall 2009 quarterly magazine, that a college admissions counseling Web site had counted Cornell among the five American colleges that have the most in common with Hogwarts. Both institutions, you see, are conveniently located outside cities. The article ended: “Bring your wand and broomstick, just in case.”
Why, aside from the promise of the magical learning that you’ll acquire if you just arrive at one leafy campus instead of another, do these campuses want to highlight their similarity to an imaginary high school? Aren’t these kids just finishing high school, eager, as everyone who’s ever watched the Breakfast Club knows, to leave behind in loco parentis along with their parentis themselves?
High school movies of the 80s were obsessed with the illegitimacy of schools’ authority; Matthew Broderick hacks into his high school’s computer in both Ferris Bueller and Wargames, to make a mockery of the so-called permanent record, and John Hughes’s movies in general are always focused on the improvisatory genius of children and adolescents and the dull brutish obsessions of school personnel: [...]
The framing of the story shouldn’t be a surprise. Lorenz and Jankowicz both come from theater kid culture, where being on the side of good is more important to the story than competence, accuracy, or public oversight. (In fairness, Jankowicz has got a great voice and stage presence: her cabaret-style performance that circulated when the Board was announced was unjustly maligned. The Tiktoks are far worse.) The kinds of people who get picked to head a “Disinformation Governance Board” don’t need deep area knowledge. They just need to be on the right side.
But it’s not just that the main characters of the drama are ideologically and personally aligned. Lorenz relies throughout the Post piece on research from Advance Democracy Inc. to prove that criticism of Jankowicz was coordinated. She cites a finding from the “nonpartisan” organization highlighting how often the Board came up in Fox News coverage the week after its announcement. The twist: the man behind Advance Democracy, Daniel Jones, funded the man behind the Steele dossier (the source of the Trump pee tape disinformation). Jones, a former top aide to senile CA Senator Dianne Feinstein, helped create one of the biggest pieces of electoral disinformation of the past ten years.
The Food Stamp Program, administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, is proud to be distributing this year the greatest amount of free meals and food stamps ever, to 46 million people.
Meanwhile, the National Park Service, administered by the U.S. Department of the Interior, asks us “Please Do Not Feed the Animals.” Their stated reason is because “The animals will grow dependent on handouts and will not learn to take care of themselves.”
Mark Zuckerberg says it was challenging to censor COVID misinformation because the scientific establishment was frequently wrong, which ultimately undermined public trust:
"Just take some of the stuff around COVID earlier in the pandemic where there were real health implications, but there hadn't been time to fully vet a bunch of the scientific assumptions. Unfortunately, I think a lot of the kind of establishment on that kind of waffled on a bunch of facts and asked for a bunch of things to be censored that, in retrospect, ended up being more debatable or true. That stuff is really tough, right? It really undermines trust."
You can see why they’re worried. The CSI 300 index of mainland shares has lost about 42% of its value since January 2021, and Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index is down some 48% over the same period.
Rational explanations aren’t in short supply. A continuing crackdown on credit in the property industry has dented home buying and other business that accounted for as much as one-third of gross domestic product. The economy has never fully recovered from draconian pandemic lockdowns, and foreign companies are shifting more production out of China to protect themselves from growing political risk. Demographic decline is underway.
Closer to the stock markets, Mr. Xi periodically cracks down on industries such as big tech that would otherwise form the backbone of the domestic stock market. Investors never know when the next hot company might be subjected to regulatory-political inspections or see an executive fall from favor and disappear for months or longer. The suppression of Hong Kong’s incipient democracy and rule of law is scaring investors out of the territory’s markets.
Which brings us to Oct. 7. As a student at Yale, I returned to campus after the massacres to find my peers shouting “resistance is justified” in the hundreds. An officially sanctioned campus organization called Yalies4Palestine (Y4P) held “the Israeli Zionist regime responsible for the unfolding violence” and called on the Yale community “to celebrate the resistance’s success.” The group stated that “breaking out of a prison requires force,” standing in “full support of the Palestinian people’s right to resist colonization and return to their land.”
I read over these terrifying statements and quickly turned around an op-ed for The Yale Daily News calling Y4P a hate group for its open support of terror. The kangaroo court editorial process my commentary was subjected to was predictably absurd. I was asked to clearly define the terms “hate group” and “terror,” which I did. I was then told that the piece would not run for fear of “violence” and “harm” it may pose to students.
The process at work here is again worth a closer look, in order to understand what the next generation of American journalism will look like. The paper’s opinion editor had previously told Brolin that the paper needed something like his column to show the other side. But given “sensitive” subjects in the column, it needed to be viewed by yet another editor with sensitivity training—a type of review that has become all but mandatory at many student papers, and which hands ultimate editorial authority over to political activists who understand their role to be enforcement of the intersectional progressive party line. The sensitivity editor’s suggested counterpoints included those of a U.N. employee, who accused Israel of ethnic cleansing.
My name is Simon Aban Deng. I am from South Sudan. I am a Shilluk. I am a Christian. I am a former slave.
I will not forget that day when Arab Sudanese government troops came and raided my village. We didn’t know what was going on until we heard gunshots from every direction. I was only 9 years old, but the militiamen were shooting anybody they saw, including children.
I left with that man and his family for their farm and I never saw Abdullahi again. Three days later, I stupidly asked the family where Abdullahi was, since he was the way I was going to get back to Malakal, and to my parents. For that question I was beaten terribly. Bleeding and in pain the man told me that I should never ask anything about Abdullahi again, since he had given me away as a “gift.” In other words, I was now a slave.[...]Describing what happened to me is one thing, but actually *(being)* a slave is something I cannot describe with words. You have to be a slave to know how bad slavery is. You’re talking about treating a human being worse than an animal. Yes, I was beaten; I was made to haul water for people who believed I wasn’t human; I lived with people who didn’t love me; I was made to sleep with farm animals. But living as someone’s possession—as a *(slave)*—is not something I can describe.
What Hamas did was precisely like what Arab Sudan’s genocidal government did to my people. Since they invaded Africa in the seventh century, Arab Muslims had always been doing jihad. We will never really know many Blacks have died between then and today. It is one of those numbers which, because it is unknown, proves how huge the suffering must be.
Both Israel and my country, South Sudan, were born through jihad, one which began in 1948, the other in 1955. In 1948, the Arabs declared a jihad against the new State of Israel and tried to finish what Hitler had started. In 1955, the Black Christian people of southern Sudan revolted against the north because the Muslim government refused to give them autonomy or freedom of religion. In response, the government declared a jihad—but not on paper, as it would later in 1989. The Arabs killed possibly up to 1.5 million Black people in the south. Nobody knows the number they enslaved, since nobody really counted.
The Israelis, like the Black Sudanese, won the war but lost the peace, and the jihad continued.
What made you decide to come to America and what were your first impressions of this country?I decided I could no longer be in Sudan. How can I be proud of a country that enslaved me? A country that I am not even considered a citizen in. A country that is still enslaving my people. A country trying to impose their will on people and victimizing people like me—the black people. I reached the conclusion that part of the country is not mine even though I was born there.What I knew about the U.S. was that it was a country where somebody will not be subject to what we go through in my country. So this is where I wanted to go and tell people what the people in Sudan are going through.When I came, I didn’t know if I would be accepted here. But today I am blessed and very proud to be part of this nation. That is why I have become a voice for those whose voice will not be heard. Thanks to this country that opened its door to me, people are hearing what I went through. People are hearing what is wrong in Sudan.People will give thanks when they get a good thing, but I don’t know how to thank a nation that has opened its door and accepted me as a human being.
Given the history of slavery in the U.S., I was wondering what the response has been of Americans—especially African Americans—to your story?
> When I came to this country, my hope was that African Americans would be the first people to come and rescue me. I was disappointed. Up to today, I am still very disappointed. Nobody seems to care. I do not know what the reason is. Is it because we’ve become immune to it? Is it because slavery is still fresh in us, and we don’t want to talk about it? Nobody has given me an answer.
> We thought the first people to rescue us would be our own brothers and sisters here. Especially when we talk about the slavery that is going on in Africa in Sudan and Mauritania. African Americans should be the ones speaking out against this, but the ones speaking out happen to be the white people, which we appreciate.
The trajectory of anti-Israel protests across America suggests a deeper, more unsettling trend. Far from a legitimate expression of opposition, they’ve morphed into a troubling display of ideological extremism and physical violence cloaked in the guise of social justice and backed by wealthy domestic radicals and by foreign states like Qatar, the primary global sponsor of the Muslim Brotherhood. The reckless tolerance of this continuing level of radicalism and disruption does a profound disservice to the principles of democracy and civil discourse. Whatever one believes the rights and wrongs of the Israeli-Arab conflict to be, allowing violent demonstrators calling for genocide and supporting terror organizations like Hamas and the Houthis to own the streets of Western democracies sends a very dangerous message—one that threatens the fabric of a society built on liberal values and legitimate dissent.
What do Nasra Abukar Ali and Claudine Gay have in common? Or, for that matter, the Somali Ministry of Sports and the Harvard Corporation?
The answer is straightforward: both Ali and Gay came unprepared onto a major public stage, failed spectacularly in their respective roles, and massively embarrassed their respective organisations.
All of which raises a peculiar question: if the Sports Ministry of a war-torn African country is able to show ethical clarity when objective standards of merit have been violated, what is holding back the leadership of America’s most renowned university? The answer, I suspect, lies in the three-letter acronym that has been menacing American and other Western institutions of higher education for the past decade: DEI, which supposedly stands for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.
If Mr. Trump does somehow win, Democrats predict a second Trump term will end in dictatorship. But that undersells the resilience of American institutions, which have held up so far against the stress test of Mr. Trump and his enemies, including the riot of Jan. 6, 2021. Congress responded quickly and ratified the Electoral College votes. The plotters were a rump group opposed across the government. There was nothing close to a coup d’état.
The better question in our view is whether Mr. Trump can deliver the policy and political victories that GOP voters want. There are many reasons to think he can’t.
Start with the fact that Mr. Trump would be an immediate lame duck. He can’t serve more than one more term, and if he does win it will be narrowly with little political capital. He has never reached an approval rating above 50%, and his rolling seven-week RealClearPolitics average favorability is 41.5%. If there’s a strong third-party ticket, he might win with the smallest plurality since 1912. Mr. Trump would lack the most potent presidential power—the ability to persuade.
Energy prices have retreated since Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, but America’s enemies haven’t. So it’s hard to believe the Biden Administration is considering an election-year gift to Russia and Iran: An embargo on permitting new liquefied natural gas (LNG) export projects.
Our sources say Biden adviser John Podesta is pushing the idea in the White House as a sop to the climate lobby, which is still furious over the Administration’s approval of ConocoPhillips’ Willow oil project in Alaska. “We can help Gulf Coast residents stop the onslaught of LNG export terminals,” chief climate lobbyist Bill McKibben tweeted last week.
The Trump Administration approved permits in seven weeks on average, but the Biden team is taking 11 months to process them. Permits for four LNG projects capable of satisfying the annual natural-gas demand of India are awaiting approval, and one has been sitting at DOE for more than a year.
taqiyyah, in Islam, the practice of concealing one’s belief and foregoing ordinary religious duties when under threat of death or injury. Derived from the Arabic word waqa (“to shield oneself”), taqiyyah defies easy translation. English renderings such as “precautionary dissimulation” or “prudent fear” partly convey the term’s meaning of self-protection in the face of danger to oneself or, by extension and depending upon the circumstances, to one’s fellow Muslims. Thus, taqiyyah may be used for either the protection of an individual or the protection of a community. Moreover, it is not used or even interpreted in the same way by every sect of Islam. Taqiyyah has been employed by the Shīʿites, the largest minority sect of Islam, because of their historical persecution and political defeats not only by non-Muslims but also at the hands of the majority Sunni sect.
Almost 150 years ago, a young medical student at Edinburgh University was inspired by one of his lecturers to devise a detective with remarkable powers of deduction based on solid scientific principles. Arthur Conan Doyle wanted a hero for the modern age who relied on logic and reason, and the creation that resulted — Sherlock Holmes — was such a success that the character still enthrals the world.[...]So in the absence of their evidence, let us examine some of the existing data. After all, as Conan Doyle once wrote to explain how dodgy theories can get bolstered to mask the truth, “there is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact”.
There are at least 10,000 cities on our planet. And yet, Covid emerged in the Chinese metropolis of Wuhan. This sprawling city is hundreds of miles from the nearest colonies of wild bats with similar coronaviruses, found in the tropical caves of southern China, so the location surprised even Shi “Bat Woman” Zhengli, their leading expert on such diseases. She is based at Wuhan Institute of Virology, China’s most important bio-security laboratory and the biggest repository of bat coronaviruses in Asia. It had known safety concerns. And it was conducting risky research to boost the infectivity of mutant bat viruses in humanised mice in low-level biosafety conditions.
Other labs in the city were also carrying out cutting-edge scientific work. So it did not take the forensic genius of a great detective to suspect the emergence of Sars-CoV-2 — the strain of virus that causes Covid-19 — could possibly be tied to research in the city. Especially when this new disease had a feature not seen on more than 200 similar types of coronavirus called a furin cleavage site, which allows its spike protein to bind effectively to cells in many human tissues.
Imagine a time-traveller from any decade in recent memory arriving in America in January 2024: they would encounter a country that would appear to have gone nuts. Millions of migrants stream illegally into the US at the highest rates in history, while the government in Washington prohibits border states from enforcing Federal law. Meanwhile, major cities such as New York, Chicago and Los Angeles are routinely paralysed by angry demonstrators whose causes change from month to month (this month’s cause is “intifada”). Questions like “should doctors perform surgery on children to change their gender?” and “is it ok for the President of Harvard to routinely plagiarise the work of other authors?” are now seriously debated by reputable media outlets.[...]Contrary to the country’s powerful democratic mythos, which imagines American democracy ceaselessly expanding to include workers, women and minorities — not to mention the inhabitants of many far-flung countries — Americans now find themselves living in an oligarchy administered day-to-day by institutional bureaucracies that move in lock-step with each other, enforcing a set of ideologically-driven top-down imperatives that seemingly change from week-to-week and cover nearly every subject under the sun.
Yet there was also evidence to suggest that the idea Obama was no longer concerned with power or involved with power was itself part of a new set of myths being woven by and around the ex-president. First, the Obamas never left town. Instead, they bought a large brick mansion in the center of Washington’s Kalorama neighborhood—violating a norm governing the transfer of presidential power which has been breached only once in post-Civil War American history, by Woodrow Wilson, who couldn’t physically be moved after suffering a series of debilitating strokes. In the Obamas case, the reason for staying in D.C. was ostensibly that their youngest daughter, Sasha, wanted to finish high school with her class at Sidwell Friends. In June 2019, Sasha went off to college, yet her parents remained in Washington.
By then, it was clear to any informed observer that the Obamas’ continuing presence in the nation’s capital was not purely a personal matter. To an extent that has never been meaningfully reported on, the Obamas served as both the symbolic and practical heads of the Democratic Party shadow government that “resisted” Trump—another phenomenon that defied prior norms. The fact that these were not normal times could be adduced by even a passing glance at the front pages of the country’s daily newspapers, which were filled with claims that the 2016 election had been “stolen” by Russia and that Trump was a Russian agent.
Obama’s central position in the Democratic Party is both practical and symbolic: in his person, he represents both the elite institutions such as Harvard Law School and the large American foundations and billionaire funders who backed his political rise in Chicago. Obama represents the new American elite, which is composed of the people who populate the types of institutions that produced and backed him, and which is the main instrument of oligarchical rule.
I talked to the former Israeli prime minister, Ehud Barak, who was defense minister when the Iran deal was moving toward completion. And I asked him, “Well, what do you think is motivating this? “ And he said, “Well, Barack Obama’s not a normal politician. He is this strange combination of a college professor and a person who has ideas about his place in history. He decided that this deal was going to be the reason Barack Obama was going to be on Mount Rushmore. And that’s the reason that they could never let go.” I think he was right.
> The irony is that the number one legacy of the Obama presidency is going to be the failure to intervene in Syria and the failure to object to Russia taking Crimea and the Donbas.
It’s interesting. I doubt that in the long run, Obama’s foreign-policy failures are going to be seen as the most important part of his legacy. I think future historians are going to look at the Obama presidency and see it as the moment when this new oligarchy merged with the Democratic Party and used the capacities of these new technologies and the power of this new class of people, the oligarchs and their servants, to create a new apparatus of social control. How far they can go with it, what the limits are … you see them trying to test it out every week or so.
> So my question is: Is Barack Obama the author of this new machine? Did he create it purposefully? Does it report back to him? Or is it a larger phenomenon that originated partly on his watch, due to whatever combination of personal negligence and disengagement, and his sense that it benefited the Democratic Party or personally benefited him?
> He has no interest in building the Democratic Party as an institution. I think that’s obvious. And I don’t think he had any truly deep, meaningful policy commitments other than the need to feel and to be perceived as victorious, as triumphant. I’ve sometimes said to people that I think Barack is actually just as insecure as Trump, but in ways that are not readily perceived by the vast majority of people. I think that’s probably my most basic takeaway.
I go back to the first chapter of your book, about these steel workers and all these mills closing down in Chicago and then Obama sort of deciding, “Well, we know here at the Joyce Foundation,” where he was then hanging out, “that nothing can be done to help these people. The solutions are on a national level.” At first I was, like, “Okay, whatever that means.”
But then it struck me in your telling that in fact, the place where he finds a home is not in community organizing. It’s in foundation-land, the place where foundations, foundation executives, very rich people, and politics meet. He was well spoken, Black yet white-coded, a credentialed academic, yet had some street cred because he’d been an organizer for that crucial year plus whatever, the way kids today start an NGO in order to get into Harvard.
So if Obama is the first U.S. president from the periphery of empire, he’s also the first president from the billionaire-foundation-NGO complex, which makes him the perfect mediating figure between the progressive part of the party, the billionaires, and the security state.
I think that it’s culturally and intellectually part of the New England DNA, which Obama—the president of the Harvard Law Review—taps into. To me, the most profound thing that was ever written about the New England Puritans was written by Perry Miller, whose thesis was that the Puritans go to New England with the goal of redeeming old Europe by building a shining city on a hill whose example will put an end to all the wars in Europe. Except, of course, the example of the New England colonies has no impact on Europe whatsoever. Nobody in Prague or Vienna gives a shit about Narragansett.
At which point, the Puritans have to explain why this great vision that they have sacrificed for and died for, having essentially traveled off the map of the civilized world and gone to the 17th-century equivalent of Mars, didn’t quite go as planned. And at that point, you have the American turn into self-absorption and narcissism. The fault is in us, you see. We must turn inwards and scour our souls for sin, because God is punishing us. And this is the link between both the deep narcissism and the redemptive impulse of New Englanders, which I think has been a constant in that region and in its impact on American history ever since.
> Exactly. For them, 200-year-old statues are more important than five-year-old Black children.
> I want to go back to something about Barack I’ve mentioned twice now. Barack never had any loyalty toward any of these people. Use John Kennedy as an example. I mean, whatever else we say about Kennedy, he remained intensely loyal to people who went back way before the presidency with him. Kenny O’Donnell, for example. Lem Billings was openly gay at a moment when that was hardly fashionable or acceptable. They all loved and accepted him, quite publicly, because he was Jack’s best friend from prep school, and that continued after Jack was dead. Friendship was everything to them.
That’s because the Kennedys are from somewhere. Their communal and religious ties were real and organic, not some product of some abstract progressive ideology. Honey Fitz was the mayor of Boston. They all went to church every Sunday, or else Rose would beat them.
What do the Obamas and their circle have in common with each other? They are Ivy League people, who ran away from whatever they came from in order to become members of the credentialed elites, whose loyalty is to the system that gives them prestige—or rather, gives prestige to their degrees, of which they are the holders. Once they pair off and reproduce under the seal of Harvard or Yale, they may find it seemly to donate money to an NGO that offers microloans to female entrepreneurs in Pakistan.
Covid lockdowns led to the creation of a broad quasi-governmental censorship apparatus to police “disinformation” under the guise of public health. The George Floyd riots revealed that lockdowns had become a convenient fiction, while wholesale looting and property crimes, along with the incineration of downtown Minneapolis, were embraced by the American power structure as healthy social justice rituals.
A sane, constructive political class would have recognised the dangers posed by the emerging oligarchy, and increasingly insane public discourse, and worked to build bridges between the two Americas and help create the basis for a healthier society. Instead, Barack Obama, like Bill Clinton before him, saw an opportunity to rubbish Republicans by making Democrats the party of the rich in the name of the poor. The policy of aligning the Democrats with the wealthiest Americans, while taking from the middle class and rewarding the poor with symbolic identity politics victories, was Obama’s creation — hardly a surprising coinage from a BLM-promoting Harvard Law School graduate who once told an intimate that the two things he wanted, as he left the White House, were a private jet and a valet. Obama’s continuing influence as a tone-setter for the Democratic Party, and within the Biden administration itself, should not be underestimated; there’s a reason why he became the first (healthy) former US President since George Washington who refused to retire to his farm (or the equivalent), instead keeping a large mansion in the heart of Washington.
Then again, they’re all like that now. Think of the Clintons. The man from Hope. And Hillary, the great defender of children and the poor. And then its like, “Wait a minute. Did they just amass $3 billion in a private foundation, plus a private fortune of $300 or $400 million within three or four years after leaving the White House?” It’s not just the Obamas. The whole system is sick.
I did some research at the Truman Library recently for a screenplay I am writing, and on the way there you drive by Harry Truman’s old house, where he and his wife, Bess, sat on their porch after he was president. They went back there because that was their house.
I remember thinking, imagine telling Harry Truman, “Hey, why don’t you sell that old house and buy three or four huge mansions in Martha’s Vineyard and Hawaii and Washington, D.C., and rake in hundreds of millions of dollars in sweetheart deals with big corporations while you’re vacationing on rich people’s yachts?” He’d probably sock you in the jaw.
Trumpism, at its core, is the American version of the transatlantic phenomenon of national populism. Local variants in the West differ, but they share common characteristics: opposition to mass immigration, for instance, as well as socially conservative programmes and protectionist trade policies previously favoured by the trade unions.
Many of these voters and their ancestors used to find a home in the parties of the centre-left, such as the New Deal Democrats in the US, Labour in the UK and the Social Democrats in Germany. But the replacement of the union by the university as their social and ideological base — now defined by identity politics, equity and a quasi-religious obsession with long-term climate change — has driven away these parties’ core supporters. At the same time, many have been repelled by the post-Thatcher and post-Reagan conservatives who sought to cut their government benefits, supported the mass importation of cheap labour from abroad, and backed inconclusive or doomed “forever wars” following 9/11.
In January 1985, Sol Wachtler, then the newly minted chief judge of the New York Court of Appeals, commented to The New York Daily News that prosecutors in his state could "by and large" get grand juries to "indict a ham sandwich."[...]The case almost immediately became a cultural litmus test for how you feel about crime, homelessness, and the right to self-defense. Is Daniel Penny a reckless vigilante? Or is he a ham sandwich?[...]Those who feel Penny's prosecution is unjust—that he has been ham-sandwiched—can take comfort in the fact that his jury at trial will be tasked with evaluating his case with a much higher standard of proof than his grand jury was. That may not be complete consolation, however, when considering another criminal justice cliche: that "the process is the punishment."
I also cringe when I read parts of Uncle Tom or Huck Finn. But I fear that says more about me—and the prejudices of our own age—than it says about the moral failings of Mark Twain or Harriet Beecher Stowe. These two popular works, one a boyhood adventure and the other a protest novel, never aimed to be high literary fiction. But they are indeed great works of literature, and they deserve their place at the top of the American canon. In their different ways, they both deal with a shameful episode of American history, but they are full of high ideals and heart. They are ours, and they are us.
The recent convulsions in Ireland are just the latest manifestation of a wave of anti-immigrant populism in Europe, which was a factor in Brexit and in the rise of Viktor Orbán, Marine le Pen, Giorgia Meloni, and Geert Wilders. But Ireland’s immigration crisis has happened too quickly and recently for significant political opposition to begin to form in response. A number of very small anti-immigrant parties, such as the Irish Freedom Party, have appeared on the scene, but there hasn’t been a major election in Ireland since the issue has become more prominent.
Far from deterring the formation of a dangerous far-right faction in Ireland, the Irish government’s recent actions seem almost designed to encourage one. They have allowed unprecedented numbers of immigrants to enter Ireland—some of them hostile to Western values—and provided them with state benefits. They have ignored protestors and polling results and smeared all opponents of their policies as far right and white supremacist. Thanks to the new hate speech bill, they will soon be able to arrest people for their social media posts. Together, these actions may make the rise of a genuinely far-right movement a real and terrifying possibility.
But Levi said: "what I want to know: Why has [Michelle Obama], and all these other famous women Naama looked up to, and all of the global human rights organizations she believed in, stayed silent about what has happened to my Naama and all the other girls who are still held hostage? It is like they have disappeared. Their silence shouts loudly."
Milei explained that no other country is a better example of this trend than Argentina. Once a global economic powerhouse, Argentina has spiraled into poverty as a consequence of extensive state intervention in the economy. Two out of every five Argentines live in poverty and the inflation rate is over 200 percent.[...]Milei argued that collectivism punishes business owners and stifles innovation by destroying any incentives "to produce better goods and better services at a better price." Countries embracing greater economic freedom are eight times wealthier than their repressed counterparts, Milei asserted.
"The case of Argentina is an empirical demonstration that—no matter how rich you may be, or how much you may have in terms of natural resources…or how many bars of gold you may have in the central bank—if measures are adopted that hinder the free function of markets, free competition, free price systems, if you hinder trade, if you attack private property, the only possible fate is poverty," Milei said.
Hours before its April 17 public announcement, REI told the mayor’s office that it would close the store, which had opened in 2004. “We haven’t seen substantial progress to address the city’s challenges to give us the confidence to invest in another long-term lease,” REI’s chief commercial officer told the city.
In its April public statement, REI said the safety of its employees, members and customers was a priority and that it had outgrown the space.
Days later, REI Chief Executive Eric Artz said in a letter to members that the company failed to make a profit in 2022 despite registering record sales. Artz said REI had significantly invested in its people and the communities it serves.
The retailer plans to open a bigger store just outside Portland this spring.
Anne Fausto-Sterling s suggestion that the prevalence of intersex might be as high as 1.7% has attracted wide attention in both the scholarly press and the popular media. Many reviewers are not aware that this figure includes conditions which most clinicians do not recognize as intersex, such as Klinefelter syndrome, Turner syndrome, and late-onset adrenal hyperplasia. If the term intersex is to retain any meaning, the term should be restricted to those conditions in which chromosomal sex is inconsistent with phenotypic sex, or in which the phenotype is not classifiable as either male or female. Applying this more precise definition, the true prevalence of intersex is seen to be about 0.018%, almost 100 times lower than Fausto-Sterling s estimate of 1.7%.
When carmakers test gasoline-powered vehicles for compliance with the Transportation Department’s fuel-efficiency rules, they must use real values measured in a laboratory. By contrast, under an Energy Department rule, carmakers can arbitrarily multiply the efficiency of electric cars by 6.67. This means that although a 2022 Tesla Model Y tests at the equivalent of about 65 miles per gallon in a laboratory (roughly the same as a hybrid), it is counted as having an absurdly high compliance value of 430 mpg. That number has no basis in reality or law.[...]The secret is out. After environmental groups pointed out the illegality of this charade, the Energy Department proposed eliminating the 6.67 multiplier for electric cars, recognizing that the number “lacks legal support” and has “no basis.”
Welcome to Chapter 23 of an inquiry this column has been conducting for more than a decade, sometimes in print, sometimes in email exchanges with readers. It concerns the Tesla bubble and Mr. Musk’s unique brand of CEO stewardship.
Here’s where I have tended to come down: Mr. Musk has conducted himself in a way that wouldn’t be tolerated of another CEO, overselling the future, all but manipulating the stock. But no company is followed more avidly by the press or by Wall Street. The pros and cons of Mr. Musk’s management are lengthily and pointillistically debated.
Not only his shareholders but the legal-political system and even society itself have issued Mr. Musk a partial exemption from the behavioral norms imposed on public-company CEOs. Witness the SEC’s toothless and barely enforced settlement of Mr. Musk’s tweeting offenses in 2018. The SEC likes to shoot the wounded after a stock market miscarriage; it doesn’t want to be the author of one. And investors still believe; for all the SEC can know, Mr. Musk is well on his way to delivering the innovations to justify a market cap that remains greater than Toyota, GM, Ford, Daimler, BMW and Volkswagen combined.
In retrospect, the pessimism also represented a failure of communication. Legacy automakers should have made clear at the outset that EVs were short-range commuter cars, designed to be charged overnight at home, not on the frozen tundra of Illinois. Hindsight being 20/20, automakers should have emphasized residential charging first.
Ford’s fumbling of its F-150 Lightning pickup was also pretty hard to watch. The finished product, when it came, looked like Tarzan but hit like Boy, badly underperforming when it came to doing trucky things, like trailering boats in cold weather.
The most pernicious FUD may be the idea that EVs can’t move the needle on carbon emissions. They already are. EV adoption cut demand for oil by 1.8 million barrels in 2023, according to BloombergNEF, thereby avoiding 122 megatons of carbon-dioxide emissions.
Melanie Egorin, HHS assistant secretary for legislation, wrote last month to the committee’s chair, Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R., Wash.), that Ren submitted the virus sequence on Dec. 28, 2019, to a genetic database, GenBank, run by the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
The universities were on board. Utah State’s annual diversity symposium featured talks such as “Decentering Whiteness.” The university also required DEI statements from applicants to the faculty, explaining how they infused diversity and equity—a focus on race, gender, sexual orientation, and other categories of “marginalization”—into their work. Even for positions in fields such as insect ecology and lithospheric evolution.
Then, in December, Cox announced a different priority: reversing the excesses of DEI. At a press conference he said, “We’re using identitarianism to force people into boxes, and into victimhood, and I just don’t think that’s helpful at all. In fact, I think it’s harmful.” So harmful that he announced his intention to bar the use of diversity statements in faculty hiring, condemning the practice as “bordering on evil.”
“There’s widespread concern among Berkeley faculty, including liberal faculty, about the prevailing climate of self-censorship and political orthodoxy in academia,” Will Fithian, a professor of statistics at UC Berkeley, told me. “As more faculty realize they’re not alone, I’ve seen them become increasingly comfortable expressing their concerns to each other in private or semi-private settings.
“A few people I know who angrily dismissed concerns about political intolerance only a few years ago have changed their minds since then.”
Like many independent federal agencies, the NLRB complaint against SpaceX will be heard by an administrative law judge who works for the agency. If SpaceX doesn't like the judge's decision, it has to appeal to NLRB members themselves.
Neither NLRB members nor its administrative law judges can be removed by the president at will. They can only be fired for cause. The agency also uses its adjudication process to set substantive policies that bind private parties.
"In effect, the NLRB is acting as the lawmaker, the prosecutor, the jury, the judge, and the appellate court before a company has a chance to get to a real court," says Oliver Dunford, an attorney at the Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF).
SpaceX's lawsuit argues that this whole setup is unconstitutional. The inability of the president to fire NLRB members and judges violates his constitutional powers to hire and fire "officers of the United States." Its adjudication process violates the Seventh Amendment's guarantee of jury trials. The fact that the NLRB prosecutes violations of policies it sets in front of its administrative law judges and hears appeals of those judges' decisions all violates due process guarantees.
SpaceX's arguments against the NLRB have implications for many other federal agencies that are structured the same way.
"To say this structure itself violates the Constitution would be saying a large swath of the federal government is unconstitutional," one attorney told Bloomberg Law.
It’s close, in fact, to what I’ve called ‘sexual Thatcherism’: a war of all against all, in which slight-but-persistent sexed differences are weaponised as competitive advantages in the pursuit of personal gain. And as it turns out, what this produces is what markets always produce: not utopia, or a true equality between all parties, but a cartoon version of persistent asymmetries.
Manhattan Institute senior fellow Christopher Rufo has since produced convincing evidence that Ms. Gay plagiarized parts of her dissertation. Failing to properly quote source material can either be a sign of carelessness or a symptom of struggling to generate original ideas. Her academic output since then suggests it was the latter.
Over about two decades, Ms. Gay has written 10 journal articles and no books. This is about half the average rate for a political science professor, even at a middling university. By comparison, Amy Gutmann — who like Ms. Gay is a political scientist and until early last year served as president of the University of Pennsylvania — has published more than a dozen books and well over 100 articles.
In her last article, published six years ago, titled “A Room for One’s Own?,” Ms. Gay found that Democratic governors direct federal housing subsidies to supportive constituencies when they have the discretion to do so. Amazing!
In “Knowledge Matters,” Ms. Gay found that political ignorance is a key reason why African Americans support Democrats despite policy disagreements. Who knew?
In “Seeing Difference,” Ms. Gay found that African Americans resent economically successful Hispanic neighbors. Wow!
How did Ms. Gay rise so far despite such a mediocre academic record? You already know how, or at least part of how. Ms. Gay is a woman of color, and within the liberal ivory tower of Harvard, it’s impermissible for a White professor to accuse a woman of color of being intellectually mediocre. Only a Black professor could possibly do that.
It’s interesting, then, that Ms. Gay’s institutional rise was marked by a pattern of destroying the careers of genuinely brilliant Black scholars who had the stature to point out her mediocrity.
Harvard economist Roland Fryer, for example, has published more in a single year than Ms. Gay has in her entire career. But while serving as the dean of faculty, Ms. Gay led the charge to strip Mr. Fryer of almost all of his academic privileges on trumped-up charges of having run an office with a hostile work environment.
As documentary filmmaker Rob Muntz put it, “Fryer was the victim of a coordinated professional assassination. And … the chief architect of that assassination was none other than Claudine Gay.”
Anthony Fauci has never struggled to speak his mind. But now that he has left government, he is finally speaking at least some of the truth about government policies and Covid. For instance, the six-feet rule for social distancing “sort of just appeared” without a solid scientific basis. That’s one of the admissions that Members of Congress say the former National Institutes of Health potentate made this week in two days of closed-door testimony to the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.[...]“Show me a school that I shut down and show me a factory that I shut down,” Dr. Fauci told the New York Times last April. “Never. I never did. I gave a public-health recommendation that echoed the C.D.C.’s recommendation, and people made a decision based on that.” He’s too modest. He knows his recommendations, backed by a conformist press, put pressure on politicians to agree with him.
Plagiarism is a lot like speeding - Everyone does it - Important to have a standard anyway- Tough judgment call when it's too much- Enforcement always seems biased and sometimes is
A legend that scientists who opposed lockdowns were doing so because they “want them infected” became a popular propaganda line, one incidentally pushed by Fauci, who spoke of those who wanted to “let it rip.” We now know there were scientists like Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya whose simple objection to lockdowns was that his data showed SARS CoV-2 infection rates were much higher than initially admitted, making efforts to stop transmission bit of a fool’s errand. It wasn’t a question of “letting” transmission happen, but focusing protection on those who needed it most, like the elderly, and those with co-morbidities.
On November 14, one of the Israeli PhD students in my department confided to me that he was taking a few weeks off from the semester to return to Israel—an active war zone—because he needed to escape the toxicity of MIT’s campus. This week, he told me he is considering leaving MIT without completing his PhD.
I am truly in awe of emerging leaders like Talia Khan, an MIT graduate student, who boldly spoke in front of Congress one month ago, explaining how her peers told her the young people murdered at the Nova music festival in Israel on October 7 “deserved to die because they were partying on stolen land.” She has served as a powerful voice for the Jewish community, particularly when so many others have been silent.
It is not an exaggeration to say that everything that the Marxists said was the nature of the capitalist system – exploitation of the many by a privileged few; a gross inequality of wealth and opportunity simply due to an artificial arrangement of control over the means of production; a manipulation of reality to make slavery seem as if it meant freedom – was, in fact, the nature and essence, of Soviet socialism.
Veblen proposed that the wealthy flaunt these symbols not because they are useful, but because they are so pricey or wasteful that only the wealthy can afford them, which is why they’re high-status indicators. And this still goes on. A couple of winters ago it was common to see students at Yale and Harvard wearing Canada Goose jackets. Is it necessary to spend $900 to stay warm in New England? No. But kids weren’t spending their parents’ money just for the warmth. They were spending the equivalent of the typical American’s weekly income ($865) for the logo. Likewise, are students spending $250,000 at prestigious universities for the education? Maybe. But they are also spending it for the logo.
This is not to say that elite colleges don’t educate their students, or that Canada Goose jackets don’t keep their wearers warm. But top universities are also crucial for induction into the luxury belief class. Take vocabulary. Your typical middle-class American could not tell you what “heteronormative” or “cisgender” means. But if you visit Harvard, you’ll find plenty of rich 19-year-olds who will eagerly explain them to you. When someone uses the phrase “cultural appropriation,” what they are really saying is “I was educated at a top college.” Consider the Veblen quote, “Refined tastes, manners, habits of life are a useful evidence of gentility, because good breeding requires time, application and expense, and can therefore not be compassed by those whose time and energy are taken up with work.” Only the affluent can afford to learn strange vocabulary because ordinary people have real problems to worry about.
This is well-illustrated by the finding that in 1960 the percentage of American children living with both biological parents was identical for affluent and working-class families—95 percent. By 2005, 85 percent of affluent families were still intact, but for working-class families the figure had plummeted to 30 percent.
The economist and social theorist Thomas Sowell once said that activism is “a way for useless people to feel important, even if the consequences of their activism are counterproductive for those they claim to be helping and damaging to the fabric of society as a whole.” The same could be said for luxury beliefs.
But then, in 2019, she started to feel the tug of identity politics, and it was like a whirlpool. She and Alan, who is Jewish and 18 years older, had always been “sparring partners.” Now, it felt more personal, as if she, a “brown woman,” were facing off against whiteness and the patriarchy.
During the summer of 2020, “it became really difficult for us to have a conversation,” she said. He thought defunding the police was idiotic, and worried about illegal immigration and crime. “I remember saying at one point,” she continued, “‘You know what, let’s not talk politics. You’re never going to understand me, because you’re white, a man, privileged’—all the jargon.”
https://www.cbsnews.com/boston/news/joe-biden-wont-appear-new-hampshire-democratic-primary-ballot/One person saying what lots of other Democrats are thinking is Dean Phillips. He’s the moderate congressman running against Biden in the primary who hopes an embarrassing showing for the president in New Hampshire (where a debate over the primary calendar means Biden won’t appear on the ballot and needs voters to write him in) would force more in the party to consider dumping Biden. (Bari sat down with Phillips late last week for Honestly. . . stay tuned for that episode.)
But New Hampshire has balked at the plan, arguing that it has traditionally held the nation's opening primary - a rule that Iowa only got around by having caucuses. Top New Hampshire Democrats say state law there mandates hosting the nation's first primary, and officials have vowed to have a primary prior to South Carolina's regardless of what the DNC says.
The DNC has warned that such a move would lead to an unsanctioned primary that could trigger sanctions, including New Hampshire potentially losing delegates to the 2024 Democratic convention in Chicago. In the meantime, New Hampshire voters will still be able to write in Biden's name even during an unsanctioned primary, and some of the state's top Democrats have organized an effort to encourage write-in support for the president.
In the fifteen years before the oft-mocked real estate magnate ran for president, the U.S. introduced torture, kidnapping, warrantless arrest (back for the first time since 1861), drone assassination, n{Minority Report}-style predictive policing, preemptive war, mass surveillance, and a long, long list of other lunacies into our culture. These weren’t small changes, but sweeping rewrites of n{Schoolhouse Rock} promises, things that as a citizen made you want to puke from shame.
Trump was just getting started on the campaign trail when headlines like “‘Sodomized’ Gitmo Detainee Recovering After Surgery. Prison: No Comment” hit the news, letting us know at least one terror suspect needed a special pillow for court after years of “rectal feeding.” A little-noticed detail from the email scandal of Hillary “Love Trumps Hate” Clinton involved correspondence showing Trump’s general election opponent objected to just 1 of 294 extralegal drone strikes (causing 2,192 deaths) approved during her tenure as Secretary of State.
Another report on meeting Marx was given by Gustav Techow, a Prussian military officer who had joined the Berlin insurrectionists during the failed revolution of 1848. Techow had to escape to Switzerland after being sentenced and imprisoned for treason. The revolutionary group with whom Techow associated in Switzerland sent him to London and he spent time with Marx.
In a letter to his revolutionary associates, Techow described his impression of Marx, the man and his mind. The picture was of a power-lusting personality who had contempt for both friends and foes:{> He gave me the impression of both outstanding intellectual superiority and a most impressive personality. If he had had as much heart as brain, as much love as hate, I would have gone through fire with him despite the fact that he not only did not hide his contempt for me, but as the end was quite explicit about it …
> I regret, because of our cause, that this man does not have, together with his outstanding intelligence, a noble heart to place at our disposal. I am convinced that everything good in him has been devoured by the most dangerous personal ambitions. He laughs at the fools who repeat after him his proletarian catechism, just as he laughs at [other] communists … and also at the bourgeoisie …
> Despite all of his assurances to the contrary, perhaps precisely because of them, I left with the impression that personal domination is the end-all of his every activity … And [Marx considers that] all of his old associates are, despite their considerable talents, well beneath and behind him and should they ever dare to forget that, he will put them back in their places with the impudence worth of a Napoleon.}
\"The War Court," he concludes, "understood that, under the Constitution and its intentionally broad language, the government has wide and necessary latitude in addressing vexing social, economic, and administrative issues." Well, maybe the government does have all the power it needs to govern—but there are constitutional limits, including delineations as to which branch has that power in a given situation. The main New Deal economic programs were legislated, after all: Congress created the agricultural quotas at issue in Wickard v. Filburn, not some deputy undersecretary of agriculture. That’s a far cry from the pen-and-phone (and Tweet) governance we’ve seen, where with the exception of Obamacare, which provoked its own constitutional fight, most "major questions" of regulatory power are indeed first decided by administrative agencies.
But I do agree with Sloan’s characterizing the Roosevelt Court as "a cautionary tale—a story of excessive deference to the Executive Branch and its inflated claims of national security at times of severe national stress." Hot takes on the present day aside, it’s a tale worth reading.
Shortly after arriving in the States, Pilat stumbled across the work of another Eastern European immigrant: Ayn Rand. Though she didn't become an Objectivist, Pilat responded viscerally to Rand's insistence that "you have a right and a moral obligation to yourself to have a purpose and work towards the purpose as hard as you can."
And landlords are discovering new ways to keep a lid on costs when they can design whole neighborhoods from the ground up. A family home built by institutional investors will usually have a wide hallway and stairs to protect the paintwork from knocks and bumps when multiple tenants haul furniture in and out. The homes are sturdily built, with hard-wearing countertops and flooring that will last for years. High-quality fittings attract tenants, but also lower the landlord’s maintenance bills over time.
These questions were answered in 1869—the year after the amendment was adopted—by then-Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Salmon Chase. In the seminal case of In re Griffin, Chase, acting as presiding judge for the circuit court in the District of Virginia, rejected a defendant’s claim that his conviction was void because it had been entered by a judge who had been a Confederate official and thus disqualified from holding judicial office. Chase ruled that Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment is not self-executing. That is, it cannot be enforced unless and until Congress enacts legislation that sets up an enforcement mechanism. And Congress, in 1869, had not implemented any such enforcement procedure. In other words, Congress—not the states—gets to decide how individuals are disqualified from office under the Fourteenth Amendment.
In fact, Congress did decide. It did so the year after Justice Chase’s decision when Congress enacted the Enforcement Act of 1870. That law contained two provisions for the expressed purpose of enforcing Section Three. One provision set up a mechanism by which federal attorneys could bring a civil action to remove from office a person alleged to be disqualified for engaging in insurrection or rebellion. (This provision was repealed in 1948.) The second provision authorized criminal prosecution of someone for knowingly accepting or holding office in violation of Section Three. This provision has evolved into Section 2383 in the current criminal code, which makes it a crime to engage in rebellion or insurrection against the United States and disqualifies anyone who does from holding federal office.
Masimo sued Apple in January 2020 over allegations that Apple stole its trade secrets. Apple announced the Apple Watch Series 6 with a pulse oximeter later that year. The case, along with other legal efforts against Apple, has cost Masimo about $100 million so far. The publicly traded company posted about $144 million in profit in 2022.
Normally we wouldn’t wish trial lawyers on our worst enemy. But as anti-Israel demonstrations grow increasingly lawless, the plaintiffs bar could help. Why not hit protesters who break the law and keep Americans from getting to their destination with a tort liability suit for false imprisonment?
On Wednesday anti-Israel protesters blocked access to JFK and LAX airports in New York and Los Angeles, respectively. The laws of New York and California, like most states, recognize the tort. While there is no precedent applying this tort to road-blocking protesters, it fits the offense. The purpose of these demonstrations is to block the road to keep people from getting to the airport—deliberately and against their will.
We wouldn’t say this if we were confident in the authorities’ ability to control unlawful protest. You might think that after the lawlessness and violence that attended both the George Floyd and Jan. 6 Capitol protests, American authorities would have learned the lesson. Yet here we are, with mobs using their opposition to Israel’s war on Hamas to bring chaos to campuses and city streets.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_genocideThe Armenians are a strong and stubborn people, but they can only endure so much cruelty. As of this writing, 50,000+ of the 120,000 Artsakh Armenians have fled their ancestral homeland because they see no end in sight to the demoralization. Many had no choice because they were forced at gunpoint to leave their homes. Ruben Vardanyan, the leader of Artsakh, has been arrested. The democratic republic will officially be disbanded on January 1, 2024. Azerbaijan has plunged the area back into the stone ages. Without consistent electricity or internet, the fog of war has thickened. There are rumors on Telegram and Twitter of more civilian massacres, surrender agreements, and Armenian militias fighting valiantly to the last man.
This genocide put an end to more than two thousand years of Armenian civilization in eastern Anatolia. Together with the mass murder and expulsion of Assyrian/Syriac and Greek Orthodox Christians, it enabled the creation of an ethnonationalist Turkish state, the Republic of Turkey. The Turkish government maintains that the deportation of Armenians was a legitimate action that cannot be described as genocide. As of 2023, 34 countries have recognized the events as genocide, concurring with the academic consensus.
https://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&httpsredir=1&article=2720&context=iljIn law school (in the late '90s, I have some idea that this would not be taught today) - there is a particular case that ALWAYS causes problems - Shelley v. Kraemer. Everyone knows it is entirely wrongly decided: the finding of "state action" in the court's enforcement of racially restrictive covenants makes no sense in the larger context of what "state action" the Constitution limits. Robert Bork pointed out in a 1971 law review article the obvious problems with Shelley, as well as a bunch of other hot button civil rights cases. That article was used to call him a racist and crater his SCOTUS nomination. (Link to the offending scholarly piece - https://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&httpsredir=1&article=2720&context=ilj).
We had a professor who had worked in the Civil Rights Division of RFK's DoJ during the 60s. He pointed out that RFK as AG wanted to "end racism" but ran up against the problem Bork identifies - and you have as well - it smacks right up against the 1st Amendment and Free Association clause. The Supreme Court - largely infested with the "progressives" of any area - has been the architect of all of the mischief around race relations, from Dred Scott causing the Civil War to Plessy v. Ferguson enshrining "separate but equal" to Brown v. Board's attempts to un-ring the bell. All of it has been caused by the Supreme Court.
→ Claudine Gay is the perfect president of Harvard: As the plagiarism allegations become impossible to deny, columnists from the Times and The Washington Post—John McWhorter and Ruth Marcus—are coming out to say she should resign now. Another shoe dropping: a group of researchers say that the paper that made Claudine Gay’s career is based on faulty data analysis and that, when asked by fellow researchers to share her raw data, Gay refused. Another shoe: one member of the Harvard board, Tracy Palandjian, said that the school needs more than just Gay’s ouster, but “generational change.”
I still think Claudine Gay is too big to fail. She is a symbol. And the perfect one for a once-great American institution running on prestige fumes and foreign dollars. Of course her papers are flawed and plagiarized. Of course she isn’t up for the actual task of the job. It’s part of the point of Claudine Gay being president of Harvard. It’s part of the statement. And I don’t mean the crude take that she got the job simply based on her identity, since Claudine herself has played a major role in smearing several truly great black academics throughout her career. No, the statement Claudine Gay as president of Harvard makes is that politics matter more than anything else. It’s actually better for the movement that her work is fake. Because it makes the message even clearer: mediocrity, so long as it’s wedded to ideology, is enough. We’ll even call mediocrity genius and give it the most prestigious academic job in the land, so long as you say just the right things about this list of issues. In conclusion, Claudine Gay is the perfect president of Harvard.
“Nor will it be difficult to find things to charge opponents with,” he wrote. “Think of all the laws now on the books that give the federal government enormous power to surveil people for possible links to terrorism, a dangerously flexible term, not to mention all the usual opportunities to investigate people for alleged tax evasion or violation of foreign agent registration laws.” He also complained about the “whiff of new McCarthyism” from Trump acolytes accusing opponents of being “communist” or tools of China.
It’s as if Kagan doesn’t remember — or maybe he does — the last eight years of accusing everyone out of line with uniparty orthodoxy of siding with Russia, the overzealous FARA prosecutions of Trump allies like Thomas Barrack and Matthew Grimes, or the constant leaks about how the release of Donald Trump’s tax returns would serve up the long-awaited evidence of collusion. Moreover the line about the possible misuse of the “dangerously flexible term,” terrorism, coming from Robert Kagan — the man who helped lead us into war by conjuring a fictional “scenario” involving Saddam Hussein and terrorists — is enough to make anyone wonder how inflated his fears of dictatorship are.
I don’t know what to tell you at this point, but it’s pretty obvious Covid came from the Wuhan lab. New documents show scientists discussing making cool new Covid strains in Wuhan, and also how China is not as careful about safety. Ralph Baric, a virologist at University of North Carolina, noted in some planning docs that U.S. researchers will be alarmed by the lower biosafety levels at Wuhan: “In the U.S., these recombinant SARS-CoV are studied under BSL3. . . . In China, might be growing these viruses under BSL2. U.S. researchers will likely freak out.”
As Richard Ebright, Board of Governors Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Rutgers University, put it: “At this point, there is sufficient evidence to conclude, beyond reasonable doubt, that SARS-CoV-2 entered humans through a lab accident.”
It has retroactively issued guidance denying eligibility to employers that claim they curtailed operations owing to guidelines by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The IRS says agency public-health guidelines aren’t a government “order.”
As science and scholarship developed, academics widely accepted that progress depended on being able to draw a line between the known and the unknown. Once the frontiers of knowledge had been identified, effort and resources could be directed where they were most needed. For the same reason—efficient use of resources—it was important that those in the field assign credit for discoveries made. A structure of incentives developed that rewarded researchers who contributed to knowledge. Sometimes rewards were offered in the form of simple monetary inducements, as when the British Parliament in 1714 offered a prize of up to £20,000 to anyone who could discover a method of finding longitude at sea. More often, however, the reward was employment and promotion within the academy. Fellowships, grants, and free time for research were assigned on the basis of the quality of an academic’s work. At the high end of achievement, an outstanding mind might be recognized with a Fields Medal or a Nobel Prize.
this is this is what the good thinkers in the west think too you know when when something happens when the government extends its its tentacles and takes away more Liberties or starts threatening people the idea is well if you didn't do anything wrong you you wouldn't have anything to worry about we still hear that today oh abolutely we hear that all the time it's like I see so if I never did anything wrong I wouldn't have to worry about you okay so that means only the person who's utterly innocent has nothing to fear right well yeah that'll work out well for everyone and if they hadn't done anything then surely they would have nothing to fear
The IRA created a new tax credit for producing clean hydrogen from low-emissions sources. The climate lobby envisions clean hydrogen someday replacing fossil fuels in airplanes, long-distance trucking, shipping, and steel and fertilizer manufacturing. The dispute is over how the government should define “clean.”
I wish we didn’t focus on the word insurrection. All the evidence presented of the events in and around 1/6 leaves me convinced that Mr. Trump attempted to overturn a democratic election outcome to hold on to power; that he deliberately and repeatedly lied to the country in furtherance of this aim; that he either directed or egged on a violent assault on the U.S. Capitol to halt the constitutionally mandated vote-counting process; that he attempted to pressure the state of Georgia to alter its final vote tally illegally; that he has never shown remorse for these things and would surely do it all again if returned to the presidency. I believe that in the court cases he faces he will be found guilty of many charges.
I’m not at odds with what might be called the animating spirit of the Colorado decision, but if allowed to stand it would create chaos, because once these things start they spread like a virus. If Colorado judges can knock a presidential candidate off its ballot, New York judges can do it too, and Mississippi ones, and so on.
The stakes are not small. Mugabe is one of the last surviving members of a club of African big men—a club that included the likes of Mobutu Sese Seko, of Zaire, and Daniel Arap Moi, of Kenya. These men led necessary and bold opposition to colonial rule, but then grew addicted to power and its opulent trappings. They began to see themselves less as rulers of their lands than as owners. As their support waned, the big men acted in ways that big men so often do, following a manual very much like Mugabe's—profiteering, stealing elections, torturing opponents, alienating professionals and foreigners, and ignoring the needs of their impoverished citizens.
Today, the Supreme Court of Colorado ruled that Donald Trump is ineligible to be on the ballot for the 2024 presidential election because he is disqualified by Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. Section 3 states that "No person" can hold any state or federal office if they had previously been "a member of Congress, or… an officer of the United States" or a state official, and then "engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof." The Colorado court ruled that Trump "engaged in insurrection" because of his role in instigating the January 6, 2021 assault on the Capitol, and is therefore disqualified. This—and the lower court ruling it reviewed—are the first decisions that address the Section 3 case against Trump on the merits; several previous rulings in other states have dismissed Section 3 claims against Trump on varous procedural grounds.
https://www.thefp.com/p/colorado-court-trump-2024-peter-meijer-democracyI think it's fairly obvious that the January 6 attack on the Capitol amounts to an insurrection, and the Colorado justices also concluded this is not a close issue:
> [F]or purposes of deciding this case, we need not adopt a single, all-encompassing definition of the word "insurrection." Rather, it suffices for us to conclude that any definition of "insurrection" for purposes of Section Three would encompass a concerted and public use of force or threat of force by a group of people to hinder or prevent the U.S. government from taking the actions necessary to accomplish a peaceful transfer of power in this country.
This is an important point that I have tried to highlight in some of my own writings about the case. January 6 qualifies as an "insurrection" even under a fairly narrow definition of the term that is limited to the use of force to take over the powers of government. We don't need to rely on much broader definitions advocated by some legal scholars.
https://reason.com/2023/12/19/removing-trump-from-the-colorado-ballot-wont-make-things-better/Broadening the Fourteenth Amendment understanding of insurrection from the horrendous bloodshed of a civil war or equivalent catastrophe will open the floodgates to tit-for-tat challenges. If Trump’s rhetorical culpability for January 6 qualifies, similar lawsuits against Democratic politicians who encouraged BLM rioters will swiftly follow. Was Kamala Harris giving “aid or comfort” when she fundraised bail money for rioters? You can imagine where this could go.
Second, let's assume that Trump's harshest critics are correct when they say he represents a unique threat to the future of American democracy. Even so, the idea that of booting someone off the ballot to save democracy seems like a weird argument at best—and an authoritarian one at worst.
On June 10, 2022, upon surrounding the house, police ordered those inside to exit. Hadley's son, Noah—who was 15 years old at the time—was the only one home; he came out with his hands up as instructed. Police immediately conceded on the body camera footage that he was not who they were looking for. They placed him in double handcuffs, put him in a caged squad car, and took him to the police station anyway.
U.S. Steel put itself on the auction block this summer and sought to strike a deal while the irony is hot. Trillions of dollars in Washington spending on public works and green energy are goosing domestic demand for steel while tariffs protect U.S. manufacturers against foreign competition. U.S. Steel’s best assets are political creations.
President Trump in 2018 slapped 25% tariffs on foreign steel under the pretense of protecting national security. Domestic steel producers lobbied for the tariffs, which they said would protect American workers from cheap foreign imports. Yet U.S. Steel’s workforce had shrunk to 22,740 at the end of 2022 from 29,000 in 2018.
The evidence shows that the tariffs have resulted in fewer downstream manufacturing jobs and raised prices for consumers, all while padding the bottom line of domestic steel makers. Washington’s industrial policy is also helping to boost demand for domestic steel and U.S. manufacturers’ profits.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/claudine-gay-and-my-scholarship-plagiarism-elite-system-unearned-position-24e4a1b1Columbia is New York City’s largest private landowner, with more than 320 properties, valued at nearly $4 billion. The school saves more than $182 million annually by not paying property tax. Harvard avoids some $50 million annually. Property tax exemptions allow colleges to offer low-cost housing to faculty and reduce the cost of building facilities to house new bureaucracies.
At the same time, Ivy League endowments—Harvard ($50.7 billion), Yale ($40.7 billion), Princeton ($34.1 billion) and the University of Pennsylvania ($21 billion)—exceed the market values of most publicly traded corporations. These endowments wouldn’t be anywhere near as large if the schools had to pay a 23.8% tax on capital gains, as their wealthy alumni must on their investment earnings.
When scholars aren’t cited adequately or their work is ignored, it harms them because academic stature is determined by how often other researchers cite your work. Ms. Gay had no problem riding on the coattails of people whose work she used without proper attribution. Many of those whose work she pilfered aren’t as incensed as I am. They are elites who have benefited from a system that protects its own.
Even aside from the documented instances of plagiarism, Ms. Gay’s work wouldn’t normally have earned tenure in the Ivy League. Tenure at a top-tier institution normally demands ground-breaking originality; her work displays none. In a world where the privilege of diversity is king, Ms. Gay was able to parlay mediocre research into tenure and administrative advancement at what was once considered a world-class university.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Negro_Family:_The_Case_For_National_ActionAfter graduating, Nader moved to D.C. to work for Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who would later become a powerful senator and the namesake for a disappointing train station but who at the time was JFK’s Assistant Secretary of Labor. Moynihan was also interested in auto safety, and he even had a contract to write a book about the issue modeled on Upton Sinclair’s meatpacking exposé The Jungle, but he never ended up completing it. (Presumably he was too distracted by his other work, like blaming Black poverty on “ghetto culture.”7)
African-American libertarian economist and writer Walter E. Williams has praised the report for its findings. He has also said, "The solutions to the major problems that confront many black people won't be found in the political arena, especially not in Washington or state capitols."[6] Thomas Sowell, an African-American libertarian economist as well, has also praised the Moynihan Report on several occasions. His 1982 book Race and Economics mentions Moynihan's report, and in 1998 he asserted that the report "may have been the last honest government report on race."[14] In 2015 Sowell argued that time had proved correct Moynihan's core idea that African-American poverty was less a result of racism and more a result of single-parent families: "One key fact that keeps getting ignored is that the poverty rate among black married couples has been in single digits every year since 1994."[15]
Confucius’s strategy of small-group elite instruction eventually bore fruit, but its very success in reaching the halls of power meant it faced many of the same corrupting influences we face in such institutions today. The band of disciples grew, eventually giving rise to a class of scholar-bureaucrats that later rulers found indispensable in administering their empire. By the Han Dynasty, Confucianism had become the state ideology and was the subject of school instruction and civil service exams. Predictably, this had a corrupting influence as bureaucratic demands compressed a philosophy that once developed under lived conditions into formulas to be recited on command. Against this pressure, generations of scholars labored to maintain the spirit and practice of Confucianism, both within and outside academic institutions.
The Confucian idea serves as direction for those who want to serve civilization but currently endure an oppressive system of education unaligned with either personal or societal flourishing. It rebukes the many who follow the institutional incentives towards becoming excellent sheep. Thousands of years ago, Confucius already condemned the ambitions of the average striver.
Millions of jobs across the country have gone unfilled during 2023 because of an economic rebound and the aging of the U.S. workforce. Meanwhile, the U.S. government apprehended more than two million people trying to cross illegally between ports of entry in the fiscal year that ended in September, similar to the number the year before—people who are willing and eager to fill many of these jobs but have few legal avenues to get to the U.S.
But it was a sham. At that time, the percentage of all blacks on college campuses who were from lower economic backgrounds had fallen to the single digits. These students had been replaced by middle- to upper-class blacks, Africans, Caribbeans, and multiracials like me.
By checking the black box, I was being asked to mask the actual problems and inequities that undermine the efforts of lower-class blacks—all so university administrations could claim the pretense of racial redemption through higher enrollment numbers.
But if one really wants to know why I never checked the black box, the true answer lies in my black grandfather’s life. Born to formerly enslaved parents on a dirt floor in Camp Nelson, Kentucky, his parents died when he was just a teen. On his own, he traveled to Detroit and then to Chicago, where he worked odd jobs to fuel his playboy lifestyle. Then one day, he realized his current life would lead to no good. He straightened up and became a founding member of Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), where he met my grandmother. He got a job as a truck driver, became a family man, and educated himself by reading every book he could find. In doing so, he lifted his family from poverty to a solid lower-middle-class life despite living under segregation.
Why, then, would I betray this admirable progress for the empty promise of skin color?
Nearly 50 years later, this is exactly what we’ve seen with the Twitter Files, the CTI League, the Virality Project I just wrote about, and innumerable other “content moderation” projects. They start off promising to stop clearly offensive or ridiculous posts, like about microchips in vaccines. Quickly however the purview expands to include anything that “promotes hesitancy,” contains “anti-Ukraine narratives,” or too closely overlaps with the “information ecosystem” of, say, Russia. This is how Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya or the Green Party’s Jill Stein end up deamplified on Twitter, and how Aaron Maté ended up on a list of accounts passed to the FBI by Ukrainian intelligence.
Benjamin Eidelson, a professor at Harvard Law School who signed the faculty letter, said that he believes Gay’s comments have been misinterpreted and misused since she repeatedly condemned antisemitism at the congressional hearing.
“It is a politically motivated effort to make the university operate by the standards that certain donors and opportunistic politicians think that we should, rather than the intellectual values that define the institution,” he said.
A trial judge last week issued an order allowing Cox to obtain the procedure but the state Supreme Court on Friday put a temporary hold on that ruling. Then late Monday, the high court ruled Cox’s doctor, Damla Karsan, hadn’t adequately attested that Cox’s condition met the state’s exception.
“Dr. Karsan did not assert that Ms. Cox has a ‘life-threatening physical condition’ or that, in Dr. Karsan’s reasonable medical judgment, an abortion is necessary because Ms. Cox has the type of condition the exception requires,” the court wrote.[...]“A pregnant woman does not need a court order to have a lifesaving abortion in Texas,” the court wrote. “Our ruling today does not block a life-saving abortion in this very case if a physician determines that one is needed under the appropriate legal standard, using reasonable medical judgment.”
Rents are on the rise, but the cost of buying a home has risen by a lot more. The average monthly new mortgage payment is 52% higher in the U.S. than the average apartment rent, according to an analysis by CBRE. The premium is even sharper in many major metro areas—including 175% or more in Seattle and Austin, Texas, and several cities in California.
https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/ICA_2017_01.pdfThe Russian government used espionage to interfere in the 2016 United States elections with the goals of sabotaging the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton, boosting the presidential campaign of Donald Trump, and increasing political and social discord in the United States.
We assess with high confidence that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election, the consistent goals of which were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency
President Biden and his supporters project their own authoritarian impulses onto Mr. Trump because they don’t want to come to terms with their own illiberalism. The examples in the Biden presidency are rife.
With the stroke of a pen, Mr. Biden tried to cancel half a trillion dollars in student debt, ban evictions and mandate Covid vaccines—each of which the Supreme Court blocked because Congress never gave the president the authority to do so. Even after losing at the high court, his administration has used other regulatory means to write off about $770 billion in student debt.
Then Republican Senators walked out, which they say removed a quorum. “The Democrats tried, but were unsuccessful in their attempt to issue a subpoena because they did not follow committee rules and violated the Senate Standing Rules,” the GOP press office says.
Pablo Biró, a representative of one pilots union, is ready to fight Milei’s expected cuts at government-run carrier Aerolineas Argentinas, which last year posted $200 million in losses. “They’re going to have to literally kill us,” Biró said on national radio.
That same day Watson learned that somebody from London Against Transphobia contacted her employer, a London council where she works as a town planner, and accused her of being transphobic. As a result, the company’s HR department gave Watson a verbal warning—“they told me I had to stop saying things like ‘lesbians don’t have penises,’ ” she says—and instructed her to take a half day of “trans awareness training,” which teaches workplace tolerance and understanding of trans issues, with a local firm called Gendered Awareness.
She took the training but worried that her job, her reputation, and her speed-dating business were all on the line. So Watson reached out to the LGBA, which orchestrated a media blitz in August, leaking the story to the Daily Mail and booking Watson to appear in various media outlets. The organization also sent open letters to Watson’s employer and the Stonegate Group, the company that owns and operates The College Arms, pressuring them to reconsider their actions, arguing that Watson’s gender-critical beliefs are protected under the Equalities Act of 2010.
Within weeks, Watson’s employer, who’d been pressuring her to “take some time off,” Watson says, walked back their threats. On September 1, the Stonegate Group officially welcomed her to continue hosting at The College Arms and told her that the manager who first blew the whistle was no longer employed by them. (A Stonegate spokesperson told The Free Press in an email that the manager’s actions “were not in line with our company values and ethos.”)
“I would have crumbled without the LGBA,” Watson tells me.
The phrase “transwomen are women,” she says, “is a goddamn cult for my generation. I can’t be dealing with it anymore. You can tell a person’s sex from every single cell in their body. Transwomen don’t like it when women tell them no, because they’ve been socialized to have control, to be leaders, to not be questioned because they’re men. And that’s pretty much it. The whole thing is bloody nuts.”
Breaking news: Henry Kissinger dies at 100. The diplomate exercised an unparalleled control over U.S. international affairs and policymaking. He was also the target of relentless critics, who deemed him unprincipled and amoral.[...]Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, austere religious scholar at helm of Islamic State, dies at 48
https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/israeli-peace-activists-face-reckoning-after-hamas-attack-8a075fdcYair Rotem, Hila’s uncle, is now her primary guardian, as his sister Raaya remains a Hamas hostage. He said his niece doesn’t show emotion when talking about her time in captivity, held in the dark for 50 days with little food and no showers. He is reluctant to press her for details of what happened when Hamas’s bloody Oct. 7 attack on Israel interrupted a sleepover she was having with Emily at Hila’s house in Kibbutz Be’eri.[...]Captives weren’t able to take showers, so Raaya would clean Hila and Emily with a towel and hot water from a portable burner, according to Hila’s uncle. They subsisted on cans of tuna and beans, but were sometimes still hungry and had to ask for more food. The family friend, who met Hila and Emily at the hospital, said the water they drank in captivity sometimes tasted like mud.
https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/israeli-military-shows-video-evidence-of-oct-7-attacks-some-taken-from-militants-body-cams-262d6369Some of Hamas’s victims were involved in fostering ties with Palestinians, including veteran Canadian-Israeli activist Vivian Silver, whose remains were identified last week. Silver, 74, was a co-founder of Women Wage Peace, which promotes peace-building efforts, and worked as a volunteer for Noy’s group, driving Palestinians from the Gaza Strip to hospitals in Israel.
https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/israel-hamas-war-pro-palestinian-college-campus-35c19c7aHamas has denied it targeted civilians. Khaled Meshaal, director of Hamas’s diaspora operations and a chief spokesman for the group, said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was fabricating allegations of massacres to win sympathy in the West.
“In all wars there are some civilian victims. We are not responsible for them,” he said in an interview with Saudi Arabia-based television channel Al Arabiya on Friday. “Hamas does not kill civilians on purpose. It focuses on the soldiers. Period.”
At Columbia University, a male student was hit with a wooden stick after he confronted a female student who was ripping down posters advertising a rally supporting Israel. At both Tulane University and the University of Massachusetts, Palestinian supporters punched Jewish students during protests. At Cornell University, a student was charged with threatening to shoot up a kosher dining hall. Students at schools across the country have torn down or scribbled over posters of Israelis who are being held hostage by Hamas in Gaza.
One theme prominent at protests across the country is the opposition to “settler colonialism,” or violent empire building that displaces an indigenous community. Zionism—support for Israel as a Jewish state—is viewed by many college protesters as the modern equivalent to European colonization of the Americas and Africa.
“We will never capitulate to the colonizer or his sympathizers,” the George Washington University Students for Justice in Palestine said on their Instagram account. “The settler colony will fall, our land will be liberated, and we will return to our homes again.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-rape-of-the-israeli-women-october-7-hamas-gaza-progressives-c2a4cd38College brought new encounters with students from a range of backgrounds, which Little said was eye-opening. With a double major of French studies and fine arts, he signed up for classes about areas colonized by the French empire, Islamic art and theology. He became best friends with a Pakistani American student and joined a South Asian student group, and more recently the Arab Student Union and Muslim Student Association.
Last month he stayed on after a club event, as some of the students began discussing plans for a rally.
Price Little at the University of San Francisco. PHOTO: PRICE LITTLE“I sat in for a few hours on that, just in the corner, listening,” Little recalled. He knew that Hamas had attacked and Israel was striking back with bombs, but said being in that room was a galvanizing moment. “This was not something where I knew the brutal extent of all of it. That’s when it became more of an active mission for me,” he said.
A few weeks ago, Little joined in a pro-Palestinian rally, his sign reading, “Queer Muslims for Palestine.”
Little, who identifies as queer and isn’t Muslim, said he doesn’t condone Hamas’s treatment of queer people. Same-sex relations are outlawed in Gaza and punishable by up to 10 years in prison, according to Human Rights Watch.
“It’s not ideal,” he said of supporting a resistance movement led by Hamas. “But I don’t think there was another option.”
Never have college campuses exerted so great or so destructive an influence. Once an indispensable support of our advanced society, academia has become a cancer metastasizing through its vital organs. The radical left is the cause, most obviously through the one-party campuses having graduated an entire generation of young Americans indoctrinated with their ideas.
The received Beltway wisdom on Hunter Biden is that yes, he was selling his father’s influence but he was swindling the buyers because Joe did nothing in return for the money Hunter collected—and that Republicans have come up with zero. Except showing that Joe Biden has seldom been truthful.
The Environmental Protection Agency “is not imposing an EV mandate,” says a memo from Democrats on the Energy and Commerce Committee opposing the GOP legislation. But the EPA in April proposed tailpipe emissions standards for greenhouse gases that would effectively require that electric vehicles make up two-thirds of car sales in 2032.[...]The Democratic memo accuses Republicans of attacking “EPA’s authority to protect Americans from dangerous air pollution.” But greenhouse gases are ubiquitous and aren’t hazardous to human health, unlike tailpipe pollutants such as sulfur dioxide and particulate matter. Some studies suggest EVs may produce more fine particulate matter—pollutants that lodge deep in the lungs—because their battery weight increases wear and tear from tires. EPA ignores this potential harm.
Airlines have long contended that security concerns prevent them from making name changes, but that doesn't make any sense. All ticketed passengers are now screened through TSA's Secure Flight program, and transfers would not affect the process at all. In fact, some airlines allow tickets to be transferred for a modest fee.
It's about money. If airline tickets could be transferred from one passenger to another, it would create a secondary market for tickets that would undermine the airline industry's entire business model, which is to discount advance-purchase fares bought by tourists and raise the price of a tickets typically bought by business travelers.
Imagine if a business traveler could buy a name-transfer from a leisure traveler at a modest markup? Suddenly that $600 walk-up fare would be cut to $99. That would be great for the business traveler -- but not so good for the airline.
The platform of the candidate for the Vinorhady election district, Jaroslav Hašek, consisted of seven points:[16]
1. The reintroduction of slavery.2. The nationalization of janitors.("similar to how it is in Russia [...], where every janitor is simultaneously a police informer").3. The rehabilitation of animals.4. The institutionalization of feeble-minded MPs.5. The reintroduction of the Inquisition.6. Judicial immunity for priests and the Church ("In cases where a schoolgirl is deflowered by a priest").7. The mandatory introduction of alcoholism.
The correct adjective for the tragedy I'm experiencing is not "unimaginable" but /{unfathomable}. I can imagine it just fine because it's happening to me, and you can imagine it too now because I'm describing it to you. And because we can imagine it, we can turn and face it, and, with God's grace, we can lift up our cross and bear it, somehow.
Imagine if nearly half of New York City lost heat for months during the winter. That’s not the plot of a new survival drama. Such a catastrophe nearly occurred last Christmas, according to an alarming recent report by energy regulators that deserves more attention.[...]It “is especially disconcerting that it happened in the Eastern Interconnection which normally has ample generation and transmission ties to other grid operators that allow them to import and export power,” the report notes. Yet problems cascaded through the eastern U.S.’s interdependent energy systems, which nearly caused New York City’s gas distribution to collapse.[...]Winter storms happen, but U.S. energy systems are becoming less resilient as coal and nuclear power plants shut down owing to competition from heavily subsidized green energy and cheaper natural gas. While gas power is more reliable than wind and solar, icy winter conditions can still cause fuel shortages.
https://twitter.com/rationalinpdx/status/1727220476559474755Parent Isabel Johnson praises Bonilla’s star power but wonders about some of the union’s street theater.
On Nov. 8, 1,000 people and the aforementioned llama marched from PAT headquarters to the Oregon Convention Center in search of School Board member Andrew Scott, who was there for a work meeting at his day job for the regional government Metro. Scott had to be escorted out.
A veteran security employee said it was “like nothing he had ever experienced in his years at the OCC” and Metro employees were “upset and traumatized,” according to a letter from the school district’s attorneys. PAT’s leadership downplayed the action as “a little rebellion” on Instagram.
That same day, a demonstration in front of district chief of staff Jonathan Garcia’s home left his wife and neighbors “shaken,” Garcia said. The next morning, Superintendent Guadalupe Guerrero woke up to “Wanted” posters with his face on them all over his neighborhood. The campaign escalated further Nov. 21 when a flyer encouraged people to camp out on board members’ front lawns—and listed their home addresses.
“The way the School Board members have been treated is unacceptable,” Johnson says. “They’re not the evil empire—they are volunteers, they don’t even get paid! I can disagree with Andrew Scott, but I have no doubt about his commitment to education. People are trying to do their best, and if we keep treating them like this, who is going to want to run?
JJ: I used to always hear Democrats saying, “The election was all just Trump’s racist appeals,” but I actually went to the rallies in 2015. He would talk about bad trade deals. He promised to bring back Glass-Steagall, which is the bill regulating finance. He talked about health insurance. He was going to do a plan that actually would cover all Americans and wasn’t going to be like a rat’s maze. And if you compare the ads, his ads were overwhelmingly more policy-oriented than Clinton’s. She was really just attacking him as a bad guy and it didn’t work.
MM: So, you didn’t anticipate that the party that said, “We are the party of Paul Ryan, we’re the party of tax cuts, we’re the party of Milton Friedman,” would actually start to sound more liberal on economic policy?
RT: Yeah, and that’s another way in which Trump was misunderstood. He got the nomination because the Republican Party itself was changing and was becoming more of a working-class party driven by these kinds of voters. They didn’t want to hear the Paul Ryan message over and over again. They didn’t want to hear just about tax cuts. They didn’t want to just hear, “We unleash the free market, everything will be great. Trust us on this.” They were mad, and they thought the elites of the Republican Party as well as the Democratic Party were selling them out. So Trump’s message fell on receptive ears, and that shock to the Republican Party system is still with us today, because I don’t think there’s any turning back to the former economic approach of the Republicans. Trump is the guy who changed the landscape. This gets away from looking at him as just an avatar of white supremacy or whatever it is he is frequently portrayed as by some Democrats.
The Democrats also made a serious error in melding Hispanics into this construct of “people of color” in the United States who are all oppressed by the fact they are non-whites in a white supremacist society; who are all the victims of racism and discrimination; who all believe in a very liberal immigration policy. None of those things were correct. Hispanics think of themselves as Americans. They think of themselves as people who want to pursue economic uplift for themselves, their families, their communities. They want healthcare. They want safe streets. They want a normal, good, prosperous American life. And they’re not so sure the Democrats really have their backs on economics.
You can subsidize a buyer into the auto showroom, but you can’t make him buy. That’s the word from some 3,900 car dealers across the country who on Tuesday wrote President Biden that electric vehicles are piling up unsold on their lots. They want relief from his onerous and unrealistic EV sales mandate.
“There are many excellent battery electric vehicles available for consumers to purchase,” the dealers write in their letter to the President. But they add that “electric vehicle demand today is not keeping up with the large influx of BEVs arriving at our dealerships prompted by the current regulations,” and “BEVs are stacking up on our lots.”
Another CEO might stay off X while claiming to superintend its existence as a public service, or at least have a team vetting the background of any tweet he was considering retweeting (by then a week or two later).
It should make us in the mainstream press sheepish that, by not doing this, Mr. Musk is telling us how little our criticism matters these days. He may be right. While declaring him a promoter of antisemitic tropes, the New York Times was still expecting to host him at a Wednesday event for paying customers.[...]The language problem makes human life interesting. No matter how carefully I choose my words, I can’t make you know all or exactly what I mean. Yet the language problem was also once a market opportunity for the news media, which sold itself as exercising exceptional discipline in the use of words and evidence. It is sad but true that nowadays a reader thinks twice or perhaps three times before investing five minutes to read and trust something in a major newspaper. But technology also offers a solution. Used intelligently, X, Substack, and various podcast aggregators make it easy to keep track of writers and thinkers who have a history of not abusing your trust.
I have my own continuing dialogue with several readers about Mr. Musk’s many inaccurate, misleading, hyperbolic words about Tesla. My answer has tended to be, “Yes . . . but”: The market hears Mr. Musk but also hears his critics, etc. When the Securities and Exchange Commission slapped his wrist in 2018 for a disclosure violation that might have gotten another CEO banned for life, it seemed to consider the market sufficiently informed about the risks of following Mr. Musk.
With the birth of behavioral economics, Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman gave us a new way to talk about an old truth: People, and this includes the press, largely believe and say what they hear others believing and saying.
An important twist was then supplied by Duke University Prof. Timur Kuran’s book on preference falsification, aka the incentive to exhibit opinions we don’t actually hold. It raises a difficulty: In what sense are our preferences even stable? Witness the ease with which yesterday’s liberal Democrats become today’s left-wing authoritarians, or some on the left and right who once espoused universal ideals now embrace identity politics. Conventional claims are often absurdly wrong. Ronald Reagan is solemnified as a free trader to criticize Donald Trump when, in fact, Reagan was the most protectionist president in memory. Climate change is routinely cited as an “existential risk” when that’s not what the science says.
Hamas has attacked Israel indiscriminately every day of the war, beginning with the Oct. 7 massacre. Each of the terrorist group’s more than 10,000 rocket attacks has been a war crime, firing on Israeli cities without care for who or what gets hit.
“The need for energy is not declining on a global basis,” says Matthew Hutton, managing director responsible for energy investments in the infrastructure group at Brookfield.
https://elessarbooks.substack.com/p/an-object-of-contemptuous-abhorrenceLet me turn your eyes from your Fathers, to the Father of us all, the first and most high God; he hath divided humane nature into two Sexes, the Male and Female; he hath hid in our very make and frame a secret sympathy, a natural kindness, nay, a little necessity to joyn, to contribute to the felicity of each others life.
Equity guides many of the district’s decisions, embodied in a stated board goal: “Recognizing that racism is the most devastating factor contributing to the diminished achievement of students, ETHS will strive to eliminate the predictability of academic achievement based upon race.”
Student testimonials included in a presentation Evanston teachers gave at a conference last fall described how students feel more accepted in the classes.
“I feel like I represent me and not the whole black race in this AP class,” said a student who took an AXLE class in 2021. “It’s a safe space. In AP classes that are mostly white, I feel like if I answer wrong, I am representing all black kids. I stay quiet in those classes.”
Since Calvin’s own followers were being sent to the flames throughout Catholic Europe, Calvin had good reason to sympathise with Servetus. But he failed to make the connection, as he thought of his followers not as heretics but as martyrs to the truth. In addition, his position in Geneva was far from secure; the city was riven with theological strife between Calvin’s followers and those of a rival Protestant sect. Calvin needed to show that he could be just as tough on heresy as the Catholic Church that he sought to overthrow. And this wasn’t difficult, since he believed wholeheartedly that heresy deserved death. “Whoever shall now contend that it is unjust to put heretics and blasphemers to death will knowingly and willingly incur their very guilt,” he writes in his own tract on heresy. Throughout the trial, he prayed Servetus would repent, and when he did not, asked the council to grant his old friend a faster death by beheading, as a final mercy. But he did not doubt either the justice or necessity of putting Servetus to death.
In 2020–21, the world was thrown into chaos by the global COVID-19 pandemic, which eventually claimed between 7 and 32 million lives. But thanks to modern science and industry—products of the Enlightenment—we were able to rapidly develop, mass produce, and roll out vaccines, which prevented an estimated 19.8 million deaths, reducing the worldwide mortality toll by around 63 percent.
Yet throughout this, many thousands of people around the world committed acts of collective self-harm. They packed themselves together indoors, creating superspreader events. They rejected centuries of modern science dating back to Servetus’s studies of human circulation in favour of quack treatments ranging from silver-infused toothpaste to household bleach. Some spread bizarre conspiracy theories through social media; some even denied that the virus exists.
Now, just two months and ten buses later, LA is ready to sue. Other Democratic strongholds targeted by Abbot’s bussing program are also starting to crack. Last week, New York mayor Eric Adams said that absent tighter border security and a federal bailout, the migrant crisis will “break” New York. Left-wing Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson, recently elected with the backing of the militant Chicago Teachers Union and the Democratic Socialists of America, echoed the same sentiment: “Let me state this clearly: the city of Chicago cannot go on welcoming new arrivals safely and capably without significant support and immigration policy changes.”
Sanctuary cities can go back to pretending that the debate over immigration has nothing to do with material politics — a competition for resources and power — and that anyone who suggests otherwise is promoting the “The Great Replacement Theory.” For the uninitiated, this is a “conspiracy theory” which holds that Democratic strategists view the “browning” of America as an election strategy capable of propelling them into a permanent supermajority (which they’ve openly said for a decade). Conveniently, this fake conspiracy theory has the same name as an actual conspiracy theory, which says the Jews are covertly orchestrating a white genocide. Thus, pointed criticism of the Democratic party can be freely conflated with antisemitism, as the Anti-Defamation League — a group you’d wrongly assume might have a problem with such vulgar equivocation and wolf-crying — did in a tirade against Tucker Carlson last year.
But if they really wish to hang on to it, please remember that Hamas established the exchange rate with the return of Gilard Shalit in 2011 as 1,027 Palestinians for one Israeli. Against the estimate of 1,400 Israeli deaths, Israel should unilaterally cease fire when dead Palestinians approach 150,000.
But what about people who identify as black but are unable to prove their slave lineage? What about people who can prove their lineage but choose to identify as something other than black or as more than one thing? What about people who meet both criteria but who do not think contemporary blacks deserve reparations or who would feel stigmatized or demeaned by reparations?
Of course, investing in early education does not guarantee equal outcomes across groups, or what today's racial justice activists call equity. But the government does have an obligation to make sure that good educational opportunities are there for the taking. If they were, the sense of racial injustice in America would be much less.
In other words, Mr. Acevedo offered the floor to Mr. Trump, who ran away with it. But confrontation isn’t the only way journalists try to provoke news. “I’m a reporter and my job is to ask questions,” Mr. Acevedo later wrote. “Information should be the protagonist here.” In any case, the U.S. has a vigorous press, and pundits and fact-checkers can go to town on Mr. Trump’s flights of factual nonsense.
What’s more troubling is the backlash. Latino groups demanded that Univision do an internal review, arguing: “Unfiltered, unaddressed and unrestricted disinformation does a disservice to all communities in the U.S.” The Congressional Hispanic Caucus drew up a draft letter, the Washington Post says, asking a Univision bigwig “to meet with members of Congress about the journalistic standards of the network.”
That sounds almost Trumpy in its attempt to intimidate the press. The country doesn’t need politicians demanding that journalists filter and restrict the “disinformation” from a leading candidate for President, even if that were possible. And if it’s softball interviews they’re worried about, have they seen hosts on MSNBC or CNN question Reps. Jamie Raskin or Adam Schiff?
Other committees valued political ideology as an end in itself. In a search for a professor of chemistry, the report notes that one candidate’s “experiences as a queer, neurodivergent Latinx woman in STEM has provided her with an important motivation to expand DEI efforts beyond simply representation and instead toward social justice.” Another report concedes that “as a white male” one proposed finalist “does not outwardly present as a diversity candidate.” In his defense it notes that he recently published on critical race theory.
Mr. Sailer is director of university policy at the National Association of Scholars.
Early in the project, advisors from other countries came to California, hoping to win contracts to help devise the system. Among them was the SNCF, France’s state-run rail line. Their proposal — a direct line between San Francisco and LA — was quickly rejected. By 2011, the French advisors left, telling the state of California that they were “leaving for North Africa, which was less politically dysfunctional,” according to an official interviewed by the Times. Seven years later they completed a bullet train in Morocco. The lack of financial incentives inherent to the free market isn’t stopping California from laying rail. Being a democratic government that has to contend with a diverse range of politically organized constituencies isn’t the problem either — the French called California “politically dysfunctional,” and they live in a country where virtually every proposed law is met with a Molotov cocktail or a general strike.
Fundamentally, both the corporate suits at Brightline and the bureaucrats running France’s nationalized train service understand the same thing: you can’t please everyone. American Capitalism can build you a high-speed rail system. French socialism can build you a high-speed rail system. But Californiaism — the politics of endless deference and limitless inclusion — cannot build you anything. It is incapable of producing anything apart from mass homelessness, open-air drug markets, a housing crisis, sanctuary cities overrun with illegals, politically sanctioned race riots, mass looting, and yes, a $9.8 billion “investment” in rail that produces no rail. That is Californiaism, sailing aimlessly in a gulf of money, throwing its trash off the deck and imagining it built the sea instead of the ship.
You could also call that decadence. It’s all the same thing
and as you can see, the spaceship has just experienced a rapid, unscheduled disassembly
https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/israel-palestine-2-state-solutionInternationally, the set of rules that determines statehood is the Montevideo Convention:
> The state as a person of international law should possess the following qualifications: (a) a permanent population; (b) a defined territory; (c) government; and (d) capacity to enter into relations with the other states.
Additionally, regions can’t be countries, and countries can’t gain independence through military action.
As of today, in my humble opinion, neither Israel, nor Gaza, nor the West Bank respect these four.
The extraordinary nature of the pro-Palestinian demonstrations that have swept through the capitals of the West—demonstrations that began before Israel dropped a single bomb on Gaza—has, perhaps, not been fully appreciated. Horrific massacres of unarmed civilians are, unfortunately, taking place right now in South Sudan, Congo, Ethiopia, Syria, and Darfur. Unforgivably, the so-called international community usually ignores them. But none inspires cries of esteem for the perpetrators and acclaim for their crimes. And nowhere are the victims—defenseless civilians, including children and their mothers—blamed for being murdered.
In 1979, leftists who supported the Iranian Revolution had a rude awakening when the mullahs came to power and promptly executed them, along with secularists, union organizers, intellectuals, feminists, and everyone else who fit into the enormously capacious category of a counterrevolutionary. There was a lesson here: Activists have the responsibility to know who and what they support, and to separate themselves—openly and decisively—from programs and regimes that are predicated on violence and repression. Similarly, those who imagine that Hamas’s slaughters may have promoted “liberation,” “justice,” and “freedom” for Palestinians, as the banners demand, have a big surprise in store.
Unlike Iran in 1979, though, there’s no mystery as to what kind of state Hamas (an acronym for the Islamic Resistance Movement) aims to create; we need only look at what it already has created. This time, no one can plead ignorance. There’s little liberation, justice, or freedom to be found in Gaza, where there are no opposition political parties, no elections, and no freedom of religion, the press, or protest. Opponents are arrested, tortured, and sometimes executed. (Yahya Sinwar, a head of Hamas’s armed wing, was known as “the butcher of Khan Younis” for his brutality toward other Palestinians.) Abortion and homosexuality are outlawed (what are those protestors with “Queers for Palestine” signs thinking?); mentioning trans rights would be unwise. It is legal for husbands to beat their wives, and so-called honor killings go unpunished. The ruling clique is notoriously corrupt, and though Gazans are very poor, Hamas is a very rich organization.
There is, and always has been, another tradition, another sense, of what it means to be “progressive” and to stand with the oppressed. In 2011, Fred Halliday wrote an essay titled “Terrorism in Historical Perspective.” It is the most intellectually and morally lucid work on the subject that I know. Halliday addressed himself to his comrades on the Left and made a crucial argument: Any movement that claims to represent an oppressed people must act in an ethical way even if it is not in power and perceives itself as weak.
Oppression is not a carte blanche for severing heads from bodies, shooting hundreds of young festival-goers, bludgeoning people to death, murdering children in front of parents and vice versa, killing naked women point-blank, and kidnapping babies and the elderly; there is no universe in which these are revolutionary, emancipatory, or anticolonialist acts, much less “beautiful” ones. Sadism and violence are not synonyms. Sexual torture cannot be anti-imperialist—nor is it an understandable, much less inevitable, response to oppression. An eliminationist program is not a freedom charter. History has proved, again and again, that terrorists and freedom fighters aren’t the same, which is why the former never achieve anything approaching either liberation or justice. There is no room for “yes, but.” Why, when it comes to the deaths of Israelis, is this so hard to understand?
When people use the term Orwellian, Matt, in reference to things resembling the novel, 1984, what they often fail to note is that in the world of 1984, everything’s crumbling, everything sucks. The tobacco, the cigarettes fall apart, the victory gin is barely alcohol, or at least doesn’t taste like something made from plants. Maybe it’s made from an industrial product. And the streets are filthy, and the people are poor. And in 1984, the whole thought control superstructure is meant to obscure that fact that they live in a society that’s perpetually at war and is falling apart. That’s the reason people’s minds have to be policed. And here again, you see in this Sullivan article, an attempt to criticize the thinking of people rather than explore the reality of their lives. And here, she basically acts like a cheerleader, or some kind of drill sergeant, actually, for newsrooms across the country.
The husband was a farmer and they’d lost the farm and he’d had to go to work at Walmart for $11 an hour. And the husband was talking to me about... These were Bernie people to the core. They would never vote for a Republican, but they were saying, “Look, you want to understand why people vote for Trump. I mean, I work at Walmart. In Iowa, we hear politicians come through here all the time. We’ve talked to them personally. They never deliver. When the boss says something at Walmart, it happens the next day. And that’s why people vote for somebody like Donald Trump.” For the ordinary person who has some kind of job like that, they’re used to the politician lying and not delivering, and the reality is different at work. So they’re throwing a Hail Mary. And it makes total sense, doesn’t it? I mean, doesn’t that explanation of American politics make a lot of sense? Why are we not reading that anywhere?
In any case, fundamentalist Christians and Orthodox Jews don’t tend to be confused about the problem of jihadism because they understand the power of religious beliefs, however secular people generally are. We imagine that people everywhere, at bottom, want the same things: They want to live safe and prosperous lives. They want clean drinking water and good schools for their kids. And we imagine that if whole groups of people start behaving in extraordinarily destructive ways—practicing suicidal terrorism against noncombatants, for instance—they must have been pushed into extremis by others.[...]These are religious beliefs, sincerely held. They are beliefs about the moral structure of the universe. And they explain how normal people—even good ones—can commit horrific acts of violence against innocent civilians—on purpose, not as collateral damage—and still consider themselves good. When you believe that life in this world has no value, apart from deciding who goes to hell and who goes to Paradise, it becomes possible to feel perfectly at ease killing noncombatants, or even using your own women and children as human shields, because you know that any Muslims who get killed will go to Paradise for eternity.
The problem that we have to grapple with—and by “we” I mean Muslims and non-Muslims alike—is that the doctrines that directly support jihadist violence are very easy to find in the Quran, and the hadith, and in the biography of Muhammad. For Muslims, Muhammad is the greatest person who has ever lived. Unfortunately, he did not behave like Jesus or Buddha—at all. It sort of matters that he tortured people and cut their heads off and took sex slaves, because his example is meant to inspire his followers for all time.
And I’ve been aware that year after year in the United States, no group has been targeted with more hate, and hate crime, than Jews. This is something that many Americans aren’t aware of. As I said, the American Left would have you believe that “Islamophobia” is a major concern. Vice President Kamala Harris is now heading a commission on “Islamophobia” in America, as though that’s the problem we’ve been seeing in recent weeks—just a massive outpouring of hatred for Muslims in America by non-Muslims. Has that ever happened?
Even in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Jews were targeted far more than Muslims. And that has been true every year since. According to FBI statistics, though Jews are just over 2 percent of the population, they receive over half the hate in America, and five times the level that Muslims do (and I think it’s safe to say that much of this hate comes from Muslims themselves). Jewish schools and synagogues have always incurred greater security costs than non-Jewish institutions, and for good reason, because the threat to them is greatest.
The most striking quality of the Muslim Brotherhood was their ability to transform me and my fellow teenagers from passive believers into activists, almost overnight. We didn’t just say things or pray for things: we did things. As girls, we donned the burka and swore off Western fashion and makeup. The boys cultivated their facial hair to the greatest extent possible. They wore the white, dress-like thawb worn in Arab countries, or had their trousers shortened above their ankle bones. We operated in groups and volunteered our services in charity to the poor, the old, the disabled, and the weak. We urged fellow Muslims to pray and demanded that non-Muslims convert to Islam.
During Islamic study sessions, we shared with the preacher in charge of the session our worries. For instance, what should we do about the friends we loved and felt loyal to but who refused to accept our dawa (invitation to the faith)? In response, we were reminded repeatedly about the clarity of the Prophet’s instructions. We were told in no uncertain terms that we could not be loyal to Allah and Muhammad while also maintaining friendships and loyalty toward the unbelievers. If they explicitly rejected our summons to Islam, we were to hate and curse them.
And so I have come to realize that Russell and my atheist friends failed to see the wood for the trees. The wood is the civilization built on the Judeo-Christian tradition; it is the story of the West, warts and all. Russell’s critique of those contradictions in Christian doctrine is serious, but it is also too narrow in scope.
There is still enough courage left in the U.S. that a Jewish woman publishes an essay written by a Muslim woman turned atheist turned Christian.
May God Bless the U.S.A.
It’s far from the only elite incubator with a blind spot around Jews. A member of the Harvard Law Review and others were captured on video—published over two weeks ago by the Free Beacon—accosting an Israeli Harvard Business School student. Harvard has yet to address the incident beyond a statement from Srikant Datar, the dean of the business school, lamenting both “Islamophobia” and antisemitism. It did, however, create a task force for the “doxxed students” who signed an open letter blaming Israel for Hamas’s atrocities.
What kind of message, exactly, are these schools sending to future leaders, who have for weeks now watched their classmates cheer terrorists and jeer Jews with no administrative pushback? Yale Law School’s budding attorneys aced the LSAT, sure, but they were also admitted because they can read rooms and climb greasy poles.
When, in so many other instances, every microaggression is policed, every alleged trauma met with concern, and every act of horror denounced with an official statement, what other lesson will they draw from the past month than that Jews matter less than other groups?
When Yale Law student Trent Colbert invited classmates to his “trap house,” a term some claimed had racist associations with crack houses, in 2021, it took exactly 12 hours for administrators to process nine discrimination complaints, haul Colbert in for a meeting, and suggest his career was on the line if he didn’t sign an apology they penned on his behalf. Gerken, the law school’s dean, also authorized a schoolwide message condemning Colbert’s language.
But when Jewish students appealed to Gerken almost two weeks after the Hamas attacks, describing the antisemitic vitriol in their inboxes, they got a rote reply from her deputy, Debra Kroszner, who directed them to student support services.
“Dean Gerken wanted to ensure that you are connected with any support you might need in [the Office of Student Affairs],” Kroszner wrote. “I understand these are deeply challenging times and we appreciate you reaching out to share your concerns.”
What you’re about to read is correspondence between British political operatives who discuss how to use fake news to destroy opponents, while hiding behind a disguise as an operation supposedly fighting fake news. Three tactics stand out:
1. Accusations of bigotry and homophobia, used to silence political opponents on the group’s left;
2. Use of guilt-by-accusation narratives to attack the reputations of both conservative and leftist politicians;
3. Close coordination with dependably incurious mainstream media organizations.[...]It's crucial to understand that the affairs detailed here weren’t obscure back-page events in England, but serious scandals Fleet Street made instantly recognizable to the average Briton, using headline catchphrases like “Brickgate.” An analogous tale here might be the furor over supposedly abusive tweets by Bernie Sanders supporters, the alleged preference Vladimir Putin had for Sanders, or the coordinated wipeout of Democrat Tulsi Gabbard.
Then there’s the Obama approach. At about the same time Ms. Tlaib was drawing condemnation even from Democrats, the “Pod Save America” podcast released a clip from an interview. In it Mr. Obama also made a case for moral equivalence. But he went about it in an underhanded manner that is more damaging to Democratic unity and support for Mr. Biden’s policy than anything Ms. Tlaib could do.
It’s all wrapped in his call for an admission of “complexity.” The 44th president did declare that what Hamas did on Oct. 7 was “horrific” and unjustified. But complexity means it’s also true the “occupation” was “unbearable” for Palestinians and that “nobody’s hands are clean.”
Get it? To look at the atrocities of Oct. 7 and conclude that Israel has the right to ensure that Hamas can never again pull off such an attack lacks nuance. Mr. Obama didn’t criticize Mr. Biden by name or say Hamas and Israel are morally equivalent. Then again, he didn’t have to. Everyone understood it for what it was: a jab at the Biden administration’s support for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as he takes on Hamas.
On Dec. 8, 2016, U.S. Central Command released a statement: “Coalition Strikes Mosul Hospital.” The Islamic State, it explained, “was using the hospital as a base of operations and command and control headquarters.” Accordingly, the U.S.-led coalition conducted precision strikes in support of Iraqi troops who fought for the hospital.
The story, and the scandal, wasn’t that the U.S. struck the terrorists where they hid, but that terrorists had used the hospital for cover in the first place. “In Mosul Battle, ISIS Used Hospital Base” was the Human Rights Watch headline; it explained that “armed forces or groups should not occupy medical facilities, undermining their protected status.”
Today in Gaza, Hamas terrorists use the same war-crime tactics. Only now observers rush to apologize for it. See the front page of the Human Rights Watch website: “Unlawful Israeli Hospital Strikes Worsen Health Crisis.” For 4,500 words, the group acts as Hamas’s defense attorney, contesting Israel’s claims and dismissing evidence.
I have always been a responsible pro-life advocate, but polls and elections like this week’s ballot initiative in Ohio show that most Americans want the balance found for the past 50 years in Roe v. Wade.
So last year I pushed for a bill that would have codified the 1973 ruling into law. At the time, Democrats controlled the White House and both chambers of Congress. We should have had the votes to pass the bill.
But the Senate Democratic leadership and the majority of the caucus refused to allow a vote on the floor because they wanted to expand abortion rights beyond Roe v. Wade. They put politics over the will of the people.
Later that year, the same thing happened on the other side of the aisle with a bill to reform energy permitting. America’s energy security is and will continue to be threatened without such a law, and passing one has long been a Republican priority. This time the Republican Senate leadership and the majority of their caucus killed the bill because they were angry that I had helped pass an energy-security bill they didn’t like. Again, they put politics over the will of the people.
Like the Democrats on abortion, Republicans refused to take yes for an answer. Both events demonstrated the kind of self-defeating political tribalism that has become all too common in Washington.
What I saw was a worldview that replaced basic ideas of good and evil with a new rubric: the powerless (good) and the powerful (bad). It replaced lots of things. Color blindness with race obsession. Ideas with identity. Debate with denunciation. Persuasion with public shaming. The rule of law with the fury of the mob.
People were to be given authority in this new order not in recognition of their gifts, hard work, accomplishments, or contributions to society, but in inverse proportion to the disadvantages their group had suffered, as defined by radical ideologues. According to them, as James Kirchick concisely put it: “Muslim > gay, black > female, and everybody > the Jews.”
There is a word in Hebrew for this ethic that doesn’t exist in English: gibush.
Gibush is both an act—bonding with an informal group or team—and an ideal that Israelis inhale from a young age: from youth scouts (which most young Israelis participate in), to classrooms (where creating a sense of cohesiveness in homeroom classes is no less important than educational objectives), to the pre-army gap year community service programs, and most intensely, in military service itself.
It is scary to realize that the same administration that “protects” your fellow students from every perceived slight and insult will side with them against you as they literally call for your annihilation.
Despite receiving historically high funding over the past several years, Amtrak's ridership remains below historic levels. Amtrak CEO Stephen Gardner told a House subcommittee back in June that as of April 2023, ridership was 84 percent of 2019 levels and ticket revenue was 95 percent of 2019 levels.
"I don't think it's in the public interest to support Amtrak. We generally expect the other modes that Amtrak competes against to operate self-sufficiently, and I think Amtrak should as well," says Scribner.
Legalizing drugs and regulating them similar to beer, wine, and alcohol won't end abuse or accidental deaths, but it will make those outcomes less likely. Evidence from Oregon, which decriminalized low-level drug possession in 2021, shows that reducing legal penalties had no impact on overdose deaths a year after implementation. In 2022, the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) told the Senate that marijuana legalization "has not been associated with an increase in adolescents' marijuana use." That's almost certainly because legal businesses have more reason than outside-the-law dealers to follow rules.
It's better to stop spending billions of dollars a year propping up a drug war that fails most basic cost-benefit analyses (such as this one coauthored by Nobel Prize–winning economist Gary Becker) and spend more time helping people with problems and creating new cultural norms that encourage responsible living, with or without the use of intoxicants. (Drinking, for instance, has declined globally over the past 20 years.)
Matt Taibbi: The Bezos case that targets Substack and Rumble is a classic example of that merry-go-round... There are other analogies there that are probably too rude to use on the air.
Glenn Greenwald: We’re an R-rated show!
Matt Taibbi: It’s a reach-around, basically.
It starts with the Washington Post article, which complains about how Alexa is citing Substack and Rumble, and some of the contributors are making points about what they call election disinformation or claiming that the 2020 election that Trump won it. And as a result of this article, Amy Klobuchar and the other congressman you mentioned, Joe Morelle from, I believe it’s the Rochester area in New York, they sent a letter to Jeff Bezos now at Amazon wearing his other hat, demanding that he take measures to prevent the even accidental citing of either our sites, Rumble or Substack.
What’s so critical about this is it’s the same pattern as you saw with the Consortium case. Consortium News has six articles that the Pentagon takes issue with, but it demerits all 20,000 in their library. Here, God knows how many articles in Substack they object to or Rumble they object to, but they want to ban the entire platform basically from being cited. And this comes from the Washington Post, which by the way, had to print a whole raft of corrections because of something I wrote on Substack. And they didn’t even credit me for that, by the way, which is another thing. But the whole thing is just one establishment organization saying to another, help me and then appealing to a third establishment organization, which is related. And I have no doubt that probably in the end this is what’s going to happen.
This whole thing really I think started to go bad in 2017 with Russiagate. There was a moment when the Senate Intelligence Committee was heavily pressuring Twitter to change its ads policy, and they were thinking about pushing back and the response to Twitter was, “Hey, if you give us a hard time about this, there’s going to be new legislation that we’re going to be sending your way.” Twitter thought they were bluffing. Next thing they know, they wake up and there’s a new Amy Klobuchar drafted bill called the Honest Ads Act, which would heavily police, basically Silicon Valley. So from that point forward, they started taking Congress very seriously on the content moderation front. They created new standards which basically said we’ll decide what is and isn’t disinformation on our own accord when it is normal content, but when the security state says so, we will remove it at their behest if it’s an advertisement.
CEFC was asked to commit $10 million in capital. When the money didn’t come, a frustrated Hunter sent a July 30, 2017, WhatsApp message to Raymond Zhao, a CEFC associate. It said he was sitting with his dad, demanded payment and warned: “I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction.”
About a week ago I was interviewed about Twitter and content moderation and asked what I would do about speech, if I were put in charge of the Internet.
I made the mistake of answering, saying something like “Well, I’d start with all legal speech…” I don’t remember what I said, but it wasn’t smart.
Later I realized the correct answer: I’m not in charge of anything, and thank God! I’m just a reporter. My job is to get information and pass it on. That’s hard enough. Decisions are for voters.
I believe journalism began to lose its way when we lost touch with what it is we actually do. This was once more a trade than a profession. Reporters reflexively looked at things from the perspective of the general public, because they were the general public. They identified with cabbies, nurses, teachers, plumbers, hardware store owners, because that tended to be where they came from. They once thought people who couldn’t afford K Street lobbyists, the people who had the least representation, needed the press the most.
Those audiences tend not to want special treatment, because they’re not used to getting it. They’ll settle for the truth. You get that for us, we’ll buy your paper. That simple deal made things easy, as I learned from a young age. I’m blessed to have my father Mike here tonight. He started working at a New Jersey newspaper as a teenager. He used to say, “The story’s the boss.” We were supposed to follow facts wherever they led, publish anything true, and not care who was offended by it.
I go back the next day. I look at the front page. A photo of Gaza and “violence escalates.” Israelis “dead” but Palestinians “killed.” If they can’t empathize with the Jews now, they never will.
I email the editors. I tell them that my newspaper’s coverage has been upsetting. They tell me that their thoughts are with my family but they stand by the paper’s reporting.
I hear colleagues complaining about the newspaper’s “American readers. They’re always accusing us of antisemitism.” They’re laughing.
While the smear of apartheid has long been leveled at Israel in an attempt to draw a moral equivalency to apartheid South Africa, this newer libel that Israel is engaged in genocide against Palestinians attempts to do the unthinkable—to link the Jewish state with Nazi Germany. This cynical calculus is as wrong as it is obscene.
The common definition of “genocide” is the deliberate targeting of an entire group of people in an effort to eliminate that group. The term was originally coined by the Polish-Jewish jurist Raphael Lemkin in his 1944 book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. Reflecting on the mass slaughter of 6 million Jews, Lemkin declares, “New conceptions require new terms.” The neologism is a combination of genos, Greek for “race,” and cide, Latin for “killing.”
In Lemkin’s understanding, genocide refers to “the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group” or “a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves.” The crime of genocide was codified by the United Nations in 1946 with the passage of General Assembly Resolution 96, defined as “a denial of the right of existence of entire human groups, as homicide is the denial of the right to live of individual human beings.”
Amid rising pressure on Egypt to admit Palestinian refugees, the country's prime minister, Mostafa Madbouly, said it remained committed to protecting its land and sovereignty regardless of the cost.
"We are prepared to sacrifice millions of lives to ensure that no one encroaches upon our territory,” Madbouly told a gathering in Sinai of military leaders, local tribal leaders, members of parliament and other politicians. The prime minister said Egypt would never allow any imposed situation or the settlement of regional issues at its expense. Senior officials in Egypt said however that the country would start taking in severely wounded Palestinians from Gaza on Wednesday to receive treatment at field hospitals in north Sinai.
Hamas is not part of a progressive coalition, as Judith Butler once said. It’s the Palestinian version of the Ku Klux Klan or the Nazis. Hamas are not humanists. They are fascists. So why is it that so many of our allegedly most learned citizens found themselves rationalizing, defending, and in some cases even celebrating the barbarism of October 7?
The answer is found in a mangled paraphrase from Professor Rickford’s speech about Palestinians being unable to breathe. One hears this formulation from the pro-Hamas left all the time. The CUNY Jewish Law Students Association, in an October 10 open letter proclaiming solidarity with Palestinian self-determination, stated: “We revolt simply because, for many reasons, we can no longer breathe.”
That line is a paraphrase of Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, published in 1952.[...]
Women in the region we now call “China” have endured lower-caste treatment in all eras. During the Ming and Qing dynasties, a man could beat, abuse, and kill his adulterous wife with impunity. Any woman who attempted to escape an abusive husband would be lashed a hundred times with bamboo strips and then sold, while similar punishments were mandated for those who had failed to sufficiently resist while being raped. Widows were required to remain chaste for the rest of their lives. The penalty for violating this law was death.
With the collapse of the last dynasty (in 1912) came the first true flowering of intellectual freedom in China’s long history, and the briefest moment of hope. A variety of social movements began highlighting women’s oppression, and the thousand-year practice of foot-binding finally came to an end. No longer would young girls suffer the breaking of their arches and the slow necrotising of their flesh in pursuit of a lifelong disability considered “beautiful.”
Even post-Mao, China’s misogynistic culture would lose none of its savagery. In his memoir Red Dust, political exile Ma Jian recalls joining the crowds on a dusty Beijing road to watch a condemned woman being dragged to the execution ground by a wire hooked between her vagina and anus. (The male prisoners were hooked at the shoulder blades.) This scene, so redolent of the long-dead ancient world, of the Assyrians or Persians or Romans, occurred in the 1980s—within living memory for most of us.
Local agents had to “go pens down sometimes for 2 or 3 weeks at a time before they could re-engage,” he says. He’d “never in [his DOJ] career” seen anything like it, and on a “fairly regular” basis had to go to the deputy AG’s office for help.
Mr. Brady says his office was informed by “members of the Pittsburgh FBI team” that they had been instructed by headquarters not to “affirmatively share information” with the Brady team. He says he was “surprised” to learn from public reporting in October 2020 that the FBI had possessed Hunter’s laptop since 2019, since his team had asked the FBI for anything it had on Hunter and Burisma, and the laptop would have been “helpful.” No kidding.
Last year, Scott ran for mayor, in part because of his own direct experience with crime.
At around 10 p.m. on October 30, 2021, Scott got a call warning him that two men were in his garden trying to steal the water heater. When he went down to check it out, he found two guys had set up a tent and laid drugs out on his picnic table.
When Scott told them to put down the water heater, one of the guys pulled a knife. Scott showed the men his Heckler & Koch USP45 Compact pistol and again told them to put down the water heater. One of the guys took off.
At that moment, two Alameda County police officers passed by in their cruiser and the remaining intruder flagged them down. He told the officers Scott had pulled a gun on him and his friend. The officers saw the handle of Scott’s pistol sticking out of his vest pocket and, according to the police report, they took the gun and arrested Scott on charges of brandishing a weapon and carrying a concealed firearm.
“I had a firearm ’cause I came down knowing I was going to encounter two thieves, and I showed it to them,” Scott said. “It’s unfortunate that we’re forced to self-help right now. Just that same night, an hour earlier, my neighbor was shot in his face while holding his baby. That was on the same street, like eight houses down. There’s no rule of law.”
Two of the three gun charges, all misdemeanors, were dropped this April. The third was later dropped, too, though Scott is still mad he never got his gun back. Gun or no gun, the incident did push him into local politics.
Maybe for Mr. Sharlett's next book he could make a similar pilgrimage to elite academia, various progressive NGOs, and AOC and Bernie fan clubs. There he will find a similar set of incoherent, incompatible, and contradictory beliefs, blind rage at something or other, and mindless groupthink.
In my book the biggest difference between Antifa and the GOP Freedom Caucus is that Anitfa wears black hoodies and the Freedom Caucus wears suits. Other than that they are both essentially anarchists, empowered by the types Mr Sharlett is interviewing on the right, and should be interviewing on the left.
PB: Hamas has fully embraced these ideas. You can see that in their founding charter from 1988. The charter, or “covenant,” begins with a quotation from the Quran, followed by a quotation from Banna about the obliteration of Israel. The cultural and psychological analysis that follows seems to come from Qutb, or from thinkers with similar views. And the charter goes on to invoke this strictly European document, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
Once as the Trump administration is over, no one has anything to fear or hate. No threat could ever be as exciting as the racist rapist in the White House. No Malibu hausfrau will ever again feel like she is in the French Resistance. After Prohibition, breweries could still sell nonalcoholic beer. This is journalism after Trump.
Why was I pro-Biden? Because I longed to see my enemies cast out into the cold, uncaring wind of poverty and despair. Why were you pro-Trump? Because you loved seeing your enemies grow huge and fat and hard? I like to win. I hate to get owned. How about you, my based friend?
By March or April, America's ruling class will feel like Hunter Biden on a Tuesday morning. Hunter reflects. He knows he left his pipe somewhere. He's not sure where. What he knows is that this world, which as recently as mimosa brunch on Sunday was still burning with the rainbow fire of a hundred suns exploding in H-bomb supernova pornstar orgasms while galaxies collide, is an ugly, boring place. A sterile promontory. A foul and pestilent congregation of vapors… also, something sticky is stuck to his ass. He'll get to it in a minute... oh, man...
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/machiavelli/works/discourses/ch01.htm#s09As I have often said, America has only one problem: kinglessness. The problem with America is all the Americans who think they understand political science better than Machiavelli. Whenever you see any problem with American governance—from a free-range lunatic to a gain-of-function experiment, from a land war in Asia to a preteen sex-change clinic—the ultimate cause is always the same: the incomplete memetic propagation of Chapter IX of the Discourses on The First Ten Books of Titus Livius.
To found a new republic, or to reform entirely the old institutions of an existing one, must be the work of one man only.
And the great advantage of the 21st-century voter is that he is not square. He is not a Norman Rockwell voter, attached to Puritan civic virtues at the navel of his soul. Nor is he the spergy social-science voter of mid-century Harvard America, convinced by the best statistical arguments in the marketplace of ideas.
The 21st-century voter, regardless of age, is a child. He is frivolous, vain, whimsical and ironic.
https://www.thefp.com/p/qatars-war-for-young-american-mindsI haven’t talked to Sarah in twelve years. I don’t know how she went from the girl I performed with at Kresge Hall, ranting about feminism and consent—typical college-aged defiance and edge—to standing on a street corner, tearing apart pictures of kidnapped Israelis and flinging them to the ground like a dirty tissue. In her online bio it says that she has a master’s in social work from University of Chicago and that she is working to better her community through “internal, interpersonal, and systems change.” It also says that she is “dedicated to supporting queer and trans youth as they learn to love themselves, radically and unapologetically, and gain a healthier understanding of their resilience and power.” (Sarah perhaps doesn’t know that queerness can get you arrested, and far worse, in Gaza.) On a “30 Under 30” award she won a few years ago, she describes herself as a prison abolitionist, a therapist, a social worker, a sexual assault crisis counselor, a teaching artist, a resource advocate, and a performer in participatory educational theater.
It is painfully ironic that the one thing you don’t need an advanced degree or elitist jargon for—you know, standing against the kidnapping of innocent children—is the one thing this “queer, gender-fluid femme of color,” as she labels herself, is utterly unable to grasp. It may well be that those advanced degrees are precisely what has emboldened her to commit such acts in the name of progress or power or resilience or resistance.
https://www.thefp.com/p/on-double-standards-and-deafening-new-york-timesDuring the George W. Bush and Obama administrations, it was deemed prudent policy to make talk about “radical Islam” taboo. Why? “[Such talk] helps to create this clash of civilizations,” explained Hillary Clinton in 2015, “that is actually a recruiting tool for ISIS and other radical jihadists who use this as a way of saying, ‘We are in a war against the West―you must join us.’” The NYT and the rest of the liberal intelligentsia were happy to agree with this reasoning, as it appeared to serve their preoccupation with restraining public Islamophobia. But it was always predicated on dubious logic. After all, shouldn’t moderates be among those most eager to emphasize the distinction between violent radicals and peaceful believers? Shouldn’t they object to the religious deviants corrupting their faith as much as we do?
If the logic of Kerry, Clinton et al. had any utility, then, it was as one of Plato’s noble lies intended to calm matters down. But it had the opposite effect. Not only did it make Western government officials sound like fools, but it left them unable to distinguish between genuinely moderate Muslims and radicals only pretending to be moderate. And the problem is that Hamas is considered a legitimate and even authoritative Islamic movement by many mainstream Muslims, even those working as journalists for Western outlets.
Some leftists are framing Hamas’s killing of 1,400 Israelis and abduction of 222 more as “decolonization,” believing they’re championing the cause of oppressed Palestinians. In reality, these leftists are condescending to them.
Mass murder, these leftists suggest, is the understandable consequence of Jewish “colonization.” Such a perspective is deeply insulting to Palestinian humanity. It implies that Palestinians are so controlled by circumstance that they lack agency. It implies that Palestinians cannot be expected to behave according to the same ethical standards of those who refrain from mass murder.
https://www.thefp.com/p/the-day-the-delusions-died-konstantin-kisin[Chamath Palihapitiya] continued:
> So much of the work that happened in that administration turns out to have been right. And that’s what is so frustrating for me. The work on the border wall? We didn’t like the messenger, so we killed the message. Turned out it was right. Issuing long-term debt to refinance when rates were at zero? We didn’t like the messenger, so we killed the message. A structural peace in the Middle East? We didn’t like the messenger, so we killed the message. When are we gonna stop shooting ourselves in the foot? And when are we going to actually see and take the time to look past who is saying things and actually listen to them word for word?
If it’s clear that the last two weeks have been a wake-up call, the next question is: Why?
Part of the answer is the sheer depravity of Hamas’s terrorism. That depravity has made the justification and celebration of their acts by those who police pronouns that much starker. The contradictions and moral bankruptcy of a worldview that spends years worrying about microaggressions and tone policing, but can’t decide what side it is on after the beheading of babies, aren’t exactly difficult to spot.
The defense establishment—IDF, Shin Bet, Mossad—during those months repeatedly warned the government that the social divisiveness Netanyahu was sowing was detrimental to Israeli security (even veteran Israel Air Force pilots, bent on preserving the country's democratic norms, were refusing to volunteer or serve) and that the surrounding Islamist coalition, led by Iran, was preparing to strike. But Netanyahu refused to listen. Indeed, he persisted in a policy that effectively bolstered the Hamas in Gaza by allowing Qatar to send them suitcases full of dollars, while continuously degrading and denigrating the Palestinian Authority under President Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank, partly in order to bolster Israel's creeping annexation of that territory. (During the weeks preceding the Hamas attack the IDF transferred most of its troops guarding the Israel–Gaza border to the West Bank and transferred arms dispersed among the local defense squads in the settlements around Gaza to Israeli settlers in the West Bank.)
https://quillette.com/2023/10/21/mind-the-gap/The Constitutional Tribunal, which has the power to review the country’s laws and interpret whether they are in alignment with the constitution, was the first institution to be targeted. The Tribunal—which had yet to be packed by loyalists—declared the legislative changes unconstitutional, but the government ignored the ruling. PiS also lowered the retirement age of judges and fired a significant portion of the judiciary, including a third of all Supreme Court justices. They also gave the justice minister sweeping powers to appoint and discipline lower court judges.
Much of the responsibility for that gap-narrowing will fall to PiS. Its campaign described the opposition parties as something like traitors to the state, which would make their supporters complicit in national treachery. It has been PiS that has cowed nearly all the media channels into subservience; it has been PiS that has made abortion illegal in all but the most extreme circumstances (a damaged or dead foetus); it has been PiS that encouraged dislike of gays and others by declaring “LGBT-free zones”; it has been PiS that manipulated the constitutional and other courts to suit its political agenda, prompting the EU to withhold €24 billion in grants and €12 billion in loans from the pandemic recovery programme.
https://reason.com/2023/10/23/government-run-grocery-store-is-predictably-losing-money/Janssen said the goal is to narrow losses to under $100,000 this year—out of the city’s total budget of $6 million—and keep improving from there.
In aid of World Mental Health Day, here are some crucial facts about gender dysphoria, a globally-recognised mental health condition, and the unethical medicalisation of children who suffer from it:
There is no other mental health condition in which you can tell a doctor you have something wrong with you, with no objective test, and receive irreversible medication or surgery on your say-so.This goes squarely against the Hippocratic Oath.
Gender dysphoria is the only mental health condition in which treatment affirms the highly distressing thoughts inside someone’s head or encourages them to physically change their body.The treatment for anorexia or body dysmorphia is not liposuction.
Studies show that the vast majority of children who feel uncomfortable in their bodies will naturally settle into their biological sex, if given time.The treatment with the best success rate for children with gender dysphoria is the natural process of puberty itself.
There are significant co-morbidities often present alongside gender dysphoria, including autism.There is often the presence of previous detrimental life experiences, such as historic trauma and abuse, bullying and internalised homophobia.
Puberty blockers are not reversible. They disrupt brain development and bone growth.They cause untold social effects.They are a slippery slope towards hormones and surgery.They make it less likely a child will settle into their body.
At best, cross-sex hormones can cause permanent imprints, including vocal changes and changes to hair growth.At worst, they can cause infertility and types of cancer. Should we play Russian roulette with the health and fertility of our children?
Research has shown that the dosage of testosterone given to young girls who want to transition is often so high that it causes them a significantly higher likelihood of having a heart attack (more so than even a biological male).
Studies show transitioning does not reduce the rate of suicide attempts amongst those with gender dysphoria.Are we affirming children to irreversibly change themselves in search of something that doesn’t exist?
Studies on children demonstrate that if they begin to ‘live’ as the other sex, it can cause changes to their brain, making it far less likely they will become comfortable with their biological sex.‘Mere’ social transitioning may be irreversible.
In the United Kingdom, there are children who cannot purchase Christmas crackers, open a bank account, buy a scratch card or vote in an election.Yet, they can consent to irreversible, and experimental puberty blockers and hormones.
The majority of children experiencing gender dysphoria are same-sex attracted.We are essentially telling gay children that they are straight but ‘trapped in the wrong body’.Is this not a form of ‘conversion therapy’?
The biggest contradiction of gender ideology is the holding out that the real self is fundamentally separate from our material bodies but then insisting that transforming the body is crucial in order to feel complete.
Sex is binary and immutable.Gender dysphoria is a mental health condition and should be treated through explorative therapy.We should not be encouraging our children down a one-way path towards potential lifelong regret.
He then said that he told the president of the MSA's UCSB chapter at the time: "I'm a Jew. The head of Hezbollah has said that he hopes we will all gather in Israel so that he doesn't have to hunt us down globally."
Raising his voice, Horowitz then asked the student before him: "For it or against it?"
"For it," the student responded after pausing and leaning toward the microphone, prompting an audible reaction from attendees.[...]Per a letter sent to UCSD campus newspaper The Guardian shortly after the event, the student in question clarified her position on Hamas: "My opinion of Hamas is not as simple as condemn or condone, for it or against it.
"I firmly believe that the killing of civilians, even as collateral damage regardless of creed, politics, sexuality, nationality or ethnicity is one of the highest crimes in the eyes of God and is morally reprehensible and abhorrent."
The largest lock, built in the 1960s and called the Poe Lock, is a vital link in the U.S. industrial supply chain but has been shut down for repairs 20 times in the last 10 years. Nine of the outages occurred in the last four years.[...]The Biden administration is pouring nearly $700 million from the $1 trillion infrastructure law into building a new lock, almost doubling the money dedicated to the project at $1.6 billion.
But that is still roughly half of the money that will be needed to finish the project, which is expected to be completed by 2030, meaning that a fractured Congress will need to allocate more spending when the benefits of government spending and the nation’s rising deficit are politically contentious.
If history is anything to go by, the future funding will require an aggressive push by lawmakers and advocates every year. Congress authorized work on the Soo Locks in 1986 but funding mostly lagged behind until 2015.
The precise reasons for these foreign-policy disasters are many and varied. A common thread is Europe’s failure to admit that other parts of the world weren’t as ideologically exhausted as it was. The Continent’s reliance on economic leverage leaves it ill-equipped to deal with counterparts for whom prosperity is secondary to some other goal—the reconstitution of a Russian empire, the preservation of the Chinese Communist Party, the destruction of the Jews.
https://www.racket.news/p/have-they-gone-madBy any marker, this is an enormous news story. If we go by the usual measuring stick of American scandal, the Watergate story, this potentially meets or exceeds that, on almost every level. Does it reach into the current White House? Check. Was it a craven attempt to subvert the electoral process? Check again. Did a presidential candidate engineer a massive public deception? Yes, resoundingly. Did it involve intelligence agencies? Yes, and these weren’t amateurs like Nixon’s plumbers. These were 50 of the most powerful people in the intelligence world — including five former heads or acting heads of the Agency in Morell, John Brennan, Leon Panetta, Michael Hayden, and John McLaughlin — conspiring to meddle in domestic politics on a grand scale.
someone should point out that a month ago, on September 8th, Joe Biden renewed the original State of Emergency issued three days after 9/11 by George W. Bush. We spent the last 22 years giving presidents the ability to surveil, isolate, and detain even American citizens. Fortunately we’ll never regret those decisions!
During my three decades spent working as an Australian journalist, I’d never previously had to defend a complaint before the Press Council. My reporting on gender issues exposed me to other “firsts” as well. For the first time in my career, I was told that asking questions about the harms associated with a particular kind of medical procedure was off limits. For the first time in my career, a medical institution flat-out refused to subject itself to accountability regarding its practices. For the first time in my career, I was besieged by activists—some moonlighting as journalists—who insisted that subjecting the truth of their slogans to scrutiny might drive fragile youth to suicide.
I received smears and death threats, as well, of the type journalists more typically face when writing about cults, criminal syndicates, or terrorist groups. One might think all of this would be of concern to a group such as the Australian Press Council, whose self-professed goal is “promoting high standards of media practice, community access to information of public interest, and freedom of expression through the media.” Instead, the Council’s guidelines encoded many of the same demands issued by those who wanted me to stop doing my job.
In her 2017 academic paper, Khan argued that Amazon sweet-talked customers by using predatory pricing, or slashed prices so low that it lost money but rivals couldn’t compete. Her paper acknowledged that predatory pricing was almost obsolete as a legal theory, the Supreme Court having set the bar so high that enforcers stopped trying to prove it.
Now the FTC accuses Amazon of hurting consumers with higher prices, mainly through punishing its marketplace sellers if they offer lower discounts anywhere else. It also says Amazon reaps the fruits of monopoly by requiring sellers to use its fulfillment service.
“It’s really hard to square the circle of the earlier theory of harm that Lina Khan enunciated with the current complaint,” said John Mayo, an economist who leads Georgetown University’s Center for Business and Public Policy. “The earlier complaint was that prices were going to be too low and therefore anticompetitive. And now the theory is they are too high and they are anticompetitive.”
While Khan wrote six years ago that Amazon built its monopoly using aggressive discounting, the company later switched to raising prices after it had market power, Stoller said. The most common theory of harm in antitrust involves alleging harm to consumers, typically through higher prices or reduced output or quality.
Two weeks later, Anderson emailed to tell me that there was “blowback” on my talk and that “[s]ome internally are arguing we shouldn’t post it.” In the email, he told me that the “most challenging” blowback had come from a “well-known” social scientist (who I later learned was Adam Grant). He quoted from Grant’s message directly:
Really glad to see TED offering viewpoint diversity—we need more conservative voices—but as a social scientist, was dismayed to see Coleman Hughes deliver an inaccurate message.
{> His case for color blindness is directly contradicted by an extensive body of rigorous research; for the state of the science, see Leslie, Bono, Kim & Beaver (2020, Journal of Applied Psychology). In a meta-analysis of 296 studies, they found that whereas color-conscious models reduce prejudice and discrimination, color-blind approaches often fail to help and sometimes backfire.}
I read the paper that Grant referenced, titled “On Melting Pots and Salad Bowls: A Meta-Analysis of the Effects of Identity-Blind and Identity-Conscious Diversity Ideologies,” expecting to find arguments against color blindness. I was shocked to find that the paper largely supported my talk. In the results section, the authors write that “colorblindness is negatively related to stereotyping” and “is also negatively related to prejudice.” They also found that “meritocracy is negatively related to discrimination.”
I wrote back to Anderson:
{> Far from a refutation of my talk, this meta-analysis is closer to an endorsement of it. > -> The only anti–color blindness finding in the paper is that color blindness & meritocracy are associated with opposing DEI policies. Well, I do oppose race-based DEI policies in most (but not all) cases. Unapologetically. But that is a philosophical disagreement, not an example of me delivering incorrect social science. }
I feel it would be unjustified not to release my talk simply because many people disagree with my philosophical perspective. By that standard, most TED talks would never get released.
While individuals can have vestigial remnants of an opposite-sex reproductive system caused by genetic mutations—such as a male developing with a partial uterus, or a female with a mix of internal ovarian and testicular tissue—both male and female reproductive roles cannot fully develop and function in the same individual. As the principles of evolutionary and developmental biology would predict, there has been no documented case of a human having both fully developed reproductive systems in the same individual.
Proponents of the sex spectrum claim that isogamous organisms can have tens of thousands of sexes. But this conflates mating types with sexes. Mating types are molecular mechanisms that regulate compatibility between gametes. Isogamous organisms such as fungi can have thousands of pairs of these complementary gamete genotypes (i.e., thousands of unique pairs of locks and keys), and therefore, they can have thousands of mating types—but not sexes.
Thus, citing fungi that do not reproduce through anisogamy as evidence against male and female is an obvious red herring. The only response required to such an argument is this: humans are not fungi.
Dick Dyke’s Bushmaster now became the envy of all gunmakers. As a young man Dyke wanted to be a dancer, but his parents refused to pay for art school, so he studied business instead and embarked on a career of turning around failing companies. In 1976 Dyke purchased the bankrupt Bushmaster for $241,000. By the 1990s, he had turned it into a viable enterprise by selling a semiautomatic version of Stoner’s gun and its parts at a time when few other gunmakers made the weapon. Dyke could get machine shops to churn out parts at a low cost. All his employees had to do was assemble the guns and ship them out.
The trio became friends and, in 2011, published their first joint paper, “False-Positive Psychology.” It included a satirical experiment that used accepted research methods to demonstrate that people who listened to the Beatles song “When I’m Sixty-Four” grew younger. They wanted to show how research standards could accommodate absurd findings. “They’re kind of legendary for that,” said Yoel Inbar, a psychologist at the University of Toronto Scarborough. The study became the most cited paper in the journal Psychological Science.
To me, the barometer of whether any subset of left-wing culture would qualify again as /{open} would be its ability to admit the following three facts:{* Starting about 10 years ago, the left pushed hard on the idea that social progress was being held back by liberal values, including due process, objectivity in journalism, free speech, merit-based advancement, and that an argument must stand to reason in order to be valid.
* This led predictably to a lot of abuses. Innocent people suffered unnecessarily. People who held to old-school liberal values were vilified and fired and ostracized. Violent protest was valorized, businesses were destroyed and people killed. Good books were bowlderized and valuable cultural artifacts taught less often in schools, while ideology was taught more.
* This was arguably a bad thing.}This should be table stakes, politically.
Of course, in saying all this, I start to run into my own inability to tell the difference between protesting a culture and protesting my own alienation from it. It’s possible that everybody else is already on this page, that this is all in my head, and I just need to leave the house more. That’s certainly what the first editor to whom I showed the Star Trek piece seemed to think—specifically that I’d been traumatized by my bad experiences and that I was just being paranoid. Exactly how I got traumatized if none of the bad experiences ever happened, he failed to explain. But he also thinks queerness is not a biological reality but “a way of life,” and that scientific truths have to be conditioned by “inner truths,” ideas he has definitely held his entire life and which are definitely not Stockholm syndrome from ten years in the New York area literary scene.
It's a short leap from "tell your own story" to "make your own rules." In fact, the closer you look, the more "make your own rules" seems like the theme of the series. In the season two opener, they steal the ship to rescue a crewmate who’s been doing unsanctioned freelance espionage behind enemy lines—all with zero consequences. The Admiral treats it like a harmless lark and lets them off with a warning. In “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow,” an immortal alien’s hoard of stolen antiquities is presented as an adorable quirk.
In the series premiere, "First Contact," making your own rules is the core theme. It even contains the line "Screw General Order One"—their term for the Prime Directive: Starfleet's principle of non-interference and its most sacred law. "What good is a rule if you're not going to break it?" asks the captain, before using the Enterprise to threaten a less developed species into putting aside their differences. What differences? We never learn, because the writers never bother to explore them. They could have truly unresolvable conflicts. One faction could be uncompromising space Nazis. Or they could merely be so unintelligible as to render allegory impossible.
But the allegory is the point, so details must be avoided. Every plot hole and forced revelation must be in service of inspiring the captain to give a speech likening their problems to ours—a speech that seems less designed to convince the aliens than to lecture the viewers. The United States is treated as a distant, regrettable memory, whose civil war over “competing ideas of liberty” dragged the world into chaos. There's even an "AUDIT THE VOTE" sign in the historic montage, in case it's not clear that the problem is the intransigence of the American right.
If truth is the first casualty of war, then perhaps good fiction is the first tragedy of culture war.
While most radioactive isotopes have been successfully removed, there is no known process for filtering tritium from water. So the tritium remains. Japanese authorities are confident these tritium levels remain far below safety limits; the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) agrees. Indeed, there is little difference with the discharges from ordinary nuclear power plants. About 8.4kg of tritium already circulates in the Pacific, while Fukushima’s wastewater contains just 3g—a veritable drop in the ocean. And in the days following the first release, tests of seawater in the region did not detect tritium at all. According to an IAEA report (with a notable Chinese contributor), the release is sure to have “a negligible radiological impact on people and the environment.”
But the opportunity was too good to pass up. Knowing most citizens would never read the IAEA report, China’s leaders set about conjuring that old jingoistic demon. “By dumping the water into the ocean,” raged a Foreign Ministry statement, “Japan is spreading the risks to the rest of the world and passing an open wound onto the future generations of humanity. By doing so, Japan has turned itself into a saboteur of the ecological system and polluter of the global marine environment.”
This week, Canadian parents who oppose school curricula that push born-in-the-wrong-body propaganda staged a nation-wide series of protests under the banner of “#1MillionMarch4Children.” The surprisingly large multicultural turnout, much like the survey results cited above, clearly indicate that this is a mainstream movement. But that hasn’t stopped the Canadian political, activist, academic, and corporate establishments—all of which adopted gender cultism as an official in-house faith in the late 2010s—from denouncing the protesters as peddlers of “hate.”
Meanwhile, Toronto’s Globe & Mail newspaper tried to pretend the national event was an “anti-LGBTQ protest,” even though some of the most enthusiastic participants were lesbians and transgender. For its part, the rival Toronto Star offered readers an op-ed titled, It’s a privilege, not a right, to know your kid’s gender identity, which argued that if teachers help transition a child without telling the family about it, well, that just means mom and dad must be garbage parents.[...]Canada’s leading mental-health hospital suggested to employees that a failure to oppose the protests could make them complicit in trans suicides. Bell, a large telecommunications company, held “healing sessions” so that employees could palliate the (apparently devastating) psychic effects of the protests. A power utility in Atlantic Canada denounced the protests with the hashtag #NoSpaceForHate. Vancouver Coastal Health, one of Canada’s largest health providers, sent out a mass mailing asking employees to shed a tear for board-of-directors members “who are part of the 2SLGBTQIA+ community.” Not to be outdone, the Undergraduate Program Office of the Education Faculty at York University in Ontario not only denounced the “hateful” march, but ominously predicted that its horrifying emotional effects could make students “feel unsafe trying to complete program requirements.” (The director also promised to do more to fight something called “cis-hetero hegemony.”)
Meanwhile, the more that Brand’s supporters tap their noses and say meaningfully “but why now?,” and the more that the likes of Carlson and Musk hijack the situation to insinuate that they, too, are on the side of weak against the powerful, the more that onlooking liberals will dismiss anyone with doubts about mainstream media narratives as manipulated and gullible.
Stuck at the side of the dancefloor, meanwhile, the women who told their story sit like wallflowers.
Justice McGeehan, who was backed by the Bronx Democratic political machine, had previously tried to have a portrait of Martin Luther removed from a courthouse mural illustrating legal history. Upon hearing the accusations against Russell, the judge declared, “If I find that these books sustain the allegations of the petition, I will give the Appellate Division and the Court of Appeals something to think about.” Shortly thereafter—without having heard the testimony of any witnesses for the defense or having reviewed any evidence other than excerpts from Russell’s books, McGeehan gave his opinion that the philosopher’s work ran contrary to “the laws of nature and nature’s God.”
The gist of Thomas Sowell’s new work is that the flawed assumptions of social-justice activists are endangering Western societies. The entire social-justice narrative rests on misunderstandings of issues like individual and group disparities, underrepresentation, discrimination, sex and race, the welfare state, affirmative action, taxation, the minimum wage, and the legacy of slavery. It is not the existence of these mistaken beliefs that bothers Sowell but the dangerous extent to which they “prevail without being subjected to tests of either facts or logic, and the extent to which people who present empirical evidence counter to prevailing beliefs, are met with ad hominem denunciations and with efforts to suppress their evidence.”
One by one, Sowell dispels social-justice myths using evidence and facts derived from humanity’s past experience. “The study of history” he argues, quoting historian Paul Johnson, “is a powerful antidote to contemporary arrogance. It is humbling to discover how many of our glib assumptions, which seem to us novel and plausible, have been tested before, not once but many times and in innumerable guises; and discovered to be, at great human cost, wholly false.”
A leading social-justice fallacy assumes that human disparities are invariably caused by the exploitation and oppression of subordinate minorities by dominant majorities. But as Sowell demonstrates, many minorities have “economically outperformed dominant majorities in many countries around the world and in many periods of history—the Ottoman Empire, is one example, where none of the 40 private bankers listed in Istanbul in 1912, was a Turk, even though Turks ruled the empire. Nor was any of the 34 stockbrokers in Istanbul a Turk.” Other racial or ethnic minorities who have owned or operated more than half of whole industries include the Chinese in Malaysia, Germans in Brazil, Ibos in Nigeria, Marwaris in India, and Jews in pre-Holocaust Poland.
One of the most persistent social-justice fallacies concerns the legacy of slavery, and the reflexive tendency to hold it responsible for any misfortune that befalls any black person. Sowell objects to this causal reasoning, and argues that welfare policies introduced in the 1960s must shoulder much of the blame for social problems faced by American blacks, particularly the collapse of the family. Although activists seldom acknowledge it, black Americans made striking progress in the decades before the 1960s until “demonstrable harm” was inflicted upon them by the introduction of social-justice policies.
Welfare policies, Sowell argues, led to the father absenteeism that devastated the black family. What followed was a sharp reversal of the decline in homicides, and a steep rise in the proportion of black children born to unmarried women. “For more than a hundred years after the end of slavery,” he reminds us, “most black children were born to women who were married, and the children were raised in two-parent homes.” In 1963, 23.6 percent of black children were born to single mothers. By the end of the 20th century, that figure stood at 68.7 percent.
The reason that social-justice activists get so much wrong, Sowell contends, is that they refuse to acknowledge the pivotal importance of factors that help to determine life outcomes for different groups, including work ethic, cultural background, history, and geography. They likewise ignore important sex differences:
> Women are full-time, year-round workers significantly less often than men, the work patterns of women include more part-time work, and some whole years when many women are out of the labor force entirely, often due to staying home to take care of young children—when these and other differences in work patterns are taken into account, male-female differences in income shrink drastically, and in some cases reverse.
Another important factor that tends to be disregarded is median age. “Different groups, with different median ages varying by a decade or two, are unlikely to be equal in endeavors requiring either the physical vitality of youth or the experience that comes with age.” As soon as one reads this argument, its importance becomes self-evident. We learn that the populations in Germany, Italy, and Japan have a median age over 40, while Nigeria, Afghanistan, and Angola have median ages under 20. “It is wrong,” Sowell observes matter-of-factly, “to expect a nation where half the population are infants, young children and teenagers, to have the same human capital (work experience and education), as a nation where half the population is 40 years old or older.”
Sowell offers a stark warning to successful intellectuals, who assume their accomplishments “confer validity to their notions about a broad swath of issues, ranging far beyond the scope of their accomplishments—but stepping outside the scope of one’s expertise can be like stepping off a cliff.” Beware the highly educated and overconfident intellectual out of his element. “A high IQ and low information,” Sowell cautions, “can be a very dangerous combination, stupid people can create problems, but it often takes brilliant people to create a real catastrophe. They have already done that enough times.”
Thomas Sowell has spent six decades as an economist and social theorist. His remarkable intellect and knowledge have made him dangerous to debate. “Television and print media wised up,” said the late Walter Williams. “You can’t win an argument with Thomas Sowell, so they just ignore what he’s written.” Brutally honest and astonishingly bright, Sowell is a man with history on his side because he has taken the trouble to study and understand it. Decades ago, he argued that electing black officials to public office would not be the answer to bridging disparities, that social activism would be the ruin of education, that the welfare state was subsidising people into dependence and more. And as all of this has come to pass, he has continued to study the consequences of the developments he foresaw.
Fain this past week sounded annoyed when asked about Tesla’s cost advantage.
“Competition is code word for race to the bottom, and I’m not concerned about Elon Musk building more rocket ships so he can fly in outer space and stuff,” Fain told CNBC on-air Wednesday. “Our concern is working-class people need their share of economic justice in this world.”
Form Energy landed on iron, which is plentiful, cheap and nonflammable. That allows the company to build hefty battery modules the size of a washer-dryer set. Packed together in enclosures resembling shipping containers, the batteries can discharge power for about four straight days—far longer than the standard four-hour discharge capability of lithium-ion batteries.[...]A one-megawatt system can take up about half an acre of land, according to Form. The company says its batteries can store energy at less than one-tenth the cost of lithium-ion battery technology.
Mr. Biden used the world’s attention at a NATO summit in March 2022 amid the Ukraine war to let his followers know he would consider himself “very fortunate” to have Mr. Trump as his opponent. A staged leak to the New York Times in April signaled to Democratic officeholders his displeasure with his own Justice Department’s failure to charge Mr. Trump. Thereupon the department eventually named a special counsel who, under special counsel logic, creates an illusion of distance between the department and any move to charge the president’s political adversary.
"No one is coming for your gas stove anytime soon," reassured a headline in The New York Times back in January, after the fracas that ensued in response to Trumka's comments. "Switching from gas to electric stoves is seen as good for the environment—which has inspired a conservative backlash," reads the subhead, which somehow pins the blame on conservatives.
The CPSC quickly came to Trumka's defense, citing how the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and World Health Organization had deemed the levels of nitrogen dioxide and carbon monoxide released by gas stoves unsafe. As evidence, it offered a new study that attributed 13 percent of childhood asthma cases to gas stoves.
Just one problem: The study was terribly flawed.
It was not full of new findings or bolstered by new and better methodology, but rather a review of existing literature on the topic. It used excess asthma risk calculations from those studies and an estimate of the number of homes in the U.S. with gas stoves in them to calculate how many childhood asthma cases are caused by gas stoves (12.7 percent, they claim). It was funded by the environmentalist group Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI), which seeks to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent by 2030. Study co-author Brady Seals is part of RMI's carbon-free buildings initiative—a conflict of interest that makes clear where RMI stands on the matter of eliminating gas stoves from people's homes.
In one instance Sams was able to quote himself in a tweet less than 24 hours after the Washington Post obligingly used, in a headline, language from his letter about GOP efforts to “muddy waters.” Once this kind of thing would have been considered embarrassing, but this crew just nuzzles and begs for more. Already all summer, they’ve been helping blanket a quote assiduously kept out of headlines: “Five million to pay one Biden, and five million to another Biden.”
Some of these journalists came of age when Fox was being ridiculed for the same practices. When Executive VP James Moody urged Fox staff to watch for “statements from the Iraqi insurgents who must be thrilled at the prospect of a Dem-controlled Congress,” or senior VP Bill Shine described the Obama administration as “the opposition,” reporters dismissed the network as a GOP outpost. The watchdog FAIR.org correctly noted that if Fox “ceased to treat Democrats as an internal enemy, they would cease to exist.” This Biden-era parade not only isn’t different, it’s dumber, but who has enough shame to care now?
Under the Detroit companies’ current contract, hourly labor costs average out around $65, including benefits, compared with Tesla’s $45 and $55 for Asian automakers.
Analysts estimate the union’s initial demands would roughly double automakers’ hourly labor costs. The UAW has said that labor accounts for less than 5% of the companies’ costs per vehicle.
There’s a famous story, I remember Jimmy Carter told about how... Carter begins by saying, “I was always very bad at telling jokes, but once I was in Japan, and I began a speech with a joke that I used to do all the time. And I delivered the joke and the translator finished delivering it, and the audience exploded with laughter. And afterwards I went to the translator and I asked, ‘How did you deliver that joke? I’ve never gotten that reaction before.’ And he said, ‘Oh no, I just said, president Carter has told a funny story, everyone must laugh.’” And I think that’s the way a lot of folks in media view their relationship to the audience now. I have made a determination, this is the line that we are going to pursue and you’re going to accept it. And if you don’t accept it, you belong on some other platform, which is too bad.
Enter House Republicans, who have introduced a bill that would override EPA waivers that let California and other states “directly or indirectly limit the sale or use of new motor vehicles with internal combustion engines.” The bill wouldn’t interfere with California’s authority to regulate actual tail-pipe pollutants and protect local air quality.
Progressives howl that the bill interferes with state sovereignty. This sudden concern for federalism is touching, but the problem is that California’s mandates have national economic implications. Vehicle manufacturers can meet mandates on EV sales only by raising prices on internal-combustion engine vehicles.
A decade ago the Washington Post ended the practice of employing an ombudsman, who in the name of honest reporting would police the paper’s own pages. That decision by then-editor Marty Baron saved the asterisk key from wear and tear in response to Friday’s front-page story about Donald Trump’s typically unconstrained, free-association approach to exploiting the Hunter Biden scandal.
A reader didn’t have to progress far to discover that President Biden “has denied any involvement in his son’s affairs, and no evidence has emerged proving otherwise.”
The only word in this sentence not needing an asterisk is “and.”
This book was again entirely devoted toward introducing students to the character of mathematical thought, to the methods of abstraction, the nature of variables and functions, and to offer some sense of the power and generality of these formalisms.
Party allegiance can affect our judgment and behavior, many experiments show. When Shanto Iyengar of Stanford University and Sean J. Westwood, then at Princeton University, asked a group of Democrats and Republicans to review the résumés of two fictitious high-school students in a 2015 study, their subjects proved more likely to award a scholarship to the student who matched their own party affiliation. People in the experiment gave political party more weight than the student’s race or even grade-point average.
In a landmark 2013 study, Dan Kahan, a Yale University law professor, and colleagues assessed the math skills of about 1,000 adults, a mix of self-described liberals, conservatives and moderates. Then, the researchers gave them a politically inflected math problem to solve, presenting data that pointed to whether cities that had banned concealed handguns experienced a decrease or increase in crime. In half the tests, solving the problem correctly showed that a concealed-carry ban reduced crime rates. In the other half, the correct solution would suggest that crime had risen.
The result was striking: The more adept the test-takers were at math, the more likely they were to get the correct answer—but only when the right answer matched their political outlook. When the right answer ran contrary to their political stance—that is, when liberals drew a version of the problem suggesting that gun control was ineffective—they tended to give the wrong answer. They were no more likely to solve the problem correctly than were people in the study who were less adept at math.
To explain why the animosity in American politics is greater today than in the past, some researchers have focused on the nation’s political “sorting”—the fact that Americans have shifted their allegiances so that the membership of each party is now far more uniform. In the past, each party had a mix of people who leaned conservative and liberal, rural residents and urbanites, the religiously devout and those less observant.
Data from the General Social Survey, a 50-year public opinion study run by NORC, a nonpartisan research group, shows that this is less the case today. Americans in the past were more likely to meet people different than themselves, which created opportunities for reducing group bias and creating conditions for compromise.
I found, on examination, a bottle, holding about a pint, with a short neck and small mouth, firmly attached to his body by the penis, which was drawn through the neck and projected into the bottle, being swollen and purple. The bottle, which was a white one, with a ground-glass stopper and perfectly transparent, had an opening of three fourths of an inch in diameter only: and the penis being much swollen rendered its extraction utterly impossible.[...]The novelty of this accident is my apology for spending so many words in reporting it, while its ludicrous character will, perhaps, excite a smile; but it was anything but a joke at the time to the poor sufferer, who imagined in his fright that if his penis was not already ruined, breaking the bottle to liberate it would endanger its integrity by the broken spicules cutting or lacerating the parts.
> According to the reprimand issued to Yates, many of the female students said they were uncomfortable with the man’s presence in the facility, as well as with the comments he made to the girls. “I was too busy picking my jaw up off the floor when I read it,” [school board member, Michelle] Smyers said. “Because the second incident outlined where he’d gone into the same locker room and was… talking to them about their menstrual cycles and what type of panties they like to wear.”[...]Let’s be clear – a female teacher, an actual one that is, who behaved in this way would not only be reprimanded, but fired. This isn’t “discrimination” because he’s a transwoman. Any teacher talking about such intimate details with children in their care while parading around in their underwear should and would be suspended on the spot, almost certainly fired. This shouldn’t even be a question.
In a statement to The Free Press, Montgomery County Board of Education President Karla Silvestre defended eliminating the opt-out. “This policy articulates our commitment to mutual respect and understanding regardless of gender, race, ethnicity, ability, or culture,” she wrote. “We support a curriculum that creates an awareness of our diverse community and we want our students to see themselves in the texts available to them.”
After a young girl testified about not wanting to be forced to sit in class discussions that violated her religious beliefs, Harris—who wears rainbow pride t-shirts and decorates her laptop with pride paraphernalia—said she felt “kind of sorry” for the girl and wondered to what extent she was “parroting dogma” she learned from her parents.
the vision of cosmic justice is very beneficial to the people who hold it, even if it's not very beneficial to those whom it is intended to benefit
The numbers are bleak: A recent study by data journalist Jan Diehm and musicologist Jada Watson reported that fewer than 0.5 percent of songs played on country radio in 2022 were by women of color and LGBTQ+ artists. Watson’s previous work shows that songs by women of color and LGBTQ+ artists were largely excluded from radio playlists for most of the two decades prior.
Why our generals were more successful in World War II than in Korea, Vietnam or Iraq/Afghanistan
Mason Lecture Series - "Freedom's Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II"
Another sure-fire way to inflame and confuse any debate: misuse the terms "existence" and "existential".
If I ask you to turn down your music, I am asking you not to be noisy. "So you're saying I shouldn't BE!" No, I said you shouldn't be noisy. "But you're saying I should't be! You literally want me not to exist!! My existence is being threatened!!!" Actually, I have no objection to your existence, it's only your volume that I'd like you to modulate. And you can change your volume without losing your existence.
"What do you mean, you want to eradicate racism in America? You must mean you want racists not to exist! You are literally threatening their existence!!!" No, I'm quite happy for those people to continue existing, but I'd like them to lose their racist attitudes. Becoming less racist will not kill them -- they will just stop being racist. "You see? You just said you want them to stop being! This is an existential threat! You want to kill millions of Americans!" Here we see the sequential fallacies of sliding from "end -ism" to "end -ists" to "kill the -ists".
And of course, you can ratchet up the misuse of "existence" by tossing in some "genocides" here and there.
"Oh, so you wish there were fewer people with COVID? In other words, you want those people not to exist! You are advocating for the genocide of people with COVID!!!" Umm, no, I just want them to get better. It's true that I would like fewer copies of the virus to exist -- that really is a matter of existence -- and I might even be okay with genocide for the genus of COVID viruses. But so far as their human hosts go, I am not attacking their existence at all, just trying to cure them. I don't want the people not to be, I just want them not to be sick.
And on and on it continues, confusing "being F" with "being" in the sense of "existing". It's a cheap trick, and I wish it were not so prevalent among people with whom I otherwise agree.
I think there can be some myopia among those who consider themselves pragmatists. They may think there are opportunities for gains if they allow for compromise and tactical retreats in some areas, but in fact they are just giving up ground and getting nothing in return.
To use your Texas example. It's true that Medicaid expansion would be a huge benefit to an enormous amount of currently-uninsured people in our state. But Medicaid expansion also currently has a snowball's chance in hell of passing anytime soon. As frustrating as it is, we are a conservative state and we're unlikely to have anything other than Republican majorities for another two or three cycles, at the least.
Meanwhile, our governor and attorney general have been actively weaponizing the state government to attack trans people. Parents are getting investigated for child abuse for helping their child get gender-affirming care. Providers are being targeted for harassment. Trans people who had gone through years of psychological evaluations, social transition, and are now finally beginning their hormonal transition are getting cut off midway through their treatment and told they have to wait and re-start after they turn 18 (after which it will be a much more arduous process).
So when "pragmatic" progressives are unwilling to come to the defense of trans people because some trans issues are unpopular, they aren't actually helping any uninsured people in Texas. What they are doing is leaving the rest of us in the lurch. Yeah, school sports bans were always going to pass, but things like having CPS going after families with trans kids are morally shocking enough that it could be stopped. Calling out that horrible situation and advocating for its end is the moral and pragmatic option.
https://www.realityslaststand.com/p/the-usada-allows-doping-by-pretendingPage’s idea of what it means to be a girl or woman, or not to be a girl or woman, is regressive. She believes that enjoying boy’s toys or preferring comfortable clothes indicated she was not a girl, and that her attraction to women, like boys and men are, disqualified her from girlhood. This is both factually untrue and a dangerously misleading narrative to impart upon gender non-conforming young women. While being a lesbian is certainly an atypical female experience, it is nevertheless a distinctly female experience. Experiencing body dysmorphia, self-harming, and neglecting one’s female body does not mean it is a male body, yet these are the reasons Page consistently cites as evidence for being trans.
“There was a study recently,” Fauci said confidently, “where a group of highly qualified evolutionary virologists looked at the sequences there and the sequences in bats as they evolve, and the mutations that it took to get to where it is now is /{totally consistent} with a jump of a species from an animal to a human.” In other words, it wasn’t from the lab.
As Steele “traveled around from one little Puritan village (read: university) to another, a common scene would unfold. Whenever my talk was finished, though sometimes before, a virtual militia of black students would rush to the microphones and begin to scream.” He was invariably accused of betraying his race. “My confronters were not freedom fighters; they were Carrie Nation-like enforcers, racial bluenoses, who lived in terror of certain words. Repression was their game, not liberation, and they said as much.” This outrage, Steele believed, illuminated an ironic reversal in the nature of black protest from the 1960s to the ’90s: “a shift in focus from protest to suppression, from blowing the lid off to tightening it down.”
While most students didn’t react this way, the very decency of the majority made the shaming of the minority more effective: “I learned what it was like to stand before a crowd, in which a coterie of one’s enemies had the license to shame, while a mixture of decorum and fear silenced the decent people who might’ve come to one’s aid.” In what Steele and his son would later refer to as “bathroom black,” many of these same confrontational students would meet with him in the bathroom after his talk to let him know that they agreed with what he said but that they were afraid to say so in public. “The goal of shaming was never to win an argument with me; it was to make a display of shame that would make others afraid for themselves, that would cause eyes to avert. … Shame’s victory was in the averting of eyes, the cowering of decency.”
For many therapists, this movement has clearly become a means to explain away a child’s depression, loneliness, or trauma in a way that offers families the tantalizing possibility of a decisive fix. This tendency is reinforced by school curricula, public-service announcements, and media reports, in which transition is presented as a wondrous “gender journey” into a magical land of self-fulfillment. Well-meaning parents, having been told that a failure to instantly “affirm” their child’s claimed trans identity might prompt self-harm, or even suicide, naturally fall into line.
Kimberly is a self-identified transsexual man, now in his 40s. A one-time butch lesbian, he transitioned at age 30, and feels more comfortable as a result. But he emphasizes that transition is no cure-all for psychological distress, and warns that several of his trans friends regret their decision to transition.[...]Kimberly’s critiques highlight the fairly obvious contradictions embedded in trans-activist demands. On the one hand, they typically insist that gender dysphoria shouldn’t be seen as an affliction, but rather as a natural (perhaps even /{welcome}) outgrowth of the soul-like gender spirit that supposedly infuses all of us. On the other hand, we are simultaneously warned that many trans people will experience crippling psychic pain if they do not receive immediate access to surgeries and a lifelong program of cross-sex hormones. That sounds a /{lot} like a serious medical condition rather than some kind of cosmic gender journey, no?
Genderwang is something completely different. It’s a quasi-religious ideological movement that demands public acceptance of the claim that all humans are infused with a soul-like ether known as gender identity—a spirit whose nature trumps the objective reality of biological sex when it comes to policymaking and even interpersonal relationships. Genderwang channels the magical thinking of Christian transubstantiation by demanding that acts of verbal attestation and other sanctified rites serve to literally transform men into women and vice versa. It also casts small children, even toddlers in diapers, as savants whose unfalsifiable pronouncements in regard to their “true” gender identity must be affirmed by doctors as holy writ. Like all totalizing creeds, Genderwang demands implementation in every sphere of human activity, including sex and sports. An orthodox Genderwanger will claim with a straight face, for instance, that human sexual attraction, as we know it, is a misnomer, because the subject of one’s attraction is not really a person’s outwardly observable sex, but rather his or her inwardly experienced gender identity. By this logic, lesbians using Genderwang-informed dating apps are instructed to submit to the conceit that a man with a penis must be treated as a bona fide object of same-sex female erotic attraction if he uses female pronouns. As in all matters of puritanical religious observance, any conflict between doctrine and reality must always be reconciled in favour of the former.
I often refer to Genderwang as a cult, insofar as its precepts (a) encourage physical disfigurement as a means to rid one’s body or mind of some imagined contaminant; (b) offers the promise that conversion/transition will serve to solve one’s earthly woes; (c) divides society between believers who are “seen and loved,” and sinister heretics who must be condemned and attacked; and (d) demands the estrangement of acolytes from family members and peers who reject the cult’s teachings.
But the cult comparison is inexact in at least three important ways.
Firstly, for all its ideological excesses, Genderwang is (or, at least, was) extrapolated from a real medical truth, which is that some human beings truly do suffer from gender dysphoria. This has allowed Genderwang entré into mainstream medical culture, notwithstanding the fact that many of the (often untested) medical therapies encouraged under its “affirming” auspices have horrifying side effects.
Secondly, a typical cult does not arrogate to itself the power of regulating speech and thought among non-believers. Except in Islamic theocracies, in fact, even religious movements no longer demand that right. While I know many observant Christians here in Canada, not a single one of them would ever dream of calling out non-believers whose blasphemies they’d overheard in a public café.
Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, traditional cults, such as Scientology or NXIVM, exist outside mainstream political tribes—while Genderwang has been adopted at the very core of progressive social dogma.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commentaries_on_the_Constitution_of_the_United_StatesThe militia is the natural defence of a free country against sudden foreign invasions, domestic insurrections and domestic usurpations of power by rulers. It is against sound policy for a free people to keep up large military establishments and standing armies in time of peace both from the enormous expenses with which they are attended and the facile means which they afford to ambitious and unprincipled rulers to subvert the government or trample upon the rights of the people. The right of the citizens to keep and bear arms has justly been considered as the palladium of the liberties of a republic since it offers a strong moral check against the usurpation and arbitrary power of rulers and will generally even if these are successful the first instance enable the people to resist and triumph over them. And yet though this truth would seem so clear and the importance of a well regulated militia would seem so undeniable it cannot be disguised that among the American people there is a growing indifference to any system of militia discipline and a disposition from a sense of its burthens to be rid of all regulations. How it is practicable to keep the people duly armed without some organization it is difficult to see. There is certainly no small danger that indifference may lead to disgust and disgust to contempt and thus gradually undermine all the protection intended by this clause of our national bill of rights.
Justice Scalia, with whom Justice Thomas joins, dissenting.
I join The Chief Justice’s opinion in full. I write separately to call attention to this Court’s threat to American democracy.
The substance of today’s decree is not of immense personal importance to me. The law can recognize as marriage whatever sexual attachments and living arrangements it wishes, and can accord them favorable civil consequences, from tax treatment to rights of inheritance. Those civil consequences—and the public approval that conferring the name of marriage evidences—can perhaps have adverse social effects, but no more adverse than the effects of many other controversial laws. So it is not of special importance to me what the law says about marriage. It is of overwhelming importance, however, who it is that rules me. Today’s decree says that my Ruler, and the Ruler of 320 million Americans coast-to-coast, is a majority of the nine lawyers on the Supreme Court. The opinion in these cases is the furthest extension in fact—and the furthest extension one can even imagine—of the Court’s claimed power to create “liberties” that the Constitution and its Amendments neglect to mention. This practice of constitutional revision by an unelected committee of nine, always accompanied (as it is today) by extravagant praise of liberty, robs the People of the most important liberty they asserted in the Declaration of Independence and won in the Revolution of 1776: the freedom to govern themselves.
The opinion is couched in a style that is as pretentious as its content is egotistic. It is one thing for separate concurring or dissenting opinions to contain extravagances, even silly extravagances, of thought and expression; it is something else for the official opinion of the Court to do so. [22]
[22]: If, even as the price to be paid for a fifth vote, I ever joined an opinion for the Court that began: “The Constitution promises liberty to all within its reach, a liberty that includes certain specific rights that allow persons, within a lawful realm, to define and express their identity,” I would hide my head in a bag. The Supreme Court of the United States has descended from the disciplined legal reasoning of John Marshall and Joseph Story to the mystical aphorisms of the fortune cookie.
From there we’ve had one lie-spun war after another. The real reason the United States under Bush wanted to invade Iraq was to effect regime change, but the public was told tall tales about WMDs. The British Chilcot report revealed Tony Blair saying later that “obviously,” if the U.S. and U.K. hadn’t come with WMDs, “you would have had to use and deploy different arguments.” Ahead of NATO bombings in Libya that led to the deposing of Muammar al-Qaddafi, we spread porkies about Qaddafi forces being given Viagra to aid in using rape as a weapon.
In Syria, we even used the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, which was supposed to be limited to permitting war operations against those responsible for 9/11, as legal justification for military actions against groups that didn’t even exist when the towers fell. We changed the excuses for our presence in Afghanistan and adjusted supposed goals there so many times that by the time we left in 2021, most Americans weren’t even sure why were there, if they remembered we were there at all.
> women are way more obsessed with sex in my experience no idea how ppl got the idea its the other way around
Its a Victorian hangover from the days when women could only think but it was taboo for them to talk about it.
Obviously women think more about sex, you go on a female discord its all clothes, dating advice, how to look sexy
You go on a guy's discord it's games and war.
“Many people will get worse in therapy,” Los Angeles therapist Patrick Lockwood tells me. He cites three primary reasons: “First, the clinician is incompetent. Then there’s counter-transference,” which occurs when the therapist drags his own issues into the sessions and responds to his patient through that lens. Finally says Lockwood, “Therapy may trap people in a victim-state.”
All of which further decreases the supply of America’s rarest latter-day commodity: /{adults in the room}. That is, people imbued with a grown-up’s long view and the understanding that not every hedonistic impulse was meant to be indulged in real time. In contrast, personal-growth therapy cultivates the puerile forever-children that Steven Mintz labels “kidults.” Adulthood, writes Mintz, is about “maturity, caring, responsibility, reliability, and experience. ... Adults live not for themselves alone, but for those who depend on them, whether these are their children, a partner, aging parents, friends, or co-workers. ... These responsibilities make the lives of adults more stressful and demanding than at any other stage of life.”
Just as clearly, though, in a more prophylactic sense, the ubiquity of therapy hasn’t exactly made America an emotional Canaan. Suicides continue to spike. Illicit drug use is a national emergency. Self-reported anxiety and depression are at an all-time high. As is social polarization. Even the divorce rate, after decades of moderating, is ticking mildly back up again.
American politics has long been a careful truce, in which natural economic tensions were obscured by an elegantly phony two-party structure that kept urban and rural poor separate, nurtured a politically unadventurous middle class, and tended to needs of the mega-rich no matter who won. That system is in collapse. Voters are abandoning traditional blue-red political identities and realigning according to more explosive divisions based on education and income. As the middle class vanishes the replacement endgame emerges. A small pocket of very wealthy and very educated, for whom elections have until now mostly been ceremonial and to whom more fraught realities of the current situation are an annoyance, will move to one side. That’s your “15% strongly approve” group, the Marie Antoinettes who’ll go to the razor pledging loyalty to the regent, even if he’s a loon in a periwig, or Joe Biden.
I worry that Caplan is eliding the important summoner/demon distinction. This is an easy distinction to miss, since demons often kill their summoners and wear their skin. But in this case, he’s become hopelessly confused without it.
I am pretty sure there was, at one point, such a thing as western civilization. I think it included things like dancing around maypoles and copying Latin manuscripts. At some point Thor might have been involved. That civilization is dead. It summoned an alien entity from beyond the void which devoured its summoner and is proceeding to eat the rest of the world.
The same is true of more intellectual “products”. Caplan notes that foreigners consume western gender norms, but these certainly aren’t gender norms that would have been recognizable to Cicero, St. Augustine, Henry VIII, or even Voltaire. They’re gender norms that sprung up in the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution and its turbulent intermixing of the domestic and public economies. They arose because they /{worked}. The West was the first region to industrialize and realize those were the gender norms that worked for industrial societies, and as China and Arabia industrialize they’re going to find the same thing.
We could even look at this as a form of colonialism – if Brexit supporters and opponents lived on two different islands and had different colored skin, then people in London saying things like “These people are so butthurt that we’re destroying their so-called ‘culture’, but they’re really just a bunch of ignorant rubes, and they don’t realize they need us elites to keep their country running, so screw them,” would sound a lot more sinister. The insistence that they tolerate unwanted immigration into their lands would look a lot like how China is trying to destroy Tibet by exporting millions of people to it in the hopes they will eventually outnumber the recalcitrant native Tibetans (if you don’t believe me, believe the Dalai Lama, who apparently has the same perspective). The claim that they’re confused bout their own economic self-interest would give way to discussions of Bhutan style “gross national happiness”.
(I get accused of being crypto-conservative around here every so often, but I think I’m just taking my anti-colonialism position to its logical conclusion. A liberal getting upset about how other liberals are treating conservatives, doesn’t become conservative himself, any more than an American getting upset about how other Americans treat Iraqis becomes an Iraqi.)
I’m constantly intrigued (though always a little skeptical) by claims that “primitive” cultures live happier and more satisfying lives than our own. I know of several of this type. First, happiness surveys that tend to find Latin American countries doing as well or better than much richer and more advanced European countries. Second, the evidence from the Amish, whose children are allowed to experience the modern culture around them but who usually prefer to stay in Amish society. Third, Axtell’s paper on prisoner exchanges between early US colonists and Native Americans; colonists captured by the natives almost always wanted to stay and live with the natives; natives captured by the colonists never wanted to stay and live with the colonists. Many people have remarked on how more culturally homogenous countries seem happier. Bhutan itself might be evidence here, although I’ve seen wildly different claims on where it falls on happiness surveys. I’ve also talked before about how China’s happiness level stayed stable or even dropped during its period of rapid development.
The results of this study reveal a truth that contradicts the current diversity narrative pervading the United States: the longer group members work together, the less impact surface-level diversity has on how well they work, and the more deep-level diversity matters. Contrary to what many diversity activists claim, for both groups of employees, it is not the diversity of race, ethnicity, sex, or age that matters, it is the opportunities for team members to engage in meaningful interactions with each other over time.
But more than 60% of Salvadorans said they didn’t care if their government was democratic as long as it solved their day-to-day problems, according to a survey by Chile-based regional pollster Latinobarometro in 2021.
The militarists, corporatists, oligarchs, politicians, academics and media conglomerates champion identity politics and diversity because it does nothing to address the systemic injustices or the scourge of permanent war that plague the U.S. It is an advertising gimmick, a brand, used to mask mounting social inequality and imperial folly. It busies liberals and the educated with a boutique activism, which is not only ineffectual but exacerbates the divide between the privileged and a working class in deep economic distress. The haves scold the have-nots for their bad manners, racism, linguistic insensitivity and garishness, while ignoring the root causes of their economic distress. The oligarchs could not be happier.
Did the lives of Native Americans improve as a result of the legislation mandating assimilation and the revoking of tribal land titles pushed through by Charles Curtis, the first Native American Vice President? Are we better off with Clarence Thomas, who opposes affirmative action, on the Supreme Court, or Victoria Nuland, a war hawk in the State Department? Is our perpetuation of permanent war more palatable because Lloyd Austin, an African American, is the Secretary of Defense? Is the military more humane because it accepts transgender soldiers? Is social inequality, and the surveillance state that controls it, ameliorated because Sundar Pichai — who was born in India — is the CEO of Google and Alphabet? Has the weapons industry improved because Kathy J. Warden, a woman, is the CEO of Northop Grumman, and another woman, Phebe Novakovic, is the CEO of General Dynamics? Are working families better off with Janet Yellen, who promotes increasing unemployment and “job insecurity” to lower inflation, as Secretary of the Treasury? Is the movie industry enhanced when a female director, Kathryn Bigelow, makes “Zero Dark Thirty,” which is agitprop for the CIA? Take a look at this recruitment ad put out by the CIA. It sums up the absurdity of where we have ended up.[...]We live under a species of corporate colonialism. The engines of white supremacy, which constructed the forms of institutional and economic racism that keep the poor poor, are obscured behind attractive political personalities such as Barack Obama, whom Cornel West called “a Black mascot for Wall Street.” These faces of diversity are vetted and selected by the ruling class. Obama was groomed and promoted by the Chicago political machine, one of the dirtiest and most corrupt in the country.
A key concern of James Madison and Alexander Hamilton was that demagogues would incite mobs and factions to defy the rule of law, overturn free and fair elections and undermine American democracy. “The only path to a subversion of the republican system of the Country is, by flattering the prejudices of the people, and exciting their jealousies and apprehensions, to throw affairs into confusion, and bring on civil commotion,” Alexander Hamilton wrote in 1790. “When a man unprincipled in private life, desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper…is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity,” Hamilton warned, “he may ‘ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.’”
Ontario’s Workplace Safety and Insurance Board looked into the matter. In August 2021, the board released its findings, stating that Thompson’s behavior was “abusive” and amounted to “workplace harassment.” Bilkszto was awarded seven weeks of lost pay.
But by then, Bilkszto was tainted goods.
Mike Ramsay, a friend of Bilkszto, told us: “His contracts were freezing up—and not a word from his former supervisors and colleagues. While he said some people were nice to him, for many others, he was not politically popular to be seen or be around.”[...]In April, Bilkszto sued the Toronto District School Board, citing Thompson’s “defamatory statements” and the unwillingness of administrators and other higher-ups at the TDSB to stand up for him—even though they had previously showered him with praise.
“What I’m finding interesting is that, in the middle of this Covid disaster, where the inequities in this fair and equal healthcare system have been properly shown to all of us. . . you and your whiteness think that you can tell me what’s really going on with black people—like, is that what you’re doing, ’cause I think that’s what you’re doing, but I’m not sure, so I’m going to leave you space to tell me what you’re doing right now,” she said.
This prosecution puts Americans in the same conundrum they’ve been in since the beginning of the Trump years: forced once again to choose between a serial line-crosser and more or less open gangster on one hand, and a gang of never-Trump lawfare aficionados who’d like to revive the Alien and Sedition Acts on the other. As Woody Allen put it, “Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.” Are you excited yet?
The definition of misinformation provided in Australia's new draft law reveals its inherent elitism. According to the guidance note, misinformation refers to "online content that is false, misleading or deceptive, that is shared or created without an intent to deceive but can cause and contribute to serious harm." Significantly, the definition exempts content produced by professional news outlets, governments, or educational providers, as well as artistic content.
In Grand Rapids, managers at the John Ball Zoo are coaching seasonal workers in their teens and early 20s on basics such as why it’s important to look visitors in the eye, and how to make change at a cash register.
They are also trying to instill a work ethic in their employees that includes taking some initiative, getting off their phones and engaging with visitors, said Laura Davis, the director of strategy and organizational development at the zoo. Her young employees haven’t been held accountable for things like finishing homework assignments, and Davis believes that has led to a decline in motivation.
“They’re not looking to be productive,” Davis said. “If they’re not told what to do, if someone isn’t managing every second and keeping them busy, their inclination is not to self identify what they can do—it’s to do nothing.”
Nonetheless, a proposal to establish an inspector general's office to monitor the flow of money from Washington to Ukraine was just rejected by the Senate: 51 senators voted Yes, in favor of this oversight, while 48 voted No. Democrats invoked what they often referred to as the “Jim Crow filibuster” – at least that's what it's called when Republicans use it – 60 votes rather than 50 were required for passage, leaving the amendment nine votes short of passage. Not only did all but two Senate Democrats vote to sink this oversight provision, but the radical anti-establishment, working-class hero, independent from Vermont, Bernie Sanders, joined the Democrats in doing so. Failure of this amendment, which in this case was sponsored by Mississippi Republican Roger Wicker, along with three other Senate Republicans and Arizona independent Kyrsten Sinema means not only that the U.S. role in the proxy war in Ukraine will continue at that end, but so too will the oversight free flow of billions of dollars.
The Farage affair is worse than those instances of a bank occasionally ignoring regulations in search of profit. The dossier which Farage recovered from the bank showed that it had trawled through reports and commentary which described him as racist, xenophobic, and chauvinistic—largely because of his campaign against continued membership of the EU—and claimed that his rhetoric promotes violence against immigrants. These accusations are one-sided and questionable—the dossier does not, for instance, include Farage’s resignation from UKIP in 2018, because its new leader Gerard Batten developed a “fixation” on the dangers of the British Muslim community and employed the far-Right activist Tommy Robinson.
The board’s overriding concern is not education or mathematical excellence, but minimizing racial inequity. Since a disproportionate number of white and Asian kids perform at the high end of the mathematics spectrum, and a disproportionate number of black and Latino children are at the bottom end, the board was left with two options: pull the bottom performers up, or push the top performers down. They did the easier thing.
I turned to Alan Schoenfeld, a Berkeley education professor who advised members of the Board of Education on the CMF, to see what he thought about this, and he said the same thing opponents of affirmative action have—that lower-performing students might perform better and develop greater confidence if they’re in a less rigorous environment. “Now some of them are going to turn out to enjoy mathematics, and they’re going to pursue mathematical careers,” Schoenfeld told me.
We can’t tell people the truth: This week, thanks to the U.S. Oversight Committee, we can read through the damning Slack messages scientists were sending each other as they coordinated in real time how to deceive the American public about Covid’s origins.
Andrew Rambaut, professor of molecular evolution at the University of Edinburgh wrote: “Given the shitshow that would happen if anyone seriously accused the Chinese of even accidental release, my feeling is we should say there is no evidence of a specifically engineered virus, we cannot possibly distinguish between natural evolution and escape, so we are content with ascribing it to a natural process.”
Professor Kristian Andersen, of the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California replied: “Yup, I totally agree that that’s a very reasonable conclusion. Although I hate it when politics is injected into science—but it’s impossible not to, especially given the circumstance. We should be sensitive to that.”
Rambaut was one of the authors of an influential Nature Medicine paper, “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2,” that argued the virus is simply natural: “Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.” That paper was then used to censor American conversation around this for years. Here is a great visual with quotes of those Nature Medicine scientists privately agreeing that Covid really seems like it came from the lab. The visual was put together by a rare good professor: Richard H. Ebright, professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Rutgers, who is also on the team of Biosafety Now, which calls for action on lab-generated pandemics.
This is not a unique story. I have reported for Quillette on other instances in which audience members have dared raise their voice when confronted with this kind of diatribe. It is part of the pattern of hypocrisy that surrounds the DEI industry more generally: While these consciousness-raising sessions are typically conducted on the conceit of teaching participants to be “brave” and ”disruptive,” the well-paid corporate trainers who lead them generally demand a climate of craven subservience.
Yet nothing in my own experience allowed me to fully comprehend the pain that Bilkszto was experiencing. A political progressive who’d devoted more than two decades of his life to the TDSB, Bilkszto never fully recovered from being falsely smeared as a supporter of white supremacy in front of his peers.
This month, Bilkszto, aged 60, committed suicide. I don’t know if he left a note. But according to his family, his suicide related to the false accusations of racism he’d endured in April 2021.
Mr. Johnson emphasizes that this DEIA push is not a benign directive about trying to reach students from diverse backgrounds in the classroom. It’s a radical political project. He cites an official DEIA glossary posted by California Community Colleges:
• Antiracists “understand that racism is pervasive and has been embedded into all societal structures.” Also: “Persons are either anti-racist or racist. Persons that say they are ‘not a racist’ are in denial of the inequities and racial problems that exist.”
• Colorblindness “de-emphasizes, or ignores, race and ethnicity, a large part of one’s identity and lived experience.” A suggested synonym is “color-evasiveness,” which is better, because it “avoids describing people with disabilities as problematic or deficient by using blindness as a metaphor for ignorance.”
• Merit “at face value appears to be a neutral measure of academic achievement and qualifications; however, merit is embedded in the ideology of Whiteness and upholds race-based structural inequality.”
Stafstrom, who retired in 2021, said the factory’s struggles were exacerbated by attrition among “gray-haired folks” with deep knowledge of tool making, while Felty said turnover at the top of Stanley’s tool division contributed. [...]Nick Pinchuk, CEO of Snap-on, another premium brand, said that in 2010 the company’s U.S. factories had a roughly 100-to-1 ratio of workers to robots. Today it’s 8 to 1, but the gradual transition helped the company identify the optimal roles for humans and machines, he said.
“Sometimes the ease of installing automation is a little bit overestimated,” he said. “Where that comes from is, people don’t really understand how the product is made in the first place.”
The ABC’s problem is not really the incoherence of the trans kids story, which can be compelling on an emotional level. No, the problem is a seemingly boring international trend begun in cold Nordic countries less than five years ago. Some clinicians had been worrying away at the poor outcomes of medicalised gender change offered to ever younger patients; this is a relatively new enterprise. Health agencies in Finland and Sweden commissioned “systematic reviews” of the evidence base; England did the same.
The unconvincing claim that puberty suppression is reversible was not tested. Cross-sex hormones, which are acknowledged as bringing irreversible changes, were airily said to be “often the next stage” after blockers. In fact, according to all available data, the vast majority who begin taking blockers go on to take cross-sex hormones. The idea that blockers allow a child time to think before committing to lifelong dependence on synthetic hormones has been memory holed. Unmentioned were the likely sterilisation and future sexual dysfunction of children started early on blockers and proceeding to cross-sex hormones. Also unexamined were the implications for informed consent of a one-way medical pathway embarked on at age 10-12.
In part, this was because we liberals understood math. We needed white, straight, male legislators to support our causes, a project that could only be engaged through free and open debate. Empathy-based co-operation enabled us to create bridges among our diverse groups: The Gay Liberation Front raised money for the Black Panthers. In turn, its leader, Huey Newton, supported the gay liberation and women’s liberation movements. Meanwhile, Jewish groups, applied their historical understanding of discrimination to help lead the fights for women’s rights (Betty Friedan), gay rights (Larry Kramer), and black voting rights, with some even giving their lives as Freedom Riders.
My generation mocked our parents’ conformity and stoic, suck-it-up ethos, forgetting that these traits had been necessary social adaptations during the Great Depression and World War II. Similarly, activists of this generation attack our commitment to free speech and integration within society, forgetting that these strategies were necessary for us to be heard during the Cold War, when outsiders were suspected as potential fifth columnists.
In particular, the idea that pronouns serve as magic spells that can turn a man into a (literal) women is no less ridiculous than anything Trump has ever said. The same goes for the mantra that while girls who cut themselves need therapy, girls seeking a double mastectomy require “affirmation.” Likewise: Racial segregation is a bigoted practice … except when it represents the very acme of progressive enlightenment. “Defund the police” doesn’t mean abolish the police, except when it means exactly that.
As these documents show, however, we can’t even have that expectation. Once people see an institutional malfunction on this scale, it’s like walking in on a cheating spouse, they can’t unsee it. That’s what these scientists were risking when they played around with a lie this big: everything.
Once upon a time, Central Missouri was the political center of America, a kind of stabilizing force. In elections, it was the national temperature-taker. From 1904 to 2004, the state voted for the winning presidential candidate every time. (The only exception was 1956, when it backed Democrat Adlai Stevenson, the governor of neighboring Illinois.)
HB: This area of healthcare has avoided any of the normal scrutiny one would expect, particularly when dealing with children and with a drug that’s being used off-label. The questions and scrutiny that would normally apply from healthcare commissioners, from politicians, from society, and from the media, they just weren’t asked. And I think that’s what’s gone wrong. Collectively, there has been this fear that if you questioned the standard of care here, that you’re somehow questioning the patient population. We wouldn’t have some great cancer hospital applying treatments which haven’t gone through clinical trials and don’t appear to have any evidence of them working. That’s not attacking people with cancer. That’s attacking the system. It’s really strange that any scrutiny is seen as hateful when actually the reverse is true. Because if gender clinics and society and medicine can get this right, then care will be better both for patients who will thrive as trans adults, and for those for whom it won’t be the right pathway. It’s going to be better for everybody.
Part of the reason that public opinion about cannabis has outpaced the science is related to federal restrictions on cannabis research, says Marusak. “It’s really difficult to do controlled research because it requires a Schedule 1 license from the DEA and to purchase cannabis from DEA-compliant growers, of which there are few available.”
“Yeah, yeah. But it’s like the language,” he says, noting the decline in Apsáalooke, the native Crow language. “They’re not gonna put effort into it.”
But Kennard disagrees that fighting for the U.S. military should be the new path to valor.
“I mean, Jesus,” he says, slamming his fist on the table, “if I want to prove my manhood I would do something that’s revenge against the non-Indian, who stole all of this.”
In reality, the Crow were on Custer’s side, serving as his scouts. That’s because the Cheyenne and Sioux were encroaching upon territory that the Crow considered theirs—and that the U.S. government had assigned them a few years earlier.
Jim Real Bird says he’s invited the Cheyenne, who share a border with the Crow, and Sioux tribal members to participate in the reenactment, but no one ever shows. So young Crow men play the warriors instead.
Katie Berkram, Jim Real Bird’s wife, tells me that what matters most is that this is a chance for young Crow men to ride horses, a defining feature that the Crows shared with their enemies.
Worrying about the state of our men is an American tradition. But today’s problems are real and well documented. Deindustrialization, automation, free trade and peacetime have shifted the labor market dramatically, and not in men’s favor — the need for physical labor has declined, while soft skills and academic credentials are increasingly rewarded. Growing numbers of working-age men have detached from the labor market, with the biggest drop in employment among men ages 25 to 34. For those in a job, wages have stagnated everywhere except the top.
Much of the content in the online men’s space is misogyny masquerading as being simply pro-male, advocating a return to a strict hierarchy in which a particular kind of man deserves to rule over everyone else. Decent advice becomes an on-ramp to darker viewpoints: You can get from Tate urging his followers to work hard to his announcing that women are property within seconds.
I've probably mentioned this before, but I was an intern at a nonprofit around 2012–13. One afternoon I was having lunch with a bunch of people, all female. Some of them worked at the place, some were visitors. One had matriculated to Princeton and after a stint working on Democratic political campaigns had the resources to kind of bum around and "find herself" or whatever for a few years. Another was from a South Asian immigrant family that owned a restaurant in upstate NY, had attended Bryn Mawr, had a fiance with an academic gig in the ivy leagues and was in academia herself. Another was a coworker (and a lesbian) who was significantly higher up on the career/income scale than me. I don't know how the idpol talk started, but I was the only male at the table, and I got lectured by these women—all of whom came from wealthier and more stable families than me, who went to more prestigious universities than me, and had higher incomes and more social capital than me—about how damn good I had it on the basis of my being a straight white male and how /{I} needed to come to terms with that.
https://www.reddit.com/r/stupidpol/comments/14txbdz/my_white_friends_trivialise_racism_by_labelling/I had a similar experience at university, but further back in time than yours. I grew up in a socioeconomically deprived family (we're talking leaky roofs, black mould, everything hand-me-down, and 'eat or heat?' poor at its worst) and university was a (rare) opportunity for a better life. I was first in my family to get a degree, part funded by my own part time work (thank God for student grants, even if it was only a much diminished one by the time I got to uni). No holiday backpacking for this broke white boy.
Got that very same mocking lecture from a South Asian medical student with backup from other hangers-on. She had the benefit of her middleclass upbringing and its family expectations of success, combined with their financial assets; the university's 'women in medicine' group; an 'IndSoc' for her ethnicity; and accolades all round for being so hard done by.
But when it was done, she dressed for a ball then got in the car that daddy had given her for getting to university. I got disconsolately on my bicycle and went to work a night shift.
I guess that inoculated me against identity politics pretty early on.
https://www.reddit.com/r/stupidpol/comments/14sq3v6/the_absurdity_of_idpol_in_places_that_you_would/Quite simple- tell them that calling everything racist is in itself racist, an abuse of white patriarchal privilege that puts folx of color and other oppressed groups in danger, and is thus extremely problematic and not okay for an ally to attempt. They’ll stop that very second.
Not only that, but contrary to what the prefix of the word might imply, there is no such thing as a "sex between two sexes". There is no combination of sperm and egg. Most intersex people aren't even fertile to begin with.
Most people try to use their rare hormonal conditions to justify a spectrum of sex, because most people still think sex is defined by what chromosomes you have, instead of the simpler, more accurate, historically correct way of resolving the question of whether you have balls or not (or a wolffian reproductive structure, if you're pedantic).
It's ultimately a systematic "othering" people in order to reaffirm metaphysical dogma through propaganda that isn't even true.
A serious house on serious earth it is,In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,Are recognised, and robed as destinies.And that much never can be obsolete,Since someone will forever be surprisingA hunger in himself to be more serious,And gravitating with it to this ground,Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,If only that so many dead lie round.
It’s the horror of being told by your other child, the one who serves as the pronoun police in your home, that /{you} are the one who isn’t loving and supportive. It’s the shame of realizing that you’ve lost your ability to be the adult in the room. It’s feeling that the liberal, progressive values you instilled in your children are being used against you in a way you could never have seen coming. It’s disheartening, destabilizing, and destructive.
We should all want to know why so many kids are declaring a trans identity. We should not simply accept this as normal, and we should certainly not teach it, nor enshrine it into law, until someone can demonstrate through unassailable longitudinal studies that any of it is valid in the first place. Many of these young people are being led astray by the very people who are supposed to protect them. Doctors and psychologists are no longer experts to be trusted.
Children on the spectrum are especially vulnerable to a theoretical concept that suggests a person can be born in the wrong body and that identifying and transitioning to the opposite sex could relieve the individual from all the mental pain and physical discomforts they have been experiencing. Gender ideology conveniently avoids the obvious, that an individual’s biological sex cannot be changed and that medical interventions are purely cosmetic and come with health risks, many of which are still unknown due to lack of research.
This village interpreted her nonconformity to gender stereotypes, her quirkiness, and her same-sex attraction as things that needed to be fixed medically. In order to be part of the community, she needed to fit a specific box, even if that meant taking lifelong medications and undergoing multiple surgeries. Because she wasn’t mainstream, it wasn’t okay for her to stay in her natural state. Meanwhile, I accepted and loved her differences and wanted to give her time to see if she could love and accept those differences in herself.
This was back in 2016–2017. The medical community not only dismissed my concerns about the risks involved and the lack of assessment inherent to the affirmation model, but also told me my questions were not supportive and were detrimental to my daughter’s mental health. The “village” was telling me I was wrong and negligent for trying to weigh the benefits against the risks, and for considering other less invasive methods of treatment.
My daughter’s gender dysphoria gradually resolved without medical interventions over a two-year period, as she began to accept her bisexuality and learned how to better cope with the sensory and social challenges of autism. I shouldn’t have had to fight “the village” to allow my child time to do that.
The Supreme Court then famously invalidated the law on compelled speech grounds, and in doing so, the elegant pen of Justice Robert H. Jackson delivered one of the most memorable lines in all of constitutional law. He explained:
> If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.
Specifically, these sessions taught that believing in colorblindness is a form of white supremacy, that systemic racism is "woven into the very foundation of American culture, society, and laws," and that American institutions all contribute to or reinforce "the oppression of marginalized social groups while elevating dominant social groups." Participants were also told that being sufficiently "anti-racist" means not remaining "silent or inactive" because doing so constitutes "white silence"—a form of white supremacy.
I was attracted to living on a commune as a method of putting theory into practice. During my high school years, I became attracted to Marxism and leftism as a methodological way of understanding the world. I was happy to adopt a worldview that emphasized a linear and progressive sense of history, a cosmic struggle between good and evil, and the potential to change the world for the better. My teenage self did not yet know or understand the debates between the accelerationists and those who preferred to wait for the revolution.
The 1,500-hour requirement is a relatively new one. It was enacted by Congress in the wake of the 2009 Colgan Air crash in upstate New York that killed 50 people and was partially blamed on pilot error. The previous requirement had been 250 hours of flight time.[...]The Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA), the pilot's union, has likewise argued in a Thursday letter that the existing rule should remain in place, citing the near disappearance of airline fatalities since the Cogan crash.
Critics note that the Colgan pilots both had over 1,500 hours of experience. Some say the current hours requirement can be counterproductive when it comes to improving pilot performance.
"Simulators allow pilots to train on platforms that they're intended to fly on in circumstances you can't replicate live," says Dan Stohr of the National Air Carrier Association, like inclement weather. "That's better training than toeing a banner over a beach on a sunny day."
Neither the FAA nor the National Transportation Safety Board, the independent agency that investigates transportation accidents, has found any evidence that requiring 1,500 hours of flight time improves aviation safety, notes Gary Leff at the aviation blog View From the Wing.
"Now is not the time to put corporate profits ahead of the lives of our constituents who may want to board a commercial flight in the future," said Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D–Ill.), per Politico, saying that supporters of changes to the 1,500-hour rule would have "blood on your hands."
While the Department of Education argued that this granted it broad authority to cancel student loan debt, citing COVID-19 as the "national emergency" in question, the Supreme Court didn't buy it. "The Secretary's plan has 'modified' the cited provisions only in the same sense that 'the French Revolution "modified" the status of the French nobility,'" wrote Chief Justice John Roberts in the majority opinion. "It has abolished them and supplanted them with a new regime entirely."
The watershed decision by Chief Justice John Roberts sets new parameters for the continuing national debate over what criteria should determine who is admitted to the country’s elite institutions and hired into top jobs—crucial springboards for upward mobility in America.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/supreme-court-affirmative-action-college-admissions-e3de89d8Before the court were admissions practices at two pillars of American higher education: Harvard College, the Ivy League titan whose name has symbolized achievement and power for centuries, and the University of North Carolina, a public flagship that provides an elite education subsidized by taxpayers for state residents.
Can Colleges Be Racially Diverse Without Affirmative Action? Experience Suggests No
The dissenters argued that affirmative action is a necessary counterbalance to right the wrongs of centuries of racial discrimination in which nonwhite Americans were denied admission to schools and workplaces despite their qualifications. Society “is not, and has never been, colorblind,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, who recused herself from the portion of the case dealing with Harvard University as a former member of that institution’s Board of Overseers. “The Court ignores the dangerous consequences of an America where its leadership does not reflect the diversity of the People.”
I have so many ideas, but none of them will be used. Cut the school day in half and make classes half the size; half the kids go to school at the start of the day, half the kids go to school at the midway point. Cut out the unnecessary fluff. Track kids for academia or skills-based learning much sooner. Make school lunch out of real food. Etc etc etc
Some people (who should know better) refer to scientific accounts of behavior that invoke evolution by natural selection as “just so stories.” For a variety of reasons I have come to believe that a large number of these, maybe the majority, are bad faith responses to an internal sense of revulsion that some people have on being forced to consider that they are animals, and that the rules of biology therefore apply to them.
In another example, FBI personnel continued to refer to Christopher Steele’s primary sub-source, the Washington-based Brookings Institute fellow Igor Danchenko, as “Russia-based” and out of their control, even after he became a paid FBI source. “Similar concealments and misrepresentations by, say, Enron executives would be taken very seriously by DOJ officials,” says Stephen McIntyre, who was part of the “Sleuth’s Corner” team that helped identify Danchenko.
Given that Papadopoulos for instance was prosecuted over an obscure timeline discrepancy in an interview that only took place when investigators came to him, it seems strange that more consequential “errors” that made their way into FISA applications, didn’t merit the same approach.
Durham put the lie to all of this, which would have been embarrassing at least for news media, if it cared about its reputation. But a larger question remains: if none of that material was true, and much of it was engineered lying, how is that not in some way illegal? If Richard Nixon became an all-time villain for pulling campus-style pranks like the “Canuck Letter,” how is there nothing in the books covering the faking of the innumerable Steele stories, or the Alfa Server affair, or even engineering digital surveillance of a presidential campaign under false pretenses?
It was a relief to see some truths exposed, even years late. But if Durham had to answer real questions, it would be difficult for him to explain leaving so many of these issues unresolved.
Content that is not included in PHIL20046, on the other hand, includes white supremacist propaganda, neo-Nazi talking points, and an approving literary exegesis of /{Mein Kampf}. This might seem like an odd detail to note. But it is important to state for the record, given the profusion of stickers and posters recently plastered around the University of Melbourne campus, accusing the course instructor, Holly Lawford-Smith, of crafting her syllabus for the exclusive benefit of “fascists.”
Gender-critical feminists trace their roots to the radical-feminism movement of the 1960s. They often focus on the pernicious effects of gender stereotypes; and critique the industries that profit from women’s pain, such as pornography. This kind of analysis focuses attention on the hardships that have historically gone along with existing as a woman. It also focuses attention on the real policy solutions required to address such hardships, including, where necessary, the maintenance of safe single-sex spaces. As one might assume, gender-critical feminists typically have little time for men who, having recently announced the discovery of some soul-like spark of womanhood within them, commence hectoring women about the imperfect nature of their intersectional feminism.
The choice of venue is worth reflecting upon. It wasn’t until 1963 that women were permitted full and equal membership in the Oxford Union. At the time, some men objected to female inclusion on the basis that women would distract the august proceedings with “chatter”; and that, instead of paying attention, the women would be “eternally occupied by nylons, high-heeled shoes, and an aura of scent.” (We are happy to report that Stock somehow managed to resist such distractions during her well-received oration.) Just six decades later, a misogynistic campaign to shut women up stirs anew, though now trafficking under the faux-progressive banner of intersectional feminism instead of traditional sexism.
Amid the protests that unfolded outside the Oxford Union debating hall, a reporter from Times Radio asked demonstrators if they’d read Stock’s 2021 book Material Girls. All of them said no. Like many self-identified progressives who seek to muzzle women, they feel themselves unencumbered by the need to engage with their opponents’ arguments, having pre-emptively defined any form of dissent as a form of de facto hate speech. “This isn’t really about freedom of speech,” one said. “This is about debating somebody’s existence.”
Such rhetoric is typical of the tired slogans that now substitute for intellectual argument in this area. By this stated view, offering objections to the housing of female prisoners with biologically male trans-identified rapists is tantamount to condemning swathes of humanity to some symbolic abyss; just as insisting on proper therapeutic safeguards before rubber-stamping a child’s demand for transition drugs and surgeries is denounced as an invitation to suicide.
This kind of ghoulish sloganeering has gotten a free pass for years within certain academic and activist subcultures. And so it should not surprise us that these same sloganeers would make the absurd suggestion that Lawford-Smith is a “fascist.” By the lights of this movement, anything less than complete ideological acquiescence signals a tendency to hum 1930s-era German marching music.
Earlier this month I strolled around the L.A. Pride parade in Hollywood. There I met a gay eleven-year-old boy who had to contend not with being routinely bullied, but with the fact that the two other gay boys in his class were dating each other and not him (and who’s to say which is worse, really?). I met a whole slew of gay-looking girls who identified as everything from queer to lesbian to trans, and who very politely tolerated my interrogations on everything from their pronouns to their chest-bindings. I met a ten-year-old who told me she was nonbinary and pansexual. Or rather, they were nonbinary and pansexual.
I felt approximately 90. It’s not like the various identities comprising “LGBTQ+” are totally new to me, but at the end of the day I’m just a boring old G who came of age at a time when most of these labels had yet to be invented. Walking around Pride, I wondered if these new letters are a reflection of immutable characteristics—remember born this way?—or rather, a new way of categorizing oneself based on aesthetics—a kind of performance.
Whereas I don’t think of homosexuality as a performance. Sure, it’s a showstopper when I practice it, but it has nothing to do with my hair color or my clothes.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9221.2007.00586.x?ref=quillette.comA further problem with the whole industry is there’s often a reluctance to even say what the positive effects /{might} be—because then you would have to measure them.
One of the things that seems to trigger a person’s latent predisposition to authoritarianism is exposure to difference, and thinking of someone as the other. And in the work of Karen Stenner and other research literature on authoritarianism, it makes the point that what we consider the /{other} is actually pretty malleable.
Diversity training raises the salience of race, of gender, of whatever attribute it is that you’re talking about in training sessions with your coworkers. And I think that the people who advocate for this kind of training are excited by, or are favourably disposed to, diversity. And they imagine that they have the same psychology as everyone else, where if you tell people more about these other people who are /{different}, then everybody will get along better.
But in fact, for the minority of people who have a latent predisposition to authoritarianism, if you raise the degree to which they think of another group of people as the other—as a them and not an us—they’ll become less comfortable and more hostile to that group.
If journalists understood this insight, then when refugees came from, say, Afghanistan, and moved into a small town in the United States or Canada, the local newspaper reporter who wants them to be accepted, instead of going out and writing an article about, “Oh, their food is so /{different} from anything I’ve ever had, and their music is so atonal and interesting, and aren’t there all these unique differences?” they would write a story that said, “I went and I ate with these people, and even though their dress is different and their customs are different, it turns out, at the end of the day, they love their kids just like we do, and they want them to get an education. That was the most important thing. And we have so much in common as humans.”
And I would say that my relatively charitable view of this is informed partly by talking to a bunch of people who do diversity trainings for a living, and hearing how critical many of them are about their own industry. They don’t want to get rid of DEI training entirely. They just think there’s a better way.
As I also say in the article, some things that come under the DEI umbrella are utterly defensible. I don’t think that it never makes sense to hire a diversity consultant. Some companies have racially discriminated for years. If they find that they’ve been doing that, and that their hiring procedures are all messed up. and they bring someone in who is an expert on conducting fair interviews et cetera, that is fine.
This is part of the maddening thing about the conversation on this subject: “DEI” is a bundle of three goods that are hazily defined. They encompass practical things that almost everyone would agree to—along with other things that almost no one wants.
What we’re talking about here helps explain why there are even some leftists—and maybe even self-described /{socialists}—who are expressing these concerns. I’m thinking of Catherine Liu, who has written a book describing how some aspects of DEI have basically become a socially acceptable ideological template to allow the existing managerial class to reassert its moral authority over the workplace.
Here in Canada, it’s not uncommon for university DEI vice-presidents to make $250,000 a year, at a time when adjunct professors are getting paid peanuts. By traditional class analysis, it’s difficult to sustain that difference unless you say, “Oh, well, this person is an enlightened prophet of diversity and inclusion and equity. And how else are we going to solve these existential problems?”
In December 2022, a lunch date at Farrar’s home was offered as a prize in a McMaster auction held to benefit the local United Way charity. Small worlds being what they are, the winner turned out to be none other than Karin Humphreys. After the university confirmed that her $200 payment had cleared, the lunch was scheduled for March 24th, 2023.
Alas, when Humphreys then notified the president’s assistant of the guests who would accompany her—a list that included three PNB faculty members, and a graduate student whose life had been upended by the 2020 sex-ring social panic—it was discovered that the president had a scheduling conflict.
The lunch would have to be delayed, an assistant told Humphreys in a March 13th email. But the professor was assured that the president’s office would be back in touch, just as soon as the assistant “confirm[ed] a few spring travel dates.”
As of press time, Karin Humphreys is still waiting.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/randall-jarrellFrom my mother’s sleep I fell into the State,And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.
In this neo-Soviet information age we’ve sadly learned the third-world habit of reading between-the-lines messaging, like: irrespective of who actually did the Nord Stream attack, the U.S. appears — this week anyway — to be throwing the Ukrainian government overboard. Why? The fact that voters have to wonder is already a strain.
Specialists in “anti-disinformation” insist a goal of foreign fake news artists is to assault the reasoning process itself, making populations distrust once-reliable sources, leaving them susceptible to conspiracy theories. If that’s true, how is it not provably the case that domestic officials are playing the same game, moving goalposts on everything from the origin of the coronavirus to vaccine efficacy to Nord Stream?
The Nord Stream narrative has now gone from “No one thinks anyone but Russia did it” to “It’s a mystery!” to “There’s no evidence Russia did it” to “pro-Ukraine saboteurs may have done it” to “The U.S. and its allies have known for nearly a year Kyiv did it, but said otherwise the whole time.” What are we supposed to think next time officials make statements after a disaster? Are we supposed to forget all this background?
I will also stress this part: we should forgive the debt because doing so is about as simple as policy gets. 90+% of this debt is held by the feds. We can wave a magic wand and make it disappear. That is a very rare condition in politics.
So, this piece by Sam Adler-Bell about how the left “can’t take a W.” I don’t know that the actual left can’t take a W. But the “left,” what passes for the left, can’t take a W because it’s not a political movement. It’s not a sincere attempt to positively change the world. Instead, the “left” is a) a social culture of frustrated post-college urbanites who know little about left theory or practice and who use left politics as just another way to wage petty little wars of social status with their peers, and b) a set of ambitious entrepreneurs who milk that community for all its worth in the form of podcasts, newsletters, and Twitch. The professionals sell their precious disaffection and their endlessly-workshopped little bon mots and (credit where due) wring out income streams like they’re squeezing water out of a towel. And what they know is that their audience of email-job rageaholics, that army of frustrated would-be filmmakers/musicians/social media stars, doesn’t demand constructive insight but rather anger, formless and pointless and directionless, that then gets packaged as anticapitalist politics. The “left” can’t take a W because positivity is inimical to everything that defines their culture.
Adler-Bell’s too rosy about the Democrats. Fossil fuel companies celebrated the Inflation Reduction Act, which by the way seems unlikely to actually help much with inflation. Student debt relief will not survive legal challenge in the court system Republicans have meticulously built for decades, and anyway it does nothing to address the structural problems with college funding. And in general the Democrats remain a Clintonite party, a triangulating and cowardly party, even as I acknowledge that their policy platform has genuinely moved to the left in my adult life. The country also happens to be all kinds of fucked up. Anger is a natural, and a correct, response to the state of things.
My YA novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, is one of the most challenged and banned books of the last 20 years. According to the American Library Association, my novel was the most banned and challenged book in the United States in the decade 2010-2019. So I have more personal experience with the right wing's vilification of books and writers than just about everybody. But I'm also highly aware of the way the left censors and silences writers. And a lot of this silencing and censoring happens before a book is even published, with sensitivity readers who demand changes based on ever-shifting moral standards and definitions of "triggers" and, more dangerously, by creating an environment where writers silence and censor themselves because they fear professional and personal excommunication. As I've written elsewhere, the right wing are censorship vikings and the left wing are censorship ninjas.-Sherman Alexie
Credential inflation has employers favoring applicants with bachelor and advanced degrees for roles that don’t even require such education. The lowliest entry-level administrative assistant now usually needs a four-year degree to get their foot in the door of most big companies. (Lind contends, as have others, that this highly competitive environment encourages the promotion of toxic identity politics by professionals who leverage identity as yet another credential and a weapon for elbowing one’s way past the competition and up the career ladder.)
When I showed Hasnas the poster that I consider to be the most objectionable—the one that names me and directs students to boycott my class on pain of supporting fascists and bigots—he delivered his judgement without hesitation: that statement would be categorized as protected speech at an American university.
Wood takes the core of a university to be its commitment to free and open inquiry, a tradition that can be traced back to Thomas Jefferson at the University of Virginia in the United States, and Alexander von Humboldt at Humboldt-Univerzität zu Berlin in Germany. There were university-like institutions in the United Kingdom before this time, but they were religious institutions, which meant they had blasphemy rules that severely limited the possibilities for free inquiry. Wood thinks that what we’re seeing today with the heavy emphasis on diversity, equity, and inclusion by universities is a return to the old British blasphemy rules but in the form of a secular morality.
It’s true that the Netherlands did not get where it is without some highly intensive farming practices, which have certainly damaged the country’s ecosystem with nitrates leaching into rivers. Worldwide, the agriculture industry has been a major contributor to carbon and nitrogen greenhouse gases and has led to plummeting numbers of birds and insects.
But a society demanding cheap food has been fully complicit in farming’s industrialization. It is wrong to blame farmers for following not just markets but also government policy under the EU Common Agricultural Policy, which subsidized farmers to produce food on the cheap.
Take methane. On my farm in Scotland, we are talking to a start-up business named Biofactory. Their micro anaerobic digester can process all our slurry (cow manure) and turn the methane into biogas, which is burnt on-site to create electricity, heat, carbon dioxide, and digestate. The electricity will power not just our farming operations but also local houses, while the heat and the carbon dioxide will support a hydroponic farming operation to produce vegetables. And the digestate is a nutrient-rich fertilizer that we can spread back on the land without environmental damage.
Furthermore, farmers are already producing green fuel. After slaughter, the tallow from our cows is turned into biodiesel (one ton of liveweight animal produces around 180 liters of biodiesel)—a major saving on fossil fuels. Out in the fields, we are embracing regenerative grazing practices by moving the cows regularly to allow the land to rest. This sequesters carbon into the soil—something we can now measure. It also increases soil health and biodiversity: a cow on pasture creates a fifth of its own body weight in insects every year through its cow pats, enough to sustain increased birdlife if you don’t use ivermectin wormers.
https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/2019-01-14/ty-article-magazine/world-desalination-industry-is-dumping-50-more-toxic-brine-than-thought/0000017f-e72a-dc7e-adff-f7af9e540000It doesn't matter how "spread out" it is. What this technology does is alter the salinity of water, which impacts the wildlife living there. The more you do it, the worse it gets. Sure, maybe the effect is negligible now, but it can't be scaled up. It's painfully unsustainable.
Roger Williams, a 17th-century Christian minister and founder of Rhode Island, interpreted several passages in the Old and New Testament to support limiting government interference in religious matters. Williams published The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution for Cause of Conscience, arguing for a separation of church and state based on biblical reasoning. Williams believed that Israel was a unique covenant kingdom and not an appropriate model for New Testament Christians who believed that the Old Testament covenant had been fulfilled. Therefore, the more informative Old Testament examples of civil government were "good" non-covenant kings such as Artaxerxes, who tolerated the Jews and did not insist that they follow his state religion.
Instead of putting energy and emotion into protecting preconceptions that had been imposed on me from outside, I was free to investigate anything and to follow any path wherever it took me. I could use my time to formulate questions and hypotheses and to deduce consequences from any hypothesis and from the negation of any hypothesis. I became an autonomous member of the community of investigators and thereby became collegial with people that had been ideological enemies. This train of thought pervades my signature piece "Argumentations and logic" and it continues the advice formulated in my two instructional articles: "Critical thinking and pedagogical license" and "Inseparability of logic and ethics"
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/15291006231163179For ten years lots of important people told us again and again that discrimination against women in STEM was a massive problem. People who questioned its extent were accused of misogyny and sometimes fired, I got harassed and insulted for pointing out reasons the standard arguments didn’t seem to hold true. Millions of dollars were spent investigating and responding to the problem. And now I expect this pretty strong evidence that women were actually /{advantaged} in hiring and had parity in most other things (the salary is probably just the usual negotiation issue) to produce no publicity, no apologies, and no soul-searching from the people leading the current round of anti-academia and anti-STEM inquisitions. Sorry, yes I am bitter, it just bothers me how much the people claiming that it’s urgently important that nobody is ever allowed to suggest they are wrong have a consistent track record of being totally and inexcusably wrong.
the exhausted majority
America has had roughly one mass shooting a day for the last decade—roughly the time when we first started looking at this phenomenon. Some of the responses to our first paper surprised me. I hadn’t realized that, up until 2015, the framing of gun violence as a public health issue was actually forbidden by Congress, resulting in a strange generational skew in investigations and a lack of investigators. In addition, America’s addiction to guns (something that, as scientists, we were utterly uninterested in to begin with, except as a control measure to further our analysis) started to look like a nicotine addict’s ingenious ways to keep nicotine in their life. Almost every day someone sends me details of bulletproof backpacks for junior schoolers, rapidly assembled bulletproof school walls, suggestions about arming teachers, and similar ingenious (or downright potty) ideas. They remind me of my ingenious attempts to stop smoking 20 years ago. I tried a pipe. I tried nicotine gum. I tried patches. I’d try anything rather than face up to being addicted to nicotine. As the Onion puts it with gallows humour, “No way to prevent this, says the only nation where this regularly happens.”
But that’s not quite fair. Spree killings are not uniquely American. Indeed, we are currently documenting and analysing killings, with exactly the same profiles, worldwide—but typically using vehicles or knives. What is unique about America is the ready availability of firearms coupled with a lobbying body that resists any attempts at restricting their access. That means that the death rate in other countries is much lower.
Also, the phenomenon of mass public killings of strangers by men is not new. It was not that long ago that such killings were regarded as an old and culture-bound syndrome. After all, “amok” is a Malay word. And here is how one contemporary (from a couple of centuries ago) described it:
> A man — it was almost always a man — would feel he had endured an unbearable indignity. After a period of brooding, he lashed out by attacking everyone in sight with knives or other sharp weapons, hacking away until fellow villagers or the authorities finally killed him.
When she first tried to do so, in June, 2022, Cooney’s therapist reacted badly. She told Cooney that critiquing cancel culture was giving in to “white supremacy culture,” and said Cooney was making her feel “unsafe” as a black woman. By the end of the session, the therapist had given her an ultimatum: they could continue to work together and keep cancel culture discussions off the table, or “the relationship was over,” Cooney said.
Cooney continued with the therapist for six more months, but her therapist seemed to emphasize Cooney’s victimhood, reiterating that other people were responsible for her oppression as a gay woman. “She said, ‘You’re not free because of homophobia and sexism. You’ll never be free.’”
Cooney began pushing back, expressing views the therapist had declared taboo such as not wanting to categorize people based on their identities, or asserting that too many people were being shamed and punished for minor supposed transgressions. Finally, her therapist told Cooney their relationship was finished.
her judge is Lila Lavender, the 2019 national debate champion, whose paradigm reads, “Before anything else, including being a debate judge, I am a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist. . . . I cannot check the revolutionary proletarian science at the door when I’m judging. . . . I will no longer evaluate and thus never vote for rightest capitalist-imperialist positions/arguments. . . . Examples of arguments of this nature are as follows: fascism good, capitalism good, imperialist war good, neoliberalism good, defenses of US or otherwise bourgeois nationalism, Zionism or normalizing Israel, colonialism good, US white fascist policing good, etc.”
Psychological flexibility means being open to experience (emotions, sensations, memories) and being mindfully aware of ongoing thoughts without automatically taking them to be literally true, so that you can chose which products of the judgmental mind are worth using and which ones should be left unutilized. It means being able to direct your attention in a flexible, fluid, and voluntary way, noticing what you notice from a more spiritual or perspective-taking sense of self that connects you in shared consciousness to the awareness of others.
To a ruling class that had already grown tired of democracy’s demand that freedom be granted to its subjects, disinformation provided a regulatory framework to replace the U.S. Constitution. By aiming at the impossible, the elimination of all error and deviation from party orthodoxy, the ruling class ensures that it will always be able to point to a looming threat from extremists—a threat that justifies its own iron grip on power.
Adnan’s case follows a decades-old pattern in “true-crime” journalism. A writer or producer creates a superficially convincing documentary or book that relies on partisan sources such as the defendant, his lawyers, and his family. More often than not, the documentary commits errors typical of legal novices (or lawyers with an axe to grind). It dismisses the original trial as an afterthought, valuable only as a source of soundbites. It insists on a level of proof beyond what the justice system (or common sense) demands. It treats routine compromises involved in prosecuting criminals as sinister skulduggery. It obsesses over individual pieces of evidence or testimony without considering how all the evidence fits together. It demands the State’s evidence be pristine and conclusive, while excusing gaping logical flaws in the defendant’s own arguments.
Another common-law legal maxim calls cross-examination the “greatest legal engine ever invented for the discovery of truth.” This is an exaggeration, but not a ridiculous one. A disciplined cross-examination can destroy flimsy arguments and false narratives. Now, millions of people online can “cross-examine” the evidence themselves.
People born outside the U.S. made up 18.1% of the overall labor force, up from 17.4% the prior year and the highest level in data back to 1996, the Labor Department said in its annual report on foreign-born workers. The number of immigrants in the labor force—those working or actively looking for jobs—rose by 1.8 million, or 6.3%, to 29.8 million in 2022.
More foreign-born people joined the labor force than native-born Americans, accounting for more than half of the 3.1 million overall gain last year, the report said. There were roughly 164 million workers age 16 or older in the U.S. labor force last year.
You’re disgusted at those who “do their own research”? What do you think journalism is? None of us do lab experiments. The job is always an imperfect effort to figure out which sources are most trustworthy, and because even the most credentialed often screw up, we always need to leave room for consensus proving wrong.
This would have been an insane way of approaching the issue if the vaccine actually worked as advertised. It was {Heathers} meets public health messaging, guaranteed to alienate the people they were ostensibly trying to reach.
Now that the Bidens, Faucis, and Rochelle Walenskys turned out to be wrong about so many questions, the lack of apology about the sadism is glaring. Perhaps that’s because this campaign worked as intended. In the #TwitterFiles we saw anti-disinformation “experts” appearing to consciously blur lines between genuine disinfo (“garlic, ginger, honey, and lemon” cure Covid-19) and healthy skepticism (vaccines do not prevent infection).
One of my favorite things about sports is that they provide a mostly harmless setting for me to vent my more bloodcurdlingly reactionary impulses, which, if I applied them to the political realm, might result in my favoring things such as the restoration of Stuart sovereignty over North America or the prosecution and public flogging of Uber drivers who play David Guetta while shuffling me around Brooklyn.
Sports are, after all, one of the few remaining realms in which we generally accept the legitimacy of hierarchy and order. Anyone can play, of course, but some people are simply better than others, and this fact is out in public for everyone to see. You cannot cry or bully your way into victory. You cannot call HR or summon a Twitter mob to wangle your way out of defeat. And excuses, everyone understands, are for losers. In sports, there is talent, hard work, sheer dumb luck, and nothing else—a fitting metaphor for life, whether or not we choose to acknowledge it.
My fellow tennis players, resist that urge. Those public courts are ours and for good reason. The greatest modern writer about tennis, the novelist David Foster Wallace, wrote in Infinite Jest of the sport as a form of “training for citizenship,” insofar as it teaches a sort of self-mastery and overcoming necessary for free citizens in a democratic state:
> The true opponent, the enfolding boundary, is the player himself. Always and only the self out there, on court, to be met, fought, brought to the table to hammer out terms. . . . All life is the same, as citizens of the human State: the animating limits are within, to be killed and mourned, over and over again.
Everyone who has learned to play tennis at an adequate level has demonstrated that they possess certain qualities that we prize, or once prized, in our fellow man. Our society, in its wisdom, once chose to honor these people by providing them with places to play. That our courts should now be invaded by pickleballers, the representatives of a future in which human freedom and conscience dissolve in the steady IV drip of easy pleasure on demand, can, if left unopposed, only bode ill for our country.
Stanford’s new social order offers a peek into the bureaucrat’s vision for America. It is a world without risk, genuine difference, or the kind of group connection that makes teenage boys want to rent bulldozers and build islands. It is a world largely without unencumbered joy; without the kind of cultural specificity that makes college, or the rest of life, particularly interesting.
Since 2013, Stanford’s administration has executed a top-to-bottom destruction of student social life. Driven by a fear of uncontrollable student spontaneity and a desire to enforce equity on campus, a growing administrative bureaucracy has destroyed almost all of Stanford’s distinctive student culture.
What happened at Stanford is a cultural revolution on the scale of a two-mile college campus. In less than a decade, Stanford’s administration eviscerated a hundred years of undergraduate culture and social groups. They ended decades-old traditions. They drove student groups out of their houses. They scraped names off buildings. They went after long-established hubs of student life, like fraternities and cultural theme houses. In place of it all, Stanford erected a homogenous housing system that sorts new students into perfectly equitable groups named with letters and numbers. All social distinction is gone.
1. traditional viewIn this conception, “sex” is thought to result from human biology and occur in a bimodal (“male” versus “female”) distribution, except for very specific and extremely rare genetic and phenotypic anomalies. In this conception, “gender” isn’t quite the same thing as sex, since the roles, responsibilities, and privileges associated with being of one sex or the other are, at least to some extent, socially constructed and may therefore vary from one culture or context to the next. Nevertheless, gender identities and roles are assumed in some significant way to track biological sex and have some roots therein.[...]2. Social constructionAlternatively, one might hold that all aspects of sex- and gender-related identity are purely social constructions. This wouldn’t necessarily erase the facts of biology and science, but it would consign them to irrelevance for identity-constitution purposes. And indeed, the conception of social construction would be a powerful weapon against the traditional notion of sex and gender identities rooted in the undeniable objective facts of dimorphic human biology. [...]3. Internal essentialismA third view might posit that there is something inherent about sexual and gender identity—that it is a kind of internal essence that exists entirely independent of the particular, contingent biological facts of your existence. In this view, you could be truly a man or a woman (or conceivably something else) irrespective of what biology you happen to have. [...]4. ChoiceThe fourth fundamental conceptual model for how one might think about these sorts of identity is personal choice. There is a sort of libertarian logic to this approach, inasmuch as it leaves the determination of “what” one is to the individual. This conception is inherently much more flexible than the others, for it does not need to demonstrate the existence of any sort of objectively pre-social “fact” (e.g., in the form of biological identity or of some quasi-religiously postulated “sexual soul”) and it can also easily accommodate dynamics of change.
By contrast, the terms “masculine” and “feminine” are clearly associated with specific gendered expectations about how it is that males and females should behave, and are thus less at risk of being confused with biological categories.
But this mindset was considered anathema during MeToo. With trauma allegedly lurking just around the corner of every heterosexual encounter, distrust became the default. Not just the default, but celebrated—“men need to feel a cold spike of fear when they begin a sexual encounter,” intoned Vox’s Ezra Klein, in a proto-MeToo celebration of this new, terrified paradigm for intimacy. The idea, of course, was that women already felt that fear, living as they did at the eternal precipice of victimization by the patriarchy; in a truly equal society, everyone would be scared.
Of course, today’s 180-degree pivot to brash fearlessness is identitarian horse-trading: MeToo is out, BLM is in. The dynamics of any conflict must be considered along these lines, and the narrative must be massaged accordingly.
This was true in 2020 when a white woman called the police on a black man who threatened her in a public park; it is true now, as piety demands that the behavior of the black, homeless victim of this terrible tragedy must not be scrutinized in any way. On the Left, that is; the Right has spent the past few days waving Neely’s criminal history in the air, singing “He Had It Coming,” in an absolute spectacle of ghoulishness.
The protesters would stay in Washington until the nation agreed to a radical redistribution of wealth, with guaranteed jobs, guaranteed income and a “Marshall Plan” to revitalize America’s cities. King said he hoped to jolt the president and Congress by bringing together a populist coalition, with poor people from every racial, ethnic and geographic group in the country, as well as the “swelling masses of young people” who had grown disenchanted with American materialism and militarism.
In my opinion, the movement is not strictly to liberate women, it's to liberate men. For every liberated woman, there's a more liberated man.
I think there've been more and more dents made in all armors, not just in that of the traditional ale. Women still want a man to be a man, yes, bu they don't want him going around flexing his muscles and shouting "I'm a man!"
The thing now is there are fewer frustrated women. Women now are more capable of expressing their desires sexual instead of being an old-time submissive object. The old way wasn't much fun for women, and probably wasn't much fun for men, either.
Of course, there's a differentiation between male and female, and I think it will always be there. /{vive la diffèrence!}
A former subway performer known for his spot-on Michael Jackson impression, Neely struggled in recent years with homelessness and worsening mental illness, friends said. He had been arrested several times, and had recently pleaded guilty to assaulting a 67-year-old woman in 2021 as she left a subway station. After pleading guilty, he missed a court date, leading to a warrant for his arrest that was still active at the time of his death.
His death has divided some in New York and beyond, triggering intense debates and protests. Left-leaning advocates described the killing as an act of racist vigilantism, invoking comparisons to the infamous subway shooting carried out by Bernhard Goetz against four teenagers in 1984.
This is exactly what people feared about Jankowicz, that from a position of authority she would deem protected-but-pointed speech illegitimate. She additionally doesn’t seem to grasp that the Mary Poppins video was broadcast and re-broadcast precisely because her performance so completely bulls-eyed the general public’s fears about the type of personality that might be staffing a “nanny state.” For her to file this scary lawsuit in an effort to show that she was falsely depicted as “scary” is — am I allowed to say it’s funny? It is funny, isn’t it?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreethoughtBoerne came into being as an offshoot of the Texas Hill Country Free Thinker Latin Settlements, resulting from the Revolutions of 1848 in the German states. Those who came were Forty-Eighters, intellectual liberal abolitionists who enjoyed conversing in Latin and who believed in utopian ideals that guaranteed basic human rights to all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_revolutions_of_1848%E2%80%931849Freethought (sometimes spelled free thought)[1][2][3] is an epistemological viewpoint which holds that beliefs should not be formed on the basis of authority, tradition, revelation, or dogma, and that beliefs should instead be reached by other methods such as logic, reason, and empirical observation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forty-EightersThe middle-class elements were committed to liberal principles, while the working class sought radical improvements to their working and living conditions. As the middle class and working class components of the Revolution split, the conservative aristocracy defeated it. Liberals were forced into exile to escape political persecution, where they became known as Forty-Eighters. Many emigrated to the United States, settling from Wisconsin to Texas.
Thus did I stumble, blindly, into the Imperial History Wars. Had I been a professional historian, I would have known what to expect, but being a mere ethicist, I did not. Still, naivety has its advantages, bringing fresh eyes to see sharply what weary ones have learned to live with.
This unscrupulous indifference to historical truth indicates that the controversy over empire is not really a controversy about history at all. It is about the present, not the past. An empire is a single state that contains a variety of peoples, one of which is dominant. As a form of political organisation, it has been around for millennia and has appeared on every continent. The Assyrians were doing empire in the Middle East over 4,000 years ago. They were followed by the Egyptians, the Babylonians, and the Persians. In the sixth century BC, the Carthaginians established a series of colonies around the Mediterranean. Then came the Athenians, followed by the Romans and after them the Byzantine rump.
Empire first appeared in China in the third century BC and, despite periodic collapses, still survives today. From the seventh century AD, Muslim Arabs invaded east as far as Afghanistan and west as far as central France. In the 15th century, empire proved very popular: the Ottomans were doing it in Asia Minor, the Mughals in the Indian subcontinent, the Incas in South America, and the Aztecs in Mesoamerica. Further north, a couple of centuries later, the Comanche extended their imperial sway over much of what is now Texas, while the Asante were expanding their control in West Africa. And in the 1820s, King Shaka led the highly militarised Zulus in scattering other South African peoples to several of the four winds, conducting at least one exterminationist war in the process.
dopamine detox: no- phone- internet- computer- music- masturbation- junk food
because we knew there would be some little old ladies back on Earth who would be very upsed that their tax dollars had sent Playboy bunnies up to the Moon
A university has “confiscated” the findings of an academic studying Britain’s gender wars in a row over her “dangerous” research data, The Telegraph can reveal.
Dr Laura Favaro began the first ever taxpayer-funded study into whether social scientists at universities feel censored over their views on transgender issues in March 2020 at City, University of London.
But it has descended into chaos, with the study’s author allegedly hounded out of the university, stripped of the findings she collected and barred from publishing them amid claims of transphobia.
Culpeper County public school officials have decided to stop assigning a version of Anne Frank's diary, one of the most enduring symbols of the atrocities of the Nazi regime, after a parent complained that the book includes sexually explicit material and homosexual themes.[...]The diary documents the daily life of a Jewish girl in Amsterdam during World War II. Frank started writing on her 13th birthday, shortly before her family went into hiding in an annex of an office building. The version of the diary in question includes passages previously excluded from the widely read original edition, first published in Dutch in 1947. That book was arranged by her father, the only survivor in her immediate family. Some of the extra passages detail her emerging sexual desires; others include unflattering descriptions of her mother and other people living together.
Whenever I mention this, people misunderstand. Yes, some portions of the city are a mess. Yes, the city faces major property crime and homelessness problems. Just this week, the National Guard and California Highway Patrol were sent in to shut down open-air drug markets. Major retailers are exiting because of the theft problem. But conservatives undermine their case when they overstate things.[...]San Francisco is unlikely to ever become a conservative paradise, but even the politics there is self-correcting. Last year, voters recalled their soft-on-crime district attorney Chesa Boudin. The newly appointed DA has vowed to clean up the streets. Note the National Guard intervention mentioned above. If you don't like San Francisco, that's fine, but don't spread tall tales about it.
In a recent interview with The New York Times, former White House COVID-19 adviser Anthony Fauci conceded that face masks had, at best, a modest overall impact on coronavirus transmission during the pandemic. "From a broad public-health standpoint, at the population level, masks work at the margins—maybe 10 percent," he said. "But for an individual who religiously wears a mask, a well-fitted KN95 or N95, it's not at the margin. It really does work."
However, it should be said that “permanent” is a relative term. Iroquoian farming villages tended to have a shelf life of 10 to 30 years. That was because of the slash-and-burn method of agriculture they adopted. Establishing a farming village required the clearing of forest. Stone axes were used to fell smaller trees, while larger ones were “girdled” (a method of killing a tree by removing its bark in a ring near the trunk). Over time, the tree dies, and its branches fall off. Once enough trees were removed, the resulting land was rich in nutrients and open to sunlight.
War seems to have been driven by the need of men (especially young men) to make a name for themselves, or to exact retribution for past wrongs. It seems the process of amalgamation and social cohesion had mostly re-directed violence from conflicts within the community, into well organized violence enacted far from home. Warriors who returned from battle with plenty of prisoners to ritually torture and kill won great prestige among their neighbours.
While workers and taxpayers are the losers in the low-wage/high-welfare system, the biggest winners are a minority of Americans: low-wage employers and consumers of some goods and services provided by underpaid workers. Means-tested wage subsidies like the EITC and in-kind benefits like food stamps and Medicaid are not only vertical redistribution from rich to poor, they are also lateral transfers from all taxpayers to particular consumers who buy things made cheaper by government-subsidized labor.
Affluent Americans are disproportionately likely to hire low-wage workers to do tasks that working-class Americans do for themselves. Why should I be taxed to keep your housecleaner or gardener out of poverty, so that you can pay a lower wage for a service that benefits you alone?
the goodie-goddies are the enemies of true virtue [...] the road to hell is paved by good intentions
Being in the bullseye, it's important to know something about the enemy's weapons, and how to spoil their aim. That aim is nothing less than world conquest, and subversion by every possible means is the chief method used.
The key word is "conflict". Outside of the Red countries themselves, conflict must be promoted everywhere. Every dissatisfaction must grow into a resentment; every resentment must become an argument; every argument must grow into a fight; every fight must blossom into a riot; every riot must expand into a war; and every war must end in devastation. For there in the ruins, Communism finds its chance.
For a Communist, there must never be a compromise, never a settlement of disputes. Only conflict.
To Americans, none of it makes much sense. But wherever there is poverty, unemployment, disillusionment, there is also despair. And where there is despair, people may listen to anyone to any plan, that promises a change.
Here’s something else that happened after Fukushima. The German government set up two commissions. The first focused on safety, asking whether any of Germany’s nuclear plants could someday experience a Chernobyl- or Fukushima-style calamity. The answer was no. “The safety review found they were in perfect working order,” Lambermont told me. “There was a significantly lower chance of an accident because the plants were extremely well constructed, more resilient, and less likely to face a sizable earthquake,” she added. (Ah, German engineering.)
https://quillette.com/2023/04/26/chernobyl-revisited/The answer the Greens give is that, however small the likelihood, a nuclear accident must be avoided at all costs. And that even if Germany must use coal for the time being—until the country has a fully renewable energy grid, another one of the country’s pipe dreams—it is worth it to prevent a nuclear disaster like Chernobyl or Fukushima. What tends to be forgotten is that at Fukushima, nobody died of radiation poisoning. Subsequent studies have shown no discernible increase in the cancer rate.
And yes, Chernobyl was awful, with 31 plant workers killed in the accident, and as many as an additional 4,000 people may eventually die from cancers resulting from the radioactivity they absorbed, according to a 2005 estimate by the United Nations. But the Chernobyl plant was “an unstable plant design that was intentionally pushed to the absolute brink of its operational capabilities in secret,” Lambermont said. (Ah, Russian engineering.)
“It’s as if your irresponsible neighbor started a house fire with his outmoded stove, so you decide that you can only use your microwave from now on,” she added.
In an interview, nuclear engineer and radiation specialist David LeClear described how the more extreme mortality estimates are reached through LNT. “You can take one millirem, which is a very tiny tiny amount of radiation, and do a dose estimation over several billion people and you can come up with a death number. Even though that’s kind of like saying that being spritzed with water from a little spray bottle makes you more wet even though you are standing in the pouring rain.”
Much of the tragedy of Chernobyl resides in the response to the meltdown. People exposed to harmless doses of radiation reported increased levels of depression, anxiety, and medically unexplained physical symptoms. In response to the accident, it was estimated in 1987 that over 100,000 wanted pregnancies were aborted in Western Europe. The Chernobyl Forum, an organization that is part of the UN, concluded that “the mental health impact of Chernobyl is the largest public health problem unleashed by the accident to date.”
But in 2022 my agents’ foreboding was realized. The manuscript of “Trial” was rejected by roughly 20 imprints of major New York publishers. A number of them found it impressive; several opined that it evoked my best work. Nonetheless, my ethnicity was now deeply problematic.
One publisher responded that I would be “rightly criticized” for writing the book; another that she only cared to hear on such subjects from “marginalized voices”; another, more colorfully, that I was “too liberal for white people and too white for Black people.” Others worried that this wasn’t the right book for my re-entry into fiction after nearly a decade. The head of one major publishing conglomerate called my agent hours after receiving the manuscript, saying that she adored it. All she had to do, she added, was to consult the young people who worked for her. That ended that.
The concept of iatrogenesis, native to medicine, describes misfortunes that would not occur but for one’s interaction with medicine itself. For example, the case of COVID you catch in the doctor’s waiting room or the elective surgery that impinges on a vein, which throws a clot, causing a stroke. Shockingly, medical iatrogenesis is the fifth leading cause of death worldwide.
Journalism’s iatrogenic damage may be less dramatic, but it is surely more pervasive because there is no escape from exposure. Avoid consuming news and you still will be passively subject to the media’s effect on your environment.[...]The potency of advertising, especially saturation advertising, is now beyond reasonable dispute. Tide may or may not be your best option for keeping clothes clean and springtime fresh, but it’s the top-selling detergent in the US by a wide margin, doubling its nearest competitor in revenues—and Procter & Gamble has spent a fortune to engineer that outcome and keep Tide’s orange trade dress front-of-mind for American housewives.
Studying critical and queer theory as an English Literature undergraduate at Oxford both confirmed and radically scrambled my faith in progress. At Oxford I was taught that language itself helps to shape meaning—and, worse, that every “sign” can only be defined in relation to other signs. In other words, we have no way of experiencing truth directly or objectively. How this related to the material world—the pressures of survival or the demands of physical life—was unclear.
This mental shift sent me (to say the least) a bit loopy. Overnight, the hallowed buildings of Oxford University stopped looking like an expression of ancient traditions where I could find my place. Suddenly they were hostile incursions by something phallic, domineering, and authoritarian. I told a friend that I experienced the “dreaming spires” as “barbed penises straining to fuck the sky.”
Disrupting this system seemed possible, perhaps for the first time, thanks to technology. In the heady early years of social media, it suddenly was easy to find others with similar interests. I experimented with drugs, kink, and nonmonogamous relationships. It felt possible to reimagine our genders and create supportive communities to realize our inner lives. I changed my name to Sebastian for a while. I pondered whether I really was female. It felt liberating, revolutionary, and unambiguously like the “progress” I’d always dreamed of.
By the time I emerged in my mid-thirties, I was married to a man, no longer lived in London, and had qualified as a psychotherapist.
And: I had a baby. Up to the point where I got pregnant, I’d taken for granted that men and women are substantially the same apart from our biology, and “progress” meant broadly the same thing for both sexes: the equal right to self-realization, shorn of culturally imposed obligations, expectations, stereotypes, or constraints.
The experience of being pregnant, and then a new mother, blew this out of the water.
Mainstream feminism has morphed from a movement with communitarian and libertarian strands to one focused almost entirely on individual freedom. But the answer for women does not lie in pursuing untrammeled freedom, mindless hedonism, or the final victory of one sex over the other, but rather a broader project of staying human together, as men and women, in ways that are in the common interests of both sexes.
The first of these must be reinstating single-sex spaces. This isn’t just to protect women from predatory men; men, too, need social spaces where they can do whatever it is men do when women aren’t around. Second, the most powerful weapon at women’s disposal for defending ourselves against the undercounted cost of supposedly “empowering” hookup culture is making sex properly consequential again.
So I’d like to ignore “the Twitter files,” documents from Twitter that Elon Musk sent to Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss, among others. They have been releasing information about how Twitter’s prior administration and its actions relating to moderation and censorship. It’s not that I don’t think there’s anything newsworthy there. I’m just not that interested. Frankly, I don’t believe that a big corporation like Twitter will ever maintain anything like just or equitable rules about what can and cannot be published on its platform. I didn’t trust Twitter’s old ownership; I don’t trust the new. Living under the directives of Vijaya Gaade is like being 40 and owning an expensive Manhattan walkup but still having an RA; living under the directives of Elon Musk is like being ruled by the guy at your gym who only shows up every two weeks but when he does performatively grunts and sweats and talks too loud to everyone in earshot. Musk has become right-coded, but while I’m sure he’s pretty good at running an electric car company, he’s mostly a sterling example of the casually-destructive American doofus, someone whose political views are totally subject to the point of view of whatever “funny” meme he last saw. Meanwhile it’s 2022 and Jack Dorsey still thinks cryptocurrency has a chance to liberate mankind. Twitter will always be led by a confederacy of dunces. Consistency and justice were never in the cards.
I would never attack good journalists, if only for fear of harming an endangered species. My contention is that the ProPublica troika’s work is a travesty of journalism, and I am increasingly disinclined to credit them with practicing journalism at all. Instead, they function as political opposition researchers. They follow the facts only far enough to find a plausible complaint that Justice Thomas did something wrong, which they baselessly frame as evidence of corruption, then move on to the next accusation.
SpaceX Starship Launch Engulfs Car in ‘Rapid Unscheduled Flying Debris’
Although people who look morphologically like modern humans appeared in Ethiopia almost 200,000 years ago, they did not develop modern human behavior for another 150,000 years. Then, suddenly, around 50,000 years ago modern human behavior emerges in Africa for the first time and we have seen the fundamental changes that took place at this time: (1) tools made from ivory, shells, and bones, not just stone, (2) these tools change in style rapidly in both time and space, (3) art first appears, (4) spatial organization in houses, (5) religious burials, and (6) fishing begins.
The enigma is why all of these fundamental changes happened simultaneously. Do all of these disparate changes have something in common? It has been suggested that the underlying cause of these changes was the appearance of symbolic thought in the form of fully modern human language.
Genetic evidence indicates that all people living today are descendants of a small East African population, perhaps as few as a thousand people, that lived around 50,000 years ago. Yet this small population succeeded in replacing all the people who had lived outside Africa for over a million years, as well as the other African populations that existed at that time.
The reason why this small African population succeeded in replacing everyone else was simply that they had developed the first fully modern language, which had an adaptive value so great that it allowed them to conquer the entire world in a short period of time, eliminating everyone else.
If there are clear genetic traces of this original small population, why aren’t there linguistic traces as well? The answer, of course, is that there are, they have been recognized for over a century, and yet, as we have seen, many experts deny they exist or could exist. That’s why I wrote this book.
What is disturbing about this affair is that it illustrates how a small vocal clique can bend an academic discipline to its will, relying on the unwillingness of the majority to push back. Academics—as is sometimes observed—are selected for conformity. (I used to think that philosophy was an exception to this rule, but not anymore.) Brazen unprofessionalism is permitted, even encouraged—provided it’s from those with the “correct” opinions. Junior academics and graduate students soon learn what they are not allowed to say.
A CDC committed to science would also have worked with other government agencies and private organizations from the first clusters of cases to conduct high-quality RCTs on masking. Such trials would need to be powered with large sample sizes in order to detect modest effects. To this day, they have not funded any RCTs.
Of course, such a comparison could not be made before the mandates were implemented. It would take some time before the policies could be tracked and evaluated, and nobody knew for sure what the data would show. In the meantime, the credibility of the CDC (and by extension all of public health) was on the line. The agency had already reversed itself once. The pressures were therefore intense for the CDC to find some real-world data to justify its new position.
It did so by trumpeting evidence that any beginning student in research methods would be embarrassed to include in a course assignment.
Extensive research in psychology, neuroscience, political science, and other disciplines shows what happens when issues get incorporated into political identities in that fashion. The first casualty is nuance, for people feel pressured to pick a side. Processes of confirmation bias and motivated reason kick into overdrive as people defend their group. Those holding the opposing position get demonized as not just wrong but immoral, and it becomes borderline impossible to engage in rational dialogue based on logic, reason, and evidence. People can even lose their ability to solve math problems when the correct answer would undercut their political commitments.
We can and must demand that public health officials not succumb to these same biases. If you’re going to invoke the mantle of science as the reason why someone should trust you, you have to actually adhere to the best scientific practices, regardless of whose political stances they uphold or undermine.
Nevertheless, research groups did manage to secure funding to conduct RCTs in two other countries. An RCT in Denmark failed to uncover a statistically significant effect of surgical masks on COVID rates. A later one in Bangladesh found no reliable benefit for the cloth masks that the CDC pronounced as effective in its famous reversal. The Bangladesh study did find a 12 percent reduction in cases for surgical masks, an effect size far smaller than masking advocates would have wanted. However, a series of problems with the study’s design and execution have led other researchers to challenge even the 12 percent figure.
The top of the hierarchy of evidence is a meta-analysis of RCTs, which is precisely what the Cochrane Library offered.
In countries like the U.S., you’re so free that you’re /{free to be unfree}, if you so choose. Echo chambers are like mini-dictatorships inside a larger free speech zone
The press loses its institutional power the moment the public ceases to view it as being separate from government.
According to a summary document assembled by a lawyer engaged by the Law Society, and subsequently made available to Quillette, Smith claimed that Nick had spoken in a “dangerous and dehumanizing” manner; had made comments that implied “trans people are not valid” and “trans people are wilfully committing fraud by cheating at sports, accessing public spaces for the purpose of committing sexual assault, or are mentally ill”; had “fram[ed] questions politely which are in substance efforts to have trans people engage in a debate about whether trans people have a right to exist in the world”; and had been engaged in “a search for authorization to discriminate against people who identify with a gender that is not their assigned sex, which is profoundly transphobic.” Smith also claimed that Nick was one of those “opponents to trans inclusion [who] intentionally attend workshops … to make use of the question period to derail the concept of transgender inclusion.”
OHRP read the article, investigated, and learned that Johns Hopkins IRB had exempted the study from the privacy restrictions. These restrictions were hard-to-interpret, but OHRP decided to take a maximalist approach. They stepped in, shut down the study, and said it could not restart until they got consent from every patient, doctor, and nurse involved, plus separate approval from each Michigan hospital’s IRB. This was impossible; even if all doctors and nurses unanimously consented, the patients were mostly unconscious, and the under-resourced Detroit hospitals didn’t have IRBs. The OHRP’s answer would make Hans Jonas proud - that’s not our problem, guess you have to cancel the study.
Luckily for Pronovost, Atul Gawande had recently published Checklist Manifesto and become a beloved public intellectual. He agreed to take the case public and shop it around to journalists and politicians. The OHRP woke up and found angry reporters outside their door. Whitney records their forced justifications for why the study might be harmful - maybe complying with the checklists would take so much time that doctors couldn’t do more important things? Maybe the nurses’ reminders would make doctors so angry at the nurses that medical communication would break down? Dr. Gawande and the reporters weren’t impressed, and finally some politician forced OHRP to relent. The experiment resumed, and found the nurse-enforced checklist saved about 1,500 lives over the course of the study. The setup was exported around the country and has since saved tens of thousands of people. Nobody knows how many people OHRP’s six month delay killed, and nobody ever did figure out any way the study could have violated privacy.
My own consent form story: in my bipolar study, the IRB demanded I include the name of the study on the form. I didn’t want to - I didn’t want to bias patients by telling what we were testing for. Next they wanted me to list all the risks. There was no risk; we would be giving the patient a questionnaire that we would have given them anyway. The IRB didn’t care; no list of risks, no study. I can’t remember if I actually submitted, or only considered submitting, that the risk was they would get a paper cut on all the consent forms we gave them. In any case, another doctor on my team found a regulation saying that we could skip this part of the consent form for our zero-possible-harm study. The IRB accepted it, let us start the study, then changed their mind and demanded the full consent form along with their 26 other suggestions.
Whitney doesn’t want a revolution. He just wants to go back to the pre-1998 system, before Gary Ellis crushed Johns Hopkins, doctors were replaced with administrators, and pragmatic research ethics were replaced by liability avoidance. Specifically:
* Allow zero-risk research (for example, testing urine samples a patient has already provided) with verbal or minimal written consent.
* Allow consent forms to skip trivial issues no one cares about (“aspirin might taste bad”) and optimize them for patient understanding instead of liability avoidance.
* Let each institution run their IRB with limited federal interference. Big institutions doing dangerous studies can enforce more regulations; small institutions doing simpler ones can be more permissive. The government only has to step in when some institution seems to be failing really badly.
* Researchers should be allowed to appeal IRB decisions to higher authorities like deans or chancellors5
These make sense. I’m just worried they’re impossible.
Mrs. Sanborn was the president of many charity organizations and this had given her an addiction to autocracy such as no other avocation could develop.
The Big Five personality traits (openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism) are a set of mental traits covering the bulk of a person’s personality (at least in theory). They are, if not entirely uncorrelated, at least largely unrelated. Extending the previous analyses to a set of five mental traits suggests that about 21% of people are “abnormal” on at least one of their personality traits
According to our calculations, the crossing-over point is 14 mental traits. At 14 traits, just over 50% of the population is unusual (± 2 SD) on at least one mental trait, and 13% are unusual on two or more. This seems pretty conservative — probably there are more than 14 ways people’s minds can be different from one another.
Of the dozens of high-follower DID accounts that I’ve seen, almost none are experiencing any of that. Plenty of them are in therapy, but judging from how they talk about it, it all seems to be of the customer service variety of therapy. Hardly any of them say they’re medicated, which I guess makes sense - every last one I’ve seen comes from the school that sees mental illness as some adorable personality quirk that makes them unique and high status, rather than as a source of great pain and personal destruction. They don’t take meds because they don’t think there’s anything to treat. And, indeed, they aren’t living debilitated lives.
On the contrary, they’re flourishing, going about self-actualized and successful lives, getting into Ivy League schools, bragging about their social media clout, being girlbosses. This is the status of mental illness in youth culture today, where we are expected to extend every accommodation to those who say they have mental illness even as they would seem to require no accommodation at all; they would like the laurel of victimhood without the actuality of being victimized.
Here’s the problem: under current conditions, there’s no way I can talk about any of this in a way that liberals and leftists will listen to. They’ll see that I’m criticizing Zoomers on TikTok who are engaging under the broad umbrella of “identity” and they’ll declare me a reactionary. No matter how right I am. Ruy Texeira calls it the Fox News Fallacy: “if Fox News (substitute here the conservative bête noire of your choice if you prefer) criticizes the Democrats for X then there must be absolutely nothing to X and the job of Democrats is to assert that loudly and often.”
But insisting that the psychic comfort of some should be the top priority of all is ideology at its purest, political by definition.
By that I mean the left's intense and deepening attachment to psychological safety, to the maintenance of emotional comfort above all things, to avoiding giving offense even to the point of reducing freedom. I know that the term safetyism implies a pejorative stance, and yes, I'm opposed to it. But I'm trying to speak about it in entirely neutral terms here, not argue against it.
A study published last year showed that US headlines denoting anger, fear, disgust, and sadness have all been proliferating over the past two decades, whereas headlines connoting joy or neutral sentiments have become less common. These trends were observed on both sides of the partisan divide. The study found that although these trends pre-existed modern forms of social media, there was a notable inflection point around the year 2010, at which point the change became more pronounced. This was around the time when Facebook introduced the “Like” button and Twitter introduced Retweets. Journalists looking to create viral content now had a way of keeping score.
I asked several parents why they haven’t said something to the administration about the masking and lunchtime speaking prohibition. Both told me that the administration gave the distinct impression that they were not interested in dissent, and that most parents were too timid to try to organize a collective response. One parent whose child is in eighth grade, the final year in the school, said she didn’t want to make waves. “There are so many other issues that are more pressing,” the parent told me, that objecting to the restrictions “didn’t seem worth it.”
One day officer West stopped the president, whom he recognized, and gave him a warning. “Your fast driving, sir . . . is endangering the lives of the people who have to cross the street.” The president apologized. But the next night, patrolling at 13th and M Streets, West saw a slew of carriages barreling down the street at high speed, with the president in the lead.
West held up his club. Grant got control of his horses and asked, abashed, if he’d been speeding. In 1908, when the story broke in Washington’s Sunday Star, West said Grant had the look of a schoolboy caught in a guilty act. He reminded Grant of his promise to stop speeding. West told Grant: “I am very sorry, Mr. President, to have to do it, for you are the chief of the nation and I am nothing but a policeman, but duty is duty, sir, and I will have to place you under arrest.”
Grant did something he hadn’t done much, which was surrender. He invited West into his carriage and drove to the station house. On the way they talked about the war. West had been at the evacuation of Richmond. Grant said he admired a man who does his duty. At the station house Grant put up $20 and stayed long enough to be amused by friends, also hauled in, who were protesting their arrests. Days later word reached him that West’s job might be in danger. Grant dispatched a quick message to the chief of police, complimenting West on his fearlessness and making clear he hoped no harm would come to him. None did.
Uber’s ride-share revenue more than doubled in 2022, and the company posted its first full-year adjusted profit since its founding. It now commands 74% of the U.S. ride-share market, up from 62% in early 2020, according to consumer receipts analyzed by market-research firm YipitData.
A mom brought her six-year-old daughter into the office with a fever and a sore throat. I asked the little girl to open her mouth and say “Ah.” She shook her head and clenched her mouth shut. “Mom, it looks like I’m going to need your help here," I said. "Could you please ask your daughter to open her mouth and say ‘Ah’?” Mom arched her eyebrows and replied, “Her body, her choice.”
Parenting researchers have consistently found that the best parents—the parents whose kids are most likely to thrive as adults—are parents who are authoritative, meaning parents who are both strict and loving. They are not Too Hard or Too Soft; they are Just Right. But in the eight years since I wrote the book, I’ve noticed something new. For the first time, I am seeing a political dimension to parenting. It is now much less common to find left-of-center parents who are {/both} strict and loving. Loving, yes, but not strict. I’m seeing a growing number of parents like the mom I just described—parents who truly believe that it's virtuous to let the kid be in charge, even when the kid is a six 6-year-old with a fever who is refusing to let the doctor look at her throat.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/279289797_Permissive_Parenting_and_Mental_Health_in_College_Students_Mediating_Effects_of_Academic_EntitlementThat’s important, because researchers have found that permissive parenting leads to young adults with “less sense of meaning and purpose in life, less autonomy and mastery of the world around them.” Other researchers have found that permissive parenting leads to lower emotional intelligence and lower personal growth. Still other researchers report that permissive parenting is associated with an increased risk of drug and alcohol abuse, and lower academic achievement, while authoritative parenting is associated with lower risk of drug and alcohol abuse and higher academic achievement. The children of permissive parents are more likely to become anxious and depressed.
Student mental health may suffer due to unreasonable expectations associated with academic entitlement; permissive parenting may be one source of these expectations.
Probably not, because most underage Central Americans are being sent to the US for precisely this purpose—to join the workforce as quickly as possible. Typically the people sending them on this mission are their own parents, who go deeply into debt to do so. For the kids, therefore, failing to earn money can have far worse consequences than a midnight shift or a job injury detected by a school nurse—it can mean losing the house or land their family has pledged as collateral.
I am an anthropologist who interviews migrants and their families in a sending hub in the Guatemalan highlands. I ask them about their debts. They give me a very different picture from media coverage of the dramas on the Mexican border. The underage workers found by the Times are 21st-century indentured servants. Their obligations to their families are why, paradoxical as this may sound, humanitarian reforms to protect them have had the opposite effect, of endangering more kids than they protect. Instead of discouraging families from sending their kids, the reforms have encouraged them to send more.[...]The new law prohibited the feds from rapidly deporting minors to their homeland. It also gave them the right to a hearing. Smugglers learned that, if they recruited teenagers or adults with small children, border agents would be helpless to stop them. The migrants only had to say that they are afraid to go home. Asking for asylum became so easy and cheap that smuggling networks were able to slash prices, putting these within reach of a wider range of Central Americans. The number of teenagers coming to the border exploded. So did the number of adults with small children. Since country-of-origin identification documents are easy to falsify, juveniles became a passport for any older immigrant in need of one.
Defining asylum this broadly blows a hole in the original definition, codified internationally after World War II. Until advocates expanded the meaning and persuaded sympathetic media to accept this expansion as an unquestionable human right, asylum was for people fleeing wars and political persecution. Now, with an ever-broader vision of who qualifies, advocates are encouraging an ever-wider range of people in low-income countries to try their luck.
Still, I voiced objections in a measured way I hoped might get through, either to Nance or to someone at the network. “I’ve been on the air with Malcolm Nance and he seemed like a nice guy,” I tweeted, “but this awful practice of calling people traitors and foreign agents based on no evidence has really gotten out of hand.”
Nance’s response was “Ok, you’ve convinced me. You need to be blocked. #Bye.” He remained a regular guest on the network, which didn’t cool on booking him until the Russia story fell apart with the release of the Mueller report the next year.
The Nance situation was symbolic of what happened at the network from the beginning of Trump’s term, really beginning in early 2017. It went from being a place where you had to be at least in the ballpark of demonstrably true to being a place where the factual standard was, “Whatever dogshit drops out of the mouth of any hack or spook.”
Note how many things they get wrong in this segment. Vance says there’s nothing to accusations of FISA abuse later proven by Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz (“A lot of hullabaloo about nothing at the end of the day”). The CIA’s McMullin touts the Steele Dossier (“Much of it has been validated”). Dilanian rushes at the end to squeeze in the Hamilton hoax (“This release…is the top hashtag among Russian bots and trolls, according to Hamilton 68”).
It’s extremely rare that a journalist who’s actually trying to avoid mistakes makes even one factual mistake as big as falling for the Hamilton hoax or the Steele Dossier, or dismissing the Nunes memo. These people managed all three at once. If I’d made even one error of that magnitude early in my career, I wouldn’t have had a career. This kind of thing was basically constant for years, when MSNBC was the staging ground for many lunatic conspiracy theories involving Trump, Russia, and their delicacy item, the Dossier.
As we later found out, among other things via Jeff Gerth’s gigantic piece in the Columbia Journalism Review, the FBI said nothing about many stories it knew to be wrong, including the influential New York Times exposé, “Trump Campaign Aides Had Repeated Contacts With Russian Intelligence.” The possibility that officials can lie to us in this way — leaking, asking that attribution be limited to uncheckable “sources familiar with the matter,” then saying nothing as stories start taking water — is exactly why we don’t stick our necks out for such people. [...]When sources lie to you, you should be mad. At minimum, you should be ripping their names out of your Rolodex (or modern equivalent). MSNBC did the opposite, hiring seemingly everyone who’d helped them down this reputation-tarnishing path.
II. Unacceptable behaviour[…]Promote the work of those who have violated Professional Codes of Ethics (e.g., the AAS Code of Ethics). Promotion of an author’s work includes any verbal or visual presentation including that person’s name or likeness. In cases where the participant’s work is sufficiently scientifically-independent from that of the person who has violated the professional code, the work may be presented so long as the presenter is not engaging in promotion. Citations are not violations of this policy, though all participants should weigh the necessity of presenting that citation with the harm that it could perpetuate.
By “deconstructing” the canon, English professors ultimately deconstructed the very grounds of their claim to intellectual authority. If no text is better than any other one, and if the matter of interpretation is the sole, subjective province of the individual, what do we need English professors for? Is it any coincidence that the decline of English accelerated as the attacks on the canon intensified? Basically, the discipline decided that it would deliberately //refuse// to teach students the transcendent wisdom that they wanted to learn.[...]Today, English departments are essentially telling students that we don’t have anything very important to teach them. We shouldn’t blame them for taking us at our word.
In the broader maritime region, the year was divided by the season. In the summer, the people settled along narrows and rapids in the rivers, to catch the annual spawning runs of fish and fatty eels. In the winter, communities moved down-river to settle on the coast. There, they could gather shellfish in the tidal areas during fall and spring, and hunt sea mammals such as seals.
The level of co-operation this required led to a form of social hierarchy, as hunting vessels required crews, led by a captain. As a result, the east coast had the first recorded instances of ceremonial burial in Canada, as special status was conferred upon the leaders of the hunt—though it’s unclear how permanent these hierarchies were, or whether such status could be inherited. In other words, despite the emergence of ceremonial burial, the east coast does not appear to have fostered the same kind of complex, stratified societies that emerged on the west coast.
Finally, reporting violations of campaign finance law are almost never prosecuted as felonies. Recall that last year, the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign were fined for a similar violation. They had obscured the reporting of payments to a former British spy for his work on a dossier that falsely alleged Trump had colluded with Russia. Instead of reporting the expense as dirt-digging or scandal-mongering, the campaign claimed the fees were for “legal services” and “legal and compliance consulting.”
This concession of mine might be unsatisfying to those frustrated by the extent to which activism has crept ever further into universities. But all academics have academic freedom, and it’s not clear why it’s worse if one picks a research interest on the basis of one’s activist interests rather than on the basis of happenstance, curiosity, or careerism. The goal should not be to deny or suppress an academic’s activist ardour, but rather to ensure that the inevitable professional tensions that ensue are consciously and defensibly addressed.
But imagine it takes the doctor an hour of painful phone calls to even get the right person from the insurance company on the line. Now there’s a cost involved. If your patient is going to die without the medication, you’ll probably groan and start making the phone calls. But if your patient doesn’t really need it, and you just wanted to approve it in order to be nice, now you might start having a heartfelt talk with your patient about the importance of trying less expensive medications before jumping right to the $10,000 one.
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/letter-from-a-subscriber-my-new-therapistVoldemorting has an obvious political purpose: that which you cannot name is made that much harder to discuss, and that which is harder to discuss is harder to criticize. That they would hide within these discursive tricks does not say good things about the content of their politics or their ability to defend them. What’s more, the people who act this way seem to think that there is no reason to give their faction a name because what they want isn’t politics, it’s just “the moral arc of the universe,” just progress, just the way things ought to be. There’s no need to talk about what they want because their politics are just right. What’s particularly weird is that they’re the same ones who think everything is political, everything is ideological. They find a culture war valence in everything, but they don’t want to be pinned down themselves. As they so often do, they exempt themselves from their own rules.
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/i-cannot-stress-enough-that-gradeWhat follows is a piece that I was commissioned to write for an education publication called The Grade. On submission they declared that the piece was, quote, “too hot” for publication. As I said to them, that response demonstrates the piece’s thesis perfectly.[...]The only place where education does not suffer from optimism bias is reality.
So an increasing focus on GPA won’t dramatically change who gets in anyway. Why then would we want to use the SAT? Because that ~.4 of the variance that’s not explained by GPA in SAT results can represent very different kinds of students. GPA rewards grinders; it rewards grade-grubbers; it rewards teacher’s pets. It’s as much a function of effort as of academic ability. And that’s fine; I would never want to remove GPA from the application process. But there are other kinds of kids, the brilliant but disengaged, the talented but unfocused, the gifted whose difficult lives keep them from doing well in school. Those kids are the ones the SAT rewards. So why not use both? And, for the record, the people who stand to gain the most from getting rid of the SAT are not poor Black kids but affluent white kids whose parents have the sway in the local school district they need to lean on teachers and get the grades they want for their children. People complain that SAT scores can be gamed with expensive tutoring. In fact, SAT tutoring has little effect, but let’s set that aside and point out what should be obvious: rich kids can get expensive tutoring to raise their GPA too! How on earth is tutoring an argument against the SAT but not against GPA, when grades are likely more easily influenced by tutoring?
The Senate voted on Wednesday to immediately end the COVID-19 national emergency — and the White House has indicated that President Biden will finally sign the bill into law, months after declaring the pandemic was “over.”
The resolution passed the upper chamber in a 68-23 vote, with 21 Democrats joining Republicans in support of the bill. In February, the measure passed the GOP-controlled House in a 229-197 vote.
In October 2020, the prestigious academic journal Nature endorsed Joe Biden’s presidential campaign. Last week, Nature Human Behaviour—a journal which, as far as I can tell, is only loosely related to Nature—published the results of an experiment purporting to show that this endorsement eroded trust in science in general and in Nature in particular. This included diminished trust in information provided in the journal about COVID-19.
Here, in a nutshell, is the essence of the college woke spa: an aesthetic and worldview built predominantly around what have been largely female interests, concerns, and fears. The GLC’s self-esteem bromides, the self-compassion ethic, the yoga and mindfulness sessions—all would be at home in a Beverly Hills “healing space,” where trophy wives can “center themselves in an atmosphere of calm.” A visitor keeps expecting to encounter crystals and star charts.
For the last 40 years, men have been an underrepresented minority in higher education, reports American Enterprise Institute scholar Mark Perry. Since 1982, females earned nearly 14 million more college degrees than men. Colleges began a “desperate” search for women faculty in the 1970s that eroded the “intellectual rigor of elite higher education in the U.S.,” says Camille Paglia, the feminist professor and author. “Due to that sudden influx, academe’s entire internal culture changed,” she says. As the female presence has grown, so have claims of a crisis of collegiate mental health.
Mental-health administrators have the same imperialistic ambitions as the rest of the student-services bureaucracy. They seek to extend their reach to the entire campus population, through an open-ended definition of “wellness.” Williams’s Integrative Wellbeing Services, for example, “reimagines” mental-health services to encompass “all students.” There’s a service for everyone, whether providing “healthy coping and self-care skills,” integrating “identities of all kinds,” or offering an “ever-expanding array of psychoeducational workshops, groups, special events and outreach activities.”
The real crisis in academia is not mental health; it is the breakdown of universities’ understanding of their core mission. All other alleged crises follow from this one. Education exists for one main purpose: to pass on an inheritance of human achievement, as the philosopher Michael Oakeshott explained. Yet faculty have lost the language for celebrating that inheritance; they have gone mute, or worse, when it comes to articulating the splendors of Western civilization.
I was luckier than Mike: I had wonderful grandparents. They had come from Mississippi, and migrated from the farm to small-town life, and my grandfather had been an assistant manager at a wholesale-goods store in Memphis. And when I was 11, and my mother and sister and I had to flee Memphis—my father was a violent son of a bitch; there’s no other way to put it—my grandparents sold everything and came with us to Springfield. While my mother worked two minimum-wage jobs, as a janitor and a clerk at a clothing store, my grandparents gave me structure and a sense of purpose. There was no drinking and no swearing, and we always read the Bible before bed. I’m not a devout Southern Baptist like they were, but that faith still gives me ballast.
SAN FRANCISCO—Many of this city’s streets are clogged with homeless tents, drug addicts and illegal vendors. City inspectors recently went after a Little Free Library.[...]That prompted San Francisco inspectors to affix notices to get those permitted or removed, too. One notice went to B & C Laundromat, where owner Bill Lee said he has hung a sign with Chinese lettering since he opened the business in 1978.
“They asked if I had a permit for the sign,” said Mr. Lee, 79. “I said, ‘How do I know, it’s been over 40 years’?”[...]“This is a situation of a well-intentioned rule gone wrong,” Ms. Ronen said.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1508557/A 2016 survey by the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family found the incidence of intimate-partner violence at 41.5 percent, significantly higher than the global average of 30 percent.
Both partners' reports were used to estimate the following lower- and upper-bound rates: 5.21% and 13.61% for male-to-female partner violence, 6.22% and 18.21% for female-to-male partner violence, and 7.84% to 21.48% for any partner-to-partner violence
The American left wants no housing built anywhere in any city, and also, all our magic abundant housing must be full of joy and light. And ponies! Ponies, we can all agree, are beautiful, and having ponies is a human right. It’s maddening if you think too deeply, but charming to say over coffee. This is why socialists make such wonderful art teachers and such lovely college girlfriends.
Pro tip: As science reporters grapple with a new round of natural origins vs. lab leak pieces, I'd really urge you to consider the handy 'nut test' in weighing your expert source's reliability before presenting them to readers.
The nut test comes after the source makes their argument , and you ask them: 'what are the chances you are wrong?'
If they say, 'there's always a chance I'm wrong, and this is the way..." with details, then they pass the nut test to the first degree.
If they say, "Well, I don't think I'm wrong, because" and start going into their personal grievances, childhood, or politics etc. Put down the pen. They are a nut.
Handily applies to climate, UFO's, havana syndrome etc. as well as scientific politics over GoF research.
My fellow IPCC authors and I have spent years combing through the evidence, and have found that there are things we can do right now across all areas of life—including the basic choices you and I make every day—that can cut greenhouse gas emissions by more than half by 2030. [...]“The big things the world needs to do to address climate change are already well-known: decarbonize our energy system by winding down the use of fossil fuels and using renewable energy sources like wind and solar to power our homes and buildings; and electrify as much we possibly can, including vehicles, heating systems, appliances and machines. We need to also improve public transportation and limit industrial-scale emissions that come from making materials like cement, plastic, and steel; move to a more sustainable food system; and conserve and restore forests and other ecosystems.”
The most meaningful lifestyle changes include things like choosing low-emission transportation: walking, biking, taking public transportation, switching to an electric car if you can, and limiting flights when possible. Our mobility choices have the largest potential to reduce our carbon footprint, and can also make our air cleaner, especially in the U.S. where transportation is now the largest source of emissions.
Adopting healthier, more sustainable diets, and reducing food waste can also make a big difference in emissions. In the Global North, that generally means eating more fruits and vegetables and less meat, sugars and packaged processed food, as well as limiting the amount we buy and order in restaurants that could go to waste. In the U.S. alone we waste an estimated 35 percent of all the food we produce or import, which in turn wastes all the energy, land, water and greenhouse gas emissions that went into growing, processing, shipping and storing it.
Last, when we build or remodel homes or buildings, we can use energy efficient materials, appliances and technology. Every homeowner in America can now take advantage of financial incentives as part of the Inflation Reduction Act for things like heat pumps or electric cookstoves that reduce both emissions and electric bills.
I mean it was bone-deep, down to the marrow stupid. [...] Okay, Silicon Valley Bank did it-- it was like a rock, only dumber, but they did it.
In a court motion, Stanford also denied any responsibility in inflicting “emotional distress” on Katie or her parents, writing that their accusations are “hopelessly confusing, internally inconsistent, and ambiguous.”
The Meyers’ suit argues that the school should have known that the type of students who make it into Stanford—that four percent—demand perfection of themselves. Instead of relieving that pressure these students feel, the suit argues, Stanford’s disciplinary process only amplifies it.
As Katie Meyer herself wrote in a formal letter to Stanford administrators on November 21, 2021, responding to the accusations against her, according to the suit: “My whole life I’ve been terrified to make any mistakes. No alcohol, no speeding tickets, no A– marks on my report cards. Everything had to be perfect to get in and stay at Stanford.”
“Any place that sets a bar so high that you have to be literally perfect to get there; and when you get here, if you don’t stay perfect, [Stanford] will punish you with every administrative resource they have for embarrassing them,” Paulmeier added. “To me, that just sounds like an abusive parent, not like an educational institution you should model your kid’s life around.”
In a word, that isn’t what happened. It turned out that the purpose of a conference like Women in the World was not to mobilize financial capital and political power among people who are fortunate enough to possess it in order to help people suffering in places like China and North Korea; it was—if there was any point at all—to passionately discuss the suffering of women in America.
The word //oppression// here was defined to mean things like making ninety cents on the dollar compared with men, or being only the vice president of a Fortune 500 company rather than the CEO, or how male-dominated office culture doesn’t make it safe for women to cry. As much as I tried to have compassion, I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.
Hillary Clinton watched my speech from the greenroom backstage, since she was the next speaker after me. It was October of 2015 and she was running for president at the time. When I came down from the stage in tears after my speech, Clinton came up to me, looked me in the eye, and told me that she would never forget what I said that day. She promised that she would do everything in her power to help the women of North Korea.
Perhaps she might have if she’d been elected president; she elected instead to spend the next several years—as far as I could tell—complaining about not being president.
But by Election Day of 2016, I was, in my own naive way, radicalized. I was convinced that Donald Trump was a fascist, a would-be dictator, and a rapist. I told my fiancé at the time that if he had any reasons for liking Trump, I didn’t want to hear them, and that if he even considered voting for Trump, I wouldn’t marry him. Some of my girlfriends in Brooklyn and Manhattan would go to weeknight meetings to organize efforts for how to resist Trump and how we could bring him down. When they told me about their plans to move to Canada if Clinton lost, I believed them. Looking back on it, I didn’t know a single American at the time who supported Trump, or even anybody who just felt neutral about the election. My peers were all very smart people, had much higher levels of educational attainment than I did, and had spent far more of their lives in the United States than I had.
Everything I absorbed from them was mutually reinforced by everything I read in the newspapers and everything I heard on the radio. When I saw Trump’s face or heard his voice and felt viscerally angry, there was simply no reason to think twice about where on earth these feelings were coming from. I still remember the moment when my fiancé called and told me that Trump had won. I was in my bed and felt afraid. I started to sob. I called my friends to see how they were doing, and they checked in on me. I watched cable news all day, read through the major national newspapers, and listened to radio and podcasts.
It was clear that Trump had colluded with the Russians to steal the election from Clinton, and also that he would soon be impeached and removed from office, if not assassinated. If not, then the dark night of fascism would soon fall on America, the place I’d immigrated to in search of freedom. It was just my luck that I’d finally arrived here only in time to watch it disintegrate into the kind of dictatorship from which I’d escaped. This was now the world I inhabited: one in which a single election victory by one of America’s two political parties spelled the end of the Republic, the death of peace and freedom, the end of the line. This was the world of The New York Times, the Washington Post, NPR, and Columbia—the world of the elite.
For the next four years, many of the people who appeared to listen intently as I told them what they could do to make a difference in the world instead spent their time warning the nation incessantly about fascists in the White House, of Russian puppets in the Oval Office, of white nationalists putting babies in cages. They advocated against truth in media and the neutral application of laws, which they no longer regarded as democratic norms but as unaffordable luxuries in the face of an existential threat: a president they didn’t vote for. Almost in unison, they started advocating for critical race theory and “antiracism,” which more than anything else I’d encountered in America reminded me of Juche, the North Korean version of Marxism-Leninism, with its arcane vocabulary and impenetrable set of ideas that pretend to serve political change but really just sort ordinary people into different identity categories that keep them as separate as possible from the elite.
And like the elite in North Korea, the American elite used their new ideology to cancel and deplatform political and ideological dissidents. It was a shocking four years for me as it was for millions of my fellow Americans, but there was one aspect of it that didn’t surprise me, because I’d seen it up close on the conference circuit in 2016 and 2017: a certain brazen disingenuousness, which also reminded me of North Korea. In North Korea, it is not uncommon to see the well-fed son of a Party official lambast a farmer on the brink of starvation for insufficient loyalty to the Dear Leader.
In post-2016 America, it started to become possible for a white magazine editor or white film producer or white tech CEO to lecture a black construction worker or Latino small business owner who voted for Trump for his “self-hatred” or “internalized racism.” I started to wonder if that was the kind of thing they’d thought about me when I talked to them about my life and work. “Oh this poor little Asian girl, she’s too stupid and naive to realize that the problem isn’t dictatorship in North Korea or slavery in China. It’s dictatorship and slavery in America!”
Congress attempted to employ the Congressional Review Act, a statute that allows legislators to review certain administrative rulemakings with a simple majority in each house. Republicans voted in favor, and all but two Senate and one House Democrats against. Only defections by Sens. Joe Manchin (D–W.Va.) and Jon Tester (D–Mont.) carried the resolution through the Senate.
At first glance, this could seem like a case of anti-ESG Republicans attempting to block deregulation that allows investors more freedom—that's Biden's narrative. But this framing is incomplete. In truth, the president is shrouding the fact that he is acting at the edges of his statutory mandate, consistent with his administration's long-standing commitment to the bureaucratic furtherance of progressive environmental policies.
Mr. Kennedy: You said that “the killing of unarmed black men by police happens every day in America.” Did you say that?
Ms. Choudhury: Senator, I don’t recall the statement, but it’s something I may have said in that context.
Mr. Kennedy: You think it happens every single day?
Ms. Choudhury: Senator, I believe in that statement I was making a comment in my role as an advocate, and I was engaging in rhetorical advocacy, as advocates do.
Mr. Kennedy: But do you believe that police officers kill unarmed black men every day in America?
Ms. Choudhury: Senator I believe the killing of unarmed citizens by law enforcement is tragic, and I believe in that instance—. . .
Mr. Kennedy: I believe it’s tragic too, but do you believe—and this is a really simple question, counselor—do you believe that cops kill unarmed black men in America every single day? You said it at Princeton.
Ms. Choudhury: Senator, I said it in my role as an advocate.
Rates of functional mental illness are high in open societies and low in authoritarian ones.
This powerful South Carolina politico was one of 31 Democratic House members who voted on Jan. 6, 2005, to object to awarding Ohio’s electoral votes to President George W. Bush, despite Mr. Bush winning the Buckeye State by 118,601 votes. Flipping Ohio would have made John Kerry president by a 271-266 Electoral College vote.
On the House floor in 2005, the ranking Judiciary Committee Democrat, Rep. John Conyers (D., Mich.), presented the case for awarding Ohio to the Democrats, claiming “electronic machines transferred” votes from Mr. Kerry to Mr. Bush, creating situations with “significantly more votes than voters in some precincts, significantly less ballots than voters in other precincts, and voters casting more than one ballot.” He even asserted that a voting-machine company “reprogrammed the computer by remote dial-up” in a way that altered the outcome. Sound familiar? [...]Though she didn’t vote to flip the Buckeye State, then-Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) defended her party’s election deniers. She said the “debate is fundamental to our democracy” and warned Republicans not to “talk about this as a ‘conspiracy theory,’ ” arguing instead “it is about the Constitution.”
The challenge museums face isn’t “commissars” but a national crisis of loneliness and atomization. It’s also fear mongering. This spring the Met launched Date Night, inviting visitors to turn off their streaming services, get off the couch and enjoy the museum. This marked a change; instead of marketing exhibitions, we marketed the museum experience. As a result, we are doubling evening attendance and enjoying a younger and more diverse audience.
A range of content, from European classic paintings to kimonos, industrial photography and Afro-Futurist art, lights up the faces of these visitors. The lesson isn’t new: To connect visitors to the treasures within our walls, museums must constantly iterate, lest we truly become commissars of a prior era.
https://quillette.com/2023/03/19/chronicle-of-a-war/I hadn’t sufficiently understood that Saddam’s absolutist rule had destroyed every vestige of civil society in Iraq, from the family and tribe at the base of the social order to the regime at the top. He had made it impossible for any sort of order to succeed him. His tyranny was so extreme and unpredictable that it was itself a species of anarchy. This was a searing revelation for me. America’s military could accomplish many things, but reconstituting and reforming a brutalized, ferociously sectarian Iraq was not one of them. I should have known better.
Or perhaps not. I can speak only for myself. Mr. Brodsky’s impatience, mockery, scorn, and ridicule delivered a shock to my system that was—given the peculiarities of my intellectual development or lack thereof—exactly the education I needed. I don’t doubt that a safe, nurturing classroom environment can be conducive to learning; that was the norm, thankfully, even in my college years. And yet if Mr. Brodsky had been polite, deferential, conciliatory—if he had been anything other than the combative, infuriating classroom presence that he was—Problems of Philosophy would have been, for me, just another routine, forgotten, undergraduate survey course. He did me the favor of disrespecting me.
Conservative New York media was also pleased with the run. It was finally a comeuppance for all those Bay Area wokes who love to hire womxn. Here’s the sober Wall Street Journal on the situation: “SVB notes that besides 91% of their board being independent and 45% women, they also have ‘1 Black,’ ‘1 LGBTO+’ and ‘2 Veterans.’ I'm not saying 12 white men would have avoided this mess, but the company may have been distracted by diversity demands.” Banks do use faux progressive nonsense to shield themselves from criticism and generally distract the public—it’s true. Semafor has great reporting on this: The Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, the primary Washington regulator for SVB, was “pushing climate change as a financial risk, holding conferences and writing papers on the issue,” instead of, like, regulating the banks. And yes, Signature Bank’s boss–that bank was shuttered last Sunday—led a seminar on gender-neutral pronouns such as “ze” and “hir” in the fall. Being theatrically woke didn’t cause the bad investments though. And eventually not even neopronouns can save you.
The city's origin dates back to the Stone Age. It became part of the Assyrian Empire, then the Babylonian Empire before it fell into the hands of Achaemenid Empire after the Fall of Babylon, and subsequently fell into the hands of Alexander the Great and the Romans. It became an important center of Syriac Christianity where it was known as "ܒܝܬ ܢܘܗܕܪܐ" Beth Nohdry, before fading out after the conquests of Mesopotamia by Tamerlane.
Miaphysitism is the Christological doctrine that holds Jesus, the "Incarnate Word, is fully divine and fully human, in one 'nature' (physis)."[1] It is a position held by the Oriental Orthodox Churches and differs from the Chalcedonian position that Jesus is one "person" (Greek: ὑπόστασις) in two "natures" (Greek: φύσεις), a divine nature and a human nature (Dyophysitism).
While historically a major point of controversy within Christianity, several modern declarations by both Chalcedonian and Miaphysite churches state that the difference between the two Christological formulations does not reflect any significant difference in belief about the nature of Christ.
She was responsible for numerous effective, if belated reforms – including the abolition of slavery, ancient torturous punishments and the ancient examination system in her ailing years. The latter was supplanted by institutions including the new Peking University.
A study performed by Thomas Van Hoof of the Utrecht University suggests that the innumerable deaths brought on by the pandemic cooled the climate by freeing up land and triggering reforestation. This may have led to the Little Ice Age.
Greeks first began to settle the Northwestern part of the Indian subcontinent during the time of the Persian Achaemenid empire. Darius the Great conquered the area, but along with his successors also conquered much of the Greek world, which at the time included all of the western Anatolian peninsula. When Greek villages rebelled under the Persian yoke, they were sometimes ethnically cleansed, by relocation to the far side of the empire. Thus there came to be many Greek communities in the Indian parts of the Persian empire.
After inventing writing in the late 1990's, I went on to master it. You've doubtless heard of my exploits, of the grace and bravery with which I weild the written word. The world is pocked with countless battlefields, scorched by my enemies in their attempts to stop the growth of my power. Yet I stand before you unscathed, my skin shining like burnished ivory and my jowls swaying in even the gentlest of breezes.
Few are they who dare to dip their cups directly in the stream of my mighty prose; even fewer, then, can say they walk away from the experience under their own power. But all are changed by it; the details of how vary person to person. Some lead richer lives, surrounded by family and friends they only truly appreciate in the remembered coal-glow of my word-forge. Some acheive greatness in pursuit of something, anything to rival that first encounter with my radiance.
Have care, friend. Do not tread lightly into my domain. Only they who truly wish it and who heartily prepare for it find the succor and satisfaction they seek - others founder, blinded by the light of a literary sun burning close enough to taste but yet too far to be fully grasped. Are you truly ready? Are you fully trained?
Put short, are you a bad enough dude to read my blog?
I wrote a post about how the US is similar to historic one-party states. Whether you look at party registration, campaign contributions, or survey data, the average administrative agency has about ten times as many Democrats as Republicans; and by the same standards, there are about a hundred times as many Democrats as Republicans at the average "cultural prestige institution" (NYT/WaPo, Harvard/Yale, Netflix, Twitter, etc). There doesn't seem to be a powerful pole where the opposite is true: for instance, employees at military contractors, energy companies, big banks, etc, all seem just about evenly split between the two parties.
This is, I argue, fairly similar to how standard one-party states work. For instance, there were actually somewhat fair elections in East Germany, and rival parties performed about as well in them as did the socialists (I know that this goes against most people's priors, but I substantiate it in the piece). However, the socialists dominated every administrative agency, and absolutely dominated every "cultural prestige institution," and so the elected officials only ran the country on paper. Similarly, Congress only really seems to pass a big blank check omnibus bill these days, and then bureaucrats whom the president can't legally fire -- and who seem to take their orders from the press -- end up making every policy decision that actually matters.
The piece describes how and why this tendency emerges; how and why it selects for shrill and bad governance; and how and why an honest shift toward strongman rule can reverse this decline.
The Tavistock recognised that it was in experimental territory. In 2011, the clinic decided to introduce puberty blockers for children from the age of 12—but only under the auspices of a formal research project guided by careful patient assessment, monitoring, and informed consent. “Between 2011 and 2014, 44 patients aged 12–25 joined [GIDS’s] Early Intervention Study,” Barnes reports. “While this study began with admirable aims—to test the claims about what was seen as an experimental treatment in a safe research setting—[the clinic] did not wait for the data to emerge before rolling out early puberty suppression more widely [in 2014]. The full results would remain unpublished for almost a decade.”
Many of the Tavistock patients were very different from those treated in the Dutch studies. In the Netherlands, the children were required to present with classic, early-onset gender dysphoria that had persisted; in other respects, they had to be psychologically stable. In this way, the Dutch experts believed, they were denying treatment in cases where mistaken trans identity would lead to post-transition regret.
Then, “in an astonishing aside, the researchers revealed that everyone in the early intervention group had at this point progressed from the blockers on to cross-sex hormones,” Barnes notes. “A treatment with irreversible consequences. Every single one.” This was a “holy fuck” moment for senior clinician Anna Hutchinson, a key source for Barnes:clinician Anna Hutchinson, a key source for Barnes:
> It totally exploded the idea that when we were offering the puberty blockers, we were actually offering time to think, because what are the chances of 100 per cent of the people, offered time to think, thinking the same thing? I mean, it looked to me like it was the opposite. And that once you’re on the [medical] pathway, you stayed on the pathway, perhaps you thought less.
If you give your kid brother some paint and send him into a museum with instructions to touch up the paintings in a way that will impress his friends, he will make them worse (unless it's a modern art museum)—and that's exactly what happens to our beliefs when public discourse is dominated by posturing.
But that's not all, dear readers. Trendy false beliefs typically sound better than the truth, so they're very tempting to the ignorant. Educators seem to be the kind of people who are particularly enamored of them, and kids scarf them down like candy from strangers—their parents rarely bothering to warn them away. When they do accrue more experience they're slow to correct their errors. And for many adults too it's psychologically easier to make professed beliefs into genuinely held ones: by so doing they gain an advantage in public discourse, since they don't have to fight through the friction of subjectively felt dissonance when they're speaking. Natural liars and natural fools enjoy a similar advantage. In fact, the belief signaling regime is a dream come true for sociopathic status maximizers of all stripes, who extend the competitive lead over naive altruists they've enjoyed ever since village size exceeded Dunbar's number and cousin marriage was banned out to the seventh degree. Some of them are reading right now, laughing to themselves that Sanilac is wasting time combating socially advantageous lies on the meta level while they're doing more productive things, like making money and donating a tax-deductible fraction of it toward the advancement of animal welfare to price their lessers out of red meat.
There are, however, exceptions to this analysis. Curiously, the net knowledge degradation caused by inter-group conflict isn't directly proportionate to the level of inter-group violence. This is because a serious threat, like a war, tends to focus the mind on realities relevant to surviving that threat; whereas when the stakes are lower but blood runs high, posturing to win intra-group status competitions has a more favorable cost-benefit ratio.
We use the black box verification method all the time. Almost no one personally repeats the foundational experiments that prove the validity of physics or any other science, but we can all observe that satellites and computer chips work, and that you can book flights to circle the globe, and that the people who make all these things possible rely on a body of knowledge which must therefore be true, or at least true-ish. And the main reason the hard sciences are less afflicted by epistemic load than other realms of human inquiry is that they make clear predictions which can usually be tested for accuracy in a straightforward way.
The members of a healthy society compete in positive-sum status games; the members of a declining society compete in negative-sum status games. The most powerful way to improve society is to correct this on the highest structural level. Make participation in negative-sum games low status, and participation in positive-sum games high status. Everything else will take care of itself.
Social critics should therefore direct vocal opprobrium at all negative-sum status games. When it costs more status to play a game than the players can earn if they win, participation will evaporate. Redirect competition into positive-sum status games instead, by glorifying the games and players.
It’s also a mistake to rely entirely on your personality and intelligence to sell you as a mate. This is like trying to win a triathlon without learning how to swim.
What is ATLAS SHRUGGED? What is its genre?
Atlas Shrugged is a 1500 page screed against FDR, God, and non-BDSM sexual relationships, written as a cross between a very slow mystery (that's already spoiled), a long meeting on industrial purchasing, and a harlequin romance
It works in spite of her political philosophy lacking any meaningful definition of the political. It works in spite of her being a bizarre robot who's turned on by sharp angles. It works in spite of her stopping repeatedly for dozen page speeches.
As Utopian/revolutionary fiction its hackney'd... Chernyshevsky socialist "What is to be done?" might be the closest comparison.
But as Dystopian fiction? Depicting moral & economic failure & collapse? Its one of the greatest works ever written. Surpassing Orwell or Huxley
There are two possible explanations for Rand's success...
The first is that her politics are just that compelling and her philosophy that overwhelming in its logic (they're not)
The second is that her prose is just that good. That she's the American Tolstoy or Tolkien
Tolstoy & Tolkien are two very good comparisons. In that both wrote similar novels.
Massive hundred character semi-historical parables that are meant to impart their views on spirituality and the human condition... or rather rationality and the autist condition for Rand
Rand share's their talent for being able to write dozens of characters who all embody a meditation on a theme
The same way a dozen characters might each be their own meditation on power in Tolkien, a dozen might each have their own meditation on resentment or industry in Rand
People dismiss some of these characters as 1 dimensional
Gandalf or worm-tongue are also "1-Dimensional" its what those characters mean in relation to their world that drives the value of the character and their interactions in unique ways
And the themes are foundational to American experience!
The nature of enterprise, morality, self interest, freedom... These are all core American questions as much as Heirarchy/Duty is for England, or Endurance/History is for Russia
And like every other fascinating or unique artifact American culture produces, America's elite have to try to destroy it
Same thing happened to rock, same thing to wrestling (American Theatre), same thing is going on with conspiracy theories and other folk mythology now
"But I disagree with her politics"
Do you agree with Tolkien's Conservative Catholic "Divine right of kings" Monarchism?
Do you agree with Tolstoy's Orthodox Mysticist Pacifism?
Rand's politics Are no more central than theirs. Its just more immediate in Current Year
This is the great American novel
This is the literary object that would give a true insight into "America" in all its contradiction
A Chinese or or Iranian would learn vastly more about American culture, politics, and Aesthetics from this than Moby Dick or Great Gatsby
But by the end of his first year at BlackRock, in 2019, Fancy was having doubts about ESG. That came to a head while he was on a BlackRock jet flying from Zurich to Madrid to attend a conference.
“I had a disagreement with some folks from the sales team, who, it was obvious to me, viewed the mechanics of how the funds work as irrelevant,” Fancy said. What they cared about, he said, was selling as many of these funds as possible. He called ESG “green paint on the existing system.”
He was not alone.
Carson Block, founder of San Francisco-based Muddy Waters Research, which conducts research into publicly held companies, said: “ESG investing, from the fund managers to the managements of the companies themselves, is almost entirely a giant grift.” All ESG does, Block said, is repackage existing funds. “ESG is just bullshit tweaks at the margins.”
When they arrived, the girl introduced the officer to her mother and father, according to Kaplan. But the officer refused to release her unless her parents presented their identification. When they declined to do so—arguing they hadn't done anything wrong—he called for backup.
When Kaplan arrived at his friends' home, he started filming the encounter. By now, the girl had started crying. Then her father did "what any dad would—he went to hug his crying kid," says Kaplan. "And at that point he was arrested. With handcuffs.[...]Three cops wrestled the father to the ground and then placed him in a police car, according to Kaplan. He was taken away and charged with obstructing justice, a disorderly persons offense.
Later, in his cell, he was interviewed by a woman from child protective services. She determined he was not a threat to anyone, and he was released and given a court date. The court found him guilty and he was fined $133.
In November, Fauci admitted in a hearing that “gain of function is a very nebulous term,” described “ePPP” as the more precise term, and refused to associate the research in Wuhan as gain-of-function. Senator Rand Paul shot back: “So what you’re doing is defining away gain-of-function. You’re simply saying it doesn’t exist because you’ve changed the definition on the NIH website. . . . What you’ve done is changed the definition on your website to try to cover your ass.”
Whether an experiment actually qualifies as GOF, or more specifically as ePPP, is somewhat subjective. And those who conduct or fund this type of research have an incentive to say particular experiments don’t qualify, and to play down the risks in order to bypass any critique.
The chattering class is using poor kids as pawns to eliminate standardized testing, which helps their own kids—rich kids who “don’t test well.” But they know how to strategically boost their GPAs, get recommendation letters from important people, stack their résumés with extracurriculars, and use the right slogans in their admissions essays. They have “polish.”
As a result, ignoring heat loss, only 40 percent of the energy converts into kinetic energy compared to 85 percent or more for BEVs.
In another instance, I was privately discussing with a professor the pros and cons of a Food Stamp reform proposal. After some analysis, I commented on my own experience with the program. His response was complete shock. “You don’t really mean you were on welfare. You just mean you were supported by your parents, right?”
When people think of universities, they think of their local state school, or else Harvard, Princeton, and Yale.
At Yale, I encountered the unique institution of the Master. The Master is the person who memorizes student’s names, meets with parents, and is a welcoming presence. There were twelve of them—one for each residential college (Yale’s name for an all-inclusive dormitory, a self-sustaining community with its own dining hall, library, gym, and administrators). The dean of each residential college handled administrative and academic concerns, whereas the Master was involved in cultural matters. The Master throws Master’s teas, where they curate and welcome special guests. The etymology of the word stems from “magister” of the Oxford system. Such a title does not exist at any other U.S. school, and neither does the role.
None of this was actually to their benefit, except for the few activists willing to invest time and energy into the game. It is not easy to stay up-to-date with the new, ever-more-complex rules about what you are allowed to say to qualify as the bare minimum of sociable and sane. It is cognitively and socially demanding. I had to not just study psychology and computer science, but I had to stay up-to-date with the latest PhD-level critical theory just to have conversations.
I had to debate with people why it is not racist that my Russian parents actually liked the word “Master.” That they liked that Yale was drawing from a rich, centuries-long tradition. “Master” connotes mastery of a subject. It connotes responsibilities and a cultural aesthetic far beyond what “head of college” connotes.
The Rabbis elaborate: “What is an example of a machloket l’shem shamayim, an argument for the sake of heaven? These are the disputes of Rabbis Hillel and Shammai,” [leaders of competing schools of study] who debated and argued aspects of Jewish law for over a decade without ever invalidating the other’s perspective. True, Hillel’s opinions typically prevailed, but because their arguments were for the sake of heaven, Shammai’s beliefs and positions were also valued and studied.
Florida did not have a personal income tax at the time (nor does it now). Therefore, allowing Disney to borrow money tax-free did not cost Florida anything. The Federal income tax rates hit 50 percent at $22,000 per year and 70 percent at $100,000 per year, so Disney would have been able to borrow at a substantial savings compared to if the company had to issue conventional taxable corporate bonds (see discussion in the comments about whether a 50 percent tax rate implies that a muni can be sold at half the yield of a same-risk same-duration corporate bond).
How could the arrangement be justified? If it is that easy, why not have the Florida state government give every company a 1-foot-square county-like “district” to administer and then the company can use its district to issue tax-exempt bonds? Disney told the legislature that the planned primary use for the 27,000 acres it had purchased was a town: Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow (EPCOT).[...]Circling back to the original topic, Disney was able to cut its costs tremendously at the expense of the average Federal taxpayer. What’s curious is that DeSantis-hating folks in other states who’ve been paying Disney’s tax bills advocate for this arrangement to continue. They’re so against DeSantis that they’re in favor of corporate welfare that actually costs them personally (since if people who buy Disney World (“Reedy Creek”) bonds don’t have to pay tax on the interest, taxes necessary to run the Federal government will have to be extracted from ordinary schlubs) and if you ask them “How much longer do you think Disney should have the right to issue tax-free municipal bonds?” they don’t propose any end date.
Originally students at the universities undertook training as priests even if destined for other professions, therefore chastity was obligatory.
Pliny the Elder's Natural History adds to the obligatory description—that they "abound in fruit and birds of every kind"—the unexpected detail "These islands, however, are greatly annoyed by the putrefying bodies of monsters, which are constantly thrown up by the sea".
Wheat was domesticated somewhere around Karaca Dag, Turkey, around 9000 BC. Barley was domesticated somewhere around Jarmo, Iraq, around 9000 BC. Cows were domesticated somewhere around Cayonu Tepesi, Iraq, in 8500 BC (then a second time, in Pakistan, later on). Rice was domesticated in two places in China around 10,000 BC.
I think you have to start with basic skepticism in that we have zero records of advanced human societies dating before the onset of the Holocene. That's an incredible evidentiary bar to be overcome by anyone arguing the opposite. But the Pleistocene epoch lasted for 2.5 million years, only ending 11,700 years ago, and humans and proto-humans were around for all of it. We don't know a lot in relative terms about human life in the Pleistocene, but we do know that the environment in which those humans lived was very different from our own. It was very cold, icy, windy and filled with giant animals quite capable of killing a human being in seconds. Not an environment likely to be conducive to advanced human civilizations.
But however much we know about the Pleistocene from geology and genetics, the archeological record from it is almost nil, nor do we have even the roughest of sketches from other ways of knowing. Most of our myths and religions, even if you were take them literally, don't extend back in time into the Pleistocene. The line of cultures in all parts of the world stops well short of there. Any way you cut it, a 2.5 million year long epoch across all corners of the Earth is a lot of time and space for which we have very little information with respect to how we were existing within it.
And it could be a mistake to think that because much of the Holocene archeological record would survive a 400 foot rise in sea levels, therefore were there to have been advanced human societies in the Pleistocene, those records would've survived as well. In relative terms, the geology and climate of the Holocene has been warm and stable (it's probably not a coincidence that it has given rise to such human flourishing). Do we really understand the cataclysms that would be associated with the transition from a 2.5 million year long geological age into the next? Do we really understand the dissipating effects of tens or even hundreds of thousands of years of Ice Age pressures on archeological artifacts as compared to the impact of thousands of years in a warm and stable climate?
“Dialysis costs Medicare about $60,000 per year, but the government spends more on covering inpatient hospitalizations,” said the nephrologist. “The average is roughly $120,000 per patient per year. In the pre-Medicare age, these patients would have died years earlier, but now Medicare pays for all the cardiovascular complications [heart attacks, leg ischemia, strokes] in these sick patients in addition to the vascular access complications [infections and stenosis]. Over the years they have bundled the payments so we get a fixed monthly fee for dialysis patients and take a hit if they get hospitalized for a vascular access complication. We perform outpatient procedures [e.g., stents and balloon angioplasty] to ensure they don’t wind up in the hospital. Two interventions per year is typical.”
Both low- and high-skilled natives are affected by the influx of immigrants. But because a disproportionate percentage of immigrants have few skills, it is low-skilled American workers, including many blacks and Hispanics, who have suffered most from this wage dip. The monetary loss is sizable. The typical high school dropout earns about $25,000 annually. According to census data, immigrants admitted in the past two decades lacking a high school diploma have increased the size of the low-skilled workforce by roughly 25 percent. As a result, the earnings of this particularly vulnerable group dropped by between $800 and $1,500 each year.
What does it all add up to? The fiscal burden offsets the gain from the $50 billion immigration surplus, so it’s not too farfetched to conclude that immigration has barely affected the total wealth of natives at all. Instead, it has changed how the pie is split, with the losers—the workers who compete with immigrants, many of those being low-skilled Americans—sending a roughly $500 billion check annually to the winners. Those winners are primarily their employers. And the immigrants themselves come out ahead, too. Put bluntly, immigration turns out to be just another income redistribution program.
I’m not sure that I love the evolution of Jewish victimhood over the past 75 years. In 1948, we fought against the regular militaries of Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen. Today our enemy is an individual 24-year-old incel. If we extrapolate out another 10 years, is it reasonable to predict that all Jews worldwide can be taken out by a pet rabbit and we need all of the goyim to rally around us and protect us from that rabbit?
“Local Carpenter Continues To Spread Disinformation Deemed Harmful By Religious Experts” (Babylon Bee): Religious experts have begun voicing concerns that a local carpenter’s disinformation is spreading among Israelites most susceptible to unapproved ideas. “Visit your nearest synagogue for the latest information on how to obey God. Listen to the experts!” … Eyewitnesses have confirmed that a group of Independent Fact Checkers followed the carpenter around holding large signs with disclaimers above his head: “SINCE YOUR SERMON INCLUDES INFORMATION ABOUT OBEYING GOD’S LAW, WE’VE ADDED DIRECTIONS TO THE NEAREST SYNAGOGUE.”
I summarized the below photo on Facebook with “One of these machines requires hours of reading, intensive Web searches, YouTube video tutorial review, phone calls to experts, and in-person dual instruction to operate.” Why the complexity? Tesla has tossed out decades of user interface conventions developed by Ford, GM, Toyota, Honda, Mercedes, and BMW. Instead of a four-position switch for wipers, the driver is supposed to press a button on the left stalk and then turn his/her/zir/their attention to the central touch screen where different wiper speeds, including a not-very-smart “Auto” mode, can be selected. Instead of dedicated buttons to answer the phone, hang up, or invoke Siri, some combination of the multi-function wheels on the steering wheel will accomplish these tasks. Instead of dedicated buttons to turn on and adjust cruise control, one engages it with overloaded gestures on the shift lever.
In 1971, Karenga was sentenced to one to ten years in prison on counts of felony assault and false imprisonment.[22] One of the victims gave testimony of how Karenga and other men tortured her and another woman. The woman described having been stripped naked and beaten with an electrical cord. Karenga's estranged wife, Brenda Lorraine Karenga, testified that she sat on the other woman's stomach while another man forced water into her mouth through a hose.[...]As of 2021, Karenga chairs the Africana Studies Department at California State University, Long Beach.
From “At Berkeley Law, a Debate Over Zionism, Free Speech and Campus Ideals” (New York Times, December 21):
> a student group created a bylaw that banned supporters of Zionism from speaking at its events. … the bylaw, which eight other student groups also adopted
In some cases, this was true. Some converts naively believed in the limitless piety of ISIS fighters, so they could be affected by counter-propaganda that depicted, accurately, how these figures drank and whored like soldiers everywhere. But many ISIL converts defected for legitimate, if bizarre reasons. Some just wanted to horrify their parents. Still others were just turned on by beheading videos. This was twisted, but not “disinformation” in any real sense.
An even bigger reason: many ISIL recuits perceived little chance to ever have an impact or even own a home in their own societies, while ISIS was offering them land and authority just a click away. Even a writer at the Huffington Post was writing in 2015 that the problem wasn’t social media per se, but that many potential recruits “don’t feel they have a stake or future in their community or country.” Offered such a stake, they jumped at the chance.
The first type of park which we will consider is usually called "Play Grounds". These play grounds should contain an area from six to ten acres and should be spaced throughout the City at such intervals that no child will need to walk more than one-half mile to reach one. These play grounds should be chosen with special regard to their location, so that, for instance, the children will not have to cross railroad tracks or other dangerous hazards in reaching them.
The improvements on these play grounds should be designed for intensively supervised play for children between the ages of six and twelve years. A very desirable method of providing this type of play ground is to extend the school grounds sufficiently to care for the play ground area. This has an advantage in that the supervised play can be handled by the school authorities.
In our studies in Austin we have found that the negroes are present in small numbers, in practically all sections of the city, excepting the area just east of East Avenue and south of the City Cemetery. This area seems to be all negro population. It is our recommendation that the nearest approach to the solution of the race segregation problem will be the recommendation of this district as a negro district; and that all the facilities and conveniences be provided the negroes in this district, as an incentive to draw the negro population to this area.This will eliminate the necessity of duplication of white and black schools, white and black parks, and other dJiplicate facilities for this area. We are recommending that sufficient area acquired adjoining the negro high school to provide adequate space for a complete negro play-field in connection with the negro high school. We further recommend that the negro schools in this area be provided with ample and adequate play ground space and facilities similar to the white schomis of the city.
Today, when a Uyghur man is taken from his home by the police, his wife can expect a new man to turn up on the doorstep within days. This will be a spy appointed by the government to monitor her behaviour. Invariably, the spy will be Han Chinese, and as part of his “monitoring” he will share her bed. The Communist Party calls this the “Pair Up and Become Family” program, and the eugenicist overtones are unmistakeable. Xi wants to dilute the Uyghur genes. He is unmoved by the human suffering his program entails—suffering perhaps akin to losing a husband in battle in the ancient world and then being taken as the killer’s concubine (the fate of Andromache in myth and scores of nameless women in reality). These women are being punished for the crime of having married the wrong person.
But the real game-changer has been tech. Silicon Valley, once an exemplar of competitive capitalism, is morphing into a Gargantua of giant firms with market power unprecedented in modern times. For example, Google and Apple account for nearly all mobile browsers worldwide, while Microsoft controls 90 percent of all PC operating system software. Three tech firms now account for nearly two-thirds of all online advertising revenues, which comprises the vast majority of all ad sales.
Mike Malone, who has chronicled Silicon Valley over the past quarter-century, believes the industry has lost much of its egalitarian ethos; the new masters of tech, he argues, have shifted from “blue-collar kids to the children of privilege.” “An intensely competitive industry,” he suggests, has become enamored with the allure of “the sure thing” backed by massive capital. If there is a potential competitor, they simply buy it. We can see this clearly in the evolution of artificial intelligence (AI), which, rather than spark a wave of new startups, is now becoming dominated by a few large firms.
A //prehistoric// society is often defined as one without writing. The Spartans never became entirely illiterate, but though they presumably produced lists and records, they produced no literature of any kind in the 5th century BC, and only political tracts after that (Millender 2001). They wrote no histories. They didn't even write down their laws. Spartan apologists claim this was because memorizing the laws made them better citizens, but throughout history we find that tyrannical rulers strongly preferred not to write down their laws, so that they could say the law was whatever was most-convenient at the time.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-265Even though Sparta still counts as pre-historic by the usual definition, I think a more-useful definition is one by Michael Vassar, which highlights not the artifacts but the metaphysics of a culture: *{A prehistoric society is one which makes no distinction between myth and history.}* What matters is not whether myths were written down, but whether a people were conscious of the fact that their myths might not be literally true. I don't mean just whether they doubted their myths, but whether they even had a concept of /{factual truth as distinct from mythic, pragmatic, personal, or ideological truth}/.[...]True history is a solvent which dissolves mythic cultures. The most-crucial task of a totalitarian government is to control history, and to suppress the understanding that knowledge lies in /{quantitative data}/ rather than in absolute, context-free, unverifiable "eternal truths". Reality is too messy to be fit by any theory simple enough to be understood by the common citizen. Totalitarian ideologies are therefore always over-simplifications, and totalitarian governments are doomed always to force their subjects to act out the fantasy of some madman.
Understanding Sparta is important today because the pre-historic mindset is no longer in decline, but on the rise; and all of it descends from Sparta, through Plato. Plato was also a pre-historic, inventing myths and using them as /{arguments}/. Later totalitarian Western social systems were pre-historic as well, including medievial Christendom, the French Revolutionaries (following Rousseau, who used his own myths of pre-history not just as narrative, but as /{evidence}/), and all Marxist or fascist governments (AFAIK).
The replacement of history with /{historicism}/ (re-casting history to fit an eschatalogical myth, and extrapolating the future from that myth), and of objective facts with "lived experience," "personal truths," and social construction, is endemic in the West today. It was popularized by phenomenologists in the 20th century, and has completely dominated continental philosophy ever since fascists exterminated all other philosophy in continental Europe in the period 1930-1944. The myth of Sparta as the noblest of cities is one of the supporting myths of this fascist philosophical legacy, which is politically stronger today than it ever has been since 1945.
Idealistic [12] cultures, from the Egyptians to modern communist states, habitually rewrite history, erasing from it people who had fallen from grace, and lying about battles they'd lost, in order to cover up why they had lost, or even the fact that they had lost. Such cultures couldn't learn from their mistakes because they wouldn't admit to having made mistakes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_the_GreatSocrates wasn't executed for being a "gadfly"; other Athenians of the time, such as Euripides, insulted more-powerful people more-often and more-publicly than Socrates ever did and were never punished for it [4b]. He was executed for corrupting the youth, because he did: he taught them to admire Sparta and to despise Athens and democracy. Many of them, including Xenophon, Critias, Charmides, Alcibiades, and probably Plato, either conspired to betray Athens to Sparta during the Peloponnesian War, or were associated with the bloody reign of anti-democratic terror imposed by Sparta on Athens for the year following the Peloponessian War. Athens rose up and cast out the Spartans and their Athenian aristocratic allies, but never recovered culturally. Socrates had taught his students well: they succeeded in destroying Athens and thereby snuffing out democracy for 1200 years.
Similarly, Aristotle was pressured into leaving Athens not because the Athenians objected to his philosophy, but because he was not just Macedonian, but had been a personal bud of Athens' newly-dead tyrant, Alexander the Great.
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Socrates/Background-of-the-trialIn return for teaching Alexander, Philip agreed to rebuild Aristotle's hometown of Stageira, which Philip had razed, and to repopulate it by buying and freeing the ex-citizens who were slaves, or pardoning those who were in exile.
As Plato and Xenophon confirm, Socrates himself shared some of these qualities. In Aristophanes’ Birds [414], the young who express their admiration for Sparta are said to be “Socratizing.”
But even if Socrates’ association with Critias and Alcibiades was an important factor leading to his trial and conviction, it certainly was not the only ingredient of the case against him, nor even the most important one. The law that Socrates was alleged to have violated was a law against impiety, and the thrust of his defense, as presented by Plato, was that his life has been consumed by his single-minded devotion to the god. The Socrates who speaks to us in Plato’s Apology has no doubt that the charge of impiety against him must be refuted. There is no reason to suspect that this charge was a mere pretext and that what Socrates was really being prosecuted for was his antidemocratic associations and ideas.
Whenever Athens had a major military defeat, some part of the assembly agitated for executing the general in charge, or at least exiling him. Even after winning the naval battle of Arginusae, the Athenian assembly executed 6 of the 8 naval commanders, because they were angry that a storm had prevented the rescue of survivors from 25 disabled or sunken Athenian triremes. Several famous generals didn't go back to Athens after losing a battle. Even Thucydides was exiled after "losing" a battle (there had been no battle because he hadn't been able to get the army there in time).
"The society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting by fools."-- Thucydides
“I have been investing for 80 years—more than one-third of our country’s lifetime. Despite our citizens’ penchant—almost enthusiasm—for self-criticism and self-doubt, I have yet to see a time when it made sense to make a long-term bet against America,” Mr. Buffett said in the letter.[...]“America would have done fine without Berkshire. The reverse is not true,” he said. In his letter, Mr. Buffett also defended the practice of stock buybacks. Berkshire spent nearly $8 billion repurchasing its shares in 2022, down from a record of $27 billion the previous year.
Although critics of buybacks contend that companies would be better off investing that money into their businesses, proponents, like Mr. Buffett, say they can benefit shareholders if they are executed when a company’s share price is trading below its value.
“When you are told that all repurchases are harmful to shareholders or to the country, or particularly beneficial to CEOs, you are listening to either an economic illiterate or a silver-tongued demagogue,” he said.
The former financial manager turned cartoonist made his comments on Wednesday in response to a Rasmussen Poll that said a small majority of Black Americans agreed with the statement “It’s OK to be white.”
Mr. Adams, in one of his regular talks he records and posts online, said, among other things, that white people should stay away from Black Americans.
“If nearly half of all Blacks are not OK with white people…that’s a hate group,” Mr. Adams said at one point in the video. “I don’t want to have anything to do with them. And I would say, based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from Black people…because there is no fixing this.”
Soon thereafter, newspapers began announcing they were dropping “Dilbert.”
1. No screens at the dinner table.2. No screens in the bedroom.3. No screens for babies.4. Stick to smart, positive content.5. Take regular breaks.
The end result was that in the West, urbanism declined severely between the fourth and sixth centuries. Rome, once a city of a million people, collapsed down to a population of just 80,000. Arles, which had been a thriving Roman city with an amphitheater, an aqueduct, a chariot-racing track, a theater and full city walls shrunk so severely that the remains of the city moved inside its amphitheater, repurposing it as a new set of city walls, with the town square in the middle and houses built in the stands.
Federal rules require human-performed visual track inspections. In the past few years, the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) has allowed a number of railroads to conduct pilot programs whereby the railroads reduced the number of human-performed inspections and increased the number of automated inspections.
Those pilot programs proved successful in that the automated inspections found more defects than visual human inspections, says Scribner. The hope of these programs was that they would free up visual inspectors to examine signals and other track components that can't be inspected by automated technology. Doing that should improve safety.
But Biden's FRA killed these pilot programs. In 2021, Rubio and 22 other senators signed a letter asking that these pilot programs be continued. They weren't.
Buttigieg bringing that up as an example of Republican safety regulation–slashing is disingenuous. It's particularly egregious given that there's been no indication thus far that track defects (that these inspections, human or automated, would detect) had anything to do with the East Palestine derailment.
The improvement of the mind : or, a supplement to the art of logick: containing a variety of remarks and rules for the attainment and communication of useful knowledge, in religion, in the sciences, and in common life
Selling unused Covid gear on the cheap: New York City is auctioning off $200 million in Covid supplies for just $500,000. This comes from local news blog The City, who got the scoop. Among some of the details from the story: A junk dealer from Long Island picked up $12 million in ventilators for just $24,600. “It took the dealer 28 truckloads to cart the stuff away, auction records state.” It’s a great story that also includes emails showing city officials fretting that people might find out how much they overspent. It’s like Storage Wars but so, so sad.
Congratulations to the junk dealer who got 500,000 pounds of ventilators.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/himars-transform-battle-for-ukraine-modern-warfare-11665169716Like external analysts, Moscow overestimated its own capabilities and underestimated how much Ukrainian military capabilities had improved since Russia first occupied Ukrainian territory in 2014. Mr. Putin failed to anticipate Western unity in backing Ukraine. And military planners sent in too small a force to take and occupy a country nearly the size of Texas.
Russian artillery—like most such systems since World War I—lacks precision. To destroy a target, troops generally level everything around it. Gunners following maps rain shells in a grid pattern that aims to leave no terrain in a quadrant untouched. Russian forces in Ukraine are lobbing dozens of shells per acre to hit one objective, analysts say.
Himars can do the job with one rocket carrying a 200-pound explosive warhead. Each Ukrainian Himars carries one six-rocket pod that can effectively land the punch of more than 100,000 lbs. of traditional artillery.
Artillery is cumbersome. During Operation Desert Storm in Iraq in 1991, it accounted for more than 60% of a U.S. division’s weight. Moving it demands soldiers, trucks, fuel and time, plus additional soldiers and vehicles to protect those supply operations.[...]“It’s not just the precision of Himars that’s revolutionary,” said Gen. Scales. “It’s the ability to reduce the tonnage requirements by an order of magnitude or better.”
Fearing a massive explosion would send shrapnel and toxic fumes soaring for miles, nearly 2,000 residents, including the Kuglers, were evacuated. On February 6, Norfolk Southern officials set off a controlled burn. But even that sent a fireball into the sky, with a black mushroom cloud that looked like something out of Chernobyl.
Bures’ time in Hong Kong was a bust. There was a penis theft panic there forty years earlier, and he was able to interview some of the doctors who treated it. But they all said that was long ago. Now everybody is Westernized and has Western fears like vaccine injury or structural racism. They get Western mental disorders like depression and anorexia. The idea of witches stealing their penises seems as risible to them as it probably does to you.
Bures had a terrible time getting to Lin’gao. He had equal trouble getting an interpreter; the natives spoke a language called Be, very distantly related to Thai but not at all to regular Chinese. Finally he found someone who was able to contact a local shaman. Like any good doctor, the shaman referred him to a specialist - in this case, the designated anti-ghost shaman, who lived in a different village. He spent most of his time off on various ghost-fighting missions, but eventually Bures and his team were able to track him down.
I want you to picture the scene. An American journalist has been traveling the world in search of a dying variety of witchcraft. Now he’s reached the end of the line, the wildest and most primitive region of China. With great difficulty, he has procured an interpreter. Together, they consult a shaman, who sends them on a quest to find a second, wiser shaman who specializes in ghosts. After many trials and tribulations, he reaches the second, wiser, ghost-specialist shaman, who invites him into his home, filled with strange charms and magical images. “Tell me your question,” says the shaman. And Bures asks: “What do you know about penis-stealing witches?”
. . . and the shaman answers: “Haha, no one believes in that stuff anymore.”
The ancient Romans loved war. If you loved war, and killed a lot of people, that made you glorious. Nobody worried it meant you were a bloodthirsty psychopath. Or if you were, it’s fine! The past twelve emperors were bloodthirsty psychopaths! Their families, concubines, and guards were all bloodthirsty psychopaths! You’ll fit right in! Relatedly, it doesn’t seem like the Romans had PTSD.
In our society, it’s commonly believed that War Is Hell, and if you enjoy it too much, you might be a bloodthirsty psychopath. Relatedly, estimates of what percent of veterans get PTSD range from 15% to 85%. I’m not sure the 85% number is accurate, but if it was, and I was a veteran, and I wasn’t getting PTSD, I might start worrying that this was starting to signal negative things about me. If my unconscious felt the same way, maybe I’d develop a few PTSD symptoms, just to be safe.
We’re conducting a massive experiment in how far you can take this. People now believe that you can be traumatized by hearing someone express the wrong opinion during a college class - and that intellectuals with a sensitive souls and diverse equity-loving justice-promoting minorities will be traumatized most of all. I suspect all of this is true, if you believe it.
So fine, yes, gender dysphoria shares some resemblance to culture-bound illnesses; I would put it around the same level as anorexia. But be careful: everything shares some resemblance to everything. What if transphobia is our culture’s version of the penis-stealing witch panic? Wise but evil women (gender studies professors) are using incomprehensible black arts (post-modernism) to make people lose their penises. Sure, those people are losing their penises through voluntary sex-change surgery, but this is just another case of the general principle that we replace the magical explanations natural to other cultures with the medicalized explanations natural to our own. And sure, other culture’s panics involved fake/illusory penis loss and ours involves the real thing, but this is just another case of the general principle that modern Western civilization turns other culture’s myths into reality.
A reasonable alternative guidance would have been not to spread claims that are unsupported by peer-reviewed studies or any other claims made without a verifiable basis in fact. But to claim that abstract information should be censored if it might be viewed by someone as harmful or offensive is symptomatic of the serious modern social disease prevalent at both ends of the current political spectrum. While this used to be primarily the province of the extreme Right, one version of the disease is now a facet of the vocal secular religion I am now choosing to call “Fundamentalist Wokism”
Free and open access to information, even information that can cause pain or distress, is essential in a free society. As Christopher Hitchens so often stressed, freedom of speech is primarily important not because it provides an opportunity for speakers to speak out against prevailing winds but because that speech gives listeners or readers the freedom to realize they might want to change their minds.
Seneca the Younger described the activities of other philosophers in ways that reflect some of the same concerns as ordinary language philosophers.[9]
For these men, too, have left to us, not positive discoveries, but problems whose solution is still to be sought. They might perhaps have discovered the essentials, had they not sought the superfluous also. They lost much time in quibbling about words and in sophistical argumentation; all that sort of thing exercises the wit to no purpose. We tie knots and bind up words in double meanings, and then try to untie them. Have we leisure enough for this? Do we already know how to live, or die? We should rather proceed with our whole souls towards the point where it is our duty to take heed lest things, as well as words, deceive us. Why, pray, do you discriminate between similar words, when nobody is ever deceived by them except during the discussion? It is things that lead us astray: it is between things that you must discriminate.
China’s Newest Weapon to Nab Western Technology—Its Courts
https://quillette.com/blog/2023/02/20/comparing-wokeness-to-christianity-is-an-insult-to-the-church/What does it mean to be “woke”? If you ask talk show host Joe Walsh, a former Republican politician who’s migrated leftward and now regularly denounces the GOP, being woke “just means being empathetic. And tolerant. And willing to listen. And open to learning.” On the other hand, if you ask writer Wesley Yang—a public intellectual whose politics are decidedly “anti-woke”—the word means “active discrimination to obtain equal outcomes across identity groups, dismantling law enforcement while policing speech and thought, and sterilizing gay, autistic, and gender-nonconforming children.”
To the extent social-justice extremism resembles a puritanical faith, it’s one that provides believers with no grace and no hope of redemption.
Susceptibility to popular delusions appears to be a human universal, although some people are more susceptible than others. These delusions can coalesce around just about anything the human mind can imagine, from get-rich-quick schemes to fear of demonic possession to blaming outgroups for moral decay. And though they are sometimes innocuous, they are also potentially dangerous. In Europe from 1500–1700, for example, tens of thousands of women and men were killed for being witches.
Both men and women can be swept into widely held social beliefs, but adolescent girls and young women might be more vulnerable to certain types of beliefs. Eagly noted that women have, on average, more communal traits as “manifested by selflessness, concern with others, and a desire to be at one with others,” whereas men have, on average, more agentic traits as manifested by “self-assertion, self-expansion, and the urge to master.” These differences are reflected in how the sexes form and maintain social relationships. Boys’ and men’s groups are larger, more integrated, more open to new recruits, and often focused on a specific outcome, such as competing against another group of males. Larger groups provide a competitive advantage, but at the cost of less social and emotional support for individual relationships.
In contrast, girls’ and women’s communal motivations include the cultivation of a network of relationships that provides them with social and emotional support and a sense of safety. These relationships are more intimate, time-intensive, and exclusive than those of boys and men. Girls’ and women’s social behavior (e.g., language expressiveness, social smiles) fosters the initiation of friendships and helps to maintain them. Girls are more engaged with, and know more about, their best friend than boys. Girls also are more sensitive to the social-emotional cues of their partner and work harder to minimize perceived inequalities in the relationship.
Mr. Pence’s resistance to the subpoena, which we’re told has no defined scope, is rooted in his role as President of the Senate. That was his constitutional position on Jan. 6 as he presided over the counting of the electoral votes. As such he has a strong case that he’s covered by Article 1, Section 6, which says that “for any Speech or Debate in either House,” Members of the House or Senate “shall not be questioned in any other Place.”
Amusingly, Mr. Pence can also produce pay stubs from the “United States Senate Disbursing Office” as a record of his salary. If he was paid for his work for the Senate, why isn’t he covered by Senate immunity?
Mr. Frigola said he disagrees with the district’s view of equity. “I was born in Cuba, and it doesn’t sound good when people are trying to achieve equal outcomes for everyone,” he said.
The use of quantitative performance indicators to measure quality in academic publishing has undercut peer review’s qualitative assessment of articles submitted to journals. The two might have co-existed quite amicably were the most common indicator, citation, on which the journal impact factor is based, not been so susceptible to gaming. Gaming of citations is ubiquitous in academic publishing and referees are powerless to prevent it. The article gives some indication of how the citation game is played. It then moves on from academic publishing in general to look at academic publishing in medicine, a discipline in which authorship is also gamed. Many authors in medicine have made no meaningful contribution to the article that bears their names, and those who have contributed most are often not named as authors. Author slots are openly bought and sold. The problem is magnified by the academic publishing industry and by academic institutions, pleased to pretend that peer review is safeguarding scholarship. In complete contrast, the editors of medicine’s leading journals are scathing about just how ineffectual is peer review in medicine. Other disciplines should take note lest they fall into the mire in which medicine is sinking.
With a unique approach and presenting an array of new and intriguing topics, Mathematical Quantization offers a survey of operator algebras and related structures from the point of view that these objects are quantizations of classical mathematical structures. This approach makes possible, with minimal mathematical detail, a unified treatment of a variety of topics.
Threatening UNC’s accreditation swings a hammer because schools can’t receive federal financial-aid dollars without it. Not long ago, accreditation was handled by regional monopolies, and a single agency could deal a death blow to a school. The Trump Administration changed the rules so colleges and universities may now be accredited by any regional accreditor.
This might be just another lament about “woke” campus culture, and the loss of traditional educational virtues. But the seminar topic was “Race and the Limits of Law in America.” Four of the 6 weeks were focused on anti-black racism (the other two were on anti-immigrant and anti-indigenous racism). I am a black professor, I directed my university’s black-studies program, I lead anti-racism and transformative-justice workshops, and I have published books on anti-black racism and prison abolition. I live in a predominantly black neighborhood of Philadelphia, my daughter went to an Afrocentric school, and I am on the board of our local black cultural organization.
Like others on the left, I had been dismissive of criticisms of the current discourse on race in the United States. But now my thoughts turned to that moment in the 1970s when leftist organizations imploded, the need to match and raise the militancy of one’s comrades leading to a toxic culture filled with dogmatism and disillusion. How did this happen to a group of bright-eyed high school students?
In a recent book, John McWhorter asserts that anti-racism is a new religion. It was an idea I quickly dismissed. Last summer, I found anti-racism to be a perversion of religion: I found a cult. From Wild Wild Country to the Nxivm shows to Scientology exposés, the features of cults have become familiar in popular culture. There is sleep deprivation. Ties to the outside world are severed. The sense of time collapses, with everything cult-related feeling extremely urgent. Participants are emotionally battered. In this weakened state, participants learn about and cling to dogmatic beliefs. Any outsider becomes a threat.
The dozen participants in this summer program were spending almost every hour of every day together, I was almost the only outsider they were encountering, and I was marked as a threat.
Socrates asserts that people who've inherited fortunes tend to be light with their money but that people who've made their fortunes "have a second love of money as a creation of their own, resembling the affection of authors for their own poems, or of parents for their children, besides that natural love of it for the sake of use and profit which is common to them and all men. And hence they are very bad company, for they can talk about nothing but the praises of wealth."
Socrates asks Cephalus, a wealthy old man, "What do you consider to be the greatest blessing which you have reaped from your wealth?" Cephalus replies that "The great blessing of riches, I do not say to every man, but to a good man, is, that he has had no occasion to deceive or to defraud others, either intentionally or unintentionally."
https://philip.greenspun.com/humor/choosing-a-major.textA number of the 10 professors in the department are ``radical feminists, gay theorists or Marxists, very dogmatic and intolerant,'' Professor Sommers said. ``Anyone who dares to oppose them gets labeled as part of the white, hetero, patriarchal hegemony.''
“Postmodern” is one of those words that means nothing because it means so many things. The postmodern concept of the self is one of constant flux. The you of yesterday, today, or next year could all be very different people. Additionally, labels such as “American” or “sane” or “diabetic” collapse into meaninglessness, because what does “American” or “sane” or “diabetic” mean at the end of the day? Everything’s irreducible and/or negatable through a postmodern lens, and postmodernism scoffs at the very concept of definition.
Of course, if you talk to anyone with common sense, postmodernism sounds like the intellectual equivalent of navel gazing only to discover belly button lint, and in many ways, they’re right. It’s not the kind of movement that has wide appeal.
Something I’ve noticed about movements like modernism, realism, and romanticism is that they double as personalities, and are thus easy for people to conceptualize. You can think of anyone you know and easily label them as a hard-nosed modernist, a grim realist, or a wistful romantic. Hell, I’ve encountered people I would call post-colonial. But unless you’re describing someone’s artistic output or area of study, nobody’s a postmodernist.
COWEN: The first time when you quit Harvard, what was the straw that broke the camel’s back? What was the final thought in your mind where you realized, “I need to get out of here?”
GIOIA: I realized I took my best teachers at Harvard. They fell into two camps. They were older men who had served in the military in World War II. That had given them a kind of reality index about what the purposes of literature were. My other two teachers, Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Fitzgerald, whom I write about in this book, were people who basically came to teaching very late. They had made their living as writers, and it was only when they were old and lacking funds, they ended up teaching.
I realized that Wallace Stevens hadn’t been in the university, T. S. Eliot hadn’t been in the university, I could make a living as a writer somehow some other way. I just felt that being in the university was making me, as a poet, too self-conscious. I was writing poems to be interpreted, rather than to be experienced.
I did a lot of work at the NEA in terms of American literacy, and I had never understood how we measure literacy. It’s a very simple thing, and I can explain it in about a minute. In a test that measures high levels of literacy, I say, “Tyler says that coffee is good.”
Dana says, “Coffee is bad,” and the question is, “Is coffee good? Is coffee bad? Is there a disagreement?” Most people will check good or bad. They cannot because of their, in a sense, inadequate linguistic training, they cannot recognize contradictory statements in a logical structure, which means that we’ve lost our ability to make even basic distinctions and refinements in terms of thought. There’s another whole thing which is different from this that I’ll be happy to go into but I don’t want to talk too long on this.
There’s three ways of saying conservative. Is it conservative politics, is it conservative aesthetics, is it a conservative cultural vision? There was an avant-garde composer named Lou Harrison and he had his motto which was, “Consider, [cherish], conserve, create.” The whole notion seems to me of art is of conservation, of looking at all the achievements of the past and figuring out what it is we save and what it is that we need to add to move forward.
The trouble with that in terms of academic culture is that there’s one or two trendy ways that they think are important because they generate work that validates you for promotion and for tenure versus having real deeper cultural values. The really great poets who are conserving culture, and one of the greatest ones just died, a fellow named Richard Wilbur. What you felt with Wilbur when you are reading these wonderful poems that everything that was worthwhile and usable in the past somehow found a place in these poems.
I think that’s what it is in the same way you would not in mathematics or science or economics throw out everything before you. You would take it and you would build on it to make something that was meaningful for the moment.
Nuclear plants usually have the highest capital needs of any power source, but they can generate affordable power. In Germany, nuclear ranks as the lowest-cost major source of power. In the Ontario province of Canada (where most of the nation’s nuclear power is), nuclear energy is second only to hydroelectric. Globally, the International Energy Agency reported in 2020 that nuclear energy is expected to be the cheapest source of dispatchable low-carbon electricity in 2025.
The doctors privately recognized these false self-diagnoses as a manifestation of social contagion. They even acknowledged that suicide has an element of social contagion. But when I said the clusters of girls streaming into our service looked as if their gender issues might be a manifestation of social contagion, the doctors said gender identity reflected something innate.
I replied:
“I do not ethically agree with linking a minor patient to a therapist who would be gender affirming with gender as a focus of their work without that being discussed with the parents and the parent agreeing to that kind of care.”
In all my years at the Washington University School of Medicine, I had received solidly positive performance reviews. But in 2021, that changed. I got a below-average mark for my “Judgment” and “Working Relationships/Cooperative Spirit.” Although I was described as “responsible, conscientious, hard-working and productive” the evaluation also noted: “At times Jamie responds poorly to direction from management with defensiveness and hostility.”
It was a good course. The proposal was clear and concise, indicating not only a command of the relevant literature but a sensitivity to students’ interests, expectations, and ability to handle the workload. But I noticed an apparently minor, easily correctable issue. Among the learning outcomes listed was a requirement that students develop a greater acceptance of LGBTQ+ perspectives and rights. That struck me as problematic. I happen to think that such acceptance is a good thing, but to stipulate it as a learning outcome raises a knotty question. If a student masters the course material, turns in the required work, and passes the exams, but //doesn’t// exhibit that acceptance, is he going to fail?
After expressing my general admiration for the course, I raised my misgiving in the following way (and this is nearly an exact quote): “We need to keep in mind that we’re a state university. Our mission is to pursue, ascertain, and disseminate objective truth, and to equip our students to do the same. Given that mission, I don’t think we can list a learning outcome that requires students’ assent on a matter of personal morality. The other learning outcomes are fine. You don’t need that one, so I’d just cut it.” My colleague was fresh out of graduate school and not yet tenured, which (theoretically) put her in a vulnerable position. Nevertheless, she became apoplectic; so angry, in fact, that she had difficulty getting out her first sentence. “I can’t believe people still think that way!” she spluttered. “Queer Theory has deconstructed objectivity!”
Her words hung in the air as I glanced around the room. Not a single faculty member, not even those in math or sciences, seemed fazed by her categorical statement. Since I was a tenured professor, I was reluctant to debate an untenured colleague during a school meeting. So, I let the matter drop. The course was approved without revision by the School of Liberal Arts, and went on to gain approval by the curriculum committee. And that is how my college got into the business of winning converts.
http://www.ontology.buffalo.edu/smith/derridaletter.htmWhen Jacques Derrida, the renowned “father of deconstruction,” was awarded an honorary degree by Cambridge University in 1992, 20 of the world’s preeminent philosophers—including W.V. Quine and Ruth Barcan Marcus—signed a letter of protest, in which they argued:
> M. Derrida describes himself as a philosopher, and his writings do indeed bear some marks of writings in that discipline. … In the eyes of philosophers, and certainly those working in leading departments of philosophy throughout the world, M. Derrida’s work does not meet accepted standards of clarity and rigor. … M. Derrida seems to us to have come close to making a career out of what we regard as translating into the academic sphere tricks and gimmicks similar to those of the Dadaists. … Many French philosophers see in M. Derrida only cause for embarrassment, his antics having contributed significantly to the widespread impression that contemporary French philosophy is little more than an object of ridicule.
In the eyes of philosophers, and certainly among those working in leading departments of philosophy throughout the world, M Derrida's work does not meet accepted standards of clarity and rigour.
We submit that, if the works of a physicist (say) were similarly taken to be of merit primarily by those working in other disciplines, this would in itself be sufficient grounds for casting doubt upon the idea that the physicist in question were a suitable candidate for an honorary degree.
M Derrida's career had its roots in the heady days of the 1960s, and his writings continue to reveal their origins in that period. Many of them seem to consist in no small part of elaborate jokes and puns ("logical phallusies" and the like) and M Derrida seems to us to have come close to making a career out of what we regard as translating into the academic sphere tricks and gimmicks similar to those of the Dadaists or of the concrete poets.
Certainly he has shown considerable originality in this respect. But again, we submit, such originality does not lend credence to the idea that M Derrida is a suitable candidate for an honorary degree.
M Derrida's voluminous writings in our view stretch the normal forms of academic scholarship beyond recognition. Above all as every reader can very easily establish for himself (and for this purpose any page will do) his works employ a written style that defies comprehension.
Many have been willing to give M Derrida the benefit of the doubt, insisting that language of such depth and difficulty of interpretation must hide deep and subtle thoughts indeed.
When the effort is made to penetrate it, however, then it becomes clear, to us at least, that, where coherent assertions are being made at all, these are either false or trivial.
I have long viewed investigative reporting through two prisms; either biopsies or autopsies. The former include trying to uncover potential wrongdoing or disasters ahead of time, the latter involve digging deep after the disaster has happened. Since this project was an autopsy it should have been easier, but that wasn't always the case.
I will finish with one quick example of the declining importance of journalistic ethics. It involves the standards editor of the NYT. That person used to be on the masthead, the hallowed ground for the most important and senior managers of the newsroom. Today, the standards editor is not among the 12 people listed on the masthead for the news side of the paper.
GIOIA: I guess we can blame Mies van der Rohe. Modernist architecture created this notion of functionality, form follows function. The United States is full of dreadful churches, but the function of a church is different than what architects think. I know many people who have come to Catholicism because they were in France. They walked into Chartres, Mont St. Michel and something happened in them that they did not understand. They felt something happening inside this space that was not happening in the outer world. That is the purpose of a cathedral. A purpose of a cathedral is to bring you into a space in which spiritual contemplation and experience is possible. Transformation is possible inside those walls that are not going to happen generally outside. Now, we simply have functional things. There are comfortable seating, comfortable lighting. We might as well be in the Elks lodge.
In a captivating video, Paul Simon explained his process of writing the song Bridge Over Trouble Water, providing an illuminating glimpse into artistic creativity. Simon noted that the original melody came from a Bach chorale; he wrote only a variation. Then he was stuck, but upon hearing some blues chords found inspiration for the next section. Finally, the lyrics arose from a concert he attended; he admits he stole the lines from someone else. This is a great example of T.S. Eliot’s dictum: “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.”
In 1950, there were more than 16 workers for every beneficiary. In 2035, that ratio will be only 2.3 workers per retiree.
“The biggest machines, in those days, were already pushing the limits of what could be constructed on Arbre with reasonable amounts of money."
"I hadn't known that," I said. "I always tend to assume there's an infinite amount of money out there."
"There might as well be," Arsibalt said, "but most of it gets spent on pornography, sugar water, and bombs. There is only so much that can be scraped together for particle accelerators.”
That's funny because if anyone actually did prove the existence of God we'd just tell him `nice proof, Fraa Bly' and start believing in God.
“Thousands of years ago, the work that people did had been broken down into jobs that were the same every day, in organizations where people were interchangeable parts. All of the story had been bled out of their lives. That was how it had to be; it was how you got a productive economy. But it would be easy to see a will at work behind this: not exactly an evil will, but a selfish will. The people who’d made the system thus were jealous, not of money and not of power but of story. If their employees came home at day’s end with interesting stories to tell, it meant that something had gone wrong: a blackout, a strike, a spree killing. The Powers That Be would not suffer others to be in stories of their own unless they were fake stories that had been made up to motivate them. People who couldn’t live without story had been driven into the concents or into jobs like Yul’s. All others had to look somewhere outside of work for a feeling that they were part of a story, which I guessed was why Sæculars were so concerned with sports, and with religion. How else could you see yourself as part of an adventure? Something with a beginning, middle, and end in which you played a significant part? We avout had it ready-made because we were a part of this project of learning new things. Even if it didn’t always move fast enough for people like Jesry, it did move. You could tell where you were and what you were doing in that story. Yul got all of this for free by living his stories from day to day, and the only drawback was that the world held his stories to be of small account.”
As a child, Sonia Monsour lived through civil war in Lebanon, in a town that was taken over by a Christian militia. Her father counseled her then to dispose of some leftist books that they kept at home, so that her political beliefs would not be held against her. Upon being told she was on the Hamilton 68 list, she recalled that childhood story. She moved to the West to get away from such problems.
The American taste for Irish and Polish poetry spoke of a desire for poets to be taken seriously as what Pound once called (playing on Shelley’s phrase) acknowledged legislators. “Do not be elected to the Senate of your country,” the Irish Yeats wrote publicly to the American Pound, apparently unaware that no poet would be elected to the Senate of the United States.
I’m convinced that if aliens not subject to any kind of Social Desirability Bias with regards to our species came to earth and could investigate the intellectual merits of different human beliefs, gender blank slatism would be close to the first thing they would dismiss. The ideas that America is a white supremacist nation and all ethnic groups would have equal life outcomes if not for pernicious discrimination are only slightly less crazy. I think socialist economic ideas probably cause more harm than wokeness, but it would take aliens a little more investigation to find out why. It’s possible not to understand that markets are better than central planning because you are lazy or dumb. Lazy and dumb, I can live with. But that’s not why people believe in gender blank slatism. Rather, they are missing some instinct that allows them to use common sense to see through ideas that are fashionable and high status, but clearly false.
An individual concerned with truth – and whose self-esteem is based on thinking of himself as the kind of person concerned with truth – naturally finds wokeness uniquely offensive regardless of how damaging he thinks it is. This should be even more true when the individual belongs to the same profession as the wokes, for the same reason you’d expect pilots who take themselves seriously to be the group most angry at a new generation of aviators that is always crashing planes. Pilots, one assumes, take seriously the ostensible purpose of their profession, which is getting aircraft safely from one location to another. Most academics, unfortunately, do not, and are therefore comfortable with the absurdity in their midst.
Instead of restricting livestock farming—which I suspect will simply increase the amount of meat imported into the Netherlands—the Dutch should look for other, creative solutions to their problems. For example, why not spend some of the billions set aside to pay Dutch farmers to give up on beef and use it to work with those same farmers to gather, treat, and ship the country's excess manure to Angola, which was briefly a Dutch colony? Angola's fertilizer shortage—of which manure is an effective and natural example—has threatened crop harvests and exacerbated poverty and hunger for millions of people there. People living in other poor countries with fertilizer deficits could benefit, too, if other countries with excess fertilizer (including the United States) took the same approach.
The final threat to liberal democracy comes from within. Fukuyama has long been concerned about political decay, and the internal threats to liberal democracy he identifies in his Political Order series have become increasingly dire over the past several years. In the United States, Fukuyama recognized that political polarization was causing gridlock and dysfunction before the Trump era. However, he couldn’t have foreseen the political violence on January 6th or that half the country would support an authoritarian president’s effort to overturn an election. Of all President Trump’s transgressions, his refusal to accept the results of the 2020 election was the most dangerous. It undermined faith in the most basic, centuries-old assumption of the American political system: that fair democratic elections will result in the peaceful transfer of power. Beyond the immediate chaos this caused—from the January 6th insurrection to the coordinated campaign to pressure election officials, state lawmakers, members of Congress, and even Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the election—Trump’s rejection of the results has established a new anti-democratic norm in the United States.
This behaviour far exceeded the generous ambit of peaceful protest. There were unquestionably numerous breaches of the Code of Student Conduct, among other applicable norms.
This speaks to a larger problem with the discourse: Government officials and journalists who claim to specialize in the spread of online misinformation are often just as gullible as everyone else. Even federal health experts get stuff wrong. Fauci initially downplayed the importance of masks for general use due to his private fears that hospitals would run out of them; he also deliberately lied about the herd immunity threshold because he didn't think the public could handle the truth. (In that case, the mutating nature of COVID-19 meant that Fauci was wrong about herd immunity at any level.)
According to the lawsuit, López Prater was aware that some observant Muslim students would not wish to view the images and made considerable efforts to accommodate them. López Prater wrote in the course syllabus that the class would include "showing and discussing both representational and non-representational depictions of holy figures (for example, the Prophet Muhammad, Jesus Christ, and the Buddha)," adding, "if you have any questions or concerns about either missing class for a religious observance or the visual content that will be presented, please do not hesitate to contact me."
No students expressed concerns to López Prater, according to the lawsuit. López Prater also warned students multiple times during the class itself, giving them ample opportunity to leave class or look away.
That wasn't enough for Aram Wedatalla, the president of Hamline's Muslim Student Association. Wedatalla complained first to López Prater and then to the school's administration. Within weeks, López Prater had been formally denounced by the administration, which described her actions as "Islamophobic" and insisted that "respect for the observant Muslim students in that classroom should have superseded academic freedom."
Prosecutors plan to charge Alec Baldwin with involuntary manslaughter in the fatal shooting of a cinematographer on the set of the movie “Rust” in New Mexico in 2021, the district attorney in Santa Fe said Thursday.
Brian Panish, a lawyer for Ms. Hutchins’s family, said in a statement that the family supports the district attorney’s decision to bring charges. “It is a comfort to the family that, in New Mexico, no one is above the law,” Mr. Panish said.
Mr. Baldwin filed a lawsuit against several “Rust” crew members, including Ms. Gutierrez-Reed and Mr. Halls, in November. The lawsuit alleges that the crew members were negligent in their duties to protect the cast and the crew, including giving Mr. Baldwin a loaded gun.
In response, a lawyer for Ms. Gutierrez-Reed said Mr. Baldwin “is the only one responsible for this tragedy.” A lawyer for Mr. Halls didn’t comment at the time.
The Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment, or MOXIE, is helping NASA prepare for human exploration of Mars. MOXIE will test a way for future explorers to produce oxygen from the Martian atmosphere for burning fuel and breathing.
Tech Specs / Main Job / To produce oxygen from the Martian carbon-dioxide atmosphere
https://www.city-journal.org/how-to-be-an-antiracistAs former Orlando Magic center Rony Seikaly is said to have remarked, “If 80 percent of the league is black, that means that black players are better than white players ... the black players are superior. No doubt.” If Ibram X. Kendi is right when he says, “When I see racial disparities, I see racism,” then it follows that, on the court, basketball is a racist sport, and the NBA is a racist organization. Doesn’t it?
The following is from Milan Kundera’s 1990 novel Immortality. The character “Rubens” is a fictionalized version of the artist Peter Paul Rubens.> Rubens once visited New York’s Museum of Modern Art. On the first floor he saw Matisee, Braque, Picasso, Miro, Dali, and Ernst, and he was happy. The brushstrokes on the canvas expressed wild relish. Reality was being magnificently violated like it battled with the painter like a bull with a toreador. But on the next floor, reserved for contemporary paintings, he found himself in a desert: no trace of dashing brushstrokes on canvas; no trace of relish; both bull and toreador had disappeared; the paintings had expelled reality altogether, or else they limited it with cynical, obtuse literalness. Between the two floors flowed the river Lethe, the river of death and forgetting. He told himself at that time that his renunciation of painting might have had a deeper significance than lack of talent or stubbornness: midnight had struck on the dial of European art.
Airports that recorded the highest number of incidents in 2022 include Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport, George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston, Nashville International Airport and Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport.
At security checkpoints this year, the agency has found firearms in some peculiar vessels. In September, TSA found a gun stuffed into a whole uncooked chicken at the Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport in Florida. At John F. Kennedy International Airport in December, officers found a disassembled semiautomatic handgun in two jars of peanut butter.
Or consider Shawnna Yashar, another TJ mom, whose son wasn’t told he was a commended student until after the deadline for his early admissions application. Ms. Yashar says that when she complained to TJ’s director of student services, Brandon Kosatka, he told her that the school wants “to recognize students for who they are as individuals, not focus on their achievements,” and that it delayed informing winners to spare the feelings of those who didn’t qualify.
As conservatives—and, much of the apolitical public—began to raise their voices against Commissar Richard Trumka Jr.’s diktat declaring war on gas stoves, the media took up the familiar narrative.
“How Gas Stoves Became a Right-Wing Cause in the Culture Wars” explained Time Magazine.
An unelected official proposes some indefensible new regulation in the name of “science” that materially and adversely affects the lives of tens of millions of Americans—and it is somehow another front opened by the “right wing” in their “culture wars.”
It happens all the time. You can frame a good deal of the political and cultural evolution of the country in the past few decades in this way: The left elites compel adherence to their latest ideological orthodoxy and anyone questioning it is waging culture war.
At the same time, the FAA took the initiative to announce a NOTAM modernization of its own: changing the system's name from Notice to Airmen to the gender-neutral, drone operator-inclusive Notice to Air Missions.
"Our words hold the ability to influence and transform—to include or to exclude," said the FAA in a blog post at the time.
More fundamental reform has remained elusive. The FAA has a history of dragging its feet on modernizing its air traffic control technology, says Marc Scribner, a transportation researcher with the Reason Foundation (which publishes this website).
Context is that long before COVID, there was debate about whether respiratory illnesses were more droplet spread (in which case hand-washing > masks) or airborne spread (in which case masks > hand-washing), and some people who have been on Team Droplet for decades wrote this meta-analysis, which did indeed find handwashing > masks.
Well, the kind of skills he has are common among people who are currently serving as Speaker but it hasn't worked well at all. Like if you look at Nancy Pelosi, if you look at Paul Ryan, these individuals have concentrated power and, as a result, they've created a whole bunch of tension in Congress that otherwise wouldn't exist. What you really need is a Speaker who's ideological in a particular sense, and that's the Speaker should be ideological about process. Someone who is a purist on process, not necessarily about substantive issues.
And actually, what you want is a Speaker who is not the kind of person who's thinking of themselves as a dealmaker, someone who's going to bring all the coalitions together. If anything, the Speaker needs to be someone who lays back, who says, ‘you guys are going to resolve this, I'm just going to make sure that there are rules in place that provide for the smooth operation of your debate and you guys are going to discover what the outcome is’. What we have way too often in Congress now is a Speaker who says, I have to please this faction, I have to please that faction, I've got to make sure that Mitch McConnell has this, I've got to make sure that Joe Biden has that. And they're thinking about every different faction and they're trying to piece it all together. And so, they go and they build a giant 5000-page bill and then they drop it on everyone and they say, ‘Well, this is the bill. Take it or leave it’. They can't afford to change any of it because they know if they change even one bit of it, some faction that they promised something to is going to be upset. As a result, you have these secret massive bills that are dropped on so many members of Congress who had no participation in it whatsoever.
And what we really want, I think, as American people, in our representative government, is for legislation to be worked out in front of us. We want to see the legislation in front of our eyes, put a bill on the floor, let people amend it, and let people vote yes or no on things. Let bills fail sometimes because they don't have the support. Let people come back. This is the representative process. That's what democracy is about. It's about deliberation and it's about discovery of outcomes. It's not about having the outcomes dictated from the top.
I mean, what's so interesting to me is not only is this the prevailing mindset within how the two parties function in the Congress, it seems to be the prevailing mindset about our democracy and establishment circles generally, including in the media and think tanks and kind of everyone who purports to shape opinion, because all we're really seeing so far is about 72 hours’ worth of debate about what seems to me to be a pretty significant question -- who's going to rule the House, who's third in line to be the president?
That's not really the kind of trivial debate that seems like a huge waste of time to take a couple of days to figure out. And yet it seems as though the people who claim so continuously to defend democracy are offended and alarmed that this all isn't pre-scripted and following this very kind of orderly process where everyone does what they're told in advance, but instead is trying to do exactly what you just described.
As a result, and you touched on this before, members of Congress have become performance artists because they don't have anything else to do. What do you expect them to do if they can't participate in the legislative process? They've just become mascots in this sense, right? They're mascots for people back home. Well, this is our person who's going there and presenting our views on Twitter or social media, or on TV. That's all they do. They don't participate in legislation.
Jill attended a medical conference at Hopkins during her internship, and, as she had with Emery-Dreifuss, she showed photos to doctors and told them she thought she had partial lipodystrophy. Just like before, they assured her it wasn’t the case. They jokingly diagnosed her with something a lot more common: intern syndrome. “Where you have a medical student being introduced to a lot of new diseases,” Jill says, “and they keep thinking they have what they’re reading about.”
https://aeon.co/ideas/why-schools-should-not-teach-general-critical-thinking-skillsSuch overreach aside, critical thinking is, in fact, a necessary component of a well-rounded education and an indispensable prerequisite for democratic citizenship. The problem, however, is in putting the cart in front of the horse: one cannot be critical in any intelligent fashion before one has a basic command of and appreciation for the thing at which such criticism is directed. This contention is supported by abundant research showing that a generic “critical thinking” skill, independent of domain-specific knowledge, does not exist.
In the 1960s, an interesting series of experiments was done on air-traffic controllers’ mental capacities. Researchers wanted to explore if they had a general enhanced ability to ‘keep track of a number of things at once’ and whether that skill could be applied to other situations. After observing them at their work, researchers gave the air-traffic controllers a set of generic memory-based tasks with shapes and colours. The extraordinary thing was that, when tested on these skills outside their own area of expertise, the air-traffic controllers did no better than anyone else. Their remarkably sophisticated cognitive abilities did not translate beyond their professional area.
https://samanthageimer.wordpress.com/2018/01/22/freedom-and-equality-require-risk-and-responsibility/I had a student on one of my study abroad trips who had a perennial problem with clothing. She was never wearing enough of it. She was smart, athletic, and beautiful, but also intent on advertising hotness at all moments. At a field station in a jungle in Latin America, she approached me to complain that the local men were looking at her. The rest of us were wearing field gear—a distinctly unrevealing and unsexy garb. She was in a swimsuit. “Put on more clothes,” I told her. She was aghast. She wanted me to change the men, to talk to them about where to point their eyes. Here in their home, where we were visitors, and one of the gringos had shown up nearly naked, she wanted the men to change.
“The most influential researchers have long believed so dogmatically in one theory of Alzheimer’s that they systematically thwarted alternative approaches. Several scientists described those who controlled the Alzheimer’s agenda as ‘a cabal.’ In more than two dozen interviews, scientists whose ideas fell outside the dogma recounted how, for decades, believers in the dominant hypothesis suppressed research on alternative ideas…This stifling of competing ideas, say a growing number of scholars, is a big reason why there is no treatment for Alzheimer’s.”[...]One way to understand the persistence of the amyloid theory is to look at the incentives of big academic medicine, big governmental medicine, and big pharma. For decades, time, effort, and money have been sunk into this single hypothesis. If we just make the right intervention in the process of amyloid being deposited in the brain, the logic goes, Alzheimer’s can be beaten.[...]Acknowledging that this theory may be a dead end would mean entire careers and billions of dollars have all been devoted to the wrong idea. Not only that—there is no clear path to the right one.
Drug companies have powerful motivations to stick with the amyloid hypothesis even as it has repeatedly disappointed, Alkon says. Drug development costs hundreds of millions of dollars. If executives were to authorize a non-amyloid treatment that failed, the attempt would be hard to justify. However, if they stick with the theory promoted by leading academics, another failure doesn’t look that bad.
But as Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman once said, “Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.”
Which means that everybody will agree, full stop. But when has everybody ever agreed? When have there not been “sides”? After all, we are the future to those who came before us. And I can tell you that in the 1980s, the left was just as certain that Reagan and his henchmen would be judged by history. Yet here we are, and half the country still believes he farted rainbows. We revile Andrew Jackson, Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, but they applaud them. History—then, now, and forever—is nothing but “sides.” To say that history will judge is to make the future our sock puppet, our ventriloquist’s dummy. It is to engage in a particularly feeble form of imaginative compensation.
The cost of this censorship is profound. On a practical level, many of the original data-generating studies were set up with the explicit goal of understanding risk factors for various diseases. Since intelligence and education are also risk factors for many of these diseases, denying researchers usage of these data stymies progress on the problems the studies were funded to address. Scientific research should not have to justify itself on those grounds, anyway. Perhaps the most elemental principle of science is that the search for truth is worthwhile, regardless of its practical benefits.
It is legal by default to save a life, unless it is through healthcare, in which case it is illegal by default to save a life, unless one has a license to practice healthcare, in which case it is legal by default to save a life, unless it is early 2021 and your intervention of choice is a Covid vaccine, in which case it is illegal by default to save a life and //don’t you forget it//.
California, not to mince words, prioritized the appearance of equity over saving lives, over and over and over again, as part of an explicitly documented strategy, at all levels of the government. You can read the sanitized version of the rationale, by putative medical ethics experts, in numerous official documents. The less sanitized version came out frequently in meetings.
This was the //official// strategy.
The unofficial strategy, the result the system actually obtained, was that early access to the vaccine was preferentially awarded based on proximity to power and to the professional-managerial class.
An expansion in low-wage industries will cause average wages to fall, even though it really just means there are more jobs than before and those jobs are concentrated in low-wage industries.
Wokeness, the anti-wokes believe, is therefore a foreign, communist imposition — an alien idea that successfully wormed its way into America and subverted the country’s traditional values.
To be blunt, I do not buy this origin story at all. It’s certainly true that within academia, some of the academics who invented Critical Race Theory and Critical Legal Studies saw themselves as more closely allied to so-called Critical Marxists like the Frankfurt School than to traditional Marxists. And to gain respect within the academy, scholars of Critical Race Theory certainly had to cite some scholars who came before them, and the Frankfurt School people were probably the most convenient to cite.
But that doesn’t mean CRT was actually //inspired// by the Frankfurt School. As any academic who has dealt with the dreaded Reviewer 2 knows all too well, citations are often an institutional genuflection rather than an indicator of true intellectual influence.
W.E.B. Du Bois , Zora Neale Hurston , Ralph Ellison , James Baldwin , Frantz Fanon , Sylvia Wynter , Audre Lorde , June Jordan , Angela Davis , Patricia Hill Collins , Cornel West , Kimberlé W. Crenshaw , Combahee River Collective
From talking to other woke friends, I might append some additions to the list:Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields , Roxane Gay ,Ta-Nehisi Coates , Ibram X. Kendi
None of the Frankfurt School authors are listed here. All of these authors are Black, and most are Black Americans. And that should remind us of a very important fact: Black Americans have been thinking very hard about how to change American society for a very long time. To focus on the scholarly contributions of some European leftists is to ignore the much richer veins of Black thought that have been in America for centuries.
And anyone who knows woke White people knows that they take great pains to read, pay attention to, and elevate Black intellectuals and writers. When asked about the Frankfurt School, in contrast, they are typically equivocal and dismissive. (One friend simply responded: “Adorno hated jazz.” It’s true, he did!)
But it’s important to remember that religious or quasi-religious zeal has always been an important motivator of social movements, from any side of the political spectrum. Humans might not need faith in the ineffable in order to motivate them to crusade for a better world, but it almost always helps. And wokeness doubtless gives meaning and purpose to many young Americans for whom actual Christianity is a distant memory and for whom the only other alternative is a crass, dissatisfying consumerism.
Nor is wokeness the only movement that has combined Christian ideas with a zeal for battling social injustice; various forms of liberation theology are common throughout the Christian world.
In the “real” world of political discourse, the content of ideology is largely a product of “spin.” Conservatism and socialism and anarchism are what the most powerful players in the field say they are. Within the more staid environs of the academy, however, ideologies are usually defined by a relatively stable set of core concepts. So anarchism, for example, rejects the state, repudiates capitalism, sees the self as fundamentally social, and insists on the symbiosis of ends and means. Concepts such as class war, revolution, and vertical relations of domination form a conceptual periphery.
Orwell’s socialism was, for the most part, the mirror image of Marxism. In Marxism, he detected hatred and a “hypertrophied sense of order.” To this, Orwell juxtaposed a vision of socialism based on justice and common decency. If Marxism was totalitarian, Orwell’s conservative socialism was liberty-loving. If Marxism was mechanical and technophilic, Orwell’s conservative socialism was humanist and technophobic. If Marxism was homogenising and neglectful of aesthetics, Orwell’s conservative socialism was variety-seeking and attentive to beauty and taste.
Like Weil and Ruskin, Orwell foregrounded the necessity of work in a life well-lived. Railing against the British Fabians as well as international communism, Orwell lampooned the “fat bellied version of ‘progress’,” which promised to transform human beings into “a race of enlightened sunbathers whose sole topic of conversation is their own superiority to their ancestors.”
In any case, the silo/bubble metaphor doesn’t describe American politics in the 2020s for the simple reason that there is no silo or bubble. Or if there is, it’s very large and almost exclusively populated by adherents of the smart-people party.
If you’re on the right, you simply can’t isolate yourself from the habits and attitudes of left-liberal progressivism. They are everywhere. The most determined imbiber of right-wing opinion still watches television and movies and reads the mainstream press. The left-liberal outlook is expressed everywhere in these media, and generally it isn’t expressed as viewpoint but as established fact.
The conservative voter who follows nothing but right-wing accounts on social media still sees CNN as a captive audience at airports. He advises his college-age children as they negotiate campus environments in which they’re expected to state their “pronouns” and declare themselves “allies” of the “LGBTQ2SIA+ community.” However scornful of left-wing opinion he may be, his employer still subjects him to diversity training. He attends a concert by the local symphony orchestra and has to listen to a four-minute lecture about systemic racism or climate change before the music starts. He can’t watch a pro football game without enduring little pronouncements of wokeness. The right-winger may get 100% of his news from Republican-leaning news sites but still has to be vigilant as his 5-year-old browses the children’s section of the local public library.
There is no bubble, no silo, for such a person.
The urban-dwelling knowledge-class progressive experiences few such dissonant moments. So pervasive are the opinions of left-liberal progressivism throughout American culture that the adherent of that worldview may roam freely in it with minimal disquiet. The TV ads that subtly legitimize the latest sexual identity; the lefty sermonettes intoned at public events; the movies and sitcoms that virtually all accept trendy orthodoxies; the race-fixated version of American history promoted in public schools—these the holder of conventional progressive opinions can absorb almost without noticing it.
But this objection—the objection that Republicans often behave peremptorily—misses the point. The GOP is, increasingly, the party of the uneducated, of the uncredentialed worker who lacks proper data and nuance. Surely it is the educated voter, the respecter of scientific argumentation and informed debate, who bears a special responsibility to consider contrary views. It’s the smart person, not the stupid or ignorant one, who holds the gravest obligation to respect views other than his own. Yet owing to his status as a smart person, respecting other views is precisely what he can’t do.
What one often learns, after the fact, is that some ideological enforcer within the media outlet has condemned the project as “harmful” to trans people. Even those progressive media bosses willing to brave a negative reaction from social media and woke advertisers are often wary of internal revolt. Some mastheads now reportedly have a self-appointed queer caucus that routinely challenges any articles—even drafts and story topics discussed on Slack or at editorial meetings—they deem “transphobic.”
Adopting this kind of cowardly journalistic approach is a mistake. Putting aside the welfare of medicalised children and adolescents, the trans-rights campaign against truthful reporting in this area has also served to chill free speech; normalize the sidelining of science in favour of ideology; compromise the rights of women and girls to sex-protected spaces; embolden educators who encourage students to adopt new identities without their parents’ knowledge; and inhibit the collection of sex-based government data in key fields such as health and crime.
Some techies believe that Mr. Musk’s track record of swiftly and profoundly transforming not just companies but entire industries, such as cars and rockets, means that his methods are effective, even if they include rapid experimentation of a sort that many find capricious and, for employees, alienating.
The university has also acceded to tribal religious demands in other unsettling ways. The initial protocols that SJSU adopted in regard to CalNAGPRA collections included a statement that “menstruating personnel” be forbidden from handling indigenous human remains. (Presumably, use of the word “women” would have been offensive to the university’s gender watchdogs.) It was only after my attorneys pointed out that this may violate Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972—the federal law that prohibits discrimination based on sex in education—that the menstrual taboo was removed from the protocol. (I have written at length about retrograde sexist menstrual taboos being applied in anthropology and archaeology, in Quillette and Areo. These taboos aren’t being championed by Christian conservatives, but rather by progressive academics eager to be seen as acceding to every imaginable indigenous spiritual belief.)
The Jesuits who founded St. Ignatius College were exiles from Germany, forced out by Bismarck's Kulturkampf. They brought with them the traditional structure of the Jesuit college as an extension of the apostolate of the religious community to prepare the student morally as well as intellectually. The principal instrument of this education was the classical course of seven years, in which the first three years were devoted to learning languages as necessary tools. The student was then considered prepared for university work. The next four years were devoted to the study of classical literature and Latin and Greek prose and poetry, and to developing the ability to express one's self in these languages, as well as in the vernacular, orally and in writing. The final year was devoted to philosophy. There were also electives in the sciences, history, and geography, as well as other subjects. If the student completed only six years, a certificate was given. Completion of the year of philosophy made the student eligible for the baccalaureate degree, which the college was empowered to grant when it was chartered in 1890. [...]
John Carroll's core value and mission emphasizes social justice and service to the community and the broader world. The university also follows Jesuit traditions by focusing on educating the “whole” student, or the intellectual, spiritual, emotional, and physical development of each student.
With a title like that, obviously I will be making a nitpicky technical point. I’ll start by making the point, then explain why I think it matters.
The point is: the media rarely lies explicitly and directly. Reporters rarely say specific things they know to be false. When the media misinforms people, it does so by misinterpreting things, excluding context, or signal-boosting some events while ignoring others, not by participating in some bright-line category called “misinformation”.
Or consider this New York Times article (which I’ve also criticized before): Free Market For Education: Economists Don’t Buy It. It said that only 36% of economists on a survey supported school vouchers - and if even economists don’t support a free market policy, surely that policy must be very stupid indeed. Not mentioned in the article: only 19% of economists in the same survey opposed school vouchers. The majority described themselves as uncertain - but among those who expressed an opinion, nearly twice as many were pro as con. Again, some might say this was important context. But NYT didn’t lie outright; they reported the headline number correctly.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/prevaricate(intransitive) To convey a false image or impression.
To shift or turn from direct speech or behaviour; to deviate from the truth; to evade the truth; to waffle or be (intentionally) ambiguous.
In philosophy and psychology of cognition the term "bullshit" is sometimes used to specifically refer to statements produced without particular concern of truth, to distinguish from a deliberate, manipulative lie intended to subvert the truth.
Postman asserts the presentation of television news is a form of entertainment programming; arguing that the inclusion of theme music, the interruption of commercials, and "talking hairdos" bear witness that televised news cannot readily be taken seriously. Postman further examines the differences between written speech, which he argues reached its prime in the early to mid-nineteenth century, and the forms of televisual communication, which rely mostly on visual images to "sell" lifestyles. He argues that, owing to this change in public discourse, politics has ceased to be about a candidate's ideas and solutions, but whether he comes across favorably on television.
He repeatedly states that the eighteenth century, the "Age of Reason", was the pinnacle for rational argument. Only in the printed word, he states, could complicated truths be rationally conveyed. Postman gives a striking example: many of the first fifteen U.S. presidents could probably have walked down the street without being recognized by the average citizen, yet all these men would have been quickly known by their written words. However, the reverse is true today. The names of presidents or even famous preachers, lawyers, and scientists call up visual images, typically television images, but few, if any, of their words come to mind. The few that do almost exclusively consist of carefully chosen soundbites. Postman mentions Ronald Reagan, and comments upon Reagan's abilities as an entertainer.
https://improbable.com/2016/10/15/video-of-the-peace-prize-winner-discussing-bullshit-and-people-who-crave-bullshit/The telegraph allowed bits of information to travel long distances, and so Postman claims "the local and the timeless... lost their central position in newspapers, eclipsed by the dazzle of distance and speed... Wars, crimes, crashes, fires, floods—much of it the social and political equivalent of Adelaide's whooping coughs—became the content of what people called 'the news of the day'"
Frankfurt determines that bullshit is speech intended to persuade without regard for truth. The liar cares about the truth and attempts to hide it; the bullshitter doesn't care if what they say is true or false, but cares only whether the listener is persuaded.
There’s no telling when the politically ludicrous era we’re living through now will finally exhaust itself, but it’s likely to end in the same way and for the same reasons that similar eras before it did: a critical mass of people simply decide that they have had enough and demand that it stop.
In the spring of 2021 Cassie Blotner, a senior at the State University of New York at New Paltz, helped to start a support group for victims of sexual violence with five other students. Then the other founders forced her out, she said, telling her that her support for Israel was incompatible with the mission of the organization.
Washington Post publisher Fred Ryan was shouted down after he announced to his staff that there would be layoffs. He said he wouldn’t “turn the town hall into a grievance session” before he walked out to a chorus of jeers from reporters. Here’s video:
The Post is in trouble: It has lost more than 500,000 subscribers since January 2021. And the paper’s owner, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, doesn’t seem to want to humor his children with more cash to burn. Now, I’m not entirely surprised that the Washington Post is hemorrhaging readers. Sports fans might have trouble connecting with a story like this week’s: “Why doesn't Argentina have more Black players in the World Cup?” (The article’s answer is that it is racism. The real answer is that Argentina is less than 1% black.) And TV watchers may be confused by last week’s critique of Shark Week:
> Researchers say Discovery's programming overwhelmingly featured White men as experts while emphasizing negative messages about sharks.
“My country is hard; there’s no work and our president is very bad,” Katherine Urbina, a 28-year-old from Nicaragua who was traveling with relatives and friends, said of why she came to the U.S. now. “We can’t buy rice and beans. If you buy one, you can’t buy the other.”
The sudden and continued arrivals have left El Paso shelters rushing to find space, with government buses with dozens of people routinely arriving unannounced, aid workers said.
But just as Rubin arrived in “the free state of Florida,” it became noticeably less free for its gay residents. In March 2022, Ron DeSantis signed HB 1557, which placed an assortment of new restrictions on Florida public schools. Most notably, it stipulates that “classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.” Critics of the bill worry about the implications for free speech, a topic about which Rubin still professes to care deeply. As Professor Jeffrey Sachs of PEN tells me, “Virtually any discussion of sexual orientation—even in response to a student’s question about someone in a same-marriage—could be prohibited.”
When I ask Rubin about these concerns, he tells me to “read the bill,” then misconstrues its provisions. “What these laws are doing right now are basically prohibiting the school district from encouraging discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity when it comes to like third and fourth graders.”
https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energyThe problem with this fantasy thinking is that it is locking us into yet more global heating, and continued air pollution. Air pollution from fossil fuels kills over eight million people a year—and that’s a conservative estimate. We should be rallying to move toward clean energy sources in order to decarbonise, not toward 100 percent renewables because sunshine sounds more friendly.
https://www.emergencyreactor.org/Fossil fuels are the dirtiest and most dangerous energy sources, while nuclear and modern renewable energy sources are vastly safer and cleaner. The differences are huge.
A central battleground for this debate will be Germany, whose 12-year-old Energiewende (“energy turnaround”) is supposed to eliminate all non-renewable energy sources—including nuclear—by 2038. But Energiewende has failed, and not just because Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has disrupted energy markets. The scheduled closure of Germany’s last three operating nuclear plants has been put off till April 2023. And an article published in the Journal of the European Economic Association concluded that the drawing down of Germany’s nuclear capacity has had dire economic and human consequences. According to the authors,
> We find that the lost nuclear electricity production due to the phase-out was replaced primarily by coal-fired production and net electricity imports. The social cost of this shift from nuclear to coal is approximately 12 billion dollars per year. Over 70% of this cost comes from the increased mortality risk associated with exposure to the local air pollution emitted when burning fossil fuels. Even the largest estimates of the reduction in the costs associated with nuclear accident risk and waste disposal due to the phase-out are far smaller than 12 billion dollars.
Among some environmental puritans, it seems, the insistence that nuclear energy is evil has become an article of religious faith—one that does not even permit them to be in the company of those with pro-nuclear postures. One nuclear worker I met, who shall remain nameless, told me that her date stormed out of a restaurant when she told him she had a job at a nuclear plant. She now feels hesitant about telling people about her line of work.
The chief purpose of conservatism is to preserve the social institutions, practices, and norms that contribute to the good life, to reinvigorate those that have decayed, and to recover those that have been lost. Conservatism is not only about conserving since the prevailing social order may not necessarily contribute to human flourishing. A conservative in the ante-bellum United States could have (and should have) opposed slavery because it was an iniquitous institution that caused great misery. Similarly, a contemporary conservative can (and should) oppose the radical progressivism that has become a part of the status quo.
Various other psychological associations now demand that scientific papers must be prefaced by statements about how they advance diversity, equity, and inclusiveness. One of the most prestigious journals, Nature Human Behaviour, now reserves the right to refuse articles it deems to be socially problematic, irrespective of their truth or scientific merit.
The procedures adopted by APS are nothing less than a shameful denial of procedural and natural justice. To its credit, the German Psychological Association has issued a statement upbraiding their American counterpart, stating that “it is not our understanding of procedural justice to condemn a person without giving him or her an adequate hearing.”
Those of us who have had personal experiences of living in totalitarian societies will recognize that summary condemnation and punishment of individuals accused of ideological trespasses—without due process—is the hallmark of totalitarian institutions. They should not be tolerated in our professional associations.
False beliefs about the COVID-19 virus and vaccination among many Americans led to the United States having three times the death rate from COVID-19 as neighboring Canada. While self-selected echo chambers are seductively pleasurable and may harbor us for short periods of time, in the long run, when false beliefs collide with the world, the world will always win. As Hannah Arendt noted, “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, and the distinction between true and false, no longer exists.”
I think something simpler happened. Harvard became more exclusive. Prior to the mid-20th century almost anyone with the proper educational credentials could get into Harvard. The acceptance rate was around 80-90%. Now, some of this was because you had to prove you had certain aristocratic class markers like knowing Greek. But if you had them you basically got in. This is exactly how the Jews got in: they just studied the class markers. And that wasn't a problem until there were "too many" of them.
The post-war restrictions SHARPLY cut the acceptance rate down to about a third of applicants. And it's declined ever since. It was 15%-ish by the 1980s-90s and is about 5% today. This has set off an intense competition where getting into Harvard is a status symbol.
In 1930 going to Harvard was something you did because you were a WASP. If you were an intelligent Black person you went to Howard. Partly because of racial discrimination to be sure. But partly because going to Harvard was not a prestigious trophy. Simply having a college degree marked you out as elite. So why not go to the college your community built? Where you'd see the elites of your own community?
You saw the same thing with white Catholics. Even ones from very old American families who didn't have to deal with anti-immigrant sentiment. As late as the mid-20th century you had some Virginians going to places like William & Mary because they weren't New Englanders.
Post-war all colleges organized themselves into a hierarchy. Harvard came out on top, as the "best." Elites had found a new competition: to get into the best schools. And Harvard restricted its membership because selectiveness (and the education it conferred) was a status symbol.
In the 1970s, full-tuition merit scholarships offered by third parties began to appear, but not for white males (except for scholarships offered only for particular majors, usually for careers in what was considered charitable work). Financial aid operated on the principle that they would start giving you financial aid only after your parents sold all their assets and spent all their money, and screw your brothers and sisters if that made it impossible for them to go to college. By 1980, no one could afford ivy-league tuitions except the rich or the broke, and only people who weren't white males could get full-tuition merit scholarships.
Starting around 1970, people who hadn't gone to any Ivy League or equivalent school (eg MIT) suddenly were blocked from reaching positions of power, wealth, or prestige--in politics, law, finance, business, education, and science. I did a survey around 2010 of people who had Nobels in physics, and found that of those who attended college before 1970, most had either not attended an ivy, or attended an ivy or equivalent (in physics) on a full-tuition merit scholarship. After 1970, that number dropped to... a very small number, impossible to establish because I couldn't know whether non-white-male students had received a full-tuition scholarship, but possibly zero. By the 1980s (IIRC), the number of Supreme Court justices who hadn't attended an Ivy had dropped from "most of them" to zero or one. After 1990, the same could be said of elected US Presidents, and the number of new American industrialist billionaires who hadn't attended an ivy or equivalent had dropped from "most of them" to a few, owing to big-time venture capitalists establishing a strong preference for funding only ivy-league grads.
The WASPs weren't prudish jocks just because of some accident of history. They were a self-conscious elite who deliberately cultivated in themselves those traits which were conducive to leading the lower classes.
* Sports and physical culture keep you grounded and located in your body, just like those you must lead
* Moderated interest in academics - while there's value in learning, you can become unmoored from reality recieving too much of your context from experts and scholars, A "Gentleman's C" earned from the finest academics available is about the right balance.
* Military service. T. Roosevelt dropped out of his career twice because he felt he needed to face danger to be a proper leader. When Joe Kennedy was raising his family into the WASP elite, both his sons felt they needed to distinguish themselves in battle if they wanted a chance at political office. As late as the 1960's, John Kerry had "get medals commanding a PT Swift Boat" on his career checklist.
When Perkins displayed a lack of concern for Cal's fracture, instead focusing on his high fever and breathing troubles, a social worker wrote that the couple did not ask "enough follow up questions" about the injury. When Perkins became emotional and began crying while her baby was subjected to painful blood draws as part of the DCF investigation, social workers thought she was worried that abuse would be found. "Their concern was that I seemed upset that they might find something in the test," Perkins later told the Post.
When it comes to drugs, Portland, Oregon, is one of the most liberal cities in the United States. Weed shops abound since the state legalized cannabis in 2015. The state decriminalized possession of nearly all drugs in 2020. Come January, Oregon will be the first state to allow therapeutic use of psilocybin. Even the liquor laws have been recently liberalized, with the state permanently legalizing the sale of to-go cocktails in June of 2021.
But even Portland must draw the line somewhere, and it draws it at flavored tobacco and nicotine products.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/tsmcs-arizona-chip-plant-awaiting-biden-visit-faces-birthing-pains-11670236129Indeed, it's not hard to find out what kind of help companies like TSMC are seeking. In a letter to the Commerce Department last month, the company said that the "real barrier" to expanding high-tech manufacturing in the U.S. "is [the] comparative cost to build and operate" facilities here vs. in Taiwan and other countries. Specifically, the letter pointed to "federal regulatory requirements" that have slowed construction and added unexpected costs, The Wall Street Journal reported this week.
The authors' analysis is rooted in propositions they insist should not be controversial any longer given actual evidence: that the latest vaccines "provide, at most, partial and transient protection against infection, which decreases precipitously after a few months" and that, quoting the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), "anyone with Omicron infection, regardless of vaccination status or whether or not they have symptoms, can spread the virus to others." They also stress the often unnoted benefits of previous infection for immunity in COVID policy making.
“The importance of in-person learning is well-documented, and there is already evidence of the negative impacts on children because of school closures in the spring of 2020,” the group said in a statement, which listed a litany of maladies—learning loss, food insecurity, isolation, depression, physical and sexual abuse, substance use, suicidal ideation—that could result from prolonged shutdowns. “[A]ll policy considerations for the coming school year should start with a goal of having students physically present in school.”
Then, on July 6, then President Trump tweeted: “SCHOOLS MUST OPEN IN THE FALL!!!”
Over the next week, administration officials from Vice President Mike Pence to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos cited the AAP in the course of pressuring local officials to reopen schools.
It didn’t take long for the AAP to buckle. By July 10, the organization issued a follow-up statement—this one co-authored with the teachers unions—suggesting that in-person schooling would be impossible without “substantial new investments” from the federal government. Most European children, meanwhile, returned to the classroom.
It was a microcosm the AAP’s handling of the pandemic: From masking toddlers to boosters for 12-year-olds, the group’s guidelines were consistently out of sync with those of the rest of the world, but very much in line with the demands of anti-Trump partisans.
Opposing those bureaucracies—and the Covid policies they formulated—became a professional risk. One pediatrician said her bosses threatened to fire her for tweeting critically about the AAP’s vaccine recommendations. “They hauled me into the office and asked me if I wanted to work there,” the doctor said, adding that she knew of colleagues who were terrified of speaking out. Another pediatrician described how the president of her state AAP chapter told her to pipe down about Covid restrictions if she didn’t want to lose funding for an academic program.
“Had I replied ‘F you,’ I wouldn’t have gotten the grants, and I wouldn’t have been able to help my program,” the pediatrician said.
Those treatments are part of the broader model of “gender-affirming” care that the AAP endorsed in its 2018 policy statement, “Ensuring Comprehensive Care and Support for Transgender and Gender-Diverse Children and Adolescents.” The statement, which represents the official position of the AAP, was written by a single doctor, Rafferty, and does not appear to have been reviewed by anyone else at the organization: Rafferty “conceptualized,” “drafted,” “reviewed,” “revised,” and “approved” the manuscript himself, a note at the end of the paper reads. Rafferty did not respond to a request for comment.
“There was clearly no fact-checking,” one longtime AAP member said. “The AAP thought trans was the next civil rights crusade and got boondoggled by enthusiastic young doctors.”[...]“The AAP says kids under 10 can’t cross the street by themselves,” one pediatrician said, referencing the group’s official recommendations on pedestrian safety, “but they can change their gender. How does that make sense?”
The contrast points to a broader tension within AAP guidance: On most kitchen table issues, from diet to screen time to exercise, the group has long encouraged a kind of safetyism, stressing the need for parental supervision and the pitfalls of pubescent judgment. Yet on trans issues, it has done nearly the opposite, suggesting that minors are mature enough to transition without their parents’ knowledge or consent.
“A family may deny access to care that raises concerns about the youth’s welfare and safety,” Rafferty’s statement says. “In such rare situations, pediatric providers may want to familiarize themselves with relevant local consent laws and maintain their primary responsibility for the welfare of the child.” It’s a stark departure from the way the group talks about other forms of body modification: one AAP report recommends that “adolescents speak with their parents” before getting tattoos, because they are “permanent,” “difficult to remove,” and “involve significant consequences.”
One reported seeing “a lot more hesitancy around routine immunizations,” including for measles, after schools in her area started requiring the Covid vaccine based on the AAP’s guidance. Another said she’d been inundated with requests for a second opinion by parents who “who don’t trust their own physicians on vaccines,” both Covid and non-Covid.
“I have to tell them the other vaccines are good,” the pediatrician added.
Other doctors described families–including families in deep blue areas–who have developed a reflexive distrust of anything the AAP says.
“I now hear parents mock the AAP over even non-political guidance like breastfeeding recommendations,” a pediatrician in Portland, Oregon said. “They’re just tuning everything out.”
For Vinay Prasad, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco, it’s hard to blame them.
“The reason to trust modern doctors over ancient healers is that more of what we tell you to do is justified by well-done studies,” Prasad said. “But how do we hold that perch when we just make stuff up?”
While progressives are correct about the arbitrariness of certain societal gender roles, they run afoul of the science when they try to decouple the human female’s biological child nurturing roles from pregnancy to birthing and suckling, from certain societally assigned motherhood roles. All other female mammals perform motherhood roles without learning, as a natural byproduct of their biology. Given the data about human and nonhuman mammalian biology, to believe that motherhood and child rearing are arbitrary learned behaviors in human females is as egregious as believing that biology prohibits women from voting and being doctors and lawyers.
Antisemitism is the oldest hatred and is not going to disappear quickly. Every time somebody has a grudge, you can blame the Jews. The capitalists said the Jews are communists, the communists said the Jews are capitalists. You have a problem? Blame the Jews.
BW: Do you believe that the Jewish people are chosen?
BN: Yes. In the sense that we have brought to the world the idea of morality. If you look at modern civilization, it came from Jerusalem. I don't know if it's a question of destiny.
"We are confident in our legal authority to carry out the student debt relief program and will be taking this fight to the Supreme Court as well," White House spokesman Abdullah Hasan told Bloomberg. "Republican officials and special interests are trying to rob middle-class families of the relief they need and deserve, but the president doesn't back down from a fight, especially one for middle-class families."
I introduced the idea in a 1993 Heritage Foundation paper. It was a lot better in theory than in practice.
It was a small thing, but it happened to coincide with a subtext of the discussion, i.e. the unearned waft of superiority emanating from the mainstream press. Journalists were once more down-to-earth, being mostly fuckups and castoffs from other professions who tended to feel more comfortable in the company of bartenders or hot dog vendors than politicians. The latter were universally thought of as scum, or at least suspect.
I think that they would be happier if they felt that the composition of prestigious journalistic institutions more closely reflected the full range of ideological attitudes in American public issues. That is actually a serious proposition.
I don’t mean to make light of it at all, but it is one that makes me a little uncomfortable. Because I don’t think that you can ultimately say that trust in institutions is reserved solely for institutions that perfectly match the characteristics of the general population. It is like saying that we don’t trust kindergarten teachers, because kindergarten teachers are over-represented with people having an enormous amount of patience for the temper tantrums of four year olds… I mean they are an extraordinary and very specific subgroup of the population that performs very well in that particular task more generally…
I would just point out that the reason Walter Cronkite was so beloved by people like Matt Taibbi’s father, and grandfather is that he was an amen chorus for the United States government. So the two of you should really get together in the next five minutes and work out your story. One last comment, and that is, I was most amused by the particular subjects that seemed to have excited the imagination and outrage of the two of you. I’ll just list them before I go in my last 19 seconds. Donald Trump’s relationship with Russia, the Canadian truckers, Ivermectin, Jordan Peterson, and then something. These aren’t things driven by the mainstream media. These are obsessions of the non-mainstream media. Once again, work it out guys.
The huge luminosity of quasars results from the accretion discs of central supermassive black holes, which can convert between 6% and 32% of the mass of an object into energy,[43] compared to just 0.7% for the p–p chain nuclear fusion process that dominates the energy production in Sun-like stars.
These preferential-hiring policies were originally justified as stopgaps that would supposedly be phased out over the years, as disadvantaged groups caught up. Yet they’ve become part of Canada’s permanent policy landscape, with the federal government already having set expanded equity targets for 2029.
Instead of being calibrated to reflect the pool of eligible applicants, the quotas simply match the general population. And so, by 2029, 50.9 percent of Canada Research Chairs must be “women and gender minorities,” 22 percent must be racialized minorities, 7.5 percent must be people with disabilities, and 4.9 percent must be Indigenous. As a result, some university recruitment efforts—including in fields that have little do with identity, such as quantum computing and computational biology—now flat-out exclude white males who don’t self-identify as disabled or LGBT+.
In other cases, universities will nominally permit members of any race or sex to apply for a job, but will add in ideological tests. At McGill University, for example, an ad for a tenure-track position indicated that “a demonstrated relevance of the candidate’s work to addressing anti-Black racism or systemic inequities … will be regarded as an important asset. Background in critical race theory is desirable but not required.” The hiring faculty? Computer Science.
As with many other Canadian centres of higher learning, this McMaster lab has adopted new hiring practices that “focus away from prior experience and instead [emphasize] interests of applicants, recognizing the barriers that BIPOC members may have faced in seeking out prior opportunities.” Objectively measurable criteria, such as publications, are now out of fashion, being nothing but a lagging indicator of a candidate’s privilege.
Following this, Hudlický was ostracized by his colleagues. But never mind him. In 2022, we are supposed to believe that the real hero of cancer research is Lakehead’s Lana Rey, who claims cancer is a product of colonialism. That’s nonsense, of course. But what matters on Canadian campuses now isn’t what you write and teach, but who you are and what you look like.
In the zeal to “hold Trump accountable,” or oppose figures like Vladimir Putin, ethical guardrails have been tossed out. Silent edits have become common. Serious accusations are made without calling people for comment. Reporters get too cozy with politicians, and as a result report information either without attribution at all or sourced to unnamed officials or “people familiar with the matter.” Like scientists, journalists should be able to reproduce each other’s work in the lab. With too many anonymous sources, this becomes impossible.
We had an incident a few weeks ago where the lede of a wire service story read, “A senior U.S. intelligence official says Russian missiles crossed into NATO member Poland.” That’s the kind of story where if you get it wrong, you can start a war, but they still put all their chips on one unnamed source. That’s very risky practice even if you’re right.
That story turned out to be wrong, which sadly is no longer uncommon. In the Trump years an extraordinary number of “bombshells” went sideways. From the “pee tape” to the Alfa Server story to speculation that Trump was a Russian spy (recruited before disco) to false reports of Russians hacking a Vermont utility to an evidence-free story about Trump’s campaign manager somehow sneaking undetected to meet the most watched human on earth, Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, we’ve accumulated piles of wrong stories.
Getting things right is hard enough. The minute we try to do anything else in this job, the wheels come off. Until we get back to the basics, we don’t deserve to be trusted. And we won’t be.
The question, then, is not whether Starbucks must maintain—and perhaps even strengthen—its role as a co-working space. It is rather whether Starbucks may introduce any rules it likes about //who is permitted to co-work in its space//, about who it will serve and who may be thrown out upon discovery of some disliked belief or attribute. Starbucks may not throw you out because you are Catholic, or because you are a Republican. No Melbourne cafe can throw you out because you don’t think there should be a Voice to Parliament (constitutional recognition of Indigenous Australians).
Of course, the populace does not slice cleanly into “brainwashed” and “unbrainwashed.” As I’ve argued elsewhere, the Communist Party’s indoctrination system usually produces scattershot results. The majority of citizens pick and choose from the propaganda to fashion a personalised belief system. But still, a significant minority believes it all. Another significant minority manages, heroically, to see through the whole thing. So was my friend’s experience representative? Just six percent of the nation’s minds are free?
“Kathy,” a member of the Bridge Man Generation newly arrived in London, estimates that the figure is probably closer to three percent. As she explained (pseudonymously, of course) to the New York Times, she can talk about politics to just one in 30 of her classmates back in China. Most of the time, Kathy’s friends are “normal people, even kind.” But as soon as Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan, “a program embedded in the robots was turned on,” and “everyone started posting the same horrible language on social media.” I saw it myself: gentle and kind-hearted acquaintances taking to the Chinese apps to shriek and lament that the People’s Liberation Army had failed to shoot down Pelosi’s plane—genuinely upset that an elderly woman had not been murdered.
Under Lenin, the state made explicit commitments to promote the equality of men and women. Many early Russian feminists and ordinary Russian working women actively participated in the Revolution, and many more were affected by the events of that period and the new policies. Beginning in October 1918, Lenin's government liberalized divorce and abortion laws, decriminalized homosexuality (re-criminalized in the 1930s), permitted cohabitation, and ushered in a host of reforms.[207] However, without birth control, the new system produced many broken marriages, as well as countless out-of-wedlock children.[208] The epidemic of divorces and extramarital affairs created social hardships when Soviet leaders wanted people to concentrate their efforts on growing the economy. Giving women control over their fertility also led to a precipitous decline in the birth rate, perceived as a threat to their country's military power. By 1936, Stalin reversed most of the liberal laws, ushering in a pronatalist era that lasted for decades.[209]
As part of our reenvisioning of the academic model of higher education, UATX will be organized around five Centers of Inquiry: (1) The Center for Politics, Economics and Applied History; (2) The Center for Mathematics, Engineering and Technology; (3) The Center for Arts and Letters; (4) The Center for Theoretical and Experimental Science; and (5) The Center for Education and Public Service.
These Centers differ from traditional academic departments in that while forming academic units, they will also serve as interdisciplinary research institutes, think tanks, and entrepreneurial incubators.
The Centers will host undergraduates as junior fellows in their third and fourth years of study, be home to graduate programs, and will be staffed by transdisciplinary faculty drawn from both inside and outside the academy.
The movement reached its political height during the Abbasid Caliphate during the "mihna", an 18-year period (833–851 CE) of religious persecution instituted by the 'Abbasid Caliph al-Ma'mun where religious scholars (such as Sunnis and Shias) were punished, imprisoned, or even killed unless they conformed to Muʿtazila doctrine, until it was reversed by al-Mutawakkil.
This is where Harris’s argument makes total sense. Twitter is a private company, and as such can have whatever rules it likes—and it can apply them with whatever level of consistency it likes.
In 2007, he readily accepted a prestigious State Award from Putin, having turned down similar honours from his predecessors Gorbachev and Yeltsin, both of whom were much more liberal figures. Later that same day, he received the Russian President in his home. Where, critics demanded, was the earlier Solzhenitsyn, who would have railed about the 2006 assassinations of Putin critics Anna Politkovskaya in St. Petersburg and Aleksandr Litvinenko in London, or would have blasted Putin’s rigid control over all major TV stations in the country? He seemed, step by step, to be dismantling his own moral authority or, as the Russians put it, “ruining his autopsy.”
In its place arose the anti-rationalist Ash’ari school whose increasing dominance is linked to the decline of Arabic science. With the rise of the Ash’arites, the ethos in the Islamic world was increasingly opposed to original scholarship and any scientific inquiry that did not directly aid in religious regulation of private and public life.
The greatest and most influential voice of the Ash’arites was the medieval theologian Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (also known as Algazel; died 1111). In his book The Incoherence of the Philosophers, al-Ghazali vigorously attacked philosophy and philosophers — both the Greek philosophers themselves and their followers in the Muslim world (such as al-Farabi and Avicenna). Al-Ghazali was worried that when people become favorably influenced by philosophical arguments, they will also come to trust the philosophers on matters of religion, thus making Muslims less pious. Reason, because it teaches us to discover, question, and innovate, was the enemy; al-Ghazali argued that in assuming necessity in nature, philosophy was incompatible with Islamic teaching, which recognizes that nature is entirely subject to God’s will: “Nothing in nature,” he wrote, “can act spontaneously and apart from God.” While al-Ghazali did defend logic, he did so only to the extent that it could be used to ask theological questions and wielded as a tool to undermine philosophy. Sunnis embraced al-Ghazali as the winner of the debate with the Hellenistic rationalists, and opposition to philosophy gradually ossified, even to the extent that independent inquiry became a tainted enterprise, sometimes to the point of criminality.
The contrast is most obvious in the realm of formal education. As Huff argues, the lack of a scientific curriculum in medieval madrassas reflects a deeper absence of a capacity or willingness to build legally autonomous institutions. Madrassas were established under the law of waqf, or pious endowments, which meant they were legally obligated to follow the religious commitments of their founders. Islamic law did not recognize any corporate groups or entities, and so prevented any hope of recognizing institutions such as universities within which scholarly norms could develop. (Medieval China, too, had no independent institutions dedicated to learning; all were dependent on the official bureaucracy and the state.) Legally autonomous institutions were utterly absent in the Islamic world until the late nineteenth century. And madrassas nearly always excluded study of anything besides the subjects that aid in understanding Islam: Arabic grammar, the Koran, the hadith, and the principles of sharia.
The Avengers are/were basically a better-looking version of the ideal Democratic Party cabinet, being diverse, forward-thinking, mostly from New York, and led by a lovable military contractor, with lots of Brits in auxiliary roles.
Trust in journalism isn’t something you can boost with a marketing campaign. It’s a tedious process of proving every day you have an institutional commitment to getting facts right while being willing to admit error. Readers paid attention when the Times held a piece questioning WMD intelligence until after the invasion of Iraq, when former CIA chief Michael Hayden bragged in a book about working with //Times// editors to kill stories critical of the intelligence community, and, more recently, when they refused any kind of audit with regard to failures in the Trump-Russia story.
In this fantasy world, Republicans merely put up with Trump, as a means to securing traditional conservative ends like cutting taxes and reversing Roe, because of “the idea that he is a winner.”
You’d have to be high as a Georgia Pine to believe this. There may be some Republican politicians who made the Machiavellian calculation the //Times// describes, but his voters weren’t thinking that. They just saw a way to send a giant Fuck You to people they hated and distrusted more than Trump.
That means you, esteemed members of the //New York Times// editorial board, along with the boards of other papers like the //Washington Post//, and TV and cable networks, both political parties, and most every major American or American-led institution, from NATO to the Fed to Merrick Garland’s Justice Department to the DHS and beyond.
There are probably 75 million Americans who think you’re all less trustworthy than Donald Trump, and that’s not because they think Trump is a saintly Clean Gene savior (the //Times// featured photos of Trump supporters “praying before Donald Trump”). On the contrary, they know he’s a bullshit artist of the first order. They just think you’re worse. When Trump lies, the average person shrugs, like they did when he tried to sell them on the “World’s Greatest Steaks!” When members of the we-deserve-better crowd lie, they do it with a halo, which makes millions of people want to send Trump rocketing up their poop-chutes.
The lives of the people who ran FTX and its related companies were similarly blurred. Ten of them lived and worked together in a $30 million penthouse at an upscale resort in the Bahamas. The hours were punishing, and the lines between work and play were hard to discern. Romantic relationships among Mr. Bankman-Fried’s upper echelon were common, as was use of stimulants, according to former employees.
Beyond that, I’ve already dealt with some bureaucratic things I’ve been very frustrated about. The fact that students have fundamentally lost the boundaries of respect between adults and children is quiet clear, and for all the trendy lip service about breaking down authoritative barriers and making education more child-centered, the consequences are not good. The general sense that teachers and administrators have fundamentally stopped demanding parents respect them and their boundaries is also quite clear. Parents are willing to steamroll anybody who gets in the way of their perfect child’s performance, and exhausted teachers and flimsy administrators allow that to happen.
Class sizes of forty students are incredibly challenging to teach and manage. So is the fact that all students are required to finish 12 years of school, whether or not they have any interest in academics or college. The general push for everybody to attend college is, in my opinion, deeply arrogant and misguided it and aggravates and demotivates students who would otherwise do very well in a trade. The emphasis on grades and test results rather than ability has totally upended educational priorities. The trends that come and go in education are difficult and frustrating to keep up with, especially when I know that they will soon be replaced by the next best thing.
Similarly, humans are good at recognizing faces, but they also see faces in the clouds, in cups of coffee, and on pieces of toast. This is a subset of pareidolia, or the tendency to incorrectly recognize objects or patterns that do not actually exist. The face-processing system did not evolve so that humans could see Jesus in a paint splatter. Those false recognitions are a byproduct of a system that is very good at discovering, cataloging, and remembering real faces.
The human mind, it seems, is irremediably metaphysical. If it can’t find God in the church, it will find god in spells, in drugs, in crystals, in poetry, or worst of all, in politics.
“I need to explain something,” Destiny began with a seriousness that I’d never seen before. “I care about you, and I need you to understand a few things. When we’re in here, everyone is clean, and everyone is sober. We’re not looking for our next fix. We’re not gonna hit ya up for anything in here.”
“But when we get out, we don’t even trust ourselves. We turn a trick for a cabbie home. If we’re lucky, we’ll get home on a [blowjob]. So here it is: if you see me on the street, just run. Run away and ran away fast.”
And then she added, without a trace of irony: “Trust me.” And we hugged.
Destiny explained that when a woman leaves prison, she is given some donated clothing and the standard bus fare. The bus fare doesn’t usually cover the ride home because she’s often headed for a distant town. So, resourceful cabbies park outside the prison awaiting a new release. When the happy cabbie scores a “fare,” he’ll take her anywhere she wants, in return for anything he wants. Women prisoners find performing a homeward bound trick safer than hitchhiking.
This is one of the reasons why women who leave prison can seem fated to fail. They’re systematically put at risk of victimization by a cycle of crime, incarceration, and release that encourages predatory behaviour.
Anyone who has a Twitter or Facebook account (or who teaches at a university) knows why polite society has largely submitted to being gaslit on a set of delusions so demonstrably false that even infants can see through them. The ever-present threat of public shame and stigma, and possibly even job loss, are real for those accused of transphobia.
When I wake up in the middle of the night because I’m having excruciating stomach pain that could possibly be a placental abruption—but could also just be a fart—I need the Internet search results to tell me the difference between the two using straightforward, accurate, widely-accepted and easily understood language. The potentially fatal nature of pregnancy leaves no room for gender ideology in language.
Of course, if this gender-ideology nonsense is exasperating and confusing to privileged knowledge workers like me, imagine how it strikes truly marginalized members of our society. What the hell is a “birthing person” or “menstruator” to a non-native English speaker; or to someone who hasn’t been exposed to college sensitivity training sessions, and is simply looking to buy pregnancy-related drugs at Walmart?
Among scholars operating on the leading edge of the queer-studies movement, there is an increasing trend toward pseudo-academic essays with titles such as Marisa Mercurio’s Queer Moon Rising, in which the expert in 19th-century Gothic fiction reports with great certainty that “a werewolf is something ineffably queer,” and a shape-shifting embodiment of “intersectional identities” whose “transformations demonstrate the malleability of bodies and their meanings.” It need scarcely be added that these rainbow lycanthropes also “destabilise gender and eschew sexual binaries.”
Many articles that have appeared in Quillette over the years have presented case studies in how small groups of ideologically motivated activists can take over university programs, NGOs, literary groups, and social-media subcultures. In the case of the public education system, however, the stakes are much higher.
The settlement also gave an approving nod to what would be called the TDSB’s Africentric school pilot project, which took form in the TDSB’s racially segregated Africentric Alternative School in 2009. From the beginning, the venture was out of place for Canada—a country that, then and now, is rightly held up as a global leader in creating diverse and socially integrated communities.
To be clear: some stories along these lines have been debunked as hoaxes—such as the infamous one about Michigan schools providing litter boxes for students who self-ID as cats. But apparently real-life guides for school counsellors hoping to create safe spaces for animal-children do exist online. And Pennsylvania’s Bryn Mawr College has directed students to a long list of invented pronouns for those who self-identify as teenage werewolves, robots, mermaids, dragons, or spiders in human disguise.
The day after I sent my letter, the TDSB did something that only confirmed my suspicions that they weren’t being sufficiently candid with parents: they removed the above-described documents from public view. In place of the census questions, Approach to Census 2022: Guiding Research Principles, and other related subpages that, by now, were being widely circulated and critiqued on social media, the TDSB posted the following message:
> This document is not compliant with the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disability Act (AODA). You can view the original non-compliant document here or you can send a request to our Accessibility team at [email protected], who can help you procure a compliant and accessible version of this document.
The links they provided to the original documents didn’t work, and parents using the above e-mail address to ask questions received an automated response telling them, “you should receive a response within 15 business days.” To my knowledge, no one’s heard anything since.
After Biden spoke, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan — fast becoming the Madame DeFarge of the Biden administration — all but rolled his eyes when asked if he could “offer anything about why” Musk might be investigated. “You heard the president,” he chirped, not pausing his mental knitting. Public indifference to the madness of this was astonishing. We’ve had a secret grand jury system for centuries precisely to prevent this situation, i.e. the injustice of a person not charged with a crime having to live under public suspicion. Of course erstwhile progressives being indifferent to important civil liberties concerns has become routine in the Trump era.
Tasteless? Absolutely. Worthy of firing? Are you kidding? This is a country whose top-rated sports entertainment is watching obvious steroid users give each other incurable brain trauma in front of half-naked cheerleaders. Its second-rated sport features high-flying gland freaks whose idea of social justice is a silent collective ban on Twitter criticism of Chinese TV partners, to protect the principle of $180 million contracts for Tobias Harris. Most Twitter outrage is just this kind of hypocritical con, in which gangs of high society scolds pile on to reed-thin slights by this or that nobody to give cover to society’s larger moral obscenities.
Twitter in other words is the social media version of the 19th-century Russian aristocrats who by day deflowered servant girls and by night hissed at Anna and Vronsky for trying to see an opera while living in sin.
According to the play’s promotional materials, “Jews have been talked about a lot in recent years. Now they get to speak for themselves.” This is a bizarre statement, especially when you consider that the interviewees include the Booker Prize-winning novelist Howard Jacobson, the TV actress and columnist Tracy-Ann Oberman, the former Labour MP Luciana Berger, the current Labour MP Dame Margaret Hodge, and the Financial Times editor Stephen Bush. Are these people voiceless? Are they subalterns that may or may not be able to speak? Whatever problems Jewish people might face, this is simply not one of them. But because we’re a minority group, apparently we should get to raise the same complaints as members of any other minority group: that we are structurally discriminated against, that we lack a voice, that we’re under-represented and abused. A theatre full of comfortably middle-class people get to enjoy imagining themselves as the wretched of the earth. It’s grotesque.
But they can. This is just how numbers work. Say there’s a genetic disease that affects 1% of the population, and a test for the disease with a 90% accuracy rate. If you start testing everyone, that doesn’t mean 90% of the positive results you get will be accurate; it means 90% of the positive results will be false. In each case, there’s a 10% chance that the test has given you the wrong answer, but only a 1% chance that the person really has the disease. The antisemitism panic was a much, much worse test. If you create an environment in which people are empowered to make whatever accusations they like, with absolutely no penalty for lying, but strong negative consequences for even suggesting that some of these stories might, in fact, be untrue—well, you might get a few genuine cases of racism. But the overwhelming majority will be grasping psychopaths with a political agenda, or a personal grudge, or just a howling void at the core of their being demanding to be filled with someone else’s suffering.
The link between the two mesmerisms — and, by Ogden’s account, the guarantor of mesmerism’s longevity in America far into the 1800s — is a thorough debunking by Benjamin Franklin. Along with the famed chemist Antoine Lavoisier, Franklin headed a commission deputized by Louis XVI to examine Mesmer’s claims. They observed the theatrical shrieks, convulsions, and regurgitations that occurred in his own salons under the ministrations of purple-robed practitioners. The commission then told one patient, blindfolded, that they were about to mesmerize her, in actuality doing nothing. Another subject they tried to mesmerize from behind a partition without her knowledge, then again in front of her but with intentionally wrong technique. The results from these and similar experiments were as you might expect: The patients who thought they were being mesmerized displayed all the physical signs thereof, and the ones who did not, did not.
Like so many people wedded to a nineteenth-century view of science, which promised scientific explanations for social and cultural phenomena, Dawkins overlooks the nineteenth-century reaction that said: Wait a minute; science is not the only way to pursue knowledge. There is moral knowledge too, which is the province of practical reason; there is emotional knowledge, which is the province of art, literature, and music. And just possibly there is transcendental knowledge, which is the province of religion. Why privilege science, just because it sets out to //explain// the world? Why not give weight to the disciplines that //interpret// the world, and so help us to be at home in it?
Students in my course on “The Opium of Ideology” wanted to talk about the nature and preconditions of meaningful discussion. We began with Aristotle’s understanding of politics as the citizenly exercise of speech (logos): the public sharing of articulate perceptions of the advantageous and the harmful and hence (because these things can be distributed fairly or unfairly) the just and the unjust.
Pittman found that the program did not violate administrative procedure. Instead, he found that the Higher Education Relief Opportunities for Students Act of 2003 ("HEROES Act")—which Biden used to justify his move—does not actually "provide the executive branch clear congressional authorization to create a $400 billion student loan forgiveness program." Bident's student debt relief plan "is thus an unconstitutional exercise of Congress's legislative power and must be vacated."
"In this country, we are not ruled by an all-powerful executive with a pen and a phone," Pittman wrote in his decision. "Instead, we are ruled by a Constitution that provides for three distinct and independent branches of government."
More than 26 million people have already applied for student loan forgiveness, she said, and the Biden administration will keep their information "so it can quickly process their relief once we prevail in court."
Plummer's book is considered an invaluable glimpse into the culture and mindset of the Comanche as a people before disease and war forced them onto reservations.[1] She not only recounted her feelings about her captivity, but detailed the life, lifestyle, and much as she could, the mindset of the Comanche. She detailed the roles men, women, children, and temporary captives or "slaves," played in that society, and why.[1][2] In her account of her life among the Comanche, Rachel wrote that six weeks after giving birth to a healthy son, the warriors decided she was slowed too much by childcare, and threw her son down on the ground. When he stopped moving, they left her to bury him. When she revived him, they returned and tied the infant to a rope, and dragged him through cactuses until the frail, tiny body was literally torn to pieces.[1]
You are brave to fight. Good to fallen enemy. You are directed by the Great Spirit. Indians do not have pity on a fallen enemy. By our law, it is clear. It is contrary to our law to show foul play. She began with you, and you had a right to kill her. Your noble spirit forbad you. When Indians fight, the conqueror gives or takes the life of his or her antagonist, and they seldom spare them.
For a few days there, when all assumed the Red Wave was imminent, the smart line suddenly on the left (yes) was //voter fraud//. A pre-emptive cry of //stolen election!// “There are real risks that hackers could tunnel into voting equipment and other election infrastructure to try to undermine Tuesday’s vote,” wrote Politico, saying Democracy-doubting things that I’m pretty sure are banned on social media. And MSNBC contributor Jason Johnson: “The level of voter suppression [in Georgia] is beyond anything that we saw in 2018 . . . We can’t say that whatever happens tonight is a fair and equitable election.”
German pauses. “That distinction, between people who believe bad thoughts and people who do bad things was completely lost on our counterterrorism enterprise after 9/11,” he says. “In fact, they adopted a fraudulent radicalization theory that’s been disproven over and over again, that bad ideas lead to bad acts.”
https://sites.google.com/view/k12mathmatters/homeWe agree that calculus is not the “be-all and end-all” of high-school mathematics education. In particular, we encourage introducing options such as logic, probability, discrete mathematics, and algorithms design in the K-12 curriculum, as they can be valuable foundations for STEM education in college. However, when taught beyond a superficial level (which unfortunately is not the case in the CMF “data science” proposals), these topics are not any easier than calculus. They require the same foundations of logic, algebra, and functions, and fluency with numbers and calculations. Indeed, the career paths with the highest potential for growth require more and deeper mathematical preparation than ever before. Calculus and other mathematical foundations are not important because they are admission requirements for colleges, or because they are relics of the “Sputnik era”. They are important because they provide fundamental knowledge and ways of thinking that are necessary for success in these fast growing and in-demand fields.
However, we are deeply concerned about the unintended consequences of recent well-intentioned approaches to reform mathematics education, particularly the California Mathematics Framework (CMF). Such frameworks aim to reduce achievement gaps by limiting the availability of advanced mathematical courses to middle schoolers and beginning high schoolers. While such reforms superficially seem “successful” at reducing disparities at the high school level, they are merely “kicking the can” to college. While it is possible to succeed in STEM at college without taking advanced courses in high school, it is more challenging. College students who need to spend their early years taking introductory math courses may require more time to graduate. They may need to give up other opportunities and are more likely to struggle academically. Such a reform would disadvantage K-12 public school students in the United States compared with their international and private-school peers. It may lead to a de facto privatization of advanced mathematics K-12 education and disproportionately harm students with fewer resources.
However, when the total life cycle of mining, manufacturing, production, and disposal is considered, green energy is revealed to be anything but “clean.” As an AP investigation recently revealed:
> The birds no longer sing, and the herbs no longer grow. The fish no longer swim in rivers that have turned a murky brown … cows are sometimes found dead. … Water is no longer drinkable, and endangered species such as tigers, pangolins and red pandas have fled the area.
That’s not a description of the Flint River region in Michigan, the Fukushima environs in Japan, the Love Canal community in upstate New York, nor of the dystopian wasteland in an apocalyptic novel. It’s the condition of northern Myanmar on China’s south-west border—the result of the unrestrained mining of rare earth minerals. These materials are essential to the manufacture of green energy products like electric vehicles and wind turbines.
> A single electric car battery weighing 1,000 pounds requires extracting and processing some 500,000 pounds of materials. Averaged over a battery’s life, each mile of driving an electric car ‘consumes’ five pounds of earth. Using an internal combustion engine consumes about 0.2 pounds of liquids per mile.
One such occasion occurred during a public hearing in Washington, DC convened to debate the proposed construction of a nuclear waste repository. The waste was to be treated, encapsulated, and placed in deep rock strata known to be geologically stable since their formation. Even under a hypothetical catastrophic event, the radiation exposure to the public would have been well below what everyone receives, annually, from naturally occurring radiation sources.
Nevertheless, an environmentalist took the floor and argued that because radiation is a known carcinogen (which is true), there is no safe level of exposure (which is false), and therefore any radioactive release into the biosphere is an undue cancer risk (also false). For emotional impact, he cited instances of childhood leukemia that were heart-wrenching but irrelevant since they were unrelated to radiation exposure. It didn’t matter; as I surveyed the hearing room, it became clear to me that public opinion there was not being shaped by scientific fact.
Lockdown fanatics are hoping for everyone to forgive and forget what happened back there. Those in favor are calling it Pandemic Amnesty, and the Atlantic this week published a coherent argument for it: “Let’s focus on the future, and fix the problems we still need to solve,” the author Emily Oster writes. (Oster herself was actually a reasonable voice during that whole Covid thing).
Here’s the problem: None of the fanatics ever admitted wrongdoing. There have been no apologies for keeping schools shut for so long or closing beaches and parks when it was clear those were safe places for everyone. There’s been no reckoning on the brutal realities of keeping seniors and children in little hermetic boxes for several years, nor the damage to small businesses.
The Covid fanatics had a very good run. Anytime they spoke it was phrased as “experts say.” No matter if it was a PhD in critical pottery theory, they were doctors of something. The virus allowed for America’s hall monitors to dominate, and they did it with ferocious glee. Now, ousted from power first by the vaccine and then by reasonable Covid moderates, the lockdown fanatics would like to move on and for you to forget the fact that your kid can’t do math or that your dad died alone.
They love Portland for the same reason most people love Portland. “The downtown area is filled with history and a variety of restaurants, shops, theaters, and an awesome Saturday Market on the Waterfront,” Donewald said of the Portland she knew a few years ago. Now, she said, downtown Portland “looks like a war zone.”
Until recently, the city’s biggest homeless encampment stood just across the street from the floating-homes community, in what’s called the Big Four Corners Natural Area. The camp was founded in 2018 by homeless activists on a protected wetlands site. They used to call it the Village of Hope.
By 2020, hundreds of people were living in the Village of Hope, and crime was rampant. Houseboat community residents started finding their car windows smashed in. Thieves stole their catalytic converters, and then their cars. On one occasion, a resident returned to his floating home to find someone in his bathroom taking a shower.
“We considered hiring a nightly foot patrol, but it was too expensive,” said Denise Olson, another floating home resident. “We felt terrorized.”
The sound of gunfire became routine, residents told me when I visited the site last week. One said you could smell the paint thinner-like odor of meth labs in the encampment, which burst into flames on several occasions. City firefighters refused to go into the encampment; it was too dangerous.
“The homeless situation has skyrocketed,” she said. “Mental health has gone downhill.” The decline has cast a pall over public life. Renteria is a smoker, and every time she lights up a cigarette outside, she said, she’s accosted. “I work really hard for my $10 pack of cigarettes,” she said. People come up to her and ask to bum one after another after another. When she says no, they call her “a fucking bitch,” she said.
“The biggest thing to me, though—the most off-putting thing, is open defecation,” she said. “I’m walking down the street with my kids going to a bookstore, and someone is squatted on the sidewalk taking a shit.”
"Volkswagen published an honest study [in which they] point out that the first 60,000 miles or so you're driving an electric vehicle, that electric vehicle will have emitted more carbon dioxide than if you just drove a conventional vehicle."
You would have to drive an electric car "100,000 miles" to reduce emissions by just "20 or 30 percent, which is not nothing, but it's not zero."
The word //incisive// is overused in reference to intelligence, but that’s what kind Vance’s is: He opens things up, gets inside them, and figures out what makes them work—or more often than not, concludes that they don’t. He has a temper, you might say, as a writer and critic.
There’s an especially interesting section in Elegy in which he reconnects with his father and begins visiting him on weekends in large part because he likes being a part of his father’s fundamentalist church. But just as quickly as he finishes explaining what the church meant to him, he unpacks its problems: “The downside of his theology was that it promoted a certain segregation from the outside world,” he writes. “I was a curious kid, and the deeper I immersed myself in evangelical theology, the more I felt compelled to mistrust many sectors of society.” Observes Vance, “I heard more about the gay lobby and the war on Christmas than about any particular character trait that a Christian should aspire to have.”
Vance and other conservative intellectuals tend to have convinced themselves that the liberal “ruling elite” discusses values like tolerance and inclusion only as a matter of “virtue signaling.” Perhaps this is true of some sociopaths on Twitter, rich members of Congress, and corporate executives. But for many millions of people in much of urban and suburban America, they are simply actual values, a faith that the way to have a shared community in a world of difference is to simply … share one’s community.
If your dog uses whining behavior to seek attention, rewards or desired objects, you need to teach her that remaining quiet is a better strategy. Sometimes reducing attention-seeking whining may be difficult because owners may unwittingly reinforce the behavior. Realize that any eye contact, touching or talking to your dog—even if you’re scolding her—all constitute attention. Use dramatic body language such as turning away from your dog or folding your arms across your chest and completely ignore her to indicate to your dog that her attention-seeking whining won’t work.
In addition to not reinforcing whining behavior, you need to reward your dog for being quiet. Teach your dog that she must always be quiet before receiving your attention, play or treats. Regularly seek out your dog to give her attention and rewards when she’s not whining. When your dog understands that silence works well to get your attention, she won’t feel as motivated to whine.
And it works because, in the most warped sense possible, it appeals to reason. If one really believes, as millions of American liberals do, that the U.S. faces two and only two choices — either (1) elect Democrats and ensure they rule or (2) live under a white nationalist fascist dictatorship — then of course such people will believe that media disinformation campaigns, censorship, and other forms of authoritarianism are necessary to ensure Democrats win and their opponents are vanquished.
https://quillette.com/2022/10/30/moral-toddlerhood/The COVID pandemic ushered in still greater amounts of censorship. Anyone who urged people to use masks at the start of the pandemic was accused of spreading dangerous disinformation because Dr. Anthony Fauci and the WHO insisted at the time that masks were useless or worse. When Fauci and WHO decided masks were an imperative, anyone questioning that decree by insisting that cloth masks were ineffective — the exact view of Fauci and WHO just weeks earlier — was banned from Big Tech platforms for spreading disinformation; such bans by Google included sitting U.S. Senators who themselves are medical doctors. From the start of the pandemic, it was prohibited to question whether the COVID virus may have leaked from a lab in Wuhan — until the Biden administration itself asked that question and ordered an investigation to find out, at which point Facebook and other platforms reversed themselves and announced that it was now permissible to ask this question since the U.S. Government itself was doing so.
Film writer Sonny Bunch once argued that radical environmentalists make great super-villains because they are unshakably convinced of the rightness of their cause, and just as unshakably determined to make everybody’s lives worse. If we take that observation and scale it down from Marvel movie to farce, we get the latest environmentalist protest trend, which feeds green fanatics’ sense of self-righteousness while alienating just about everyone else.
Anyone who’s ever been a parent will recognize these actions: throwing food, spilling milk, smearing paint on the walls, sitting on the ground and refusing to move. Add in the inability to properly dispose of one’s bodily waste, and the pattern is complete. This is the behavior of toddlers.
We’ve seen this approach to protest persist over the decades, for different causes—including poverty, nuclear weapons, and animal rights. (Nor is it exclusive to leftists. Not so long ago, moral toddlers on the Right conducted a mass tantrum at the US Capitol. Another thing small children have to learn is how to graciously concede when they lose a contest.) At some point, when the tactics remain the same but the cause keeps changing, you conclude that the tactics are an end in themselves and the cause is just an excuse.
Dutch investigative journalists from the website Follow the Money reported that China has as many as 54 “secret police stations” in countries around the world, with at least two in the Netherlands, in Rotterdam and Amsterdam. The story was first broken by the Spanish Civil Rights group Safeguard Defenders, which claimed in September the Chinese have “persuaded” 230,000 fugitives to return home “voluntarily,” established nine “forbidden countries” where Chinese nationals may not live without a “good reason,” and established coercive techniques that included refusing the children of relatives the right to be educated back in China. You can read the full report produced by the group here. The New York Times picked up the story and claims politicians in the United States, Canada, Britain and Australia have “expressed concern” to China about the possibility that China is operating police “offices” in Western countries.
https://www.quora.com/Why-do-certain-Proto-Indo-European-words-have-subscript-numbers-and-an-asterisk-and-what-is-their-functionGuest, host, hospital, hotel, hospitable, and hostile, among others, come from the same word, *gʰósti-, which meant “stranger”.
Once upon a time - about 6000–8000 years ago - there were some folks who lived near where modern-day Ukraine is. They really liked cows and horses, were somewhat nomadic, and would later go on to conquer the majority of the world’s landmass at some point or another.
Latin took *h₃rḗǵs, threw out the *h₃, and shortened the remaining regs to rex, “king” in its modern sense. It then took rex and pulled all sorts of new words out of it. The time when a king rules was his regnum, or règne in French, or “reign” in English; the rule itself is his regimen, which became “regimen” and “regime” and “realm”; the place where he ruled was a regionem, and that regionem lost its -em and fell on down as “region”. And the king himself? Regalis, “regal”, of course!
Go a further back from rex to *h₃rḗǵs and beyond and you’ve got *h₃reǵ-, “straight”, “to move in a straight line”, and by extension “to be just”, “to be correct”, as a king ought to be. As covered here, there’s plenty more from that route: “right” and “right” (the other kind) and the “rect” in “correct”.
There is no Antifa: A Fact Check by Newsweek’s Fact Check Team found a Ted Cruz statement FALSE. Cruz had gone on The View and referenced Antifa riots and cities burning. False! There is no Antifa, Newsweek checkers checked. Here’s Newsweek: “Labeling the protests as ‘antifa riots’ is misleading as there is no organization or group known as such.” Funny because here’s Newsweek in 2021: “Antifa activists vow to keep fighting.”
When I say that someone “thinks like an economist” I mean that share a particular view of how the world works. While schools in planning, economics, political science, and even forestry overtly appear to teach tools that can be used to manage a part of the world, they also more subtly teach a worldview.
Forestry schools teach that wood is a crucial part of society–“from the cradle to the grave, we are surrounded by wood,” wrote one forester–and so growing trees is the most important job a forester can do. Planning schools teach that urban problems result from poor urban design and that planners can fix those problems by changing the shape and form of urban areas. Political science schools teach that all decisions are political, so making government bigger somehow gives more power to the people.
Notice that all of these views place the professionals at the center of the world. I’d like to think that the economic worldview does just the opposite. According to this world view, society is made up of individuals who each make decisions every day based on their own preferences, costs, and their ability to pay those costs. Some of those decisions are made in the marketplace, some in the political sphere, and some are made for religious reasons. But society works best when people are allowed to make their own decisions and are not compelled to do so by some central power.
I’ve done a lot of work in organizing and in protest movements and in building coalitions. Community building is always about an organizer walking into the room and knowing that the people in this room do not agree on everything. But I, as an organizer, have to find the linchpin, find the common thread. And when I find that, I’m going to build the movement around that.
What I’ve been seeing over the past few years has been the opposite of that. It’s going into a room and saying, “You don’t have the right to speak because you don’t agree with our way of thinking.” Or it’s, “You’re an idiot for thinking this or that. Shut up. Get your vaccination.”
Raju has used this sentimental characterization of San Francisco’s drug dealers to cast cops who try to enforce the city’s drug laws as bigots. Last March, in a motion in San Francisco Superior Court, Raju accused a police officer of racial discrimination against Latinos in his arrests. According to the motion, over a two-year period, Sergeant Daniel Solorzano arrested 53 people for drug sales, all of whom were Latino. He declined to arrest 43 others, all but two of whom were non-Latino. This, the public defender alleges, demonstrates that Solorzano, who is of Mexican and Nicaraguan heritage and whose first language is Spanish, is prejudiced against Latinos.
But there’s another explanation for why everyone Solorzano arrested was Latino, which is precisely what Mayor Breed was trying to explain: The professional drug dealers who work in the Tenderloin and the adjacent SoMa neighborhood are all Honduran nationals. This is because Mexico’s Sinaloa drug cartel, which does not practice Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in its hiring practices, recruits the dealers from Honduras and smuggles them into the United States. So, if you arrest any number of these dealers, they’re all going to be Latino. This is not “racial profiling.” This is just a fact.
http://www.portlandfacts.com/cost_of_transit_%26_cars.htmlAccording to the American Public Transportation Association’s Public Transportation Fact Book, the average speed of rail transit is 21.5 miles per hour, while the average speed of bus transit is 14.1 mph
In 1998, the Lancet published a deeply flawed study that should never have appeared claiming vaccines were linked to autism. Eventually it was found to be fraudulent. Nevertheless, parents and activists ran wild with it. It has taken decades to fight the false connection between vaccines and autism—and it is still a battle not fully won. We need the public to believe in medically essential vaccines and be willing to give them to their children. To add an unnecessary and controversial vaccine to this list—at the risk of some states or local actors mandating it—undermines the broader good of public health.
Ms. Scher’s dog walker found her dead on the sofa that day.
https://thewalrus.ca/how-first-nations-became-a-prop-for-white-activists/My father’s family lived in Harbin, part of the Jewish émigré community in that city that helped build the trans-Siberian railroad for the Russians. (My paternal grandfather’s first wife, who died giving birth to my father’s Russian-Mexican half-sister, was apparently the daughter of Harbin’s rabbi.) While my dad’s family got out of Harbin safely, many of the other Jewish Harbin residents were slaughtered by (in chronological order) White Russians during the Russian Civil War, Japanese invaders during the 1930s, and Communist Chinese troops in the 1940s. But the current Chinese administrators in Harbin know how to make a buck, and so they’ve turned much of Harbin into a sort of Jewish theme park.
Except that, as Tablet writer Dara Horn explains, all of the exhibits are kitsch, the depiction of Jewish culture is shallow and falsified, and there’s no mention of all the slaughter that took place. It’s really one of the purest examples of “appropriation” I’ve ever heard of. And yet, when I read Horn’s article, I wasn’t really offended at all. Indeed, I thought that what the modern Chinese hucksters are doing in Harbin is actually quite hilarious.
And the reason for my insouciant reaction seems quite simple to me: We Jews have lots of opportunities to tell our own story, in movies, books, journalism, you name it. So what if the Chinese are selling a dishonest, commodified schlock version of Harbin’s Jewish history? It’s not like the real truth isn’t out there—in Horn’s article and a dozen other places.
One of the authors in Metcalfe-Chenail’s book, Steven Cooper, actually claims that Indigenous people “until they were colonized, led happy, productive, loving, lives.” Really? Would any credible author casually argue that, say, the indigenous Jewish peasants of Jerusalem—my own forebears—were “happy” and “loving” until Titus’s Roman legions bathed their streets in blood?
In large part, our historical double-standard arises from the fact that the Indigenous societies of what is now called Canada were oral cultures, so there are few written sources to document the true fabric of ancient life. The history of European and Middle-Eastern peoples, on the other hand, is recorded in written histories that clearly show our past to be a long series of wars, slaughters, famines, and epidemics. All societies have the same miserable pedigree. No one is special. No one is magical.
There is another factor at play here, too. Modern identity politics came of age in the last decades of the twentieth century, when the Left was losing faith in communism. Over the last two generations, Marxism has reinvented itself through offshoots of environmentalism, anti-racism, anti-colonialism, anti-globalization, and generic anti-capitalism. In furtherance of these causes, our intellectual class has seized, somewhat desperately, on the idea of Indigenous peoples as possessing special, even mystical, powers that permit them to resist the free market and industrialization. They have become a prop for white activists who seek to summon up a world that is more pure, more green, more altruistic than the soulless humdrum of post-industrial global capitalism.
For instance, the inevitability of political concerns coloring our research does not justify abandoning efforts at reducing their impact. Pathogenic microbes will inevitably survive any effort at sanitizing an operating theater. That hardly means that surgeons should perform procedures in gas station bathrooms. Those whose goal is to arrive at the clearest and most comprehensive understanding of reality must strive to minimize the influence of prejudices arising from nonscientific beliefs and agendas as much as possible—even if eradicating them completely is beyond anyone’s capability.
Taking root around 12,000 years ago, agriculture triggered such a change in society and the way in which people lived that its development has been dubbed the “Neolithic Revolution.” Traditional hunter-gatherer lifestyles, followed by humans since their evolution, were swept aside in favor of permanent settlements and a reliable food supply. Out of agriculture, cities and civilizations grew, and because crops and animals could now be farmed to meet demand, the global population rocketed—from some five million people 10,000 years ago, to more than seven billion today.
I never liked the term "coming out"; still, I did it. That was back in the 1970's. Now I'm having to do it all over again. I'm 65 years old, I've been with the same guy for 31 years, and on this day, I'm announcing to the world that I am "straight". I haven't met someone else, I haven't fallen lin love with a woman. I'm simply done fighting the term "Queer".
What bothers me is not that it used to be a slur-- I just don't see why I have to be rebranded for the fourth time in my life. I started as a "homosexual", then became "gay", then "LGBT", and now "Queer". And for what? Why the makeovers? And what will it be next?
I read an interview with a woman who identifies as queer because she's tall, that's it. She's never had a relationship with another woman. Doesn't care to, for all I know. So what does it mean that we're both suddenly queer? I'm not tall, just the opposite. There are parking meters that stand higher than I do.
I'm told that queer is about inclusion: it's an umbrealla that lesbians, and non-binary people, and bisexuals, and tall woman can stand under. But why not just say "I'm intersex", "I'm trans", "I'm a lesbian", et cetera; why do we need an ever-changing umbrella? Is it just to make the parades easier?
It no longer matters what you are in practice, just how you identify. I'm going with "heterosexual", because like the words "Jewish" or "female" it rarely, if ever, changes. I need a resting place, and this is as good a one as any. So from here on out, I'm as straight as they come. But with a boyfriend.
We opened a retail store a year ago on Hayes Street, the charming shopping district just blocks away from the famous Full House home. Our first week there, our windows were smashed and thousands of dollars of product was stolen. We replaced the window, and it immediately happened again (four times). We replaced with window with plywood as we waited for a month+ to get a metal security gate installed (demand for those gates is creating huge delays). As of today, we are closing the store due to rampant organized theft and lack of safety for our team. Our store is hit by organized theft rings several times per week. They brazenly enter the store and grab thousands of dollars of product and walk out. We started keeping the door locked and opening it only for customers, but even then, they’ll have a woman go to the door, and then hiding individuals rush into the store as soon as the door opens. Our team is terrified. They feel unsafe. Security guards don’t help because these theft rings know that security guards won’t/can’t stop them. It’s impossible for a retail store to operate in these circumstances, especially when cities refuse to take any action (despite us paying taxes well above any other state we operate in). The city recently announced a reduction of police presence in this neighborhood, despite mass-scale crime.
It makes me sad that I’m now avoiding San Francisco, a city I used to love. Last time my wife and I went in 2020, a drugged up person ran up to my wife’s face and started screaming some of the most obscene things I’ve ever heard. She was terrified. During a previous trip, my rental car was broken into and everything was stolen out of our trunk. When calling the police to report the theft, they let us know this happens hundreds of times per day in the city and said it was our own fault for parking in the street. I grew up in Latin America and spent much of my adult life there, and I never felt this unsafe there. Something has to change in San Francisco.
At the lengthy meeting (the book contains a full transcript) her supervisor quickly made it clear that exposing tender, young students to Peterson’s ideas was problematic. “Just to give you some context about Jordan Peterson, he is a figure that is basically highly involved with the alt-right,” the supervisor said. He went on to suggest that using the video resulted in a complaint from one or more of Shepherd’s students. “It’s one or multiple students who have come forward saying that this is something that they were concerned about and that it made them uncomfortable.” Shepherd’s discussion of pronouns, she was told, apparently contravened Laurier’s Gendered and Sexual Violence Policy and perhaps even Ontario’s human rights legislation. She was warned that some vague “informal process” might result in future disciplinary action. In the meantime, she was told to submit all subsequent lesson plans for prior approval. As she left the interview to go to her next class, something fundamental changed within Shepherd.
As for those consequences, in early 2020 Shepherd explains that she was offered a sessional instructor position at what she calls “a small college” teaching a course in media literacy. “A few days after showing my face at the online faculty orientation session, I was informed that a social justice-oriented faculty member figured out who I was, and my contract was swiftly cancelled.” The forces that tried and failed to silence her at Laurier are apparently still hard at work.
https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/general_writing/academic_writing/rhetorical_situation/example3.htmlLogos is frequently translated as some variation of “logic or reasoning,” but it originally referred to the actual content of a speech and how it was organized. Today, many people may discuss the logos qualities of a text to refer to how strong the logic or reasoning of the text is. But logos more closely refers to the structure and content of the text itself. In this resource, logos means “text.”
As should be evident from this example, even something as simple as a grocery list has its own rhetorical situation with an author and audience trying to identify their perspectives with each other.
President Donald Trump understood that, even if his exact figures were a little off. "The dishwashers, they had a little problem," he said during his 2020 campaign. "They didn't give enough water, so people would run them 10 times, so they end up using more water. And the thing's no damn good."
The Trump administration briefly liberalized dishwasher standards, but the Biden administration quickly reimposed the old rules. Millions of Americans will now spill needless gallons of water down the drain by cleaning their dishes in the sink while a machine that could have done the work for them sits sadly handicapped and idle.
Indeed, the undeniable takeaway from the BP numbers is that wind and solar energy are not displacing hydrocarbons. Instead, they are being added to our existing energy mix. Why aren’t they making more headway? The reasons are readily apparent: wind and solar simply cannot provide the staggering scale of energy the world needs at prices consumers can afford.
My biggest piece of advice would be to have expectations and require your children to meet them. People are really good at raising their behavior to the required level. Not any of this touchy feely garbage. Presumably you love and care for your kids, most people don't need advice about that these days.
What most parents struggle with is establishing that they are in charge, their word goes, and that their are consequences for not living up to expectations. You are a stand in for "the world/god" when they grow up. Except you actually care about them. So it is great for them. But you need to teach them that "the world" will punish them for laziness/stupidity/recklessness etc.
Otherwise you end up with a 15 year old who has had a great emotionally nurturing and supportive life, and has zero ability to do hard work, and zero ability to overcome challenges or obstacles.
Anyway, my relationship with my kids is great, and everyone talks about how great they are. Athletic, relatively interested in academics, polite, well behaved, socially the center of the kids in the nieghborhood. And I would put a lot of that down to me not accepting bad behavior or whining whenthey were say 2-6. Don't let them get their way by crying. Make them pick up after themselves. Hell by 7 or 8 they can start doing dishes and other small chores. If you don't like how they are are using their access to Netflix, take it away for 5 days. If you can't get them to focus about the danger of streets, give them a light cuff across the head, or an unpleasant face to face scolding. Your kids should be a little bit afraid of one of the parents and their disapproval/rebuke. You are certainly going to be a lot more measured and loving about it than the world will be.
But the jungle, in this analogy, is you.
And taking antibiotics is like burning down the jungle.
Many things will survive, and things will regrow. But it won’t come back quite the same as before. Where you once had a stand of oaks, fast-growing bamboo might take over, the way Clostridium difficile crops up in the wake of a course of antibiotics.
Often, species will go extinct. When this happens, it’s as if a piece of your genome has been deleted; the chain of stewardship of these biological heirlooms, broken. Genes that were present in every single one of your ancestors, stretching back millennia, suddenly gone in less than a week.
If they were important genes, like those that help you assimilate dietary iron, or produce serotonin and other neurotransmitters, things can go very wrong very quickly; there’s a reason that antibiotic use is associated with increased risk of depression, multiple sclerosis, and other diseases.
Existing probiotics can’t replace those missing pieces; nearly all the currently available ones are either Lactobacillus or Bifidobacterium, the occasional Streptococcus. These are like the cats and dogs of the microbial world: pretty safe, good for certain things like keeping the place clear of mice—but such a small component of the biosphere as to be useless in most cases. If an ecosystem is floundering for a lack of birds or beetles, there’s no breed of dog that can fix the problem.
A while ago, someone on the financial side of the television industry reminded me that Amazon isn’t a television company. It’s a mail order business that dabbles in TV to boost its cred. The Rings of Power seems to be a perfect case in point, as if Amazon dumped a billion dollars into it for the headlines, then ignored a lot of the details. The frustrating thing is that there is clearly so much potential here. I just don’t know if I have it in me to watch any more to see if it is ever realised.
Adderall is classified as a Schedule II drug, meaning it has medicinal value but "a high potential for abuse." The DEA is empowered by federal law to "determine the total quantity of each basic class of controlled substance…necessary to be manufactured during the following calendar year." It then sets an Aggregate Production Quota (APQ) to "determine the annual quantities of controlled substances…available for national medical, scientific, and industrial use."
That evening saw many firsts. For the first time, I heard black Jews say white Jews had benefited from white supremacy and needed to “shed your whiteness.” White Jews, they told us, had taken full advantage of white privilege and their proximity to the white power structure. I later came to understand that—like other privileged ethnicities, such as Asian Americans—many Jews were “white adjacent.” We were expected to acknowledge our complicity in white supremacy. Our role moving forward, we were told, was to acknowledge our own guilt, and “make space” for and “lift up” black voices.
At the end of the meeting, one of the organizers drew the black participants into a circle. She preached, “I was blind but now I am Woke.” The participants repeated the chant and loudly proclaimed “Amen.” At this point, I realized that the call to be woke was, in fact, a profession of faith.
In the spring of 2020, more woke alarm bells went off when Abby Levine of the Jewish Social Justice Roundtable asked my organization to sign a petition accusing two respected Jewish scholars, Ira Sheskin and Arnold Dashevsky, of engaging in racism. The pair had written an article concluding that the number of Jews of color in the United States is less than the figure that had been reported in a recent study performed by a group called “Jews of Color Initiative.” I was friendly with Sheskin, a social scientist living in Florida, and knew him to be anything but a racist. He and Dashevsky had cited research—including a 2013 Pew study, the most comprehensive data set to date—that indicated that Jews of color represented about six percent of American Jews, not the 12 to 15 percent figure claimed in the Jews of Color Initiative report.
Despite the fact there was no apparent flaw in the methodology employed by Sheskin and Dashevsky, progressive groups launched a petition that garnered more than 2,500 signatures, decrying the supposed sins of the authors. Critics attacked Sheskin and Dashevsky, claiming their findings disempowered and erased Jews of color—despite the fact that all they’d done was correct an apparent statistical error. Leaders of the Jewish Reform Movement accused the authors of “white intellectualism” and erasure.
Jury Orders Alex Jones to Pay $965 Million in Damages for Sandy Hook Claims
The award follows a Texas jury’s decision in August that ordered Mr. Jones to pay about $50 million to the parents of a 6-year-old who was killed in the shooting.
aradoxically, after the end of the mandate to make news there was actually an increase in coverage.
In 1987, the Federal Communications Commission abolished the fairness doctrine. But at the same time, cable was rising and content needed to be produced on an even greater scale. With greater competition among channels, and no more law that rationalized tolerating losses on news, the industry insisted that news divisions turn a profit like any other.
But producing the news had huge fixed costs. You needed studios, journalists, and correspondents around the globe, regardless of how many hours of coverage you aired. And so the simple solution to generating profits was to spread those costs out, producing more news across more channels within the same corporations.
Call it Stewart’s Content Theory: The real reason conventional news sucked was, well, because it sucked. It was bad because nobody had tried to make it not bad. Maybe producers didn’t have the guts, maybe journalists were addicted to access, maybe it was just the inertia of the whole system. Maybe they needed a prophet to help them see the light. Whatever the case, the answer was simple: Instead of choosing to be phony and bad, they should choose to be real and good.
Call this Lasn’s Structure Theory: The reason news sucked was that the economics of the news business required it to suck. The suits were right after all.
Stewart would have none of it. “After the debates, where do you guys head to right afterwards?…. Spin alley.” He was talking about how, after formal debates, reporters would interview campaign flaks whose job was to argue why their guy had won, regardless of what had actually happened. “Now, don’t you think that, for people watching at home, that’s kind of a drag, that you’re literally walking to a place called ‘deception lane’?”
It wasn’t real debate — it was fake. “What you do is not honest, what you do is partisan hackery.” Instead of helping the people, “you’re helping the politicians and the corporations…. you are part of their strategies.”
In the countless retrospectives that have been written on the Crossfire showdown, which became one of the defining media moments of the 2000s, much has been said about Stewart’s hypocrisy. One of the hosts pointed it out: “You had John Kerry on your show and you sniff his throne and you’re accusing us of partisan hackery?” Stewart ducked this lamely: “You’re on CNN. The show that leads into me is puppets making crank phone calls. What is wrong with you?”
But what matters isn’t that Stewart was a hypocrite. It was how masterful The Daily Show was at leveraging this double standard.
In a monologue during the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Stewart joked that “our show obviously is at a disadvantage compared to the many other news sources that we are competing with…. For one thing, we are fake.” But of course the subtext of The Daily Show was that all TV news was fake news, and everyone else was just lying about it. Being honestly fake wasn’t a liability. It was a huge asset.
The Daily Show really was news. It covered the basic facts of the stories of the day. Its viewers were about as well-informed as those of broadcast or cable TV news. And surveys showed its newscasts were as trusted as many mainstream media sources.
And because it made no pretense of “fairness” or “objectivity,” it had an enormous advantage in competing for the eyeballs and allegiances of its young audience. Because its only explicit loyalty was to the laughs, the show could ignore “the news cycle” and focus on the stories that hit the right notes for its audience. Even as Jon Stewart fought a world of empty spin, he pioneered a model of television news where you didn’t need to manage the reporting, the sources, or the production of compelling televisual imagery. By wresting control of the context, you could bend it to your will and tell the story you wanted to tell.
The genius of ``The Daily Show'' wasn’t that it was great in //spite// of everyone else sucking; it was great //because// everyone else sucked. As long as there was an endless supply of garbage on hand — and boy, was there — you could do a show that was just //about// the garbage. And, perversely, you could be more successful talking about the garbage than making it.
The Daily Show always portrayed itself as the David to the news establishment’s Goliath. But in the showdown, Cramer pointed out the advantages the show had when it came to the production mechanics of filling air time. “We’ve got seventeen hours of live TV a day to do…. I’ve got an hour, I’ve got one writer, he’s my nephew…. You have eighteen guys.”
Stewart liked to claim that they were just jokers, but really the joke was on everyone else. The Daily Show had figured out how to produce a real, high-quality newscast after all — without having to do any of its own reporting. Under the “fair use” copyright exception for parody, the show could simply steal whatever content it needed from its competitors.
It is often said that what destroyed the legacy advertising model was the Internet, but that isn’t quite true. The Internet operated for many years without touching the mass advertising business. That giant would eventually be felled by Google, but initially the company refused on moral principle to make money from advertising. In a 1998 paper, the company’s founders wrote that search engines funded by ads “will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.” Instead, Google sold licenses to other companies to use its search technology. But amid the pressures of the dot-com bust, the company would backtrack and pursue a new revenue stream based on targeted search ads, launching Adwords in October 2000.
In the premiere episode, Colbert’s character proclaimed himself the emperor of “truthiness.” “We are divided between those who think with their head and those who //know// with their //heart//,” he explained. The point was to offer the gentle viewers smug assurance that they still lived in the world of facts while the sheep over at Fox believed whatever felt right.
To illustrate, Colbert used a clip of President George W. Bush defending the nomination of White House Counsel Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court: “I know her heart.” But the quote was actually taken outrageously out of context. The punchline hit big, not because of anything brilliant Colbert had said, but because he understood exactly what his liberal audience already believed about the nomination. In calling out the scourge of truthiness, Colbert was being truthy.
Since the new business model does not especially depend on daily newspapers, the Times and Post are free to branch out and develop diverse ways of delivering content, including podcasts, documentaries, and magazines. The primary service provided is interpretation, laying out the puzzles, the narrative, and the clues to the “real” story. A 2017 internal report of the Times’s operations concluded that it spent too many resources on editing and not enough on “story sharpening.” In a 2020 job posting for a new Moscow correspondent, the paper did not require candidates to speak Russian, but did lay out at paragraph length their official storyline about “Vladimir Putin’s Russia.” The Times has doubled its Opinion staff since 2017 while cutting back on traditional shoe-leather desks like local reporting.
n his dream, Jon Stewart flees the set of the show cast in his image of journalism: Tucker Carlson Tonight.
Bursting off the stage, he finds himself in a hallway of doors, each leading to a different set where authentic, post-spin, digitally-engaged news analysis can be found. As he runs, he passes by The Rachel Maddow Show, The Joe Rogan Experience, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, The Lead with Jake Tapper, The Mehdi Hassan Show, Infowars, The ReidOut with Joy Ann Reid, Common Sense with Bari Weiss, and countless others.
Far, far down at the forgotten end of the hall, he stops before a door that reads The Problem with Jon Stewart and pushes through.
https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2005/10/20051004-1.htmlAnd that was because Stewart had the same high view of how journalism used to be that the old-timers did, the same hushed worship of Edward R. Murrow’s raised brow. Stewart spent his whole career railing against television, but he was actually the most nostalgic, backward-looking commentator of them all. You could have imagined a world where, when he finally made his promised serious turn, he just moved on to host a revamped ``Dateline'' or ``60 Minutes''.
The irony was that in blowtorching TV journalism for having become just about TV, Stewart produced a decade of great TV journalism about … well, TV. The show allowed its audience to stand above the fray, to dodge substantive politics and instead identify with the conviction that they were the ones staying true to the spirit of America while the soulless media-political hacks sold out and the fanatics went off the rails.
And so I know people are jumping to all kinds of conclusions, and that's fine; that's part of our process, you know. People are quick to opine. The thing I appreciate is that she's gotten a good reception on the United States Senate. People can opine all they want, but the final opinion is on the floor of the United States Senate. That's where it's going to be decided whether or not she is a Supreme Court judge. And I'm hopeful she'll get confirmed. I certainly don't want to prejudge the senators. Somebody asked me about trying to avoid conflict. That's up to them, to decide how they're going to treat this good woman. That's up to them, if they're going to be willing to give her a fair look at her credentials, and to listen carefully to her view of what it means to be a judge. That's up to them to make that decision. It's up to them to decide whether or not they want to reject all the special interest money that seems to want to try to influence the outcome of certain issues here in Washington, D.C. It's up to them if they want to bring dignity to the process. I will assure you this: Harriet Miers will bring dignity to the bench.
If you looked at the graph, you could get the idea that the major gains happened actually before the Cuba revolution and the growth was actually faster before than after.
In a just world, //The Professional// and //The Surgeon// would both be part of the American literary canon by now.
https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/?date=20000324&slug=4011978The Garden of Allah cabaret was an influential LGBTQ+ cabaret venue in the mid-1900s that took its name and inspiration from Nazimova's original Garden of Alla.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eva_Le_GallienneRe-creating gay cabaret of '40s ; Semi-fictional `Garden of Allah' delves into Seattle's underground past
Stop saying that being against crime is a dog whistle for racism. Have you ever met a crime victim? They don’t like crime. I work with people from a poor area, and a lot of them have been raped, or permanently disabled, or had people close to them murdered. You know what these people have in common? They don’t like crime When you say “the only reason someone could talk about law and order is that they secretly hate black people, because, y’know, all criminals are black”, not only are you an idiot, you’re a racist. Also, I judge you for not having read the polls saying that nonwhites are way more concerned about crime than white people are.
In another Kvetch I’ll dive into Hitler’s hubris and the extent of US support for the Soviet Union,4 but according to McMeekin’s Stalin’s War, in 1943, *after* Stalingrad and the turning point of the war, the following % of US production went to the USSR:
* 12.8% of US pork* 12.9% of canned and frozen fish* 15.3% of eggs* 15.7% of dried fruit* 16.8% of beans
By 1943, American wheat made up a third of Soviet consumption and nearly 70% of Russian sugar consumption by 1944.
With enemies like the US, who needs friends?
I was born in Hoboken. I am an American. Photography is my passion. The search for Truth my obsession.
PLEASE NOTE: In the above STATEMENT the following, fast becoming "obsolete", terms do not appear: ART, SCIENCE, BEAUTY, RELIGION, every ISM, ABSTRACTION, FORM, PLASTICITY, OBJECTIVITY, SUBJECTIVITY, OLD MASTERS, MODERN ART, PSYCHOANALYSIS, AESTHETICS, PICTORIAL PHOTOGRAPHY, DEMOCRACY, CEZANNE, "291", PROHIBITION. The term TRUTH did creep in but it may be kicked out by any one.
https://quillette.com/2021/07/27/rescuing-the-radicalized-discourse-on-sex-and-gender-part-two-of-a-three-part-series/In a male-dominated society, women’s sex lives were of interest only if they involved men. They were planets orbiting the male star; objects waiting to be picked up. If a woman wasn’t with a man, it was assumed she wasn’t having sex. Or, if she was having sex with a woman, it was in pornography made for men (with men being invited to imagine that they’d be welcome in a fantasy threesome). Unlike bisexual women, actual lesbians can provoke male resentment, even rage, because they reject male genitals.
Trans people deserve to be able to self-identify and self-understand as they wish. But everyone else has the same right—including women who lack the privilege or entitlement to trivialize their sex as a badge of identity. Their self-understanding as women is centred on the biological urgency of pregnancy, miscarriage, childbirth, menstruation, and menopause; and (even if they go through life without experiencing some or all of these events) bodies that are evolutionarily programmed to accommodate these processes. Their fight for the right to vote, work, drive, enter into contracts, and control their own bodies emerged from this reality, which also has included such sex-specific horrors as genital circumcision, sex slavery, menstrual huts, rape, honour killings, and live burial and burning upon widowhood. The refusal of gender supremacists to allow women the language of their bodies and historical experience is brutal. It is also deeply hypocritical, given the emphasis trans activists typically place on the idea that language can serve to oppress or even “erase” someone.
https://quillette.com/2021/09/21/the-progressive-case-for-renouncing-gender-extremism-last-of-a-three-part-series/At the same time, many of the loudest voices in the LGBT activist (and “allyship”) community are only nominally queer, their ranks being padded with legions of allegedly bi women and their boyfriends, who simply role-play, experiment, fantasize beyond the vanilla, and grab attention by writing about their queer haircuts. Now a casually assumed identity, “Queer” once was the gay N-word—the last word many gay men heard as they were beaten and killed. Many of us reclaimed it during the AIDS pandemic—“We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it”—and then continued to use it as a synonym for gay (especially when discussing our community in a political context). Its increasingly watered down usage by bourgeois dilettantes represents an offensive trivialization of our history.
Demands that women suppress their fear, modesty, or disgust are sexist, as men generally don’t have analogous reactions in the company of naked women. Then there are observant Muslim and Jewish women, who have religious obligations concerning the opposite sex. Insisting that these women be naked in front of physical males is, frankly, antisemitic and Islamophobic. Even in the case of women who aren’t religious, but simply come from socially conservative immigrant backgrounds, forcing them to prioritize avant-garde tenets of Queer Theory over their own sensibilities represents the height of cultural imperialism.
A common debating tactic here is to smear all discussion of these issues as tantamount to denouncing trans women as sexual predators, much in the bigoted tradition of presenting gay men as inherently pedophilic. But, as I’ve taken pains to demonstrate, female concerns in this area generally don’t involve trans people at all. Moreover, it shouldn’t be controversial to assert that some small fraction of trans individuals—in equal proportion to those who are not trans—will be violent and predatory. It would be nice if the research showed that trans women prove an exception to the general rule that sexual offences are overwhelmingly committed by biological males. But the criminality rates of trans women reflect the prevailing rates for men. Changing your pronouns doesn’t change your biological wiring.
A non-human civilisation that may potentially pre-date our civilisation, likely based underground or under the oceans where they're pretty difficult for us to detect (most UFOs are seen near large water sources and indeed submerging)
The World War II-age fighter armament of machine guns and cannon were inadequate to stop attacks by massed formations of high-speed bombers. Firing large volleys of unguided rockets into bomber formations was not much better, and true air-to-air missiles were in their infancy. In 1954 Douglas Aircraft began a program to investigate the possibility of a nuclear-armed air-to-air weapon. To ensure simplicity and reliability, the weapon would be unguided, since the large blast radius made precise accuracy unnecessary.
The judge’s tentative order also found that the ATF’s in-house classification process failed to comply with federal rule-making procedures. Changes to substantive federal regulations typically include a notice-and-comment period and eventual publication in the Federal Register.
This comment is drawing reports because of course it is, but I think your response is very interesting in light of my own perception of the "alt right" as just the white flavor of identitarian critical theory. My own personal take on this whole discussion is that you are miserable for basically the same reasons as the "woke" are miserable. I don't think it's possible to harbor hatred or even merely resentment toward entire classes of people, and also be a happy person.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RessentimentI want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.
https://www.vault.themotte.org/post/critical_race_theorists_and_grievance_studies_and_alchemistsIn philosophy and psychology, ressentiment (/rəˌsɒ̃.tiˈmɒ̃/; French pronunciation: [ʁə.sɑ̃.ti.mɑ̃] (listen)) is one of the forms of resentment or hostility. The concept was of particular interest to some 19th century thinkers, most notably Friedrich Nietzsche. According to their use, ressentiment is a sense of hostility directed toward an object that one identifies as the cause of one's frustration, that is, an assignment of blame for one's frustration.[1] The sense of weakness or inferiority complex and perhaps even jealousy in the face of the "cause" generates a rejecting/justifying value system, or morality, which attacks or denies the perceived source of one's frustration. This value system is then used as a means of justifying one's own weaknesses by identifying the source of envy as objectively inferior, serving as a defense mechanism that prevents the resentful individual from addressing and overcoming their insecurities and flaws. The ego creates an enemy in order to insulate itself from culpability.
https://www.vault.themotte.org/post/1984_as_1940s_anglo_civilization_and_todaysAgain, while the Church treated Galileo wrongly and his punishment was not cool, this is still constantly blown to cartoonish degrees. Galileo was allowed to pursue and write about his heliocentric ideas and the details of his ultimate suppression really had as much to do with politics and egos as anything else.
https://www.vault.themotte.org/post/mormonism_as_1950s_americaBut if social conservatives aren't allowed to say "no, starting a family is actually the best route for most people and we should be willing to celebrate those who follow this path and also to stigmatize those who actively avoid this path in hopes of pushing them back onto it, for both their own good and the good of society," then yeah, they can suspect that you aren't actually pro-family.
As for the dating market, dating as a Mormon guy is super easy, relatively speaking. More women than men are active in church, and everyone’s looking to marry. Guys can just go to church in the young single adult wards, meet someone cute, start dating, get married. There’s no cultural expectation of being established in your career before marrying. People marry young—my parents married around 20. You hear crazy stories of people dating only a few weeks before getting engaged. Six months is a long period of just dating in Mormon terms. Again, all this is slowing and changing in response to outside culture, but it’s still present. Off the top of my head I know of five or six couples who got engaged within a couple of months, all happy and doing well.
Oh, and it’s very normal for, say, a woman to go to a church university intending largely to meet a guy there, get married, and become a homemaker. Becoming a bit less so, but still pretty typical last I saw. Don’t believe me? “Family life” is the 8th most popular major at BYU.
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/04/cars-are-weirdTo tell you the truth, coming from that background, the whole world has always seemed insane to me. Broken homes, addictions, crime... like, even something as mild as swearing just wasn’t a part of my real-world sphere. It was all just stuff people talked about happening somewhere else, not, you know, anything that was actually real. Things just sort of worked.
https://www.vault.themotte.org/post/guys_just_want_one_thing__and_its_a_clear_cut_way_to_pursue_womenI am not, however, advocating the Personal Responsibility approach to climate change, where the solution to a global crisis is to encourage people one by one to embrace a minimalist lifestyle. I am a proud maximalist, and when I’m near my car I am going to go on long pointless drives along the coast and I’m going to enjoy them and not feel the slightest bit of guilt.
This is not an individual choice problem. Nobody who has ever seen Los Angeles can possibly think so. I have tried to navigate Los Angeles on foot. It was terrifying. I have not tried Los Angeles on a bike, but it seems even more terrifying. People do not sit for hours upon hours on the 405 because they are lazy or selfish, but because their city is a colossal planning failure.
https://www.vault.themotte.org/post/the_shortest_quality_contributionThe above is a description of what I’ve noticed this alot with my friends in their 20s: there is very little cross-gender friendship and the guys, even when they’re dating girls, don’t really give a shit about them or their feelings and will ghost them or dump them in the cruelest ways even after months.
I mean sure these girls might breakdown and curse his name til the end of time and their girlfriends will say “what an asshole” but there aren’t any consequences because their friendship circles don’t overlap, there are a million girls in the city just a swipe right away, and if you do try to be nice and not simply ghost them like a mercenary monster, or try to integrate your friendship circles you’ll have to deal with their woke friends dragging everything to hell.
I’m in a longterm relationship and I’ve tried to have dinner parties where I introduce my guy friends to my girlfriend’s perpetually single and painfully woke girlfriends and these poor guys will get their heads ripped off for expressing any interest in just like normal conversation. The woke shibboleths will always come out and I’m lucky if we can get through the dinner party without one of the wokesters screaming at these poor guys.
And its never the guys who bring up politics and they never even disagree with the girls, they just majored in something besides activism and, like most of the population, don’t follow politics.
https://www.vault.themotte.org/post/on_open> If the poster was an "obviously true, inoffensive statement" then far-right trolls would probably not waste half a night putting them up all over campus.
The far-right statement isn't: "It's okay to be white" , it is you tearing it down.
One of the main criticisms of open borders from nationalists is that immigrants bring their own culture, and, while assimilation occurs, it's a question of relative rates. Is the host culture (which, one assumes, created the attractive nation that people are looking to join) able to retain its beneficial qualities, or does the immigrant culture change it in such a way that those beneficial qualities are reduced or lost. This discussion often revolves around questions about "high-trust" vs. "low-trust", and tribal vs. altruistic societies. There are some cogent leftist-leaning criticisms of open borders, basically that it hurts the working-class and the viability of the welfare state, but open borders as a whole are so strongly-coded to the left than any criticism almost automatically shifts you to the right, regardless of your other beliefs.
I have small children of mixed racial backgrounds. Though the infractions are minor, we’ve encountered strange things in regards to the race of my children. Both my wife and I have been disturbed by requests to clarify our children’s racial identity by school authorities. The only way I can explain what’s going on is it’s like being a Jew in 1980’s Northern Ireland and being asked if your children are Protestant or Catholic. We’re not Christian, and race isn’t super important to our identities (unlike some people). Being asked even implicitly is an imposition and we don’t appreciate our children be asked to racialize themselves (I’m being politic, we were enraged).
Taking activists who are nonwhite at their word rather than self-interest, they believe white examination and embrace of their racial identity will allow for true anti-racism and justice. My rejoinder is simple: you put far too much faith in the innate goodness of these white people. My wife’s grandparents were good people, yes, but I know for a fact they were opposed to integration. They were good people, but of their time. Most people conform and follow the spirit of the times.
The biggest gift you can give an official source is to put his or her statement in the newspaper’s own “objective” voice, which once carried the imprimatur of apolitical fact. This is why companies paid premiums for “native advertising,” i.e. ads disguised as newspaper articles (or other typical content). It’s why the Internet melted down in 2013 when The Atlantic ran an “article” that was actually a Church of Scientology ad, and why the Columbia Journalism Review once wrote, “Editorial will forever be the cat, and native advertising, Pepe Le Pew.” Smart newspapers eschewed native advertising because it killed the proverbial cat.
No knock against the four writers in this piece, but it’s become almost impossible for ordinary readers to discern what’s cat and what’s skunk in a lot of news copy, particularly national security coverage, and particularly war coverage.
There were approximately 30,000 deaths from COVID in the United States among people younger than 50 years old. There are ~215,000,000 people in United States who are younger than 50 years old. The risk factor of catching and dying from COVID over the last year+ for this (very large) demographic (comprising ~2/3 of the country) was <0.014%, asymmetrically distributed by age, obesity, and comorbidities. That is to say, generally speaking, the fattest, oldest, least healthy, least conscientious, most unlucky 1out of every 7,143 people under 50 contracted and died with/from COVID. This does not strike me as anything resembling an emergency for the ~2/3 of the country we're referring to, and it would seem to pale in comparison to the economic, psychological, social, and physiological toll that was taken due to our hysterical and histrionic approach that treated everyone as if they were a decrepit octogenarian[...]For reference, ~40% of adults are obese, with 7.6% morbidly obese (BMI > 40) as of 2016. Obesity’s impact on life expectancy is thought to be between 5 and 20 years, worse for men than women. Meanwhile, 0.18% died from COVID, with an average age of 78. Say that the median COVID decedent lost 10 years (it’s almost certainly far less). Taking only the >50lb contingent and saying they lost 2 years (it’s likely more) on average, that alone would be ~5x the loss of life years of the entire pandemic so far. Pretty crazy to think about!
Then there's the losses regarding education, socialization, and wealth generation. [...]
Finally, the economic cost is almost too large to contemplate. Just some napkin math, but my share of just federal stimulus bill spending based on my proportion of total tax revenues puts this at a personal cost to me of >$40,000. On top of that, my firm downsized as our clients' litigation was all put on hold and I lost my job, permanently altering my career path. Small businesses closed at an alarming rate, with estimates between 200,000 and 400,000 permanently shuttered above historical levels, and massive amounts of others bearing unheard of losses. Wealth inequality has soared to dramatic new heights and our government has spent countless trillions - that could've completely paid off universal child care, free college, and wiped out student loans for a generation - on frantic, impotent lockdowns that treated the entire country like they were the tiny sliver of the populace that was actually posed a meaningful risk by this pathogen
One last thing I want to bring up is the body-worn camera footage from before the bystander footage that went viral—specifically the footage from Officer Lane. I don’t know if it had been released before the trial but I know I hadn’t seen it, and it’s definitely worth a watch. First, Officer Lane approaches Floyd as he is in a parked car. As Floyd opens the door, he is immediately kinda histrionic (and hardly ceases being histrionic throughout the whole encounter) about the officers and, presumably because he does not comply with the request to show both hands, Officer Lane pulls his gun out (~1:30 in the linked video).
Lane holsters his gun shortly afterwards, but for the rest of the video the interaction between Floyd and police can only be described as //incredibly// annoying. Between the constant, fairly easy requests to, say, show his hands that are basically ignored, to Floyd’s almost-incoherent rambling, to the eventual //absolute refusal// to sit in the squad car (sprinkled with the occasional “I can’t breathe” looong before anyone applied any kind of hold), it’s no wonder this police encounter went horribly wrong.
"Be yourself.""Forget the competition and go at your own pace.""Your only contest is with yourself.""Never let anything go out into the world that you don’t understand.""Never forget where you left your reader in the previous paragraph and what they want to know next.""Your best credential is yourself.""Decide what you want to do. Then decide to do it. Then do it."
A newly released report sheds light on enormous sums of money the federal government provides to Ivy League universities — and how that money is handled.
The report comes from Open the Books, an organization that aims to make public spending more transparent. It concluded that in the six fiscal years between 2010 and 2015, a full $41.59 billion of the Ivy League’s money could be traced back to taxpayer-funded payments and benefits.
To put that in perspective, the average amount of money that the eight Ivy League schools received annually over that time period — $4.31 billion — exceeds the amount of money received by 16 of the 50 states.
The report also examined Ivy League endowments, which are some of the largest in the country. Penn’s endowment for 2015 was the fourth highest, at $10.1 billion. In 2016, it climbed to $10.7 billion.
The Ivy League’s total endowment is around $120 billion, which amounts to about $2 million per undergraduate student. A sum of that size could give every Ivy League student a full ride for the next 51 years.
Because Ivy League schools are nonprofit institutions, they don’t pay taxes on any investment gains their endowments might make — which saves them a lot of money. Between the 2011 and 2015 fiscal years, the Ivies received a $9.6 billion tax break on the $27.3 billion growth of their collective endowments.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2015/12/21/as-muslim-women-we-actually-ask-you-not-to-wear-the-hijab-in-the-name-of-interfaith-solidarity/Outside, her brother heard screams. As family members frantically banged on the door, security officers assaulted them with batons and tear gas. An ambulance sped away from the building. Kiaresh desperately showed photos of his sister to the young women scrambling out. One of them told him that she had held Mahsa in her arms, trying to comfort her. Shocked, he ran the few blocks to the neighborhood’s government-run Kasra Hospital, where he found Mahsa intubated, an intravenous drip in her arm and her face swathed in bandages. That same night, doctors told the family that they wouldn’t be able to save her.
For us, as mainstream Muslim women, born in Egypt and India, the spectacle at the mosque was a painful reminder of the well-financed effort by conservative Muslims to dominate modern Muslim societies. This modern-day movement spreads an ideology of political Islam, called “Islamism,” enlisting well-intentioned interfaith do-gooders and the media into promoting the idea that “hijab” is a virtual “sixth pillar” of Islam, after the traditional “five pillars” of the shahada (or proclamation of faith), prayer, fasting, charity and pilgrimage.
We reject this interpretation that the “hijab” is merely a symbol of modesty and dignity adopted by faithful female followers of Islam.
"Telos means 'the end, goal, or purpose for which an act is done, or at which a profession or institution aims,'" he wrote in a Sept. 20 piece published on the website of Heterodox Academy, an organization he cofounded that promotes viewpoint diversity on college campuses, and republished by the Chronicle of Higher Education. "The telos of a knife is to cut, the telos of medicine is to heal, and the telos of a university is truth."
"The Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP)—recently asked me to violate my quasi-fiduciary duty to the truth," he added. "I was going to attend the annual conference in Atlanta next February to present some research with colleagues on a new and improved version of the Moral Foundations Questionnaire. I was surprised to learn about a new rule: In order to present research at the conference, all social psychologists are now required to submit a statement explaining 'whether and how this submission advances the equity, inclusion, and anti-racism goals of SPSP.'"
"I have gotten about a dozen supportive emails from other social psychologists, and no real criticism beyond a few psychologists on Twitter who, perhaps shaped by Twitter, go to great lengths to assume the worst about me and my motives for writing the essay," Haidt told me by email. "I have the sense that there is a large generational split. Psychologists and academics who are older than me (I'm 58) seem uniformly supportive: they are all on the left, and the left used to be creeped out by loyalty oaths, whether administered by the McCarthyite right or the Soviet left. But young people on the left seem to be very comfortable requiring such pledges."
Of course, the WPATH writers had access to the same universe of information as the Europeans and Scandinavians. They acknowledge that “a key challenge in adolescent transgender care is the quality of evidence evaluating the effectiveness of medically necessary gender-affirming medical and surgical treatments.” But instead of being concerned by the paltry evidence, WPATH has falsely claimed that “a systematic review regarding outcomes of treatment in adolescents is not possible.” They also declare puberty blockers are “fully reversible”—but we simply don’t know their long-term impact. They reject the cautionary principle employed by other countries, and leave decisions to individual doctors and patients for any treatment—social transition, hormones, surgery.
The long-term effects of these interventions on the kinds of adolescents seeking them today is unknown, but WPATH notes positively that a “2017 study of 20 WPATH-affiliated surgeons in the US reported slightly more than half had performed vaginoplasty in minors.” Yet some detransitioned men who received vaginoplasties are speaking out, saying they realized they were gay men with internalized homophobia—and that they weren’t properly evaluated before having their genitals removed.
Decades of studies, and experience by practitioners, demonstrate that the vast majority of children with early-onset gender dysphoria outgrow this by the time they emerge from puberty—and that many of these young people grow up to be gay or bisexual. WPATH even acknowledges that “there are no reliable means of predicting an individual child’s gender evolution.” So by promoting the benefits of early social and medical intervention, WPATH advocates preventing the very process of natural physical and mental maturation that has historically resulted in the resolution of most dysphoric children’s distress.
Sequins and glitter, and a companion of indeterminate sex, another ungendered being. So far, so flaming. But for a night out to be progressive and fully intersectional, it does need some more improbable complications. And so,> After a while, they [our narrator’s companion] wanted to move closer to the stage and I followed. Before we could make it to the front, though, they explained how the dance floor closest to the DJ was for black and indigenous femmes only.There we go.> Everyone else was to dance behind them in the following order: black and indigenous then other people of colour then mixed-race people, then whites, and femmes then androgynous people then mascs. Since my new friend was mixed and I was white, I would have to dance behind them, but they pointed to a stranger and told me I could dance in front of him.Now we’re cooking. Fun times must surely follow.> At first, I thought they were joking—how could such an elaborate and specific system work on the chaos of a dance floor? But as the explanation went on, I realised how serious they were. I found myself speechless, and they interpreted my silence as confusion. “Don’t worry,” they said, putting their hand on my arm, “you’ll figure it out.”
https://elizamondegreen.substack.com/p/how-to-describe-trans-activismIn my experience in the California nonprofit sector, there are three types of employees who go ultra-woke:* junior employees who don't find their jobs that interesting or fulfilling and don't have enough on their plates (whether that work is interesting or not)* employees with performance issues* emotional vampires
https://elizamondegreen.substack.com/p/i-could-not-picture-myself-as-a-womanOne distinctive aim of trans activism is to advance the interests of heterosexual adult males who are sexually aroused by simulating being female. Some of trans activists' distinctive claims are as follows:* Humans have no common words for human males or human females.* There are male women and male girls.* There are female men and female boys.* There are heterosexual male lesbians.* Female people should not have their own spaces or activities.* Everyone should act as if some male rapists are women.* Some healthy children should have their sexual development prevented.* Some healthy adolescents should have their penis and testicles removed.* Some healthy adolescents should have their breasts, ovaries and uterus removed.Further, given that some minors have in fact had their sexual development prevented and their breasts or genitals removed, trans activists are committed to the claim that such medical interventions have some track record of success. On the present evidence from several countries, even if success is measured by the standard of psychological (rather than sexual) health, they do not.
https://elizamondegreen.substack.com/p/questioning-gender-ideology-4b5This interview’s got it all:
Hyperbole!> There are people in elected office saying that, essentially, transgender people are going to be responsible for the end of existence. That degree of rhetoric is really alarming and horrible.
Historical revisionism!> The idea of gender being a binary concept specifically based on genitalia is a very new idea in relation to human history. We existed in every culture throughout history! People don’t learn about that reality. They’re banning kids from learning it. It’s all tactical.
Co-morbidities and suicide-mongering!> I struggled with food. Intense depression, anxiety, severe panic attacks. I couldn’t function. There were days when I’d only have one meeting, and I’d leave my house to go to the meeting and have to turn around. Not being able to get through a script—could not. Reading is one of my favorite things to do—I couldn’t read, couldn’t get through a paragraph…> Can I relate to the suicide problem among trans people? Yeah, I can relate deeply. And not only to the very conscious, direct act of doing it but also certain times when I lost so much weight or when I was having such severe panic attacks and collapsed multiple times—all these things that very easily could, and statistically do, lead to death. And that’s all a manifestation of that trauma and discomfort that’s a disproportionate issue for transgender people.> There were moments of wanting to not be here, but that was just the sensation that I was left with. It wasn’t a movement for action—other than the ways in which I was abusing my body, clearly. I would look out the window of my apartment and think, With everything going on right now and how incredible it all is, this is how I feel? And I’m twenty-two? It was like, I don’t know if I could do it.
And this, which I’ve heard so often from young lesbians—even young women generally—in a world that erases (or transes or cancels) older role models. Maybe you can’t picture growing old as a woman because you don’t see it:> I could not picture myself as a woman aging. Obviously. It was just like, what is my future? There’s not a future. That’s kind of what it felt like. I would say, verbatim: I’ve never been a girl. I’ll never be a woman.
Esquire headlined the piece “The Euphoria of Elliot Page.” ‘Euphoria’ is the frame through which you’re meant to read the story.
https://elizamondegreen.substack.com/p/some-things-i-dont-believe-anymoreMaybe it started with “transwomen are women.” Whenever I asked what that meant, I found a great many people who either didn’t know or didn’t care what it meant and yet thought it was a very important thing for people to say they believe.
That wasn’t reassuring.[...]Why strip meaning from language? Why not create a new language for trans identities? Why would only women’s words do?
Why does anyone's 'truth' require my silence? Why does “respecting trans lives” mean women must defer—in our speech, our perceptions, our very self-conception?
That hobble-skirt of language troubled me. I found myself wondering what my words would cost me. There’s a difference between speaking carefully out of the desire to be understood and speaking cautiously out of fear of the consequences. I found myself speaking cautiously.
But there was no way to talk about why sex matters without causing offense—to trans activists, that is. This language of menstruators and gestators certainly offended me. There was no acceptable way to talk about women as a coherent sex class.
https://elizamondegreen.substack.com/p/dont-think-about-itWhen I first waded into this issue six years ago, I did think "transwomen" were in some sense meaningfully different from other men (while not being in any sense women). I don't think this anymore.
Now I think they’re just men having a uniquely and inescapably male experience that involves projecting male ideas about what it would feel like to be a woman on women, and then relating to those projections (and insisting that we must relate to those projections, too).
These men may hold these feelings with absolute sincerity. But it really doesn't matter how sincerely you feel like something that's not a feeling.
https://elizamondegreen.substack.com/p/in-plain-english-its-wrong-to-drugYour struggles are valid... unless you're struggling with growing up as a girl or gay (or both), in which case you're probably trans
In plain English, it's wrong to drug, cut up, and sterilize kids
Lincoln's fear of the "wild and furious passions" also led him to view direct democracy much less favorably than did Jefferson. He blamed the populist rhetoric of the Jacksonian era in part for the nationwide increase in mob violence that occasioned his "Perpetuation" speech. Mob violence, in his view, leads to the loss of innocent life, encourages the "lawless in spirit" to become "lawless in practice," and, worst of all, undermines the attachment of the American people to constitutional government. This loss of affection, he warned, could someday dispose us to surrender our freedom to a would-be tyrant who promises order to a country weary of turmoil.
Lincoln's chief antidote for mob violence and other internal threats to freedom was constitutionalism, or reverence for the Constitution and the rule of law. This doctrine, the third of his political religion (albeit the first he discussed), requires Americans never to violate any laws sanctioned by the Constitution and "never to tolerate their violation by others." Lincoln knew, of course, that bad laws will always exist, as will legitimate grievances that the law often fails to address. Yet he urged concerned citizens to use legal, constitutional means to tackle these evils rather than to engage in disobedience, civil or otherwise.
The 2022 Socialism Conference in Chicago earlier this month felt more like an academic conference than, as the promotional materials pronounced, “a place where activists can share lessons from their struggles.” Attendees paid $150 for full-price passes granting access to four days of panels, talks, and social events for professional schmoozing at the Hyatt Regency McCormick Place hotel and convention center in Chicago’s swank South Loop neighborhood. Panels hosted academics and writers plugging and signing books that could be purchased at the conference book fair. Keynote speakers gave the kind of rousing and impassioned prewritten talks to restrained applause that one would expect of a literary reading. The only real perceivable difference between the Socialism Conference and, say, the annual Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference was that of genre, which was social justice instead of more traditional literary poetry or prose.
Speaker Robin D.G. Kelley, professor of history at UCLA, argued that we have all been bequeathed an impoverished view of socialism, which, apparently, can be about oh-so-much-more than just class struggle. In a 50-minute talk, he blamed the failure of previous international socialist movements on white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, the failure to center antiracism, and an internationalism that was insufficiently internationalist. The socialist project, in Kelley’s view, must be about abolition, reparations, antiracism, and climate justice. Socialism can even, he insisted, require skepticism of “science as a product of Enlightenment rationality”—it is not just a fight against capitalism but also patriarchy, racism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, settler colonialism, and more.
Identity politics was not “captured” by political, economic, and social elites—it was created by them. Despite the folksy-sounding name, the Combahee River Collective was a collective of mostly scholars and academics. Their ranks included Audre Lorde, sisters Beverly and Barbara Smith, Gloria Akasha Hull, Margo Okazawa-Rey, Cheryl Clarke, and Chirlane McCray, among others. Feel free to google the names you don’t know. Many were educated at some of the nation’s top universities and some went on to become professors at them. They entered academia, politics, and nonprofits and headed various centers and university hospitals and the like. McCray, despite her participation in the black lesbian socialist collective, later went on to marry Bill de Blasio.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasily_ArkhipovHowever, in a 2013 interview, Petrov said at the time he was never sure that the alarm was erroneous. He felt that his civilian training helped him make the right decision. He said that his colleagues were all professional soldiers with purely military training and, following instructions, would have reported a missile launch if they had been on his shift.
Phobia indoctrination instills irrational fears in members of a high-control group and uses those fears to manipulate members so they won't question the group's beliefs or try to leave.
https://unspeakablelgbtq.weebly.com/the-stories/just-like-my-old-religion-mens-feelings-and-sensibilities-must-be-taken-into-account-in-everything-that-women-doPhobia indoctrination: inculcating irrational fears about leaving the group or questioning the leader’s authoritya. No happiness or fulfillment possible outside of the groupb. Terrible consequences if you leave: hell, demon possession, incurable diseases, accidents, suicide, insanity, 10,000 reincarnations, etc.c. Shunning of those who leave; fear of being rejected by friends and familyd. Never a legitimate reason to leave; those who leave are weak, undisciplined, unspiritual, worldly, brainwashed by family or counselor, or seduced by money, sex, or rock and rolle. Threats of harm to ex-member and family
I left the church when I was 17 after finally realizing it wasn't all just in my head – the sexism really was there. I also had begun to realize that I was gay around that time, so I was hopeful that the rest of the world would be more accepting. I was excited to join LGBT spaces and meet people like me. But it wasn't like that. I left one cult and found out that what awaited me was another. In LGBT and other "progressive" circles, women don't have the right to assemble without the presence of males who, by nature of being male, have no ability to relate to the experiences of female people. Just like my old religion, you aren't allowed to question the ideology (in this case transgenderism) without being ostracized. Even dating apps specifically for lesbian and bisexual women do not have the option to filter males out of our dating pool. Just like my old religion, men's feelings and sensibilities must be taken into account in everything that women do. I do not ever want to be in a space where men feel like they have the right to appraise my appearance and decide whether or not I'm fuckable, but I can't even escape that objectification in "lesbian" spaces.
https://www.realityslaststand.com/p/intersex-is-not-as-common-as-redWe should treat children who are different with compassion and acceptance. Transgender ideology does the opposite. When children say they’re transgender, that frequently prompts a visit to a gender clinic where a “gender-affirming” therapist may prescribe puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and even surgery to “fix” this perceived misalignment between “gender identity” (i.e., social roles and stereotypes) and the child’s biological sex.
When these common DSDs are removed, and intersex conditions are more precisely defined as “conditions in which chromosomal sex is inconsistent with phenotypic sex, or in which the phenotype is not classifiable as either male or female,” Fausto-Sterling’s 1.7 percent figure drops dramatically. According to Sax, “Applying this more precise definition, the true prevalence of intersex is seen to be about 0.018%, almost 100 times lower than Fausto-Sterling's estimate of 1.7%.”
“The U.S. government used to criticize the academic environment of the Soviet Union,” he said in a speech to Harvard freshmen in September 2021. “I didn’t expect that to be revived here.”
The instrument of a written constitution, superior to statutory law and changeable only by a process separate from ordinary lawmaking, was an American innovation that developed in the states in the period after the Revolution. It seemed to enhance the standing of constitutions. Yet this fact never extended to the idea that the federal Constitution should be thought of as an enduring symbol that would connect future generations to the founding period. Even today, a written constitution is not automatically revered; few state constitutions are viewed in this way. In some states, they can be easily amended, and many have been rewritten. It would take a person of peculiar temperament, and perhaps questionable sanity, to venerate the constitution of California.
So when I hear stories like that Americans could end homelessness by redirecting the money they spend on Christmas decorations, I don’t think that’s because they’re evil or hypocritical or don’t really care about the issue. I think they would if they could but the coordination problem gets in the way.
This is one reason I’m so gung ho about people pledging to donate 10% of their income to charity. It mows through these kinds of problems. I may not be a great person. But I spend more each year on the things I consider most important than I do on almonds, and this is the kind of thing that doesn’t happen naturally. It’s the kind of thing where I have to force myself to ignore the feeling of “just a drop in the ocean”, ignore whether I feel like other people are free-riding on me, and just do it. Pledging to donate money (and then figuring out what to do with it later) ensures I will take that effort, and not end up with revealed preferences that seem ridiculous in light of my values.
The crucial point is this: land value is entirely created by nature, government, and society. Urban land owners have essentially no ability to influence the value of their own land. They can simply sit back and enjoy the land rents that are created by the efforts of everyone else around them.
In the summer of 2021, Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi offered the following response when asked about the president's power to unilaterally cancel student loan debt. "The president can't do it—so that's not even a discussion," she said. The president can delay repayment, as happened following the COVID-19 pandemic, she added, but, "it would take an act of Congress, not an executive order, to cancel student loan debt." That would seem to be that.
Yet roughly a year later, President Joe Biden did cancel up to $20,000 worth of student loan debt for most borrowers, and, in direct contradiction to Pelosi's pronouncement, he did it entirely via the executive branch. There was no act of Congress.
How exactly was this legal? What, exactly, gave the president authority to unilaterally cancel student debt?
The answer, it turned out, was the pandemic. As Reason's Damon Root wrote in August, when Biden announced his debt cancellation plan last month, administration lawyers cited the Higher Education Relief Opportunities for Students, or HEROES Act, of 2003, a post 9/11 law that "permits the Secretary of Education to waive or modify Federal student financial assistance program requirements to help students and their families or academic institutions affected by a war, other military operation, or national emergency."
The law was clearly intended as a vehicle to give the president the power to forgive student loan debt for individuals directly involved in fighting the war on terror. But in Biden's revisionist citation, it became an all-purpose tool for mass debt forgiveness via executive action, premised on the argument that the COVID-19 pandemic was an ongoing national emergency.
René Descartes, the thinker who helped to inaugurate the Enlightenment project within the realm of philosophy, offered an account of the lawgiver that extended Machiavelli's analysis. Early in the //Discourse on Method//, Descartes describes his ideal city planner, which is his stand-in for a founder: "[T]here is not so much perfection in works created...by the hands of various masters as there is in those which one person has worked on alone. Thus we see that the buildings which a single architect has undertaken and completed are usually more beautiful and better ordered than those which several people have tried to refurbish by making use of old walls built for other purposes." Descartes then goes on to propose building a city in "regular places which an engineer has designed freely on level ground."
Moreover, in a story that continues to be almost totally unreported, virtually every federal agency that’s investigated Trump across the last six years has leaked its balls off, brazenly violating laws against the release of grand jury information or classified material, with the clear purpose to intimidate. The public found out in CNN 72 hours ahead of time that the first two charges in Robert Mueller’s investigation had been dropped by a grand jury, there were countless stories about grand jury proceedings regarding Manafort, officials leaked the contents of U.S. intercepts in the infamous Washington Post story about Michael Flynn talking to a Russian ambassador, intelligence sources leaked, falsely, that Trump officials had “repeated contacts” with Russian intelligence, there were leaks of material from the supposedly sacred secure reading facility of the Senate Intelligence Committee, CNN leaked word of secret intelligence assessments about Donald Trump’s supposed vulnerability to blackmail, there was the Washington Post story about Erik Prince’s supposed “backchannel” meeting with Russians in the Seychelles that clearly came from intercepted signals intelligence, and on, and on, and on.
Journalists now routinely use language seemingly designed to prep potential jurors for prosecution. In both the case of Julian Assange and the current Trump case, reporters refer to mishandled or stolen “national defense information,” which by an amazing coincidence is exactly the language used in the Espionage Act.
Reporters have almost universally eschewed the term “riot” to describe January 6th, reflexively using “insurrection” and “insurrectionist,” which again, just happens to the language of the likely charge in play, 18 U.S. Code § 2384, “Seditious conspiracy” (both of those words are constantly used by media also). Some outlets install prejudicial presumptions of guilt in the headline, as in PBS’s “Oath Keepers’ lawyer arrested in connection with Jan. 6 insurrection.” Reporters likely don’t see the problem here, but if part of a lawyer’s defense is that what happened on January 6th was not an insurrection but an ordinary riot, he or she will have a steep hill to climb with a jury pool that by now has heard the word “insurrection” ten million times.
Now, Trump’s behavior is eccentric at best and even some sympathetic defense lawyers I talked to suggested this case involving classified material raised “interesting” questions about the difficulty of dealing with such issues in an ordinary criminal court. But the argument that the ex-president needs to be jailed posthaste is a little hard to take seriously when FBI sources are, once again, illegally leaking secrets about their investigative targets as they pursue Trump for… mishandling secrets.
The latest incidents involve leaks of grand jury material, specifically subpoenas headed to perhaps 50 Trump-connected figures, conspicuously involving some of the last people willing to serve as Trump counsel, like Rudy Giuliani and Sydney Powell and Victoria Toensing and Boris Epshteyn. Many of these people have already been raided, had their phones seized, and even been the subject of FISA surveillance. Now, some of them found out the next subpoena was coming in the middle of the previous week, via phone calls from a Politico reporter who somehow knew grand jury details.
Crimes like the Espionage Act are intentionally drawn up to make conviction easy and punishment severe. Americans need to ask themselves what’s more dangerous: Donald Trump, or a federal law enforcement bureaucracy prosecutes people for the same rules it breaks, regularly argues that national security is harmed by allowing you to see the case against you, and appears ready to start using its vast power to punish political offenses? Is getting Donald Trump worth tossing out constitutional protections? Because that’s where this is all headed.
Notwithstanding Koeltl’s ruling, Ashcroft and Comey kept after Stewart, eventually charging her under a new legal theory that she’d allowed Rahman to receive and give out messages to the world through his translator, during his (monitored) jailhouse meetings with Stewart. She was convicted and initially sentenced to 28 months. The Bush administration felt the term was insufficiently punitive and Stewart was ultimately re-sentenced to 10 years, of which she served three, before being released to die of breast cancer at the age of 77.
So, how are we ensuring that child welfare agency employees are well-trained? At the top, the field is plagued with theoretical abstractions divorced from human nature. Take a recent article published in the Columbia Law Review titled, “Survived and Coerced: Epistemic Injustice in the Family Regulation System.” The author purports to show that:
> [T]he family regulation system [child protective services] facilitated damaged knowledge production by requiring false or inauthentic victimhood narratives and excluding alternate knowledge. … The epistemic injustice lens offers insight into the marginalization of Black and Brown voices in punitive family regulation cases … ultimately reinforcing the cycle of subjugating marginalized knowledge.
How articles filled with this kind of nonsense are supposed to illuminate investigations into child abuse is anyone’s guess. Consider this article from the Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare titled, “Can the Lifeworld Save us From Neoliberal Governmentality? Social work, Critical Theory, and Habermas,” which explains:
> [O]ngoing colonial and carceral processes like slavery and settler colonialism, are at the root of health disparities, child maltreatment rates, and educational disparities (Gil, 2013), to name just a few sequelae of an economic order buttressed by the gendered and racialized maldistribution of resources.
“A critical praxis approach to policy,” the author declares, “would resist the liberal welfare state status quo in which structural inequalities are displaced onto individuals through stigmatizing, pathologizing practices (Bryson, 2016).” Presumably it will be obvious to someone—agency heads? CPS investigators?—what all this means exactly?
This was the hard drive that broke the media. New York Post reporters quibbled over who had to put their name on the story. Everyone from Brian Stelter to NPR kept flip-flopping on whether it was real or if they should even cover it, or if covering it somehow made it real. Glenn Greenwald ended up leaving The Intercept over the thing.
I still feel conflicted. Some fun right-wingers I know who hang out at the Beach Cafe—it’s this wacky spot in my neighborhood on the Upper East Side where they love to go—have been harping about this for a while. I always found their obsession with it, and the search for a smoking gun that probably was never going to emerge, to be rather reaching. I understood why they felt gaslit: Despite the Sturm und Drang of the legacy press, everyone always knew that the laptop was real. It just took the media years to admit it. And certainly, Hunter’s overseas ventures were pretty grimy. But after reading about all the scoundrels involved in peddling this thing, and their various motivations, it isn’t hard to see why the press was so wary of this story.
What if, for example, instead of spending months learning about derivatives, quadratic equations, and the interior angles of rhombuses, students learned how to interpret financial and medical reports and climate, demographic, and electoral statistics? They would graduate far better equipped to understand math in the real world and to use math to make important life decisions later on.
> When I write my pronouns, I sometimes write all of them: they/them, she/her, he/him, because I don’t care. There will be days where I’m not always even aware of what my gender is, and I will notice it based on how someone addresses me and whether I respond. I was in choir for many years, and they’d say, “women sing now,” “men sing now.” And I would find myself starting with one or the other group, even though I was obviously supposed to sing soprano. I’d be like, “Oh, I guess I’m feeling that today.”
And yet, despite the fact Kuttner apparently can’t always figure out “what my gender is,” and claims not to “care” in any case, the interim leader felt the need to issue a lengthy statement on September 6th detailing the allegedly devastating emotional effects that ensued when the pronoun descriptor “she/elle” appeared in the electronic caption that sat alongside Kuttner’s name during a Green Party of Canada Zoom call, instead of the Kuttner-approved “they/he/ille.” Indeed, Kuttner described the ordeal as evidence that the Greens were infected by a “system of oppression”[...]
In his essay, Sweet describes an experience he had while on a trip to Africa that many historians will recognize. He came across historical errors at a site of historical tourism regarding the slave trade, a subject about which he has written a great deal. The desire for a convenient narrative that he had noted in some writings about the past had diffused into historical tourism. The tour guide asserted that Africans “unknowingly” sent fellow Africans into slavery. As Sweet points out, historians have demonstrated that some Africans knowingly participated in and benefited from the trade. The exhibit focused on the North American aspects of the slave trade but did not mention that “less than one percent” of those who passed through Elmina Castle in Ghana went to North America, while the vast majority went to the Caribbean and Brazil. In his essay, Sweet objected to these factual errors as well as to the version of history of heroes and villains offered by the “1619 Project.” In short, James Sweet did exactly what a historian should do. He contrasted the results of years of scholarship with a narrative presented at a site of historical tourism.
@TitaniaMcGrath · Aug 23, 2021As a radical activist who hates the status quo, I’ll continue to fight bravely against the establishment.
But it’s so hard when the only ones on my side are big tech, academia, the mainstream media, the entertainment industry, the US government and the Duke & Duchess of Sussex.
https://www.encyclopedia.com/religion/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/god-pagan-thoughtYou already know this story has to end badly. Like almost every place Jews have ever lived, Harbin was great for the Jews until it wasn’t—but in Harbin, the usual centuries-long rise and fall was condensed into something like 30 years. The flood of refugees from the 1917 Russian Revolution included many non-Jewish “White” (anti-Communist) Russians, whose virulent anti-Semitism was soon institutionalized in a fascist party that burned the Old Synagogue in 1931. That was also the year the Japanese occupied Manchuria, noticed rich Jews there, and decided they wanted their money. Conveniently, White Russian thugs were ready to help.
A 2005 life-cycle analysis commissioned by the Scottish government found that manufacturing paper bags consumes 10 percent more energy than manufacturing conventional plastic bags, uses four times more water, emits more than three times the amount of greenhouse gases, generates 14 times more water pollution, and results in nearly three times more solid waste. A 2007 study commissioned by what is now the American Recyclable Plastic Bag Alliance, an industry group, found that, compared to making plastic bags, making paper bags takes 3.4 times as much energy, produces five times as much solid waste, emits twice as much greenhouse gases, and uses 17 times more water.
A 2011 study commissioned by the U.K.'s Environment Agency found that "the paper bag has to be used four or more times to reduce its global warming potential to below that of the conventional [plastic] bag." The report noted that "it is unlikely the paper bag can be regularly reused the required number of times due to its low durability." The report added that paper bags were "significantly worse" than plastic bags "for human toxicity and terrestrial ecotoxicity due to the effect of paper production."
After works of Davis, Matijasevic, Putman and Robinson between 1960 and 1970, we know that every recursively enumerable set of numbers can be represented by a polynomial. In particular, it's the case for the set of prime numbers.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/08/california-to-consider-keeping-last-nuclear-plant-open/Things proceeded differently abroad. As in the U.S., nuclear construction costs steeply declined in France, West Germany, and Canada during the 1960s. In the 1970s, their costs began to rise but not nearly at the American rate. Basically, their inflation-adjusted costs doubled whereas U.S. costs have more than sextupled. In other words, the trend in nuclear construction costs in these countries is similar to the cost increases for building new coal-fired plants in the United States.
https://twitter.com/marcusgilmer/status/1044604107997237249So the proposed extension isn't a surprise. The surprise is that it's being done via a complicated deal introduced late in the legislative session (the coverage from the Los Angeles Times does a good job of going through the details). The costs of the extended operation will be covered by a low-interest loan from the state, which will be forgiven if the plant doesn't qualify for subsidies from Biden's infrastructure spending package. To avoid some of the obvious mechanisms for environmental groups to sue to block the deal, the potential legislation will exempt the extended operation from additional reviews under state environmental regulations.
In the last half of the 20th century, anthropologists located and observed many groups of people—in remote parts Africa, Asia, Australia, New Guinea, South America, and elsewhere—who had maintained a hunting-and-gathering life, almost unaffected by modern ways. Although each group studied had its own language and other cultural traditions, the various groups were found to be similar in many basic ways, which allows us to speak of "the hunter-gatherer way of life" in the singular. Wherever they were found, hunter-gatherers lived in small nomadic bands (of about 25 to 50 people per band), made decisions democratically, had ethical systems that centered on egalitarian values and sharing, and had rich cultural traditions that included music, art, games, dances, and time-honored stories.
https://sudburyvalley.org/essays/growing-world-transformedHunter-gatherer children are never isolated from adult activities. They observe directly all that occurs in camp—the preparations to move, the building of huts, the making and mending of tools and other artifacts, the food preparation and cooking, the nursing and care of infants, the precautions taken against predators and diseases, the gossip and discussions, the arguments and politics, the dances and festivities. They sometimes accompany adults on food gathering trips, and by age 10 or so boys sometimes accompany men on hunting trips.
Today there's almost a reversal of roles between children and adults. It doesn't even make sense for adults to guide children. Children know more than adults nine tenths of the time. For children today, schools have become irrelevant. Even the children who go to schools and even the children who say they're okay there and they don't want to leave, even for them schools have become irrelevant. They find their interests elsewhere. Even the ones who get A's and who say they love their teacher and they love their subject. We have this experience here over and over again. A kid comes into the school and you ask him, what do you like to do? They might say, "Oh I love biology." And you listen. Okay, no problem. You come here and do all the biology you want. Then they come to school and they don't do any biology. They never even pick up a biology book, they don't talk about biology, nothing. In the beginning we thought what's going on here? Were they lying to us? And of course they weren't lying because in the environment they came from where everything else was deadly, the least deadly thing they had to do during the day was biology. So they liked biology. The minute they get into an environment where they can really do what they're interested in, they don't have to fool themselves anymore.
The Critical Classroom zeroes in on similar rationales. In one chapter, Ian Rowe incorporates the work of Eric Kaufmann, showing how critical race theory depresses black student agency. Kaufmann provided black students different perspectives in order to see whether there was a noticeable impact. One group read a selection from Ta-Nehesi Coates’ Letter to My Son: “Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body—it is heritage. …”; another group read about African Americans having a praiseworthy heritage. When these groups were asked to respond to a statement probing for agency, those having read the Coates passage did convey a sense of agency, but to a lesser extent that those having read a positive sense of heritage. The critical literature did make a difference, but not in the way intended.
https://www.mindingthecampus.org/2022/07/01/truth-in-childrens-literature-a-response-to-dr-sius-american-ogres/In separate articles about primary and secondary education, I have argued that the critical lens suffers from subject matter incompleteness and overreaches regulatory guardrails.
When Shapiro arrived to speak, activist students associated with Hastings’ Black Law Students Association had already planned to express their dissatisfaction with his views by shutting down the event and using the “heckler’s veto” to silence him for his ideological transgressions. During the entire 53-minute event, student demonstrators blocked the podium while Shapiro tried to speak and screamed “Black lawyers matter” while pounding the desks and drowning out any speech.
As future lawyers, they will not be able to shut down and suppress the speech of others in the courtroom, including that of the opposing counsel and the judge. They will not be able to present their side of a case without having the other side present theirs.
What is more, the university is a place where the same decorum for promoting views, developing intellectual arguments, providing facts and research to support one’s opinions, and inspiring academic inquiry and scholarly debate are fundamental to the advancement of learning.
That is precisely why universities exist and why any attempts to suppress certain speech—because it is currently out of favor, novel, or even controversial—are antithetical to what the university represents. That is why, whether in a law school classroom or in a courtroom, unfettered free speech is paramount, as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. put it, even “for the thought that we hate.”
As a result of all this, for the first time at MRU, I had students stating on their course evaluations that they felt “uncomfortable” in my class because of “degrading comments” that I had supposedly made.
On September 18, 2020, it was moved that Arts Faculty should work to create “an intellectually inclusive environment that supports critical thinking and open inquiry about feminist philosophies pertaining to sex and gender.” The motion passed, but with only 44% support (36% were opposed, and the remainder abstained). The low level of support for such a rational plea for open inquiry on trans issues was a bad omen of things to come. It was this motion, in fact, that became one of the allegations against me; the trans activist faculty member claimed that while my motion “appeared to address academic freedom, ‘baked into it was a poison pill, of [Widdowson’s] ideologies.’ The [trans activist faculty member] described the motion as ‘trans-exclusionary’ because there were anti-transgender feminist philosophies that were not explicitly mentioned in the motion.”
In the case of trans activism, the satirical activity that was deemed to be “harassing” and “discriminatory” took place on Twitter. It began when my union sent an email invitation to committee members to attend a workshop aimed at training participants to recognize how “white supremacy culture” supposedly was influencing the Mount Royal Faculty Association.
https://quillette.com/2017/01/16/attack-of-the-offendotrons-tyranny-of-the-flash-mob/Every Canadian citizen has the right to freely express himself in his private life. Activists should not be able to override this with a veto backed up by university administrators and their unaccountable access to vast resources. As Helen Dale pointed out back in 2017 in an article in Quillette, “We seem to have forgotten that employees are allowed to be ‘ordinary members of the public’ – people are not automatons and not the property of their employers.” If professors must give up this right to serve their administrative overlords, it will kill all creativity and prevent us from searching for the truth and finding meaning in the world around us.
Mobs are historically salient. It’s not so long ago that ‘lynch mob’ was more than metaphor. Righteousness — the belief that moral correctness of belief and action is so pressing and important that it transcends law and custom — is dangerous even in isolated individuals. When it infects a mob, it threatens everyone and everything in its path.
This, at least, has been known for a while, partly because it’s psychologically satisfying for those who indulge. Aldous Huxley observed that the surest way to work up a crusade in favour of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behaviour “righteous indignation” — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.
For me, it turned out that there was an awful lot of stuff we weren’t buying specifically because we couldn’t. Once that restriction came off, it turned out a lot of our thrift wasn’t as much of a character trait as we thought.
Food is huge here. When we were broke, there were constant economic sacrifices in terms of what we bought to eat. We bought more ramen and beans. We restocked less often, and with more restrictions on individual shopping trips. We’d get more rice, and less cheese (an enormous amount of money is spent on cheese once one has the option). We watched for sales pretty closely.
Once you have money, the default shifts immediately to “just get what you need”, with a healthy side of “and also what you want, if it’s reasonable”. When poor, I once spent about a week contemplating the impact of buying a jar of protein powder before pulling the trigger on this ostentatious luxury item. With greater-than-survival level money, you don’t do this; you just buy it.
Having done that, Biden now has a bigger problem than ever. What a mess, but how perfectly in character for our leaders! Metaphorically we’re always blowing up villages and pyramids to chase a terror suspect into the desert. Now we’re factory-producing enemies at home, too, and it doesn’t look like anyone up there knows how to stop.
One day, the strikers barged into our lecture hall, screaming in the president’s face and encouraging students to leave the class. Many did. I did not. In the days to come, in a group chat with my friends from that class, we established they would not be attending the next class. “Are u guys going,” someone texted. That was followed by: “No,” “No lol,” “no,” “Like the most inappropriate class to attend today,” and then, “It’ll just be u and Lee and his bodyguard,” and, finally, “Lmaooo.”
I kept going. Not just because I was given the opportunity to take a freedom of speech course with one of the most important free speech scholars in the world, or because each lecture runs roughly $700, or because I am truly interested in the subject, though all of those reasons are part of it. I chose to go because other people storming into class and telling me what I was supposed to believe and do felt wrong. Like it wasn’t me. Like I was being asked to conform to the blob, to give in to the sameness.
I didn’t want to be part of the reason that in America, in the 21st century, a teacher needs a bodyguard to teach class. And I didn’t want to be a part of the reason that students feel ashamed to go to class either.
Then, like Shufutinsky, Farkash went to G.W., where he’s now a senior and where Jews, he said, were widely viewed as “a core component of white elitism in this country.”
Farkash said that students were mostly ignorant of Israel, its history, and its politics—why anyone had thought to found a Jewish state in the first place. “What they think are innocent Instagram stories can actually be very dangerous and unsettling,” he told me, referring to, among other things, posts that routinely compare Israel to South Africa or the Third Reich. “Generally, I avoid discussing Israel with progressive students. It brings me too much angst.”
Then there was my own experience at G.W., in March 2020. I had been at a Shabbat dinner on campus, and I was wearing a kippah. As I was coming out, some kids started shouting, “Yahud! Yahud!”—or Jew! Jew! in Arabic—and then, for good measure, added, “You started it!”, which I could only assume meant Covid. I had never experienced anything like that growing up in Scottsdale, Arizona.
As we’ve seen many times, when said neuroticism is made modish, statusful, and an institutional obligation, the practical results are not entirely inspiring. With six experiments in racial immunity from discipline, in six different cities, resulting in six surges in violent classroom assaults, up to and including actual riots. And with apologists for the policies doubling-down and subsequently claiming that “African-American boys” are more “physical” and “demonstrative,” and so punching teachers in the face, and groping them, and setting other students’ hair on fire, is how those students “engage in learning.”
The credibility and legitimacy of public health demands two things. The rules have to make sense; they can’t be nakedly contradictory. And the rules have to benefit people. You can’t demand jumping through hoops merely for optics.
Now consider Djokovic’s risk to others. At least 140 million Americans have had and recovered from Covid-19 as of January (this number is higher today), and both vaccinated and unvaccinated can spread the disease. Data shows, when infected, that vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals shed virus at similar rates and for similar durations. Forcing Djokovic to get vaccinated won’t protect others. Sars-cov-2 will circulate in the United States for a thousand years whether we let Djokovic in, or keep him out forever.
Then, there are the absurd contradictions in our current rules. Unvaccinated American citizens can move freely in and out of the country without testing. Unvaccinated people can pack the stadium to watch this year’s U.S. Open, where face masks are optional. There is no vaccine or testing requirement to attend. Worst of all, Novak Djokovic competed in last year’s U.S. Open, where he made the finals before the travel rule barring his entry was in place.
Joe Biden, who made the rule that blocks Djokovic, has received four Covid-19 vaccine doses. He has had Covid-19 twice, and taken at least 2 courses of Paxlovid. His wife, first lady Jill Biden, has also had four vaccine doses, also had Covid-19 twice. Yet, for some reason, their concern is the Novak Djokovics of the world.
I’m not suggesting we return to some Victorian era notion of sex or some 1950s era ideal about gender roles. I’m now 43-years-old and I’m in the first truly healthy, intimate relationship in my life with my (second) husband. We recently had a daughter. And in the wake of her birth I’ve been thinking a lot about the conversations I’m going to have with her and the conversations I wish I could go back in time and have with a young Bridget.
I’d tell her:
Sex can be empowering when you’re coming from a position of healthy self-esteem. If you’re coming from a place of trauma or insecurity, casual sex won’t heal that. In fact, it might set you back and undermine any progress regarding your feelings of self-worth. If you know your value, you’re less likely to sleep with someone who doesn’t value you. Cherish yourself and you will be cherished.
After graduating high school, Glenn entered William and Mary College where he majored in English. He spent three years in the Marines and then tried to combine his passion for storytelling with his passion for adventures by working for five months as a criminal reporter at the Kenosha Evening News. Glenn planned to become an author but found out he had "problems with dialogues", so he decided to overcome it by studying acting. In 1966, he headed to New York where he joined George Morrison acting class. He helped in directing student plays to pay for his studies and appeared onstage in La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club productions. Soon after arriving in New York, Glenn became a fan of martial arts. In 1968, he joined The Actors Studio and began working in professional theater and TV. In 1970, James Bridges offered him his first movie work in The Baby Maker (1970).
The science of thermodynamics tells us that for a fuel to have high value to us, what matters is the quality, and that the fuel must have a very low degree of disorder (low entropy) if it is to support a complex society such as our own. But we have few intuitions of this, and our energy blindness requires us to rely on evidence and reason to tell us that fossil fuels are of high thermodynamic quality, as is fissile uranium. By comparison, the plentiful energy of renewables such as wind and solar is of low quality. In fact, both wind and solar radiation are so disordered that their entropy is close to that of low-temperature random heat, that is, the random movement of atoms and molecules. Their potential to do work—to cause change—is very limited.
The dissidents use pseudonyms and turn off their videos when they meet for clandestine Zoom calls. They are usually coordinating soccer practices and carpools, but now they come together to strategize. They say that they could face profound repercussions if anyone knew they were talking.
The parents in the backyard say that for every one of them, there are many more, too afraid to speak up. “I’ve talked to at least five couples who say: I get it. I think the way you do. I just don’t want the controversy right now,” related one mother. They are all eager for their story to be told — but not a single one would let me use their name. They worry about losing their jobs or hurting their children if their opposition to this ideology were known.
“The school can ask you to leave for any reason,” said one mother at Brentwood, another Los Angeles prep school. “Then you’ll be blacklisted from all the private schools and you’ll be known as a racist, which is worse than being called a murderer.”
Woe betide the working-class kid who arrives in college and uses Latino instead of “Latinx,” or who stumbles conjugating verbs because a classmate prefers to use the pronouns they/them. Fluency in woke is an effective class marker and key for these princelings to retain status in university and beyond. The parents know this, and so woke is now the lingua franca of the nation’s best prep schools. As one mother in Los Angeles puts it: “This is what all the colleges are doing, so we have to do it. The thinking is: if Harvard does it, it must be good.”
In this worldview, complexity itself is a kind of racism, nuance is a phobia, and skepticism merely a type of false consciousness. Ibram Kendi, author of `How to Be an Antiracist', plainly spelled out the logic on Twitter recently: “The heartbeat of racism is denial. And too often, the more powerful the racism, the more powerful the denial.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJkVgGYm4xoConsider this story, from Chapin, the tony all-girls school on the Upper East Side, involving a white girl in the lower grades who came home one day and told her father: “All people with lighter skin don’t like people with darker skin and are mean to them.” He was horrified as she explained that that was what she had been taught by her teachers. “I said to her: that’s not how we feel in this family.” [...] For high schoolers, the message is more explicit. A Fieldston student says that students are often told “if you are white and male, you are second in line to speak.” This is considered a normal and necessary redistribution of power.
<all singing>colorblindness is our gamebecause everyone's the sameeverybody join our circledoesn't matter if you're<token white kid>WHITE!<token black kid>or BLACK!<alien>or... purple?what the!? whoah, whoah whoahhold up a minute here, who wrote this?i think it kinda does matter that I'm purplei mean, I'm purple because i'm literally and alien<token black kid>well i'm not an alien, but it definitely matters to methat I'm blac<token white kid>yeah, it makes a difference that I'm whiteI know the two of us get treated very differently<alien>I think it's just messed up comparing me being an aliento you two being different racesyou're both human, you're totally biologically the sameadding purple people into a lesson about human racesmakes no sense<kids together>yeah, that is pretty weird<token white kid>i think people like the black whit eor purple thingbecause adding a fantasy race in therehelps distract from the actual racismblack people have to deal with<token black kid>right. my experience with anti-black racismis really specific;other people of color experience other forms of racism toobut you won't see any of that if you don't see color<alien>dude, so, this entirely public service announcementcould be a ploy to avoid talking about racism all together!hey, uh, can we get a rewrite where we appreciateeach other without erasing what makes each of us different?<director>okay, but it's going to add a couple hours to the shoot<token white kid>I'm good for it<token black kid>my schedule is open<alien>uhh, you were rolling just now, weren't you?can't we just slap some graphics on thisand call it a day?<slapped graphics>SEE COLOR. BE ANTI-RACIST!
It is unserious to beg dictators in failed states to send America oil when we invented fracking. It is unserious to talk about renewables and not nuclear. It is unserious to attack the companies leading our electrification revolution because you don’t like their memes on Twitter.
It is unserious when the most trusted men in news are stand-up comedians.
It is unserious to LARP the culture war on cable television while our adversaries bomb maternity wards.
It is unserious to attack American tech companies while turning a blind eye to China’s theft of it.
It is unserious to watch the most educated generation in American history not be able to afford a starter home.
The encouraging news, though, is that the loss of American seriousness is the deterioration of institutional will, but not our capability or desire to build new things. America is still the country that immigrants traverse the world to get to because of their unwavering belief that this land is far better than the nations they’re leaving. And they are right. It is why more than 50 percent of unicorn co-founders in Silicon Valley are foreign-born, because it’s the last and truest place in the world where you can still build something new.
But my father’s comment also unsettled me because I periodically suspected he was on to something [to assert America would turn back to conservative religion]. In one of my earliest diary entries, at age 8, I confessed a desire to become an Orthodox Jew. I had cousins who were Orthodox. Their dress and rituals were strange to me, but part of me also envied them.
During my teens, I worried a lot about whether what I was doing was *right*.
Goodman felt that Dauber had knowingly distorted the facts of the Turner case and Persky’s record on the bench. When sentencing Turner to six months, Persky was accepting the probation department’s recommendation, as he has done in every trial, according to a review by The Associated Press. When he considered the damage a prison term would do to Turner, Persky had been following California sentencing guidelines, which allow lenience for youthful or elderly defendants with no significant criminal record. The state’s prison overcrowding crisis also generally motivates judges to seek alternative punishments and minimal incarceration for new offenders. “He’s a 19-year-old with no criminal record. It should be very hard to send them to jail,” Goodman said. Many Persky supporters also dispute the premise that Turner was let off lightly, since he will have to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life. “If this were my client, I’d say take prison over sex offender registration,” Goodman told me.
It’s hard to contemplate American public life in the 21st century and not arrive at the unhappy conclusion that we are led by idiots. The political class has lately produced an impressive string of debacles: the Afghanistan pullout, urban crime waves, easily foreseen inflation, mayhem at the southern border, a self-generated energy crisis, a pandemic response that wrought little good and vast ruin. Then there are the perennial national embarrassments: a mind-bogglingly expensive welfare state that doesn’t work, public schools that make kids dumber, universities that nurture destructive grievances and noxious ideologies, and a news media nobody trusts.
Strong women cannot possibly have been women: In the new gender belief system, female-ness and male-ness are feelings, removed from the physical body. So what is femaleness, then? It is a sense of weakness, receptivity, softness, and submission. Duh.
And so it makes sense that a powerful, dominant uterus-haver in, say, 15th-century France, could not possibly have identified as a woman, not if she (they?) knew what we know now. Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre is putting on a play about the life of Joan of Arc, and in it she is not a she at all. How could she be? Joan is strong and independent! So Joan is recast as a nonbinary hero and goes by they/them. From the Globe’s website announcing the show: “Joan finds their power and their belief spreads like fire.” (Spreads like fire . . . you see Joan was burned at the stake, so they’re doing a metaphor with that.)
You know who else was nonbinary, according to the new academic experts? Elizabeth I! Yes, all through history powerful people who thought they were women were, in fact, total dudes or at least dude-adjacent. All of them, from Cleopatra to Sojourner Truth—they were never women. That was just us imposing the gender-binary on all these super awesome people of indeterminate identity.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-american-academy-of-pediatrics-dubious-transgender-science-jack-turban-research-social-contagion-gender-dysphoria-puberty-blockers-uk-11660732791Segregation is back, back again: UC Berkeley’s Person of Color Theme House has reportedly banned white guests from common spaces “to be able to avoid white violence and presence.”
The Turban study rejects the social-contagion theory on the grounds that more biological boys than girls identified as trans in 2017 and 2019, according to data collected from 19 states by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey. But the researchers who helped design the CDC questionnaire explicitly warned that youths who identify as transgender may list their sex as their gender identity, making it impossible to discern who is male-to-female or female-to-male (a limitation Dr. Turban has acknowledged in the past).
Liz Cheney lost her Republican primary in Wyoming Tuesday because she bravely stood up to the stolen-election falsehoods of Donald Trump. Liz Cheney lost the primary because she alienated too many Republicans by making common cause with Democrats like Rep. Adam Schiff.
Both statements can be true, and in our view both explain why Ms. Cheney lost decisively in a conservative state that had elected her three times and sent her father to Congress more times than that.[...]Ms. Cheney associated herself closely with that effort by her leadership role on the House Jan. 6 special committee. She didn’t publicly object when the committee leaked text messages of Ginni Thomas to attack her husband, Justice Clarence Thomas. She agreed to subpoena sitting Members of Congress in a gross breach of political norms.
She is also the leading committee voice urging the Justice Department to prosecute Mr. Trump as a criminal for his behavior that day, though the committee still hasn’t provided evidence that Mr. Trump had any direct ties to the rioters. You won’t persuade many Republican voters by calling their party “very sick,” as Ms. Cheney did in early August.
A study published in July of this year by Janet Hyde, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin, partially vindicated Summer. Hyde and her colleagues compared the scores of girls and boys in grades two through 11 on the state mathematics tests mandated by the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). They found no meaningful differences in the average performance of boys and girls. But the variability of boys’ scores was 11 to 21 percent greater at all grade levels. Consequently, boys were indeed overrepresented in the top percentile, by a 2:1 ratio over girls.
Does this mean that Summers was right after all? There are many reasons not to jump to this conclusion. First, though the difference in variability is real (on this test), it is not necessarily innate. In Minnesota, for instance, the 2:1 ratio of boys to girls in the top percentile held only for white students. For Asian American students, the proportion was 0.9 to 1. That is, girls outnumbered boys in the top percentile. It is difficult to imagine an innate difference in math ability that would be present in whites but not in Asian Americans.
Second, even this apparently positive finding fails to explain the paucity of women in some disciplines. “If a particular specialty required mathematical skills at the 99th percentile,” writes Hyde, “we would expect 67 percent men in the occupation and 33 percent women. Yet today, for example, Ph.D. programs in engineering average only about 15 percent women.”
McCabe, in other words, not only has a history of lying, but a specific history of misconduct involving improperly obtained warrants in Trump-related investigations. Paying him to go on air and offer “analysis” of an FBI warrant on Trump is an expression of total journalistic surrender on the part of CNN. They should be ashamed, but obviously aren’t, since they also employ another liar-under-oath, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who went on CNN’s “Newsroom” last Saturday to offer another master class in Trump-era journalism. Clapper shoved off hard from the pier of fact before inviting audiences to dream nightmare scenarios.
Let’s go back. I hadn’t followed the usual route to graduate school. I had majored in science, not English (although, by the middle of college, I dearly wished that I had majored in English). That meant that when I got to graduate school, I was several years behind my classmates—a handicap, but not a fatal one. More importantly, it meant that I entered the doctoral program without having been socialized into the profession to even the slightest degree. I entered like an undergraduate, with an undergraduate’s idealism and naïveté. For me, graduate school, which I didn’t begin until four years after finishing college, was a way of finally doing that English major that I’d always wished I’d done. I went, in other words, because I wanted to read books: because I loved books; because I lived my deepest life in books; because art, particularly literary art, meant everything to me; because I wanted to put myself under the guidance of teachers who would inspire me and mentor me; because I hoped someday to be such a teacher myself.
Anyone in the academic humanities—anyone who’s gotten within smelling distance of the academic humanities these last 40 years—will see the problem. Loving books is not why people are supposed to become English professors, and it hasn’t been for a long time. Loving books is scoffed at (or would be, if anybody ever copped to it). The whole concept of literature—still more, of art—has been discredited. Novels, poems, stories, plays: these are “texts,” no different in kind from other texts. The purpose of studying them is not to appreciate or understand them; it is to “interrogate” them for their ideological investments (in patriarchy, in white supremacy, in Western imperialism and ethnocentrism), and then to unmask and debunk them, to drain them of their poisonous persuasive power. The passions that are meant to draw people to the profession of literary study, these last many years, are not aesthetic; they are political.
I was dimly aware, when I got to graduate school, that the experience would be different from the few college English classes I had taken—I knew that “theory” was big, though I didn’t much know what it was—but I had no idea what I’d be up against. Fortunately (or not), it didn’t take long to find out. The first week of my first seminar—it was a “proseminar,” designed specifically for entering students—the professor said this: “The most important thing for a first-year graduate student to do is to figure out where they stand ideologically.”
“I know where I stand ideologically!” the young man next to me burst out. “I am a marxist with a small m.” He was pounced upon by two or three of the women. “But Marxism has nothing to say about feminist issues!” one of them said. “That is why I am a marxist with a small m!” he replied. The professor smiled benignly; her pupils were apt. I cowered beneath the table (metaphorically), understanding immediately that, like a dissenter in a marxist (small m or large) regime, I would need to speak my true beliefs behind closed doors, and only to those I could trust.
Gradually, over the next few years, I got the lay of the professional terrain I’d entered into. It was marked not only by a relentless animus against the works of the past (and the “dead white men” who wrote them), but by a constant effort to enlist them in contemporary battles; by an enthrallment with jargon, a commitment to verbal opacity, and a suspicion of clear, conversational prose; by intellectual dishonesty and flabbiness and sloppiness, all implicitly excused by the alleged rightness of the cause; by an adolescent sense of moral superiority; by a pervasive atmosphere of ideological surveillance.
But what disgusted me the most was not the intellectual corruption. It was the careerism. It was the sense that all of this—all the posturing, all the position-taking—was nothing more than a professional game. The goal was advancement, not truth. The worst mistake was to think for yourself. People said things that they obviously didn’t believe, or wouldn’t have believed if they had bothered to subject them to the test of their own experience—that language is incapable of making meaning, that the self is a construct—but that the climate forced them to avow. Students stuck their fingers in the air to see which way the theoretical winds were blowing, designing their dissertations to catch the swell of the latest trend. Names of departmental stars—“Franco,” “Gayatri”—were dropped in the graduate lounge like aces in a round of poker. The whole enterprise seemed completely self-enclosed. People claimed to aim to change the world, to exert some influence outside of the academy, when it was perfectly clear that their highest ambition was tenure. One of the students I started with, among the smartest and most well-read in the class, was a strong feminist who really did want to change the world. She left after a year to go to law school, where she felt that she actually could.
What they found was that the methods many teachers were using were not supported by the data. They were supported by theories, observations, hopes, and, some would argue, a few guru-like figures. Just as most children, no matter how many times they’ve been in a car, still need to be taught to drive, most readers benefit from being explicitly taught how sounds and letters go together.
Teachers have every reason to feel sore about the training they didn’t receive and the children they therefore couldn’t help. But they don’t have time to look back. “Here’s the lament,” says Weaver, who is still in discussions with OUSD. “The lament is that when we started using new materials, the kids weren’t learning how to read, and to explain that, rather than looking at our materials and what we were doing, we focused on the kids and said, ‘Something’s wrong with them. Something’s wrong with our community. They’re too traumatized or too broken. Their families aren’t good enough. They’re poor.’ We explained the lack of learning in those terms, as opposed to saying, ‘Wait a second, what are we doing? And what did we do when things were working?’”
https://www.historynet.com/jack-kennedy-dr-feelgood/During the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961, and the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, Kennedy was taking steroids for his Addison's disease, painkillers for his back, anti-spasmodics for his colitis, antibiotics for urinary tract infections, antihistamines for his allergies, and on at least one occasion, an anti-psychotic drug to treat a severe mood change that Jackie Kennedy believed was brought on by the antihistamines.
This deluge of drugs often had side effects, including grogginess or even depression. To treat this Kennedy took more still anti-anxiety medications. Yet, there is no indication that the medications impaired JFK's judgment during crucial moments in U.S. history.
"I studied very closely his performance during these crisis, and what was striking ishow effective he was," Dallek said. "He made a bet with himself and the country, in a sense, that he could be president, and he carried it off brilliantly. It was extraordinary."
Did Jacobson’s amphetamine injections have any effect on the summit? Beschloss says there is “no evidence that Kennedy’s performance was hampered” by the shots. But historian Robert Dallek isn’t so sure. “We cannot discount the impact of the Jacobson chemicals,” Dallek wrote in his JFK biography. “As the day wore on and an injection Jacobson had given him just before he met Khrushchev in the early afternoon wore off, Kennedy may have lost the emotional and physical edge initially provided by the shot.”
Another Kennedy biographer, Barbara Leaming, was more blunt: “Kennedy did himself no favors by facing Khrushchev on speed.”
Now there is a big problem in the West in that there is a clear bias amongst clinicians that 'being "gay" is a better outcome'. There is no statistical data to support this, nor, as far I am aware, and as you know I research this, is there a consistent position as to what constitutes a 'better outcome'. Clinicians like Bailey and Zucker, both of whom I respect, have made this claim and neither have any material evidence to support it. Their case seems to be 'avoiding a lifetime of hormones and surgery is better', which is superficially reasonable, but only so. We ALL face a lifetime on hormones, otherwise we should not be human.
http://www.sexologytoday.org/2021/08/caaps-rogd-and-science-neglected.htmlActually, the entire (alleged) criticism is moot. There was a study which had a sample of gender dysphoric kids AND a sample of gender non-conforming kids. Upon follow-up, their desistance rates were nearly identical (and both were over 50%).
If all the desistance cases (or most of the desistance case) came from the only the gender non-conforming group, then it would be valid to criticize the study for blurring the groups to look like desistance happened among the gender dysphorics as much as the gender non-conforming. However, the (alleged) criticism is demonstrably false: The study compared the two groups explicitly, demonstrating their outcomes to be the same. It is simply not the case that desistance cases are accounted for by people who are gender non-conforming rather than gender dysphoric.
False complaints are easily made and carry serious consequences for the accused. Many of those who make false claims sincerely believe the truth of what they report. Some are opportunistic and are consciously lying for personal gain. A special type of false allegation, the false memory syndrome, arises typically within therapy. People report the 'recovery' of memories of previously unknown childhood sexual abuse. The influence of practitioners' beliefs and practices in the eliciting of false 'memories' and of false complaints cannot be overlooked. The problems of diagnosis, issues of confidentiality and the role of the expert witness as court educator are discussed.
Of course it is 2022 that the Islamists finally get a knife into Salman Rushdie. Of course it is now, when words are literally violence and J.K. Rowling literally puts trans lives in danger and even talking about anything that might offend anyone means you are literally arguing I shouldn’t exist. Of course it’s now, when we’re surrounded by silliness and weakness and self-obsession, that a man gets on stage and plunges a knife into Rushdie, plunges it into his liver, plunges it into his arm, plunges it into his eye. That is violence.
First, I think it’s an interesting example of prescience on Herbert’s part. Thirty years before you had heard of Bayes, Herbert had tapped into an assumption that seemed so clear to him he didn’t realize he should spend more time explaining it to you: that any development of AI or AI-like programs would logically (if not actually) eventually result in an AI that held views so profoundly counter to the needs of humanity that it would wipe us out in pursuit of them.
Second, there is always some value in anything that makes us think about the unpopular part of a problem. As is the case in any movement that addresses a potential hazard, eventually the prominent voices in the field are incentivized to focus on the sexy, sexy risk and not the boring, boring solutions. And thus you see much more “eventually nanomachines will fly through space at just under the speed of light, converting everything they see to AI”. They talk about the singularity, but less about potential solutions.
In Sunni v. Shiite violence, which one is the white supremacist? When four Muslim men were murdered in Albuquerque by an alleged serial killer who drove a dark grey sedan, everyone assumed the killer was some white supremacist. Biden came out to say: “My administration stands strongly with the Muslim community. … These hateful attacks have no place in America.” Turns out, the guy arrested and charged with so far two of the killings is a Sunni Muslim, and he may have been partly motivated by anger that his daughter married a Shiite Muslim. Yes, it’s true: Violence also exists outside of Western culture.
Absolutely do not say gay and monkeypox in one sentence: When it came to Covid, there were no lifestyle changes too great. Schools closed for years and toddlers masked perpetually? Absolutely the right call. Churches closed? You bet. Leaving your father to die alone in a hospital? A sacrifice that had to be made. Seniors forced to live in isolation? They’ll be fine. But with monkeypox, all those same devotees are suddenly very wary of asking anyone to change any behavior. And they’re allergic to mentioning who is actually high risk.
It’s tricky because public health leaders don’t want to say that this is mostly spread through gay sex. But also they want to protect gay men from the disease, since it is mostly spread through gay sex. You see the conundrum.
Twitter says Denmark is fake news: Denmark in February announced that it will end the program of vaccinating children, unless they are determined to be high risk by their doctors. This was deemed “misleading” by Twitter and got a special warning label from the company: “Misleading: Learn why health officials consider Covid-19 vaccines safe for most people.” I love the idea of a scrawny 22-year-old on Twitter Slack deciding that an entire country is lying.
Parks are for fentanyl and keeping housing scarce: There’s a historic park in Berkeley called People’s Park, where once the hippies congregated. Now, it’s been taken over as—what else?—a tent encampment for addicts. U.C. Berkeley had the nice idea of turning it into proper housing, both for students and for the homeless. As the university moved ahead with its plan, protestors have thrown themselves against the newly erected fence, tearing it down and clashing with construction crews. It’s the perfect Berkeley brew of old-school liberals who like to keep housing scarce (lest the craftsman’s Zillow price drop) and new-school antifascists who think all public parks should actually be drug markets. Right now the protestors are winning: The housing project has been paused and awaits more environmental review.
“I was showering [after a swim] and I heard a man’s voice … it was quite deep,” Jaman told Reduxx, “So I looked through the shower curtain. There was a man in a women’s bathing suit, and he was near four or five little girls who were taking off their bathing suits. He was standing there watching them.”
Jaman observed the male through the opening in the shower curtain for a moment. Shocked by his presence and becoming increasingly distressed about his proximity to the children, she quietly asked: “Do you have a penis?” The male refused to answer, prompting Jaman to demand he leave the locker room.
Rowen DeLuna, the pool’s aquatics manager, was in the area at the time, and when Jaman appealed to her to remove the male from the restroom, DeLuna told her she was being “discriminatory” and threatened to call the police.
“She said, ‘you are being discriminatory, you are banned from the pool, and I am calling the police.’ I was totally stunned,” Jaman says, adding that she felt particularly vulnerable, being berated while nude. She quickly got dressed and left the changing room, immediately moving to leave the building. As she did, DeLuna continued yelling towards her.
In response to her ban, on August 1, Jaman, who has been an active citizen of Port Townsend for 40 years, chose to stand outside of the pool with a sign intended to inform other women that males were using the women’s facilities inside. A small number of majority elderly women turned up to support Jaman.
On Facebook, trans activists encouraged each other to rally in counter-demonstration, with several showing up with LGBTQ Pride Flags and berating Jaman and her friends.
“They said: You can’t say those things. You’re being a bigot,” Jaman said, “They told men males can be women. I said I don’t agree with [your] ideology. I told them that in all my 80 years I had never run into this.”
While most pool patrons remained politely curious about Jaman’s sign, she says that at one point, a mother had her 9-year-old child come up to her and tell her she was being “hurtful” to the LGBTQ community.
“Even after I explained what happened, she kept asking ‘what did you say?'” Implying Jaman was not being forthcoming, “She said ‘that’s not what I have been told,’ and I asked her what she meant.”
Jaman says Bart informed her the Mountain View staff had claimed she had been vulgarly abusive towards the trans-identified male.
“She told me she’d heard I said something to the effect of ‘you’re going to use your penis to f*ck those little girls.’ I am an 80 year old woman! I do not speak that way! I told [Bart] that.”
When Jaman asked Bart why no signs had been posted informing women that males could potentially be in the locker rooms, she says she was told: “‘We post pride signs, and we assume that lets women know what to expect.'”
Reduxx reached out to Erin Hawkins, the Marketing and Communications Manager for the Mountain View Pool, for comment, and was told Jaman was permanently banned because she had violated the pool’s policies “repeatedly.” But when Hawkins was asked what other incidents Jaman had been involved in, and on what dates those incidents occurred, she was unable to give any specific details.
On the issue of self-identification, Jaman says she was never active in the gender identity debate, having no form of social media, no smart phone, and limited knowledge of how to use a computer. She calls it a “radical cultural change” that she feels is eroding women’s right to dignity across the board.
Four decades ago, Jaman helped establish the first crisis shelter for women and children in the Port Townsend community after often offering up her own home as a safe space for women fleeing violence.
“We subsequently built Dove House, which was a shelter for women victims. I’ve now been told it’s for everyone. I don’t know if now they let men who identify as women in the women’s sleeping area … they don’t ask for sex anymore, they just ask for gender identity.”
Jaman says she has been a Democrat voter, and was active in voter registration drives and anti-war protests in her younger years, but expresses weariness as to how this new push for ‘tolerance’ is manifesting.
“It’s darn-right confusing,” Jaman says. “I am from the old-school. I know what being discriminated is about. I know about human dignity. I marched against the Vietnam war. I know all about racial discrimination against people of color. I know about the need for tolerance … But I don’t get this.”
On her incident in the locker room, Jaman expressed some surprise when she learned Clementine Adams had only begun identifying as a woman within the last few months.
“I have been a woman for all of my 80 years. I don’t intend on changing. But it erases me. Because if that’s a woman… what am I?”
https://www.commonsense.news/p/why-the-democrats-are-funding-myDemocrats have been boosting ultra-right candidates. It could backfire.
Just a few weeks later, the Jewish Agency was informed of its closure, and late last month, Russia’s leading Jewish intellectual dissidents—Yevgenia Albats, Dmitry Aleshkovsky, and Dmitry Bykov—were declared to be foreign agents.
All of this—the purge of the intellectuals, the state-sanctioned insinuations of Jewish treachery, and now the closing of the Jewish Agency—are in keeping with the old Soviet model. The only unanswered question is how much Russian Jews will suffer.
It is also a reminder, in case one was needed, of why the Jewish state exists in the first place.
Later, we learn how “a homeless shelter worker and people close to Ms. Leyden questioned whether, despite her gender identity, Ms. Harvey should have been placed in a homeless shelter for women, given her history of attacking and murdering them.” This is immediately followed by the writers’ assurance that “transgender people are far more likely to become victims of violence, not perpetrators, and data from the National Center for Transgender Equality suggests more than half of transgender people who stay in shelters encounter harassment.”
https://twitter.com/jack_turban/status/1554696508166967297Using the 2017 and 2019 Youth Risk Behavior Survey across 16 states that collected gender identity data, we calculated the AMAB:AFAB ratio for each year. We also examined the rates of bullying victimization and suicidality among TGD youth compared with their cisgender peers.[...]CONCLUSION:The sex assigned at birth ratio of TGD adolescents in the United States does not appear to favor AFAB adolescents and should not be used to argue against the provision of gender-affirming medical care for TGD adolescents.
We examined 2 hypotheses:1. That youth identify as #trans due to "social contagion" & adolescents assigned female are more susceptible2. That youth identify as trans to flee LGB-related stigmaNeither was supported by data.
We found that the percentage of adolescents who openly identified as trans actually *decreased* from 2017 to 2019 (2.4% -> 1.6%), arguing against "social contagion."
I joined the Tavistock Clinic in North London as a clinical nurse therapist in 2003. Back then, Tavistock was prestigious—known all over the world for its professional seminars and specialized psychological treatments for mental-health patients. Before I ever worked there, I would attend lectures and training workshops to hear from renowned psychoanalysts, who were considered some of the best in the field.
A lot can change in a decade.
Last week, the National Health Service ordered that the gender youth clinic at Tavistock shut its doors by next spring. And I am part of the reason why.
The story of what happened at Tavistock is the story of how small group of whistleblowers—doctors, nurses, parents and patients, together with the help of journalists and reporters—were able to relentlessly expose activist-driven medicine that they knew was irresponsible. It’s also an object lesson for others who are deeply concerned about a one-size-fit-all approach to transgender healthcare and wonder what they should do about it.
Sometime during my first few weeks we were discussing a newly referred patient, a 16-year-old boy with a complex history, who felt he had been born in the wrong body. My colleague took on the case. Four months later, the boy’s name came up again in the meeting, and my colleague announced that she was recommending him for puberty blockers (gonadotropin-releasing hormone agonists), which are used to suppress the further development of secondary-sex characteristics like breast tissue in females or facial hair in males. Puberty blockers are almost always followed by cross-sex hormones (testosterone or estrogen).
Usually, when new patients arrived at the service, they would come in for an hour or so once a month for the first few months. So I was surprised to hear that my coworker was recommending drugs when, in my view, no meaningful understanding of his internal world could have been reached. I knew from my experience in working with adolescents that any diagnostic assessment arrived at after such a short time span would have been superficial.
It’s worth pointing out that Tavistock specialized in therapy—talking through problems with patients—and that we did not generally prescribe drugs. For that reason, I had expected the same approach when it came to treating children and teens with gender dysphoria. But it seemed that, even back then, certain staff didn’t hesitate to recommend puberty blockers—even for vulnerable kids contending with anxiety, autism, internalized homophobia or other challenges.
One small anecdote: I was once instructed by a superior to rewrite a letter I’d written to a male patient’s referring doctor—making sure to use the patient’s chosen, female name and new pronouns. I understood the sensitivities around this subject, but I pointed out that using a female name and female pronouns might be confusing to the clinical team, since we had been talking about a male child with gender dysphoria..
I was informed that failure to use the right name and pronouns might result in problems or even litigation for me and the gender clinic at Tavistock.
The external influence of the advocacy groups increased. Instead of being a clinical, research-focused service where we were learning and developing ideas, it felt like it was a fait accompli that we had to go along with what Mermaids and patients wanted—even if we, the mental-health-care professionals, had legitimate questions about the appropriateness of the treatments that patients and patient advocates were demanding.
For example, a weird paradox arose at a conference on transgender health care hosted by Tavistock around 2005: the opening speaker declared that we were no longer supposed to think of gender dysphoria as a mental illness. But we were a mental-health team working at a mental-health facility. What were we supposed to be doing if not treating patients with psychological conditions?
Yet even what I saw in those years worried me deeply and working on the Gender Identity Development Service started to affect my personal well-being. I would come home with a headache on the days that I worked in the unit, and my heart would beat quickly when I went in the next morning. It felt like every time I raised a concern about us rushing prematurely to prescribe drugs that would have //permanent// effects on our patients, I’d be met with an eye roll and the unstated “Oh, here she goes again,” or “Can’t she just fit in?”
I spoke a lot to my husband, Marcus, who is a psychoanalyst and who was by now a senior member of staff in the Adult Department of Tavistock. He suggested I go to the clinical director at theTavistock, which I did. She listened and took my concerns seriously. I later learned that she reached out to Dr. David Taylor, the Medical Director of the Trust, who was asked to launch an investigation into the work of the gender clinic. That was issued in 2006. [...]It was only in 2019 that I saw the full report when Hannah Barnes, a BBC journalist, obtained it via a Freedom of Information request. It confirmed all the disturbing things I had reported: Our data was poor; it wasn’t being stored properly; and there were not sufficient follow-ups with patients once they left the service—meaning we didn't know how our patients were faring unless they voluntarily wrote to us.
In the past decade, there has been an explosion in referral numbers to the gender clinic at the Tavistock—over 3,000 in 2019—and the service came under mounting pressure to get through the long waiting lists. This resulted in even more children getting fast-tracked and put on blockers if they expressed a wish for them.
The profile of the patients changed significantly, too. Many were adolescent girls who had never exhibited signs of gender dysphoria. Often, their feelings of wanting to be a boy developed along with their breasts, or when they got their period. They were horrified by their bodies, and they wanted control over the changes taking place in them.
Between then and now, there were more whistleblowers, like Dr. David Bell, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst at Tavistock, who issued yet another report on the service in 2018 that raised a lot of the same concerns that I had raised back in 2005. Sonia Appleby, whose job title was Safeguarding Children Lead, spoke out in November 2019, claiming that she was being blocked from doing her job by management. By then, the political pressure, the institutional capture, and the influence of social media had become much more intense, and about 40 people were working on the youth gender care team. Shortly after Dave’s report came out, my husband Marcus resigned from the Tavistock Board.
His resignation gained national publicity, and Marcus was invited to present at a 2019 House of Lords meeting, which I attended with him. A representative of the Tavistock Trust who was also at the meeting read a statement claiming that no one was being rushed through treatment, that Tavistock was a best-in-class facility. This was my second Damascene moment. I raised my hand to speak. “Look, that is not correct,” I said. “I worked there. And I saw that children were being pushed to transition very quickly.”
Fast forward 36 years. Not only are we on the brink of what feels like civil war, and as of this week flirting with real war with two different superpowers, we’re nearly a decade into a crippling fun shortage. We have complexes about every holiday from Christmas to Thanksgiving to the Fourth of July, the president has been severely disordered or clinically dead for at least six years, and the most famous standup performance in a generation involved Chris Rock getting man-slapped by the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Fast forward 36 years. Not only are we on the brink of what feels like civil war, and as of this week flirting with real war with two different superpowers, we’re nearly a decade into a crippling fun shortage. We have complexes about every holiday from Christmas to Thanksgiving to the Fourth of July, the president has been severely disordered or clinically dead for at least six years, and the most famous standup performance in a generation involved Chris Rock getting man-slapped by the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Masonic_PartyThe Whigs favored an activist economic program known as the American System, which called for a protective tariff, federal subsidies for the construction of infrastructure, and support for a national bank. The party also advocated modernization, meritocracy, the rule of law, protections against majority tyranny, and vigilance against executive tyranny. The party was critical of Manifest Destiny, territorial expansion into Texas and the Southwest, and the war with Mexico (1846-48). It disliked strong presidential power as exhibited by Jackson and Polk, and preferred Congressional dominance in lawmaking.
Despite any available evidence suggesting that Juul would kill Americans with the alacrity of Marlboro Lights, beginning in 2018 the FDA attacked the company with a bizarre single mindedness, as did various state attorneys general. The allegation was that flavored vaping products were hooking a new generation of kids who would have otherwise gone to church, done yoga, and drank wheatgrass smoothies. It’s the oldest puritan trick in the book: If you want to ban something, claim that you seek its abolition in the interest of “the children.”
Of course, Latin America, Europe, and Africa all are closer to the East or Gulf. (Fun fact: most of Mediterranean Europe is closer to Florida or Louisiana than it is to Boston or New York.)
The 2015 guidelines were created with a certain cohort in mind. At the turn of the 21st century, the Dutch had designed a medical protocol for what was then called gender-identity disorder, based on a small group, mostly male, that had long-lasting, childhood-onset gender dysphoria and didn’t have other serious mental-health issues. They seemed to fare well after medical transition in adolescence, but the methodology asserting this wasn’t terribly reliable.
By contrast, the young people who sought care at Swedish clinics after 2015 were increasingly teenage girls with multiple psychiatric diagnoses—and there were a lot of them. “It rose from four to 77 per 100,000 inhabitants,” Linden said.“The guidelines were written for what we thought was a smaller group of patients and also more homogeneous.”
Because the Dutch study had indicated that relatively few patients regretted having transitioned, many clinicians assumed that detransitioning—reverting back to living as one’s birth sex—was rare. But in Finland, clinicians started to see more young people regretting medical transition, Kaltiala-Heino said. “Regrets are not coming immediately,” she said. “It’s after four, five years, maybe.” One study showed that 76% of detransitioners didn’t inform their clinics of any feelings of dissatisfaction or regret, so it was difficult to calculate the actual rate of detransition. Some regretters felt rushed into treatment or realized later they were gay and gender nonconforming, and shouldn’t have changed their bodies. A recent study in the U.K. showed a 10% detransition rate.
https://twitter.com/monoteknic/status/1552888055484350465[grooming breaks down to:]1. selection and identification of victims2. obtaining access to victims3. lies, deception and manipulation4. desensitization to sexual content5. maintaining control
https://babylonbee.com/news/sneaky-parents-dress-son-up-as-a-girl-on-first-day-of-school-so-teachers-will-show-him-how-to-be-a-boyWhat will happen if gay marriage is legalized?[pie chart diagram of only the first choice]- gay people will get married- a third world war will break out- various plagues - locusts, frogs, etc. - will erupt- schools will begin teaching kids how to have gay sex- the terrorists will win
sneaky parents dress son up as a girl on first day of school so teachers will show him how to be a boy
U.S. — The government that shut down beaches, parks, churches, schools, birthday parties, restaurants, retail shops, bars, cafes, skate parks, funerals, and hundreds of other locations, gatherings, and events across the country to slow the spread of COVID-19 announced Friday that there is "absolutely nothing we can think of" that would help slow the spread of monkeypox, a disease that is spread almost exclusively through gay sex.
CDC Director Rochelle Walensky held a press conference today where she made the somber announcement that they've tried everything and can't think of a single thing that would stop the spread of this disease which spreads via homosexual encounters.
"Uh... yeah, nothing we can think of that would help prevent this," said Walensky of the virus that is infecting only gay men the vast majority of the time. "Just, uh, keep doing what you're doing. We don't want to disrupt essential activities such as gay orgies where monkeypox is spreading almost exclusively. We wouldn't expect gay men to be able to abstain from having sex with dozens of strangers for a couple of weeks. That's, uh, that's what we think of them."
"So just keep on having anonymous sex with whoever. We've done all we can do."
At publishing time, the government that said you couldn't have a funeral for your grandma or see your dying wife one last time had declared all gay orgies to be an "essential activity."
At least Europe's sacrifices brought a cleaner environment than could have been created any other way, right? Not so much. Even before Germany brought its coal plants back online to make up for the shortfall in natural gas, its accomplishments weren't that impressive.
"The United States reduced the share of fossil fuels in its primary energy consumption from 85.7 percent to 80 percent, cutting almost exactly as much as Germany did," IEEE Spectrum's Smil noted in 2020. "Without anything like the expensive, target-mandated Energiewende, the United States has decarbonized at least as fast as Germany, the supposed poster child of emerging greenness."
"Graduate student, um, starts telling me that Jews control the world, that they, um, kill babies, that they own all banks," said Tzvia Waronker, a student at CUNY John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
But Waronker says CUNY John Jay told her comments like that were not considered to be antisemitism.
In third through fifth grade, the district begins lessons on “LGBTQIA2S+” activism. The curriculum presents the categories of “man” and “woman” as manifestations of the “dominant culture” that has used sexual norms to oppress minorities. “The culture, systems, and assumptions that everyone is straight is called heteronormative. The culture, systems, and assumptions that everyone is cisgender is called cisnormative,” the curriculum claims. “Therefore, the culture, systems, and assumptions that everyone is straight and cis is called cisheteronormativity.” This system, according to the lesson plan, is a form of “oppression” designed to benefit “white straight cis boys” and to punish “LGBTQIA2S+” people.
If true, the average college graduate today is close to the same intelligence as the average high school graduate in 1960.
When the Forest Service wants to remove those built-up fuels, it takes years to even get started, partly due to bureaucratic red tape. Recent research from my organization, the Property and Environment Research Center (PERC), found that once the agency begins the environmental review process, it takes an average of nearly five years to implement a prescribed burn.
Many Southern states have made legislative changes to promote and decentralize the use of prescribed fire. Florida led the charge, crafting policies in the 1990s to encourage burning by private property owners and other land managers. That experience is beginning to inform some Western states' approaches to grappling with wildfire risk.
Stories do not generally get written about the tens of thousands of prescribed burns that go off without a hitch. For the Forest Service to address the 63 million acres it manages that are at high risk of wildfire, replicating such safe "good" fires needs to be a part of the plan.
Further, the Biden administration rightfully frames Griner as wrongfully detained, yet it does nothing to help Americans jailed on souped-up drug charges. According to the Sentencing Project, over 400,000 Americans remain detained in U.S. jails on drug-related charges in 2019. Former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D–Hawaii) pointed out this particular hypocrisy in a video posted to Twitter on Wednesday. "Is the Biden/Harris administration going to use their power to release the countless of Americans who are currently being held in our own prisons for cannabis possession? Of course not."
While the nation is justified in its anger over Griner's imprisonment, it should also turn this outrage toward changing things at home. "People are outraged that Brittney Griner is likely pleading guilty to something she didn't do because she faces 10 years in prison," writes Rebecca Kavanaugh, a criminal defense lawyer, on Twitter. "That is outrageous—and it's something that happens here all the time."
https://www.paul.senate.gov/sites/default/files/page-attachments/2020FestivusReport.pdfIn my view, the material insecurity of the American managerial classes, whose numbers, as Peter Turchin argued, have grown too large to be absorbed by society in ways commensurate with their lofty economic expectations, helps account for this development. Consider Sweden, which is far less polarized and enjoys a much more sedate cultural environment than the United States. It operates a massive government machine to furnish the scions of the managerial class with all sorts of work. My own municipality, Uppsala, a city two-thirds the size of Reno, Nevada, employs almost 100 people as “communicators.” Their official workload mostly consists of managing the municipality’s social media accounts and writing policy documents. The communications department is notoriously dysfunctional; the municipality hired an outside consultancy to find out what all these employees do all day. But in at least one sense, it does what it is supposed to do: provide make-work jobs for university graduates who would otherwise risk going unemployed—and become potential social agitators.
Sweden is rife with various taxes, carve-outs, fees, and other accommodations that together form a massive patronage machine employing artists, bureaucrats, gender-studies majors, activists, curators, mindfulness consultants, environmental advocates, and much more. The state aggressively pays for art, education, NGOs, and even journalism—most major newspapers in Sweden depend heavily on subsidies to stay in the black. Perhaps the best illustration of the Swedish political economy is that Swedes pay in the neighborhood of $9 per gallon for gas. This massive cost difference owes almost entirely to taxes and fees, which fund social work. At first, the gas tax was intended primarily to pay for the maintenance of roads. Today, people argue for raising gas taxes to fund environmentalist causes. The managers running these causes are trying to fund themselves by imposing regressive taxes on their blue-collar countrymen.
Swedes, it’s worth observing, aren’t knocking down monuments of Carl Linnaeus. Even as the frenzy of iconoclasm and statue-toppling swept America, Swedish activists were content to launch an online poll on the subject of statue removal and give up, once it was clear that they didn’t enjoy majority support. Statue-toppling is less attractive when the municipality that owns the statues is likely to be your employer.
Most recently, back in May, the lack of clinical evidence for booster shots in young people created a stir at the FDA. The White House promoted it hard even before FDA regulators had seen any data. Once they saw the data, they weren’t impressed. It showed no clear benefit against severe disease for people under 40.
The FDA’s two top vaccine regulators—Dr. Marion Gruber, director of the FDA’s vaccine office, and her deputy director, Dr. Philip Krause—quit the agency last year over political pressure to authorize vaccine boosters in young people. After their departure they wrote scathing commentaries explaining why the data did not support a broad booster authorization, arguing in the Washington Post that “the push for boosters for everyone could actually prolong the pandemic,” citing concerns that boosting based on an outdated variant could be counterproductive.
A friend who worked on the Hill for years insists the city was ruined by Game of Thrones. Everybody with a political job in the capital thinks of himself or herself as a soldier in a thrilling bloodsport, instead of a pawn chipping away for incremental improvements somewhere. The Trump show is six years of thirtysomething Dems in gingham and power dresses gunning to be Arya killing the Night King. They think 80 million Trump supporters will collapse into ice cubes if they get him. It doesn’t work that way. You have to win in 50 real states, not Twitter.
Solar and wind power have inherent flaws that prohibit them from ever forming the backbone of an industrialized nation’s electrical grid. They require nearly 100 percent backup because they depend on the vagaries of the weather. Just look at how energy from solar and wind fluctuates. In 2019, wind power on one day rose to 59 percent of German power generation, but it fell to as low as 2.6 percent on another day of the year. In the same year, solar peaked at 25 percent and bottomed out at 0.3 percent.[...]But what about the nuclear accidents at Chernobyl and Fukushima Daiichi? The Chernobyl nuclear accident in 1986 in modern-day Ukraine is the deadliest in the history of the technology. But the death toll is less than you would think. The UN has concluded that 28 firefighters died from acute radiation syndrome, and it is documented that 15 people had died from thyroid cancer by 2008. The UN predicts another 50 to 160 fatalities over an eighty-year lifespan.
These deaths are tragic, but to put it in perspective, between 170,000 and 230,000 people were killed in China in 1975 when the Banqiao Dam collapsed. The death toll from Chernobyl is small because the radiation caused only thyroid cancer, which is one of the most treatable cancers and requires only basic medical care.
Nuclear plants in the West currently run over cost and past deadlines. In a typical case, the French company EDF began constructing two new reactors in the United Kingdom in 2017 at an estimated cost of $US22.5 billion, but EDF later raised the estimated cost to itself to $US33 billion. However, the cost of constructing nuclear plants doesn’t have to be exorbitant. A 2015 study by two French economists examined past nuclear construction in France and the US and found that the only way to control costs was to build the same design with the same team repeatedly. This is what the US and France have done in the past, and any country that follows this path can succeed.
Despite high construction costs, electricity generated by nuclear plants is usually affordable because the plants are inexpensive to run. Conversely, integrating substantial amounts of renewables is costly. By 2025, Germany will have spent around $US580 billion on the Energiewende. According to an analysis by the think tank Environmental Progress, had Germany spent those funds on new nuclear plants instead of renewables, the country would have a 100 percent emissions-free electrical grid, as well as enough clean energy to power its cars and light trucks.
“One might think that a major geopolitical shock like the war in Ukraine would have allowed for a Europe-wide reckoning,” Ashford writes, before referencing the deep divisions that continue to plague the continent and undermine its self-defense. But who really expected that Europeans would be shaken loose from their postmodern view that force is unnecessary and counterproductive in international relations? Who expects that anything short of an existential menace—and perhaps not even that—would bring European publics or even heads of state to accept the harsh reality of international life and begin to rearm, spiritually and materially?
We seem to have utterly lost sight of this basic feminist point today. Clinicians, school counsellors, mental-health providers, and other professionals are being increasingly encouraged to “affirm” the beliefs of children who claim to be the opposite gender. In Victoria, Australia, for instance, a law was recently introduced “to denounce and give statutory recognition to the serious harm caused by” the failure to “support or affirm” a person’s gender identity. But an affirmation-only approach makes it more difficult, when a female child claims to be a boy, to question them about other aspects of their life, in order to try to rule out other possible explanations than that they are transgender for why they might be thinking of themselves this way. There are high rates of mental health issues, family dysfunction, childhood sexual abuse, autism, and same-sex attraction within cohorts who identify as trans, any of which might be a better explanation of their wish to transition than that the individual is, in fact, trans.
The report, by Michael Greenstone and Ishan Nath, said renewables “raise electricity prices more than previously thought” due to “hidden costs that have typically been ignored.” They also found that the mandates “come at a high cost to consumers and are inefficient in reducing carbon emissions.” Greenstone and Nath said “the intermittent nature of renewables means that back-up capacity must be added” and that “by mandating an increase in renewable power, baseload generation is prematurely displaced, and some of the cost is passed to consumers.” It continued, saying that renewable-energy mandates lead to lead to “substantial increases in electricity prices that mirror the program’s increasing stringency over time.”
> In a July 1st telephone interview, Apodaca said the state’s climate policies are hard to fight because California is “being governed by the administrative state, the regulators.” He continued, saying “The legislature hasn’t mandated most of these climate rules. There is no legislative mandate for the majority of the regulations that the Air Resources Board and other agencies are creating. The agencies have gone too far. But they aren’t held accountable.”
The above quote is the most relevant topic in the article. Systems get captured by the administrative class. These mandarins work very hard of course but mostly the work is self-promoting. In the name of saving the people they press down on the neck of the workers who actually create the wealth. The best and most recent example of this is the Soviet Union. As i read this article i was struck by the similarities. A one party state, a huge comfortable bureaucracy, the rich intelligentsia who have no interest in the poor and the peoplle ining up to get out.
Environmentalists, Norman Borlaug once observed, “have never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty years, they would be crying out for tractors and fertilizers and irrigation canals, and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things.”
These feminists argued that legislation including mandated minimum wages, safety regulations, restricted daily and weekly hours, lunch breaks, and maternity provisions would be more beneficial to the majority of women who were forced to work out of economic necessity, not personal fulfillment.[26] The debate also drew from struggles between working class and professional women. Alice Hamilton, in her speech "Protection for Women Workers", said that the ERA would strip working women of the small protections they had achieved, leaving them powerless to further improve their condition in the future, or to attain necessary protections in the present.
The June 27 incident started, according to the police, when Mr. Walker fled an attempted stop for an undisclosed traffic and equipment violation. Video shows an officer reporting that Mr. Walker’s silver Buick sped away from police. A few minutes later, the officer reported a suspected gunshot coming from the driver’s-side window of Mr. Walker’s car.
Several minutes into the pursuit, Mr. Walker’s car slowed down and he exited from the passenger seat, while apparently wearing a ski mask. Several officers chased him on foot, and at least one officer tried to subdue him with a Taser stun gun, before eight officers fired dozens of shots in about eight seconds.[...]Mr. Walker was unarmed when he was shot, Chief Mylett said. He also said a gun and a loaded magazine were found on the driver’s seat of the vehicle and a spent shell casing was found near the scene where the initial gunshot was fired, though investigators haven’t yet confirmed that it was fired by the gun found in Mr. Walker’s car.
The Oregon Health Authority (OHA) is a government agency that coordinates medical care and social well-being in the Beaver State. During the pandemic, OHA was responsible for coordinating Oregon's vaccination drive and disseminating information about COVID-19—both vital tasks.
The agency's office for equity and inclusion, however, prefers not to rush the business of government. In fact, the office's program manager delayed a meeting with partner organizations on the stated grounds that "urgency is a white supremacy value."
"Thank you for your interest in attending the community conversation between Regional Health Equity Coalitions (RHECs) and Community Advisory Councils (CACs) to discuss the Community Investment Collaboratives (CICs)," wrote Droppers. "We recognize that urgency is a white supremacy value that can get in the way of more intentional and thoughtful work, and we want to attend to this dynamic. Therefore, we will reach out at a later date to reschedule."[...]The link redirects to a website that purportedly identifies aspects of white supremacy culture. The website was "conceived and designed" by Tema Okun, a white antiracist educator who has popularized the idea that several benign and widespread traits are actually characteristic of white supremacy. Among these are preferring quantity over quality, wanting things to be written down, perfectionism, becoming defensive, and yes, possessing a sense of urgency.
Looking back, it’s painfully obvious how unfair it was for a female to have to compete against someone who went through male puberty. The research in this area is now irrefutable. One study showed that trans women retain a nine percent faster mean run-speed advantage over female counterparts, even after a year of hormone therapy. Men punch harder, process more oxygen, and are less susceptible to sports injuries. Overall, the New York Times recently summarized, “men on average have broader shoulders, bigger hands and longer torsos, and greater lung and heart capacity. Muscles are denser.” All of this translates directly to superior athletic performance. And these advantages can’t be fully erased later in life by testosterone reduction.
Such trans women are free to compete in male athletic divisions, even as they continue to assert their female identity—since professional male sports generally don’t have rules barring women. But of course, this would mean facing a much higher standard of competition. And when it comes to such imbalances, it is evidently expected that it will be biological women, not men, who make the necessary accommodations.
Intellectuals who become obsessively anti-woke care about truth, and take deep offense at the kinds of things that are being said in the name of scholarship. Wokeness draws particular ire because, while it may not be the most harmful set of beliefs that has ever existed, it is certainly in the running for most clearly false and intellectually indefensible. I’m convinced that if aliens not subject to any kind of Social Desirability Bias with regards to our species came to earth and could investigate the intellectual merits of different human beliefs, gender blank slatism would be close to the first thing they would dismiss. The ideas that America is a white supremacist nation and all ethnic groups would have equal life outcomes if not for pernicious discrimination are only slightly less crazy. I think socialist economic ideas probably cause more harm than wokeness, but it would take aliens a little more investigation to find out why. It’s possible not to understand that markets are better than central planning because you are lazy or dumb. Lazy and dumb, I can live with. But that’s not why people believe in gender blank slatism. Rather, they are missing some instinct that allows them to use common sense to see through ideas that are fashionable and high status, but clearly false.
The authors then draw on insights from political psychology and critical Whiteness studies to argue that the opposition to CRE is unlikely to be overcome through the evidence they present. The arguments therefore are meant not to convince critics but rather to bolster educational leaders' resolve to stand strong in the face of opposition.
Ben and I talked about how it was the political left that years ago was famous for being willing to engage anyone, while the business model of right-wing media was a heated conversation with itself about an always-expanding regimen of enemies, a catastrophic strategy that allowed the Jon Stewarts and not-yet-unfunny Stephen Colberts of the world to win huge audiences by default. Add the lack of a sense of humor, which made Frank Zappa, Larry Flynt, and Dee Snider automatic winners over crusading curmudgeons like Jerry Falwell and John Tower, and the culture war for decades was never a real battle. “There’s no question that the left had been in the ascendancy my entire lifetime,” is how Shapiro put it.
Now the script is flipped. The press mainstream has borrowed from the old Fox model and not only (as Shapiro notes) excludes dissent via the “laundering of expertise” but leads interminable crusades against an exploding list of deviationists within their own ranks. You may have thought you were solidly a progressive, but you can catch a permanent green-room ban for going against narrative on any issue, whether it’s Syria or Ukraine or Russiagate or trans issues or any of a hundred other things. This is the same losing strategy that hurt the old GOP, which logically should lead to the same losing outcome, except this is a political atmosphere where no one seems to be winning.
On Friday, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision granting women a constitutional right to abortion. This exact moment was supposedly why I owed my vote to the Democratic Party, and indeed the Supreme Court was on my mind when I pulled a lever for Hillary Clinton, a politician I couldn’t stand, in 2016.
Four years later, I voted neither. The Democrats between 2016 and 2020 not only lost my vote, but reveled in the idea that they didn’t need or want it, denouncing critics in all directions as traitors, white supremacists, and terrorists, no different from the “deplorables” who voted for Donald Trump. In that time they perfected an attitude of imperious condescension and entitlement so grating that at least half of America wouldn’t piss on someone like Adam Schiff if he were on fire. Then Friday happened and it was the same song everywhere: “See! We were right all along! You do owe us! And if you ever criticized us, this was your fault! ”
No, it wasn’t. Friday was the result of decades spent building a political project so incoherent, unsellable, and untrustworthy to ordinary people that in 2016 they chose Donald Trump over the person Barack Obama called the most qualified candidate in history. The justices who cast the critical votes Friday were picked by a man denounced by all of institutional America prior to election. All those voices were ignored. That total collapse in trust, not Jill Stein’s candidacy or Putin’s Facebook ads, led to Dobbs v. Jackson.
Decades of evidence across multiple fields reinforce that children need structure and clarity. Children benefit from clearly defined expectations, a certainty that life is consistent, and, above all, the understanding that adults can provide them security.
It is empowering to learn that the world is rich and meaningful and the adults in your life will guide and support you as you discover that meaning. It can be overwhelming to hear that there’s no meaning at all unless you make it for yourself. And teaching students that their feelings and experiences are the ultimate arbiters of reality can lead to significant individual and social difficulties in the long run.
1) Remove both the seats.2) Remove the two large side panels either side of the tank, two Q/R fasteners on each, plus one at the front on the inside.3) Remove the two screws that secure the "tank" section to the beak assembly.4) Remove the two smaller black panels either side of the tank.5) Remove,(twist to remove) the slotted black cover left hand side top of tank, unclip the two electrical plugs and also the Q/R fuel line coupling.6) Remove the two vent pipes on the right hand side of the tank and also the Q/R fuel line coupling7) Remove the two Allen screws either side of the tank towards the rear.8) Lift tank off!
The important points to remember are:* The job is done in four parts: front wheel circuits, rear wheel circuit, front control circuit, rear control circuit. You can't just do the traditional 'front-brakes-'n-rear-brake' like you're normally used to.* The fluid reservoirs for the wheel circuits live on the ABS regulator, under the fuel tank. You'll recognize them straight away - the fluid caps are removed using an 8mm Allen key.* It is possible to fill these reservoirs using a syringe, but I don't recommend it. I built a fluid filler tool by gluing a soft tapered plastic plug to the end of a cheap plastic funnel.* Keep a syringe handy for adjusting fluid levels. The bigger the syringe, the better, although a 10cc one will work fine in a pinch.Wheel circuits:* Unscrew the Allen-head reservoir cap. The front is marked 'V' (Vorderrad, or 'Front wheel'), the rear 'H' (Hinterrad, or 'Rear wheel').* Insert funnel, and make sure it's well-seated.* Fill funnel about halfway with fresh DOT 4.* Turn on the ignition.* Press the brake lever, opening the bleed nipple at the same time. Flush until the fluid is clean and clear.* Close the bleed nipple, letting go the brake lever at the same time.* Bleed the wheel circuits in the following order: front left, front right (both through reservoir 'V'), rear (through reservoir 'H').Control circuits:* No need to turn on the ignition for this round.* Unscrew the handlebar (front) or under right butt cheek (rear) reservoir cap as appropriate.* Draw off all old fluid in the reservoir and dispose of it. Refill the reservoir with fresh DOT 4.* Locate the six bleed nipples on the ABS regulator. The order these must be bled in is not intuitive - if you're looking at the regulator from the left-hand side of the bike, with the fluid reservoir caps closest to you and the nipples in a horizontal line, mentally numbering the nipples from one to six, the bleed sequence should be as follows: 1, 2, 4, 1 (re-filling with fluid through the handlebar reservoir), then 6, 5, 3, 6 (re-filling with fluid through the under-butt reservoir).* Press the brake lever, opening the relevant bleed nipple at the same time. Flush until the fluid is clean and clear.* Close the bleed nipple, letting go the brake lever at the same time.
And after a year or two, the pattern became clearer, and now even the detractors don’t seem to really have their heart in it anymore. The New York Times had an article Deconstructing The Ferguson Effect, subtitled “The idea that the police have retreated under siege will not go away. But even if it's true, is it necessarily bad?”, which as far as I can tell is as close as the //New York Times// has ever come to acknowledging that a politically inconvenient fact is true.
Likewise, Vox has an article The Ferguson Effect, A Theory That’s Warping The American Crime Debate, Explained, which makes it very clear that believing in the Ferguson Effect is Problematic, but admits halfway through that if you insist on thinking on a completely literal level, “evidence has begun to mount that there really is something going on.”
I think there’s clear evidence that the current murder spike was caused primarily by the 2020 BLM protests. The timing matches the protests well, and the pandemic poorly. The spike is concentrated in black communities and not in any of the other communities affected by the pandemic. It matches homicide spikes corresponding to other anti-police protests, most notably in the cities where those protests happened but to a lesser degree around the country. And the spike seems limited to the US, while other countries had basically stable murder rates over the same period.
I understand this is the opposite of what lots of other people are saying, but I think they are wrong.
I’m also not convinced that his actions on January 6, however heinous, are enough to erase Trump’s policy legacy—getting rid of NAFTA, the First Step Act, taking on NATO and China, and Operation Warp Speed. But I know I’m not alone in thinking he is not suited to carry it further.
One ahistorical theme that runs through this activism is the portrayal of “whiteness” and Aboriginality as monolithic binaries, each characterized by their own stereotypes. Yet in reality, at the time of colonisation in the late 18th and 19th centuries, the Aboriginal population was divided into roughly 250 distinct language and cultural groups, many of which regarded one another as hostile. The various groups also went on to have different experiences with colonisation, and the notion of a pan-Aboriginal community emerged only during the latter part of the 20th century.
One reason these ahistorical and reductionist stereotypes of early Aboriginal societies are accepted by so many academics is that they read back to us our own mythologized visions of communal, pre-industrial life. In this imagined world of peace and harmony, the elders are universally respected repositories of timeless, spiritually understood truths that exist beyond the scrutiny of science (or even the comprehension of outsiders). This is the kind of “pseudo-profound bullshit” (as one academic paper has described it) that was evident in a recent ABC Science dispatch produced by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, in which an Indigenous academic explained Indigenous spirituality as a sort of proto-environmentalism in which “everything is connected and needs respect—not just humans, animals, trees and rocks—but land and sky, and past and present.”
It is equally unfashionable to point out that some of the statistical indicators taken to signal structural racism actually point to more complex (and sometimes even progressive) developments—as noted in a 2021 Australian essay by Price, a Warlpiri woman:
> It has been claimed recently that Indigenous incarceration levels have been maintained at alarming rates since Australia was first settled. Historically, incarceration for crimes committed against white settlers—the spearing of sheep or cattle, theft and homicide—was preferable to the widespread frontier practice of shooting those suspected of such crimes. This practice continued up until 1928 when my own grandfather narrowly escaped that fate during the notorious Coniston massacres that year. However, from the beginning authorities were reluctant to incarcerate, or punish in any way, Indigenous Australians for violent crimes against other Aboriginal Australians. Imprisonment rates for Aboriginal people dropped dramatically at the beginning of the 20th century when many were forced on to reserves, where their lives were more effectively controlled and their employment became the mainstay of the pastoral industry.
> Major technological changes and practices from the 1950s and the 1968 equal wage decision increased unemployment. This, and the legalising of access to alcohol, caused a dramatic rise in crime rates. The extension of full citizenship rights to Aboriginal Australians has resulted in the recognition of their right to expect the full protection of the law—including from violence inflicted on them by other Aboriginal people. Since then, incarceration rates have skyrocketed.
> At the same time, Indigenous lives lost due to criminal activity outside of custody outstrip those lost in custody. Yet no concern is expressed for these lives when the cause cannot be blamed on racism or colonisation. Between 1989 and 2012, 951 Indigenous lives were lost to homicide. Of these, 765 were killed by Indigenous perpetrators, and 67 per cent of those were classified as domestic homicides. Where is the outrage?
Evidence-based and ethical counselling emphasising reliable methods of contraception, together with free reversible contraception of a woman’s chosen type, represents the most effective known way to reduce abortions. Anti-abortion activists should be heralding this study from every Sunday and social media pulpit they command.
And yet, when New York Times journalist Emily Bazelon asked Charmaine Yoest, the peppy then-president of Americans United for Life, about the CHOICE project, Yoest said, “I don’t want to frustrate you, but I’m not going to go there. Because that would be, frankly, carrying water for the other side to allow them to redefine the issue in that way.”
Instead of finding common ground with family planning advocates over a phenomenal intervention that is scientifically shown to reduce unplanned pregnancies and terminations, Yoest and other anti-abortion leaders chose to fuss about the “framing” of the issue and to reinforce the partisan side-taking that so contaminates this issue. If preventing abortions compels such an urgent moral priority for anti-abortion campaigners, why don’t they mobilise their formidable energies to raise funds for family planning and contraception services? Is the American “pro-life” movement’s obsession with slashing support for Planned Parenthood really only about abortion, or could it have something to do with the other services they provide? Like contraception?
President Biden recently promised in these pages not to interfere with the Federal Reserve. Yet last week he endorsed a House bill that would add racial equity to the Fed’s dual mandate of price stability and full employment. How does the White House square this contradiction?
There is a difference, however, between the statements that there are only two sexes (true) and that everyone can be neatly categorized as either male or female (false). The existence of only two sexes does not mean sex is never ambiguous. But intersex individuals are extremely rare, and they are neither a third sex nor proof that sex is a “spectrum” or a “social construct.” Not everyone needs to be discretely assignable to one or the other sex in order for biological sex to be functionally binary. To assume otherwise—to confuse secondary sexual traits with biological sex itself—is a category error.
Women have fought hard for sex-based legal protections. Female-only spaces are necessary due to the pervasive threat of male violence and sexual assault. Separate sporting categories are also necessary to ensure that women and girls don’t have to face competitors who have acquired the irreversible performance-enhancing effects conferred by male puberty. The different reproductive roles of males and females require laws to safeguard women from discrimination in the workplace and elsewhere. The falsehood that sex is rooted in subjective identity instead of objective biology renders all these sex-based rights impossible to enforce.
The denial of biological sex also erases homosexuality, as same-sex attraction is meaningless without the distinction between the sexes. Many activists now define homosexuality as attraction to the “same gender identity” rather than the same sex. This view is at odds with the scientific understanding of human sexuality. Lesbians have been denounced as “bigots” for expressing a reluctance to date men who identify as women. The successful normalization of homosexuality could be undermined by miring it in an untenable ideology.
My case isn’t an isolated one. At one point last year, Etsy purged any listing associated with Dr. Seuss, following a social panic centered on the view that the famed children’s author and artist was racist. And in 2020, Etsy officials asserted that the slogan “I 💜 J.K. Rowling” promotes hatred, even while allowing the sale of products that read “Fuck J.K. Rowling”; and that instruct ideologically non-compliant “TERFs” (a term of abuse that stands for Trans-Exclusive Radical Feminists) to “shut the fuck up.” Indeed, there’s a whole product sub-category dedicated to merchandise marked “Fuck TERFs.” Amazingly, none of these //explicit// expressions of hatred has (to my knowledge) been judged as being offside Etsy’s rule against promoting hatred.
https://quillette.com/2020/07/30/think-cancel-culture-doesnt-exist-my-own-lived-experience-says-otherwise/All things considered, I’m in a fortunate position, because PayPal donations didn’t account for a large portion of my income (though it was significant and growing). But my experience does help me understand the frustration and heartbreak suffered by countless self-employed individuals who’ve spent years building up their businesses with the help of global services such as Etsy and PayPal, only to have the whole project fall to pieces because someone in a Silicon Valley cubicle doesn’t like their politics.
It’s true that these large online services are free to adopt their own policies, and can ban people for any reason they want—or for no reason at all. And it is also true that small business owners who use such services can migrate their shops and payment systems to other providers.
It was around this time that I was contacted by a biology-department chair at a private liberal arts college in the Midwest. He commended me for my writings, and told me that he’d even used my //New Evolution Deniers// essay as a basis for discussion in his own classes. But while he and his fellow biology-department faculty would likely support my hiring, he said, the school’s own human-resources department would almost certainly block me as “too risky.”
Guilt by association is a hallmark of all social panics. And in early March, I received a text message from a close friend and research collaborator who is now an assistant professor at a major research university, informing me that his colleagues had started questioning him about our affiliation. He told me that this sort of thing was happening frequently enough that he felt the need to publicly denounce my views to clear his name. And that’s exactly what he did. Ask yourself what other ideological movements and historical periods we tend to associate with such performative acts.
None of the views I have ever espoused are extreme. Indeed, all or most are taken as common sense by pretty much anyone who isn’t an activist or professional academic. And I will repeat them here. Male and female are not social constructs, but are real biological categories that do not fall on a spectrum. Humans are sexually dimorphic, and this matters in certain contexts, such as sports.
Murders definitely rose a little after Boudin took office, but that’s because that was also when the Black Lives Matter protests happened, which demoralized police and led to a so-far-permanent spike in murders nationwide.
His son and a San Francisco historian believe he stole the mayoral election for Moscone in 1975. Historian David Talbot, founder of the progressive website Salon, points to evidence that Jones committed sufficient voter fraud to account for Moscone’s narrow 4,443-vote margin of victory. “We loaded up all thirteen of our buses with maybe seventy people on each bus, and we had those buses rolling nonstop up and down the coast into San Francisco the day before the election,” said Jones Jr. “Could we have been the force that tipped the election to Moscone? Absolutely! Slam dunk. He only won by four thousand votes.” When federal investigators looked into fraud claims three years later, they discovered that all of the records were missing from the city of San Francisco’s registrar of voters.
With the Mayor and his right-hand-man both dead, San Francisco leadership ended up in the hands of previously second-tier politician Dianne Feinstein. Feinstein was what passed for a moderate in 1970s SF (which meant she had been targeted for assassination by various left-wing groups - she survived when a bomb left on her windowsill failed to explode). In Shellenberger’s telling, she managed to clean up some of the mess and restore a semblance of normalcy. San Francisco never forgave her. Moscone - voting fraud committer, underage sex enjoyer, and Jim Jones’ bff - is beloved as a martyr in today’s SF, but (the book points out) Feinstein is so loathed that in 2021 the Board of Education voted to rename Dianne Feinstein Elementary School.
[... picture of The Moscone Center ...]The Moscone Center is 2 million square feet and can fit about 10,000 people. Not to be confused with the Moscone Recreation Center, Moscone Station, or Moscone Elementary School. Meanwhile, all Dianne Feinstein got was one lousy elementary school and the Tithonus package of eternal life without eternal youth.
Is it hypocritical of me to then join a coalition saying we know better than some homeless crack addict what substances he should be allowed to take? I mean, I am mostly right when I defy the will of the people (I have learned useful things, and haven’t yet come to real harm), and the homeless person is wrong (he is a homeless crack addict). But on the Outside View, wanting to institute a law I fully intend to break - where I would get enraged if it were applied against me personally - seems somewhat hypocritical.
But ten thousand years ago, before there were governments or private property at all, anyone could sleep wherever they wanted, without having to work forty hour weeks to pay money to landlords, or limiting themselves to a few shelters.
Social change also takes place when higher education is raised in debate as an ideal and a necessity. The status of jobs that do not require extensive education falls even further. This can be seen not least in the fact that young people would rather incur large debts to get a university degree and then work as a bank clerk or in customer support for SEK 27,000 a month, than train as an electrician or plumber with a salary of as much as SEK 45,000. This illustrates that a job’s reputation weighs very heavily, and that significant wage premiums are required in a welfare state such as Sweden to persuade young people to choose occupations with a low status, even when the educational requirements are low.
During the past quarter-century, the rich countries of Western Europe have managed this equation by becoming heavily dependent on people from the former Eastern Europe and guest workers from East Asia for jobs in maintenance, forestry, agriculture, and home food deliveries. It is hard to see how this can go on indefinitely. On one hand there is popular opposition, and on the other, developments at home are making it less attractive to become a guest worker in one of today’s richer EU countries.
The group bringing the suit, WoLF, has been targeted from every conceivable angle by pressure and censorship campaigns. While we at least heard about protesting Canadian truckers having their GoFundMe campaigns frozen, WoLF didn’t even bother trying to raise money on that platform, “because they just ban you really easily,” as legal director Lauren Adams put it.
They moved to a purportedly speechier platform, GiveButter, hoping they would have “less of a censorious kind of view.” But even GiveButter soon gave WoLF the boot (I reached out to the company, which hasn’t provided public comment yet). “It was just a general fundraiser,” Adams explains. “And they said we violated their community standards. So now we’re on GiveSendGo, which is a Christian crowdfunding site.”
If there’s a better illustration of the upside-down state of politics in 2022 America, it’s a feminist activist group forced to seek cyber-refuge in a Christian fundraising company.
It’s become tantamount to career suicide to be associated with WoLF. In April, one of its board members, Devin Buckley, was disinvited to a speech on British Romanticism she was scheduled to give at Harvard. The author of Buckley’s rejection letter fairly shivered with intellectual fright:
> My co-coordinator has refused to extend to you a formal offer to speak at our colloquium. I can’t fight for you on this… Even if I were to push your visit past [the co-coordinator], it will be near impossible to get our two faculty members to sign onto funding your visit once they learn of your online presence…
WoLF has trouble attracting Board members because as a 501(c)3, the names of board members have to be public. Even the group’s advisory council is quasi-secret by necessity. “We have women on our advisory council who have to remain anonymous because they have jobs, or their spouses have jobs,” Adams says. “There are so many people who just can’t publicly associate with us.”
America is thus a nation rapidly drifting towards a state of things in which no man of science or letters will be accounted respectable unless some kind of badge or diploma is stamped upon him, and in which bare personality will be a mark of outcast estate. It seems to me high time to rouse ourselves to consciousness, and to cast a critical eye upon this decidedly grotesque tendency. Other nations suffer terribly from the Mandarin disease. Are we doomed to suffer like the rest?
Trends among elite students in the FIRE surveys show a pronounced tilt whereby left-leaning students are especially likely to reject the heterosexual label. Among very liberal white female students in leading universities, those who strongly approve of shouting down offensive speakers have a seven in 10 chance of identifying as LGBT compared to four in 10 for very liberal female students who strongly disapprove of shout-downs. A similar divide holds for views of the police among white liberal students.
Third, while the jump in transgender identification is real, there is now evidence that the trend has peaked and begun to decline. The FIRE data show that the weighted proportion of undergraduates identifying as trans declined significantly among a set of 50 top schools, from 1.5 percent in 2020 to 0.85 percent in 2021. In 2021, older students were significantly more likely to be trans than younger (18–19 year-old) students. Canada’s 2021 census data similarly show that the proportion of transgender and non-binary individuals rises in every age group as we move from old to young, but peaks at 0.85 percent among the 20–24s, declining to 0.73 percent among the 15–19s. Likewise, British data shows that referrals for potential gender reassignment surgery jumped from 136 in 2010–11 to a peak of around 2,750 in the years 2018–19 and 2019–20 before dropping to 2,383 in 2020–21, the latest year for which we have data. It seems we have passed peak trans.
Finally, all reputable survey firms struggle to get a representative sample of mobile and highly distracted young people to complete surveys. Those who are not at university are especially hard to reach. As a result, psychological traits such as openness to experience, neuroticism, and agreeableness, as well being very online, which have varying levels of association with LGBT identification, predict a higher likelihood of filling out a survey. This skews surveys.
Turning to mental health, I find the same pattern—women exhibiting same-sex behaviour are far less different from the average than women who have conventional sexual behaviour but identify as LGBT. Expanding the data to include women of all ages so as to maximize sample size, the pattern in figure 6 is clear: women who engage in same-sex behaviour differ very little from the general female population on three mental health indicators.
More seriously, it may be that modern culture is, as Boston University’s Liah Greenfeld suggests, anomic. That is, by breaking down established identity roles, narratives, and boundaries, it introduces dissonance, indeterminacy, and choice, increasing the rates of identity crisis and, by extension, psychological distress. The rise in mental health problems, she argues, is worse in the West than elsewhere in the world, reflecting the cultural specificity of mental illness. Her analysis takes a Durkheimian approach, which focuses on how a loss of communal regulation of desires and identities can produce higher suicide levels as the mind becomes unmoored from social givens in the external world.
So, between 2002 and 2012, seven percent of unhappy people under 30 were LGBT. However, by 2018–21, 22 percent of unhappy young people were LGBT—all during a period of rising toleration for sexual minorities. The well-known high incidence of mental illness among transgender youth is merely the most visible tip of a wider problem.
If the change over time is, like LGBT identification, largely a reporting difference, that’s one thing. But what if the data reflect a left-liberal culture that is producing greater mental distress? Or one which nudges people—especially the young—to identify as mentally ill, which focuses them on their emotional problems, leading to a negative psychological spiral? At the very least, one might have thought that researchers would have spent some time trying to test for anomic mental illness and its connection to left-modernist culture.
Yet, as Greenfeld notes, such research is essentially nonexistent. In addition to disciplinary constraints, this kind of endeavour is deeply unfashionable because it questions the taken-for-granted progressive narrative of discrimination, minority trauma, the fight for social justice, and the need for more resources for the psychotherapy industry. In the meantime, practitioners seem powerless to stem the tide of mental illness that now afflicts nearly half of young people and has been stubbornly rising across Western societies.
If you’re the type of person to revel in someone getting cancelled for summat they said 10 years ago, you’re just ensuring that one day you’ll be cancelled for summat you said today. You can’t predict what’ll be offensive in the future. You don’t know who the dominant mob will be. Like, the worst thing you can say today, get you cancelled on Twitter, death threats, the worst thing you can say today is, “Women don’t have penises,” right?
[Audience laughs]
Now, no one saw that coming…
[Audience laughs]
You won’t find a 10-year-old tweet of someone saying, “Women don’t have penises.” Do you know why? We didn’t think we fucking had to.
Richard Doyle, the head of the Compton branch office, was directed by one of Gascon’s lieutenants, Mario Trujillo, to drop felony charges against three BLM protesters who had dragged a metal barricade onto some metro tracks, threatening to derail a train full of passengers. When Doyle protested, he was slapped with a “letter of reprimand” and later transferred to the Environmental Crimes Division. (Trujillo did not reply to requests for comment.)[...]It’s not that the longtime prosecutors didn’t think the system needs reform. Most of the prosecutors are open to change. “There is criminal justice reform that needs to be done, and I agree that we locked up too many people, and there’s a mental-health crisis and a drug crisis,” Richard Doyle, the former head of the Compton branch, told me. Recently, the D.A.’s Office paid Doyle $800,000 to make Doyle—and the grievance complaint he filed in response to his letter of reprimand and transfer—go away.
Phil Stirling, the lead prosecutor on the Andrade case, pointed out what pretty much everyone in the city’s rougher neighborhoods already knew: “Ninety-nine percent of the victims of gang murders and gang rapes and gang robberies and gang beat downs are minorites—black and brown people,” he said. “That’s what’s crazy about this whole racist prison bullshit.”
If the Woke continue to gain ground, where will we skeptics go to educate our children, transact commerce, find fair adjudication of our custody disputes? Where will we publish when not only the New York Times has a “gender director”—when every publication does?
“Tradition is a set of solutions for which we have forgotten the problems. Throw away the solution and you get the problem back.”
It comes from, of all places, a 1982 science fiction novel called “Courtship Rite” by a writer named Donald Kingsbury.
It’s been a decade or two since American society embraced this more understanding view of addiction, and yet rates of substance abuse—and the mortality from same—have never been higher. In 1900, when cocaine and heroin were in fact legal, about one in 300 Americans lapsed into addiction. The estimate today is one in 133. Similarly, there were fewer than 3,000 overdose deaths in 1970, when heroin (by then, illegal) was the scourge of America’s inner cities. Even the height of the crack epidemic saw under 5,000 ODs. In 2020, meanwhile, an astonishing 92,000 Americans succumbed to drug overdoses, according to the NIH. “In all my years I’ve worked in the substance abuse field, I’ve never had so many patients die,” Joan Hartman, vice president of behavioral health services for Illinois-based Chestnut Health Systems, told the journal STAT.
Finally, nowhere is the topic of self-care more directly relevant than in suicide prevention. Here too we face a chilling irony. The more we obsess over self-harm, the more of it we seem to get. Rates of suicide declined noticeably between 1970 and the early 2000s, but then began an uptick and by 2020 were a good 30 percent higher than in base-year 2002 (when I began researching SHAM). During that two-decade span, media messaging executed a significant shift from Lombardi-style muscularity to the mushier language of self-care. Messaging about suicide prevention in particular became ubiquitous.
In SHAM, I demonstrated how people who perpetually take the pulse of their happiness turn out to be some of the unhappiest people alive. They’re forever reevaluating, and forever finding new things about which to be disappointed. As Twenge, Haidt/Lukianoff, and Talib have since demonstrated, children raised amid a surfeit of physical and emotional air bags come of age bereft of one of the most vital traits in a competitive society: antifragility. Says Chawla, “I think this is part of the overcorrection and the coddling trend we’ve seen wreak havoc on society in recent years. We insist on putting people in safe spaces and wrapping them in cotton wool.”
Human beings need to be tested. They need to be hurt occasionally. They need to see their coping resources stretched thin. They then build additional resources and learn the golden lesson: Tomorrow is indeed another day. So, as with addiction, while we must do all we can to prevent self-harm among those who grew up lacking antifragility, it behooves us to ensure that the next generation is better equipped.
Because yesterday, San Francisco voters decided to turn their district attorney, Chesa Boudin, out of office. They did it because he didn’t seem to care that he was making the citizens of our city miserable in service of an ideology that made sense everywhere but in reality. It’s not just about Boudin, though. There is a sense that, on everything from housing to schools, San Francisco has lost the plot—that progressive leaders here have been LARPing left-wing values instead of working to create a livable city. And many San Franciscans have had enough.
On a cold, sunny day not too long ago, I went to see the city’s new Tenderloin Center for drug addicts on Market Street. It’s downtown, an open-air chain-link enclosure in what used to be a public plaza. On the sidewalks all around it, people are lying on the ground, twitching. There’s a free mobile shower, laundry, and bathroom station emblazoned with the words DIGNITY ON WHEELS. A young man is lying next to it, stoned, his shirt riding up, his face puffy and sunburned. Inside the enclosure, services are doled out: food, medical care, clean syringes, referrals for housing. It’s basically a safe space to shoot up. The city government says it’s trying to help. But from the outside, what it looks like is young people being eased into death on the sidewalk, surrounded by half-eaten boxed lunches.
A couple of years ago, this was an intersection full of tourists and office workers who coexisted, somehow, with the large and ever-present community of the homeless. I’ve walked the corner a thousand times. Now the homeless—and those who care for the homeless—are the only ones left.
I’d gotten used to the crime, rarely violent but often brazen; to leaving the car empty and the doors unlocked so thieves would at least quit breaking my windows. A lot of people leave notes on the glass stating some variation of //Nothing’s in the car. Don't smash the windows.// One time someone smashed our windows just to steal a scarf. Once, when I was walking and a guy tore my jacket off my back and sprinted away with it, I didn’t even shout for help. I was embarrassed—what was I, //a tourist?// Living in a failing city does weird things to you. The normal thing to do then was to yell, to try to get help—even, dare I say it, from a police officer—but this felt somehow lame and maybe racist.
A couple of years ago, one of my friends saw a man staggering down the street, bleeding. She recognized him as someone who regularly slept outside in the neighborhood, and called 911. Paramedics and police arrived and began treating him, but members of a homeless advocacy group noticed and intervened. They told the man that he didn’t have to get into the ambulance, that he had the right to refuse treatment. So that’s what he did. The paramedics left; the activists left. The man sat on the sidewalk alone, still bleeding. A few months later, he died about a block away.
It was easier to ignore this kind of suffering amid the throngs of workers and tourists. And you could always avert your gaze and look at the beautiful city around you. But in lockdown the beauty became obscene. The city couldn’t get kids back into the classroom; so many people were living on the streets; petty crime was rampant. I used to tell myself that San Francisco’s politics were wacky but the city was trying—really trying—to be good. But the reality is that with the smartest minds and so much money and the very best of intentions, San Francisco became a cruel city. It became so dogmatically progressive that maintaining the purity of the politics required accepting—or at least ignoring—devastating results.
One day, Berlinn was out looking for Corey in the Tenderloin neighborhood when she came across someone else’s son. “He was naked in front of Safeway … And he was saying he was God and he was eating a cardboard box.”
She called the police. Officers arrived but said there was nothing they could do; he said he didn’t want help, and he wasn’t hurting anyone. “They said it’s not illegal to be naked; people are in the Castro naked all the time … They just left him naked eating cardboard on the street in front of Safeway.”
[...] but many parents were appalled to find that the board members didn’t even seem to want to talk much about getting kids back into classrooms. They didn’t want to talk about learning loss or issues with attendance and functionality. It seemed they couldn’t be bothered with topics like ventilation. Instead they wanted to talk about white supremacy.
One night in 2021, the meeting lasted seven hours, one of which was devoted to making sure a man named Seth Brenzel stayed off the parent committee.
Brenzel is a music teacher, and at the time he and his husband had a child in public school. Eight seats on the committee were open, and Brenzel was unanimously recommended by the other committee members. But there was a problem: Brenzel is white.
“My name’s Mari,” one attendee said. “I’m an openly queer parent of color that uses they/them pronouns.” They noted that the parent committee was already too white (out of 10 sitting members, three were white). This was “really, really problematic,” they said. “I bet there are parents that we can find that are of color and that also are queer … QTPOC voices need to be led first before white queer voices.”
Someone else called in, identifying herself as Cindy. She was calling to defend Brenzel, and she was crying. “He is a gay father of a mixed-race family,” she said.
A woman named Brandee came on the call: “I’m a white parent and have some intersectionality within my family. My son has several disabilities. And I really wouldn’t dream of putting my name forward for this.” She had some choice words for Cindy: “When white people share these kinds of tears at board meetings”—she pauses, laughing—“I have an excellent book suggestion for you. It’s called White Tears/Brown Scars. I’d encourage you to read it, thank you.”
Uvalde Shows Once Again That Cops Are Just Armed Bureaucrats
If the pronoun police of Wisconsin’s Kiel Area School District were just another woke excrescence on American education, they would be merely local embarrassments. These enforcers are, however, a national disgrace because they are a direct consequence of federal lawlessness with a progressive pedigree.
In April, the district lodged a complaint against three eighth-grade boys for the offense of “mispronouning,” referring to a classmate using the biologically correct pronoun “her” instead of the classmate’s preferred “them.” This, district officials — supposed educators — said, constitutes “sexual harassment,” a Title IX violation.
https://reason.com/2022/06/09/delusion-on-san-francisco-crime-will-get-you-recalled/Serious, severe, shocking, he said. But in the end, not surprising. Why not? Here’s how he put it: “To me, the leak is not surprising because many of the people we’ve been graduating from schools like Yale are the kind of people who would do such a thing.”
What did he mean by that? “They think that everything is violence. And so everything is permitted.”
He went on: “I’m sure this person sees themselves as a whistleblower. What they don’t understand is that, by leaking this, they violate the trust that is necessary to maintain the institution.”
One thing that's become tiresome, when it comes to 2022 progressive politics, is being told that what you're seeing with your own eyes is not happening: That's not a fire. That's not a crisis. And even if it were a crisis, that's on you; you and your privilege birthed this mess so just pipe down and let the new regime take care of it.
The guidance counselor at her public school agreed with Helena that she was a man. She helped her make a budget for her transition, and referred her to the school psychologist, who was even more gung-ho. “I remember the psychologist saying, ‘Your mom is a transphobe,’ and telling me about suicide risks.” They had three or four meetings before inviting Helena’s mother to have a conversation with the both of them, which didn't go well.
“I had a ton of issues with my academics and my mental health, but I never really got help with that,” she said. “As soon as I said I was trans, it was all hands on deck.”
Her parents—her mom is a doctor; her dad, an engineer—never came around. Days after she turned 18, Helena went to Planned Parenthood in Chicago. There, she saw a social worker, and then a nurse practitioner, who wrote a prescription for testosterone during that first visit. The nurse recommended a dose of 25 milligrams per week. “How high can we go?” Helena asked. Helena left the clinic with a prescription of 100 milligrams of testosterone. The whole thing took about an hour. She never saw a doctor.
Mia Elias, who started identifying as trans at 12, agrees with Kerschner. She was spending a lot of time on Tumblr, and in trans groups online. “I thought it was going to solve all my problems,” she said. She and her family lived near Ottawa, the Canadian capital. At 15, she went on testosterone and a puberty blocker. A year later, she realized she’d made a mistake but didn’t want to admit that to her therapist, who was also trans, so she lied and said she was happy with her body, which was now partially masculinized. In fact, she just wanted things to go back to the way they had been. “I was ashamed,” she said. “This was my whole life.”
Julie, 27, who also transitioned and then detransitioned, likens the policy to the practice of lobotomy. “I have this intense rage in me over the harm that was done to me,” said Julie, who didn’t want to be identified out of fear of backlash from activists.
She called her treatment a “collaborative idiocy”—drawing together her parents, therapists and doctors. “It took a goddamn village.”
She liked boys, but didn’t feel that she’d ever be taken seriously. She was a five-foot-three trans boy. In the summer of 2020, she started to have regrets. “I badly wanted to go out shirtless and feel that freedom,” she said. But she was confined to her bed, healing. Her nipple grafts and the scars were UV sensitive. She began feeling jealous of the girls she saw online. “I missed being pretty,” she said. In May 2021, she stopped the testosterone.
Detransitioning senior year was tough: She was dressing like a girl again, but still had “rough” features and a deep voice from all the testosterone. “I got looks from people, and other students would talk smack behind my back,” Chloe said. Her friends abandoned her. Another friend told her that “the gay side of my school hated me” because she detransitioned.
Recently, she met someone, a boy from two towns over, through a family friend. “I genuinely think he was a gift to me from God,” she said. She wished she still had her breasts. “I was looking for a niche to fit in and a sense of fulfillment,” says Chloe of those years of medicine, consultations, surgery, recovery, and self-discovery. Now? “I don’t really believe in gender identity at all.”
https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/he-was-a-world-renowned-cancer-researcherIn 2022, it seems, all sex is to be celebrated—except between older men and younger women. Student-teacher relationships are unwise for all sorts of reasons, and Joshua will be the first to tell you why. But when the same people who think that children can consent to puberty blockers claim that a 21-year-old woman cannot possibly consent to a relationship with her professor, it’s hard to take them seriously.
They hadn’t read the lawyers’ report, but they had read the internet, and they didn’t like what they’d read. NYU was about to hire a “serial sexual harasser,” as one of the demonstrators put it, trading grant dollars for their trainees’ “safety.” So where should a superstar researcher do his research? Where does the guy who’s going to help cure cancer go? “Uhhh, Prison?” Madeleine Sutherland, a postdoc, told me.
Sabatini spends his days shuffling around, watching Netflix, caring for his 11-year-old son and taking calls from lawyers. He got some job offers, from China, Russia, and the United Arab Emirates—places that don’t care about the things he’s accused of. Knouse is now an assistant professor of biology at MIT, and she runs her own lab at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, named after the late MIT alum and conservative mega-donor David H. Koch following a $100 million gift.
I hadn’t considered the possibility previously, because it would be so incredibly stupid if it were the truth, but what if the cascade of gender-fluid rhetoric coming out of academia and pop culture these days isn’t about smashing stereotypes at all, but about reinforcing them on a grand scale? If you like to climb trees instead of wearing dresses, you can’t just be a tomboy, you must actually be male. If you don’t like baseball and belching, run and grow those boobs you so obviously want.
That’s a joke, but only sort of. If you think about it, there’s an element to these ideas you might hear as easily from construction workers hooting at you across a city street as you could from a corridor full of profs at the women’s studies department at Harvard. I wonder if we’re institutionalizing stereotypes about gender in the same way academics have tried to institutionalize utterly racist and backward ideas about how “hard work,” “the written word,” and “being polite” are “white culture,” while black people shouldn’t be expected to understand “punctuality,” “linear thinking,” or the “nuclear family.”
Of course there are bigots out there, people who would probably lay down on railroad tracks to keep their kids from coming out as trans. I’d guess the overwhelming majority of the rest of us, however, would drop to our knees in joy if our kids made it to adulthood within striking distance of any sustainable formula for happiness, whether that involved a change in gender identity or a permanent move to the other side of the earth. Most parents I know would just want to be sure that their child is taking a really big step on his or her own initiative, and not for the sake of a reaction from friends or a teacher or a YouTube influencer or, especially, a parent.
As a further example, Orwell "translates" Ecclesiastes 9:11:> I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.– into "modern English of the worst sort":> Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.Orwell points out that this "translation" contains many more syllables but gives no concrete illustrations, as the original did, nor does it contain any vivid, arresting images or phrases.
Indeed, studies have long shown that simple prudence and self-discipline — of which almost anyone is capable — can nearly eliminate the prospect of poverty for black and white teenagers alike. The so-called "success sequence" analyzed by Brookings Institution scholars — finishing high school, marrying after the age of 20, and doing both before having a child — reduces the risk of falling into poverty to 2%; failure to follow this path raises it to 75%.
Citing manpower shortages, an internal memo sent to interim Seattle Police Chief Adrian Diaz revealed the department stopped assigning detectives to new sexual assault cases involving adult victims in April. The department's sexual assault unit is prioritizing cases with child victims and cases where a suspect is already in custody. The department began 2020 with 1,290 officers. As of March 2022, it had 968. And officials said many of its patrol officers are kept busy responding to calls at homeless camps.
After subjecting Shapiro to a lengthy investigation, Georgetown determined he would go unpunished and should begin work. But the reasoning is key: Law Dean William Treanor said that the tweets had occurred prior to Shapiro taking the job, meaning they were not "subject to discipline." Quite obviously, this left open the door to punishment in the future, if Shapiro tweeted (or said) something that caused a similar outcry.
When Aleksandr Barsukov and his colleagues returned to work at the Chernobyl nuclear plant after the retreat of Moscow’s forces, they found in every office what they described as a parting gift from the Russian soldiers: a pile of human excrement.[...]“The poop was the icing on the cake,” joked Mr. Barsukov, the deputy director of the Chernobyl Ecocenter, which keeps samples of radioactive material collected from all over the world.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/ukraine-nuclear-power-plants-safety-11646415538Across the plant grounds remains evidence that the Russian soldiers were poorly informed about the nature of their terrain. Military trenches were dug into the ground, stirring up soil still contaminated from the 1986 accident.
“They’re idiots,” said Mr. Barsukov, with a laugh. “Who digs ditches on the radioactive land? They didn’t know what they were doing!”
A fire broke out at Ukraine’s biggest nuclear facility on Thursday night during fighting in the area between Russian and Ukrainian forces after a projectile hit one of the buildings. Zaporizhzhia is home to six of Ukraine’s 15 nuclear reactors and is the biggest nuclear plant in Europe.
Back on March 12th, not long after Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, the New York Times ran one of the first of what would become a series of gloating articles about the demise of Russia Today. The state-sponsored TV network had just been yanked off the air by government fiat in Europe, and removed in America by private carriers like Comcast, Xfinity, and DirecTV. About the channel, the Times wrote:
> A role at RT America was a rare job in an industry where if you had screwed up, were washed up or were completely new to the field, there weren’t many other options…
The Times then listed a series of those “screwups” and “washouts,” including the paper’s own former star war reporter Chris Hedges (also thriving now on Substack) and the father-son tandem Jesse and Tyrel Ventura. The paper neglected to mention that none of these figures had failed at anything, but rather had been driven out of the mainstream press essentially over opposition to the Iraq war.
RT was taken off the air in a more complex but no less unsettling censorship episode, but the notion that Ventura got there by screwing up or washing out is not just fiction, it turns reality upside down. Similar to the criticism Glenn Greenwald gets for appearing on Fox, it ignores that crucial detail that Ventura was blackballed from mainstream green rooms long before he got to Russia Today.
But leaks from the IRS aren't war plans, misuses of power, or politicians' schemes; they're sensitive, private financial information that we're forced to surrender to government agents. We have no choice but to fill out our tax forms even though we know that the federal employees receiving our information have a track record of abusing that data for their own ends and to our detriment.
At age 42, I made a decision that turned my world upside down. Everything that was once gold turned to coal, almost instantly. That decision was to transition from a lesbian to a transman, to become Scott Newgent.
I endured medical complication after medical complication due to transgender healthcare. I lost everything I’d ever worked for: home, car, savings, career, wife, medical insurance, and most importantly my faith in myself and God. In a battle to survive, I went from ER to ER, trying to solve a mystery of why my health was failing. I learned firsthand the truth about how dangerous and perilous medical transition really is. I learned the hard way that if you get sick because of transgender health, you will witness physicians throwing their hands up and saying one of two things: 1) "transgender health is experimental, and I don't know what's wrong" or 2) "you need to go back to the physicians who hurt you in the first place."
So, as I was recovering from several near-death experiences, I began to investigate medical transitioning and realized that trans health has no baseline for care. This was hammered home when several attorneys told me in no uncertain terms, “Trans health has no baseline - These medical complications you have? There is nothing to compare it to, so we can’t help you sue. These are experimental procedures.” People point to WPATH standards, but they are filled with “At doctor’s discretion” and that does not stand up in court.
As I dug deeper, I discovered that Lupron, the pharmaceutical company that makes hormone blockers, didn’t have FDA approval to treat children with gender dysphoria. Studies on this cohort had not been done. Yet, they claim it’s reversible. Lupron was sued, lost to the US government, and fined $874 million for false advertising and bribery and deemed a “criminal enterprise" in 2001. And this is the company the world is listening to? Moreover, the original Dutch researchers who made the protocol to give puberty blockers to children with child-onset gender dysphoria have just this winter come out and said there are no studies to support the new usage of puberty blockers for kids with sudden adolescent-onset gender dysphoria.
https://genspect.org/"Often with the help of psychotherapy, some individuals integrate their trans- or cross-gender feelings into the gender role they were assigned at birth and do not feel the need to feminize or masculinize their body." - WPATH Standards of Care (2012), Page 8.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMBzfUj5zsgGenspect is an international alliance of professional groups, parents, trans people, detransitioners, and others who advocate for a better model of care than the current “affirmative” approach. Uniting 19 different organisations in 17 countries, we don’t just speak for a few: we speak for thousands.
https://twitter.com/_CryMiaRiver/status/1528738845856092162either Ohio is shaming them, or California is creating them
Imagine if, all of a sudden, we saw a 5000% increase in teenage boys suffering from anorexia. Most of those boys were gay, and at least a third of them were on the autism spectrum. Wouldn't we at least question why it was happening? Or would we shrug it off as no big deal?
Biden is just a less likable, more deranged version of Dubya, a political potted plant behind which authoritarians rule by witch hunt and moral mania, with Joe floating on a somehow even fatter cloud of media protection than Bush enjoyed after 9/11. Today’s Biden *is* Bush, a helpless, terrified passenger dragged on a political journey beyond his comprehension, signing his name whenever told to appalling policies, like a child emperor or King George in the porphyria years. It’s obvious, but no one will bring it up, for the usual reason, i.e. because Trump. The major difference is that while Bush was hammered as a simpleton by media smart-alecks for eight years, Biden’s steep mental decline has gone uncovered in an undeclared press cease-fire.
In his later, more overtly Bushian phase, Biden lied about his Iraq record repeatedly, but media outlets covering his presidential run told us not to put too much stock into his “gaffes,” which were nothing of the sort: they were intentional deceptions. “Immediately, that moment it started, I came out against the war at that moment,” Biden told NPR in September of 2019, prompting a story about “verbal slip-ups,” which became the go-to euphemism. In a debate against Trump a year later, Biden was even more explicitly deceptive:
> From the moment “shock and awe” started, from that moment, I was opposed to the effort, and I was outspoken as much as anyone at all in the Congress and the administration.
This was just a lie, and not a particularly clever one. Biden told Fox months after the Iraq invasion that “I do think it was a just war,” told reporters weeks after “we need more forces,” and gave a speech at the Brookings Institution weeks later in which he said his yea vote for war “was the right vote then and it would be a correct vote today.” As Ryan Grim put it two years ago, Biden demonstrably supported the Iraq war “before, during, and after” the invasion. Unlike Bush, he never stopped lying about it.
Bush was the perfect politician to accelerate the long-sought elite project of deconstructing American liberalism and constitutional principle, and replacing them with an authoritarian technocracy that rules by moral emergency. Bush’s special vulnerability was that he wasn’t just an evangelical Christian, but a reformed alcoholic, for whom rigidity and moral absolutism were desperate personal necessities. A George Bush who slipped and stopped seeing the world in black and white for even five seconds would likely wake up blowing coke in his own personal Hobbesian jungle in no time. He was easily convinced the unconquered world was fraught with unacceptable dangers, because for him, it was.
The [disinformation governance board], by the way, was universally misreported as having failed because of objections from “right wing media and Republican lawmakers,” as NPR put it, as if only evil Republicans could oppose such a great idea. This ignored the 1 in 3 Democrats who didn’t favor the idea, and blew off the criticisms of people like Glenn Greenwald, myself, former ACLU chief Nadine Strossen, Professor Amna Khalid, Nico Perrino of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, and countless other liberals who were horrified that Democrats who spent the Bush years raising money as defenders of civil liberties were behind such a plainly Orwellian Truth Ministry concept.
The one conspicuous stylistic difference is that this time, the loose-tongued, mentally absent executive signing off on sweeping secret surveillance programs gets a near-total pass from the press. The big difference between Bushisms and Bidenisms is the former were often endearing or unintentionally funny, while Biden is mostly just horrifying. His brain is like a cereal bowl in which the bits floating in milk occasionally touch and produce furious or incoherent exclamations: “immune to prostitute,” “I love those barrettes in her hair map,” “I used to drive an 18-wheeler, man,” “Putin may circle Kyiv with tanks but he’ll never gain the hearts and souls of the Iranian people,” and so on.
When Biden said of Putin, “For God’s sake, the man cannot remain in power,” we had NPR stories about how what he said could have been more “nuanced.” When Biden visited 82nd airborne troops in Poland and said of the war, “You’re going to see when you’re there… women, young people standing in the middle, in the front of a damn tank saying, ‘I’m not leaving.’” The next day the White House “clarified” that “The president has been clear we are not sending U.S. troops to Ukraine and there is no change in that position.”
All this is remarkably similar to Bush’s habit of saying things to troops like, “I appreciate the fact that you really snatched defeat out of the jaws of those who are trying to defeat us,” or “I fully understand those who say you can’t win this thing militarily. That’s exactly what the United States military says, that you can’t win this military.” Bush often told us the blunt truth by mistake and Biden does the same thing. The subtext in both cases is an executive who’s been read in so infrequently that he forgets what he’s supposed to lie about.
1. The computer can only observe a finite number of symbols or squares at any moment. If there is a need to exceed this bound, the computer must make additional—successive—observations. 2. The number of states of mind the computer needs to take into account is finite. This is because under an infinity of states of mind, some states of mind will be arbitrarily close and consequently confused. 3. Simple operations are elementary units that cannot be further divided. 4. New symbols mind must be immediately recognizable. Recognition is possible as long as there is a perceivable relationship between a new symbol + one previously observed + the distance between them does not exceed a fixed amount.
https://twitter.com/FreyChristopher/status/1530640178494193668Thus some people will not accept the statements of a speaker unless he gives a mathematical proof; others will not unless he makes use of illustrations; others expect to have a poet adduced as witness. Again, some require exactness in everything, while others are annoyed by it, either because they cannot follow the reasoning or because of its pettiness; for there is something about exactness which seems to some people to be mean, no less in an argument than in a business transaction.
Hence one must have been already trained how to take each kind of argument, because it is absurd to seek simultaneously for knowledge and for the method of obtaining it; and neither is easy to acquire.
Now some people do not accept what someone says if it is not stated mathematically, other if it is not based on paradigm cases, while others expect to have a poet adduced as a witness. Again, some want everything expressed exactly, whereas others are annoed by what is exact, either because they cannot string all the bits together or because they regard it as nitpicking. For exactness doe shave something of this quality, and so just as in business transactions to also in arguments it seems to have something unfree or ungenerous about it.
An irony being that the overwhelming majority of the violence experienced by transgender people occurs during arguments with intimate partners, and interactions with drug dealers, and during the aforementioned “sex work.” Much of that, presumably, a result of deceiving punters as to what, exactly, is on sale. This is not a trivial detail.
For years on-site storage was considered unacceptable since nuclear plants are often located near large population centers and accidents could have serious consequences. Today, one hears fewer concerns expressed about on-site storage, which would not have been the case 25 years ago. What changed? Some environmentalists now favor nuclear power because it’s carbon-free.
James Hansen, the climatologist who first warned about the dangers of climate change in the 1980s, has stated that there is no workable solution to fight global warming without nuclear power playing a substantial role. And there is little doubt the technology could make a difference. But at this point, at least in the US, it’s hard to imagine nuclear power playing anything more than a minimal role in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, which makes any of the projected goals for 2030 and beyond extremely difficult to achieve.
Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan made similar noises when asked about the Uyghurs. “I don’t know much about that,” he said. (Pakistan’s government has spent years deporting Uyghurs to China, and the country has long been a beneficiary of Chinese aid.) Then we had the dispiriting sight of Canadian-American billionaire Chamath Palihapitiya telling his co-host on the All-In podcast: “Nobody cares about what’s happening to the Uyghurs. … I think it’s nice that you care. The rest of us don’t care.”
Outside the world of camp-planning, many citizens (certainly not all) hold fast to the idea that the entire Uyghur ethnic group is comprised of terrorists and potential terrorists. In 2019, the internationally celebrated novelist Liu Cixin (Barack Obama’s favourite) responded with brisk irritation when the New Yorker asked him to comment on Xinjiang’s 1.5 million detainees: “Would you rather that they be hacking away at bodies at train stations and schools in terrorist attacks? ... If you were to loosen up the country a bit, the consequences would be terrifying.” I’ve heard the same view expressed plenty of times in my own conversations with mainlanders. With damning ease, the Party has managed to convince people of a link between ethnic characteristics and a propensity for murderous violence.
Hidden away in the halls of Zhongnanhai, China’s leaders know better. The “terrorism” narrative was a cynical ploy from the start. The truth is that Xinjiang’s 12 million Uyghurs represent a nation-in-waiting—disaffected, culturally and ethnically distinct, and possessed of little emotional connection to the People’s Republic. They have the potential to threaten national unity, and national unity is the most sacred of all things to the Chinese Communist Party, after its own preservation. That is the real reason we are seeing the largest incarceration of an ethnic or religious minority since the Holocaust, and the latest confirmed genocide of the 21st century.
In the spring of 2014, Beijing’s conjured terrorists finally became real. Eight Uyghurs armed with knives set upon civilians in Kunming train station, leaving 31 corpses in their bloody wake. Just a few weeks later, another five Uyghurs drove into an Ürümqi street market, where they threw explosives from the windows at random shoppers before crashing and killing themselves. Neither attack had any connection to international terrorist networks. They were the work of small and isolated groups radicalised by decades of mistreatment at the hands of the all-powerful Party-state. Nevertheless, the incidents were portrayed in the nation’s media as the latest and most grievous in an age-old Uyghur assault on Chinese civilisation.
The Tribunal found that prisoners are forced to sing songs praising the Communist Party, and that those who refuse are “dragged from the class and tortured to the point of screaming within the hearing of those still in the class.” Forced abortions are common in the camps, with some killings occurring after birth. Female detainees are raped using electric shock rods and iron bars—sometimes by men who have paid to access the camps for precisely this purpose, sometimes by multiple camp guards one after the other, and sometimes in front of an audience of detainees.
Clinton and her campaign systematically lied throughout, both about “collusion” and about their involvement in disseminating popular theories about it. We know this for a fact. The Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign recently agreed to pay a $113,000 fine to the Federal Election Commission for concealing their role in producing the Steele research, a role by the way her campaign never admitted to, and which was only disclosed through dogged effort by the House Intelligence Committee nearly a year after the 2016 election.
When the bill passed, opponents said it was tantamount to voter suppression. Charles Blow of The New York Times characterized the law as "Jim Crow 2.0," invoking the decades-long period when state and local laws throughout the South deprived black Americans of constitutional rights and liberties. The ACLU of Georgia called it "Georgia's Anti-Voter Law." President Joe Biden said that the law "makes Jim Crow look like Jim Eagle." The Department of Justice announced that it would sue to attempt to block the law.
Having failed as a medium of exchange, crypto survives as an asset class: Today, crypto is primarily used to trade other crypto. Here, too, libertarian arguments are made for crypto’s superiority over more regulated assets like equities. A stock “is a government-linked entity,” Mr. Thiel said. “Woke companies are sort of quasi-controlled by the government in a way that bitcoin never will be.”
At various times, the company has said it planned to make high-tech coffee kiosks, ventilators or electric vehicles at the site, though none of the plans have come through. Last year, Foxconn formally backed away from plans for a huge project and signed a new, scaled-back incentive deal with the state. Tax credits now max out at $80 million for creating nearly 1,500 jobs by 2024.
Evidence from Soviet-era files that emerged publicly in the 1990s suggests that Patriarch Kirill was a KGB agent with the code name “Mikhailov.” While he isn’t named directly, several documents refer to a “Mikhailov” who represented the Russian Orthodox Church at the Switzerland-based World Council of Churches, traveled to international church conferences and provided information to KGB handlers. That lines up with the biography of Patriarch Kirill, who was just 24 when he became the church’s representative to the WCC in 1971.
Princeton has denied that Katz was dismissed for expressing his opposition to the faculty letter in Quillette, and the evidence that they did so is circumstantial. “I have considered Professor Katz’s claim [that there was a “direct line” from the Quillette article to being investigated for misconduct],” wrote Faculty dean Jarrett in his report, “and have determined that the current political climate of the university, whether perceived or real, is not germane to the case, nor does it play a role in my recommendation.”
In case it’s not clear yet, I love all of these people.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that so many of them are immigrants. Immigrants believe in the American Dream. Maybe they’re the only people who still do. Back in Mexico or India or wherever, they heard that America was a magical place where ordinary people governed themselves and anyone could get ahead. Then they came to America and it met their expectations in some ways, and didn’t quite measure up in others. And they thought “Wait a second, I’m in a democracy now, it’s my job to fix this!” And so they bought their flag pin and their red-white-and-blue striped tie, subscribed to web hosting for $3.99/month, painted “[NAME] for Governor” on their beat-up old truck, and went off to the crusade.
A few years ago, I asked: what happened to the Puritans? Those old-timey almost superhuman Americans who had five incompatible jobs, invented stuff in their spare time, and fought like hell for every single weird utopian cause they believed in? The answer seems to be: they live on small farms and only come out once every four years, for gubernatorial elections. Most of these people have no cultural or genetic link to the Puritans of old, but the spirit is unmistakable.
[...]
These people see homeless encampments all around them and think “Wait, what if we just built a bunch of new cities for the homeless people to go to?” Or “how much would it cost to get all of them those $10,000 tiny houses you sometimes see advertised on Facebook?” Or “What if we built eight-story parking structures they could live in?” Probably there are good reasons we don’t do any of those things. But even thinking of them demonstrates a spirit of looking at the world, realizing it doesn’t make sense, and groping for solutions. Probably none of these particular ideas will end homelessness. But they sure beat the usual attitude of “eh, if there were some solution, some important person would have thought of it already, I’ll assume it’s either been taken care of or never will be, avert my eyes, and go about my life.”
[...]
Realistically, none of these people besides Gavin Newsom will become governor. Gavin Newsom will continue to run California for four more years, then run for President and very possibly win. When he leaves for DC, the political machine that created him will find some other excellently-hairstyled person, he or she will succeed Newsom as Governor, and none of these candidates will be consulted in any way. California will continue to have homelessness, fires, water shortages, worst-in-the-nation business climate, near-worst-in-the-nation schools, muddled and inconsistent COVID-19 policies, and all the other things these people are complaining about.
Still, I think of these candidates the same way Ross Douthat thinks about cults. They themselves may be crazy and of questionable value. But they’re the extreme version of a healthy tendency. They’re a live canary singing happily in the coal mine, demonstrating that something good still exists in American culture. Some people are still hopeful, entrepreneurial, free-thinking, and invested in democracy.
These people are our Strategic Optimism Reserve, and I am glad to have them.
At the NRC's stately pace of regulatory reform, the first innovative nuclear reactors designed by American companies may well begin operation in Eastern Europe before they get built in Idaho.
This news comes from an exclusive report by The Washington Post's Taylor Lorenz, whose scoop is buried underneath layers of pro-government verbiage. Lorenz's story excessively flatters Jankowicz—she is glamorized as "well-known" in the field, having "extensive experience," and "well-regarded" in just the first two paragraphs—while ignoring legitimate criticism of this so-called expert's track record. Indeed, there is zero mention, none whatsoever, of the fact that Jankowicz was flagrantly wrong about the pivotal "disinformation" episode of the 2020 election cycle: the Hunter Biden laptop story.
IRS Commissioner Chuck Rettig and Ms. Collins both have said the IRS’s customer-service problems are largely due to a lack of funding for staffing. I devoutly hope Congress will see to it that the IRS can answer its phones—so other taxpayers don’t face what I did.
The bill allows private citizens to bring civil lawsuits for monetary damages against anyone who performs or aids an abortion. The law sets minimum damages at $10,000, plus legal costs. It provides an exception for a medical emergency or if the pregnancy is the result of rape, sexual assault or incest that has been reported to law enforcement.
There is literally not a single liberal/CIA disinformation campaign over the last six years that she did not fully and uncritically embrace. Each time the U.S. Security State and Democratic Party fabricated blatant lies and embarked on injecting their poisonous brew into the American bloodstream, Nicolle Wallace was at the forefront. Using the skills she harnessed to help lead Americans into one of its most destructive and immoral wars in U.S. history — the invasion and 15-year destruction of Iraq — the former Bush/Cheney shill, now a DNC and CIA shill, has played a starring role in virtually every lie American liberals have been led to believe.
I know a fair bit about cults. When I was 19, I joined a small, insular, high-control Trotskyist organization, defying dear friends who told me it was a cult. I was so sure they were wrong—that the very idea defamed the funny, intelligent, well-intentioned people I was beginning to know—I stayed in the group for over 25 years. During that time I fought for many false and dangerous views, and helped spread antisemitism and misogyny. I also enjoyed the most transcendent sense of purpose, belonging, and love I have ever known.
A cult can make you feel wonderful. It feels like the family you choose for yourself, the refuge that allows you to survive a soul-crushingly lonely world. It sweeps you up in an embrace so all-encompassing that nothing and no one else matters, and the outside effectively ceases to exist. The heady rush of those early days is inevitably followed by abuse, but in the bell jar that is your world, the pain only convinces you to persevere. You become consumed by the need to chase a mirage—the love the cult promised you—and cannot conceive of life anywhere else. Like an abusive relationship, a cult breaks you down so incrementally you don’t see it happening: you only come to know that you cannot live without it.
As I was writing this essay, US Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson was asked if she could provide a definition of the word “woman.” Judge Jackson shook her head apologetically. “I’m not a biologist,” she said. One of the finest legal minds in the country could not say the words, “adult human female.” And in this respect, she is very much on-message: Trans activists have rejected the word “woman” in favor of the following partial list: chest feeders, vagina owners, menstruators, people with uteruses, cervix havers, birthing people, bleeders. The fact that countless women find these terms bizarre (and often inaccurate), not to mention objectifying and offensive, is deemed irrelevant. The new language is declared more scientific and inclusive to transgender people, and this is all that matters.
https://tinkzorg.wordpress.com/2021/09/24/the-war-on-the-horizon/Kyeyune’s theory was that the high-profile harassment and discrimination case at Activision-Blizzard symbolized America’s decline into a “negative-sum” economy. To use a California literary reference, that meant no more living off the “fat of the land,” for with the well of plenty drying, even elites are now forced to feed off each other. In such a society, he wrote, “belligerence is not a choice,” and “you need to dispossess others” to get ahead, because “not doing so means losing your own way of life.”
Blizzard, he wrote, is superficially a story about harassment, but on another level a tale about this desperate fight over resources. “Though harassment is claimed to be a problem, the solution is not for men to stop harassing women, it is for Blizzard to do a whole other slew of things,” he wrote. “Firing the offending employees… is not a solution. In fact, the only ‘real’ way forward is for them to simply hire more people… most of which will have skillsets completely orthogonal to the development of video games.”
In an age when movie studios are less and less about making movies, and academic faculties stagnate while university rolls fatten with non-academic deans and sub-deans, does this sound familiar? Institutions everywhere are filling up with employees bearing skills “orthogonal” to the bureaucratic mission, part of what’s been packaged as progress but feels more like a vast jobs program for otherwise unemployable pseudo-intellectuals. “Hire us, pay us, give us and our clients sinecures at your expense,” Kyeyune writes, “or we will make life difficult for you.”
In reality, however, the civil war inside Blizzard is probably not very ideological at all. Or, putting it differently: behind what is likely genuinely held idealistic commitments, the actual demands being levied against the corporation all have an incredibly obvious, cynical material bent to them. Activision-Blizzard has committed many great sins, and now the only way they can atone is to hire – on a permanent basis – more and more people to serve as commissars, while also reserving the well-paying non-ideological jobs for certain protected classes. Beyond all the flowery language, beyond all the philosophical and ideological commitments, this is nothing more than a fairly run of the mill protection racket. Hire us, pay us, give us and our clients sinecures at your expense, or we will make life difficult for you.
There are today so many examples of this that it would be impossible to go through them all. But consider for a second the massive expansion of the ”gig economy”, which is often cynically hailed as the result of some sort of breakthrough in information technology. In reality it is anything but; to take the ”ride-share” company of Uber as an example, it is merely a taxi company with a phone app, in a world where nearly every taxi company in the developed world has a similar phone app. The real ”innovation” of Uber lies in simply defining its taxi drivers as contractors rather than employees, shuffling over a lot of costs onto the drivers that other taxi companies have to pay for out of their own pockets.
https://tinkzorg.wordpress.com/2021/11/02/2740/The upshot of history not repeating itself is that in the US, far more people can – and probably will – become ”kulaks” in the days ahead than were ever tarred with that label in the USSR. To wit: if you are a truck driver, you are a potential kulak, because your dispossession could possibly lead to cheaper prices for the professional elite, who live their lives as consumers, not producers, of physical goods. If you are a college educated white male, you are definitely a kulak, because your dispossession means that the job you would have had can go to someone else. If you own a video equipment store, you are also certainly a kulak, because as a member of the ”petty bourgeoisie”, you do not have the kinds of profit margins that would make it possible for you to hire diversity consultants. If people buy their video equipment from Amazon or Walmart, that is more wealth freed from the hands of the inefficient and put in the hands of people who know how to give urban professionals a slice of the take.
Here, the average member of America’s credentialed classes might point out how ridiculous such an argument is, that only a philistine, a luddite or a white supremacist would consider their jobs within academia, the media, and middle management to be useless. These jobs are really completely vital to a modern economy, and the fact that I even dare to question their necessity makes me a racist, a nazi, and a white supremacist. And maybe this is all true, but it actually doesn’t matter. I could be be the mongolian reincarnation of Adolf Hitler himself, but this will not change the fact that the guy who handles garbage collection is simply much, much more willing and able to go for long stretches without the oh-so-necessary Critical Race Theory commissars, than these commissar are able or willing to go without any garbage pickup. The HR manager might be ”just as important” as the truck driver on the level of platonic forms, but the truck driver is still willing and able to carry on forever without the HR manager showing up to work, while the HR manager will quite literally start starving to death in short order if the trucker doesn’t do his job. No moral hectoring or impotent crying about racism and white supremacy will ever change that basic imbalance between these two groups.
Though it’s not part of Jeffrey Herf’s book, I found myself thinking about the historical ironies that led the major political players during the struggles over the creation of Israel to eventually switch sides. Perhaps the most consequential example of this turnabout occurred when the Stalin regime reverted to its historical anti-Zionism, even criminalizing Zionist activism. Alarmed by the euphoric reception Golda Meir received from Russian Jews during her ambassadorial visit to the USSR in 1948, Stalin began to obsess about the threat posed to the Soviet Union by Jewish disloyalty. As a result, the Soviets unleashed the big lie that Israel was actually a creation of Western imperialism—propaganda that the Arab world was happy to embrace.
None dared recall that, only a few years before, Stone and the editor of the Nation had forensically documented the collaboration between the Palestinian Arab leadership and the Nazis, nor that these left-wing journalists had once argued passionately that the birth of Israel was one of the great moral triumphs of the 20th century. It is to Jeffrey Herf’s credit as an historian and scholar that he has provided this important reminder of who actually defended and opposed international justice for the Jewish people 75 years ago.
“The soul of wit may become the very body of untruth,” wrote Aldous Huxley in the 1958 foreword to Brave New World Revisited. “However elegant and memorable, brevity can never, in the nature of things, do justice to all the facts of a complex situation.” Huxley wasn’t entirely opposed to brevity, noting that “omission and simplification help us understand.” But, he added, “they help us, in many cases, to understand the wrong thing; for our comprehension may be only of the abbreviator’s neatly formulated notions, not of the vast ramifying reality from which these notions have been so arbitrarily abstracted.”
Huxley was sympathetic to the conundrum everyone faces in tackling complexity—“life is short,” he acknowledged, “and information endless,” so people must simplify or they will simply never have enough time to grapple with anything. “Abbreviation is a necessary evil and the abbreviator’s business is to make the best of a job which, though intrinsically bad, is still better than nothing.” Nevertheless, we must be careful not to simplify to the point of falsification, or we will end up with “the dangerous quarter-truths and half-truths which have always been the current coin of thoughts.”
Self-excoriation has also become an important part of how Western democracies understand themselves. “The West invented the uneasy conscience, making a daily practice of repentance with an almost mechanical plasticity,” wrote the French philosopher Pascal Bruckner in a 2020 essay for Tablet titled, “The Flagellants of the Western World.” “We wrap ourselves in the robes of the perpetual criminal, the better to keep our distance from the world and its torments. And now the West is weaker than ever—rudderless, leaderless—since the United States withdrew from world affairs.”
People are obsessed with demanding [Elon Musk] do more. "You're a billionaire. Solve world hunger. Solve climate change." How many billionaires are in the world? I mean, when's the last time any of them have been asked to solve world hunger? It almost never happens. I believe the reason people go after Musk is not because they hate him but because he's the only person who's even come close to proving that he's capable of doing anything, of solving complex problems, of improving the world in very fundamental ways.
The findings are striking when it comes to differences between males and females. On one hand, there was no statistically significant difference between the sexes in regard to the influence that parents attributed to pornography, sexual abuse, or eating disorders. But the parents of sons were far more likely to describe their child’s dysphoria as being linked, in some way, to online gaming culture. More than one young man told his parents he wanted to be a woman so he wouldn’t end up wielding straight male privilege. Of all the parents of boys who participated in the survey, only half thought their sons actually believed they could really become a member of the opposite sex; and the boys who did believe that such a literal transition was possible were significantly more likely to have received an autism-spectrum diagnosis. Overall, more than 80 percent of boys’ parents reported that their sons were typical boys—in terms of gender norms—in their earlier years, displaying no particularly effeminate traits. Neuro-atypicality, emotional detachment, and fear of sexual development are common characteristics. But contrary to some of the more lurid examples of trans women discussed on social media, these are not sex-obsessed males, let alone budding predators. Just the opposite: they seem terrified of sex.
She explained to my daughter that if she is not 100% comfortable in her female body, then she is transgender… She then told the kids that parents aren’t safe and that it’s okay to lie to them about where they are… She explicitly asked the kids who they’re sexually attracted to. There were 11, 12 and 13-year-olds in the room when this happened.
She doubled down, [saying] that parents aren’t safe, that heterosexuality and monogamy are not normal, and she then proceeded to hand out her personal contact information to the kids, encouraging them to connect with her without their parents’ knowledge, by cell phone, by email, and by chat platforms like WhatsApp and Discord, where parents can’t see the communication. She also sends them invites to her secret meetings through these channels.
This predacious stranger, it turns out, had absolutely no qualifications to be speaking with children about sexuality. She’s not a licensed therapist or counsellor, she’s not a full-time teacher in the district. Her only qualification is that she’s a lesbian.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IlluminatiHofstadter’s era was no more unique than our own, and reading him takes us back to the long-forgotten nonsense that preoccupied and animated the forerunners of McCarthy and QAnon. Here, for instance, is a Texas newspaper in 1855:
> It is a notorious fact that the Monarchs of Europe and the Pope of Rome are at this very moment plotting our destruction and threatening the extinction of our political, civil, and religious institutions. … We have the best reasons for believing that corruption has found its way into our Executive Chamber, and that our Executive head is tainted with the infectious venom of Catholicism.
Going back even further, here’s a Massachusetts sermon in 1798 railing against a supposed Illuminati conspiracy:
> [It is] the most extensive, flagitious, and diabolical [design] that human art and malice have ever invented. Its object is the total destruction of all religion and civil order. If accomplished, the earth can be nothing better than a sink of impurities, a theatre of violence and murder, and a hell of miseries.
Illuminism was an 18th-century Bavarian movement based on Enlightenment rationalism that stood against the reactionary clericalism present in that particular place at that particular time. It promoted freedom, tolerance, constitutional government, and the separation of religion and state. Yet, “the pulpits of New England were ringing with denunciations of the Illuminati, as though the country were swarming with them,” Hofstadter wrote. He pointed out that there was no evidence that a single Illuminati member ever set foot on American soil.
While Hofstadter wasn’t able to identify the psychological mechanisms behind the phenomenon, he did offer a theory for why paranoia, while always present at some level, explodes in some historical eras and remains muted in others. Throughout American history, politics has generally been shaped by either competing interest groups (labor unions, corporations, retirees) focused on real-world problems or by cultural groups (educated professionals, Christian fundamentalists, rural residents) vying for status. In status politics, Americans are more interested in culture wars (Hofstadter used the phrase “social conflicts”) and the airing of grievances than in, say, repairing a broken economy or fighting a war.
> There is a tendency to embody discontent not so much in legislative proposals as in grousing. … Therefore, it is the tendency of status politics to be expressed more in vindictiveness, in sour memories, in the search for scapegoats, than in realistic proposals for positive action.
A bitter culture war waged against our own friends, family members, and neighbors would have been a spectacularly poor response to the Great Depression, Hitler’s invasion of Europe, the September 11th attacks, or the War of 1812. But since human beings are wired for conflict and strife, it makes a perverse sort of sense for a certain kind of person to pick oversized fights about relatively trivial matters during peacetime and to hallucinate existential threats when none exist. When there really is an enormous real-world problem, those otherwise prone to paranoia can focus on that rather than on the bogeymen in their minds.
Take Henry Newbolt’s Vitaï Lampada—corny, sure, but a poem I cannot even read in my head without choking up. This was once core curriculum, precisely because it sings the moral foundations that are laid down by a decent school. In times of great confusion, it reminded us, you do not rise to the challenge, you lean hard on the granite of your education. The reserves of courage, the heroic and the stoic, the martial virtues—these were once considered more important than a fistful of GCSEs. But, as C.S. Lewis warned in “Men Without Chests,” they are now occasions for embarrassed sniggering. Boys now are being prepared for a different set of challenges.
Knowing a popular craze when it sees one, corporate America incorporated these facile social-justice memes into national marketing campaigns. Disavowing racism had become a brand imperative, with influencers and businesses alike at risk of reputational damage if they failed to jump on the bandwagon early and hard. Along with the infographics, there was an explosion in the market for illustrative typography featuring simple slogans such as Angela Davis’s “It’s not enough to not be racist. You must be anti-racist.” Silence was violence. And so on.
But when COVID struck, my news consumption spiked—primarily CNN and MSNBC, which placed much of the blame for the pandemic, not to mention America’s racial inequities, on Trump. I developed the sense that we were living through a crisis that required each of us to make an existential choice. On one side lay those who wanted to make the world a better place. On the other lay the bigots and anti-vaxxers. Conveniently, it was the same line that separated my country into Democrats and Republicans.
My advice to others is this: Be wary of simple explanations, black-and-white thinking, and any ideology that presents the world as locked in a battle between good and evil. Take it from someone who once channeled this kind of simplistic thinking into popular memes for a living: Everything worth knowing is much more complex than any slogan can possibly convey.
To keep up with an onslaught of sales early in the Covid-19 pandemic and worker absences, Walmart hired around half a million people over six weeks between March and May of 2020
Those worries led Walmart to create a program to recruit and train college graduates to become store managers, promising a starting wage of at least $65,000 a year and an accelerated two-year track into the top store job.
Academics in faculties of education will continue to focus on big, abstract ideas. They will continue to dislike effective programs because of oppression or something. I will continue to pay attention to those picky details.
A time-traveller or alien dropped into the West’s “culture war” might be forgiven for wondering if it was all intended as a big joke. After all, most of the major arguments could be taken straight out of a comedy show: “Men can get pregnant, too,” “Winston Churchill is getting cancelled,” “Donald Trump is Hitler,” “Joe Biden is a communist,” “Math is racist!” Although the plot has sometimes been difficult to follow, the culture war has provided us with a steady stream of entertainment and hilarity.
However, it stops being fun when it becomes clear that the arguments are meant seriously. And it becomes positively frightening when one also realises that this theatre of absurdities has dominated much of the public debate across the Western world for years. The culture war created the illusion that utterly obscure arguments normally ignored by everyone except eccentric university professors, perpetually outraged radical activists, and 35-year-old children living still in their parents’ basement represent the most crucial questions facing the modern West. So important, according to their proponents, that the very foundations of liberal democracy and public discourse—such as free speech—might reasonably be disposed with to “win” the argument.
Even worse, the culture war made us start wondering whether our disagreements on things like transgender bathrooms or the correct way to understand 18th-century history really did represent irreconcilable dividing lines across the West—especially in the United States. Just a year before he died, the late talk radio host Rush Limbaugh said out loud what a lot of Americans were already thinking: “I actually think that we’re trending toward secession. I see more and more people asking, ‘What in the world do we have in common with the people who live in, say, New York?’” The last time Americans contemplated secession, the issue at hand was the ongoing enslavement of nearly four million Americans. But this time around, in the insane-asylum-reality of the culture war, it is disagreements on the merits of veganism or preferred gender pronouns that made Americans question whether they had enough in common to coexist peacefully as a single nation—let alone a nation providing leadership for the West as a whole.
U.S. reconstruction efforts in Western Europe are a good case in point. Though some postwar planners occasionally stressed the disastrous impact Europe’s deterioration could have on the American economy, the actual prosecution of the Marshall Plan and other aid initiatives demonstrates that far more pertinent concerns were at play. Understanding the link between poverty and communist agitation, U.S. policymakers proved remarkably flexible in allowing Europeans themselves to decide how funds should be allocated, much of which proved indispensable to funding social service programs and building robust welfare states, and in the case of the Nordic countries that participated, establishing numerous state-owned industries. In West Germany, Washington’s willingness to peg the Deutsche Mark to the dollar at a low exchange rate (which was unfavorable to American exporters) helped enable the miraculous economic revival known as the Wirtschaftswunder.
Therefore, the land acknowledgements recited before practically all cultural and education events in Toronto as of late do not quite tell the whole truth. “We acknowledge that this event takes place on the lands occupied for centuries by the peoples X, Y, and Z and we are grateful to them to be here” obscures the fact that possession of the land was contested among those groups. Land acknowledgements are a collective saying of grace, in effect, while they teach no history, and do nothing to improve actual Indigenous lives.
As an immigrant to Canada from the western Balkans, I became uncomfortable with the suggestion that one’s ethnicity gives you a special relationship to a piece of land—because the pursuit of that political idea has been ravaging my continent of origin for millennia. When I complained on Twitter about having to observe mandatory smudging ceremonies at opera-season launches, an activist asked me why I don’t go back to where the rituals that I find meaningful connect me to the land where I am from. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to talk to Canadian progressives if such talk of blood and belonging, and of rituals specific to a stretch of land, are not your thing.
https://github.com/HumbleUI/Skija/In programming, we are developing abstractions at an alarming rate. When enough of those are stacked, it becomes impossible to figure out or control what’s going on down the stack. This is where my contribution begins: I believe I have found some pretty vivid examples of how the ladder of abstractions has started to fall and nobody can do anything about it now because we all are used to work only at the very tip of it.
More than 107,000 people in the U.S. died from drug overdoses last year, preliminary Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data released Wednesday showed, roughly a 15% increase from 2020. The proliferation of the potent synthetic opioid fentanyl has been compounded by the destabilizing effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on users and people in recovery, according to health authorities and treatment providers.
The agency also noted rising fatalities linked to two stimulants—methamphetamines and cocaine—which researchers say people are often intentionally using alongside fentanyl.
https://www.wsj.com/video/series/moving-upstream/the-way-to-save-opioid-addicts-moving-upstream/333369B5-6817-4597-873B-514EF612B193Addiction experts are in wide agreement on the most effective way to help opioid addicts: Medication-assisted treatment. But most inpatient rehab facilities in the U.S. don’t offer this option.
The risk of electricity shortages is rising throughout the U.S. as traditional power plants are being retired more quickly than they can be replaced by renewable energy and battery storage. Power grids are feeling the strain as the U.S. makes a historic transition from conventional power plants fueled by coal and natural gas to cleaner forms of energy such as wind and solar power, and aging nuclear plants are slated for retirement in many parts of the country.
The challenge is that wind and solar farms—which are among the cheapest forms of power generation—don’t produce electricity at all times and need large batteries to store their output for later use. While a large amount of battery storage is under development, regional grid operators have lately warned that the pace may not be fast enough to offset the closures of traditional power plants that can work around the clock.
For new parents: “The biggest enemy of parenting is stress,” said Swansea University’s Dr. Reed. “Quality time with your children when you can be highly responsive to your child’s needs is better than low-level, halfhearted parenting 24/7.”
Doing that requires having a partner or other support system in place, such as having your child’s grandparents nearby, to give yourself time to recharge. Dr. Reed also advises parents to stay off their phones as much as possible around their young children, to let them know that when you’re there, you’re really there.
This is not an argument anyone is going to win. The loudest advocates on both sides are terrible representatives for their cause. When women are urged to “shout your abortion,” and when abortion becomes the subject of stand-up comedy routines, the attitude toward abortion seems ghoulish. Who could possibly be proud that they see no humanity at all in the images that science has made so painfully clear? When anti-abortion advocates speak in the most graphic terms about women “sucking babies out of the womb,” they show themselves without mercy. They are not considering the extremely human, complex, and often heartbreaking reasons behind women’s private decisions. The truth is that the best argument on each side is a damn good one, and until you acknowledge that fact, you aren’t speaking or even thinking honestly about the issue. You certainly aren’t going to convince anybody. Only the truth has the power to move.
As is the case with a lot of these accounts, MintPress falls out of the mainstream on whole ranges of issues. It’s come under heavy fire for its coverage of Syria, for instance. A lot of political moderates will struggle to connect with its point of view. This however is the whole point of alternative media, whose brief is to explore themes the traditional press won’t or can’t. If traditional news consumers feel comfortable reading them, these sites probably aren’t doing their jobs correctly. Censorship of them is especially concerning if law enforcement plays any role, since these are among the last media concerns to evince any skepticism about national security messaging.
All of this is going on at a time when the Biden administration just announced the formation of a dystopian “Disinformation Governance Board,” preposterously headed by a bubbly former Kennan Institute fellow, Nina “The Singing Neoliberal” Jankowicz. In a detail Jonathan Swift couldn’t have written better, Jankowicz — who once cited the author of the greatest news hoax of our generation, Christopher Steele, as an expert on the “evolution of disinfo” — last year put out a video of herself as the “Mary Poppins of Disinformation.” In it, she sang a variation of “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” featuring lines like:> They’re laundering disinfo and we really should take note> And not support their lies with our wallet voice or vote…As many have pointed out, this is a literal nanny singing about the joys of the nanny state, in a song that includes lines about using the “wallet” to starve speech. There’s a fine line between parody and horror, and we’re tumbling fast to the horror side.
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-irrational-misguided-discourse"They're taking away fundamental rights," Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D–N.Y.) declared during a pro-choice rally outside the Supreme Court last spring. Turning to point at the building behind him, an outraged Schumer delivered another warning: "I want to tell you, Gorsuch, I want to tell you, Kavanaugh, you have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price! You won't know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions."
Schumer's vague threat against Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, Donald Trump's first and second Supreme Court nominees, drew a rare public rebuke from Chief Justice John Roberts. "Justices know that criticism comes with the territory, but threatening statements of this sort from the highest levels of government are not only inappropriate, they are dangerous," Roberts said in a written statement. "All members of the Court will continue to do their job, without fear or favor, from whatever quarter."
But the quote from Lincoln — warning that the Court must not become the primary institution that decides controversial political questions — does not support Roe at all; indeed, Lincoln's argument is the one most often cited in favor of overruling Roe. In fact, Lincoln's argument is the primary one on which Alito relied in the draft opinion to justify overruling Roe: namely, that democracy will be imperiled, and the people will cease to be their own rulers, if the Supreme Court, rather than the legislative branches, ends up deciding hot-button political questions such as abortion about which the Constitution is silent.
Thus, the purpose of the Bill of Rights is fundamentally anti-democratic and anti-majoritarian. It bars majorities from enacting laws that infringe on the fundamental rights of minorities. Thus, in the U.S., it does not matter if 80% or 90% of Americans support a law to restrict free speech, or ban the free exercise of a particular religion, or imprison someone without due process, or subject a particularly despised criminal to cruel and unusual punishment. Such laws can never be validly enacted. The Constitution deprives the majority of the power to engage in such acts regardless of how popular they might be.
Pope Francis said that the “barking of NATO at the door of Russia” might have led to the invasion of Ukraine and that he didn't know whether other countries should supply Ukraine with more arms.
But we also learned last week that it will be headed by Nina Jankowicz. Her Twitter feed makes her look like a cross between Madame Mao and Bette Midler—a mix of impeccably conformist left-wing views about politics and media misinformation—the Hunter Biden story was Russian disinformation, the Steele Dossier was all true, etc.—with excruciating political parodies of musical-theater numbers. Watching her videos is a little like being an audience member at a Christmas concert in a prisoner-of-war camp.
“People are dying because of misinformation,” Barack Obama told a Silicon Valley audience last month. You may remember Mr. Obama. He’s been a tireless warrior for years in the twilight struggle for truth in politics. If you have a long enough memory you’ll recall that he was the president who gave a speech in 2009 to promote his signature healthcare measure, in which he attacked critics of the plan for their “scare tactics and fear-mongering.”
Summoning his famous oratorical skills at a crucial moment, he was as determined then as he is now to lay to rest all the misinformation his opponents were peddling: “No matter how we reform health care, we will keep this promise: If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor. Period.”
We don’t know how many people died because of that piece of misinformation—a whopper of such proportions that even PolitiFact, the self-appointed arbiter of truth and lies, awarded it its coveted “Lie of the Year” title in 2013—five years after rating it “true”—by which time it had become clear that what critics had been saying about ObamaCare was in fact neither scare tactics nor fear-mongering but the truth.
Mr. Clyburn may also be trying to assist historically black college and universities with less than stellar student outcomes. Morris College in Sumter, S.C., has a 25% graduation rate. The median earnings for a borrower who enrolled a decade ago is $27,644, and debt for those who completed their degrees is $31,450. Some 97% of borrowers aren’t paying down their loans.
One of the strangest arguments against nuclear power is the claim that there is nothing that can be done with the waste. In fact, the compact nature of the limited waste produced by nuclear energy makes it uniquely attractive. A single 1000 MWe coal-fired power plant produces about 600 tons of highly toxic waste daily, more than the entire American nuclear industry does in a year. The portion of this that is not simply sent up the stack piles up near the power plant, or is dumped somewhere else, eventually finding its way into the biosphere. Despite the clear, non-hypothetical consequences of this large-scale toxic pollution, no one is even talking about establishing a waste isolation facility for this material, because it is not remotely possible. In contrast to such an intractable problem, the disposal of nuclear waste is trivial.
Nuclear power is safe. Close to a thousand pressurized water reactors have been operated on land and sea for the past seven decades without causing harm to a single member of the public. No other major power source has a safety record that is even remotely comparable. Moreover, it is clean and unlimited. Yet because of a scare campaign mounted by opponents motivated by ignorance, ideology, or interests, we have been denied the immense benefits that it offers.
One reason this works so well is the second kind of lie involved. The truth is common property. You can't distinguish your group by doing things that are rational, and believing things that are true. If you want to set yourself apart from other people, you have to do things that are arbitrary, and believe things that are false. And after having spent their whole lives doing things that are arbitrary and believing things that are false, and being regarded as odd by "outsiders" on that account, the cognitive dissonance pushing children to regard themselves as Xes must be enormous. If they aren't an X, why are they attached to all these arbitrary beliefs and customs? If they aren't an X, why do all the non-Xes call them one?
This form of lie is not without its uses. You can use it to carry a payload of beneficial beliefs, and they will also become part of the child's identity. You can tell the child that in addition to never wearing the color yellow, believing the world was created by a giant rabbit, and always snapping their fingers before eating fish, Xes are also particularly honest and industrious. Then X children will grow up feeling it's part of their identity to be honest and industrious.
This probably accounts for a lot of the spread of modern religions, and explains why their doctrines are a combination of the useful and the bizarre. The bizarre half is what makes the religion stick, and the useful half is the payload. [6]
[6] Unfortunately the payload can consist of bad customs as well as good ones. For example, there are certain qualities that some groups in America consider "acting white." In fact most of them could as accurately be called "acting Japanese." There's nothing specifically white about such customs. They're common to all cultures with long traditions of living in cities. So it is probably a losing bet for a group to consider behaving the opposite way as part of its identity.
I was hitting you, I wasn't punching you
I reached out to Chomsky about the brouhaha. The good professor was charmingly unaware he’d set off a social media meltdown, but commented in a general way.
“It’s normal for the doctrinal managers to bitterly condemn people who (1) don’t keep rigidly to the Party Line, so can’t be admitted into their circles and (2) have some outreach to the rabble,” he said. “Makes sense, quite normal. Have to make sure that the ‘herd of independent minds’ doesn’t stray.”
Chomsky said people like Freeman who depart from the national security orthodoxy are often left to give interviews on smaller independent sites, at which point establishment critics then go after them for being associated with other material on those sites, a neat trick.
“It’s a highly effective system of thought control in free societies, going well beyond what Orwell imagined in his few words on this topic,” he said.
But the Occam’s razor policy answer is that corporate tax reform worked as its sponsors predicted: Lowering the rates while broadening the base by eliminating loopholes created incentives for more efficient investment decisions that paid off for shareholders, workers and the government.
One example is the way reform provided an incentive for companies to repatriate overseas earnings to invest in the U.S. Dan Clifton of Strategas Research Partners says companies have brought back some $1.8 trillion since the 2017 reform. Previously, companies that repatriated capital paid a punitive tax rate. They kept the money abroad instead.
Shiites in Afghanistan aren’t only a religious minority. They also include an ethnic minority, the Hazaras, a prime target for Islamic State, which regards them as infidels. Some are questioning whether the Taliban are committed to ensuring their safety.
“We Hazaras have a big question for the Taliban: Why are the schools, wedding halls, hospitals and educational centers only targeted in Hazara areas?” said Razia, a 35-year-old who gave one name and is the sister of an injured student. “After this blast, I have decided not to send any of my children or brothers to school anymore, as we do not have the energy to hear more about the losses of our dearest ones.”
Nuclear power, however, makes the case more clearly. It is a technology born from scientific understanding of forces and phenomena invisible to the naked eye, offering energy in quantities vastly exceeding anything available from fossil fuels. The amount of nuclear energy in a kilogram of uranium is equivalent to that obtained by burning two million kilograms of oil. Ordinary granite typically contains five parts per million uranium, giving it 10 times the energy content of an equal amount of oil! Think about that. With the help of God, Moses reportedly drew water out of a rock. With the help of science, we can draw fire from rocks.
It is important to be clear on this point: The fire does not come from the rock. It comes from thought. That was also true of powers offered by fossil fuels, sails, and domesticated horses, for that matter. None of them existed before thought, either. But nuclear power is fire created purely from thought. It is dramatic proof of the unlimited power of the free human mind. Moreover, this fire comes without smoke.
Or take Fryer’s work with the Harlem Children’s Zone, a pioneering nonprofit in which poor, mostly black students often outperform their white peers at richer schools. Fryer wanted to figure out the reasons for the Zone’s success, so the same strategies could be applied to failing schools all over the country. The politically correct solutions to lagging black academic achievement—reduce class size, increase per-pupil spending, and upgrade teachers’ nominal credentials—had all provided disappointing results.
Fryer found that a central component of the Zone’s success was a culture of high expectations. The school is institutionally allergic to the condescension that’s become the fashionable response to black underachievement. Typified by Ibram X. Kendi, this logic goes: If achievement tests show persistent racial gaps, then the tests–not the schooling–are the problem, and they need to be scrapped.
Harvard’s own investigators ultimately found that Prof. Fryer had never sexually propositioned or touched anyone, and their original recommendation for punishment was “training” on setting boundaries. That finding was transformed into an effort to derail his entire career: A small group of Harvard administrators overruled Harvard’s own Title IX office, suspended Professor Fryer without pay for two years, banned him from campus, and shut down his multi-million dollar education laboratory. He was a tenured professor, and they couldn’t get rid of him completely. But they could do their best to excommunicate him.
One of the administrators behind his punishment, Arts and Sciences Dean Claudine Gay, even reportedly went so far as to ask Harvard’s president to revoke Fryer’s tenure. Thankfully, the president declined. (There’s no known case of the university stripping a professor of tenure even once in the last hundred years.)
It’s notable that other Title IX cases at Harvard involving professors charged with more serious offenses have resulted in significantly less severe punishments. In the early 2000s, a STEM professor allegedly spent over two years exploiting one of his graduate students, demanding sexual favors in return for laboratory access and letters of recommendation. When she tried to end the relationship, he allegedly threatened to kill himself. The student went to Harvard authorities to press charges, and she reported being told that doing so would damage her career, and that she should “move on.”
Fryer found that that drawdown in police activity led to a surge in violent crime that predominantly victimized low-income black people. And he made a point of noting that the additional annual black deaths due to this withdrawal are roughly triple the number of black people killed per year at the height of lynching in America. You can guess how this kind of observation was treated by the likes of Profs. Gay and Bobo, both of whom grew up in far more privileged surroundings before taking their place among the chorus of Harvard’s //bien pensants//.
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Popular_Science_Monthly/Volume_12/March_1878/Opium_and_its_AntidoteWe now proceed to the calm and thorough consideration of another subject, more important if possible than the foregoing one, but like it somewhat difficult to seize by reason of the very opulence of the phraseology, logical and rhetorical, in which it has been set forth.
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Popular_Science_Monthly/Volume_12/March_1878/Illustrations_of_the_Logic_of_Science_IIISo used, opium is certainly a dangerous poison, and, according to the testimony of all travelers, the wretches who daily commit such excesses speedily fall to a fearful state of degradation, both moral and physical. Pale, wan, gaunt, shambling along with difficulty, they must have recourse to artificial stimulation in order to regain a part of their wasted energy. Still the injurious effects of opium have in all probability been very much exaggerated: the number of deaths caused by the abuse of the drug is not very great; and many of those who smoke it, even in considerable quantity, retain unimpaired their mental faculties. True, the digestive functions rarely escape impairment. Dyspepsia and general emaciation are the result of this sad habit; but, however that may be, China is not yet by any means on the brink of ruin, and, if she is in a state of decadence, the blame does not attach to opium.
https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htmI find myself linking to this article way too much lately, but here it is again: The Tyranny of Structurelessness by Jo Freeman. You should read it. The summary is that in any system, if you don't have an explicit hierarchy, then you have an implicit one.
Despite my ongoing best efforts, I have never seen any exception to this rule.
For most of the nineties living in Russia, I found myself gaining an appreciation for America. I thought: “As messed up as our country is, at least you can’t openly pay bribes in court, and people aren’t often boiled alive when hot water pipes burst under sidewalks.” Then I went home not long after 9/11 and, watching George Bush, soon found myself missing Russia, thinking: “At least Boris Yeltsin was too busy drinking and stealing to try to conquer the planet.” Now the worst of both worlds are on a collision course.
In January, I agreed to report on the court appearance of Jessica Yaniv, the now infamous “trans activist” who’d taken legal action against a number of aestheticians at the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal, on grounds that they’d declined to wax Yaniv’s testicles. Yaniv was subsequently charged with two counts of possession of a prohibited weapon, after brandishing a Taser on YouTube. During a recess in court proceedings relating to these charges, I entered the women’s washroom in the court building, took a few steps inside and saw Yaniv standing at the sink.
I had previously seen a video of Yaniv allegedly assaulting a reporter by repeatedly hitting him over the head with a cane. I saw another video of Yaniv inside a women’s washroom, apparently spraying pepper spray at the mirror while warning viewers, in a garbled voice, not to “fuck with me.” Yaniv is nearly a foot taller than me and weighs at least twice as much. I felt afraid. Yet of course, I would have to be the one to leave. This was in the women’s bathroom, remember.
I immediately fled. But a few minutes later, while still seated on a bench outside the court, I was approached by four sheriffs. One of them said I’d been accused of taking photographs of Yaniv inside the bathroom. He asked me if I knew “what a serious allegation” this was. Yaniv stood behind the sheriffs, demanding my arrest. I told the sheriff that Yaniv’s bizarre allegations were absolutely untrue. I opened the image feed on my phone and showed that I had not taken any pictures. The sheriffs left, as did Yaniv. But days later, Yaniv posted fabrications about the encounter on Twitter.
MT: What has writing these books touching on dangerous subjects cost you? Have you lost friends?
Laura Kipnis: A lot of times, you don’t hear directly about the blowback. What happens is you don’t get invited places. Up until when I wrote Unwanted Advances or maybe the articles that it came from, I had been a fellow traveler in academic gender and sexuality studies, at women’s and gender studies departments, and also queer theory and queer departments. I was invited to keynote queer conferences and grad conferences and feminist stuff. A lot of that somehow seemed to go away. Part of it is I think that on campus, there was — I think of it as there was Queer Studies 2.0, that replaced what used to be a really freewheeling, interesting, intellectually rich kind of queer studies.
Raff’s deferential approach to Indigenous religion and mysticism—including creationist myths—is intended to communicate respect. But this approach leads to serious logical contradictions. At one point, for instance, she criticizes pre-Darwinian American scientist Samuel G. Morton (1799–1851) for his belief in polygenesis—the incorrect view that different human races had different biological origins. Morton was wrong, of course: Darwin and many others have repeatedly shown that we all share a common ancestor. However, Raff doesn’t deal with the awkward fact that some Native American tribes have their own polygenesis beliefs, which tend to be incompatible with the idea of having migrated from the other side of the Bering Strait. This incompatibility was on display, for instance, during the controversy surrounding genetic research among members of the Havasupai tribe in Arizona, who were upset when DNA data collected from donated blood samples was applied to study their genetic history in a way that threatened to contradict their origin myths.
To defer to Indigenous creationist ideas is no different, in principle, from deferring to religious Christian attitudes. In both cases, the approach is completely at odds with the secular values that researchers are expected to apply in every other context. Among activists and ideologically-inclined progressives, Origin’s explicitly politicized message will no doubt strike a chord. But as an anthropologist, I find the anti-scientific trend that the book represents to be deeply unsettling.
Crime can not be tolerated. Criminals thrive on the indulgence of society's understanding.
- You're not talking about justice; you're talking about revenge- Sometimes they're the same- They're never the same. Justice is about harmony; revenge is about you making yourself feel better. That's why we have an impartial system.
Older cast members with families, particularly those in salaried management and creative roles favor parental rights and tend to support the legislation. What I have found most interesting about my conversations with this group is that their perceptions depend significantly on how the question is asked. If I offer a generic “What do you think of the legislation in Florida Bob [Chapek] keeps emailing about?” many are quick to condemn it. But if I ask, “What do you think of the law preventing teaching sexual topics in K-3 grade?” many say they support it. Within the Imagineering department, the creative groups tend to be against the law and in favor of Disney efforts to subvert it. The groups working in engineering and construction tend to support the law, but mostly they just want Disney to shut up about politics.
The executive group is perhaps most revealing. The majority of executives, as one would expect, not only toe the party line, but are extremely vocal in their endorsement, frequently initiating conversations about the bill as they anxiously scan the room for nods of approval. But others fall silent during company-wide calls and study their company phones whenever the topic comes up. I’ve only managed a few private conversations with these people, and the story is consistently the same: keep your mouth shut or find yourself the target of scrutiny and likely termination.
A week after getting death threats & getting 17k signatures on a petition to expel me, I had an event where I had to be rushed out of the building for my safety. Antifa cut me off and I was forced to hide in a janitor closet with the lights off while antifa searched for me.
It has only become more tormenting now, amid the invasion of Ukraine, because it is represented as both the fundamental basis of Russian governance and as evidence of the West’s complicity in, and furtherance of, its sleaziest manifestations outside of Russia. Russia has indeed played a large part in the practice and growth of corruption in governance and commerce everywhere. Only a few islands of comparative rectitude remain, usually in small states. In Transparency International’s 2021 index of public corruption, the top 10 least corrupt countries include just one large member, Germany. Of the rest—Denmark, Finland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Singapore, Sweden, and Switzerland—only Sweden has a population exceeding 10m.
The group which formed around economist Yegor Gaidar, Yeltsin’s first prime minister, believed that markets would produce an efficient allocation of goods and rewards. But they also believed they had little choice. After the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, the sudden imposition of state controls had led to the disappearance of food from shops, as peasants hoarded their produce. As a result, relatively free market relations were licensed by Lenin’s “New Economic Programme” during the 1920s. Without liberalisation, Russia’s post-communist elites realised, the systems of production and distribution would simply seize up again. I was a reporter in Moscow at the time, and I remember walking around a supermarket, the shelves of which bore just one commodity—a much-reviled kind of canned fish. During a panicky interview, a Moscow city official told me that hundreds of thousands of battery chickens were dying in their coops for lack of feed.
At a public school in the state of Victoria, one parent relates that a Queer Club newsletter included a link to a petition asking for gender-affirming surgery to be given taxpayer funding. Another parent wrote: “My child came home from school one day and said they would ‘like to try it.’ Being the opposite sex that is! TRY IT!”
“It’s enraging,” she added. “My child was eight, and had no understanding that sex is immutable or that once surgery is performed it cannot be reversed. Child abuse has many faces.”
A lot of this is being paid for by loans. Poland just signed a deal, another deal, for $6 billion dollars worth of M1 Abrams tanks. The primary reason we continued in the war in Afghanistan for so long, was because it was making money... We know from The Afghan Papers, that the policy makers in the military understood that it was a fiasco, but they just kept going, I think, because of profits. And of course, they’re ginning up conflicts with China. These people need the specter of a conflict, in order to justify those massive expenditures.
I don’t believe that Putin would’ve invaded the Ukraine, if we had honored our commitments with the collapse of the Soviet Union, not to expand NATO. The whole expansion of NATO, which never made any geopolitical sense, was about enriching the arms industry. It became a multi-billion-dollar bonanza. That’s what drove it.
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/tk-mashup-the-media-campaign-to-protectOne common refrain in recent weeks is the idea that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has caused us to rediscover the real life-and-death lessons of history. Joel Kotkin and Hügo Krüger have even predicted a return to “something resembling the ‘Great Game’ of the 19th century.” But many culture warriors are too deep into their own ideological silos to understand how high the stakes in this game have become. Because of the way we now get our news, genuine crises and catastrophes compete for attention in our feeds alongside everyday gossip, bickering, and propaganda. Every new input is mechanically valued in the currency of virality, and processed against pre-existing ideological commitments. Indeed, some of the most unsettling reactions to Putin’s aggression have emerged among those who seem too busy fighting the culture wars to notice that a *real* war has broken out.
In confirming that federal prosecutors are treating as “authenticated” the Biden emails, the Times story applies the final dollop of clown makeup to Wolf Blitzer, Lesley Stahl, Christiane Amanpour, Brian Stelter, and countless other hapless media stooges, many starring in Matt Orfalea’s damning montage above (the Hunter half-laugh is classic, by the way). All cooperated with intelligence officials to dismiss a damaging story about Biden’s abandoned laptop and his dealings with the corrupt Ukrainian energy company Burisma as “Russian disinformation.” They tossed in terms thought up for them by spooks as if they were their own thoughts, using words like “obviously” and “classic” and “textbook” to describe “the playbook of Russian disinformation,” in what itself was and still is a wildly successful disinformation campaign, one begun well before the much-derided (and initially censored) New York Post exposé on the topic from October of 2020.
Not to be petty, but — well, yes, let’s be petty, just a little, and point out that many of the people who were the most pompous about this story turned out to be the most wrong, including the conga line of Intercept editors and staffers who essentially knocked Glenn Greenwald all the way to Substack over the issue. There are more important things going on in the world, but for sheer bootlicking conformist excess and depraved journalist-on-journalist venom the “Russian disinformation” fiasco has no equal, and probably needs recording for posterity before it’s memory-holed [...]
Hayden also shat all over Risen in his book, gleefully describing the time he got Condoleezza Rice to appeal to Times editors Phil Taubman and Bill Keller to “scotch” Risen’s eventual Pulitzer-winning story about domestic surveillance. The pressure Hayden applied to the Times in getting the Risen story killed in 2004 was part of what inspired Snowden to come forward, which in turn led to the creation of the Intercept, as Risen himself later wrote about. By 2020, Hayden’s bogus letter about the “classic trademarks of Russian disinformation” succeeded in convincing scores of media outlets to “scotch” the laptop story, with Risen among the dupes and Reed and Maass playing the roles of Taubman and Keller. Despite the fact that the Intercept had thrown in with the intelligence official perhaps most associated with opposing their founding mission, Reed had the stones to say Greenwald was the one who “strayed from his original journalistic roots” by refusing to bite on the “disinformation” hook.
Critics and columnists who nod with approval at the latest “revisionist” Western film or novel are usually comparing it to an archetype of that most masculine and conservative of fiction genres; simple-minded morality tales of manhood’s vindication, populated by strong white heterosexual males defending terrified homesteaders from shrieking Indians on horseback. But the genre is and has always been much richer than that. Authors and filmmakers have been creating Western stories that feature sex workers, gender issues, Asian protagonists, homosexuality, sociopathic antiheroes, irreverent humor, and moral ambivalence for as long as the genre has existed. Anyone who thinks any of this stuff is new is simply betraying their unfamiliarity with the subject of their article. You don’t need to re-invent, re-imagine, or re-purpose the genre in order to make it inclusive of a wide variety of stories. It has been telling those stories ever since the West was won.
What went wrong? The Fed is supposed to have the world’s smartest economists and access to the best financial information. How could they make the greatest monetary policy mistake since the 1970s?
Part of the answer lies with the Fed’s economic models, which are rooted in Keynesian analysis in which demand trumps all. The Fed models give little thought to incentives for or barriers to the supply-side. As finance scholar Emre Kuvvet wrote recently on these pages, among economists in the Federal Reserve System, Democrats outnumbered Republicans by 10.4 to 1 in 2021. They prefer James Tobin over Milton Friedman.
This leads the Fed to overestimate the growth effect of federal spending but underestimate the growth benefits of regulatory and tax reform. For years after the 2008-2009 recession, the Fed’s governors and regional bank presidents predicted faster GDP growth than what happened. But they missed the faster growth after the 2017 tax reform.
Now the city will have to try to solve another massive problem that it has inflicted upon itself. It seems that local politicos have been so eager to shun others who don’t share their views on transgender policy, voting procedures and abortion availability that they have prevented themselves from doing business in much of the country—this country, not Russia.
“SF is now boycotting most of the United States,” says a headline at San Francisco’s news site Mission Local. Reporter Joe Eskenazi, who seems to support the spirit of the boycotts, nevertheless explains why the sanctions regime presents a challenge for the city:
"San Francisco can’t forge the parts it needs to keep its buses running, fix its buildings or run its computers. It has to buy things, lots of things, from elsewhere.San Francisco makes this hard. It makes it expensive. A March 4 memorandum from City Administrator Carmen Chu reveals that San Francisco will not enter into contracts with businesses headquartered in most of the United States — 28 states in all. Official travel to those states is also forbidden. And this list includes some surprises: Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Wisconsin.As a result of this vast boycott, San Francisco is constraining the number of businesses it can ink deals with, which all but certainly inhibits quality and drives up costs. It also adds onerous time constraints to the contracting process, which leads to poor outcomes and also drives up costs.“It limits our ability to procure products and receive services and contract services we need to run,” explains Chu. “It limits competition for our work.”"
But that won’t be enough. Progress has stalled in two major areas of harm reduction—opioid abuse and smoking—not because of physician resistance but because of non-physicians drunk on ideology. For example, more than two-thirds of physicians now believe electronic cigarettes can help people stop smoking. Yet more than two-thirds of counselors at smoking quick-stop centers discourage callers from trying these products. Although the counselors lack a medical education, they do have an ideology that prejudices them against vaping. Anti-vaping ideology is more popular on the political Left than on the Right. Ideologues on the political Right discourage opioid harm reduction by demanding jail time, or at best treatment centers, for substance abusers.
Politicians with an agenda, health professionals with a one-sided passion, and front-line workers with little medical education embrace these ideologies with enough vehemence to bring progress on tobacco and opioid harm reduction to a halt. Simply teaching doctors about harm reduction won’t be enough. History shows that a popular ideology was typically needed to sweep away resistance to health reform. Doctors themselves could not do it. If anything, doctors were usually behind the curve.
Rep. Malliotakis contends that funding prevention centers will distract from attacking the opioid epidemic’s “root cause.” Her choice of words is interesting, as the phrase “root cause” is also a popular catchphrase on the ideological Left (as when attacking the “root cause” of poverty). In each case, the phrase symbolizes a complex political outlook grounded in the hope that someday a hidden reality behind a difficult social problem will be exposed and easily corrected, leading to a better life for all. Whenever the phrase “root cause” is spoken, it usually indicates the workings of a significant ideological current. Rarely, however, are “root causes” actually found. Life is simply too complicated to have a single root cause for anything.
When HSBC got caught laundering over $800 million for groups like the mass-murdering Sinaloa drug cartel, no government official asked any financial companies to “review their relationships” with Europe’s largest bank. Nobody leaned on any firms to stop doing business with Too Big to Fail scumlords who laundered money for terrorists, gouged customers in a foreign exchange scam, manipulated energy prices in California, or did any of a thousand other serious things.
The more furiously they played at speech Whac-a-Mole, the more BadThink they found, usually in the form of people protesting their crackdowns. Disallowing all discussion of Stop the Steal somehow didn’t prevent people from believing the election was stolen, nor did removing Donald Trump from Twitter, but these people kept pushing harder. Maybe, Sullivan and others wondered, Fox should be banned, even if Fox had actually called the election for Biden? Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe is currently arguing Fox broadcasts are treason; sooner or later, there will be a serious effort to yank the channel from the air, because these people are delusional enough to think an extreme move like that would change hearts and minds. The situation long ago passed the point of absurdity.
"[Russians] live very poor lives. If they have sanctions, nothing is going to change in their lives because they already have nothing. They have natural gas they are selling to many countries, but many of them don't have gas at home. Our living conditions are much better here in Ukraine, and maybe that's the reason why they want to destroy everything here, because Ukraine makes Russia look bad; they don't want us to develop.
That's not to say that what Oudomsine did wasn't thoroughly immoral and plainly dumb. But a three-year stay in federal lock-up (where there is no parole) is absurdly harsh, particularly when considering that he already forfeited the card to law enforcement, that he will have to pay almost $100,000 in restitution and fines, and that the federal government also cannot be trusted to be adequate stewards of the same funds Oudomsine deceitfully pulled from.
The LME closed trading in nickel after a huge run-up in prices inflicted severe financial pressure on producers that had sold nickel forwards on the LME as a hedge. The biggest loser was Tsingshan Holding Group, the world’s largest nickel producer, which had built up the biggest short position in the metal.
At Monday’s prices, the company was sitting on a paper loss of $8 billion, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Several high-speed trading firms, however, said the cancellation of trades made the LME a less attractive place to trade. They said companies would be less likely to trade in volatile markets if there is a chance their transactions could be busted, which in turn could spur more volatility.
“The number-one rule is never, ever cancel trades,” said Don Wilson, chief executive of Chicago-based trading firm DRW, which trades on the LME and had a position in nickel canceled. “Every other exchange in the universe gets that.”
It’s the old argument from cultural evolution: tradition is the repository of what worked for past generations. Perhaps you are very smart and can beat past generations. Or perhaps you are an idiot, you think “I can do lots of cocaine-fueled orgies, because I will just calculate the pros and cons of each line of cocaine / potential sex partner as I encounter them, and reject the ones that come out negative”, and then one time you forget to carry the one and end up in a bathtub minus a kidney. This was basically how Communism went too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HolodomorSnyder put the total death toll in the "Bloodlands" at 14 million victims of both Stalin and Hitler, including Jewish civilians transported to German camps in occupied Poland during World War II, Polish intelligentsia killed in war crimes such as in the Katyn massacre, disarmed military personnel in occupied countries and prisoners of war. Snyder pointed out that "I am not counting soldiers who died on the fields of battle", saying that this "is not a complete reckoning of all the death that Soviet and German power brought to the region."
Some scholars believe that the famine was planned by Joseph Stalin to eliminate a Ukrainian independence movement. Others suggest that the man-made famine was a consequence of Soviet industrialisation.
Heather, the waitress, was another young woman whose face appeared to have nothing written on it. Yet her unscarred face belied another horrific story. One of four whites in a high school of 400, she married an Indian at age 19 and was now 21 and getting a divorce.
"I didn't realize it, but my husband had a violent temper. Spouse abuse is quite common in the tribe, both by men against women and even vice versa. I'm going back to college now. My father gave me a taste for reading, and I was a star in high school before marriage derailed everything."
As I left, I noticed a sign by the counter: "Expecting the world to treat you fairly because you are good is like expecting the bull not to charge because you are a vegetarian."
It is one thing for YouTube to ban people who are making false claims. It is quite another for YouTube to prohibit people from educating their viewers about the reality that the former president is still spreading these false claims. But the policy makes no distinction: It treats the report about misinformation as misinformation itself unless clearly labeled—even in a video where no commentary is being offered at all.
YouTube is a private company, of course, and it's free to design whatever policies it wants. No one is owed a video channel. But I don't think most people are aware of just how vast the misinformation policy has become. I understood that the platform would punish content creators who made false statements about the election. I had no idea that YouTube would punish news channels for reporting the news.
"And we see it looks like Ukraine is putting up a hell of a fight and because all the aid coming in, as far as weapons and equipment. Russia's stalled out on the side of the road with no gas for the tanks and troops with no food. And then the nuclear thing. Is Putin going to nuke us just to get rid of Ukrainians? We watched his speech. He wants to get rid of Ukrainians. He doesn't like them. It's like the new Jews. It's scary.
https://philip.greenspun.com/writing/reading.htmlAfter returning home, I had high expectations for social gatherings. I figured my great stories from the road would make me the life of the party. In reality, I'd lost the social skills necessary to survive in Cambridge, as underscored one evening when 40 people came over to my house to see some slides.
Matthew asked me what I learned on my trip.
"One thing I learned was how narrow my experience of people had been. For example, I had my first real conversation with someone with AIDS on this trip. In Utah..."
Susan interrupted: "A lot of the people you know, even some of the people here tonight, probably have AIDS; you just don't realize it."
I was never able to tell anyone what I'd learned from Arthur because my introduction challenged one of Susan's cherished beliefs, i.e., that a large percentage of upper middle-class men who are neither gay nor IV drug users carried the HIV virus. She could not wait until the end of the story to put in her two cents' worth, but had to make sure that I aligned my beliefs with hers before she would let me continue.
Initially, I thought that Susan just had a bee in her bonnet. However, at two other gatherings I tried telling the same story. In both cases, a thirtysomething Jewish woman interrupted me at the same point for the same reason.
The inability of Bostonians to cope with differences of philosophy was driven home one night at the Harvest bar in Harvard Square. Bruce, Henry, and I were going over old times when Jackie, an acquaintance of Bruce's, and Roberto, her Chilean boyfriend, sat down next to us.
Bruce congratulated Jackie, a trim brunette in a stylish suit, for having just been on the cover of a travel agent's trade magazine. Jackie works for a consulting company. She gets paid big bucks to dress nicely, fly around, and tell companies how to make their benefits packages more "family friendly."
What was the subject of the article?
"It is about the difficulties that minorities have traveling."
Er... How is her situation relevant?
"I'm half-Japanese."
Wouldn't they have been better off choosing someone from a minority group with a lower-than-average income, perhaps someone black or Puerto Rican?
"Why do you say, that?" Jackie asked with a hostile edge in her voice.
"Most businesses' primary objective is getting money out of customers, so I would think that someone who looked poor would get worse treatment. By contrast, Michael Jackson would probably get treated better than any of us for the same reason," I theorized.
Roberto was furious.
"Are you saying that only blacks are minorities?"
To deny someone the victimhood status of "minority" was apparently an unforgivable sin. Jackie went on to relate how she'd been a victim of prejudice her entire life. She'd been teased in elementary school, treated badly by service businesses, and denied jobs. Against this bleak background, she admitted that Jews and Asians were comparatively lucky.
"We're allowed to pass by white society. If we have enough money, they let us buy houses in their neighborhoods. But they never fully accept us."
Henry, born and raised in Hong Kong, piped up, "that proves that it is classism and wealthism, not simply racism."
"That doesn't prove anything. If you get bad service, you might not chalk it up to racism." Jackie's philosophy was that any bad treatment should be put down to racism unless otherwise accounted for. Thus, nearly every day provided for her more evidence that Americans are full of bad will.
"This nation is full of anti-Semitism [a German word I don't like to use; it was coined in the late 19th century to replace the simpler "Jew-hatred" to make the feeling seem more scientific and hence acceptable to educated Germans]. Doesn't your own experience confirm this?" Jackie asked.
"I just drove 15,000 miles around North America and encountered a few people who said things that most Cantabrigians would consider shockingly anti-Semitic. However, these people had never had any experience with Jews. Despite knowing that I was Jewish, they were happy to take me into their homes and feed me. Their prejudices didn't affect their actions or their openness to learn about people. So I would have to say that it didn't matter much. I just hoped that someday they'd learn more about Jews and change their opinions."
"What about the Nazis?" Jackie asked. "Would you say that they would have been nice people if only they'd actually met a few Jews? I used to live in Frankfurt and there was one school with a few Jewish students. They had to have guards with machine guns outside because there was so much hatred from the Germans."
Jackie had a good point there. I probably sounded a bit too much like Candide. I reviewed the situation: Jackie was hurt that I'd presumed to deny her minority victim status and angry that I was too obtuse to see Americans as full of hatred. If tolerance was good in her feminist-liberal worldview, why was she upset with me for not hating my fellow Americans?
Before I could finish this thought, Henry observed that he'd "traveled quite a bit through the Far East and North America and noticed that the U.S. has very little discrimination and a lot of talk about discrimination, while the Far East is the opposite."
"A lot of clubs in Tokyo hang `Japanese Only' signs out front," Bruce added.
Henry continued, "Prejudice isn't bad. If you've met nine Jews and have found them untrustworthy and say that there is a 90% chance the next Jew you meet won't be trustworthy, that's good. But if you say that there is no chance the next Jew I meet can be trusted, that's bad. If you are willing to give people a chance, it doesn't matter what your prejudices are."
Jackie ignored Henry's radical position and focused on me as the prime heretic. I tried to soothe her by saying that I considered Anti-Jewish prejudice a problem, just not a significant one.
"In Civilization and its Discontents, Freud divided the sources of pain in life into three categories..."
Before I could explain Freud's thesis that the pain that one gets from problems with loved ones is in another category from the pain inflicted by strangers and society, Jackie stopped me.
"I won't listen to anything having to do with Freud--he thought women had penis envy."
The range of expressed opinion in Cambridge is broader than in a small town, but the range of opinion that any given person is prepared to hear is much narrower. All across America, I had seen people sit down and listen to each other even when they were on opposite sides of an issue. In Cambridge, people with slight political differences can barely get through a cocktail party together.
https://philip.greenspun.com/samantha/samantha-IIThe famous University of Pennsylvania "water buffalo" case is here. MIT puts in a fairly impressive showing, notably our decision to pay administrators to watch porn movies to decide whether they were obscene. Under this policy, proposed in 1984, Dean James Tewhey prosecuted an MIT undergrad for showing Deep Throat, a film held by the Massachusetts courts to be acceptable under Cambridge's community standards. Under MIT rules, the undergrad, Adam Dershowitz, was not entitled to legal representation before the MIT Committee on Discipline (COD). However, he could bring a relative, so he asked his uncle, Alan Dershowitz, to come down the street from Harvard Law School. This resulted in an acquittal for young Dershowitz and some changes in MIT policy. COD hearings would no longer be open to the student press, students would no longer be entitled to bring a relative, and it would henceforth be forbidden to tape-record proceedings.[...]Kors is a scholar and Silverglate is a civil rights lawyer. So the book differs from what a journalist might have written in the provision of philosophical and legal underpinnings for all of the newsworthy cases. Most interestingly, the roots of speech limits on campus are traced back to Herbert Marcuse (the only philosopher ever to appear on the cover of TIME Magazine). Marcuse argued that as long as society was oppressed by the powerful, free speech does not help the weak. True toleration and liberation could only be achieved by withdrawing "toleration of speech and assembly from groups and movements which promote aggressive policies, armament, chauvinism, discrimination on the grounds of race and religion, or which oppose the extension of public services, social security, medicare care, etc."
I was recommending the book to a friend and she asked "Who is it written for?" We thought about it for awhile. It can't be the administrators because they presumably enjoy the status quo. It can't be the students because they are just passing through the university in order to pick up a credential. It can't be the professors because they've mostly abdicated control of the university to the administrators. Most faculty see themselves either as employees of a bureaucracy vastly more powerful than themselves or as low-grade autonomous entrepreneurs only loosely connected to the university.
In fact, there might not be anyone in the United States whose has both the power and the inclination to redress any of the wrongs outlined in the 400 pages of The Shadow University. That is a thought much scarier than any in the book itself.
International youth finally appeared at the youth hostel. An Australian couple, an English girl, and two German girls were sitting out on the front stoop discussing America.
"America has the worst racists in the world, and the press covers it up," noted the English girl. "Just read Noam Chomsky."
"I don't know," said an Australian. "I've lived there for a year and found that a black guy with a college degree and a middle class car is treated like a middle class person; someone of any race who looks and speaks like a member of the underclass is treated badly."
"Well, that's even worse then, isn't it? They only evaluate people on the basis of how much money they have," retorted the English girl with a triumphant expression.
He then spoke for several minutes about his own ethnic background. He reminded me that he was Jewish, and told me that both of his parents had put up with a lot of antisemitic discrimination in their universities and workplaces. Back then, they were regarded as “non-white” and were discriminated against as a result; now (ironically) he was considered “white” and was being discriminated against on that basis.
Meanwhile, the House of Commons' sitting to debate emergency measures on Friday was shut down due to the police operation near Parliament Hill. As renowned American law professor Jonathan Turley said, “The House of Commons just postponed debating Trudeau’s emergency powers because he is using his emergency powers near the Parliament to clear protesters. It is like postponing a war powers vote because there is a war going on.”
The justification for these emergency measures has relied on elaborate exaggeration. Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland defended the government's actions due to Canada's democracy itself allegedly being under threat. She said, "A liberal democracy must be prepared to defend itself."
It remains unclear how the Freedom Convoy demonstrations posed any grave threat. They have not once risen to widespread violence, looting, or civil unrest. They didn’t promote ideological extremism or discrimination of any kind. They were oriented towards the opposite, insisting that no one should be discriminated against based on their vaccination status.
In order to replace the West as it is, Marcuse finds the key in—what else?—sexual liberation. He claims, contrary to all historical evidence, that sexual liberation could absorb the human instinct for destruction (chapter six). Drawing on Freud, he also maintains, similarly, that reproduction, and hence the familial structure, is a socially enforced by-product of sexuality, whose primary function is actually the attainment of pleasure (chapter two). Here, I can only bear witness to how far philosophy has fallen from Plato’s Symposium, the text that truly understood what sex is; it is itself an expression of sexual repression to suggest that our desire for sexual pleasure is entirely unrelated to the drive toward self-replication.
That is to say, modern arts are not rebelliously heroic, but rather spoiled elements that, through a lack of repression, are as frivolously antagonistic as they please. That in itself is fine, but it means that they do not stand against the social order at all, contrary to what their creators and Marcuse would like to believe, but are, precisely, a confirmation thereof. Modern art is what it is because society lets it, and has stopped caring about it. And so, both when it comes to sex and art, what Marcuse views as a fight against Western oppression is in fact a manifestation of Western permissiveness. Many modern oikophobes are plagued by all these errors even today.
One can say about the Frankfurt School what is later to be said of the French postmodernists, namely that they are mostly wrong; and that in the instances where they are right, they are really just belaboring the utterly obvious.
But there lurks here a counterintuitive and potentially existential problem. When free citizens are deprived of the experience of self-governance, they are at particular risk of retreating into the necessary management of their own lives. They too easily lose interest in cooperating with their neighbors or working to maintain critical aspects of their environment. Entrusting citizens with the management of local affairs, Tocqueville observed, would encourage awareness of and concern for public welfare, and provide a bulwark against apathy.
The revolution of 1991 was really a greed-fueled intelligence mutiny, in which a collection of senior communists and KGB officers worked with Western partners to dismantle the Soviet Union. A happy by-product was that these insiders got to act as the bulwark to counter-revolution by privatizing the country’s wealth into their own hands, becoming the billionaire owners of obscene mega-yachts and jets and sports teams like Chelsea football and the future Brooklyn Nets. They became the instant-coffee elites whose personal investment in the survival of their states’ institutions are a consistent element of modern neoliberal democracies everywhere.
Instead of explaining this, Western reporter colleagues based in Moscow sent mountains of stories home about Russia’s “remarkable progress” (the term regularly used by the West’s aid community) toward a free-market, Western-style paradise. They churned out hagiographic profiles of the English-speaking, often Western-educated politicians like Anatoly Chubais, the aforementioned Gaidar, Maxim Boyko, and other architects of Yeltsin’s transition. The crucial events were the privatizations of Soviet industry, conducted at every step with the counsel of American (and specifically Harvard-trained) economists. These transactions were often described as “rough” or “bumpy.” Some of the more corrupt episodes, like the loans-for-shares auctions in which the Yeltsin government lent cronies money needed to buy controlling stakes in companies the size of Exxon or AT&T for pennies on the dollar, were described using mind-boggling euphemisms like “relatively fair” (the Washington Post formulation) or “relative transparency” (Euromoney, in naming Chubais “Central Banker of the Year”).
A scene I’ll never forget, from around the time of these privatizations: stopping for a smoke at a railroad station past midnight in a random factory town en route to Cherepovets, and meeting a row of female plant workers who’d been paid in drinking glasses. Their longshot method of getting paid involved trying to exchange glasses for cash in the middle of the night on the train platform to passing travelers. I bought every available glass, but my traveling companion, a Russian circus clown named Alexei, offered to pay double for one set if the women would smash them. The mostly older babushki looked like Satchel Paige hurling their wares against a concrete wall
https://betonit.blog/Politically, while the rationalist and libertarian ideals that I cherish were never close to dominant, the landscape still looked markedly better in 2005. With the collapse of the Soviet bloc still recent, socialism remained beyond the pale where it belongs. And at least in the U.S., free-market economics seemed to have a place at the table. George W. Bush even called for quite radical deregulation of immigration, albeit with little persistence. Putin did not yet seem like the dictator of Russia. China still looked like it was liberalizing. Globally, it was not yet obvious that after the collapse of the Soviet bloc, political progress was practically over. I never thought the War on Terror would end successfully or even smoothly, but the rise of the ISIS and the return of the Taliban startled me. And while I was not shocked by the Covid pandemic – far worse plagues have happened before – I remain horrified by the reaction. In 2005, I would have predicted a shutdown of two weeks before life roughly returned to normal. So far, I’m off by a factor of fifty.
Men and women are fundamentally different when it comes to sex. Humans are the only species in which it has been established that females have orgasms at all. Male orgasms, on the other hand, are universal. From an evolutionary perspective, the reason for this ought to be obvious: If the male doesn’t orgasm during copulation, there will be no offspring. And since the female orgasm is not essential to reproduction, it’s not surprising that natural selection didn’t ensure that females are as preoccupied as males with orgasmic sex. Those males most preoccupied by sexual desire tended to optimize their reproductive success and have, therefore, left more copies of their genes behind. They are our ancestors; our genes are the surviving copies of their genes. The genes of less sexually preoccupied males have largely disappeared from the human gene pool.[...]By the time he achieved wealth and status, and the power that came with them, Harvey was in a position to sate himself and he did so. In this respect, he was not especially unusual. The lines of obese patrons at the McDonald’s counter offer prima facie evidence of the fact that many people become pathologically self-indulgent when provided with the opportunity to do so. More than 40 percent of adult Americans are obese, and the Harvard School of Public Health predicts that the number will rise to more than 50 percent in less than 10 years!
A 2012 study of sex offender recidivism in Connecticut found that “The sexual recidivism rates for the 746 sex offenders released in 2005 are much lower than what many in the public have been led to expect or believe. These low re-offense rates appear to contradict a conventional wisdom that sex offenders have very high sexual re-offense rates.” A 2015 Wisconsin study found that “The two core findings pertaining to lower rates of recidivism for sex offenders when compared to the overall offender population and the considerably low sexual recidivism rates have strong empirical support within the research literature.”
So, why does almost everyone believe the opposite? Why is someone like Harvey Weinstein (who isn’t even in the same league of horror as many of the men I’ve seen completely turn their lives around) considered irredeemable? Unfortunately, it is because a lot of misinformation about sex offenders has come to be accepted as fact.
In 1986, an article by Robert Longo in Psychology Today stated (without reference to any supportive data or scientific research) that “Most untreated sex offenders go on to commit more offenses, indeed as many as 80 percent do.” That article was then referenced in a manual published by the US Department of Justice. And, on the basis of that manual, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in a 2002 SCOTUS decision that sex criminals pose “a frightening and high risk of recidivism” and that “the rate of recidivism of untreated offenders has been estimated to be as high as 80 percent.” Justice Kennedy repeated the “frightening and high” claim in a subsequent decision the following year.
We now inhabit a Schizo-PC world. On one hand, women are encouraged to make themselves as attractive as possible. On the other, we find it crude and even criminally offensive when men openly acknowledge their ubiquitous and often overwhelming sexual arousal. In order to create a path to redemption for sex offenders, we must acknowledge that male sexual misconduct is a terrible and common problem. In such a culture, we could help adolescent boys to acknowledge the extent of their desires and to distinguish between what they desire and what is acceptable. In the current climate, however, a young man would be insane to openly discuss the full extent of his desires.
If you read the nonsense written about sex offenders, sooner or later you’ll encounter the claim that rape and sexual abuse are about power, not sex. It is certainly true that sex offenders often employ violence, intimidation, and/or authority to coerce and manipulate their victims into compliance. It is also true that, for the victim, the experience of sexual abuse is about power—or rather, powerlessness. For rape victims, the experience may range from appalling disgust to abject terror, neither of which could be called a sexual experience.
Nevertheless, for the vast majority of offenders, the goal is sexual gratification, and they would not employ force if they could obtain consent. As the Monster put it in Mel Brooks’s 1974 comedy, Young Frankenstein:
> For as long as I can remember people have ... looked at my face and my body and they ran away in horror. In my loneliness I decided that if I could not inspire love, which is my deepest hope, I would instead cause fear.
With the exception of sexual sadists, a very rare minority of offenders for whom arousal is contingent upon their victim’s suffering, what sex offenders really want is to be welcomed, invited, and encouraged by the objects of their sexual desire. Even the vast majority of violent rapists, whose crimes can be quite horrific, wish they could obtain voluntary compliance, because the height of male orgasmic joy is attained not by violent domination but by loving sex.
What the offender gets instead is the consolation prize, which he actively seeks because his intense sexual hunger makes consolation feel better than nothing, at least for a moment. During a rape, when the victim is obviously suffering, the rapist abandons his impossible dream and focuses on the raw pleasure of using the woman as an unloved object for his sexual release. But a surprising number then feel ashamed or guilty and apologize immediately after the act. Others resort to delusional rationalizations (called “cognitive distortions” in the sex offender treatment business), and convince themselves that the victim actually “wanted it,” or that she was teasing him and so “she got what she deserved.”
https://twitter.com/pwafork/status/1492364591279783936Professor Surber feels undervalued by the base calculus of the market and clearly he’s essential to the working of the world. How can it be that doctors and engineers are thought more valuable more than him, a professor of philosophy? Society must be transformed to correct this abomination. To illustrate the magnitude of the injustice at hand, the professor shifts from resentment to self-congratulation:
> A second reason that liberal-arts professors tend to be politically liberal is that they have very likely studied large-scale historical processes and complex cultural dynamics.
Studies that must – simply must - lead one to the higher plains of the left. Note the implicit conceit that non-leftist outlooks lead to simplistic conclusions, unlike those who turn by default to the state and its enlargement.
> Most of those in the liberal arts have concluded that there really isn’t any other intellectually respectable way to interpret the broad contours of history and culture. They are liberal, in other words, by deliberate and reasoned choice, based upon the best available evidence.
As explained in the Massachusetts chapter of Real World Divorce, child support can be collected until a child turns 23, and, as in all other states, is tax-free. How profitable is child support? By formula (2013-2017 guidelines), $40,000 per year can be obtained from a defendant earning $250,000 per year. However, the actual costs of a child can be collected on top of that $40,000, such as health insurance, day care or nanny, and a child's cash expenses. Subtracting the USDA-estimated $8000 per year incidental costs of a child, such as housing and food, each child yields only a $32,000 per year profit. Thus a woman would need to have two children in Massachusetts with $250,000-per-year defendants in order to exceed the after-tax personal spending power of a mid-career PhD biochemist. However, the present value of the child support plaintiff's earnings are larger because the income stream can start at age 18 or younger and does not require any investment in college or graduate school. [...]A divorce litigator put it a little more simply: "There is no reason for a woman to go to medical school. If she wants to have the spending power of a doctor she can just have sex with three doctors."
A Tennessee woman was sentenced last month to six years and one day in prison for illegally registering to vote while on probation. Given the nature of the offense, that punishment has been widely characterized as unnecessarily harsh by activists, advocacy groups, and the prosecutor who sought it.
One of these things is not like the other. But while Shelby County District Attorney Amy Weirich agrees that prison term isn't proportional to the offense, she says it is justified for a different reason: the defendant, Pamela Moses, insisted on going to trial.
"I gave her a chance to plead to a misdemeanor with no prison time," Weirich said in a statement. "She requested a jury trial instead. She set this unfortunate result in motion and a jury of her peers heard the evidence and convicted her."
Six years of freedom is quite the steep price to pay for exercising her constitutional right to trial.
In January, as reporters were celebrating the first woman—and also the first transgender person—to win more than a million dollars on Jeopardy!, I was reading up on the discrimination still faced by biological women who toil away in my own fields of endeavor: anthropology and archaeology.
Perhaps, as the Daily Mail wrote, the “the US Secret Service, CIA and the Pentagon” really did receive an “exceptionally detailed” Russian invasion plan. But none of the reports that leaked out of that secret-but-not telemeeting hinted at the source. We knew the Americans claimed to have details, and told lots of people about them, but there wasn’t much on the backup front. Since no one in Western politics or the press picked up on this, and instead as usual swallowed the story without skepticism, it was left to the person perhaps most directly affected by the news, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, to try to pop the panic balloon.
On February 12th, Zelensky addressed the media in a half-sarcastic, half-seething monologue. “I think there’s too much out there about a full-scale war from Russia, and people are even naming dates,” he said, with undisguised contempt directed at the West. “All this information only creates panic, it doesn’t help us.”
Moving from there to salo-thick sarcasm, the former actor and comic made a faux request to reporters for help with the sourcing on the invasion claim. “If you or anyone else has extra information about the 100% invasion of Russia starting on the 16th, please, give it to us,” he said. Zelensky all but read out an 800 number as he spoke. [...]Zelensky might as well have announced that he was planning to celebrate the Russian invasion with a Scottish log toss festival. Under massive stress, and clearly both peeved and suspicious about being left out of the informational loop on the prediction front despite being president of the would-be invasion target, he was mocking American messaging with as much venom as he could muster. Next to sending skywriters to spell REPORTERS FUCK OFF!!! over Kyiv, he couldn’t have been more clear in saying that whatever America was trying to achieve with the February 16th “prediction,” it wasn’t helping.
The message flew straight over the heads of our intrepid news hounds. One outlet after the next began reporting that Zelensky — by repeating information that, remember, originally came from them — had essentially just confirmed the date of the invasion. A chyron on CNN blared, ZELENSKY: UKRAINE HAS BEEN INFORMED THAT FEBRUARY 16TH WILL BE THE DAY OF THE ATTACK. International correspondent Matthew Chance even said later in the day that Zelensky’s remarks were “interpreted in some circles as confirmation” of an imminent invasion.
If you didn’t screen-grab headlines that day, you’ll need to whip out your Wayback Machine, since a few more embarrassing efforts have been scrubbed. The Hill’s initial story, “Zelensky says Ukraine has been informed Feb. 16th is the day of the attack,” now reads, “Ukrainian president declares ‘day of unity’ amid fears of Russian attack.”
More importantly, at what point should people recoil from being told they’re being used to deliver messages that may or may not be true to the likes of Vladimir Putin? “Information warfare” assumes a compliant press and audiences willing to shelve their own interests in knowing what’s going on for the sake of a larger geopolitical “tabletop exercise.”
It’s bad enough knowing this is the subtext of news coverage, but for officials to announce it and expect everyone to salute? It’s nuts. A big reason we’re supposed to be an improvement over Putin’s Russia is that we don’t use the news media as an instrument of “information warfare.” Moreover, at least Russian reporters don’t have much choice in being conscripted for this duty. What’s the excuse of Westerners who broadcast Langley gibberish on command?
When one of Zelensky’s aides, Mykhailo Podoliak, was forced to make the should-have-been-unnecessary statement that Zelensky through his Facebook post was in fact taking a colossal dump on Western politicians and their media servants, journos huddled, kill-circle style, and came up with a new wrong story to explain his behavior. It was now claimed Zelensky had “walked back” his February 14th words.
“IMPORTANT UPDATE from @JoshNBCNews: Walkback from Kyiv,” tweeted NBC’s Tom Winter. Newsweek deadpanned, “Ukraine’s Zelensky Says Russian Attack is February 16, Adviser Backtracks.” Other outlets, like Forbes magazine, rushed up headlines saying things like, “Ukraine’s President Predicts Russia Will Attack This Week As Tensions Mount—But Aides Say He Was Joking.”
The last line, about how Zelensky should stick to classics like “Take Crimea, please,” reads like Neera Tanden doing Noël Coward, which is to say it’s as close to the mathematical absolute of unfunny as you’ll see in print.
After Karl Rove summoned Lewis to brief the Bush White House, our leaders began talking about how dialogue with the Middle East was impossible. As theirs was a failed culture and ours a successful one, they would always hate us. Therefore, listening to why they hate us was unnecessary, since from a practical standpoint, the only way to end the “axiomatic” hatred was to make their societies less failure-ridden, i.e. more like us.
From there, they embarked upon a conscious strategy of not taking into consideration what other peoples or countries might think, as they launched their ingenious plan to turn Mesopotamia into Arizona by force.
A child could have grasped that invading Iraq, devastating its cities with “Shock and Awe” tactics, and scooping its citizens off the streets to God knows where to be waterboarded or worse, was only going to spawn a new generation of committed adversaries. Only people with heads as far up their own backsides as Karl Rove, David Frum, George W. Bush, Richard Perle, and Donald Rumsfeld could talk themselves into believing an entire region would accept without objections the stated rationale of our presence, as in, “Yes, we blew up your Dad yesterday, but in the long run, you’ll have voting and supermarkets!”
In the Bush years, thanks to people like Rove, the sensible or at least intellectually defensible concept, “We don’t negotiate with terrorists,” morphed into the much broader idea that it’s no longer necessary to understand the thinking of any adversary or oppositional group. It’s where the now-hegemonic idea that talking is weakness and not talking is strength was born.
Early in the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama ripped this Bush administration innovation, saying:
> The notion that somehow not talking to countries is punishment to them — which has been the guiding diplomatic principle of this administration — is ridiculous.
His primary opponent Hillary Clinton cried foul, saying it was “very irresponsible and frankly naive” to countenance an American president sitting down with the leaders of countries like Cuba, Venezuela, and Syria. Why, she said, those people would use the meetings for “propaganda points.” Unacceptable!
Not listening to terrorists or “rogue states” quickly turned into not listening to anyone, even at home. In 2016, the propaganda surrounding the motives behind both the Trump and Sanders campaigns was strikingly similar to the Bush-era takes on Why do they hate us? We were again told we didn’t need to ask questions about the sources of anger. Trump supporters were uneducated white men who couldn’t accept their loss of status, and “Bernie Bros” were a related species of hopeless malcontent, perhaps sharing an ancestor in the Pliocene period.
There may be no real-world comparison between a blood-soaked monster like Ceaușescu and a bumbling ball-scratcher like Joe Biden, or an honorarium-gobbling technocrat like Hillary Clinton, or a Handsome Dan investment banker like Emmanuel Macron, or an effete pseudo-intellectual like Justin Trudeau. Still, the ongoing inability of these leaders to see the math of populist uprisings absolutely recalls that infamous scene in Bucharest. From Brexit to the election of Donald Trump to, now, the descent of thousands of Canadian truckers upon the capital city of Ottawa to confront Trudeau, a consistent theme has been the refusal to admit — not even to us, but to themselves — the numerical truth of what they’re dealing with.
There’s a Narcissistic Personality Disorder element to this, where some pols seem unable to imagine that any sane person would feel anything but admiration and respect toward them. This in turn means their detractors can’t be merely wrong, but must be abnormal or literally defective people somehow, seduced by foreign spies or driven by criminal or politically illegitimate impulses. This is how we get to a place where over half of America is reflexively denounced as racist or white supremacist —another brilliant American political fashion adopted by Trudeau, who last year denounced anti-vaxxers as “misogynists and racists” in a bold move, considering his own blackface history
Imagine you were planning a conspiracy to limit the number of doctors in America. Certainly, you’d make sure to have a costly, lengthy credentialing system. You would also tell politicians that America has too many doctors already. That way, you could purposefully constrain the number of medical-school students. You might freeze or slash funding for residencies and medical scholarships. You’d fight proposals to allow nurses to do the work of physicians. And because none of this would stop foreign-trained doctors from slipping into the country and committing the crime of helping sick people get better, you’d throw in some rules that made it onerous for immigrant doctors, especially from neighboring countries Mexico and Canada, to do their job.
As a matter of basic economics, fewer doctors means less care and more expensive services. A 2016 survey of patients in 11 countries—the U.S., Canada, New Zealand, and eight European nations—found that the U.S. trailed in providing timely access to primary medical care. High educational debts and fewer physicians push more health-care spending toward intensive and specialized services, which are more costly.
My high school’s football team, too, benefited from my absence. Helping me would have taken coaching time away from players with real talent and passion for the game. Worse, if everyone received the same level of training, and that training level were calibrated to suit my own limited athletic abilities, better players would have been subject to useless basic instructions and drills. If they tried to make football more appealing to me by, say, stressing the principles of physics that govern the game, they likely would have made it less interesting for most naturally gifted athletes.
American high schools excel at nurturing football talent. If the future of American economic and military might rested on our country’s ability to produce quality football players, the United States would have nothing to fear from Chinese great-power rivalry. But at the same time, American public schools don’t force anyone to play football. If you’re talented and want to play, there is a strong incentive to do so, since accomplished players get rewarded with social status and gain an advantage in college admissions. But those of us who never play football have other paths to success, and are not considered failures just because we didn’t master the game.
For selfish reasons, I wish that there really were no such thing as natural giftedness in children, because then I’d be able to attribute my son’s extraordinary math ability to my own parenting skill, and educators would give me a multimillion-dollar contract to teach them how to get seventh graders to perform math at a first-year college level (as my son was able to do at the time). But alas (for my career prospects in this regard), the phenomenon of gifted students is very real.
https://quillette.com/2022/02/14/ukraine-in-the-balance/Germany’s Eurasian lurch suggests the gradual uncoupling of the country from Anglo-American entanglements. The refusal to provide lethal aid to Ukraine is couched in the rhetoric of German guilt, but Deutschland seems to have few qualms about selling advanced weaponry to less democratic regimes like Hungary, a country savaged by Germany during the Second World War, as well as to Qatar, Egypt, and Algeria. The embrace of dictators like Putin and Xi on the global stage suggests a deeper yearning for a return of order, be it green, corporate, or nationalist, and a turning away from the hated Anglo-Americans, who after all had the nerve to rescue them from National Socialism and then Communism.
https://quillette.com/2022/02/14/putins-mission-to-restore-the-imperial-glory-of-mother-russia/Nevertheless, Beinart contends that a Mexican government would never invite Russian troops to guard its side of the Rio Grande. But guard against what exactly? The ghost of John Pershing? Whatever one makes of Grant’s 1879 judgment that the invasion of Mexico was a “wicked war,” it did not precipitate a conquest of every inch of Mexican soil. Nor did the United States engineer a genocidal famine to eliminate a perceived threat of counter-revolution. Nor did it sign a memorandum to guarantee Mexican territorial sovereignty in exchange for the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal. Analogies are seldom helpful if the differences are more important than the similarities.
However, this is an absurd way of measuring threat. The most significant military powers to join NATO after the Cold War—Eastern Germany and Poland—did so in the 1990s, when relations between Russia and the West were relatively cordial. Russia’s anger about NATO expansion grew just as such fearsome military powers as Latvia, Montenegro, and North Macedonia joined the alliance. What of the NATO bases the Kremlin accuses of encircling Russia? For a long time, there weren’t many NATO facilities in these new member states, except for missile defense facilities in Poland and Romania, and a couple thousand troops scattered across Eastern Europe. These latter forces were deployed, moreover, only after Russia annexed Crimea and ripped up the post-Cold War settlement in 2014, in direct response to Russia’s revisionism.
The real “threat” Russia faces today, in other words, is the threat of decisively losing its empire. NATO enlargement, and Western policy more generally, has taken the sovereignty of countries in Eastern Europe as an unabashed goal. Today’s diplomatic haggling over missile placements, troop limits, nuclear postures, and security guarantees have made little progress because there’s no agreement on the fundamental issue. At stake is whether Russia has the right to be surrounded by a belt of countries that it can bully.
Riis inspired the now-obscure Johnny Appleseed of American zoning, Lawrence Veiller, who convinced communities across the country that the density that makes housing affordable (without government subsidies) must be limited. The formula that brought housing within the reach of the poor—what Boston settlement house pioneers Robert Woods and Albert Kennedy rightly celebrated as a "zone of emergence"—would be cast aside.
Its replacement—literally in the cases of Detroit's Black Bottom, Chicago's Bronzeville, St. Louis' DeSoto-Carr, and so many other healthy neighborhoods—would be public housing. The "projects" were and still are the rotten fruit that grew from seeds planted by progressive public intellectuals. The premier modernist architect Le Corbusier envisioned high-rise urban campuses without streets or stores. Less well-known but still essential figures in American housing policy history were University of Chicago sociologist Edith Elmer Wood and self-styled reformer Catherine Bauer Wurster.
In her 1934 paper "A Century of the Housing Problem," Wood led the ill-fated charge that would guide New Deal public housing policy. She inveighed against the private housing industry broadly—even arguing against the idea that homeownership was one of the means for the poor to improve their station. "The housing problem is an inevitable feature of our modern industrial civilization and does not tend to resolve itself," Wood wrote. "Supply and demand do not reach it, because the cost of new housing and the distribution of income are such that approximately two thirds of the population cannot present an effective demand for new housing."
Yet the journalism profession increasingly sees such political refereeing as an anachronistic trap set by bad-faith conservatives who want to smuggle asymmetrically extremist ideas into a "both sides" frame. "To the extent…that journalists and pundits focus critically on President Biden and Democrats and give short shrift to Republicans' obstructions—as if the cancer of Trumpism was in remission, if not cured—that indeed distorts reality and disserves readers, listeners and viewers," former New York Times White House correspondent Jackie Calmes wrote in an October 15 Los Angeles Times piece. Calmes warned that "democracy is literally at stake."
Rather than confront Ash directly over gender issues, they focused on strengthening their connection with him in other ways, through music, board games, and intellectual pursuits. “When I brought it up, they were happy to talk with me, but they didn’t engage or aggravate me, which was, I think, the best thing to do,” Ash recalls.
Still, their relationship became strained, because many of the websites Ash was reading encouraged trans kids to detach from their parents if they were not affirming. “There was a part of me that started to vilify them,” he told me. “[The sites] said, ‘Oh, if your parents aren’t ‘with it,’ they’re evil people.’”
Ash’s therapist had been working with him on seeing nuance in the world—something autistic people, prone to black-and-white thinking, sometimes struggle to do. The goal was to be “able to take a step back, to get a bird’s eye view in the stoic tradition and try to see things from other people’s points of view.”
Cultural Fragmentation or Acquired Dispositions? A New Approach to Accounting for Patterns of Cultural Change
The authors argue that cultural fragmentation models predict that cultural change is driven primarily by period effects, whereas acquired dispositions models predict that cultural change is driven by cohort effects. To ascertain which model is on the right track, the authors develop a novel method to measure “cultural durability,” namely, the share of over-time variance that is due to either period or cohort effects for 164 variables from the 1972–2014 General Social Surveys. The authors find fairly strong levels of cultural durability across most items, especially those connected to values and morality, but less so for attitudes toward legal and political institutions.
Jews have not been the only target. Violent attacks against East Asians—disproportionately carried out by black people—have recently spiked in America, a foreseeable consequence of a decade’s worth of antiracist agitprop that blamed white, Jewish, and Asian privilege for black oppression. The progressive response to this development has been to blame white supremacy. The antiracist narrative is so far through the looking glass that white people are now held entirely to blame for the worst behaviours of a small minority of black people. This denial of agency and moral responsibility is not just deeply patronising—a soft bigotry of low expectations—but it also amounts to a kind of incitement, as white progressives line up as apologists for racial violence.
The official response to the rising influence of racist black nationalism has been to ignore it. Today, the SPLC site no longer lists black nationalist groups separately, instead choosing to include them under the inane heading of General Hate, which is by far its largest category, and appears to be dominated by black nationalists. FBI hate crime statistics also suggest that, per capita, more hate crimes are committed by black people than any other group. In 2019, 23.9 percent of recorded US hate crimes were committed by black people who make up just 12.1 percent of the population. Whites, meanwhile, committed 52.5 percent of hate crimes while making up 57.8 percent of the population.
This willingness to court all audiences is an affront to the basic formula of current commercial media, which relies upon a strategy of identifying out-groups and rallying audiences to escalating hatreds. Any show that sends an opposite message that people with differing views can and should coexist, or that people who cross conventional wisdom may be interviewed for any reason beyond being “called out,” must now themselves be considered reactionary.
https://www.jwz.org/blog/2018/06/today-in-uber-autonomous-murderbot-news-2/Perhaps the most unusual thing about the death of Elaine Herzberg is that the driver who killed her has been charged with a crime. That's so rare that there's virtually no national data on how many drivers who strike pedestrians face legal consequences; one investigation found, for example, that less than 1 percent of Minneapolis drivers who struck walkers between 2010 and 2014 were tried.
I repeat myself, but:
1. The Uber executives who put this software on the public roadways need to be in jail. They disabled safety features because they made testing harder. They disabled safety features because they made the ride rougher.2. This notion that having a "safety driver" in the passenger seat will allow a distracted human to take over at the last minute is completely insane. You think driving-while-texting is dangerous? This is so much worse. When people aren't engaged in the task of driving, their minds wander. They cannot re-engage fast enough. This is obvious on its face, we don't need studies to prove it. Oh, but we have them anyway.3. I would still like to know the answer to the question of who gets charged with vehicular homicide when one of these machines kills someone. Even if they are ultimately ruled to be not at fault, what name goes on the court docket? Is it:* The Uber employee "non-employee independent contractor" in the passenger seat?* Their shift lead?* Travis Kalanick?* The author(s) of the (proprietary, un-auditable) software?* The "corporate person" known as Uber?
https://reason.com/2022/02/04/characteristics-of-white-supremacy-culture-washington-university/“Projection means the expulsion of a subjective content into an object; it is the opposite of introjection. Accordingly, it is a process of dissimilation, by which a subjective content becomes alienated from the subject and is, so to speak, embodied in the object. The subject gets rid of painful, incompatible contents by projecting them.”
Collected Works 6 Paragraph 783
Psychological projection is the process of misinterpreting what is "inside" as coming from "outside".
One should not ignore the fact that the Chinese government, through the state owned China Southern Airlines, was a major sponsor of the Festival from 2012 through 2020, donating around $600,000 a year. Despite the atrocities committed by the Chinese government, including the occupation and persecution of Tibetans and Uyghurs, we did not witness many calls for a boycott of Chinese sponsored events during those years.
More worrying still, they intimidated hundreds of people with threats of violence backed by instances of assault. An activist used a sjambok to whip a cellphone out of a fellow student’s hand, a vice-chancellor was punched, students and staff who defied the protesters were pushed and shoved, a security guard was beaten with a steel rod, and another had to be hospitalized after a rock was dropped onto his head. No one was ultimately held accountable, either by the university’s disciplinary system or in the country’s courts. (When charges were laid, they were later withdrawn.)[...]On July 27th, 2018, Professor Bongani Mayosi, Dean of the UCT Faculty of Health Sciences, committed suicide after he was persecuted by activists disrupting the campus. Professor Mayosi’s sister did not hesitate to hold the #FeesMustFall protesters morally responsible for this tragedy. “He was hardly two weeks in his new position and the protests broke out,” she told the Sunday Times. “The vitriolic nature of the students and their do or die attitude vandalised his soul and unravelled him. Their personal insults and abuse cut him to the core, were offensive to his values and were the opposite of everything he was about.”
This kind of bullying has become pervasive, and some of it comes from the top down. In 2020, Zetu Makamandela-Mguqulwa, the university ombud, reported that she had received 37 complaints of bullying by the Vice-Chancellor, Mamokgethi Phakeng. When the university’s governing council tried to suppress her report, she published it on the ombud website and criticized the council for failing to address the VC’s conduct. She was then summoned to meet the chair of the council to answer unspecified charges of “misconduct.”
Since then, this phenomenon has become more pronounced. If a Canadian candidate for office or legislator expresses any view contradicting his or her party’s leadership in any significant way, it becomes a scandal, even if the offending view is broadly supported by the public while the head-office view is unpopular.
These incidents are covered in the media as a threat to a party’s ability to govern, because the leadership’s control over its legislators and prospective legislators is less than absolute. It reveals not that a party is diverse, complex, and pluralistic (all qualities that once were presented as core Canadian values) but rather that the party is weak and even unsafe for having permitted diversity, complexity, and pluralism. This is happening despite the fact that on the other side of the Atlantic, the country that invented the Westminster parliamentary system still routinely witnesses MPs voting against their party’s leadership, often by the dozen, and yet not just remaining within the fold but eligible for future promotion. Indeed, the Westminster system was designed to handle major splits within the factions it contains.
Back in the 20th century, Canadian caucus rebels were expected to vote against (and/or publicly contradict) their leaders during every term they served. Today, on the other hand, the definition of a caucus rebel is a legislator who votes in lock step with the party, and never makes a public pronouncement that isn’t pre-approved by the party, but who grumbles in private about having to do this. And even this private behaviour gets punished by chiefs of staff and party whips if it is discovered.
What I am really trying to do is sound a cultural alarm bell about the exaltation of order, discipline, and control. These are authoritarian impulses. In a nation where rapid change is not just a moral necessity, but an ecological one, we must not only retain the capacity for mass mobilization, but also the ability to properly recognize and resist *actual* authoritarian forces, irrespective of whether they fly under progressive or conservative banners.
Taibbi: How new is this phenomenon? If there was one, when did the change happen?
Thacker: Here’s what always happened in America previously. You got a big, broad look. In science and in the media, we would always have a main narrative or a main theory. And then around that, within science, there would be other minor theories, other alternative viewpoints. The New York Times would have something. On the left, the New Republic had a view, and on the right you’d get the National Review. They’re reexamining it, but they don’t change the facts.
Well, we don’t have main and minor anymore. What we have is truth, and conspiracy. Or vax, and anti-vax. There are only two possibilities you can go through. Do you know where you find that kind of black-white thinking? In people who have major personality disorders. And psychopaths. Psychopaths and people with narcissistic personality disorder engage in black-white thinking. America right now is in this weird situation in which it’s a country that to the outside looks psychopathic or disordered.
Taibbi: It’s similar also in the respect that the safety and compliance procedures are flawed inside these companies, yet the reporters don’t want to go near those stories, because they’re afraid of upsetting sources.
Thacker: The people we have, I don’t call reporters. I call them science writers. The people who write for Science, Nature, Scientific American, these are people who write *for* science, not on science. They see their job as telling you how fucking awesome science is. That’s what they do for a living.
That’s in part what’s going on with this story about Pfizer. It’s the same shit that has been going on with these goddamn vaccines. Because if you watch and see what happened when these vaccines rolled out, you would see there’d be a story in The New York Times about, “Pfizer announces,” or “Pfizer Expected To Ask for Authorization,” blah, blah, blah. And then about four or five paragraphs, you go down and you realize: “Wait, this is just a Pfizer press release.” This isn’t a study or anything. This is a Pfizer press release. You just reported a fucking press release as a news story.
They do press release journalism. You can argue that’s good or bad, but what that does — and no one talks about this — is it creates all this social pressure on the FDA for approval. It creates all this expectancy amongst the public that the product is coming. So, by the time you go in front of an FDA panel for authorization, it’s already been churned up in the media, they’ve got a month of positive press.
Racism in the present tense is much harder to identify than racism in the past. I don't like that term, not because of the systemic, but because of the racism. I think it's a real stretch of our cognition to go from racism being an attitude to racism referring to inequities within a system that are racial. You end up talking about inequities that have a very different nature, and you refer to them all with the term racism, which implies that there's this one particular issue. We can't help thinking that it's partly this emotion, this bias, when really the problems are often due to all sorts of things today, even if they were due to racism in the past. It's a dangerously oversimplified way of looking at the complexities and the inequities in a society.
For example, redlining. Go back to a redlined neighborhood in 1950; most of the people in it were white. That's something that we don't talk about. Redlining was not as racially targeted as a lot of people seem to almost want it to have been. It was about class. Nevertheless, a vastly disproportionate number of black people were caught in these same neighborhoods, so black people suffered disproportionately from redlining. Is that the reason today that a certain wealth gap between white and black people exists? To some extent, yes. But if you actually look at the numbers, if you distinguish between medians and averages, if you distinguish between regions of the United States, if you distinguish between social class, the wealth gap is not what people say.
She also told the police officer that safeguarding rules exist to protect women and girls from the minority of biological males who are predatory. At the prompting of the duty solicitor, she pointed out that when Girl Guides go to camp, they share accommodation and showers, and that “to have male-bodied men in that setting, I believed, was a safeguarding concern.”
At the end of the interview, she was told that her case would be sent to the CPS for consideration. Her duty solicitor, she reports, “said he had never been more baffled in his life.” When the solicitor asked the police officer whether it was necessary to proceed to the CPS, the police officer replied, she says, that the email was considered a “hate crime”.
Well, I *am* a professional educator. I am a professor of education who teaches teachers, and I can say unequivocally that the belief that one needs to be a professional educator to have meaningful insights as to what ought to be taught reflects a fundamental philosophical and cultural misunderstanding of what education actually is.
Of course, there are some things that we need from our education system in order to function as a society. We need an education system that will encourage students to grow into law-abiding citizens; we need a system that allows people to flourish and to live happy lives; and we need education that will encourage people to engage in honest work and support their families productively. But which work is important, rewarding, or fulfilling is impossible for education research to determine. The claim that education should promote these public goods is not an educational argument itself. It’s a statement of values, driven by the specific nature of the United States as an open, liberal, generally capitalist, democratic society.
Salinas has a majority Mexican population; all of Fontanilla's students were Hispanic and were learning English as a second language. Education officials who propose adding ethnic studies to various curriculums—and making it mandatory, as the Salinas school district did—typically intend for privileged white students to learn about other cultures. There's a certain irony in requiring members of an ethnic minority to study this, and an even greater irony in the fact that such students were struggling intensely with the course.
"My students are failing ethnic studies," says Fontanilla, who is of Jamaican ancestry. "I would say half of them are failing this ethnic studies class."
Many people might consider such activities to be a form of left-wing activism infiltrating the classroom . Fontanilla is one of them. As a Christian, a conservative, and a black woman, she doesn't believe that students—especially her students, learning English as a second language—need to be taught to check their privilege.
"It's hyper-race-focused," says Fontanilla. "And whenever there's hyper race focus, racism will follow."
"I do not appreciate constantly being pandered to and treated differently because of the color of my skin, especially since I did not have the freedom to not go along with it," Fontanilla wrote, warning that the curriculum was an attempt at left-wing indoctrination. The statement elicited cheers from other parents attending the meeting. In response, the school board prohibited anti-CRT comments at its next public gathering.
"You know it's something evil when they get so nasty defending it," says Fontanilla.
While she has received much praise for speaking out, Fontanilla has also endured considerable online harassment, including threats of violence. One told her to "have fun being a token black friend to racist conservatives your whole life."
"They're all basically white liberals," she says of the harassers.
Our final — and most important — finding also was unexpected. We found absolutely no difference between participants in arranged marriages and those in free-choice marriages on the four measures we included in our study. Regardless of the nature of their marriage — whether their spouse had been selected by family members/matchmakers or had been personally and freely chosen — the participants in our study were extremely (and equally) happy with their relationships.
The Sambia people believe in the necessity of gender roles within their culture. Relationships between men and women of all ages, within the tribe, are complex, with many rules and restrictions. For example, boys are removed from their mothers at age seven, to strip them of contact with their mothers. They even perform a bloodletting ritual on the boys following isolation from their mothers to rid them of their mother's blood from within them, which is viewed as contaminated. This separation is due to their tribe's fear of the women, as men are taught at a young age about the women's ability to emasculate and manipulate men
This paper presents evidence of the disruption of a transition from fossil fuels to nuclear power, and finds the benefits forgone as a consequence are substantial. Learning rates are presented for nuclear power in seven countries, comprising 58% of all power reactors ever built globally. Learning rates and deployment rates changed in the late-1960s and 1970s from rapidly falling costs and accelerating deployment to rapidly rising costs and stalled deployment. Historical nuclear global capacity, electricity generation and overnight construction costs are compared with the counterfactual that pre-disruption learning and deployment rates had continued to 2015. Had the early rates continued, nuclear power could now be around 10% of its current cost. The additional nuclear power could have substituted for 69,000–186,000 TWh of coal and gas generation, thereby avoiding up to 9.5 million deaths and 174 Gt CO2 emissions. In 2015 alone, nuclear power could have replaced up to 100% of coal-generated and 76% of gas-generated electricity, thereby avoiding up to 540,000 deaths and 11 Gt CO2. Rapid progress was achieved in the past and could be again, with appropriate policies. Research is needed to identify impediments to progress, and policy is needed to remove them.
The main reason that we spend more on health care than other countries is that we make more use of expensive procedures. Compare the per capita usage of colonoscopies in the U.S. with Canada.
Those additional colonoscopies don’t move the needle a perceptible amount when it comes to average life expectancy. They do move the needle on our national health care budget.
As individuals, we all want to have unrestricted access to medical procedures without having to pay for them. But the closer a nation’s health care system comes to satisfying those desires, the bigger the health care budget will be. In the end, every health care system in advanced democracies looks similar to every other one, because they are all trying to deal with this same trilemma.
Everybody hates the idea of rationing health care by price. We all want the “gift” of health care. So politically it is easier to ration health care by restricting availability. In Canada, as of the time I wrote the book, providers with the skills and equipment to perform colonoscopies were scarce.
In the U.S., we try to avoid rationing by either price or availability. So our spending soars and our average life expectancy goes nowhere. If we wanted to win the international life expectancy Olympics, then rather than throwing so much money at medical procedures we should try harder to fight obesity, homicide, drunk driving, and “deaths of despair.”
“A lot of [clients] only really get enthusiastic if they get comfortable that they are not sacrificing return,” says Valentijn van Nieuwenhuijzen, chief investment officer at fund manager NN IP, which is being bought by Goldman Sachs.
Someone has to take a loss somewhere if fossil fuels are going to be left in the ground rather than extracted and sold. ESG investors’ hope is that the losses will fall on other people. The problem is that less environmentally-minded investors buying those shares, oil wells or power plants are absolutely not going to shut them down unless they stop being profitable.
Mr. Chauvin pleaded guilty in December to similar federal charges. The prosecution agreed to seek a 300-month maximum sentence instead of life imprisonment.
Months earlier, Mr. Chauvin was convicted of second-degree murder and then sentenced to 22½ years in prison in a state trial.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/train-robberies-are-a-problem-in-los-angeles-and-no-one-agrees-on-how-to-stop-them-11642946401Almost 50 years later, I received an email from an old friend who lives in Minneapolis. He began: “Another report from the hinterland. The people of Minneapolis now share online updates of carjackings and other crimes. It would be difficult to exaggerate the extent of violent crime throughout the city. Everyone now knows someone who’s a victim. This will be a huge issue in this year’s elections.”
More than 650 people were shot in the city last year; 95 died—just short of the city’s record. There were more than 2,000 robberies. According to the Minneapolis Star Tribune, carjackings in the city rose 537% from November 2019 to November 2020, and then rose another 40% in the 10 months after that.
In the 2019 Code, they found 1,510 criminal sections. By examining some of those sections at random, they estimated that they encompass 5,199 crimes in total. The Heritage Foundation report notes that “there is no single place where any citizen can go to learn” all federal criminal laws, and even if there were, some “are so vague that . . . no reasonable person could understand what they mean.”
Mr. Scholz appears committed to preserving Germany’s $150 billion a year exports to China at all costs. This was made clear recently to Lithuania, which is suffering a Chinese trade war for letting Taiwan open a representative office. German businesses, rather than supporting their democratic neighbor, are warning Lithuania to give in to China’s demands or see German investment suspended. That lack of democratic solidarity stems from the Federal Chancellery. This is a realm where Volkswagen exports talk and the Uyghur genocide, destruction of Hong Kong democracy and military imperialism walk.
Even when Germany pretends that it cares about the democratic international order, its lack of genuine interest quickly becomes obvious. Germany recently deployed a warship in the South China Sea, which China claims as its own private swimming pool. Simultaneously, however, Berlin begged Beijing to let its ship make a Shanghai port call. China denied the request. Contrast Germany’s South China Sea experience with that of France, which has sent nuclear attack submarines to train with U.S. Navy counterparts for battle with an advanced adversary.
The issue is that once Islamists manage to get themselves into power, they frequently prove incapable of delivering on their promises. Islamist governments have often been, at best, incompetent and out-of-touch (as has been the case in the Arab world) and at worst, economically disastrous (as has been the case in Turkey and Sudan). In the more consolidated democracies of Malaysia and Indonesia, Islamist movements are fractious and riven by internal divisions and overly ambitious leaders.
Prior Covid-19 Infection Offered Better Protection Than Vaccination During Delta Wave
CDC says research from California and New York before Omicron’s spread showed unvaccinated people without previous infection faced greatest risk
Surviving a previous infection provided better protection than vaccination against Covid-19 during the Delta wave, federal health authorities said, citing research showing that both the shots and recovery from the virus provided significant defense.[...]“Although the epidemiology of this virus may continue to change as new variants emerge, vaccination remains the safest way to prevent infection, hospitalization and death,” Mary T. Bassett, study co-author and Acting State Health Commissioner in New York, said. The New York State Department of Health said it would publish a new dashboard on Covid-19 reinfection data, to be updated weekly.
A combination of strong demand that industry officials expect to persist, the chip drought and governments’ willingness to offer subsidies to land semiconductor-production plants has triggered an investment spree among companies.
During a news conference Wednesday, as Democrats’ proposed voting laws stood on the verge of defeat in the Senate, Mr. Biden was asked whether he expected the 2022 elections would be legitimate.
“I’m not going to say it’s going to be legit,” Mr. Biden said. “The increase and the prospect of being illegitimate is in direct proportion to us not being able to get these reforms passed.” Mr. Biden also voiced optimism that Americans would go to the polls despite any impediments.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki wrote Thursday on Twitter that the president “was not casting doubt on the legitimacy of the 2022 election. He was making the opposite point: In 2020, a record number of voters turned out in the face of a pandemic, and election officials made sure they could vote and have those votes counted.”
It’s tempting to blame demographic defections on culture-war stupidity like the insistent use of loathed words like “Latinx,” but that’s just a symptom of the real problem: Democrats under Biden have become the party of the nomenklatura. Their base is the slice of hyper-educated, jargon-spouting bureaucrats whose ranks are growing thanks to their skill at siphoning resources to themselves before they have a chance to reach a wider base of regular people:
"@matthewstollerThere are plenty of workers in America, it's just that many are occupied at Soviet style bureaucratic nonsense, like health insurance, management consulting, university administration, hospital billing, etc. Private equity has 100k workers earning large salaries doing arson."
These new commissars are the most hated people in the country, and they’re the Democrats’ main constituency. Even species of viper and corporate parasite is swimming in riches now, from tax-evading private equity titans to the oil & gas CEOs who are right now gouging everyone, to old pals in the banking sector (Goldman’s just-announced special 1% bonus celebrating last year’s record $27 billion profit was a nice touch), all thriving but lionized so long as they mask appropriately and genuflect to “norms.” Meanwhile, the party increasingly demonizes every species of complaining underclass person as a right-wing enemy, even the minorities.
There was zero understanding that messaging about “systemic barriers” might contrast with how the huge influx of Asian, Hispanic, and African immigrants view the American experience, bafflement that minority voters apparently didn’t all see the Voting Rights bill as an existential necessity, and resistance to even considering the complaints of, say, Hispanic immigrants who were more adversely affected by lockdowns than upscale zoomer intellectuals (whose latest fetish, as Freddie deBoer’s recent column humorously notes, is denouncing calls to return to work as “eugenics” that “privilege a deeply violent normalcy”). Asian-Americans got their own executive order and even some sexy new taxonomy — who wouldn’t be stoked to be one of the “AA and NHPI”? — but they spent much of the last year being told their anger over lowered academic standards in particular was right-wing myth. How could these voters not know the gifted and talented programs they care about are also a “modern day eugenics project,” as one NYU researcher put it? But at least everyone got an official State Department Tweet on International Pronouns Day.
About One-in-Four U.S. Hispanics Have Heard of Latinx, but Just 3% Use It
Mr. Xue said he liked having his two daughters at home during the first year of the pandemic except for virtual band practice, during which his daughter Ya-An, now an eighth-grader, played the oboe so loudly that he had to go to the garage to work. But he knew that it was better for them to be in school.
Nuclear power is among the safest means we have of producing electricity. Fatality rates per billion kilowatt-hours generated are 25 for coal, 2.8 for natural gas, 0.074 for nuclear (including Chernobyl), 0.035 for wind, 0.024 for hydro, 0.019 for solar and 0.0001 for U.S. nuclear, as reported in the Lancet and the Journal of Cleaner Production.
Last week the journal Obstetrics & Gynecology published a study that found “vaccination is associated with a small change in cycle length.” NPR.org titled an article on the finding “COVID vaccines may briefly change your menstrual cycle, but you should still get one.”
“That’s perfectly fine to conclude,” Dr. Ladapo says, though one may question NPR’s authority to dispense medical advice.
The justification for mandatory vaccination is that the unvaccinated put others at risk of infection. Dr. Ladapo maintains that rationale doesn’t apply to Covid, especially given Omicron’s infectiousness. So many people have been vaccinated that “if the vaccines stopped spread, this pandemic would be over,” he says. “The argument for the negative externalities does not hold water.”
Is it worth the risk? Miami-Dade County has had a higher per capita Covid case count than New York City for several weeks, but its hospitalization rate is somewhat lower. That sounds like a wash until you flip the question: Is the possible reduction in risk worth the price in freedom?
Hannah Arendt’s essay “Truth and Politics” echoes similar themes. She begins by acknowledging that in some ways, this is a timeless problem: “no one has ever doubted that truth and politics are on rather bad terms, and no one, as far as I know, has ever counted truthfulness among the political virtues.” In this context, since Plato first founded his Academy, we can see a dream of the university as a counter-society of Socratic debate and iconoclasm. This position opens the university to all sorts of political influence, perhaps even direct conflict with the public world beyond the university.
I’m stipulating these points, I’m not debating them, so log off if you find them too extreme. Go read more bullshit. Immerse yourself in news of Russian plots to counterfeit presidential children’s laptops, viruses spawned in Wuhan market stalls, vast secret legions of domestic terrorists flashing one another the OK sign in shadowy parking lots behind Bass Pro Shops experiencing “temporary” inflation, and patriotic tech conglomerates purging the commons of untruths. Comfort yourself with the thoughts that the same fortunes engaged in the building of amusement parks, the production and distribution of TV comedies, and the provision of computing services to the defense and intelligence establishments, have allied to protect your family’s health, advance the causes of equity and justice, and safeguard our democratic institutions. Dismiss as cynical the notion that you, the reader, are not their client but their product. Your data for their bullshit, that’s the deal. And Build Back Better. That’s the sermon.
One reason to stick with the premium name-brand bullshit is to deconstruct it. What lines are the propagandists pushing now? Where will they lead? How blatant will they get? Why are the authors so weirdly fearless? The other day when Cuba erupted in protests, numerous stories explained the riots, confidently, instantly, as demands for COVID vaccines. The accompanying photos didn’t support this claim; they featured ragged American flags and homemade signs demanding freedom. One wire-service headline used the protests to raise concerns about viral spread in crowds. A puzzling message. It wasn’t meant for the defiant Cubans, who weren’t at liberty to read it and whose anger at their rulers clearly outweighed their concerns about contagion. It had to be aimed at English-speaking Americans. But to what end? American protests of the previous summer hadn’t raised such cautions from the press. To the contrary. Our riots, if one could call them that (and one could not at many companies) were framed as transcendent cries for justice whose risks to public health were negligible, almost as though moral passion enhances immunity. And maybe it does, but why not in Cuba, too? To me, the headline only made sense in the context of the offensive against domestic “vaccine hesitancy” and its alleged fascist-bumpkin leaders. The Reuters writer had seen in Cuba’s revolt a chance to glancingly editorialize against rebelliousness of another type. The type its staff abhors day in, day out, no matter what’s happening in Cuba, or, for that matter, in America. The bullshit is consistent in this way, reducing stories of every kind into nitrogen-rich soil for the same views. These views feel unusually ferocious now, reflecting the convictions of those on high that they should determine the fates of those on low with minimal backtalk and no laughter.
https://quillette.com/2018/06/19/why-women-dont-code/You might imagine that a different course, one that addressed these concerns, might help overcome the racial performance gap. But why just imagine? A group of computer-science educators has spent years trying to develop exactly such a course. The result is known as AP Computer Science Principles. In this course, programming is just one of several major topics. Other big ideas include creative development, and studying the impact of computing on society. Students work on projects in groups on topics that interest them.
Unfortunately, the results have been underwhelming. The percentage of black students taking the exam went up, but their average relative performance did not. We have just three years of exam data, but in each of those years, blacks scored, on average, a full point below the average for white and Asian students. In 2019, for instance, the scores averaged 2.3 for black students, 3.26 for white students, and 3.47 for Asian students.
The best minds in our field—and the ones eager to remedy the type of inequities that Kendi identifies—have failed to produce a course and exam that can close the performance gap. So what should we do instead? Both AP CS exams test mastery of programming skills and computer-science concepts. Students who fail to master these concepts will have difficulty creating or analyzing computer software. What is the alternative?
When I tried to discuss Damore at my school, I found it almost impossible. As a thought experiment, I asked how we could make someone like Damore feel welcome in our community. The pushback was intense. My question was labeled an “inflammatory example” and my comments were described as “hurtful” to women. When I mentioned that perhaps we could invite Damore to speak at UW, a faculty member responded, “If he comes here, we’ll hurt him.” She was joking, but the sentiment was clear.
I suggest a variation of Hanlon’s Razor that one should never attribute to oppression that which is adequately explained by free choice.
Since 1970, women have made dramatic gains in science. Today, half of all MD degrees and 52 percent of PhDs in life sciences are awarded to women, as are 57 percent of PhDs in social sciences, 71 percent of PhDs to psychologists, and 77 percent of DVMs to veterinarians. Forty years ago, women’s presence in most of these fields was several orders of magnitude less; e.g., in 1970 only 13 percent of PhDs in life sciences went to women. In the most math-intensive fields, however, women’s growth has been less pronounced.
They concluded that women may choose non-STEM careers because they have academic strengths that many men lack. They found that individuals with high math ability but only moderate verbal ability were the most likely to choose a career in STEM (49 percent) and that this group included more men than women (70 percent men). By contrast, individuals with both high math ability and high verbal ability were less likely to pursue a career in STEM (34 percent) and this group had more women than men (63 percent women). They write that, “Our study provides evidence that it is not lack of ability that causes females to pursue non-STEM careers, but rather the greater likelihood that females with high math ability also have high verbal ability and thus can consider a wider range of occupations.”
Webb is now roughly halfway along its 29-day journey to a destination about 1 million miles from Earth called L2, or the second LaGrange point. Once it reaches this perch in orbit around the sun, Webb will spend about five months cooling down while mission scientists align its mirrors and calibrate its cameras and other instruments.
If all goes well, Webb will release its first images to the public in June.
But Webb still faces hurdles in coming weeks, including activating and individually adjusting the 18 hexagonal, gold-plated segments that make up the primary mirror—and making sure the telescope cools to its minus 388 degree Fahrenheit operating temperature.
Djokovic was questioned for about eight hours through the night at Melbourne’s Tullamarine airport and should have been given until 8:30 a.m. local time to respond to notice that authorities intended to cancel his visa. The decision was made 48 minutes before that, denying Djokovic more time to consult with his lawyers.
In an interview on CNN, he said the U.S. had sought clarification on why the Kazakh government had summoned Russian-led CSTO troops when “authorities in Kazakhstan should be able to deal with the challenges that they’re facing peacefully, to make sure that the rights of those who are protesting peacefully are protected, to protect the institutions of the state and law and order, but to do it in a way that is rights-respecting.”
Russia’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, speaking on a popular talk show, dismissed the secretary’s concerns as “baby talk” without any basis.
We are a sexually dimorphic species, and men and women are different. Evolution has designed us to be different. Realising that we evolved through slow steps, rather than just popping into being in an act of creation, has implications. For one thing, it means that men and women have their own separate evolutionary histories, as a result of differing (although not wholly different, of course) selection pressures. Resisting this truth—pretending that men and women are a sort of silly putty, totally moulded by social forces—has already had serious consequences in medical science, and it also has implications for my field of study.
The interrogation in the prison is just horrific. It starts with questioning, of course. Every time they interrogated me, the first thing they asked was: What did I do in Kazakhstan? Who did I meet in Kazakhstan? Do I have any relationship with an organization in the United States? And whenever you say "no" or "I don't know" as an answer to the questions, you get hit.
As a punishment once, they had me sit on the tiger chair. For a full three to three and a half days they didn't give me any food. I think it was about our third day, and one of the Kazakh prison officials brought me some food and told me to eat. I was so upset and angry. I just grabbed his shirt and told him, "Why didn't you just kill me instead of torturing me? Just kill me."
While I was doing it—I don't know where he came from—one of the Chinese police came in, and I don't know what he used, but he beat me so hard I fell down onto the floor. Then he started to kick my stomach with his heavy shoes. I wasn't able to breathe, and I wasn't able to move. From the beating and the kicking, I started to bleed.
Other than beating, I faced even worse nightmares in the camps. Sometimes I used to see girls brought in. Those girls' whole bodies were bruised, and the marks—it looked so -horrible. I didn't know what had happened to them at the time, until the same horrible thing came to me. The nighttime is the most horrific and scary time in the camps.
One night, I was also taken. They inserted electric equipment into my vagina, and that's how they tortured me. And then I was gang raped.
In almost every instance, my students come to study at the University of Chicago not because some particular quality about this school (its “nerdy” reputation, location, etc.) appealed to them, but because it was the “highest-ranked” school that accepted them. Once here, they organize their leisure and career aspirations around rankings. Many student clubs require potential members to submit applications and undergo interviews, and students seem to get a certain sadistic thrill from doing to others as the educational system has done to them. Already in their sophomore years, they are applying for internships that will open paths to careers in consulting and finance, which they also perceive in terms of rank—only a few “top” firms in New York, they have learned from peers and parents, are worthy of a bright young person’s ambition.
"It turns out that the PCR-based nasal swab your caregiver uses in the hospital does a great job determining if you are infected," Walensky and David Paltiel, a professor at the Yale School of Public Health, wrote, "but it does a rotten job of zooming in on whether you are infectious. By contrast, the rapid saliva-based antigen test with the 30 percent false negative rate does a poor job of diagnosing infection, but it is likely the better tool for judging infectiousness."
Electricity prices tripled in many European countries this winter, including in Germany, as renewable power supplies faltered and Russia seized the opportunity to boost the price of its natural gas exports. So, of course, the German government thought this was a fine time to permanently shutter three perfectly good nuclear power plants.
https://mediaevalfollies.tumblr.com/post/9749728877/william-dunbar-a-brash-of-wowingHe clappit fast, he kist and chukkit As with the glaikis he wer ouirgane; Yit be his feirris he wald have fukkit;'Ye brek my hart, my bony ane!'
In fact it was so commonplace that in the 1551's Mary Queen Of Scots passed a law banning the foul habit. Punishments included the use of "swearboxes" (in case you were wondering who came up with the idea of the home or office "swearjar") or a right good paddling. When her son James VI became king James I of England as well in 1603 he took those laws with him to his new kingdom. The success of these laws can be seen in the fact that to this day hardly anybody in the English speaking world swears anymore. Problem solved.
He said it wasn’t appropriate to discuss Djokovic’s medical history but added that the government told Australian Open organizers in late November that a diagnosis of, and recovery from, Covid within six months of entry wouldn’t exempt players from Australia’s vaccination requirements.
History has well and truly returned, in other words, after the briefest and most tantalizing of disappearances. Ischinger fingers the Trump administration for revealing and aggravating the fragile condition of the “entire liberal world order.” Who could quibble with his contention that, before 2017, “nobody could have known that the new American president, of all people, would be the one to challenge” the economic order of free trade, to say nothing of “the Western canon of values and the principle of collective security anchored in Article 5 of the NATO treaty.” And without a stalwart liberal superpower guarding democracy’s ramparts in Europe and much of the world beyond, this order looks desperately vulnerable.
I am firm, you are obstinate, he is a pig-headed fool.I am righteously indignant, you are annoyed, he is making a fuss over nothing.I have reconsidered the matter, you have changed your mind, he has gone back on his word.
What is the solution to pathological whiteness? According to Un and the Tigard-Tualatin School District, the answer lies with a new form of “white identity development.” In a series of “antiracist resources” provided to teachers, the Department of Equity and Inclusion includes a handful of strategies for this identity transformation… Couched in the language of professional development, the process assumes that whites are born “racist,” even if they “don’t purposely or consciously act in a racist way.” The first step in the training document is “contact,” defined as confronting whites with “active racism or real-world experiences that highlight their whiteness.” The goal is to provoke an emotional rupture that brings the subject to the next step, “disintegration,” in which he or she feels intense “white guilt” and “white shame,” and admits: “I feel bad for being white.”
In the clinical realm, the APA’s advice has similarly been questionable. A 2017 recommendation highlighted Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT; in which I am myself primarily trained) as treatment of choice for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. It remains in effect despite several meta-analyses subsequently finding CBT has little benefit over other therapies. More controversial were practice guidelines for men and boys which drew deeply from feminist theories, dwelled on topics of patriarchy, intersectionality, and privilege, and arguably disparaged men and families from traditional backgrounds. This guideline is actively harmful to the degree it both misguides therapy in favor of an ideological worldview and likely discourages men and families from more traditional backgrounds from seeking therapy.
The way I’ve characterized this—most recently in a meeting of the Congress on Innovation and American Progress in Washington—is that we live in a civilization like the Star Wars movie series: we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology. That’s a huge problem! We’re not going to keep our balance and figure out the right things to do as long as we don’t understand or even accept that our emotions are Paleolithic, and that they have an evolved basis.
Instead of using numbers to teach math, “Pathway” advocates that schools use numbers to motivate anti-racist discussions of social justice.
Each year, 7,000 to 9,000 Americans die from math errors in medication dosage. Math errors kill and cause substantial property damage and losses each year.
https://people.howstuffworks.com/cult4.htmHere are some common characteristics of cults:* Belief that they have the one and only true answer to universal peace or happiness.* Fanatical devotion to their founder/leader.* Unquestioning acceptance of the group's teachings.* Ultimate purpose is to recruit new believers, and members are pressured to recruit family and friends.* Belief that they're being persecuted or censored by the rest of the world.* Hysterical reactions to criticism (usually accompanied by personal attacks on the integrity of the critic).* Members discouraged from having personal relationships outside the group, even with family members who couldn't be recruited.* Shunning of those who leave the group, even if they're family members.* Members' whole lives revolve around the cult group.* Members expected to be involved their whole lives, until the day they die.* Members required to renounce important aspects of their identity or basic values--or at least keep them in a closet.* Members' lives are controlled or directed, often down to whom they can marry (always within the group, of course).* Mind control techniques employed by the leaders (otherwise, who would agree to all this stuff?).* A peculiar way of talking, using specialized language, often repeating special words or phrases.* Bizarre beliefs (e.g., space aliens, the identity or whereabouts of the Messiah, etc.).* Members required or pressured to donate their assets to the group, often for the personal enrichment of the leader(s).
https://www.cultinformation.org.uk/question_what-is-a-cult.htmlA destructive cult uses countless techniques to get its members to stay, commit themselves and take part in what may be harmful activities. The sum of these techniques constitutes what some people call "mind control." It's also known as "thought reform," "brainwashing" and "coercive persuasion," and it involves the systematic breakdown of a person's sense of self.
A cult has all of the following characteristics:1. It uses psychological coercion to recruit, indoctrinate and retain potential members.2. It forms an elitist totalitarian society.3. Its founder leader is self-appointed, dogmatic, messianic, not accountable and has charisma.4. It believes the end justifies the means.5. Its wealth does not benefit its members or society.
There are two distinct categories into which most cults can be classified. Whilst most people have heard of Religious Cults, few are aware of Therapy Cults. Victims of both groupings require the same counselling skills, but it is useful to understand the differences between the two classifications even if only to help recognise these groups as being cults. The two types of cults are as follows:
Religious CultsCommunal living common.Members usually leave or do not join societys workforce.Average age at the point of recruitment is in the low 20s.Registered as religious groups.Appear to offer association with a group interested in making the world a better place via political, spiritual or other means.
Therapy CultsCommunal living rare.Members stay in societys workforce.Average age at the point of recruitment is in the mid 30s.Registered as not for profit groups.Appear to offer association with a group giving courses in some kind of self improvement or self help technique or therapy.
By fabricating a then-imminent economic calamity, Biden could attempt to claim credit for averting it. Neat! But it's also the kind of political deception you would think that professional journalism, particularly in this age of heightened "moral clarity," would be sensitively attuned to detect and criticize.
Well, you would be wrong. A Google News search on the phrases "Biden," "economy," and "brink of collapse," produces zero mainstream news articles. There was a similar lack of evident interest when the president made another "brink of collapse" claim this May in Ohio.
Behavior that gets rewarded (or even just unpunished) tends to get repeated. And Biden at this stage in his presidency is repeatedly saying things that aren't true.
Hannah-Jones’s first answer was to chide Todd for not remembering that Virginia was lost not because of whatever unimportant thing he’d just said, but because of a “right-wing propaganda campaign that told white parents to fight against their children being indoctrinated.” This was standard pundit fare that for the millionth time showed a national media figure ignoring, say, the objections of Asian immigrant parents to Virginia policies, but whatever: her next response was more notable.
“I don’t really understand this idea that parents should decide what’s being taught,” Hannah-Jones said. “I’m not a professional educator. I don’t have a degree in social studies or science.”
I’m against bills like the proposed Oklahoma measure that would ban the teaching of Jones’s work at all state-sponsored educational institutions. I think bans are counter-productive and politically a terrible move by Republicans, who undercut their own arguments against authoritarianism and in favor of “local control” with such sweeping statewide measures. Still, it was pretty rich hearing the author of The 1619 Project say she lacked the expertise to teach, given that a) many historians agree with her there, yet b) she’s been advocating for schools to teach her dubious work to students all over the country.
However, much like the Hillary Clinton quote about “deplorables,” conventional wisdom after the “gaffe” soon hardened around the idea that what McAuliffe said wasn’t wrong at all. In fact, people like Hannah-Jones are now doubling down and applying to education the same formula that Democrats brought with disastrous results to a whole range of other issues in the Trump years, telling voters that they should get over themselves and learn to defer to “experts” and “expertise.”
This was a bad enough error in 2016 when neither Democrats nor traditional Republicans realized how furious the public was with “experts” on Wall Street who designed horrifically unequal bailouts, or “experts” on trade who promised technical retraining that never arrived to make up for NAFTA job josses, or Pentagon “experts” who promised we’d find WMDs in Iraq and be greeted as liberators there, and so on, and so on. Ignoring that drumbeat, and advising Hillary Clinton to run on her 25 years of “experience” as the ultimate Washington insider, won the Democratic Party leaders four years of Donald Trump.
https://www.loudountimes.com/news/loudoun-school-board-votes-to-send-another-class-to-fairfaxs-tj/article_f90def8e-8221-11e9-b2b8-6fecffe40943.htmlIt was at least understandable how national pols could once believe the public valued their “professional” governance on foreign policy, trade, the economy, etc. Many of these matters probably shouldn’t be left to amateurs (although as has been revealed over and over of late, the lofty reputations of experts often turn out to be based mainly upon their fluidity with gibberish occupational jargon), and disaster probably would ensue if your average neophyte was suddenly asked to revamp, say, the laws governing securities clearing.
But parenting? For good reason, there’s no parent anywhere who believes that any “expert” knows what’s better for their kids than they do. Parents of course will rush to seek out a medical expert when a child is sick, or has a learning disability, or is depressed, or mired in a hundred other dilemmas. Even through these inevitable terrifying crises of child rearing, however, all parents are alike in being animated by the absolute certainty — and they’re virtually always right in this — that no one loves their children more than they do, or worries about them more, or agonizes even a fraction as much over how best to shepherd them to adulthood happy and in one piece.
https://loudounnow.com/2020/10/06/diversity-effort-may-cut-loudouns-seats-at-thomas-jefferson-hs/Fairfax County Public Schools invoiced LCPS $3.79 million for students this fiscal year, and the board budgeted $500,000 for transportation to TJ. According to LCPS staff, by not providing transportation, the school district would save $1.2 million over the next four years.
However, several board members said this posed an equity issue because it would serve as an additional burden to students from economically disadvantaged families who wish to apply or accepting an admittance offer.
According to information provided to the School Board last week, Loudoun may only be allocated up to only 62 seats for the next freshman class at Thomas Jefferson under the new lottery system. Typically, about 100 Loudoun students per year are admitted to the program.
"My administration contemplated a significantly different outcome in this case and initiated plea negotiations but Mr. Aguilera-Mederos declined to consider anything other than a traffic ticket," she told me last week.
King's statement may not shock the conscience at first glance: Plea deals are a fixture of the U.S. criminal legal system. But her remarks hit at something deeper. By her own admission, Aguilera-Mederos was sentenced to die in prison not because the state felt that was the fair and just punishment, but because he insisted on exercising his constitutional right to trial.
https://davidthompson.typepad.com/davidthompson/2021/11/ive-put-the-breakables-in-storage.htmlI suspect that most of academia’s leftward shift was due to self-reinforcing processes: social homophily (conservatives not wanting to enter a profession where there aren’t many conservatives); political typing (conservatives feeling that an academic career “isn’t for them” in the same way that some women feel that a construction career “isn’t for them”); and discrimination (conservatives being discriminated against in hiring, research and funding).
However, one other possible cause of academia’s leftward shift, and of the rise of woke activism in particular, is the influx of women into that institution. Note: this factor is at least partly exogenous to the phenomenon we’re trying to explain. Although more women may have entered the academy in part because it became more left-wing (people with left-wing views tend to be more concerned about gender equality), the influx was also caused by the general rise in opportunities for women in society.
https://reason.com/2021/12/22/fda-finally-gets-around-to-approving-pfizers-anti-covid-pill/A new report by ProPublica details federal regulators' infuriating series of screw-ups. For instance, Irene Bosch, an MIT scientist, developed a reliable 15-minute test at the start of the pandemic that only cost $10—and would have cost even less if purchased in bulk. But the FDA refused to approve the test because it wasn't as accurate as the harder-to-come-by PCR tests.
The FDA waited to issue an EUA until now, despite the fact that in early November, Pfizer stopped enrolling participants in its clinical trial because the treatment was so effective that it would have been unethical to give new participants a placebo. In the meantime, diagnosed COVID-19 cases grew by another 5 million and 50,000 Americans died of the illness.
These record-breaking numbers reflect the perverse impact of the government's efforts to reduce drug-related deaths. The surge in fatalities followed a successful campaign to reduce opioid prescriptions, which drove nonmedical users toward black-market substitutes that are much more dangerous because their purity and potency are unpredictable.
In October, a local non-profit called the Metropolitan Crime Commission reported that the homicide rate in New Orleans has shot up to 12 per 100,000 residents since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. “Not only have nonfatal crimes similarly increased during the period,” the report added, “but New Orleans District Attorney Jason Williams has declined to pursue many alleged crimes.” As we picked our way through the hypodermic needles littering the river levee, and watched people who were clearly mentally ill rummaging through the “free store” established by the anarchist community that squats there, I paused for a moment and surveyed the scene. I turned to my husband and said, “It’s time for us to move again.”
But, Lambrecht’s defiance notwithstanding, Russia has caught Germany at a difficult time, as he must surely have calculated. The German administration is already facing pressure from allies in Europe and North America to cancel Nordstream II, an agreement with Russia that will supply gas to the huge German market via an almost-completed pipeline. Germany’s Foreign Minister, Annalena Baerbock, joint leader of the Greens and a member of the governing coalition, is a longstanding opponent of the pipeline. But Germany’s Chancellor, Olaf Scholz, is a member of the Social Democrats who dominate the coalition, and they have supported it. This is potentially a weak link in the attempt to show a united front against an invasion of Ukraine. Russia already supplies about 60 percent of Germany’s gas supply, and although gas accounts for only 20 percent of the country’s energy use, consumption will rise if coal stations are decommissioned and nuclear power continues to be phased out.
The offhand press descriptions of Smith as part of the “unruly” crowd that was acting out at the School Board over the county’s trans and equity policies were constant. In sentencing Smith, the judge in the case even chastised him: “I look at that and I go, why would anybody want to be on a School Board?” Commonwealth Attorney Buta Biberaj, a member of the Antiracist Facebook Group who would later have to be recused from the Beth Barts petition case, wanted a heavier punishment for Smith that included a fine and anger management training.
It seems no one was interested in the context of his case, until the 15-year-old boy in question was convicted in both the incident involving Smith’s daughter and a second sexual assault case at a different school. There were extenuating circumstances; Smith’s daughter did know the boy and agreed to meet him in the school bathroom. Still, despite a court agreeing that she never consented to being sodomized on the bathroom floor, the incident was downplayed in the press, seemingly for the inexcusable reason that Smith had been made an involuntary culture war combatant.
Trump not only capitalized on the unpopularity of these wealthy Washingtonians, he prospered every time DC-based national journalists or Washington insiders like Hillary Clinton caricatured his supporters as “deplorable” hayseeds, when sometimes they were merely protest voters left behind by decades of neoliberal misrule. In this way, the national political establishment was crucial in helping stoke Trumpism as a phenomenon. This time, both national reporters and politicians ranging from Barack Obama to Terry McAuliffe repeated the self-defeating error closer to home.
Around that time, the school system drafted a proposal — this really happened — to prohibit employees from making “comments that are not in alignment with the school division’s commitment to action-oriented equity practices,” in “on-campus and off-campus speech.” The plan would ban any statements by LCPS employees deemed to be “undermining the views, positions, goals, policies or public statements” of school leadership. Furthermore, all employees would have a “duty to report” such comments. The draft statement even recognized their employees’ “First Amendment right to engage in protected speech,” but went so far as to say such concerns “may be outweighed” by the goal of achieving “directives, including protected class equity, racial equity, and the goal to root out systemic racism.”
Loudoun was also very much a story about transformational changes on the blue side of American politics. Fifteen or twenty years ago, the Tanner Cross story would have had big-city ACLU lawyers stumbling over one another to come defend the controversial speech of a small-town teacher. In 2021, the ACLU wrote a brief in opposition to Cross. FOIA was another progressive legacy, having been created in response to the persecution of accused communists in the Eisenhower years, while standardized tests had been progressivism’s tool for helping Jews and Catholics break into the Ivy Leagues. What we called “progressives” once were now becoming something else, and the composition of their opposition was as a result also changing.
This saga was about so much more than Critical Race Theory, yet in the coming months of intense national spotlight between June and November, “CRT” became the national media’s sole explanation for everything that happened there. Invocation of the decades-old academic theory, papers like the Post explained, was the “new Trump,” the latest in fake news scammery (Barack Obama, in campaigning for McAuliffe, even described the controversies as “fake outrage”). It was all, the Post said, rightist hokum that had been “weaponized” by a population whose real problem was anxiety over an “influx of families of color,” since the county that was “85 percent White in 2000” was “barely 60 percent White in 2020.” Many outlets made this same point, by the way. Most failed to mention that the bulk of that demographic change came from the 750% rise during that time in the county’s Asian population, whose members of course made up a significant part of the opposition to the school policies. It was impossible to make it through a paragraph of most of these national accounts without hitting a bluntly provable lie.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1474401093962588166.htmlMany people took issue with the scholar’s using the adjective form of a word (three times) to define the noun form of the word. But maybe there’s some logic the scholar’s definition. After all, on page 17 of his book “How to be an Antiracist”, the scholar says:“To be antiracist is to set lucid definitions of racism/antiracism, racist/antiracist policies, racist/antiracist ideas, racist/antiracist people.”Let’s explore the scholar’s lucid definitions……[...]racism: a collection of measures that produce/sustain Blacks & Whites on unequal footing that lead to Blacks & Whites on unequal footing that are substantiated by the suggestion that one racial group is superior.
According to the scholar, this cannot be a “nonracist or race-neutral policy”. It must be either racist or antiracist. Again: “An antiracist policy is any measure that produces or sustains racial equity between racial groups.” In Colombia, there is not equity between Blacks, Latinos & Blacks. This policy is not producing equity,nor sustaining equity. Therefore, it is not an antiracist policy. The policy must be either racist or antiracist. Therefore, it is a racist policy.
HONG KONG—The governing body of the city’s oldest university removed a statue commemorating the victims of the Tiananmen Square massacre, felling one of the most prominent monuments to the incident on Chinese soil.
The Council of the University of Hong Kong said in a statement Thursday that it made the decision based on legal and risk assessments. It said that no party had ever obtained approval from the university to display the statue on campus.
https://www.thecollegefix.com/dartmouth-alumni-relations-black-lives-matter-library-disruption-no-rules-broken/At one point the protestors crowded around a guy sitting at his laptop and stared at him, screaming at him, ‘If we can’t study, you can’t study.”
While the Chinese government has been silent on Peng's allegations, Global Times editor-in-chief Hu Xijin, a prominent state media journalist, has continued to comment on the case on Twitter, serving as de facto messenger to the world outside. He has not mentioned Zhang, the former vice premier, referring only to "the thing people talked about".
"Those who suspect Peng Shuai is under duress, how dark they must be inside. There must be many many forced political performances in their countries," he tweeted on Sunday.
Everything I had dreamed about has come true beyond my wildest imagination. Any American can now read the widest range of opinions. In the past, it was nearly impossible to access underlying source documents. Now anyone with a phone can find a trove of legislation, court rulings, studies, and rulemakings. We can watch hearings on YouTube.
Instead of entering a golden age of reasoned public policy, we are descending into a dark age of sensationalism and misinformation. Laugh at my naïveté, but I've finally learned that Americans prefer ad hominem attacks and conspiracy-mongering to reading municipal budgets and weighing arguments in amicus briefs. So much for the democratization of news.
On the contrary, the more that schools rely on non-academic criteria such as extracurricular activities and legacy status, the more they reward applicants who are wealthy and well-connected. A gifted but impoverished Latino teen who is the first in his family to finish high school has a better shot in a system that cares about his SAT score than in a system that cares if his parents paid for clarinet lessons and secured him a spot on the water polo team.
The America's Cultivation of Hope and Inclusion for Long-Term Dependents Raised and Educated Natively Act would eliminate this nightmare scenario.
While Warren was hectoring Musk for failing to "actually pay taxes," 61 percent of Americans (roughly 100 million households) actually, for real, didn't pay federal income taxes last year. Now, last year was a bit anomalous due to high unemployment and the stimulus checks, but the number typically hovers somewhere between 40 and 47 percent, comprised by people who make low incomes, take advantage of child-related tax credits, or are elderly. And roughly 20 percent of Americans end up paying neither federal income tax nor payroll taxes.
The Tax Foundation noted that in 2018, the top 25 percent of taxpayers paid 87 percent of total federal income taxes. The top 1 percent pony up roughly 40 percent of total federal income taxes. Warren's spending priorities are largely bankrolled by the richest people in America—to the extent that they're bankrolled at all, as opposed to being added to the exorbitant national debt. Part of her critique is fair: Musk's use of government subsidies does constitute freeloading off the American taxpayers. But the rest is somewhere between misleading and dishonest.
It is now recognised that these statues represent an indigenous African tradition that attained a high level of realism and refinement.[3][failed verification][10] The Ife heads are considered the highest achievement of African culture, and it is believed that they were made by an individual artist in a single workshop.
A teacher I spoke with for this story, not based in Virginia, put it like this:
“Education is dominated by consultants,” she said. “They were former teachers, but they decide they actually want to make money, so they leave and then they start these companies.”
Just like soldiers-turned-defense contractors, or SEC investigators turned corporate defense lawyers, education consultants often end up selling their services at high-dollar rates to the same types of public entities where they once toiled, thanklessly and in the public interest, for small change. Enter the Equity Collaborative, headed by a lingo-spinning Stanford-trained ex-teacher called Jamie Almanzan, who by the summer of 2019 would become one of the most controversial names in northern Virginia.
These news stories contained excerpts that made the Collaborative’s “Assessment” sound like the lost papers of the Heaven’s Gate cultists, but not everyone was convinced they could really be that bad. People like Emily Curtis, a former Clinton Administration official who had never voted for a Republican, were skeptical. “I hadn’t fully lost my trust in mainstream media yet,” Curtis recalls. “So I said, ‘Point me at all this stuff.’”
Curtis read the raw documents. A lot of the ideas struck first-time readers like her as beyond bizarre, from “affinity groups” that regularly segregated kids according to race through an “Equity Ambassador” program that, as originally conceived, would have recruited a secret network of “Student Leaders of Color” to inform to school leaders. The Collaborative suggested these “ambassadors” collect “anonymous student stories/experiences regarding issues of racism, injustice and inequity” using an electronic form “to ascertain whether or not the student would like… the issue investigated.”* The Stasi, but for kids — awesome! Curtis, especially troubled by the affinity groups, tells a story of approaching various local Democratic officials with warnings like, “These issues you’re dismissing are going to hurt you in the next election.”
One prominent local Democrat scoffed in reply, to the effect that complaints were coming from Fox-watching racists only. When she approached another currently serving official to express concerns about the affinity groups, the official replied, “Have you read White Fragility? You need to do the work.” Curtis was aghast.
“I’m from the South. I felt like I’d walked into an old-fashioned tent revival,” she says. “This wasn’t politics. They were trying to save souls.”
Governments have never liked being scrutinized and criticized, but free countries expect them to suffer the spotlight as the price of controlling the dangerous apparatus of the state. If they don't like it, that's too bad. That a country enjoying the protections of the First Amendment for free speech and a free press puts the screws to people who attract attention emphasizes the fact that the rest of the planet is in even more dire straits.
Jordan wasn’t hit, but watching the fight, and then the adults pulling everyone apart, was draining, he said. “Ever since we got back to school, we have to deal with Covid, and, also here, we have to deal with the fighting and violence,” he said. “It’s a lot.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/an-autopsy-of-new-yorks-mail-vote-mess-11596841128Because noncitizens can’t participate in federal or state races, a practical problem is that the city’s Board of Elections, which is legendary for ineptitude, would have to manage a second voting list and set of ballots. What about people who don’t speak the basic English required by the citizenship test? Councilman Mark Treyger, a Brooklyn Democrat who abstained on the bill, said he once asked for a law requiring interpreters at polling sites, and “I was told that we didn’t have the authority.”
What a fiasco. Meantime, the national debate over mass mail voting proceeds like two postcards passing in the night. President Trump uses the word “fraud.” The factotums of conventional wisdom hit their computer hotkeys for phrases like “no evidence” of “widespread fraud.” Why focus on criminality? Old-fashioned government incompetence is clearly sufficient to create a mail-vote debacle the country might come to regret in November.
Facing pressure from congressional Democrats and a need to deliver on President Biden’s campaign promises, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is instructing financial regulators under her watch to take steps to reduce risks tied to climate change.
Those regulators traditionally have worked to ensure that banks remained sound, markets stayed competitive and investors received fair and accurate information. Now, Ms. Yellen is leaning on agencies such as the Federal Reserve and the Securities and Exchange Commission to respond to what she says is the urgent threat posed by climate change to the economy and financial assets, such as a portfolio of mortgages in low-lying coastal areas or an insurance company’s backing of drought-sensitive farm land.
Pressure on regulators to act has risen because other aspects of the White House’s climate agenda remain mired in the president’s $2 trillion social-spending package, which hasn’t passed Congress, and some have been stripped out of that bill entirely.
Progressive-leaning lawmakers balked at Mr. Biden’s renomination of Jerome Powell for Federal Reserve chairman on the grounds that the institution isn’t doing enough to address climate-related risks.
Even as westerns push harder than ever for authentic American history—Leonardo DiCaprio didn’t eat raw bison liver in “The Revenant” because he was hungry—Hollywood is chasing Brits who often come with classical training and awards-friendly prestige.
These multisensory experiences are not art—they’re a form of entertainment,” said Max Hollein, director of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, where attendance currently hovers around half the museum’s pre-pandemic levels. “We’re keeping an eye on these shows, but we don’t need to emulate them.”
At Ohio’s Columbus Museum of Art, where a major show about Van Gogh’s work opened last month, Executive Director Nannette Maciejunes said some visitors thought the “Immersive Van Gogh Exhibit” was opening inside the museum, rather than at a former furniture store. Billboards for the immersive show read, “It’s safe to Gogh.”
“It was awkward,” Ms. Maciejunes said. “Everybody in Columbus is talking about Van Gogh right now, and they either mean us or them. But their experience is popular culture about art, and ours is an exhibition of art.”
In Columbus, the museum director Ms. Maciejunes decided to do some reconnaissance by attending her local Van Gogh immersive—and she wound up taking notes, not jabs. She particularly liked one giant primer on impasto, or his style of thickly layering paint, in greater detail than her museum ever has done. But she said digital projections don’t advance any lasting scholarship on artists and minimize the heavy lifting curators often do.
Musk is "the model businessman in the age of Obama," wrote The Washington Examiner's Tim Carney several years ago. "His businesses thrive on mandates, regulations, and subsidies. Tesla received a federal loan guarantee to make its plug-in cars, which are also subsidized through tax credits for buyers. SolarCity's suppliers are subsidized solar panel makers, and its customers get tax credits for getting the panels installed. SpaceX is largely a government contractor.""Tesla Motors Inc., SolarCity Corp. and Space Exploration Technologies Corp., known as SpaceX, together have benefited from an estimated $4.9 billion in government support," according to a 2015 Los Angeles Times' investigation. "Musk and his companies' investors enjoy most of the financial upside of the government support, while taxpayers shoulder the cost."
The Yale political scientists Matthew Graham and Milan Svolik conducted experiments asking partisans if they would still support their party's candidates if those standard-bearers advocated various policies that violate democratic norms. Among the policies: a redistricting plan that would give their own party two extra seats despite a decline at the polls, and a proposal to reduce the number of polling stations in areas where the opposition party is strong. The researchers found that only a small percentage of voters would withhold their support from politicians from their own parties who violated such norms. "Put bluntly," they conclude, "our estimates suggest that in the vast majority of U.S. House districts, a majority-party candidate could openly violate one of the democratic principles we examined and nonetheless get away with it."
Remarkably, 26 percent of Trump voters with college degrees answered incorrectly. "When a Republican says that Trump's inauguration photo has more people, they are not actually disagreeing with those who claim otherwise. They're just cheerleading," argues Hannon. "People are simply making claims about factual issues to signal their allegiance to a particular ideological community."
Partisan cheerleading sounds harmless—not much different from fans rooting for a local football team, right? Nope. Hannon argues that "if our disagreements are not based on genuine reasons or arguments, then we cannot engage with each other's views." If team loyalty is the main thing, then the upshot for Hannon is that "we cannot decrease polarization by reasoned debate."
On the other hand is a series of experiments conducted by the Texas A&M political scientist Erik Peterson and the Stanford political scientist Shanto Iyengar. As they report in a 2021 article for the American Journal of Political Science, they asked Republican and Democratic partisans to evaluate the truth of claims about several hot-button issues, such as "illegal immigrants commit violent crime at a significantly higher rate than legal American citizens" and "40 percent of firearm sales in the U.S. occur without a background check." (In both cases, the correct answer was they don't.) The researchers found that 97 percent of the Democrats got the right answer about immigrant crime vs. 45 percent of the Republicans. But on gun sales, only 22 percent of the Democrats got the right answer, compared to 56 percent of the Republicans.
Whatever one may say of Walker’s arguments (and, in fairness to Rand, parts of his critique could be described in the same hysterical terms he reserves for her), that last bit does touch on something at once terribly ancient and incredibly up-to-date. In places, he might just as well have been writing about the social justice activists of the 2020s, with their similarly radiant certainties and haughty contempt for disagreement. But why stop there? No doubt, some of the more vulnerable youngsters who followed Socrates and Plato were seized with a similar conviction that theirs was the last and definitive word on all things. The young hooligans who ransacked Rand’s father’s business in Russia probably felt the same way.
For the “new intellectual,” ultimately, the way forward has to be paved with nuance and understanding. This echoes Karl Popper’s excellent observation that the wholesale adoption of any rigid set of ideas is for the birds. Nor is it much intellectual fun. It is rare, Popper pointed out, that in a debate between two respectful participants one will succeed in converting the other, much less getting him to join some philosophical cult. But it’s equally unusual for either of them to go away from a properly conducted conversation with precisely the same position as that from which they began. Concessions and refinements will have occurred. Initial positions will have undergone a degree of modification, and the sum of human knowledge improves accordingly.
When performance gaps are mapped to competitor numbers within a given discipline as a percentage, the impact is obvious and large. For example, the male-to-female gap in track sprinting is 12 percent. This translates into approximately 10,000 males having a personal best 100m sprint time faster than the current female Olympic champion, Elaine Thompson-Herah.
Thompson’s 2016 gold medal performance was, within the year, slower than not just elite senior male sprinters, but also slower than schoolboys, Master’s category males (i.e., age 35 and older), Paralympic males, and males whose primary sport is not track sprinting.
In places like Loudoun, where roughly a fifth of the population is Asian or South Asian, the reason for at least some of those defections is not so hard to figure, if you bother to ask.
Of course, few asked. The Loudoun mess had a lot to do with race, but it was no simple sequel to old civil rights battles. This was a brand-new tale about multidimensional racial tensions, beginning perhaps with the impatience of affluent intellectuals toward a quiet immigrant community whose chief crime, as ham-handed as this sounds, was believing the American dream. For that offense, they were sentenced to the rudest of awakenings.
If you’re looking for a highway directly to the Ivy League (and from there, to the upper class), “TJ” is the most consistent launching pad in the most affluent region in the country. In the three years between 2015 and 2017, students from Thomas Jefferson High produced an absurd 79 graduates from Harvard, Princeton, and MIT alone. In the shrinking opportunity zone that is the modern United States, where debt and privation spread like cancer and even wealthy parents fear their children can’t afford to waste their time having childhoods, the competition to put kids in pipelines to top feeder schools like TJ as early as possible is ferocious.
In another of the innumerable million-pound ironies in the Loudoun mess, many of these immigrants came to America in flight not just from racism, but from a true white supremacist legacy. Back home, many experienced discrimination from a northern population that looks down upon them, among other things, for having darker skin, an echo of India’s colonial past. Mention “blacks” to some, and they might think you’re referring to them, since that’s an operative slur there as well. “If we were racist, why would we have the south?” a parliament member from India’s ruling BJP party said a few years ago. “Why do we live with them? We have black people around us.”
“One of the reasons a lot of these immigrants don’t want to talk about this, is they don’t like to wear their grievances on their sleeve,” says Asra Nomani, veteran journalist and onetime colleague of murdered reporter Daniel Pearl, and now Vice-President of an advocacy group called Parents Defending Education. “These are people who have been looked down upon for having dark skin. A lot of the kids at TJ, for instance, are darker than black Americans. But it’s something they don’t talk about.”
As Reason has repeatedly pointed out, several key parts of the bill are designed to game the CBO's method for scoring the cost of legislation by setting arbitrary expiration dates even though lawmakers obviously intend for those policies to be permanent fixtures. Probably the best example is the expanded child tax credit, which would expire after just a single year. Other parts of the bill, including the universal pre-K funding and new subsidies for child care, would expire after six years. Expanded subsidies through the Affordable Care Act would last until 2025.
With all those gimmicks in place, the CBO assessment of the bill projects that it will cost about $1.8 trillion and add about $367 billion to the deficit over the next decade.
If all the Build Back Better plan's proposals were made permanent, however, the final price tag would be $4.8 trillion, and the bill would add about $2.8 trillion to the deficit, according to the CRFB.
The Natural Science and Engineering Council of Canada rejected a grant request from Patanjali Kambhampati, professor chemistry at Montreal's McGill University. The council told Kambhampati "the Equity, Diversity and Inclusion considerations in the application were deemed insufficient." He had another request for government funding turned down for similar reasons last year. He wrote on the application, "We will hire the most qualified people based upon their skills and mutual interests." Both grants were rejected before they even had a chance to go to actual scientists to judge the scientific merits of the proposed research.
We are long past the point of purist outrage in big-time college sports. Flimsy notions of amateurism and loyalty evaporated from the landscape generations ago. Today, college football is a fully formed, billion-dollar enterprise, with no fundamental attachment to anything but the bottom line and the Next Big Thing.
Before NIAID issued this denial, there was almost no coverage at all of the story in the mainstream media. With a few isolated exceptions, it was covered only in conservative media, independent media, and social media for obvious reasons: since it reflects poorly on Fauci, the liberal sector of the corporate media has no interest in doing anything other than burying it. But as soon as NIAID chummed the water with its questionable denial, suddenly it was a hot topic in the press: not as a story about animal abuse, but about “right-wing misinformation.” In other words, corporate journalists had no interest in any of this — including the misuse of taxpayer funds to support ethically monstrous and medically useless experiments — until they found a way to wield it as a cudgel to attack right-wing media and shield Fauci.
On the other end of the spectrum was East Carolina University, a public institution in Greenville, N.C., which created its dentistry program a decade ago and accepts applications only from state residents. Its graduates carried median debt of about $131,000, and they had median income that was nearly as much, at about $120,000.
“It didn’t happen by accident,” said Gregory Chadwick, dean of ECU’s dentistry program. He said the school was created expressly to create dentists who would serve people in poor and rural parts of North Carolina. “They have to have debt that’s manageable to go out to those areas,” he added.
Timothy Mucciante, a producer working on a film adaptation of Lucky, was fired after raising questions about inconsistencies in Sebold's story. Mucciante, who has a legal background, started reviewing the police files; he became even more troubled by discrepancies between the memoir and the facts of the case, to the point where he "couldn't sleep." Mucciante ended up hiring a private investigator to investigate further, and the P.I. broke the case. Broadwater's conviction turns out to have rested on shaky evidence: Sebold had had trouble identifying her assailant—she had initially picked a different man out of a lineup—and the only forensic evidence was a form of hair analysis that the government now considers junk science.
I discussed the “deaths of despair” phenomenon and showed photos of haunted industrial landscapes and the lonely downtown area. I presented national data on the characteristics of individuals who abused prescription pills and on the frequency with which addiction develops. I talked about the culture of prescribing in rural mining towns and the myriad factors that caused the crisis. I closed by highlighting the heroic efforts of Irontonians to boost the economy and the morale of their beloved town.
One month later, I received an e-mail from the chairman of the department, a fine man and brilliant researcher whom I have known since we were interns together in the 1980s. He admitted that he had not anticipated “the extent of the hurt and offense that folks would take” to my presence. He appended an anonymous complaint that he had received from an unspecified number of “Concerned Yale Psychiatry Residents.”
The residents told the chairman that my talk, coming only two days after the January 6th attack on the Capitol, “was further traumatizing to us.” They wrote that, “the language Dr. Satel used in her presentation was dehumanizing, demeaning, and classist toward individuals living in rural Ohio and for rural populations in general … We find her canon to be beyond a ‘difference of opinion’ worth debate.” My earlier writing on health disparities was deemed a “racist canon.”
Prior to 2016, elite mouthpieces bragged about acting as gatekeepers to political power. Someone like then-ABC writer Mark Halperin could write boastful pieces about how a “Gang of 500” in Washington really decided the presidency. These were “campaign consultants, strategists, pollsters, pundits, and journalists who make up the modern-day political establishment,” as the New Yorker put it. When political debates were held, a handful of analysts on television told you who won. We, reporters, told you who was “electable” and who wasn’t, and people mostly listened, even if “electability” was a crock that mostly measured levels of corporate donor approval.
Then came 2016. Trump didn’t get the big Republican donor money (it went to Jeb Bush), he didn’t get the support of his party’s bureaucracy (which at various times pulled out stops to try to “derail” his candidacy for the nomination), and even conservative media locked arms against him early in the race (the National Review published an unprecedented “Conservatives Against Trump” mega-piece featuring a slew of famed mouthpieces, who aimed to forestall the “crisis for conservatism” Trump’s presence threatened). Trump throughout his political career benefited from free corporate media coverage, but by the time of his first nomination, he had universally negative editoria[...]People will focus on the fact that it was bad bad Donald Trump who got elected that year, but that was really incidental. The real problem Trump represented for elite America had less to do with his political beliefs than the unapproved manner of his rise. Twitter, seen as a co-conspirator in this evil, became a target of establishment reprisal after Trump’s win.
Propagandists ran a hell of a game on people like Dorsey. After fiascoes caused by official lies like the WMD affair, no one in government called for tighter regulation of media or the Internet, or told the executives of private communications firms they had blood on their hands. WMDs, after all, were approved disinformation. The unapproved variety, in the form of, say, anything Trump thought, inspired a different reaction. People like Dorsey were now told by Senators and other figures they had responsibility to prevent “misinformation” and “harm” in ways no one else had ever been asked to assume. The message was hammered everywhere, so pervasively that it permeated the ranks of firms like Twitter, where employees began to push their bosses even harder to accept what was, in essence, more outside control of their company.
Our lives are guided by that general conception of the course of things which has been created by society for social purposes. Our words, our phrases, our forms and processes and modes of thought, are common property, fashioned and perfected from age to age; an heirloom which every succeeding generation inherits as a precious deposit and a sacred trust to be handled on to the next one, not unchanged but enlarged and purified, with some clear marks of its proper handiwork. Into this, for good or ill, is woven every belief of every man who has speech of his fellows. An awful privilege, and an awful responsibility, that we should help to create the world in which posterity will live.
For Clifford, this meant that each of us has an important ethical responsibility: namely, to believe only on the basis of proper evidence. As I will be arguing in the next chapter, if our epistemic situation is a common resource in this way, then we all have a duty to do what we can to preserve the integrity of this resource. However, believing on the basis of proper evidence, though important in its own right, is not enough—we also have a duty to speak our minds.
The Graphing Jane Austen team was inspired by the work of the anthropologist Christopher Boehm, who gained renown in the early 2000s for demonstrating that the lives of hunter-gatherers were typified not by the every-man-for-himself behavior that most associate with Darwinism but by a much gentler ethic of communalism and egalitarianism.
The golden rule of hunter-gather life is pretty simple: Do everything to bring the band together; do nothing to split it apart. Don’t sow division. Don’t hog up more than your share (of food, sex partners, attention). If you happen to be blessed with muscle, don’t throw it around. If you happen to be a great hunter or a dazzling beauty, don’t flaunt it over others. Be one of the good guys, in other words. Of course, if there’s an instinct in humans to get along with each other in groups, there’s also an instinct to get ahead. We proposed that agonistic structure in stories generally, not just in Victorian novels, reflects the ancient morality of hunter-gatherer life. Living in groups, as humans must, means constantly balancing our selfish impulses with group needs. Protagonists of stories properly balance individual self-interest with the needs of the group. In general, protagonists sacrifice their self-interest for the common good when the two are in conflict. Not antagonists. Pretty much the definition of a bad person among hunter-gatherers is the bad team player who reliably puts his or her own interests above the group’s.
Kjeldgaard-Christiansen is describing the archetypal villain, the one who has been haunting stories in different guises since the origins of humanity. The villain is always the same deep down: he’s the guy who wants to split us apart. She’s the selfish one at work. The ball hog at the pickup game. The jerk who steals your parking spot. The murderer hiding in the bushes. The selfish bastard who’s going to subvert the egalitarian ethos that holds the community together. And who’s the hero? The term hero evokes ancient associations with physical muscle and physical courage. But with much greater predictability, protagonists embody moral virtues, not physical ones. The protagonist is rarely a saint and not just because saints are boring. An interesting protagonist must have room for improvement.
They found not only that the Agta put a premium on good storytelling but also that the prosocial messages in the tales actually sink in and modify group behavior. Agta bands that boasted strong storytellers also functioned better as cohesive and harmonious teams.
The deeply moralistic, judgy character of stories is embedded in the very word story, which is derived from the ancient Greek historía. This is obviously where we get our word history, but it’s also where we get our word story. The oldest meaning of the root word hístōr, going back to how it’s used in Homeric-era Greek, indicates a referee, wise man, or judge. This suggests that stories, including historical stories, aren’t just neutral accounts of events but renderings of judgment upon them.
The judgy connotations of the word story have died away along with knowledge of ancient Greek. But the judginess of our stories is nonetheless as pronounced as ever.
https://medium.com/exploring-history/how-a-gay-artist-defined-the-perfect-american-male-in-1905-bed71e7029ddAfter she and Eleanor grew closer, Hick resigned from her AP position since she could no longer report on her subject objectively. She had her own room to sleep in next to Eleanor’s in the White House when she visited, and they wrote of dreaming of their own place together someday. It was Hick’s encouragement that sparked Eleanor’s move to redefine the role of First Lady.
Leyendecker knew that it would be too risky to base the country’s most prominent symbol of masculinity on his own own gay lover. However, this taboo was hidden in plain sight — right in front of everyone’s face and on their skin in the form of the most prominent clothing brand of that day and age.
The massive inspection backlogs at the FDA have been caused by the FDA shooting itself in the foot by baring their inspectors from flying during the pandemic, delaying 15,000 inspections. It’s a grim situation.
The fact remains, FDA officials could sign a document today releasing either drug to at-risk patients and start saving lives tomorrow, but they are choosing not to.
Like many English intellectuals of the time, he was aligned with socialist causes for much of his life. I don’t want to get bogged down in what exactly I construe ‘socialism’ to mean; for the purpose of this post you can assume I am in favour of some weak form of socialism, somewhere to the right of ‘the state must control all the means of production’ and but to the left of ‘being poor is always your own fault’. I also don’t believe the unfettered free market will solve all our problems, but as I get older I have increasingly begun to believe that the solution to problems with ‘like, the System, man’ lie in creating incentives that are aligned with the desired outcome, and less prone to attribute to malice what can be attributed to stupidity, unintended consequences, or emergent effects (which is not to say that malice doesn’t also play an important role in many of the world’s ills).
“I’m in a nice room with my own aircon,” tweets a contented Luke Ellis from Howard Springs, “I’m sitting back watching Netflix on free Wi-Fi. I had barra with garlic butter and broccolini for dinner. I’m in constant contact with loved ones.” “The food is amazing.” But Ellis’s best observation? “If it’s a ‘genocide’ it’s a pretty shit planned one.”
Howard Springs is not a concentration camp. To say so is to do violence to the English language. Its builders were probably closer to the mark when they described it as “a stylish, innovative and sustainable accommodation village” that can house 850 people. In the Northern Territory, known for its rough edges, the accommodation at Howard Springs *is* the equivalent of a five-star resort for some people.
As activist and journalist Adam Zivo has pointed out, the new iteration of the Church-Wellesley Village business association, in its rush to be perceived as on the right side of history, is creating a narrative that denies Indigenous agency and ignores the history endorsed by the Shingwaukonse Residential School survivors’ association. Herein lies the tragicomic irony of Wood’s statue: Created to commemorate a possibly false allegation two centuries ago, it now may be toppled because of a certainly false allegation in our own time.
Every mayor of Atlanta for the past 142 years has been a Democrat. Every mayor of Baltimore for the past 54 years has been a Democrat. Every mayor of Chicago for the past 90 years has been a Democrat. Every mayor of Detroit for the past 59 years has been a Democrat. And every mayor of St. Louis for the past 72 years has been a Democrat. Just two of Houston’s last 14 mayors have not been Democrats; in other words, Houston has had a Democrat mayor for nearly 83 percent of the last 78 years. Minneapolis has also been governed by Democrats almost exclusively for the past 47 years—the only exception being Charles Stenvig who won as an independent in 1976.
It is easy to point out fundamental moral and practical flaws in these systems, including disenfranchisement of women and the existence of massive slave populations alongside empowered free male citizens. Still, most human history is a history of monarchy, making republican and democratic systems particularly valuable to study for those who wish to live in the exceptional systems that involve popular participation. And Putin, Xi Jinping and Trump all remind us that the threat of autocracy is very real. Studying how ancient systems worked, and why they failed, is an urgent exercise as we struggle to shore up democracy in the 21st century.
We should honor the dead by being smart and strategic. Our society cannot and will not survive a polity that permits armed children to walk the streets and kill with impunity. Our moral sensibilities push in a different direction, and we must take action to ensure that our moral sensibilities are adequately reflected in our positive law.
A true and sincere confession of one’s actual sins and cruelties is a courageous act that leaves the confessor vulnerable and exposed. The ritualized anti-confession of social-justice liturgy, by contrast, is performed with the opposite purpose: It insulates the confessor by dispersing responsibility for his or her (invariably unspecified) sins among the hundreds of millions of other Earthlings who happen to share the same skin color. “I rear-ended your car” is a true confession. “I have failed to use my white privilege to address our structurally racist highway system” is not.
In November 2021, a few hundred people set up camp outside Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas, where John F. Kennedy was assassinated 58 years earlier. The people gathered there believed that the slain president’s son, John F. Kennedy Jr., who died in a plane crash in 1999, was about to return. He would become vice president under former president Donald Trump, who would then step down, making JFK Jr. the president. This would precipitate a chain of increasingly bizarre events that would turn US politics upside-down. This is a fringe belief even among the disciples of QAnon. What makes it intriguing, however, is that it is so preposterous that it strains the credulity of most reasonable people. Do QAnon believers really buy into this stuff, or is this just an elaborate prank of some kind?
Of course, this weird story also attracted attention because it helped to confirm what those on the Left like to think about their opponents on the Right—that they’re deranged lunatics clinging to increasingly absurd conspiracy theories borne of bigotry. The radical Left believe that racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and all 31 flavors of hateful prejudice are hiding in every corner, sitting in every corporate boardroom, and lurking in the hearts of anyone who disagrees with them. This eldritch threat is unseeable and unprovable, but the belief has become mainstream over the last decade, even so. Still, it is just a belief, and one that makes up with conviction what it lacks in evidence. Indeed, it spurns the very notion that evidence is required.
Nevertheless, a person still needs some sort of justification for a belief. Evolutionary psychology tells us that humans evolved to formulate beliefs for the purpose of survival—to increase evolutionary fitness. A person formulates beliefs by abstracting from their experiences and applying a belief toward goal-oriented behavior. So, a belief is true when it can lead to successfully accomplishing goals. This is the epistemic theory of pragmatism.
Because of all of these simple factual misconceptions — that Rittenhouse was a militia member and a white supremacist who’d traveled a great distance to a town to which he had no connection, then fired first and indiscriminately — analysts not only pre-judged Rittenhouse’s guilt, but offered advance explanations for any possible acquittal.
Since it was not possible that it was real self-defense, the trial could only be an affirmation of white supremacy’s hold on the judicial system.
"You were facing 20 years, Mr. Chansley," said the judge, telling him he was "smart" for not going to trial. "You did the right thing."
The "right" thing. At first glance, I'd posit most readers wouldn't think much of that; plea bargains are a core part of the U.S. criminal justice system. Yet in being frank with Chansley, Lamberth laid bare why those "bargains" are raw deals: Had Chansley insisted on his constitutional right to a trial by jury, he would have been staring down more than 16 additional years in prison. That's not because the government believes such a stratospheric sentence would serve public safety. It's because prosecutors routinely inflate hypothetical prison sentences and dangle them over defendants in order to bully them out of going to trial, where outcomes are both costly and uncertain.
The trial was stopped due to ‘ethical considerations’ for being too effective. You see, we live in a world in which:
1. It is illegal to give this drug to any patients, because it hasn’t been proven safe and effective.2. It is illegal to continue a trial to study the drug, because it has been proven so safe and effective that it isn’t ethical to not give the drug to half the patients.3. Who, if they weren’t in the study, couldn’t get the drug at all, because it is illegal due to not being proven safe and effective yet. 4. So now no one gets added to the trial so those who would have been definitely don’t get Paxlovid, and are several times more likely to die.5. But our treatment of them is now ‘ethical.’6. For the rest of time we will now hear about how it was only seven deaths and we can’t be sure Paxlovid works or how well it works, and I expect to spend hours arguing over exactly how much it works.7. For the rest of time people will argue the study wasn’t big enough so we don’t know the Paxlovid is safe.8. Those arguments will then be used both by people arguing to not take Paxlovid, and people who want to require other interventions because of these concerns.9. FDA Delenda Est.
But also: one of the data detectives who exposed some fraudulent ivermectin papers was a medical student, which puts him somewhere between pond scum and hookworms on the Medical Establishment Totem Pole. Some of the people whose studies he helped sink were distinguished Professors of Medicine and heads of Health Institutes. If anyone interprets “trust experts” as “mere medical students must not publicly challenge heads of Health Institutes”, then we’ve accidentally thrown the fundamental principle of science out with the bathwater. But Pierre Kory, spiritual leader of the Ivermectin Jihad, is a distinguished critical care doctor. What heuristic tells us “Medical students should be allowed to publicly challenge heads of Health Institutes” but not “Distinguished critical care doctors should be allowed to publicly challenge the CDC”?
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/11/leftist-language-policing-wont-fix-health-disparities/620695/The AMA’s Advancing Health Equity: A Guide to Language, Narrative and Concepts is so over the top I thought at first it was satire from the BabylonBee. The guide, for example, recommends that instead of talking about poor health among low-income people that physicians should blame “landowners and large corporations” for “increasingly centralizing political and financial power wielded by a few” and limiting “prospects for good health and well-being for many groups.” Put aside that this is at best tendentious and at worst utterly fallacious and just imagine that you are a landowner or work for a large corporation (that’s most of us!). Would you trust a doctor spouting this rhetoric or might you feel that such a doctor doesn’t have your best interests at heart?
https://reason.com/2021/11/18/american-medical-association-health-equity-report-woke-jargon/If adhering to the guidance, Walensky would have to say something like, “We know that vaccination helps to decrease community transmission and protect those who are most oppressed.”
But that would be misleading. Medical vulnerability is not synonymous with oppression. Men are more vulnerable to COVID-19 than women, but not because men are more oppressed. My grandmother is far more vulnerable to the disease than a wrongfully incarcerated teenager, yet she is far less oppressed. Meanwhile, a warehouse worker whose boss fails to update workplace-safety protocols might indeed be vulnerable to COVID-19 because of lopsided power relations. But if exposed to a public-health message urging vaccination for “the most oppressed,” he might think, That’s not me, whereas a message informing him that “indoor workers are among the most vulnerable” is far more explicit about whom the advice is for.
https://quillette.com/2021/11/07/anti-racism-as-office-politics-power-play-a-canadian-academic-case-study/Theory directs its animus, above all, says Ruddick, at the very idea of selfhood, the presumed value of the inner life, and the attendant ideals of self-possession, self-regulation, and self-cultivation. Thus diminished, individuals are portrayed as interchangeable, “promoting the evacuation of selves into the group,” and undermining readers’ faith in loving attachments, in particular any assumption that home and family can sustain us in a troubled world. All such allegiances, according to Theory, are the mere leavings of “mainstream psychology,” symptoms of a “retrograde humanism” hopelessly “fraught with bourgeois ideology.” In his Seventh Letter, Plato insists that we are born, not simply for ourselves, but “partly for our parents, partly for our friends,” and “partly for our country.” If Ruddick’s conception of home likewise extends to one’s homeland, then perhaps we have here at least the beginnings of an answer to our question.
There were (and in some cases still are) expat-run coffee shops, rave clubs, literary magazines, vegetarian restaurants, New York pizza joints, one of the continent's greatest English-language bookstores, one of its dingiest pool bars, some guy named Peyton who would swing by our office every day selling homemade submarine sandwiches, and so forth. Americans expect immigrants to be entrepreneurial, to bring some of the home culture to the new place, but we don't necessarily expect them to be us.
Lost, too, were opportunities, in literally every country, for a kind of moral inventory of how the Cold War, even on the most righteous of flanks, corrupted our belief systems and activity. Americans in the political class could have spent the '90s confessing their prior misjudgments, publicly recalibrating their views, and rediscovering humility in the face of events literally no one predicted. Instead, most just dutifully trudged on to the next political fight, took in precious little information after the secret police archives opened up, and slowly began preparing for the next "existential crisis." After beginning the decade with heated political debates about Washington's role at "the end of history," a bipartisan elite consensus by the turn of the millennium agreed with (Czech-born) Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's characterization of America as the "indispensable nation." We are still living with the consequences of that choice.
These reactions are evidence of a trend towards an activist model of scholarship. At the root of this model is academia’s image of itself as the vanguard of social change in America, burdened with the grave responsibility of helping to forge the nation’s future and fight its evils.
But this is largely a fantasy. Very little of academic work has a notable influence on society, and when it does, the nature of that influence is very different to what academics profess to believe.
https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/owning-the-progressives-a-new-book-takes-aim-at-san-franciscos-homelesness-policies/For much of human history, people with mental illness were thought to be possessed by gods or devils. Madness, as it was called, was believed to be supernatural, not natural. Some Greeks, including Plato, viewed mental illness as a kind of spiritual gift, a portal into new ways of seeing. Many believed that madness revealed hidden intuitive and mystical knowledge. The idea that mental illness was in fact a way toward wisdom could still be found in medieval Christian visionaries.
In the Netherlands, another famously permissive country, a certain number of citations for heroin possession triggers mandatory treatment. The Netherlands and many other countries also practice “contingency management,” providing progressively better housing and welfare benefits in exchange for staying sober or taking psychiatric medication. These kinds of policies often exist alongside needle exchanges, safe consumption sites, methadone clinics and ample homelessness and mental health services.
Not every policy that works in other places will work in San Francisco. But it’s remarkable how quickly many best practices — or even remotely functional practices — from across the country and around the world are dismissed by activists and leaders here on the left coast. A little humility and inquisitiveness would seem to be in order, when, clearly, our policies related to homelessness, drugs, and mental health are not working.
As a Bay Area resident and a lapsed progressive activist who previously focused on the environment and drug decriminalization, Shellenberger writes with the conviction of a convert. As such, he cherry picks data that fits his narrative, and overlooks essential counterfactuals — namely, the situation in conservative America.
Michael Shermer has seen a pseudo-spiritual element to the behaviour of these critics: he says they view evil as “a quasi-mystical force akin to Satan.” This means that figures like Peterson “are seen as carriers of evil, much like witches channelling demons from below, no matter that they never actually say or do anything evil in nature.” Peterson embodies white supremacy and institutional racism, as far as these people are concerned, and his actual behaviour is of no importance. As Shermer explains, when people stop thinking of evil as a descriptor of individual motivations and think of it instead as a hazily idealised force, then they “imagine the locus of evil as lying completely outside their own intentions and actions.”[10] This absolves them of all manner of horrendous activity, while removing any chance of absolution for the ‘evil’ party. In this way Peterson has become a magnet for many lurid accusations.
This means that reliable data on deaths are hard to come by. Estimates suggest that turbines in North America kill 600,000 to 949,000 bats and 140,000 to 679,000 birds a year. Dogs are, by far, the quickest and most effective way to find them.
The best dogs for this work are misfits of the pet world. They have to be utterly obsessed with play—to a point that most humans would find exhausting. “All the dogs that we have in our program, they're either rescues … or they’re an owner surrender, where they just say they’re out of options and even a shelter won’t take them,” says Heath Smith, the director of Rogue Detection Teams, a conservation-detection-dog company. The dogs have too much energy and an “insatiable drive to play fetch,” which is not great for a family pet but very useful for motivating a dog to find birds or bats so they can get their favorite toy as a reward.
These reactions are evidence of a trend towards an activist model of scholarship. At the root of this model is academia’s image of itself as the vanguard of social change in America, burdened with the grave responsibility of helping to forge the nation’s future and fight its evils.
But this is largely a fantasy. Very little of academic work has a notable influence on society, and when it does, the nature of that influence is very different to what academics profess to believe.
It is not that academic research has no influence on society, nor that it is never a force for good. It is more that the strength and nature of academic power is very different from what researchers say they believe. This is the essence of the identity crisis: a feverish moral urgency to use academia for good and an unwillingness to be honest about the realities of academic power.
The Tibetan Plateau is often called the “Third Pole” because its great glaciers and lakes contain the biggest reserve of fresh water outside the polar regions—a reserve that feeds many of Asia’s major rivers. Billions of people (nearly half the world’s population) live in the watersheds of these rivers, investing the Plateau with immense strategic importance. From the Chinese perspective, this value is rising in tandem with a deepening water crisis. Much of China’s territory is still desert, half of its rivers have now disappeared, and more than 50 percent of the country’s remaining river water and 90 percent of its groundwater is unfit to drink. Every year 190 million Chinese fall ill because of water pollution.
For all its geographical value to Beijing, Tibet is still an occupied territory. When the Chinese Communist Party falls—as one day it must—the case for Tibetan independence will become too strong to ignore.[...]For now, with the Second Cold War gaining pace, we may dare to hope that American politics can leave behind the simpering cowardice of the Obama years. There are some encouraging signs. In November 2020, Lobsang Sangay visited the White House—the first visit of its kind in decades—and in December, Congress passed the Tibet Policy and Support Act, which calls for the right of Tibetans to confirm the identity of the next Dalai Lama, and also for the establishment of an American consulate in Lhasa.
https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2021/07/why-did-a-christian-college-fire-a-tenured-professor/From another Canadian university came a note from two science researchers which provides perhaps the most ridiculous example I have seen of how DEI statements are used to adjudicate grant applications. In this case, the grant was simply for a piece of scientific equipment, valued at $150,000, to be used by the scientists in their research. Yet, as one of them writes:> Yet even here for literally just an instrument, we have to write some DIE text … I am now forced to lie for the first time since age 7 when I stole the candy.
The Roman Empire was weakened by 450 AD, but it was not impotent or fallen. The Huns had been kept at bay, whether through payment of tribute or military deterrence and diplomacy. Tenth-century Europe could not afford payment, because it was not a cash society. It could not resist because it was entirely disunited, a Christian civilization that was simply a collection of petty warring principalities, united by nominal loyalty to a Roman papacy constantly embroiled in civil wars.
https://www.news-medical.net/news/20210521/Can-SARS-CoV-2-trigger-amyloidosis.aspxThese interactions suggests that the heparin-binding site on the S1 protein might assist the binding of amyloid proteins to the viral surface and thus could initiate aggregation of these proteins and finally leads to neurodegeneration in brain. The results will help us to prevent future outcomes of neurodegeneration by targeting this binding and aggregation process.
The virus SARS-CoV-2 has secondary effects other than COVID-19, especially in the presence of some solid tumors or inflammatory conditions that predispose to amyloid deposition and its subsequent issues.
“I kind of kept it there all day under its little glass thing, and when my son got home we were observing it for a long time and then I’m like, ‘well, we have to smush it now.’ And I brought out a shoe,” she said. “It goes against everything you tell your kids, you know, respecting nature yet let’s, you know, go and kill this bug, specifically.”
When a population is placed in a state of sufficiently grave fear and anger regarding a perceived threat, concerns about the constitutionality, legality and morality of measures adopted in the name of punishing the enemy typically disappear. The first priority, indeed the sole priority, is to crush the threat. Questions about the legality of actions ostensibly undertaken against the guilty parties are brushed aside as trivial annoyances at best, or, worse, castigated as efforts to sympathize with and protect those responsible for the danger. When a population is subsumed with pulsating fear and rage, there is little patience for seemingly abstract quibbles about legality or ethics. The craving for punishment, for vengeance, for protection, is visceral and thus easily drowns out cerebral or rational impediments to satiating those primal impulses.[...]What makes this ongoing prohibition of dissent or even doubt so remarkable is that so many of the responses to 1/6 are precisely the legal and judicial policies that liberals have spent decades denouncing. Indeed, many of the defining post-1/6 policies are identical to those now retrospectively viewed as abusive and excessive, if not unconstitutional, when invoked as part of the first War on Terror.
Several convicted of nothing more than trivial misdemeanors are being sentenced to real prison time; last week, Michigan's Robert Reeder pled guilty to “one count of parading, demonstrating or picketing in a Capitol building” yet received a jail term of 3 months, with the judge admitting that the motive was to “send a signal to the other participants in that riot… that they can expect to receive jail time.”
What makes these secret notices especially pernicious is that the committee requested that these companies not notify their customers that the committee has demanded the preservation of their data. The committee knows it lacks the power to impose a "gag order” on these companies to prevent them from notifying their users that they received the precursor to a subpoena: a power the FBI in conjunction with courts does have. So they are relying instead on "voluntary compliance" with the gag order request, accompanied by the thuggish threat that any companies refusing to voluntarily comply risk the public relations harm of appearing to be obstructing the committee's investigation and, worse, protecting the 1/6 “insurrectionists.”
Worse still, the committee in its preservation notices to these communications companies requested that “you do not disable, suspend, lock, cancel, or interrupt service to these subscribers or accounts solely due to this request,” and that they should first contact the committee “if you are not able or willing to respond to this request without alerting the subscribers." The motive here is obvious: if any of these companies risk the PR hit by refusing to conceal from their customers the fact that Congress is seeking to obtain their private data, they are instructed to contact the committee instead, so that the committee can withdraw the request. That way, none of the customers will ever be aware that the committee targeted their private data and will thus never be able to challenge the legality of the committee's acts in a court of law.
This congressional committee is designed to be cathartic theater for liberals, and a political drama for the rest of the country. They know Republicans will object to their deliberately unconstitutional inquisitions, and they intend to exploit those objections to darkly insinuate to the country that Republicans are driven by a desire to protect the violent traitors so that they can deploy them as an insurrectionary army for future coups. They have staffed the committee with their most flamboyant and dishonest drama queens, knowing that Adam Schiff will spend most of his days on CNN with Chris Cuomo comparing 1/6 to Pearl Harbor and the Holocaust; Liz Cheney will equate Republicans with Al Qaeda and the Capitol riot to the destruction of the World Trade Center; and Adam Kinzinger will cry on cue as he reminds everyone over and over that he served in the U.S. military only to find himself distraught and traumatized that the real terrorists are not those he was sent to fight overseas but those at home, in his own party.
The whole show is about his ongoing beef with mostly-upper-class, mostly-white intellectuals trying to make him take seriously their self-appointed new status as humanity’s Bigotry Police. In a now-infamous passage about being a trans-exclusionary radical feminist “TERF,” he says, “I didn’t even know what the fuck that was.” Chappelle is like the overwhelming majority of Americans, alternately mystified and enraged at being scolded for violating a confounding and constantly expanding list of social rules he had no say in writing. To be black and lectured in this way, from one’s own former audience no less, has to be doubly infuriating. No wonder he’s pissed.
“We’re committed to birddogging” Ms. Sinema, vowed Our Revolution Executive Director Joseph Geevarghese to Politico this week. “We’re going to make her life unpleasant or uncomfortable” until she follows orders. The group—which spun out of Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign—gathered shock troops this week outside Ms. Sinema’s Phoenix and Tucson offices to make a start on that threat. Only the left gets away with warnings like this. Suburban parents who grump at school boards are labeled (by the same progressives) “domestic terrorists.”
Remember being told a vote for Mr. Biden was a vote for decency and morality? The oh-so-decent Mr. Biden last week—when given an opportunity to denounce the bathroom bullying of Ms. Sinema—instead called it “part of the process.”
Teenage girls across the globe have been showing up at doctors’ offices with tics—physical jerking movements and verbal outbursts—since the start of the pandemic.
Movement-disorder doctors were stumped at first. Girls with tics are rare, and these teens had an unusually high number of them, which had developed suddenly. After months of studying the patients and consulting with one another, experts at top pediatric hospitals in the U.S., Canada, Australia and the U.K. discovered that most of the girls had something in common: TikTok.
Doctors say most of the teens have previously diagnosed anxiety or depression that was brought on or exacerbated by the pandemic. Physical symptoms of psychological stress often manifest in ways that patients have seen before in others, Dr. Gilbert said. In the past, he said he has had patients who experienced nonepileptic seizures and who, in most cases, had witnessed the seizures of relatives with epilepsy.
To remind us of why we developed these institutions in the first place, Mr. Rauch returns to the beginning of modernity. When the wars of religion were drenching Europe in blood, writers and philosophers such as Michel de Montaigne and John Locke saw a way through that impasse of intransigence. They originated an approach to thinking that systematized doubt and made it productive.
The institutions built to encourage constructive doubt embody Mr. Rauch’s constitution of knowledge. Their cardinal principles are “fallibilism” and “empiricism.” Knowledge is fallible if it might be debunked yet “withstands attempts to debunk it.” It is empirical if the method we use to check it “gives the same result regardless of the identity of the checker.” While our processes of review don’t tell us exactly what truth is, they often identify what truth isn’t. And they produce tested hypotheses that help us govern ourselves.
Mr. Rauch draws a parallel between this constitution of knowledge and two of liberalism’s other hallmark institutions, constitutional government and free-market economics. All of them “organize far-flung cooperation, distribute decision-making across social networks, and exploit network intelligence.” The result is political cooperation, reliable scientific findings and economic prosperity.
If experts want to regain the trust they need to be effective, they must remember that, while they judge themselves by their credentials, others judge them by their fruits. Mr. Rauch rightly points out the invaluable work done by the institutions of the constitution of knowledge. But those who rule can only justify their place by ruling well—and knowing their limits.
Medieval thinkers pretending to infallibility often claimed to have received a direct revelation from God. Since the 19th century, secular thinkers have invoked science. As Anthony Fauci said in June, “a lot of what you’re seeing as attacks on me, quite frankly are attacks on science.”
One can often tell that an appeal to science is unwarranted without knowing anything about the science in question. If science is treated as a solid block, each part of which is as indubitable as all the others, then science has been misunderstood. Science always contains some propositions less firmly grounded than others: on the frontier, newly discovered, based on experiments not readily replicated.
Dr. Fauci admitted that he first stated that masks were ineffective in part because there was a shortage of masks and he wanted to preserve them for medical workers, who needed them most. He doesn’t seem to have considered: Once he shades the truth for a reason of policy, why shouldn’t reasonable people assume his other statements are based on policy considerations rather than science?
https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-follow-science-mandate-authority-de-blasio-gathering-11634246624Mr. Morson is a professor of Slavic languages and literature at Northwestern University and a co-author of “Minds Wide Shut: How the New Fundamentalisms Divide Us.”
As a trained virologist and practicing neuroscientist, I am appalled at the scientific and political censorship regarding Covid-19 immunization.
Every medical student learns that viral immunity can be achieved by natural infection or by vaccination, but natural immunity is better. Natural immunity is recognized in Europe. An Israeli study earlier this year showed the stronger and longer-lasting benefit of natural immunity. But this may be a win-win situation: Either we’ll get cessation of vaccine mandates, as in Texas, or politicians will insist on them at the expense of jobs, education, healthcare and more—and then be voted out.
What about the danger that new arrivals from blue states will vote for the policies they left behind? That doesn’t worry Mr. Suarez either: “My family came from Cuba, a communist country. People aren’t getting on rafts to go back. People are making major decisions to flee the cities that don’t appreciate them. I can’t vouch for every person coming, but they largely aren’t looking to re-create what they left behind.”
When I ask Mr. Woodson how much race remains a factor in American life today, he responds with a parable. A farmer leads his mule to a stream, “and the stream is 3 feet high, moving at 20 miles an hour.” The farmer “forces the mule in, and they both get swept a mile down the stream.” A year later, the farmer and the mule return. The river has receded to 6 inches. “But the mule refuses to go in, because the mule has good memory but poor judgment.”
In Philadelphia, he says, there had been “certain swimming pools you couldn’t go into, amusement parks.” But the extent of segregation in the South took him by surprise. On the first day, he recalls, he and a white friend from basic training “got in a cab to go in town and have a beer,” forgetting where they were. Once they got outside the gate of the Air Force base, “the cabdriver said, ‘I can take you or him, but not both of you,’” Mr. Woodson recalls. “You didn’t have that kind of stuff in Philly.”
The efforts are part of an unprecedented collaboration among conservation groups, researchers and biologists, several federal and state government agencies, the Smithsonian, Disney, aquariums around the country, special forces veterans, citizen-scientists, and volunteer scuba divers to save America's only barrier reef.
So why did the well-intentioned NHCE fail? Dudden blames the bust on its refusal to acknowledge race, its failure to unionize workers, and language that alienated employers while failing to appeal to domestic workers themselves. Without knowing it, the group was presiding over the death of an institution—and today’s homes are shaped by that shift in American culture.
https://www.revzilla.com/common-tread/how-to-charge-a-motorcycle-battery10.50 Volts: No meaningful charge. Check to see if battery has been replaced with rock.
https://advrider.com/f/threads/so-whats-the-deal-with-bmw-battery-tenders-on-1200-gs.548801/Small batteries, like the one in your motorcycle, do not take kindly to being discharged. They really don’t like being discharged and left that way for a period of time. Sometimes batteries can be brought back from the dead, but even when salvageable, permanent and irreparable damage has been done by both the discharge and subsequent rapid charging you’re probably going to attempt. Expect to buy a new battery, and if yours can be saved, think of it as serendipity.
https://www.r1200gs.info/threads/brake-failure-indicator-light-on.29034/The dealer I got my BMW battery tender from actually had cards printed up to attach to the cords so one could remember how to get the bikes and tenders to play nice. With tender plugged in the wall and ready to go, turn the key on and let the bike do its self check. Once that is done, plug in the tender and wait at least 5 seconds. After that, turn key off and you should be good to go. This is the way I have been doing mine for years and the tender and bike always play nice.
An Irishman, an Italian, and an Iowan are arguing about which bar is the world’s best. “The best bar in the world is Paddy’s Pub in County Cork,” says the Irishman. “After you’ve bought two drinks at Paddy’s, the house stands you to a third.” “That’s a good bar,” says the Italian, “but not as good as Antonio’s in Old Napoli. At Antonio’s, for every drink you buy the bartender buys you another.” “Now, those sound like mighty fine bars,” says the Iowan, “but the best bar in the world is Bob’s Bar and Grill in Des Moines. When you go into Bob’s you get three free drinks and then you get to go in the back room and get laid.” The Irishman and the Italian are astonished to hear this, but they are forced to admit that Bob’s Bar and Grill must indeed be the best bar in the world. Suddenly, however, the Italian gets suspicious. “Wait a minute,” he says to the Iowan. “Did that actually happen to you personally?” “Well, no, not to me personally,” admits the Iowan. “But it actually happened to my sister.”
https://quillette.com/2018/06/07/explaining-monogamy-vox/Arguably, though, the most persuasive argument against the Nurture Only view is that sex differences in sexual inclinations and choosiness can be found in many individuals who have no gender norms, no socialization, and little in the way of culture: that rather sizeable group, so often overlooked by psychologists, known as other animals. The differences aren’t found in all other species, but they are found in many, including most birds, mammals, and reptiles. And when we find the differences in other animals, evolution is the only reasonable explanation. Why should humans be different?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DaqinThe story of the Trojan horse was depicted in the art of Gandhara.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emperor_Wuzong_of_TangIn later eras, starting in AD 550, as Syriac Christians settled along the Silk Road and founded mission churches, Daqin or Tai-Ch'in is also used to refer to these Christian populations rather than to Rome or the Roman church.[1] So, for example, when the Taoist Emperor Wuzong of Tang closed Christian monasteries in the mid-9th century, the imperial edict commanded:[13]
As for the Tai-Ch'in (Syrian Christian) and Muh-hu (Zoroastrian) forms of worship, since Buddhism has already been cast out, these heresies alone must not be allowed to survive.[14]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ManichaeismThe religious persecution reached its height in the year 845 CE, ultimately confiscating the Buddhist temple properties, destroying 4,600 Buddhist temples and 40,000 shrines, and removing 260,500 monks and nuns from the monasteries.[9] Emperor Wuzong's reasons for doing so were not purely economic. A zealous Taoist, Wuzong considered Buddhism a foreign religion that was harmful to Chinese society. One notable victim of the persecution was the Japanese Tendai monk Ennin.
Among its purposes were to raise war funds and to cleanse China of foreign influences. As such, the persecution was directed not only towards Buddhism but also towards other foreign religions, such as Zoroastrianism, Nestorian Christianity, and Manichaeism.[10] Only the native Chinese ideologies of Confucianism and Taoism survived the upheaval relatively unaffected. He all but destroyed Zoroastrianism and Manichaeism in China, and his persecution of the growing Nestorian Christian churches sent Chinese Christianity into a decline from which it never recovered.
Augustine of Hippo (354–430) converted to Christianity from Manichaeism in the year 387. This was shortly after the Roman emperor Theodosius I had issued a decree of death for all Manichaean monks in 382 and shortly before he declared Christianity to be the only legitimate religion for the Roman Empire in 391. Due to the heavy persecution, the religion almost disappeared from western Europe in the fifth century and from the eastern portion of the empire in the sixth century.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustine_of_HippoManichaean Painting of the Buddha Jesus depicts Jesus Christ as a Manichaean prophet. The figure can be identified as a representation of Jesus Christ by the small gold cross that sits on the red lotus pedestal in His left hand.
It was the most detailed and accurate representation of the world that had been produced up until that time. As such, the Fra Mauro map is considered one of the most important works in the history of cartography. It marks the end of Bible-based geography in Europe and the beginning of embracing a more scientific way of making maps, placing accuracy ahead of religious or traditional beliefs.
In my journey, I’ve come across conservatives, argued with them, laughed with them and shared with them. If you are on the Left, they are nothing like you imagine. Apart from anything else I desperately needed them- because I knew in my bones that the problem could be solved by liberal thinking alone, the universities would have solved it decades ago.
When I say that I am for the square deal, I mean not merely that I stand for fair play under the present rules of the game, but that I stand for having those rules changed so as to work for a more substantial equality of opportunity and of reward for equally good service.
At this point, cloth masks are so ubiquitous in the United States that it can be easy to forget that they were originally supposed to be a stopgap measure. In April 2020, when surgical masks and highly coveted N95s were first in short supply, the CDC released its initial mask guidance and said cloth masks were the way to go for most people—noting that they could be sewn at home from old T-shirts. Even at that point, when the pandemic was full of unknowns, we knew that cloth masks, although far better than going maskless, weren’t as protective as other types. A growing amount of research supports the idea that our masking norms don’t make much sense: A recent study in Bangladesh, which has yet to be peer-reviewed but is considered one of the most rigorous to date to tackle masking, linked wearing surgical masks with an 11.2 percent decrease in COVID-19 symptoms and antibodies, while cloth masks were associated with only a 5 percent decrease. It’s no wonder that many other countries, including France, Austria, and Germany, shifted their mask guidance away from cloth masks toward those offering higher protection a long time ago.
And for all the companies now offering fabric masks, selling them is a brisk business that, by one estimate, was worth $19.2 billion in 2020. Like T-shirts and baseball caps, cloth masks have become a way to encourage that most American of pastimes: pledging one’s allegiance to sports teams, colleges, and political causes. For the more luxury-inclined, Fendi offers a logo-embroidered silk version for $590.
These are hard questions. Interestingly, even if the zygote implants successfully in the uterus, a large proportion of those cells are not going to be part of the infant, per se. They will become umbilical cord, placenta, and all of the extra-embryonic tissues that are the life-support system for the embryo. Since all of those other cells have exactly the same genetics as all of the cells in the embryo, and the embryo can’t live without them, do they share in the personhood ascribed to that smaller patch of cells that will eventually become the infant, sensu stricto?
I’d be the last person to claim there aren’t dumb people out there in America, but at least the audiences of channels like Fox and OAN know that content has been designed for them. The people gobbling down these pieces by Bloomberg and the Times that have the journalistic equivalent of child-proof caps on every paragraph that even parenthetically mentions COVID really believe that content has been dumbed down for some other person. They think it’s someone else who can’t handle news that vaccines work and that there also might be a pill that treats the disease, without freaking out or coming to politically unsafe conclusions. So they put up with being talked to like children — demand it, even. Which is nuts. Right? It is nuts, isn’t it?
Of all the factors most predictive of economic mobility in America, one factor clearly stands out in their study: family structure. By their reckoning, when it comes to mobility, “the strongest and most robust predictor is the fraction of children with single parents.” They find that children raised in communities with high percentages of single mothers are significantly less likely to experience absolute and relative mobility. Moreover, “[c]hildren of married parents also have higher rates of upward mobility if they live in communities with fewer single parents.” In other words, as the figure below indicates, it looks like a married village is more likely to raise the economic prospects of a poor child.
Another powerful predictor of absolute mobility for lower-income children is the quality of schools in their communities. Chetty, et al. measure this in the study by looking at high-school dropout rates. Their takeaway: Poor kids are more likely to make it in America when they have access to schools that do a good job of educating them.
Throughout his presidency, Barack Obama has stressed his commitment to data-driven decision-making, not ideology. Similarly, progressives like Krugman have stressed their scientific bona fides, as against the “anti-science” right. If progressives like the president and the Nobel laureate are serious about reviving the fortunes of the American Dream in the 21st century in light of the data, this new study suggests they will need to take pages from both left and right playbooks on matters ranging from zoning to education reform.
Throughout his presidency, Barack Obama has stressed his commitment to data-driven decision-making, not ideology. Similarly, progressives like Krugman have stressed their scientific bona fides, as against the “anti-science” right. If progressives like the president and the Nobel laureate are serious about reviving the fortunes of the American Dream in the 21st century in light of the data, this new study suggests they will need to take pages from both left and right playbooks on matters ranging from zoning to education reform.
The jury, after roughly four hours of deliberation, found in favor of Mr. Diaz on all claims and ordered Tesla to pay Mr. Diaz $6.9 million in compensatory damages and $130 million in punitive damages.
He was regularly called racial epithets at work, where he saw racist images and language written in the bathroom and elsewhere, said Bernard Alexander, one of his attorneys, during the trial.
A crucial feature of Thomson’s argument is that the violinist case begins “mid-act.” The thought experiment traps us, wholly against our will, in an extraordinary scenario that has happened to no one else in all of human history. But this set-up is necessary to establish the conditions under which the decision “to unplug” will constitute an allowing/letting die of another adult human being rather than the killing and active termination of a life-sustaining process (and accompanying entity).
But in normal cases of consensual intercourse, the foreseeable causal chain and accompanying risks are set into motion by the original decision to have sex. So, if the woman later chooses to terminate that process, doing so would constitute a knowledgeable act of doing/killing rather than a mere allowing/letting die. Indeed, baked into the woman’s choice to have sex in the first place is the moral risk of setting off a predictable causal chain whereby another human life becomes wholly dependent upon her bodily functions to survive.
The everyday risks of consensual sex stand in dramatic contrast to the outlandish scenario in which some parasitic foreign entity suddenly attaches itself to a person’s pre-existing life-sustaining processes without that person’s will, knowledge, or foresight. Once we do a better job at filling in the causal back-story, it becomes evident that the life-sustaining process terminated in the abortive act finds its moral and metaphysical origin in the woman’s original choice to have sex.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/pill-intended-to-be-covid-19s-tamiflu-succeeds-in-key-study-11633082In April 2020, Rick Bright, who was removed as head of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) before the approval of the drug, submitted a whistleblower complaint asserting that Ridgeback pressured BARDA to provide funding to manufacture EIDD-2801 despite Bright's concerns that similar drugs in its class have mutagenic properties.
I think the clear answer to all of these questions is no, and the reason is that we assume something about universities at a definitional level: they are generally understood to be entities devoted to the production and development of *knowledge*. The central questions then become why these should be excluded from serious academic inquiry, and how that can be achieved.
https://www.isegoria.net/2008/07/robert-conquests-three-laws-of-politics/Robert Conquest’s Three Laws of Politics:1. Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.2. Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.3. The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.
John Moore thinks the third law is almost right; it should read “assume that it is controlled by a cabal of the enemies of the stated purpose of that bureaucracy.”
Miltion Friedman noted that bureaucratic resource allocation involves spending other people’s money on other people, so there are no compelling reasons to control either cost or quality — but a bureaucrat will learn, given time, how to “spend on others” in such a fashion that the primary benefit flows to himself.
https://twitter.com/BidoliNicolaThe substantial number of infections, coupled with the increasing scientific evidence that natural immunity was durable, led some medical observers to ask why natural immunity didn’t seem to be factored into decisions about prioritising vaccination.
https://twitter.com/BidoliNicola/status/1361669981302317057SC2/RNA parasitic/chimeric Adenovirus AAV recombinated in VLP HEK293+Sf21particles /AD5, and retroviral insert, in PRRARS (S1/S2) BaTCoV+Humanized MHV mice.
Far from being a patriarchal imposition of purity culture, then, aimed at repressing women’s innate libidinousness, before contraception ‘no sex before marriage’ was a profoundly pro-women position. Norms forbidding pre-marital sex might seem repressive to the modern eye, but shielded young women from the risk of being knocked up by faithless shaggers and left to deal with pregnancy alone.
https://unherd.com/2021/09/the-trans-war-on-motherhood/Let’s hope they don’t get much worse. Because if we’re to be confident that abolishing marriage in favour of a sexual free-for-all is in women’s interests, we’d better be equally confident that welfare states and reproductive healthcare will always be with us. Should that ever change, we’ll need a radical revision of what ‘feminism’ looks like. And in that unsettling scenario, we might discover that far from ‘free love’, the pro-women position is once again ‘no sex before marriage’.
The relation between class and sex becomes clearer when you remember that chasing workplace equality gets steadily easier the less physical a job is. It’s one thing to demand an equal right to earn hundreds of thousands a year as a lawyer, but there’s no feminist campaign for an equal right to become bin men.
While the LGBT community has ever-shifting labels that mean different things at different times, it’s safe to say that most people who identify as transgender have or had gender dysphoria, and transitioned in part as an attempt to alleviate it.
Not so fast, argued the author of the eNeuro article. Stephen Gliske, a researcher who trained as a physicist but who gained sufficient expertise in neuroscience to be hired as a research assistant professor in the University of Michigan Medical School’s department of neurology, posited a new theory questioning “the relevance of cerebral sexual dimorphism in regard to gender dysphoria”.
Instead, he argued that “in individuals with gender dysphoria, the aspects of chronic distress, gender atypical behavior, and incongruence between perception of gender identity and external primary sex characteristics are all directly related to functional differences in associated brain networks.”
Almost immediately, Gliske’s paper was denounced by a group of researchers and activists who accused it of peddling dangerous ideas about trans people.
The rate of virgins mostly increased as students reported taking more Advanced Placement exams, with 53 percent of students who took no AP tests identifying as virgins and 64.7 percent of students who took 10 AP exams identifying as virgins.
Nationalisation also affected Venezuela’s food processors. The government expropriated 18 of the 27 plants producing the staple corn flour. All are now making a loss and are in various stages of collapse. One of the most egregious nationalisation cases is the Cariaco Sugar Plant: within two years of being nationalised it was only producing at 11% of its previous production levels. The Ezequiel Zamora Sugar Plant, started in 2002 as a new state enterprise by Chavez in his home state, has cost a huge amount but is largely in ruins and barely producing any sugar. Workers in nationalised food-processing firms who protest the situation are treated with no mercy. In February this year, the regime arrested several trade union leaders at the Lacteos Los Andes “Hugo Chavez” plant in Cabudare who protested corrupt and incompetent management.
To be clear, we agree with the general principle that all forms of discrimination must be called out and confronted (much like Albucher and Levin themselves, who began their open letter by stating, “As psychotherapists, we strongly support diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives”). But given the manner by which Critical Social Justice ideology has been weaponized against Jews, our group, the American-based Jewish Institute for Liberal Values (JILV), opposes its continued imposition on institutions, including (ironically) many Jewish organizations. Likewise, we encourage other Jewish groups to raise their own voices, notwithstanding the manner by which CSJ proponents market their ideas as variations on “anti-racism” and other uncontroversial causes.
Some have expressed surprise that Quillette would adopt the “mainstream position” on this issue. Or that we have taken a position inconsistent with “conservative” or “libertarian” principles. We have, after all, run many articles that dispute the mainstream position on weighty topics like gender, race, academia, and education. The assumption seems to be that because we disagree a lot with the Left, we must be part of the Right.
This is simply a misunderstanding. Quillette is not a contrarian or partisan publication and it never has been. And if we are partisan, it is in the preference of empiricism over intuition or revelation. In an uncertain world, sometimes the elite consensus will get it right and sometimes it won't. If a popular narrative is not supported by good evidence, or if good evidence supports another more plausible explanation for what is going on, what we publish will tend to counter that narrative.
https://reason.com/2021/09/29/democrats-are-denying-basic-economics/To put it another way, the tax break would amount to an average of $250 for American households earning between $50,000 and $75,000 annually, according to the Tax Policy Center, a left-of-center think tank. Households earning over $1 million will get a tax break of $47,000 on average.
To be sure, it's fine to advocate for letting wealthy Americans keep a larger share of their income. They are almost certainly going to make better decisions about how to spend that money than the federal government will. If that's what some Democrats believe would be in the best interests of the country, then they should say so—please!—and they should work to incorporate that same philosophy into their other tax policies.
https://reason.com/2021/09/30/joe-manchin-is-forcing-congress-to-think-about-the-deficit-good/Hence we were treated to essays attempting to downplay the cost with headlines like: "$3.5 Trillion Is Not a Lot of Money" (New York magazine) and "It's Not Really a '$3.5 Trillion' Bill" (The New York Times). And then, of course, there were the official statements from Biden and White House communications functionaries making claims like "it's just a fact" that the plan "adds $0 to the debt."
THERE IS NO BRUTAL FISCAL REALITY THE NATION FACES; IT IS ENTIRELY MADE UP!— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) September 29, 2021
We'll tell you anything you want to hear. We lie like hell! We'll tell you Kojak always gets the killer, and nobody ever gets cancer in Archie Bunker's house… We'll tell you any shit you want to hear! We deal in illusion, man! None of it's true! But you people… do whatever the tube tells you... This is mass madness, you maniacs!— from Network, 1976
News in America used to be fun to talk about, fun to joke about, interesting to think about. Now it’s an interminable bummer, because the press business has taken on characteristics of that other institution where talking, joking, and thinking aren’t allowed: church. We have two denominations, both as fact-averse as real churches, as is shown in polls about, say, pandemic attitudes, where Americans across the board consistently show they know less than they think.
This pattern has continued for more than a year now. Fox News anchors misled audiences when they said there was solid evidence ivermectin “works,” but MSNBC anchors were somehow worse, intentionally misleading followers when they said it was a “parasitic de-worming agent for livestock,” not a treatment for human diseases. Fox hosts misled audiences when they talked about vaccine side effects without comparing them to problems suffered by unvaccinated patients, but blue state media repeatedly conflated opposing vaccine mandates with opposing vaccines, lied about when Republican governors implemented vaccine programs, and bit hard on a phony story about nonexistent horse paste eaters blocking nonexistent gunshot victims from an Oklahoma E.R., all in service of a weird fatwa against evil science apostates living in places most city dwellers will never even drive past. During the kind of emergency that would seem to justify an at least temporary embargo on partisan bullshit, groups are despising one another for real, because The Tube commands it more than ever.
Firefighters and land-management agencies across the American West have recognized for decades that one of the most effective tools to reduce wildfire risk is to thin forests, whether by removing dead trees and brush in accessible areas or reducing the most flammable elements with controlled burns in remote ones. Between 1999 and 2019, the use of intentionally set fires by state and federal agencies tripled to six million acres a year, according to the National Interagency Fire Center.
But that isn’t enough to keep up with the rising wildfire risk caused by drought, climate change and homes built too close to wild lands, according to researchers.
“We need two to five times more fire and thinning,” said Mark Finney, a research forester for the U.S. Forest Service based in Missoula, Mont. “This needs to be a consistent, long-term program.”
Nonetheless, Issac is indisputably right that the risk of dying or becoming seriously ill from COVID is extremely low for someone like him: early 20s, healthy and with natural immunity. In fact, during the entire course of the pandemic, the total number of people aged 15-24 (Isaac's age group) who have died of COVID — in a country of 330 million people — is 1,372: fewer than the number in that age group who have died of non-COVID pneumonia. Add onto that Isaac's physical fitness and the fact that he already had COVID once, and it is clear that his risk from contracting the virus is vanishingly small.
It is true that the long-term effects of COVID are unknown, but that is also true of the long-term risks from these new vaccines. Isaac is also right that the risk of adverse consequences from the COVID vaccine is very low, but it is not zero. For the young, there is absolutely nothing irrational about fearing the vaccine more than fearing COVID even if that is not the conclusion I reached for myself. Indeed, for the age group right below Isaac's, there is data demonstrating that the risk of the vaccine outweighs the risk of COVID. As The Guardian reported earlier this month, “healthy boys may be more likely to be admitted to the hospital with a rare side-effect of the Pfizer/BioNTech Covid vaccine that causes inflammation of the heart than with Covid itself.”
But liberal COVID discourse long ago ceased being about The Science™ — at least since months of adamant demands that we all stay at home were replaced in the blink of an eye in June, 2020, by decrees that it was our moral duty to attend densely packed BLM street protests since racism is a worse threat to the public health than COVID.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas in a statement said the proposal was an important step in the administration’s efforts to preserve DACA. “However, only Congress can provide permanent protection,” he said, urging lawmakers to address the matter in pending spending legislation.
Democrats are unlikely to be able to help through legislation. They are unable to include a permanent solution for Dreamers—a path to citizenship for them and millions of other immigrants in the country illegally—in a $3.5 trillion spending proposal.
Nuclear power, meanwhile, has lost public favor in the wake of accidents such as Japan’s 2011 Fukushima disaster and has struggled to compete economically in the U.S.
But Mr. Biden has also kept in place several other pressure points inherited from Donald Trump, including tariffs on Chinese steel and aluminum, washing machines, solar panels and other goods. The administration is still reviewing its economic and trade policy for China.
Somewhere between Women’s Studies turning into Gender Studies and the university lawyers turning into risk managers, we seem to have lost the clitoris.
As I was polishing up the syllabus for the first version of that [sex and gender] class, the university sent us all a brochure about the latest sexual harassment policy. Reading it and deciding it was garbage—much more concerned with protecting the university’s administration than protecting women—I decided to annotate my syllabus to inform the Lyman Briggs School’s director of all the ways I intended to violate their policy. For example, I *would* be showing photos of genitals and discussing them with my undergraduate science students. We *would* have conversations that were likely to implicate our own sex lives, and I *would* let them write papers about their sex lives if they wanted; then, I *would* then shamelessly grade those papers. Finally, we *would* talk about sex during office hours.
To his credit, our director—a mathematician—thanked me for the warning and then began voluntarily reading from the humanities literature about the ways in which talking about sex is a form of sex. One cannot teach about sex without at some level engaging our sexual cultures as well as the parts of our brains that respond to sexual cues. (We rather elegantly ignored the implications for our conversation. Tea was sipped.)
But the pact has provoked outrage in France, as Australia withdrew from a contract to purchase 12 diesel-powered subs from Paris, and French officials first heard about the breakup through media reports. France recalledits ambassadors to Washington and Canberra, the first time France had withdrawn its U.S. ambassador since 1778, when the countries established diplomatic relations—in a deal negotiated by Benjamin Franklin.
https://quillette.com/2019/02/27/why-renewables-cant-save-the-planet/The real problem with nuclear is, in short, that it solves our biggest problems: war, poverty, resource scarcity, environmental degradation, and climate change. As such, it deprives powerful elites in powerful nations the intellectual and moral basis for demanding control over foreign territories, resources, economies, and populations.
Because nuclear plants produce heat without fire, they emit no air pollution in the form of smoke. By contrast, the smoke from burning fossil fuels and biomass results in the premature deaths of seven million people per year, according to the World Health Organization.
We tend to think of solar panels as clean, but the truth is that there is no plan anywhere to deal with solar panels at the end of their 20 to 25 year lifespan.
Experts fear solar panels will be shipped, along with other forms of electronic waste, to be disassembled—or, more often, smashed with hammers—by poor communities in Africa and Asia, whose residents will be exposed to the dust from toxic heavy metals including lead, cadmium, and chromium.
https://quillette.com/2020/07/29/why-democrats-are-trying-to-shut-me-up-about-climate-change-and-renewables/The problem with nuclear is that it is unpopular, a victim of a 50 year-long concerted effort by fossil fuel, renewable energy, anti-nuclear weapons campaigners, and misanthropic environmentalists to ban the technology.
In response, the nuclear industry suffers battered wife syndrome, and constantly apologizes for its best attributes, from its waste to its safety.
Being male, I am a spectator here: It is women themselves who should decide who gets into women’s spaces. My opinions are relevant only insofar as the LGBT and progressive movements to which I belong have been damaged by the top-down efforts of ideologues to replace sex with self-described gender in every facet of policymaking. That attempt strikes at the heart of gay and lesbian identity. By definition, gays and lesbians are attracted to same sexed bodies. It’s why we’ve been beaten, murdered, and legally and socially persecuted throughout history. The outlandish, if fashionable, claim that we’re attracted to someone else’s gender ID gaslights the truth of our lives and insults the memory of our ancestors. That’s why I fight for sex-based recognitions, and refuse to accept their erasure.
Demands that women suppress their fear, modesty, or disgust are sexist, as men generally don’t have analogous reactions in the company of naked women. Then there are observant Muslim and Jewish women, who have religious obligations concerning the opposite sex. Insisting that these women be naked in front of physical males is, frankly, antisemitic and Islamophobic. Even in the case of women who aren’t religious, but simply come from socially conservative immigrant backgrounds, forcing them to prioritize avant-garde tenets of Queer Theory over their own sensibilities represents the height of cultural imperialism.
A common debating tactic here is to smear all discussion of these issues as tantamount to denouncing trans women as sexual predators, much in the bigoted tradition of presenting gay men as inherently pedophilic. But, as I’ve taken pains to demonstrate, female concerns in this area generally don’t involve trans people at all. Moreover, it shouldn’t be controversial to assert that some small fraction of trans individuals—in equal proportion to those who are not trans—will be violent and predatory. It would be nice if the research showed that trans women prove an exception to the general rule that sexual offences are overwhelmingly committed by biological males. But the criminality rates of trans women reflect the prevailing rates for men. Changing your pronouns doesn’t change your biological wiring.
https://www.standard.co.uk/sport/football/australian-women-s-national-team-lose-70-to-team-of-15yearold-boys-a3257266.htmlWhile branding their activism as part of the epic struggle against patriarchy, heteronormativity, and even capitalism, gender supremacists have actually produced an effectively colonialist doctrine that demands universal obeisance to the pronouncements of privileged professors at elite universities and leaders of well-connected western NGOs. Indigenous prisoners, beaten women, marginalized female athletes, immigrants, Jews, Muslims—all are treated as transphobic saboteurs who stand in the way of that great moral project for our time: recognizing that biological males can be literal women.
Chinese economic policies disadvantage U.S. companies by subsidizing exports at below-market prices and winking at the theft of intellectual property, Ms. Raimondo said. Even so, she said the U.S. must trade with China given the size of its market.
“It’s just an economic fact,” she said in the interview with The Wall Street Journal. “I actually think robust commercial engagement will help to mitigate any potential tensions.”
Russiagate was a daisy-chain of deceptions. The Clinton campaign systematically planted phony stories about things like the Trump-Alfa business, the pee tape/blackmail tale, and Carter Page’s supposed role as a Trump-Russia conduit; the FBI went along with the fiction that inquiries launched on these matters did not originate as paid research from the Clinton campaign; and a parade of news media figures were culpable either as dupes or witting participants in these frauds, which in the case of the Alfa stunt was executed in a “hurry” to affect a presidential election.
The only thing preventing all of this from being thought of as a scaled-up version of Watergate is the continued refusal of institutional America to own up to the comparison. Dick Nixon’s low-rent escapades like the “Canuck letter,” distributing fliers offering free “balloons for the kiddies” on behalf of Hubert Humphrey in black neighborhoods, or sending masses of pizzas to Ed Muskie’s hotel, all paled in comparison to the massive, ongoing campaign of fake news stories — political sabotage — planted by Clinton campaign figures in 2016 and beyond. The fact that the accompanying program of illegal surveillance was effected by lying to obtain FISA authority instead of a “third-rate burglary” and a bug doesn’t improve the situation. If the target had been anyone but Donald Trump, no one would bother even trying to deny how corrupt all this was, and continues to be.
The incident, along with constant broadcasting of that disturbing footage by the media, set off a firestorm of protests and riots and a national dialogue—monologue, really—about race and policing.
Caldwell’s overarching narrative holds that modern America is governed by two fundamentally irreconcilable constitutions. The first is the actual Constitution—the one that preserves liberty through the structural protections of the separation of powers and federalism and the rights articulated in its first 10 amendments. The second constitution—what Caldwell calls the “rival constitution”—is a complex web of civil rights statutes, judicial claims, policies and regulations, bureaucracies, and a cultural attitude of entitlement upon which this power structure has been constructed and organized. This is less an extension of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that ended de jure segregation based on race in public accommodations, and more the hardening of an “all-embracing ideology of diversity.”
Much of what we have called “polarization” or “incivility” in recent years is something more grave—it is the disagreement over which of the two constitutions shall prevail: the de jure constitution of 1788, with all the traditional forms of jurisprudential legitimacy and centuries of American culture behind it; or the de facto constitution of 1964, which lacks the traditional kind of legitimacy but commands the near-unanimous endorsement of judicial elites and civil educators and the passionate allegiance of those who received it as a liberation.
But let’s not fool ourselves. For most of that country’s women, an Islamic system would represent a step up, because the worst problems they confront come not from religion but from tribal traditions. Islam does not allow forced marriage and does not require women to cover anything more than what modesty demands; it does not ban them from public spaces, and it energetically prohibits Afghan customs such as settling disputes by giving a girl to the enemy clan as a slave.
The practices that are worst for women stem from the so-called Pashtun code, a strongly patriarchal, hierarchical system which held that male prestige required the total submission and absolute virtue of their women. Seclusion, veiling and illiteracy, to prevent any opportunity for misconduct, and honour killings, to remove the stain of even rumoured or perceived female wrong-doing, are its ugliest accompaniments. It is no surprise that in surveys, Afghan women vastly preferred sharia law to Pashtunwali, the Pashtun honour code.
When I protested to the faculty diversity trainer, a law professor from the West Coast, that the real minority at Georgetown Law are the conservative students who have been telling me about how isolated and beleaguered they feel, especially with the flood of emails from the administration when Trump was in office denouncing racism, without defining what it is or indeed giving a single account of a racist incident, she quipped, “They don’t have to be at Georgetown. They can go to Notre Dame!”
As another example, since modernists believe in science and its utility, they are aware that obese individuals are at higher health risks. For postmodernists, however, the concept of health is just another oppressive force of Western colonial hegemony (since objective truth doesn’t exist and is merely manufactured as a tool of oppression), and so an entire cadre of “fat” activists mobilize themselves on social media, emboldened with postmodern concepts. Modernists recognize that nobody should be shamed or discriminated against for their appearance and believe that everyone has the right to make their own lifestyle choices, but are also concerned that distributing scientifically inaccurate information about health poses considerable risk to those who might believe it. Again, as in so many other cases, these disagreements fundamentally can be distilled down to science acceptance vs denialism.
In 1770, Robert Baker suggested use of “one, ones” instead of “one, his”, since there was no equivalent “one, hers”. Others shared this sentiment in 1868, 1884, 1979, and even now. Others throughout this period disagreed, finding it too pedantic.
For five of the seven abilities, the educational system has realistic expectations and behaves sensibly. Children with below-average bodily-kinesthetic ability have to take PE with everybody else, but no 44 Real Educationone tries to make them into good athletes. Children with below- average musical ability are usually exposed to music classes in elementary school, but they are allowed to drop out thereafter. Children with below-average spatial skills are usually exposed to art classes in elementary school, and in middle school may be exposed to a year of shop, but they are allowed to drop out thereafter. When it comes to interpersonal skills, good teachers will try to give some protection to children who are especially shy and restrain children who are especially aggressive, but the typical school does not undertake to transform their students’ interpersonal skills for the better, and reasonable parents do not expect them to do so. Children with below- average intrapersonal skills can be helped by a school that reinforces good study habits and enforces appropriate social behavior in the halls and classroom, but everyone accepts that the child’s inherited characteristics and socialization at home in the preschool years limit what the school can accomplish. Only for linguistic and logical-mathematical ability are we told that we can expect everyone to do well.
Full participation in any culture requiresfamiliarity with a body of core knowledge. To live in the United States and not recognize Teddy Roosevelt, Prohibition, Minutemen, Huckleberry Finn, Wall Street, smoke-filled room, or Gettysburg is like trying to read without knowing some of the ten thousand most commonly used words in the language. It signifies a degree of cultural illiteracy about America. But the core knowledge transcends one’s own country. Not to recog nize FalstafF, Apollo, Sistine Chapel, Inquisition, Twenty-third Psalm, or Mozart signifies cultural illiteracy about the West. Not to recognize solar system, Big Bang, natural selection, relativity, or periodic table is to be scientifically illiterate. Not to recognize Mediterranean, Vienna, Yangtze River, Mount Everest, or Mecca is to be geographically illiterate.
American History. The earliest Americans (tribes of the Southwest & Eastern Woodlands). Early exploration of North America (Spanish exploration of the Southeast & Southwest, search for the Northwest Passage). Settlement of the Thirteen Colonies, with extended treatment of New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Massachusetts, & development of the slave trade.Frederick County Public Schools
Peoples of the Nation & World. No specific peoples. Sample of curricula: "Describe the benefits of a multicultural setting."
Verbal expression is what the elite does. A comparatively few members of the elite—for example, some types of scientists, physicians, and artists—exercise advanced physical skills, but usually the physical aspect of the elite’s work consists of reading, tapping on key boards, listening, and talking. Hence the importance of verbal skills.
Writing two centuries apart in cultures unaware of each other’s existence, Aristotle and Confucius laid down systems that would dominate their respective worlds for the next two millennia. The differences between the two systems are associated with profound differences in the cultures (more on that presently). But from day to day, these differences are trivial in comparison with their similarities. If your children grow up to be courageous, temperate, able to think clearly about the consequences of their actions, to be concerned with the welfare of others, with a sense of obligation to set a good example for others in their own behavior and to accord to others their rightful due, do you really care whether they were raised to be good Aristotelians or good Confucians?
A hundred years ago, the phrase “It’s not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game” was not a cliche that people mocked. People really believed it. The phrases “a good sport” and “a bad loser” had meaning, and those meanings were rooted in moral precepts. Fictional athletic heroes Frank Merriwell and Dink Stover were moral paragons, and the novels portraying them were runaway bestsellers of juvenile fiction. Educators brought this view of sports-as-morality- play to the conduct of games at school. Agreeing with Aristotle that virtue is acquired by becoming a habit, and habits are formed by daily practice, they saw sports as an arena for practicing virtues-—fair play, courage in adversity, loyalty to teammates, modesty in victory, dignity in defeat. Sports were also seen as a way to let students understand the valid sources of human satisfaction—doing one’s best is a source of self-respect, regardless of whether one wins or loses, and there can be satisfaction in winning only if the winning has been accomplished the right way. Athletics were a tool for moral instruction.
In a meta-analysis of 150 praise studies, other scholars concluded that praise makes children averse to risk and decreases their sense of autonomy. These scholars found consistent correlations between repeated praise and “shorter task persistence, more eye-checking with the teacher, and inflected speech such that answers have the intonation of questions.” And this finding begins to bring us back to college students angrily demanding that professors raise their grades: Researchers are discovering that the more children are praised, the more important it becomes for them to maintain their image. Their goal becomes to protect themselves, not to outshine others through superior achievement.
“The forgotten half” is a term used in educational circles to refer to those who are work-bound after high school, not college-bound. If we include everyone who drops out of college or community college without a degree, that number is closer to two-thirds. The current system makes life as difficult for them as it possibly can.
Then, high schools ignore the skills that employers of high- school graduates do value. Again common sense and the scholarly evidence coincide: When hiring high-school graduates, employers usually assume that they are going to have to provide the job training themselves. The purpose of the job interview is to identify young people who will show up every day and on time, work hard, and get along with the people around them. In short, they want dependability and a good attitude, and those are the qualities that the applicant had better convey during the interview.
The second thing we have going for us is that professors are deeply motivated to show their peers how smart they are—exhibiting smartness is the only way to score points that count in academia. The way to do that is to say smart things about difficult problems in their fields. For the last few decades, intellectual fashion has made it possible for professors to score points by being tricky-smart. The postmodernists in literary criticism are an excellent example, using impenetrable vocabulary to make convoluted arguments in proof of points of a triviality and sophistry that would excite the envy of a medieval theologian. It works for a while, but only for a while. Ultimately, for a literature professor to be smart about Moliere or Yeats requires insights into what the author was talking about. Similarly, philosophy professors can take logical positivism only so far; ultimately, they have to be smart about the great issues of metaphysics and ethics, which means being smart about Descartes and Spinoza. Scholars of the fine arts can take a Piss Christ and installation art only so far; ultimately, they have to be smart about Dtirer and Velazquez. I cannot predict how long it will take, but the greatest work must ultimately come back into scholarly fashion.
In the days when the phrase “Yale man” conjured up an image of a solid, athletic fellow who played fair and came from a good family, Frank Merriwell was an ideal for many American boys—an unequivocal paragon of virtue who had, as one reviewer put it, “a body like Tarzan’s and a head like Einstein’s.” In short, he was the kind of hero that grown-ups resent but boys adore.
Like Merriwell, “Dink” Stover was born in a series of books for boys, the Lawrenceville books by Owen Johnson, Class of 1900. But Johnson had more on his mind than boyish exploits when he wrote Stover at Yale in 1911. Sure, Dink wrestles for his freshman class during the annual Fence Rush, plays heroically on the football team, and goes to Mory’s, but Stover is really about how Dink expands his mind beyond the shallow concerns of his prep-school set—not in the classroom, but through conversation with bright but less exalted fellow students who aren’t likely to be on the Bones tap list. Johnson was arguing—half a century before his time—that Yale should be a meritocracy, where extracurriculars and social activities are given their due, but where intellectual life is also nurtured. As for Dink, he gets to have his cake and eat it too. Though it looks for some time that he will be blackballed by the senior societies for broadening his horizons, in the end he receives Tap Day’s highest honor: last man tapped for Bones.
Moreover, university graduates now dominate positions of influence in a way not seen for generations. If even in the early 1960s a fourth of all members of congress lacked a college degree, by the 2000s, 100% of all Senators and 95% of House members had one. Also, as Sandel notes, almost no one in a position of power in today’s United States knows what it means to have ever had a working class job.
“In the U.S., about half of the labor force is employed in working class jobs, defined as manual labor, service industry, and clerical jobs,” he writes. “But fewer than 2 percent of the members of congress had such jobs before election.”
Meanwhile, despite the fact that universities are more diverse with regard to race and gender than ever, from a class perspective they remain symbols of iron exclusivity. “At Harvard and other Ivy League colleges,” Sandel writes, “there are more students from families in the top 1 percent… than there are in the bottom half of the income distribution combined.” He notes that two-thirds of the students at Harvard and Stanford come from the top fifth of the income scale, while “despite generous financial aid packages, fewer than 4 percent of Ivy League students come from the bottom fifth.”
First, cultivate your garden. We got into this mess by believing the government could solve every problem. We're learning it can''t. We're not going to get legitimate institutions again until we unwind the overly high expectations produced by High Modernism, and the best way to do that is to stop expecting government to solve all your problems. So cultivate your garden. If you're concerned about obesity, go on a diet, or volunteer at a local urban vegetable garden, or organize a Fun Run in your community, do anything other than start a protest telling the government to end obesity. This is an interesting contrast to eg Just Giving, which I interpret as having the opposite model - if you want to fight obesity, you should work through the democratic system by petitioning the government to do something; trying to figure out a way to fight it on your own would be an undemocratic exercise of raw power. Gurri is recommending that we tear that way of thinking up at the root.
Second, start looking for a new set of elites who can achieve legitimacy. These will have to be genuinely decent and humble people - Gurri gives the example of George Washington. They won't claim to be able to solve everything. They won't claim the scientific-administrative mantle of High Modernism. They'll just be good honorable people who will try to govern wisely for the common good. Haha, yeah right.
We were gobsmacked several years ago when a colleague informed us that a student had requested a trigger warning for a reading about the Holocaust. This same student also asked for an alternative text to read because the original reading was "too disturbing."
Two quick observations:* First, if you read about the Holocaust and are not disturbed, you should really look into the possibility that you're a sociopath.* Second, there is no alternative to learning about the Holocaust.At the college level, we don't believe the Holocaust, slavery, genocide, and other harrowing topics should come in two different versions: "regular" and "lite."
Woodson, known most widely today as the founder of Black History Month, was born to enslaved parents in 1875 and labored in a West Virginia coal mine before earning a history Ph.D. from Harvard. His hardscrabble life must have made him impatient with protracted debates about what people of African descent “should be called.” Whether they were called “Negroes” or “Afro-Americans,” many Black people would still be standing in breadlines, doing their best to make it through the Great Depression. It’s not surprising, then, that Woodson dismissed battles over terminology as fixated on the “trifles rather than the great problems of life.”
But that is no alibi for Congress to approve hasty, sweeping, punitive and counterproductive regulations of America’s most important industry. Any decision on federal involvement in the auto industry should have been made on the merits of the proposed legislation. Yet the legislators displayed minimal curiosity about safety issues. They were primarily interested in taking down a corporate giant and the fight for legislative credit. They were as reckless in their treatment of Detroit as Nader and friends imagined automakers to be in their treatment of consumers.
Altogether, these congressmen, lawyers, and activists represented an enormous shift in America’s entrepreneurial energies, from economic growth to identifying and combatting growth’s negative consequences. Or, as author Robert Gordon put it, from creating goods to fighting bads. This was the end of American enterprise in the form it had taken for the first 200 years of the country’s history.
Nader and the NHTSA claim that the legislative and regulatory apparatus created in 1966 saved 3.5 million lives during the 50-year period that followed, with the NHTSA calling it “one of the most effective public health and safety efforts of the past century.” But the data does not support this claim. Statistically speaking, there was more safety progress in the half-century before the 1966 legislation than in the half-century that followed. Moreover, that 3.5-million figure includes fatality reductions that are unrelated to vehicle-safety technology, such as those associated with mandatory seatbelt usage and drunk-driving laws.
This was one of the more invidious effects of second-collision theory: The rush to blame Detroit for traffic deaths gave drivers a free pass. In fact, Nader himself vociferously opposed mandatory seatbelt usage on the grounds that people were incorrigible and behavior-control laws would never work. “We learned that in prohibition,” he told a government hearing in 1983. As for drunk driving, he told a journalist that he was skeptical of prohibiting that, too, because “the culture is deeply embedded. I thought it was too ingrained.”
For the next two months, JMU compiled a case against Reid. Investigators instructed her to begin preparing her defense, though they did not spell out the charges. They also asked her to find witnesses to speak on her behalf, which was a challenge, since Reid had no idea what aspects of her behavior were under scrutiny. She was not given access to Lese's statement until after her witnesses were interviewed, she says.
A hearing was set for March 13, 2019. Reid was told that she could not cross-examine Lese directly; she would need to pose her questions to the hearing's chair instead. She was denied the right to have an active attorney present: The Title IX coordinator permitted a "support person" to attend, but this individual was barred from playing any role in the hearing, according to Reid's lawsuit.
But I'm uneasy with using words like "sexist" and "rape" to describe situations like these. Why is that? If I'm ready to say that other animals express "grief," even "love," why balk now at using human terms?
Here's my answer: for the most part we're dealing with actions taken by men against women and these actions occur within, and are enabled by, uniquely human cultural systems of power and oppression. Patrick and his orangutan male counterparts may indeed act badly toward females, yet they aren't willfully choosing to inflict harm or violence as an expression of institutionalized male dominance.
Earlier this week, I asked two feminist scholars for their views on this matter (without expressing my own thoughts to them).
Erin Tarver, a professor of philosophy at Oxford College of Emory University, sent me this response via email on Tuesday:
> First of all, when we look at the non-human world through gender-colored-glasses, which is what we do when we describe it using gendered language, it's hardly a shock that we "see" our own gender patterns everywhere. Second, these kinds of perceptions can end up justifying bad social practices. Once we believe that male domination is just natural, it's a very small step to believing that it's inevitable—and, for some people, that it's divinely ordained or otherwise meant to be.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LysenkoismNancy Gray, a colleague and a professor of English and women's studies at the College of William and Mary, underscored this point in an email also sent on Tuesday:
> What it comes down to for me is a deep wariness of and attention to the human factor in defining animal behavior. Yes, we can observe. Yes, we can correct for possible bias in what we observe and what we conclude about it. But if Marx was right that we think only those thoughts that are thinkable in our time, then we might do well to consider how the discourses of our time shape what counts as real or meaningful, and what truths are delivered to us as a result.
That's beautifully put. What truths are delivered to us as a result of the language we use in talking about our closest evolutionary cousins? The truth I would like to convey is that male-to-female aggression and sexual violence is neither natural nor inevitable, as the more peaceable and egalitarian bonobos tell us.
https://www.dallasobserver.com/news/patrick-the-dallas-zoos-sexist-gorilla-has-a-friend-in-npr-7108005More than 3,000 mainstream biologists were dismissed or imprisoned, and numerous scientists were executed in the campaign to suppress scientific opponents. The president of the Agriculture Academy, Nikolai Vavilov, who had encouraged Lysenko, was sent to prison and died there, while Soviet genetics research was effectively destroyed. Research and teaching in the fields of neurophysiology, cell biology, and many other biological disciplines were harmed or banned.
It is not surprising that in order to break into the mainstream, mindfulness had to be packaged in a scientifically validated standardized program (uncoincidentally designed by a white male). The masculine qualities that made it relevant to our culture are perfectly aligned with what we collectively value—rationality, even-temperedness, scientific evidence, righteousness. I love all of these things, but they are only half the story. They fail to include the more feminine qualities of emotion, embodiment, and lightning-strike wisdom that culminate from the mind–body–heart connection. Fortunately, mindfulness itself is not beholden to our western values. It is inherently whole — a healthy balance of masculine and feminine energies.
Sometimes referred to as the Stalin of Mongolia, Choibalsan oversaw Soviet-ordered purges in the late 1930s that resulted in the deaths of an estimated 30,000 to 35,000 Mongolians. Most of the victims were Buddhist clergy, intelligentsia, political dissidents, ethnic Buryats and Kazakhs and others perceived as "enemies of the revolution." His intense persecution of Mongolia's Buddhist monks resulted in the near-eradication of a clergy class that had numbered over 100,000 monks (13% of the population); by 2000, only 200-300 monks live in Mongolia, though a majority of the population continue to identify as Buddhist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conceptual_proliferationIt looks attractive to the ego, because it stimulates certain hope in us, a hope to get closer to the Truth -- but this is a false hope. There is a Pali term, papañca, which can be translated as "conceptual bullshit". This is the danger here, getting caught up in quasi-intellectual masturbation.
The exact derivation of papañca is not entirely clear, but its sense hovers somewhere between the three nodes of 1) to spread out or proliferate; 2) an illusion or an obsession; and 3) an obstacle or impediment. The place where these three meanings converge in experience is not hard to locate. Sit down with your back straight and your legs folded around your ankles, close your eyes, and attend carefully to your experience. What do you see? Papañca.
Shortly thereafter, swastikas in the bathroom with my name under them began appearing in two bathrooms near the philosophy department. They also occasionally showed up on my office door, in one instance accompanied by bags of feces. Our university remained silent. When it acted, it was against me, not the perpetrators.
https://oregon.public.law/statutes/ors_162.375Meanwhile, ideological intolerance continued to grow at Portland State. In March 2018, a tenured professor disrupted a public discussion I was holding with author Christina Hoff Sommers and evolutionary biologists Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying. In June 2018, someone triggered the fire alarm during my conversation with popular cultural critic Carl Benjamin. In October 2018, an activist pulled out the speaker wires to interrupt a panel with former Google engineer James Damore. The university did nothing to stop or address this behavior. No one was punished or disciplined.
For me, the years that followed were marked by continued harassment. I’d find flyers around campus of me with a Pinocchio nose. I was spit on and threatened by passersby while walking to class. I was informed by students that my colleagues were telling them to avoid my classes. And, of course, I was subjected to more investigation.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/contra-drum-on-the-fish-oil-storyAnd I was tickled to hear Dr. Gura describe Dr. Jennings as a “cowboy”, because I’ve been trying to make the case that the point where “cowboy” (used metaphorically, to mean someone who is willing to take initiative) went from complimentary to perjorative marked the beginning of the end for our civilization, and we need to make it a compliment again. All four of these doctors needed to at least kind of be “cowboys”, willing to try crazy things that weren’t the standard of care. If you imagine there’s a 10% chance of each link in this chain being around in any given situation and being able to do their cowboying successfully, the chance of an Omegaven-level discovery is 10% * 10% * 10% * 10% = 0.01%. This is one of the reasons science is so hard.
At any time, a doctor could just prescribe Sinequan for sleep. In fact, I do this all the time and it works great. But this is an “off label” prescription, and there are various regulations that make off label prescriptions less convenient than the usual type, so most people stick with Silenor, which makes between $10 million and $25 million per year for its parent company.
I want a world where if there is a $250 version of a drug, and a $10 version of the same drug, people are encouraged to get the $10 version even though the manufacturer did not give the FDA $100 million dollars.
I want a world where if Europeans have been giving fish oil based nutrient fluids to babies for years, and everybody from NBC News to random bloggers know that the babies are much less likely to die on fish-oil based fluids, and a study confirms it, you are allowed to give those babies the fish oil based fluids without waiting another five years for an FDA approval.
But all of this stopped being about The Science™ long ago — ever since months of relentless messaging that it is our moral duty to Stay At Home unless we want to sociopathically kill Grandma was replaced overnight by dictates that we had a moral duty to leave our homes to attend densely packed street protests since the racism being protested was a more severe threat to the public health than the global COVID pandemic. One can locate in all of this jumbled and always-shifting rationale various forms of control, shaming, stigma and hierarchy, while The Science™ is nowhere to be found.
Gonzalez's one slightly bummer moment came when some groovier-than-thou dude tried to press him on his allegedly overly materialistic attitudes about money. As Gonzalez explains, growing up struggling and seeing cockroaches in his cereal means that to him money is first and foremost a way to make sure he and his family can have a decent life, not some evil to be scorned.
But it could have been worse. I didn’t like transgender people, and so I left them alone while still standing up for their rights. My epistemic structure failed gracefully. For anyone who’s not overconfident, and so who expects massive epistemic failure on a variety of important issues all the time, graceful failure modes are a really important feature for an epistemic structure to have.
God only knows what Andrew would have done, if through bad luck he had accidentally gotten it into his head that transgender people are bad. From his own words, we know he wouldn’t be “pussyfooting around with debate-team nonsense”.
In the history of American democracy, if you take the mainstream political position (Overton Window, if you care) at time T1, and place it on the map at a later time T2, T1 is always way to the right, near the fringe or outside it. So, for instance, if you take the average segregationist voter of 1963 and let him vote in the 2008 election, he will be way out on the wacky right wing. Cthulhu has passed him by.
Epstein was born in New York City and grew up in Amherst, Massachusetts. His father was a logician and a philosopher of science. Nonetheless, Epstein never managed to finish high school. Instead he got into college on a piano audition and, after composing a series of chamber-music pieces, ended up switching to the study of mathematics and political economy. That led to a Ph.D. in political science in 1981 and then a position at Brookings, plus the realization that he was fascinated by mathematical models. One day in the early 1990s, when he was giving a talk about his model of arms races, he met Axtell, who was then a graduate student. He wound up bringing Axtell to Brookings, in 1992.
This brings us to a third, more compelling and quite disturbing theory—the one that my Afghan friend, the court translator, puts forward. On the basis of his hundreds of interactions with these young men in his professional capacity over the past several years, he believes to have discovered that they are motivated by a deep and abiding contempt for Western civilization. To them, Europeans are the enemy, and their women are legitimate spoils, as are all the other things one can take from them: housing, money, passports. Their laws don’t matter, their culture is uninteresting and, ultimately, their civilization is going to fall anyway to the horde of which one is the spearhead. No need to assimilate, or work hard, or try to build a decent life here for yourself—these Europeans are too soft to seriously punish you for a transgression, and their days are numbered.
Western legal systems are meticulous and procedural, operate on the basis of rules and rights and forms and documents, and consider you innocent until proven guilty. It didn’t take the refugees long to figure out how to leverage this to their advantage. “They’ll stand right there, balding, grey at the temples, and insist that they’re eighteen,” an exasperated Austrian prosecutor told me. Having “lost” their documents, the only way to refute even the most patently absurd such claim is through expensive lab tests. If you have no documents and no shame, you can assert just about anything and then lean back and wait for the system to try and prove otherwise. If you are rejected, no problem: you can launch multiple appeals. Once you have set foot in Europe, it will be almost impossible to get rid of you; indeed, you can literally commit murder. If a court finds you guilty of rape, you need only argue that if you are sent home, your conservative society will kill you for the dishonorable act—then you can’t be shipped out, because EU law forbids extradition if doing so puts the individual’s life at risk. And murderers cannot be sent back to countries that have the death penalty or a judicial system known to be harsh.
But we are still left with a mystery. Welfare fraud is one thing: it makes a certain kind of sense, if you have no regard for rule of law or fairness and you are lazy. But why is this current cohort of Afghans making its mark as sexual predators . . . and inept, stupid ones at that? In search of an answer, perhaps we should take a closer look at the victims. We have eliminated improper attire and an unwittingly seductive manner, but might they have any other traits in common to shed light on why they became the targets of such madness? Reviewing them, one word comes to mind: fulfillment. A Turkish exchange student, happy to be advancing her education in industrial design at a good university in Vienna. A girl in a park, enjoying the sunshine. Two friends, taking their babies for a walk. A mother, enjoying a summer stroll with her two children. A contented old lady, out with her pet. Attractive, accomplished, happy, normal people . . . an unbearable sight, perhaps, to—and here I must agree with President Trump—losers. That is what he proposed we should call terrorists, and he is right. These young men, even minus a suicide vest, are losers, which has inspired them to become social terrorists.
What to do? The necessary measures, I think, are obvious.
Anyone convicted of a felony or any kind of sexual crime should be immediately deported, and that consequence should be made known to new arrivals as part of their initial orientation. This is the only way to stop the accelerating problem. (Doing so will, of course, require changes to European law.)
Every arriving refugee and asylum seeker must be subjected to rigorous fact-checking of their story, including validation of their asserted age by lab testing if there is any doubt. Yes, it’s troublesome and costly, but not nearly as troublesome and costly as letting the wrong people in, or putting hundreds of thousands of foreigners permanently or semipermanently on the dole with benefits they are not entitled to. And European countries must share the resultant data with each other, and identities must be linked to fingerprints, not to documents of dubious authenticity or no documents at all.
That brand of pious sadism is now baseline norm in the wing of the media business where I once worked. The press was once a great haven for every atheistic practitioner of gallows humor who couldn’t get a real job anywhere else, but it’s lately become a humorless religious cult, not meaningfully different from Falwell’s gang, except that it’s bigger and vastly more influential, in theory anyway.
Reporters who adopted any posture other than Maximum Freakout about these manias were hounded as traitors until they confessed their sins. If you thought Trump’s border policy was egregious but perhaps less than an absolute replay of Auschwitz, if you would’ve voted no on Bret Kavanaugh but weren’t 100% convinced he was a serial rapist, or if you said that police brutality can be a serious problem without literally every police officer being a racist murderer, you were suspect. In a moral mania you’re either on board or aiding the enemy, which is how even the mildest skeptics in some of these deviance hunts end up slapped with absurd monikers like “anti-anti-Trump” or “anti-anti-Russia.” The press devolved into clashes of massive black-white characterizations, which were not only childish but mandatory.
“Well, what do you like? What do you do when no one is telling you what to do?” “I don’t know. Mostly just look at Tik Tok videos and Instagram.”“Is there anything you like to make or anything interesting that you find yourself watching videos about?“No, not really. Just famous people and stuff.”“What about basketball? Do you love it? Can you see yourself wanting to coach when you’re older?”“Coach? Oh no! Basketball’s cool and all, but it’s getting old. Coaches are always so extra.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tang_dynastyWhile originally following the faiths of Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism, Buddhism and, to a lesser extent, Nestorian Christianity from West Asia, the gradual conversion to Islam among the Sogdians and their descendants began with the Muslim conquest of Transoxiana in the 8th century. The Sogdian conversion to Islam was virtually complete by the end of the Samanid Empire in 999, coinciding with the decline of the Sogdian language, as it was largely supplanted by Persian.
In Biden's telling, everything hinged on passing a multi-trillion-dollar spending package that was ostensibly meant to upgrade America's basic infrastructure but that also contained a wide range of unrelated spending on new social programs, industrial policy, and other forms of federal bureaucracy. Previous generations may have fought civilization-defining battles against tyrannical rulers and such toxic ideas as slavery and Nazism. But the fate of the free world, the president would have you believe, now depends on whether 50 senators (plus Vice President Kamala Harris) will vote for bigger Amtrak subsidies and expanded government-run internet service.
In that sense, infrastructure might be defined as "big things the government does that affect a lot of people." And under that expansive definition, Biden's plan comes into focus. Infrastructure, the White House and its allies are arguing, is not about roads and bridges and trains and pipes. It's a catchall for spending that's supposed to benefit large swaths of the population—whether you're trying to drive from city to city or trying to get online or trying to afford an electric car.
Somewhere, though, the late William Tucker is smiling. In "Environmentalism and the Leisure Class," an influential 1977 Harper's Magazine essay later expanded into the 1982 book Progress and Privilege, Tucker argued that the environmentalist banner, when waved against local development, offers a conveniently genteel way to "favor the status quo" for those whose "material comfort under the present system has been more or less assured."
https://forum.quillette.com/t/the-social-science-monoculture-doubles-down/32860/3Related to these “trust in experts” scales are the “trust in science” scales in the psychological literature (or their complement, “anti-scientific attitude” scales). I have constructed such a scale, but now consider it to be a conceptual error and prone to misuse. Asking a subject if they believe “science is the best method of acquiring knowledge” is like asking them if they have been to college. At university one learns to endorse items like this. Every person with a BA knows that it is a good thing to “follow the science.” That same BA equips us to critique our fellow citizens who don’t know that “trust the science” is a codeword used by university-educated elites.
In the end, it didn’t matter much that our Iraqi-born relatives weren’t schooled in the latest political doctrines. They were focused on making a living. Having come from a country with no real democratic tradition, they never had interest in so much as running for dog catcher. But like many of the immigrants who come to the United States from other repressive dictatorships, they still appreciate the fruits of democracy. They know that in Afghanistan, the Taliban are the bad guys and the Americans were a force for good. And they never went in for those political word games, played on both sides of the political spectrum, that serve to muddle the difference between freedom and actual oppression. It’s something I think about when I hear right-wing populists and ultra-progressive critical race theorists alike pretend that our hard-won democratic institutions are a mask for tyranny.
“I mix three kraters only for those who are wise.One is for good health, which they drink first.The second is for love and pleasure.The third is for sleep, and when they have drunk it those who are wise wander homewards.The fourth is no longer ours, but belongs to arrogance.The fifth leads to shouting.The sixth to a drunken revel.The seventh to black eyes.The eighth to a summons.The ninth to bile.The tenth to madness, in that it makes people throw things.”
Furthermore, in fourth century Greek law, hubriswas a civic offence that covered physical assault and perhaps also rape and adultery, as well as a host of more minor offences. According to Aristotle, men were thought to have committed hubris not because of an innocent excess of high spirits or a desire to redress some balance but because they wanted to take pleasure from degrading another person
The only reason Snowden is in Russia is because of the actions of Rhodes and his fellow Obama officials to deliberately trap him there: first by invalidating his passport so that he could not board any international flights, and then by threatening the Cuban government that any chance for normalization with the U.S. would be permanently destroyed unless they withdrew their guarantee to Snowden of safe passage through Havana, which they then did.
This level of conscious lying — spending years implying that Snowden was a traitor or Russian spy because he fled to Russia when you know that he wanted to leave and did everything possible to do so but it was your actions that trapped him there against his wishes — requires an unlimited willingness to lie the moment one's interests are served by doing so.
number 1 comes the country, number 2 comes the people, number 3 comes the army, number 4 comes the enslisted (because this is a war for democracy), number 5 comes the officers, far behind that
It shouldn’t need to be said, but if you have to invent a “metric for success” in war that goes beyond defeating an enemy, you’re not really at war, you’re doing something else.
Is the military for building roads and power plants, fighting drug lords, promoting “democracy,” securing women’s rights, raising the average vehicle speed on roads, rooting out terror cells, training foreign police, improving “poultry management,” building independent radio stations (we can’t even do that in America!), ending sectarian or even domestic violence, even reducing carbon emissions? So long as the money kept coming, our military was willing to be about all of those things in Afghanistan, which initially mystified the Taliban, whose leaders had no concept of a war without goals.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2001/10/15/bush-rejects-taliban-offer-on-bin-laden/bc0ec919-082b-40e6-91ca-55e5ca34a70a/Thinking we were there in search of revenge and bin Laden, the Taliban offered to turn him over once we started bombing, but were refused. We now also know that when we’d beaten them militarily at first, the Taliban tried to surrender, but we rejected even those overtures. The U.S. broadened the mission instead. “We originally said that we won’t do nation building,” said Bush National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, “but there is no way to ensure that al-Qaeda won’t come back without it.”
President Bush rejected an offer from Afghanistan's ruling Taliban to turn over suspected terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden to a neutral third country yesterday as an eighth day of bombing made clear that military coercion, not diplomacy, remains the crux of U.S. policy toward the regime.
"They must have not heard: There's no negotiations," Bush told reporters on the White House South Lawn after returning from Camp David. That brusque dismissal came on a day when Attorney General John D. Ashcroft warned in television appearances that nearly 200 people with potential links to the Sept. 11 attacks -- some of whom he believes are probably terrorists themselves -- remain at large in the United States.
There is no way to look at what happened in Afghanistan and conclude anything but that it was a giant spending program in search of a mission that ended with the mightiest army in the world fleeing from a pre-historic fighting force armed with our own weapons.
The reason we kept writing those checks is obvious: the leaders of both the Democratic and Republican parties are little more than donation-fattened proxies for contractors, in particular the big five of Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon, who also happen to be the top-five federal contractors overall. Lockheed Martin by itself gobbled a remarkable $75.8 billion in contracts last year, and the top five defense firms overall took in a staggering $167 billion.
"Naturally," Srinath argues, "the consequence of [adopting the new speech proposal] would be forcing students to tolerate bigoted speech in their student government, in their learning environment and in campus life."
One Instagram message sent to him asked, "Can I call you a greasy haired cracker or is that not free speech?" Another contained a screenshot of a Google Images search for "cracker thats doing too much," followed by a video of an ISIS beheading.
Hernández's support of the statement led to the student government approving a vote of no confidence against him as president. This made Hernández one of four presidents of the student government last year. Typically presidents serve for one entire year.
"I am not perfect but I care about our rights," Hernández told The College Fix on the issue. "One of my family members ran for mayor of a city in Honduras and was killed during the campaign trail for opposing the political orthodoxy. In much of the world speech is not free. On the contrary, some people have to pay for it with their lives."
This spring, Hernández and his supporters officially pulled their legislation from consideration after they said that the undergraduate student government violated its own procedures to keep the issue from even being raised for a vote. One committee, Johnson says, went as far as to pack a committee meeting with opponents to keep the statement from being proposed.
Bipartisanship flourished because voting coalitions split parties on an issue-by-issue basis. Liberal (Northern) Republicans and liberal (Northern) Democrats had many positions in common, as did conservative (Southern) Democrats and conservative (Western) Republicans. There were few permanent enemies and few permanent allies. Both parties also held a broadly shared consensus on American values, largely united against a shared enemy: the evil empire of the Soviet Union.
In retrospect, the pre-1980s era of American politics was not really a two-party system at all, but instead a four-party system within the broader container of a two-party system. Both party coalitions held together liberals and conservatives, who operated as independent factions within the parties. As a result, both parties looked modestly centrist as a whole, and could compete everywhere because their brands were capacious enough to take on different forms depending on local values.
As this process continued, the Democratic stranglehold on Congress loosened, which further polarized our politics. Since 1980, and especially since the mid-1990s, almost every national legislative election has put majorities in both houses up for grabs, and this tight partisan competition has transformed American politics into trench warfare. Political scientist Frances Lee has looked closely at the devastating consequences of this intense national partisan competition, most recently in her masterful book, Insecure Majorities. The conclusion of her research is dispiriting: The more closely contested the control of institutions, the more politics devolves into zero-sum partisanship with all its dysfunctional consequences. Every vote becomes a party-line vote. Party leaders raise the stakes of every potential dispute to draw clear contrasts for activists, donors, and voters. Each party denies the other any small victory that might be useful in the next election, and looks primarily to embarrass the other side rather than to collaborate. The permanent campaign takes over.
Countries with proportional voting have shown three notable advantages over our two-party plurality-winner system: Their governments do a better job of representing the median voter, and politics is generally more stable; voting rates are higher, and support for democracy is higher; and it is easier to marginalize extremism. It is worth examining how each of these works in turn.
Criminal law directly addresses man's passions. The key to the British common law's success, for Adams, is its sharp distinction between self-defense and revenge. This distinction vindicates only violence that is "absolutely necessary for [one's] preservation." For example, the law would not justify the actions of someone who, having been lightly attacked or insulted, kills his attacker in turn. It would not "justify a furious beating, bruising, and wounding, upon the provocation of a fillip of the finger, or a kick upon the shins," as Adams writes. In this way, British common law teaches citizens that anger and revenge will neither be honored nor protected. The law compels individuals to understand that they will be punished if their passions alone govern them. The law thus enforces moderation by teaching that "little injuries and insults ought to be borne patiently for the present, rather than run the risk of violent consequences by retaliation." By contrast, in several Middle Eastern nations today, there are laws that protect husbands who murder adulterous wives and the men with whom they've committed adultery. Such laws guard and sanctify this form of righteous anger and the natural desire to personally avenge affronted pride.
Tracing this transformation is not easy due to the peculiar way OCR and the courts have formulated policy under Title IX. The law authorizes OCR to establish regulations that spell out what schools must do to receive federal funds. Like all regulations, they are subject to the Administrative Procedure Act's notice-and-comment rulemaking requirements. But Title IX goes beyond this normal requirement, demanding that all such rules also be signed by the president. Remarkably, the last time OCR followed these procedures for a major Title IX rule was in 1975, when President Gerald Ford signed a rule concerning discrimination in athletics. Since then, it has relied exclusively on unilaterally announced "interpretations," "clarifications," and Dear Colleague Letters instead of formal rules.
But I sympathize with you! I think there's a genuine difficulty associated with describing decentralized movements like this. Compare the Proud Boys (defined leader, public membership, preannounced rallies) to Rose City Antifa (completely anonymous, once or twice a member has given a statement to the media or they've publicly claimed credit for an "action" - but that's definitely not the norm).
When a bunch of black-clad people waving flags with downward-shooting-arrows break windows downtown - well, I can either wait for Rose City Antifa to say "ah yes, those anynomous folks were definitely us this time" (in which case I'll generally be waiting forever) or I can say "antifa broke some windows downtown," in which case I'll get criticized for giving the gullible the impression that I'm describing part of a national organized network.
In March 2021, Prince-Bythewood a new role as Co-Chair of the Directors Guild of America African American Steering Committee (AASC). Working alongside Director Jeffrey W. Byrd, Prince-Bythewood will be addressing needs of the African American members of the Guild such as job creation and career advancement in this new position.[32]
Prince-Bythewood was born in Los Angeles, California,[1] and adopted by Bob Prince, a computer programmer, and Maria Prince, a nurse, when she was 3 weeks old.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DahomeyPrince-Bythewood is currently working on directing TriStar Pictures epic The Woman King, a feature inspired by true events that took place in the Kingdom of Dahomey, one of the most powerful states of Africa in the 18th and 19th centuries, The Woman King tells the story of Nanisca (Viola Davis), general of the all-female military unit known as the Amazons, and her daughter, Nawi, who together fought the French and neighboring tribes who violated their honor, enslaved their people and threatened to destroy everything they’ve lived for.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AbeokutaThe Oyo empire engaged in frequent conflicts with the Kingdom of Dahomey and Dahomey became a tributary of the Oyo from 1732 until 1823. The city-state of Porto-Novo, under the protection of Oyo, and Dahomey had a long-standing rivalry largely over control of the slave trade along the coast. The rise of Abeokuta in the 1840s created another power rivaling Dahomey, largely by creating a safe haven for people from the slave trade.
Chief Sodeke first settled Abeokuta (meaning literally "the underneath of the rock"[6] or indirectly "refuge among rocks")[2] in 1830 as a place of refuge from slavehunters from Dahomey and Ibadan. The village populations scattered over the open country to take refuge among the rocks surrounding the city. Here they formed a free confederacy of many distinct groups, each preserving the traditional customs, religious rites and the names of their original villages.
https://quillette.com/2018/04/15/stifling-uniformity-literary-theory/this is basically like playing – not to do the thing where everything is compared to Hitler – but this is like neutrally playing a speech by Hitler, or Milo Yiannopoulos from Gamergate.
https://quillette.com/2019/08/22/why-white-privilege-is-wrong-part-1/However, it is not simply a matter of which thinkers are taught, but also how they are taught. Whenever I teach literary theory, I always ensure that I stress to students that what they are studying is not Gospel, but rather ‘highly opinionated men and women making very contentious statements about the world’. Critical thinking cannot flourish in conditions in which students cannot question the material they are being taught. We should not expect or even encourage students to inherit our own ideas, least not of all political beliefs.
Using two years of fatal shooting data across 16 crime rate estimates, the researchers found no evidence of anti-black disparities in fatal shootings, fatal shootings of unarmed citizens, or fatal shootings involving misidentified objects. In fact, the odds of being killed by police gunfire were 3.9 and 4.8 times higher for whites than it was for blacks for homicide and violent crime arrests, respectively.
https://quillette.com/2019/10/16/why-white-privilege-is-wrong-part-2/In The War on Cops, Heather MacDonald provides a battery of heart-rending statistics. From 1976 to 2005, blacks Americans committed over 52 percent of all homicides in the U.S. They also made up roughly the same number of homicide victims, as these crimes are often committed within the same communities. In 2005, the black homicide rate was over seven times the rate of whites and Hispanics combined. In 2006, blacks constituted 39.3 percent of all violent-crime arrests, including 56.3 percent of all robbery and 34.5 percent of all aggravated-assault arrests, and 29.4 percent of all property-crime arrests. These statistics, which are supported by several key criminological studies, are disconcerting, but they help to clarify differences in incarceration rates.
Despite New York being the principal destination of blacks from the Caribbean, this group is outnumbered by a factor of four by native-born American blacks. Nevertheless, the first black borough presidents of Manhattan were West Indians. As late as 1970, the highest-ranking blacks in New York’s police department were West Indians, as were all the black federal judges in the city. 1970 census data showed that black West Indian families in the New York metropolitan area had 28 percent higher incomes than the families of American blacks. Furthermore, the incomes of second-generation West Indian black families living in the same area exceeded that of black families by 58 percent. Studies published in 2004 revealed that an absolute majority of black college alumni were West Indian or African immigrants, or the children of these immigrants.
https://twitter.com/Nicoletta0602/status/1429420574066024450Culture matters. Researchers, David Austen-Smith and Roland G. Fryer, Jr., note that “black peers and communities impose costs on their members who try to ‘act white’.” To this extent, Fryer and Torelli, using two nationally representative datasets, found that blacks were more likely to associate good grades with unpopularity. In fact, the researchers estimated that eliminating the difference between blacks and whites on their views on grades and popularity would reduce the black-white test score gap by 10 percent, effort gap by 40 percent, and homework completion gap by 60 percent.
Edu-Speak Voodoo Decoder (1):Systemic racism = different outcomesRestorative justice = double standardsRestructure curriculum = dumb it downAffinity space = racial segregationLived experience = subjective point of viewAnti-racism = racial discriminationEquity = communism
Imagine if you heard this from public school:"We don't teach religion. We just teach kids how to pray, confess, worship, and view everything through a spiritual lens. But there's no "religion" course in the curriculum. So. There. Not teaching it."
In a 2015 survey conducted by the Council of Graduate Schools and the Graduate Record Examinations Board, about 55 percent of all participating graduate students in mathematics, computer sciences, and engineering at US schools were found to be foreign nationals. In 2017, the National Foundation for American Policy estimated that international students accounted for 81 percent of full-time graduate students in electrical engineering at U.S. universities; and 79 percent of full-time graduate students in computer science.
My older daughter, in the seventh grade, is currently one of the only girls in her class who does not self-identify as someone on the gender/orientation 2SLGTBQ+ spectrum. Her neutrality (not hostility nor intolerance) to seventh grade sexual politics has resulted in some of her classmates branding her a “homo,” a word that has an interesting etymology: it has retained its derogatory connotations, but now means, evidently, “homophobe” rather than “homosexual.” The trend for self-identifying with a sexual identity other than “cis-” has even led some seventh graders to identify as a new sexual category “semi-bisexual,” which means “bi-sexual but attracted to only one gender.” In other words, straight. (I am certain that the definition is meant to be satirical, but the irony is lost on most 12-year-olds, I’m afraid.)
My students, for instance, are surprised to learn that of the 154 love sonnets that Shakespeare wrote, the first 126 of them are to a young man. (The final 28, give or take, are love sonnets to the “dark lady,” who is characterized as both sexually experienced and sexually active, with desires and a will of her own. A woman adored and respected, deserving of admiration and love. So much for repressive patriarchy.) The question students invariably ask, then, is: “So… Shakespeare was bi?” To which I reply, “I think Shakespeare would have simply characterized himself as a man, a husband, and a father, though he clearly had an attraction to the beautiful young man of the sonnets, to say nothing of his many characters who demonstrate sexual flexibility in identity and desire.” “But then he’s bi!” they insist. To which I reply, “I think Shakespeare would have found our need for precise labels strange. Why do we have the need to define and to categorize human desire? Why this compulsion to attach precise labels to attraction, lust, and pleasure? If what Oscar Wilde says is true, ‘To define is to limit,’ then is it really Shakespeare and his contemporaries who are more repressed than us moderns because they didn’t self-identify as a category? Or is it us who try to contain our sexuality by itemizing every possible iteration of lust and attraction? Are we ready to assume that because we attach a label to human sexuality, we somehow understand better than Shakespeare did? Are we in a cultural position to say that Shakespeare’s insight into human nature is limited compared to the average 19-year-old student’s today?”
The changing nature of Pride parades offers a tidy example of this kind of shift away from sex to sanitation. A few years ago, the parades were celebrations of lust and desire, filled with fellatio, fuelled by ecstasy and cocaine. Now they are family friendly events, populated by suburban parents snapping pics of their cotton-candied sticky kids for social media, and fuelled by non-fat, dairy-free, almond-milk lattes. Cool. It is difficult, I suppose, to combine pure bacchanalian freedom with corporate sponsors. We attend events such as the Pride parade, and congratulate ourselves on how sexually free we are, all while remaining at a safe distance from cocks and cunts and cum, the messy, lumpish parts of ourselves that stubbornly refuse to be recategorized as bourgeois.
As the US was convulsed by the Floyd protests and violence in 2020, the Chinese foreign minister had the gall to denounce the “systemic and persistent existence” of repression of “people of color.” China, meanwhile, forces the assimilation of the non-Han Chinese who make up roughly six percent of the population, most famously in Xinjiang and Tibet. Only 0.01 percent of China’s population are immigrants, and those who do come—particularly from Africa—are not generally well-treated. Racist comments and memes are common throughout Chinese media.
Mao and his successors would no doubt be comforted by the fact that many key Western institutions—the academy, the media, the corporate hierarchy, and even some churches—increasingly reject Western culture, an assessment most common among the young.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TimurAlthough Arabic was used as the international language of science, the scholarship involved not only Arabs, but also Persians, Syriacs, Nestorians, Jews, Arab Christians, and people from other ethnic and religious groups native to the region. These are considered among the fundamental elements that contributed to the flourishing of scholarship in the Medieval Islamic world.
Timur invaded Baghdad in June 1401. After the capture of the city, 20,000 of its citizens were massacred. Timur ordered that every soldier should return with at least two severed human heads to show him. When they ran out of men to kill, many warriors killed prisoners captured earlier in the campaign, and when they ran out of prisoners to kill, many resorted to beheading their own wives.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_Golden_AgeTimur is also considered a great patron of art and architecture as he interacted with intellectuals such as Ibn Khaldun and Hafiz-i Abru and his reign introduced the Timurid Renaissance.[...]Timur's armies were inclusively multi-ethnic and were feared throughout Asia, Africa, and Europe, sizable parts of which his campaigns laid waste. Scholars estimate that his military campaigns caused the deaths of 17 million people, amounting to about 5% of the world population at the time.
To account for the decline of Islamic science, it has been argued that the Sunni Revival in the 11th and 12th centuries produced a series of institutional changes that decreased the relative payoff to producing scientific works. With the spread of madrasas and the greater influence of religious leaders, it became more lucrative to produce religious knowledge.[...]Current research has led to the conclusion that "the available evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that an increase in the political power of these elites caused the observed decline in scientific output."
How, then, is political correctness defined by someone who declines the warm invitation from identity politics? First of all, citing Robert Hughes, Tsakalakis suggests that it is not really about “politics itself,” nor about ideas and opinions. Rather, it is about “political etiquette.” Political correctness is part of middle-class manners, i.e., what is fitting to express in a certain social circumstance in order not to lose your face.
When a discussion is no longer about ideas but about manners and etiquette, the losing end, as it seems, has no way out. Now, you haven’t merely lost a fair game. You have shown bad manners, and you are expected to be ashamed of it and humbly seek repentance. This is how disagreements are solved under political correctness.
One important theme in the book relates to how modernity is undermined by political correctness. In the 1980s, when political correctness was slowly brewing in parts of academia, Isaac Asimov claimed democracy was under attack. A “cult of ignorance” was spreading according to which democracy was interpreted as saying “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.” This blatant relativism collides with one of the pillars of democracy—selection by merit or “meritocracy.” An elitism based on superior knowledge is by no means in conflict with the ideals of democracy. On the contrary in fact. Democracy is undermined by sectarianism, whether you call it minority selection, identity politics, or political correctness.
Another question is: whatever happened to the upper-class bourgeoisie and their pretentious self-perception? While it may have vanished, Tsakalakis suggests, their arrogance never did. Like a flea, it merely leaped over to another host animal. “Minorities,” he says, “have acquired a prerogative that used to be peculiar to the bourgeoisie: unmitigated egoism and the pleasure of self-satisfaction.” Like the ruling classes not long ago, current minorities “noisily proclaim their personalities,” “practice self-celebration, and recognize no defect in themselves.” If modernity peaked a few decades ago, we are now sliding back in time again—this time, however, with another group on top.
I am an outspoken critic of multiculturalism, coming from a left-wing political perspective.
My PhD thesis, published in 2009, asked why people vote for right-wing populist parties. My initial conclusion was racism, frankly. Then I realized it was mostly about an attack against the political elite. I began looking at the populists’ most energetic critics - the multiculturalists - and it changed my mind.
Today I believe multiculturalism is naïve and dangerously misguided, and that its rhetoric, while aimed at defeating right-wing populism, is only fueling it.
One of the things all those young women had in common was that their mothers had apparently never told them that when a man invites you to be alone with him in his hotel room, he has only one thing in mind.
Bailey probably deserved to be a casualty of #MeToo more than some of its other victims. But he was also a casualty of the curious clash of #MeToo and its neo-fastidiousness about sexual exploitation with the no-holds-barred sexual revolution that had immediately preceded it. In this respect, the cool teacher who wanted to get down with his students at their sexual-blossoming level, only to discover a generation later that his coolness would be reclassified as rapey and their sexual blossoming as irrelevant, was actually an epigone of his biographical subject Philip Roth, who suffered his own descent from emblem of newfound ’60s sexual freedom with Portnoy to perennial feminist target of the 1990s and beyond.
As for the girlfriends, the photo album full of them and more, I asked my husband why a man would feel compelled to have sex with quite so /many/ different women. He answered, “Women have no idea how attractive they are to men.” Roth slept with dozens of women because he could.
To begin with, we have seen these tactics from U.S. officials — lying to the American public about wars to justify both their initiation and continuation — over and over. The Vietnam War, like the Iraq War, was begun with a complete fabrication disseminated by the intelligence community and endorsed by corporate media outlets: that the North Vietnamese had launched an unprovoked attack on U.S. ships in the Gulf of Tonkin. In 2011, President Obama, who ultimately ignored a Congressional vote against authorization of his involvement in the war in Libya to topple Muammar Qaddafi, justified the NATO war by denying that regime change was the goal: “our military mission is narrowly focused on saving lives . . . broadening our military mission to include regime change would be a mistake.” Even as Obama issued those false assurances, The New York Times reported that “the American military has been carrying out an expansive and increasingly potent air campaign to compel the Libyan Army to turn against Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.”
Though the program was still in place when Mr. Biden took office, the Trump administration had stopped relying on it nearly a year earlier at the start of the pandemic. It had adopted a new policy known as Title 42, which Mr. Biden is still using, that allows border agents to send migrants back to Mexico without allowing them a chance to ask for asylum.
https://forum.quillette.com/t/watching-america-s-crack-up/31453/3I doubt that it is necessary to present a complete list of the symptoms of this collective nervous breakdown, but there were certain inflection points that seem important in retrospect. Over the past 20 years, America threw itself into two wars, one necessary and the other wholly not. It saw the rise of an anti-war movement that asserted, quite stridently, that a relatively innocuous president was the equivalent of Hitler. It watched as its overclass, through greed and short-sighted pursuit of profits, nearly destroyed the economy. It elected a messianic leader who proved all too human and followed him with a narcissistic, bloviating, entirely unscrupulous incompetent who was indifferent to the basic conduct required to sustain a democracy. It witnessed a direct attack on one of the great institutions of that democracy, now defended by a great many who ought to know better. It fostered an opposition composed of radicals prone to censorship and street violence. It has been riven by racial divisions that appear to admit of no obvious solution. And now it must contend with the fact that approximately half the country believes that a presidential election was stolen because their mendacious leader told them so.
Economic analyses from the UK has looked at the issue from the point of the economic spectrum and found that migration of all types economically benefits people in the top 20% of the income spectrum at the expense of the 20% at the bottom of the working age population. The Migration Observatory, a group affiliated with Oxford University is generally quite favourable towards migration, but they have at least been honest enough to compile a list of studies which show that at a rate of 14% foreign-born citizenship, the bottom 20% of the working population suffers around an 8% reduction in wages, whilst it reduces labour population for the host population as a whole by around 2%.
So, while even many conservatives in the West tend to dismiss fears of a “great replacement” as a crude racist conspiracy theory, average people in societies with stagnating or declining populations are likely to think and vote differently. This is especially true if, as in Central and Eastern Europe, history is full of nearby examples of populations actually being replaced. Fidesz capitalized on this with an effective rhetorical campaign against mass immigration into Europe, and a lesser-known set of popular pro-natal incentives such as lifetime exemption from income taxes for women who have a certain number of children. These have helped increase the fertility rate by almost a quarter in the last decade, while nearly doubling the number of marriages. Knocking or mocking this concern won’t make it go away.
Orbán was introduced to many in the West in 2015 when he tried to halt a wave of Syrian refugees traveling to Germany and other points in Western and Northern Europe via Hungary. While the move was widely denounced as lawless, it was actually German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s sudden decision to admit more than a million such migrants that was in stark contravention of EU law. This and similar cases in which Western governments or bodies have twisted their own statutes or regulations have made protests against Hungary’s real rule-of-law abuses all too easy for Orbán and his supporters to brush off.
Was [Nabokov] wrong to create Humbert? The woke perspective would say yes, but both the book and the author have oddly escaped cancelation (Nabokov would have roared with laughter to see a titan of middlebrow entertainment like J.K. Rowling set upon by moral mobs while his cackling portrait of tumescent evil continues to be taught in universities).
As I read the book this weekend, it occurred to me there might be another reason /Lolita/ survived. In the social media age, our conception of both good and evil has been dulled to the point where the horror the book represents, and what it says about the absurd nature of human morality, has become invisible to modern readers. The flip side of the woke revolution is that it’s so trivialized the idea of evil that a generation is growing up unable to see and understand the depths of the real thing.
In the context of Cuomo’s career, it’s a bizarre document. There are 2-3 flash allegations of genuine crime — a hand up a blouse to grab a breast, an apparent improper promotion of a female trooper as a come-on — surrounded by a mountainous chronicle of gray-area dickishness/inappropriateness/cluelessness, from referring to female staff as “sweetheart” or “honey” to “allowing senior staff members to sit on his lap” and holding “discussions about the age differences of partners.”
When Cuomo meets his maker I seriously doubt more than a handful of these episodes will make the first draft of what assuredly will otherwise be a lengthy case for hell. Morally, almost none of it compares to the other things we already knew he’d done: deliberately undercounting rest-home Covid-19 deaths to head off a federal civil rights investigation, taking money from Harvey Weinstein’s lawyers before halting an investigation into the handling of Weinstein’s case, keeping a right-hand man who took hundreds of thousands in bribes, or any of a dozen other episodes reflecting calculated transgression as opposed to generalized, anachronistic horniness.
With Cuomo as with anyone else in the Internet age, the important issue isn’t right or wrong, but whether or not he’ll survive. Bad People news stories now inevitably devolve into Twitter math contests, where the goal is to topple a career once the right ratio is reached. We see public opinion shifting against Cuomo, with 70% of New Yorkers calling for his resignation. If he quits, he goes into disgrace, a one-size-fits-all afterlife which is always permanent now — Al Franken and Louis C.K. get disappeared down the same chute as Weinstein and Cosby, and almost no one comes back from the other side.
This surface question of proper names, however, dramatically obscures the underlying conceptual tensions, moral values, and metaphysical commitments fundamentally at stake. Indeed, as claims of “misgendering” have swelled from being regarded as instances of impoliteness, to disrespect, to phobia, to hate, to intentional harassment, to threats, to actual violence, to warranting official legal penalty, to “human rights” violations (language previously reserved for exclusive use in reference to torture, genocide, atrocity, and crimes against humanity), the moral and metaphysical landscape and the linguistic and social institutions presumably about that landscape have been run over roughshod in public discourse with alarming speed and scarce pause for serious philosophical reflection.
The social and political consequence of allowing such false rights claims to swell unopposed to the level of /positive/ rights claims, eventually codifying into actual state-compelled law (as is already the case with Canada’s Bill C-16 and soon to be with America’s Equality Act) will be nothing less than the legal sanctioning of a new priest class of magical people who speak all of reality into existence, and then the rest of society who must simply obey.
For claims or propositions to be true or false at all, they must first be “truth-apt” and therefore must rise to a level of basic intelligibility in order for us to be capable of evaluating them as true or false. Accordingly, claims about special transgender rights do not get off the ground to begin with, because claims about “gender identity” don’t get off the ground to begin with, since such claims fail to rise to the level of being truth-apt or minimally coherent. Claims about transgender rights are therefore as intelligible and truth-apt as claims about “flipl-flopl” rights, or “Jabberwocky” rights, or “schmerkle” rights. And just because someone happens to utter the noise “rights” after a particular word or set of words, doesn’t mean that such claims actually grip the moral or metaphysical joints of the world.
This felt sense of something being perpetually “off” has, according to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, led to over 40 percent of gender dysphoric men and women in the US having attempted to take their own life, nearly 10 times the national average.
The logical implications of the passing of the US Equality Act would therefore constitute nothing less than the legal canonization of a new priest class of magical persons who speak all of reality into existence and a subordinate class of everyday citizens held hostage by state compulsion to be unwilling stage-actors in their never-ending, incoherent game of pretend.
The above claims are neither hyperbole nor slippery slope alarmism, nor hypothetical conjecture. Indeed, in just the past few years we have already begun to see the tragic and unjust fallout of such conceptual incoherence playing out under the illogic baked into Canada’s Bill C-16. From a BC man being held in jail for objecting to his teenage daughter’s gender transition, to a “transgender” female inmate sexually assaulting other inmates at an all-female penitentiary, to “trans” female, Jessica Yaniv, taking more than a dozen esthetician businesses to a Human Rights Tribunal for refusing to Brazilian wax his scrotum, the madness of this incoherent ideology is only just beginning.
And I asked whether the Indigenous permissions that Duggan’s group apparently had obtained for their earlier research on mDNA had been revoked. As of this writing, I have received no response. Duggan told me that my own concerns were “meaningless when compared to the distress caused to Indigenous communities by the historical treatment of their ancestral remains.” But she failed to provide detail on this potential “distress.” Until this discussion, a half century had passed with no complaint, to my knowledge, from any Indigenous group, in regard to this specific area of study.
And this penchant for moving around didn’t end when humans arrived in North America. In the north-eastern part of North America, south of the St. Lawrence River and Gulf, for example, the arrival of mainly Basques and French settlers in the late 16th century set off a scramble among Indigenous groups—not generally to escape oppressive “settler colonization,” but rather to gain access to the new arrivals for purposes of trade and the formation of military alliances against existing enemies. This competition set off a series of long and bloody wars, which in turn led to the extermination of whole Indigenous cultures—true genocides, whose human toll was exacerbated by the epidemics brought from Europe.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/4032245.stmThe subject has caused controversy in most of modern Greece. In 2002, a conference on Alexander the Great was stormed as a paper about his homosexuality was about to be presented.
Should we speak of fascism when we are describing an uprising, or a movement driven by white supremacists, Confederate apologists, economic populists, religious zealots, activist industrialists and financiers, and political demagogues?
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/1980s-far-left-female-led-domestic-terrorism-group-bombed-us-capitol-180973904/Codifying detailed definitions of key theoretical terms is a noble academic pursuit. For those actively working to combat fascism, though, such efforts are not only misguided but actively harmful. Instead of insisting activists adhere to the taxonomic conventions of academics, we would do better to listen to how organizers use the term to highlight and dismantle authoritarian formations of power that, too often, evade journalistic and academic attention.
As for the claims of “racism,” our talk never mentioned race. Instead, we focused on the issue of creation myths, and the associated revival of simple-minded racial classifications that are now being employed (ironically, in the service of anti-racism) as a purported means to advance scientific inquiry. In this view, religious mysticism is an important (indeed, dispositive) fact-finding tool, but only if such mysticism is transmitted by certain kinds of racially defined groups.
Obviously, we have no objection to anyone, Indigenous or non-Indigenous, engaging in religious practices, or advancing their understanding of the cosmos according to their own spiritual viewpoint.
Another example to consider can be found in a collection that one of us (Elizabeth) curates at San José State University: the Ryan Mound. This collection has been continuously studied for decades. But only in recent years did we first learn that there may be multiple populations at the site, with one group having been displaced by another. This is a common situation one deals with in anthropology research. In terms of NAGPRA, it results in an ironic situation whereby remains and artifacts of an early civilization are being handed to the descendants of those who conquered, displaced, or exterminated the original inhabitants.
The preliminary data are quite promising: The overwhelming majority of those released on home detention have not reoffended. Of the 28,881 prisoners allowed on home detention last year, only 151 individuals, less than 1 percent, violated the terms of their confinement. Only one person has committed a new crime. Additionally, research on technical parole and probation violations shows that removing people from community supervision and reincarcerating them when they have not committed an offense increases the likelihood of criminal recidivism and makes future reentry into society more difficult.
In Virginia, the breakthrough hospitalization rate is 0.0032 percent and the breakthrough death rate is 0.0009 percent.
The New Zealand weightlifter who lost her spot to the trans athlete didn't think it was fair, but said she and others were told to stay quiet about it.
Athletes won't speak up, says Schneeberger, because "they don't want to lose sponsorship opportunities [or] be called a bigot."
Neuropsychological test scores were more powerfully associated with grades than were IQ scores, despite their later and single administration. In addition, hierarchical regression analysis demonstrated that three of four neuropsychological test score factors (Verbal Learning, Executive Function, and Tactile Laterality improved the statistical association with six-year averaged failure-weighted grades over and above IQ (averaged Vocabulary and Block Design). NEO-PI-R Agreeableness was significantly and positively related to grades, over and above both IQ and neuropsychological function.
The contention that bills aiming to return states more or less to pre-pandemic voting norms amount to a rebirth of Southern secessionism or segregation is a preposterous slander that requires attention only because powerful people are repeating it. Whether their claims are politically savvy is doubtful—calling your opponents racist works better when you have evidence. But the aspersions will have an effect. Mr. Biden called the Georgia proposal, which he clearly knew nothing about, “un-American” and “sick” and so obliged an assortment of multinational corporations to defame Georgia lawmakers as racists.
What’s notable about this line of argument is that, like many other claims made by the cultural left, it’s self-refuting. How are we to believe Mr. Biden when he says 2019 voting regulations were racist when he said nothing about them in 2019? Is he, too, “un-American” and “sick” because he remained silent all those years when Georgia and Texas hadn’t yet expanded early voting and loosened laws on mail-in ballots?
I worry that people are going to come away from this with some conclusion like “wow, the FDA seemed really unprepared to handle COVID.” No. It’s not that specific. Every single thing the FDA does is like this. Every single hour of every single day the FDA does things exactly this stupid and destructive, and the only reason you never hear about the others is because they’re about some disease with a name like Schmoe’s Syndrome and a few hundred cases nationwide instead of something big and media-worthy like coronavirus. I am a doctor and sometimes I have to deal with the Schmoe’s Syndromes of the world and every f@$king time there is some story about the FDA doing something exactly this awful and counterproductive. A while back I learned about Infant Short Bowel Syndrome, a rare condition with only a few hundred cases nationwide. Babies cannot digest food effectively, but you can save their lives by using an IV line to direct nutrients directly into their veins. But you need to use the right nutrient fluid. The FDA approved an early draft of the nutrient fluid, but it didn’t have enough fish oil, which is necessary for development, so a lot of the babies still died or ended up with permanent neurological damage. Around the late 90s/early 00s, researchers figured out what was going on and recommended adding fish oil to the IV fluid. The FDA responded that they had only approved the non-fish-oil version, it would take them a while to approve the new version, and until they did that adding fish oil was illegal. A bunch of babies kept dying and getting permanent neurological damage, and everyone knew exactly how to stop it, but if anyone did the FDA would take away their licenses and shut them down. Around 2010, Boston Children’s Hospital found some loophole that let them add fish oil to their nutrient fluid on site, and infants with short bowel syndrome at that one hospital stopped dying or ending up permanently disabled, and the FDA grudgingly agreed to permit it but banned them from distributing their formulation or letting it cross state lines - so for a while if you wanted your baby not to die you had to have them spend their infancy in one specific hospital in Massachusetts. Around 2015 the FDA said that if your doctor applied for a special exemption, they would let you import the correct nutritional fluid from Europe (where, lacking the FDA, they had just added fish oil to the fluid as soon as researchers discovered it was necessary), but you were only able to apply after your baby had already sustained serious damage, and the FDA might just say no. Finally in 2018 the FDA got around to approving the corrected nutritional fluid and now babies with short bowel syndrome do fine, after twenty years of easily preventable state-mandated deaths. And it’s not just this and coronavirus, I CANNOT STRESS ENOUGH HOW TYPICAL THIS IS OF EVERYTHING THE FDA DOES ALL THE TIME.
Remko Leemhuis, director of the American Jewish Committee’s Berlin office, said that such trials had the symbolic power of reminding society that justice must be done as well as warning war criminals of our age that they, too, would face prosecution at some point.
All in all, even most outwardly successful full-time comedians still make an annual income that sits significantly below the poverty line. As such, the performers that the industry tends to retain are middle-to-upper class young people with financial support from their family (topped up, in some cases, by government benefits such as unemployment insurance and disability), a white-collar day job that lets them put food on the table, no dependants, and a schedule that permits them to dedicate their evenings to what is effectively a life of endless unpaid auditions. Unsurprisingly, the field has a massive attrition rate; with working-class people having an especially hard time. (Comedians, even those with blue-collar roots, generally have had some degree of post-secondary education. Think of your average successful comedian as a failed member of the professional class: somebody who could have been a lawyer under different circumstances.)
A popular view in stand-up comedy is that the gender imbalance is culturally rooted in the field’s hyper-masculine social environment, not to mention the harassment and misogyny endured by female comics. But my own experience (as well the persistence of a wide gender gap, even following the industry’s effort to embrace women in recent decades), suggests that a combination of gendered differences in socialization, risk tolerance, and lifestyle barriers are at least equally important factors.
In practice, the diversity mandates mean that gay, female, and non-white performers aren’t just talent—they’re a commodity that event organizers can leverage to earn money, protect themselves from criticism, and project moral influence. In other words, it’s the same kind of incentive system that’s been playing out all over the cultural landscape in recent years: Rather than growing the number of diverse performers at the grass-roots level, or making the industry more economically attractive to people who don’t enjoy white-collar middle-class privilege, gatekeepers find it easier to gerrymander their most visible talent by excluding or limiting people who don’t belong to the favoured groups.
In theory, anyone can get stage time by just showing up at an open-mic evening, the subset of the amateur field that’s open to those who haven’t yet gotten to the booking stage. At open-mic nights, the comedy ranges from genius-in-the-making to sets so radioactively awful you should only watch them through several feet of specially treated glass. Judging by all the ones I’ve been to, at least a third of the participants at your average open-mic event are suffering some form of clinical depression, and the odds are high that someone will either take off their clothes or cry.
Bianca’s brother left the maternal home when he was 16, and Bianca described feeling completely isolated. She missed her brother, and her friendships faded with the boys at the football club, because by now they were more interested in girls who appeared more feminine
In New York City, the elite Stuyvesant public high school illustrates the discrepancy between the quality of our discussions of systemic racism and how race, class, and education actually interact in the real world. Admission to the school is based on a standardized test. The current student body is 73 percent Asian American and 19 percent white. New York City is about 15 percent Asian American and 30 percent white. In other words, white kids are under-represented in the student body (though far less so than blacks and Latinos). Forty-three percent of the students at Stuyvesant come from “poor” families. Upper-middle-class New Yorkers will not be surprised by these numbers. They know that connected white families with kids cognitively able enough to qualify for Stuyvesant send their children to private schools. They also know that these private schools lure minorities with scholarships in order to diversify their student body. The Dalton School costs $55,000 per year, and its student body is 68 percent white, 11 percent black, and eight percent Asian American. For Asian American children from poor families, on the other hand, Stuyvesant offers a golden opportunity for excellence, as they are not diverse nor affluent enough for private schools. This is their reality.
But if we really care about inequities, we need to focus on solutions that produce real change, rather than symbolism that nourishes self-righteousness. Comfortable white people—“nice white parents” in affluent neighborhoods who support efforts to “defund the police”—can refuse to look into the data or insist that those data are the product of racist systems and structures. They can “interrogate their privilege” and “confront their white supremacy,” or better yet, demand that others do so. But they won’t be any closer to understanding why poor African Americans and Latinos in inner-city neighborhoods want more police officers in their neighborhoods and not fewer, nor why poor African American parents clamor for access to strict charter schools that activists condemn for being “anti-black.” Principled ignorance might be a costless gesture for affluent progressives, but they’re heaping additional injustice onto the backs of those who can least afford the wages of social signalling.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Razib_KhanTo recap a harsh truth of my own, with which I opened this essay: Those already familiar with the data on racial differences in cognitive tests and crime rates, and therefore predisposed to take Murray’s book seriously, will most likely give up on engagement due to intellectual exhaustion with today’s punitive and spiteful political climate. And those who might benefit from Murray’s book will not read it because it was written by someone who transmits ritual pollution to all those who acknowledge him.
There was certainly a child-like quality to Weil—if not entirely innocent, then arrogant at least. Despite her best efforts to achieve philosophical worldliness, Weil was a thinker unfamiliar with the complex negotiations and compromises of a full and connected life. That said, once one gets past the immaturity that moderately marks her work, we encounter a profound philosopher and great soul who speaks directly to issues we confront today.
In 1943, Weil sought to put these principles into practice: on one hand, at the very moment when de Gaulle was attempting to rally the support of French colonial leaders, Weil berated France for its role as a colonial power; on the other, Weil proposed her “Nurses Plan,” a scheme to parachute white uniformed nurses into battle in occupied France, with Weil leading the first group herself. This suggestion was absurdly impractical and dismissed without consideration. But it is not for common sense or everyday political nous that we turn to Weil. It is for purity and profundity and goodness.
As the famous Marxian historian Eugene Genovese recently wrote: 'Any professor who, subject to the restraints of common sense and common decency, does not seize every opportunity to offend the sensibilities of his students is insulting and cheating them, and is no college professor at all.'"
But I'm not interested in those arguments. Here's what I am interested in: the very simple and /radical/ idea that Biles' decision was hers to make, because she doesn't owe viewers, or the country, anything at all. No one is entitled to her performance simply because she is the best in the U.S.—and the world—at a sport. It isn't an embarrassment. It isn't heroism. It just is.
After the arrest, Hale pleaded guilty and essentially threw himself at the mercy of the court, acknowledging that he violated the law while refusing to apologize for it. In a lengthy handwritten letter to U.S. District Judge Liam O'Grady, Hale described an incident where a drone strike he helped arrange failed to kill its target (an Afghan man allegedly involved in making car bombs) and instead killed his 5-year-old daughter. He wrote, "Now, whenever I encounter an individual who thinks that drone warfare is justified and reliably keeps America safe, I remember that time and ask myself how I could possibly believe that I am a good person, deserving of my life and the right to pursue happiness."
https://forum.quillette.com/t/vaccines-and-the-coronavirus-crank-crisis/30661/3On one level, this phenomenon looks like a crude form of attention-seeking ultra-contrarianism. The two interventions that have the biggest effect on reducing COVID’s death toll—lockdowns and vaccines—are the two interventions that the sceptics will go to the wall to deny. Meanwhile, they propose alternative solutions that are preposterous. Instead of using vaccines which have been tested in clinical trials and have demonstrated their safety and effectiveness beyond reasonable doubt in recent months, smileys endorse the use of ivermectin, a worming drug used on sheep.
The scene on Friday night, described by a person with firsthand knowledge, kicked off an uneasy weekend at the White House as demonstrations spread after the brutal death of a black man in police custody under a white officer’s knee. While in the end officials said they were never really in danger, Mr. Trump and his family have been rattled by protests near the Executive Mansion that turned violent for a third night on Sunday.
The U.S. federal judge who sentenced Cromitie to decades in prison, Colleen McMahon, said she did so only because the law of “entrapment” is so narrow that it is virtually impossible for a defendant to win, but in doing so, she repeatedly condemned the FBI in the harshest terms for single-handedly converting Cromitie from a helpless but resentful anti-government fanatic into a criminal. The defendant “was incapable of committing an act of terrorism on his own,” she said, adding: “only the government could have made a terrorist out of Mr. Cromitie, whose buffoonery is positively Shakespearean in scope.” She added: “There is not the slightest doubt in my mind that James Cromitie could never have dreamed up the scenario in which he actually became involved.”
The university has averred that standardized tests discriminate against low-income Black and Latino students; its evidence is that these students tend to perform worse on the SAT and ACT than students from other racial and ethnic groups. If we were to think about this assertion rationally instead of emotionally, we would have to face what California has done: consigned its most vulnerable students to some of the worst K–12 schools in America. There can be no more obvious example of state-sponsored discrimination than the condition of these schools, which, decade after decade, have robbed students of 13 years and given them little in return. All the standardized tests do is reveal the obvious outcome of our cruelty. Saying it’s the tests’ fault is like feeding children a poisoned sundae and then blaming the cherry on top for making them sick.
Only the counterrevolutionary impulse would lead anyone to want to douse the flames of social justice with the fire retardant of fact.
How do i know all of this? Because unlike the regents, who enthusiastically voted to eliminate the tests for the first time in 2020, I did not ignore the findings of a 225-page report that was prepared for them at the request of the UC’s then-president, Janet Napolitano. This report, by the Academic Council’s Standardized Testing Task Force, was based on years of UC admissions data and was the product of a tremendous amount of work by a formidable team of experts in statistics, medicine, law, philosophy, neuroscience, education, anthropology, and admissions.
Four percent of undergraduates in the UC are Black, compared with 5 percent of K–12 public-school students statewide. Twenty-five percent of undergraduates are Hispanic or Latino, compared with 55 percent of schoolchildren in the state. The unspoken assumption many advocates of scrapping the SAT make is that cutting the undeserving white population down to size would make these numbers fairer. But white students are also underrepresented, if only ever so slightly, at the UC: They make up 21 percent of the undergraduate population and 22 percent of K–12 schoolchildren.
There is only one group of students who are “overrepresented,” to use the chilling language of social engineering, at the university: Asian Americans. Twelve percent of K–12 students are Asian or Pacific Islander, compared with 34 percent of UC undergraduates. Aligning enrollment with state demographics would require cutting the share of those students by almost two-thirds. It would mean getting right with contemporary concepts of anti-racism by reviving one of California’s most shameful traditions: clearing Asians out of desirable spaces.
In the 19th century, Chinese people were beaten and lynched in California, in a prelude to the state’s successful campaign for the Chinese Exclusion Act, which cut off immigration from China. In 1906, San Francisco tried to force all Chinese, Korean, and Japanese public-school children to go to a separate “Oriental School.” And in 1942, the first internment camps for Japanese Americans opened in California. The UC has an established history in this dirty art. In the 1960s, Asian enrollment at UC Berkeley was strong, and it soared through the ’70s. But in the ’80s, it plummeted mysteriously. Berkeley was investigated by the Department of Education, and in 1989, the chancellor apologized and pledged that this would never happen again.
I was on an assembly floor working six days a week, very long hours. There were no windows - it really sucked. I mean, this is really what drove me to become a sex worker is because I worked there for a year and then I had an opportunity for aphotography job that I went for, but it didn't work out. At that point I was kind of cut loose and thought ‘What do I want to do?’ I could’ve gone back to the factory, but I just couldn't bring myself to do it. So I tried to do some various startups, which I was really inept at because I had no experience or and I was isolated from the world. I didn't understand culture. I was a really weird person. And then eventually somebody suggested camming to me. I was like, ‘OK, I guess I'll try that because it's not a factory.’ I tried it and it did really well. And then that was the beginning of everything.
“If you had asked me when I became a mom what I thought were the pressing concerns my kids would face I probably would have said climate change, maybe ending the Iraq war,” she said. “I am so shocked that what I worry about now is creeping totalitarianism in America.”
So what explains this disparity in middle school? Liberal educators claim that they are overwhelmingly a function of poverty, school funding, and implicit racism. But these claims don't hold up: Baltimore schools spend $16,184 per pupil, more than all but three urban school systems nationally and 27 percent more than the average suburban school systems. And more than 40 percent of its teaching staff is African American.
National data also verifies that neither poverty nor school characteristics are sufficient explanations. When adjustments are made for family income, parental educational attainment, school resources, and teacher quality, one-half of the racial gap still remains. The remaining gaps are even larger for Black boys, especially those in schools with Black enrollment over 80 percent.
This kind of regime-analysis disappeared with the rise of classical liberalism, which supplied an altogether different language of politics. As an intellectual reaction against an oppressive order, classical liberalism is first and foremost a negative ideal. Most liberal theorists know what they do /not/ want—domination, illegitimate hierarchies, dogma—but they do not know what they /do/ want, insofar as they do not tie their political philosophy to a precise definition of the good life. Once liberated, individuals must build their sense of selfhood by and for themselves. The liberal state provides liberty and rights, not meaning and purpose.
In this sense, most of the West’s civilizational challenges stem from the simple fact that liberal societies are no longer producing liberal citizens. The campus Left, the nationalist Right, ardent neo-Marxists, and Catholic integralists may not have much in common, but they all share a disdain for liberalism’s rationalist outlook, atomistic individualism, and pseudo-neutral proceduralism. In different ways, these movements attack the idea that we are self-constructed individuals who can build our sense of identity out of thin air. Marxists emphasise the role of class, gender, and race; communitarians stress the moral obligations we inherit—to the Church, the family, the community, and the nation. More fundamentally, these political forces reject the liberal desire to let people seek their own sources of meaning. Embracing comprehensive definitions of the good life, the critics of liberalism view politics as a power-game wherein competing moral systems fight for supremacy in the public square.
For much of the 20th century, liberalism existed within a convenient trichotomy, alongside fascism and communism. In this context, liberal democracies did not struggle to provide normative justifications for the superiority of liberal thought; anyone who desired basic levels of material prosperity and rejected racial hierarchies would have to be a liberal by default. After the fall of the USSR, however, liberalism began to reign supreme—and with this supremacy came a need to provide a positive vision for the liberal order. The problem, of course, is that liberalism has no comprehensive conception of the good. Liberal states offer rights and prosperity, but nothing more.
As Fukuyama puts it, “`thymos' cannot be satisfied by the knowledge that we are merely equal in worth to all other human beings.”[...]Ultimately, the greatest threat to liberalism comes from within—and its name is generalized boredom.
The condition of poor blacks is precisely what we should expect based on our history, it is argued. As Coates puts it, “It is as though we have run up a credit card bill and, having pledged to charge no more, remain befuddled that the balance does not disappear. The effects of that balance, interest accruing daily, are all around us.”
This growing liberal spirit began to wane, however, when millions of black southerners arrived, leading white majorities in those cities to erect racial barriers against blacks in general. This development reflected a common historical pattern, in which ethnically similar groups with different cultures are punished for the mass influx of the less developed group, such as the retrogression in American attitudes toward Jews when millions of eastern European Jews immigrated to the US after German Jews had already been living there for generations. In fact, the term “kike” was invented by German Jews as an epithet against their Eastern European counterparts, and major efforts were made to acculturate the incomers in order to prevent the arousal of anti-Jewish sentiment.
More illustrative of the prevailing view of racial history and its blindspots than what it highlights, however, is what it omits. For instance, one would never guess, upon hearing this account, that the legislative victories of the civil rights movement were followed by a massive wave of reparational, race-conscious policies introduced as part of President Johnson’s War on Poverty and Great Society initiatives. These spent an estimated 20 trillion dollars on programs geared to ameliorate “poverty and racial injustice.” A few examples include the Food Stamp Act of 1964, the Child Nutrition Act of 1966, the Social Security Amendments of 1965, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, the Social Security Amendments of 1962, and the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964.
The War on Poverty was based on the notion that black poverty was unique because of historical racism, just as activists claim today. But the desired results were not forthcoming. Violence, single households, joblessness, welfare dependency, teen pregnancy, drug addiction, and all of the ills we associate with the urban ghettos today were accelerated in the late 60s, whether or not those policies were a cause of the decline or just an ineffective remedy. So, much of what is called for by modern anti-racist activists has already been tried and failed. And yet it is critics of such policies that are accused of not knowing their history.
But the wealth gap perfectly illustrates the problem with using statistical disparities to diagnose and address social issues. An analysis by the left-leaning People’s Policy Project reflects just one of the problems with what Coleman Hughes had called the disparity fallacy by uncovering an element of the racial wealth gap that’s gone unremarked upon in most mainstream discourse—almost all of it is coming from the top. The gap between the wealthiest 10 percent of the white population and the wealthiest 10 percent of the black population accounts for 77.5 percent of the total wealth gap. And although the racial wealth gap exists to some degree across class lines, if we were to eliminate the disparity between the bottom 50 percent of blacks and whites in terms of wealth, a full 97 percent of the total gap would remain. Only three percent of the racial wealth gap is explained by the disparity between the poorer half of each population, while the vast majority of the gap is explained by the disparity between the top 10 percent of the wealthiest white and black Americans in the population.
What is unique about the United States and the West more broadly, however, is that it was the first society to question the moral foundations of slavery and actively root it out the world over. That there have been writings attempting to justify slavery in America doesn’t belie this point; there would be no point in justifying slavery if it wasn’t felt that it was something requiring justification, whereas the necessity of enslaving other human beings was taken for granted for much of history. As the Jamaican-born cultural sociologist Orlando Patterson writes, “For most of human history, and for nearly all of the non-Western world prior to Western contact, freedom was, and for many remains, anything but an obvious or desirable goal. … Indeed, non-Western peoples have thought so little about freedom that most human languages did not even possess a word for the concept before contact with the West.”
https://quillette.com/2021/07/19/the-accomplishments-of-black-conservative-thought/Unless we are willing to accept the racist idea that, to paraphrase John McWhorter, black Americans are the only group in human history who can’t succeed under anything less than ideal conditions, there is no reason to believe the ultimate story of black Americans will be any different from other successful ethnic groups.
Obviously, a kid raised in a single-parent home in a decaying neighborhood will encounter problems besides an internalized sense of victimhood. However, heterodox thinkers have repeatedly pointed out that many leftist and black Americans do hold a range of wildly untrue beliefs about the nature of “racial oppression” that are likely to hamper success. A recent study from the Skeptic Research Center (SRC) found that 31 percent of those identified as “very liberal” on an ordinal survey believe that the average number of unarmed black Americans killed annually by police is “about 1,000.” Fourteen percent believe that this number is “about 10,000,” while almost eight percent believe it is more than that. To put this astonishing finding in context, less than 20,000 homicides of any kind take place in a typical year, about half of which involve blacks. The total number of unarmed black men shot by police in 2020 was 18.
The SRC’s finding was not an outlier. During the same year, the political scientist Eric Kaufmann found that 80 percent of American blacks and 60 percent of college-educated white liberals believe that more young black men are shot annually by police than die in auto wrecks. In reality, there are roughly 40,000 fatal car wrecks annually, concentrated among younger drivers, and roughly 1,000 fatal cop shootings, fewer than 250 of which involve blacks.
Paranoia about the threat to black safety posed by whites is hardly confined to discussions of policing. A remarkable 2005 article in the Washington Post reported that more than 25 percent of black Americans believed AIDS was created in a government lab, 15 percent saw the disease as a form of genocide against blacks, and 12 percent thought it was originally created and spread by the CIA. While such beliefs are obviously not the only thing preventing black advancement, it is difficult to imagine those who hold them participating whole-heartedly in society alongside those they see as genocidal oppressors
https://quillette.com/2021/07/20/should-critical-race-theory-be-banned-in-public-schools-a-conversation-with-christopher-f-rufo/Both O’Neill and Sowell have argued that adjusting for factors like region of residence, family structure, average age—the most common age for a black American is 27 compared with 58 for a white American—and aptitude test scores almost totally closes black-white gaps in income.
Little did Henry B. know that he would be the only East Asian person featured, standing in racially for half of all Facebook technical employees. The other employees’ stories and photos tend to feature bright lighting, full smiles, and gushing reports of how much they care about Facebook’s diversity platform. Henry B. has a dimly lit photo and a story that begins, “There are different ways of coding an application to make it more reusable.”
According to publicly available 2020 data from Facebook itself, Asians make up 44.5 percent of the company’s total positions and 53.4 percent of what Facebook calls “technical roles.” (Technical roles include both the hardcore “software engineer” roles that are almost exclusively Asian-staffed, and the soft-core “data scientist” roles that tend to attract more white people.) But Asians make up just 25.4 percent of what Facebook calls “leadership” positions. That represents a nearly 50 percent cut in terms of Asian employees who start in the company and move up to leadership.
No other race exhibits the same low ratio. Black workers represent 3.9 percent of all roles at Facebook and 3.4 of leadership positions. Hispanic workers represent 6.3 percent of all roles and 4.3 of leadership. White people? Forty-one percent of all roles, and 63 percent of leadership.
The passage of the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 was a classic demonstration of how America works, or doesn’t, depending on your point of view. While we focus on differences between Republicans and Democrats, it’s their uncanny habit of having just a sliver of enough agreement to pass crucial industry-friendly bills that really defines the parties.
Whether it’s NAFTA, the Iraq War authorization, or the Obama stimulus, there are always just enough aisle-crossers to get the job done, and the tally usually tracks with industry money with humorous accuracy. In this law signed by George Bush, sponsored by Republican Chuck Grassley, and greased by millions in donations from entities like Sallie Mae, the crucial votes were cast by a handful of aisle-crossing Democrats, including especially the Delawareans Joe Biden and Tom Carper. Hillary Clinton, who took $140,000 from bank interests in her Senate run, had voted for an earlier version.
Smith laughs about this `I didn’t climb the hills at Normandy with a knife in my teeth just to eat the debt on your useless-ass liberal arts degree' perspective, noting that “when those guys who did all that complaining went to school, only rich prep school kids went to college, and by the way, tuition was like ten bucks.” Still, he wasn’t completely unsympathetic to the conservative position.
"The only way human beings can deal with one another is through language, discussion, debate," he says in my new video. "If we say that that's violence, then the only way for us to relate to one another is through power."
https://reason.com/2021/07/22/cubas-protests-are-a-sign-of-imperial-overreach/In an interview, Caballero describes his confusion after coming to the U.S. in the late 1990s and noticing various differences between the two nations. He no longer had to make his own kites out of reeds and newspapers, and, to his surprise, kids no longer played baseball with broomsticks and bottle caps. Other differences were more dramatic: When Caballero came to his Cuban public school in an American Olympic '96 basketball jersey, his teacher threatened him with reeducation unless his mother stole Coca-Cola from her factory job and turned it over for a school party.
"I also used to steal light bulbs and sell them for candy," he adds.
He was able to ditch that side hustle upon moving to the U.S. "I would say that what I have thanks to Cuba is to be grateful for having opportunities," he says, having mounted a Libertarian bid in 2018 for the Florida House of Representatives. "I realized that here in America, you could basically make anything of yourself….The pursuit of happiness is something that is really central to my core."
That mentality is not welcome in Cuba. On the contrary, it's actively discouraged, and punishable by law. "There was a man that was arrested who produced illegal cheese," notes Caballero. "He didn't report all the milk that the cows were producing, even though they were his cows….He only reported the milk production, started making cheese and selling cheese on the side….The government found out and they confiscated his cheesemaking operation." The man was then sent to jail, says Caballero.
Only four years later, Castro's new protege was elected president of Venezuela, the country that would have the world's largest oil reserves by 2010. In 2011, Venezuela was covering 61 percent of Cuba's energy needs with a constant and increasing oil supply, exporting an average of 105,000 barrels per day to the island between 2007 and 2014. In return for such largesse, Cuba exported to Venezuela its own comparative advantage, refined for decades under Castro's unparalleled expertise: namely, political repression of the most brutal variety, albeit under the guise of revolutionary humanitarianism.
Whether or not the current protests in Cuba endanger the tyranny, they do contain several levels of irony. Not least since the regime that exports doctors and nurses as if they were commodities and touts its decrepit health care system as a global example, fooling gullible Western intellectuals such as Michael Moore, is now facing popular unrest due, in large part, to a severe health care crisis. Although the media has claimed that the pandemic brought the Cuban health care system to the brink of breakdown, this is nothing new. In 2015, a PanAm Post reporter visited a Havana hospital undercover, only to find shortages of basic medical supplies, improvised stretchers, filthy bathrooms lacking doors or toilet paper, wards staffed only by medical students, and patients forced to supply their own sheets, pillows, and medicine. In recent weeks, heightened attention and a broader use of social media tools have made this reality evident to anyone willing to pay attention.
And who knows how long it'll last? We get that [reserve currency status] because of our great political stability, our unwavering commitment to low inflation, our unwavering commitment to always paying off our debts, our commitment to a strong dollar. Sooner or later, people are going to start looking around unless we shape up.
There is widespread agreement that a combination of wind, solar, geothermal and nuclear power mixed with short-duration lithium-ion batteries can generate 80% of electricity. The final 20% will require some type of multiday storage.
They recruited other battery-industry veterans. “The founding team has 100 years of battery experience,” says Mr. Chiang. “We’re the alumni of a generation of failed battery companies who all came back for more.”
In 2020, as work was moving quickly, Form caught a break. It needed a critical battery component called a cathode that was impermeable to water but breathed oxygen, like a Gore-Tex jacket. An Arizona battery company, NantEnergy Inc., had spent a decade building such a membrane for a zinc-air battery. Owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, a billionaire biotechnology entrepreneur who owns the Los Angeles Times, wound down operations last year to focus on other investments.
Form bought its patents as well as its inventory of thousands of cathodes, which sit in cardboard boxes in a corner of the company’s building. “Having this piece nailed down allowed us to hit the accelerator,” said Mr. Jaramillo.
The early Roman prejudice against commerce, especially the retail trade of the nundinal markets, means that the nundinae are usually referenced in negative contexts in Latin literature, particularly for the buying and selling of things that should not be sold such as virginity and love, medical treatment, education, government and church offices and favors, and judicial decisions. This bias endured into medieval Latin, where nundinatio ("marketing") without other qualification meant corruption, especially the purchase of judicial verdicts.
Chief among them were his actions shortly before he joined the White House — the thing for which he would later face a federal investigation and plead guilty to a crime. (He was eventually pardoned by Trump.) Flynn initially denied both federal investigators, The Washington Post and (apparently) the Trump White House that he discussed the Obama administration’s sanctions on Russia for its 2016 election interference with then-Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak in the month before Trump took office — something that raised questions about whether he was undermining the Obama administration, potentially illegally.
Dynasties were built selling Southern California as the healthy, horizontal, autonomous alternative to the tubercular, vertical, anonymous cramp back east. Places of dubious aesthetic appeal were prettied up with fanciful names like Garden Grove and the Inland Empire. Here was a broad middle class living the dream of homeownership, good-paying aerospace jobs, stylish automotive personalization, and year-round recreation.
The 1970s and '80s saw the rise of "slow growth" policies up and down the West Coast. In Santa Barbara, where I first started reporting in the late 1980s, these shackles on new development had predictable results: The local population was cemented at 90,000, tent cities sprang up wherever they were tolerated, and the median home price vaulted toward $1 million. As long as you had bought early, learned to avoid certain neighborhoods, and didn't mind inward-looking politics, it was a pretty good deal.
https://reason.com/2021/07/19/experts-warn-accurate-news-articles-are-misinformation-if-they-support-conservative-views/Mixed in with Ibram Kendi recommendations for children’s books, instructions on how to “decolonize your bookshelf” and “talk to your parents about racism” (even if your parents are an interracial couple), and important dispatches from the war on complacency like “Monuments And Teams Have Changed Names As America Reckons With Racism, Birds Are Next,” “National” Public Radio in the last year has committed itself to a sliver of a sliver of a sliver of the most moralizing, tendentious, humor-deprived, jargon-obsessed segment of American society. Yet without any irony, yesterday’s piece still made deadpan complaint about Shapiro’s habit of “telling [people] what their opinions should be” and speaking in “buzzwords.”
Stories like this NPR report perpetuate the divide. Parks says The Daily Wire's stories "don't normally include falsehoods," but then lets Settle (who has a book to sell blaming social media for political polarization) say that sometimes the truth can "become a piece of misinformation."
On Saturday, President Biden called the ruling “deeply disappointing.”
A very basic question will be, "What is politics for?" What are we trying to do here? We're an extraordinarily diverse country and an extraordinarily large country, and we know it. We're aware of it. And yet sometimes we talk about our country as if it is like a two-bit town with 10 politicians in it, which is just not true. This is an entirely side issue, but the nationalization of local politics is really concerning to me. People will be like, "I'm very concerned about this thing happening in Portland." And I'm like, "I've only been to Portland once. It's very far away from me. Please explain how this has a direct impact on my life."
For centuries, Americans have worried that immigrants could overwhelm and negatively alter economic and political institutions in the United States. In 1783, at the end of the American War of Independence, even Thomas Jefferson had misgivings about too rapid an influx of immigrants, writing that they "will bring with them the principles of the governments they leave, imbibed in their early youth; or, if able to throw them off, it will be in exchange for an unbounded licentiousness, passing, as is usual, from one extreme to another. It would be a miracle were they to stop precisely at the point of temperate liberty." John Jay, the first chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court and co-author of The Federalist Papers, thought that Catholicism was inimical to the principles of individual liberty and representative government, so he argued that the federal government should "erect a wall of brass around the country for the exclusion of Catholics." Prominent Federalist Party member Harrison Gray Otis said, "If some means are not adopted to prevent the indiscriminate admission of wild Irishmen and others to the right of suffrage, there will soon be an end to liberty and prosperity."
However, as the political Left endlessly moves the goalposts after each Pyrrhic victory, I hope the moment will come when a critical mass of faculty and students refuse to play the game. It is difficult to convey the toll taken—semester after semester, year after year, decade after decade—by a teaching environment in which a single criticism or correction or incautious remark can produce an explosion and formal or informal disciplinary proceedings.
In retrospect, it was an innocuous exchange. At the time, though, I was disturbed by it. I saw myself as an accepted member of this progressive world I’d embraced. But even when (as in this case) pronouncing a fundamentally feminist point of view, my perceived identity—white, male, and conventionally masculine in gender presentation—I’d frequently be perceived by students as privileged, and, therefore, ideologically suspect and out of touch. During my time at Columbia, people around me would interpret my words in a way that was the exact opposite of what I’d intended; or they’d cast any kind of nuanced, heterodox perspective as an argument made in bad faith. For “cisgender” white dudes like me—no matter my life experiences, my sexuality, my history of adolescent gender-nonconformity, or the complexity of whichever topic we happened to be discussing—it was best to toe the radically progressive line, using only Party-approved language … or shut the fuck up.
Within a few days of starting work, I became aware of how consumed the other interns (early 20s, most of them) were by their identities and by online culture. I also began to see the connection between “gender ideology” (as some now call it) and narcissism, and between extreme forms of trans activism and homophobia. (Note that I said connection, not equivalence.) I was struck by the way these younger colleagues seemed to conflate gender identity with gender expression, and how obsessed they were with their appearances—their clothes, their hair, their makeup—and their digital personas.
https://quillette.com/2021/07/12/almost-four-decades-after-its-birth-the-diversity-industry-thrives-on-its-own-failures/After I read Dommu’s article, I opened up about it to Morgan. “I’m so sick and tired of people saying anything about who, how, and where I should fuck,” I said.
Morgan furrowed their brow. “But I think that writer is trans,” they said.
Taibbi: What went through your mind when you saw the White House announcement about working with Facebook?
Orfalea: You have all these people who’ve been complaining about fascism since Trump, and then this is actual, by-definition, fascism. According to the classic definition, it includes the merging of corporate and state power.
Combating racism becomes a convenient alternative to attacking inequality and inequality, even those inequalities that appear or the manifest themselves as racial disparities. Because the struggle against racism is exactly parallel to the struggle against terrorism… It can go on forever, because the enemy is an abstraction that you can define however you want to define it, at the moment that you wanted to find it.
It’s why so much effort was spent denouncing “economic anxiety” as code for racism, why Hillary Clinton accused both Jill Stein and Tulsi Gabbard of being foreign assets, why the New Yorker ran a story arguing Glenn Greenwald’s criticism of Russiagate was rooted in his disdain for “the ascendance of women and people of color in the [Democratic] Party,” why Cenk Uygur is accusing “alt left” enemies of being “paid by the Russians,” why Current Affairs went after impossibly congenial podcast host Krystal Ball by accusing cohort Saagar Enjeti of being a human gateway drug to Hitler, why critics went after Substack by claiming it was racist and transphobic (or, most amusingly lately, “bad for democracy”), why former New York Times editorial page editor James Bennet was ousted for putting the lives of black staff “in danger” by running a Tom Cotton editorial, and, yes, why Andrew Weissman went after Carlson by saying sowing distrust in the NSA is “un-American.”
These are all debate-pre-emptive strategies. When Clinton went after Gabbard, we stopped talking about whether or not military intervention in Syria was a good idea, and moved to debating whether Gabbard was an accomplice to genocide. Critics of Russiagate from the start had to calculate their appetites for being accused of supporting Putin or Trump. Anyone even considering going on Fox now can expect to spend years answering questions about abetting fascism and white supremacy. Argument goes out the door: the discourse becomes entirely about courage and career risk. How much flak are you willing to take? How much can you afford to take?
As any married person knows, there are certain words you never say in a fight, because you’ll still be living together when it’s over. Americans, like it or not, are married to one another. That’s not accommodationist talk, it’s just fact. The people we disagree with aren’t going anywhere, and it makes more sense to talk to them than not.
https://www.alternet.org/story/48051/obama_is_the_best_bs_artist_since_bill_clintonThe Illinois senator is the ultimate modern media creature — he's a good-looking, youthful, smooth-talking, buttery-warm personality with an aw-shucks demeanor who exudes a seemingly impenetrable air of Harvard-crafted moral neutrality. If Hillary Clinton even dares to open her mouth within a hundred feet of him at any time during the campaign, she's going to come off like a pig digging for truffles. Even Edwards — the so-called "slick" candidate from '04 — sounds like a two-bit suburban Buick dealer next to Obama. You get past the "issues," and it's a wipeout.
"I've been on the fence about Obama for more than two years now, ever since his breakout performance at the Democratic convention in '04. When I saw that speech -- an iconic piece of inspired nonsense/political showmanship, one that set flashbulbs popping like Michael Jordan's virtuoso 1988 dunk contest performance -- I knew right away that he would be the Democratic presidential nominee someday, perhaps even in the next election cycle. When I mentioned this to my friends, they told me I was crazy. ... Here's the thing about Obama, the reason they call him a "natural" and a "rare talent." When Hillary Clinton spouts a cliche, it's four words long, she's reading it off a teleprompter, and it hits the ear like the fat part of a wooden oar. Obama, on the other hand, can close his eyes and the cliches just pour out of his mouth in huge polysyllabic paragraphs, like Rachmaninoff improvisations. In this sense he's exactly like Bill Clinton, who had the same gift. He is exactly what is meant by the term BS artist."
(Kay Lough)This is really great breakdown of the key issues. Like a lot of people, I have no definite answers either but know that all of the irregularities, censorship/suppression, and outright lies by the cabal of media, government, tech and corporate elite are not an accident. The other point I would make is that if the cabal genuinely believed that 45 was a Russian asset and engaged in treasonous activities, then it would be noble and proper to collaborate and neutralize the threat in any way possible. I would expect no less. (Darryl Cooper, Author)The appropriate thing to do in that case would have been to inform flag officers, heads of agencies, politicians of both parties, and every prominent American with bipartisan credibility of the evidence, then call a press a conference where it’s presented and immediate action is demanded. We’re not talking about laundering campaign funds, after all. What you don’t do is have a special counsel staffed with known partisans conduct a secretive investigation fueled by anonymous leaks, then drop the entire thing and move on as soon as Devin Nunes no longer controls of House investigative committee.
I think what happened was that they talked themselves into a conspiracy theory to justify taking unconscionable actions against the Trump campaign, and realized they could be in a lot of trouble when it began to fall apart. So they shuffled the investigation off into the special counsel’s office so that every congressional inquiry could be answered with “I cannot comment on an ongoing investigation” until the Democrats took back the House. And maybe they hoped they could find something, related to Russia or not, damaging enough to take him down - although the record seems to indicate that they gave up on serious investigations after only a few months and spent the rest of the time trying to build an obstruction case.
Recent film program graduates of Columbia University who took out federal student loans had a median debt of $181,000.
Yet two years after earning their master’s degrees, half of the borrowers were making less than $30,000 a year.
“As a poor kid and a high-school dropout, there was an attraction to getting an Ivy League master’s degree,” said Mr. Clement, 41. He graduated in 2020 from Columbia, borrowing more than $360,000 in federal loans for the degree. He is casting for an independent film, he said. To pay the bills, he teaches film at a community college and runs an antique shop.
"Middle-management circuit judges must salute smartly and follow precedent," Judge Don Willett regretfully explained in his concurring opinion. "And today's result is precedentially inescapable: Private citizens who are brutalized—even killed—by rogue federal officers can find little solace" in U.S. Supreme Court case law. The unfortunate reality, Willett observed, is that "if you wear a federal badge, you can inflict excessive force on someone with little fear of liability."
But was Bivens really such a radical departure? Not when considered in the full light of American legal history. Indeed, the idea that federal judges have the authority to impose damages against lawless federal officers is as old as the republic—older, in fact, since it comes from venerable British common law judgments that directly influenced the founding generation.
In Entick v. Carrington (1765), for example, the chief justice of Britain's Court of Common Pleas, Lord Camden, weighed a suit for damages filed by the Grub Street journalist John Entick against three messengers of King George III. The messengers, acting on a general warrant issued by the secretary of state, Lord Halifax, broke into Entick's home by force of arms, destructively rifled his belongings, and carried away various papers and effects.
It is "incumbent upon the defendants to show the law by which this seizure is warranted," Camden declared in his judgment. "If that cannot be done, it is a trespass," and the king's messengers are "liable to an action." In what is now remembered as one of the great early victories for civil liberty against overreaching government power, Camden ruled the defendants liable because the general warrant they acted under "is not law."
That ruling heavily influenced what would become the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. And it is no wonder that it did. As Yale legal scholar Akhil Reed Amar noted in his book The Bill of Rights, Entick v. Carrington was "one of the two or three most important search-and-seizure cases on the books in 1789."
In 1788, for instance, the Anti-Federalist writer known as Maryland Farmer argued that "whenever an officer had deviated from the rigid letter of the law," that officer should be forced to pay "ruinous damages." But under the proposed Constitution, Maryland Farmer feared, federal judges might refuse to award damages to "spare the public purse, if not favour a brother officer."
George Mason, another Anti-Federalist, raised the same concern at the Virginia ratifying convention. Speaking on June 19, 1788, Mason worried that the new federal judiciary could not be trusted "to bring officers to justice." Suppose "any of the federal officers should be guilty of the greatest oppressions, or behave with the most insolent and wanton brutality to a man's wife or daughter," Mason demanded, "where is this man to get relief?"
Researchers admit there are absolutely no current examples of low-energy societies providing a decent living standard for their citizens.
In addition, food consumption per capita would vary depending on age and other conditions, but the average would be 2,100 calories per day. While just over 10 percent of the world's people are unfortunately still undernourished, the Food and Agriculture Organization reports that the daily global average food supply now stands at just under 3,000 calories per person. Each individual is allocated a new clothing allowance of nine pounds per year, and clothes may be washed 20 times annually. The good news is that everyone over age 10 is permitted a mobile phone and each household can have a laptop.
"This petition [Eychaner v. Chicago] provides us the opportunity to correct the mistake the Court made in Kelo," Thomas wrote. "That decision was wrong the day it was decided. And it remains wrong today."Thomas should know. He dissented in Kelo and accurately predicted the decision's destructive aftermath. "The deferential standard this Court has adopted for the Public Use Clause," Thomas wrote in his Kelo dissent, is "deeply perverse."
Start with the fact that the USADA doesn't actually classify tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the psychoactive chemical found in cannabis, as a performance-enhancing drug. But the USADA—whose sole purpose, ostensibly, is to ensure the integrity of athletic events—tests athletes for THC anyway because it regards marijuana as "a 'Substance of Abuse' because it is frequently used in society outside the context of sport."
In an interview with NBC on Wednesday, Richardson admitted to using marijuana to cope with the emotional stress caused by the unexpected death of her mother last month—a death she learned about from a reporter. "It sent me into a state of emotional panic," she said. Even world-class athletes, it turns out, are human.
But here's where things get even more ridiculous for the USADA. If Richardson had learned of her mother's death and emotionally coped by getting drunk instead of high, she'd still be allowed to compete in the Olympics. These rules governing what athletes do outside of competition (when there is no competitive advantage to be gained) are indefensible.
South Texas College of Law professor Josh Blackman is not impressed by Kavanaugh's explanation for leaving the CDC's order in place. "The application [to remove the stay] was filed on June 3," he writes in a Volokh Conspiracy post. "The response was due on June 10. The application has been pending for 19 days. It did not take 19 days to write a one-paragraph concurrence. No one wrote a dissent in response. The Court was no doubt hoping Biden would decline to extend the moratorium so the case would go away. But the administration did extend it. And with 31 days remaining on the order, Justice Kavanaugh now says there are only a 'few weeks' left….Therefore, he will decline to grant relief. If the Court moved with alacrity, the rule of law would have already been restored."
By Ms. Cai’s reckoning, U.S. policy makers have miscalculated at every turn, from restoring relations after Beijing’s 1989 crackdown in Tiananmen Square to backing China’s entry into the World Trade Organization—“naiveté” that has emboldened the regime. While U.S. administrations have described China as a competitor, the Communist Party has always viewed the U.S. as a hostile adversary, she argues.
The Gates Foundation said it would spend $2.1 billion on gender-equality work over five years [...] The amount is among the largest single commitments the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has made in its more than two decades of work, cementing the advancement of gender equality as a priority alongside polio eradication and the development of vaccines.
Amounting to the equivalent of about $420 million a year, the funding is intended to help women obtain training and financial services, to increase access to contraceptives and to help elevate women into leadership roles in health, law and economics. [...] “Prioritizing gender equality is not only the right thing to do, it is essential to fighting poverty and preventable disease,” Mr. Gates said in a statement. Mr. Suzman said that both Mr. Gates and Ms. French Gates have pushed for more data on the impact of gender-equality programs.
In January of this year, the Department of Education found that the school district had engaged in intentional race discrimination when it separated students and staff on the basis of race for antiracism trainings and lessons. The report singled out a “privilege walk” in a school that “explicitly instructed students to take steps based on race, e.g., two steps forward if they were white and two steps back if they were black.”
Experts have documented that political polarization is intensifying in the United States. However, a Penn State sociologist now suggests that this separation isn't just more intense, but it is also growing broader, coagulating into an ideological slick of opinions. [...]As an example of this division, DellaPosta said that, in the past, people could have disagreed on abortion rights, but they may have still agreed on gun control or tax rates. Now agreement on those unconnected issues have become more tightly bound with the person's ideology.
One Chinese immigrant landlord, who works as a hairstylist and asked to remain anonymous, tells Reason that she used money that her mother had saved, over the course of 20 years working seven days a week in a nail salon, to make a down payment on a house in Queens in 2016. She fears that all of that hard work will now go to benefit her tenant, who has stopped paying rent and who she says is mentally unstable.
"One of my black students said, 'Black Lives Matter,'" Woody recalled. "I said that is not an issue that I would take up. That's not an argument. It's a fact. Black lives matter. You are not obligated to listen to or entertain an argument that is trying to tell you your real experiences are not real because the person making that argument has never experienced them."
The presenter did not seem to grasp that her anti-racist pedagogy had actually prompted her to delegitimize the perspective of a student who was black.
"I usually look for my students who might be entertaining the idea of listening to a problematic argument," said Woody. "I say, 'We don't have to listen to that. That's not an argument we have to listen to.'"
https://reason.com/2021/06/22/the-filibuster-will-survive-because-a-few-democrats-are-smart-enough-not-to-kill-it/Pundits tend to blame mistakes of rhetoric or legislative strategy for politicians' failure to achieve e pluribus unum. The truth is, neither cause is primarily to blame. Americans are not divided because politicians failed to pronounce the correct phrases or promoted one bill rather than another. We are divided because we genuinely disagree—not only on matters of public policy but also on basic questions of justice and identity.
At a glance, this should not be very surprising. This is an enormous country that contains a vast number of people with quite various backgrounds. Disappointed Americans sometimes wonder why the United States does not enjoy the levels of consensus or solidarity that seem possible in, say, Denmark. Part of the answer is that the population of Denmark is comparable to that of metropolitan Phoenix.
Some very large states pursue a higher degree of political and moral consensus than we seem to manage. The difficulty is that the means they employ are not very appealing. There are just six other countries with populations greater than 200 million: Brazil, China, Indonesia, Pakistan, India, and Nigeria. Most employ policies of coercion and discrimination against religious, ethnic, or cultural minorities that shock American sensibilities.
Perhaps that's because some members of the Senate remember what happened the last time they eroded the filibuster. In 2013, then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D–Nev.) abolished the filibuster for lower-court judicial nominees, ostensibly to allow Democrats to confirm more of then-President Barack Obama's picks for the federal bench.
How did that work out in the long run? President Donald Trump and a Republican-controlled Senate installed nearly as many federal judges in four years as Trump's predecessor did in eight—causing liberals to howl about a conservative overhaul of the federal courts.
Eight million people watched Kory say that on the C-SPAN video of the hearing posted to YouTube, but YouTube, in what appears to be a first, removed video of the hearing, as even Senate testimony was now deemed too dangerous for public consumption. YouTube later suspended the Wisconsin Senator who’d invited Kory to the hearing, and when Kory went on podcasts to tell his story, YouTube took down those videos, too. Kory was like a ghost who floated through the Internet, leaving suspensions and blackened warning screens everywhere he went.
They have no mercy on a woman who prostitutes her chastity. Neither beauty, nor youth, nor wealth can find her another husband. In fact, no one there laughs about vice, nor is seducing and being seduced called "modern"
George's take on Carhart-Harris & Nutt is that this is influenced by the balance of 5-HT1A vs. 5-HT2A receptors - two different kinds of serotonin receptor. 5-HT1A is (to vastly oversimplify) the main target of antidepressants. The more strongly it's stimulated, the more likely you are to resolve prediction error by adjusting your predictions - the equivalent of stepping into a freezing shower, but then acclimating so that it feels okay. Suppose you're depressed/anxious/upset because your boss keeps yelling at you. With enough 5-HT1A activation, you're better able to - on a neurological level - adjust your world-model to include a prediction that your boss will yell at you. Then when your boss does yell at you, there's less prediction error and less suffering. This is good insofar as you're suffering less, but bad insofar as you've adjusted to stop caring about a bad thing or thinking of it as something that needs solving - though it's more complicated than this, since suffering less can make you less depressed and being less depressed can put you in a more solution-oriented frame of mind.
5-HT2A receptors are (to vastly oversimplify) the main target of psychedelics. The more strongly it's stimulated, the more active your inference gets. George argues that this means psychedelics are more likely to get you to try to solve your problems. But is this really true? The average person on shrooms doesn't spend their trip contacting HR and reporting their abusive boss, they spend it staring at a flower marveling at how delicate the petals are or something. What problem is this solving? I think Carhart-Harris, Nutt, and maybe George think that this "active coping" isn't necessarily physical action per se, it's rejiggering your world model on a deeper level so that it's more creative and risky in generating strategies. It's a bias towards thinking of problems as solveable. This could potentially fit with the thing where people who do too much LSD become yogis or transhumanists or whatever; they're biased towards believing *all* problems are solveable, even the tough ones like suffering and mortality.
This actually seems to reinforce an old bias of mine that people take psychedelics for the wrong reasons, i.e. they take psychedelics to solve "existential" problems that have no real solution other than some form of "accepting", when instead psychedelics are particularly good for solving a hands-on problem like studying the behaviour of ants, figuring out how your mind works or learning to play an instrument.
I found it curious that people who take psychedelics for introspection usually end up as religious cranks or burnouts. While people that take psychedelics because "they are fun" don't seem to experience many negative side effects. Under this framework, it makes perfect sense, activate highly conceptual functions in the cortex and tell them to solve an intrinsic and emotional, you'll end up with some very weird conceptual scaffolding.
Conclusion: Group disparities ≠ discrimination
The data presented here poses challenges for the notion that outcome disparities between racial groups necessarily signify discrimination. First, if large outcome gaps can endure between groups—including between different European ancestry groups—even in the absence of discrimination, how can it be concluded that those between whites and African Americans are entirely or even mostly the product of discrimination? On what basis can we be confident that their outcomes would equalize in the absence of discrimination when outcomes are far from equal between groups that hardly faced discrimination? Next to which group(s) would African Americans have placed in Figures 1-2 if not for ‘systemic racism’? French Canadians? Portuguese? Russians? Hell, why not the Chinese or Indians?
Second, if African Americans are systemically penalized on account of their race, why does this ostensible bias vanish when controlling for cognitive ability? More specifically, why do whites and African Americans of the same ability level have statistically indistinguishable life outcomes?
If you dismiss every group that does better than whites, then you can tell a story where all inequality is caused by white people controlling everything and creating covert structures/institutions that favor whites. If you don't dismiss those groups, the story becomes harder. Anti-Semites had their own story about the problems caused by Jews controlling everything and creating covert structures/institutions that favored Jews. Nowadays we rightly reject that story. But in order to continue rejecting it, we have to come up with increasingly strained explanations to make Jewish achievement "less interesting", because we've already committed to using the structural racism explanation for every group difference that seems relevant to us. I’m glad most people aren't Nazis, but I would like them to be consistent, principled non-Nazis, who are able to remain non-Nazi for reasons other than that they scrupulously avoid thinking about the parts of their principles that inevitably imply Nazism.
In 2009, another long-time pro-surveillance California House Democrat, Rep. Jane Harman, learned that her private communications with an Israeli government agent had been intercepted by NSA wiretaps as she was plotting to pressure the DOJ to reduce the criminal charges against two AIPAC officials. She was absolutely furious to learn of this, telling MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell:
> I call it an abuse of power…. I'm just very disappointed that my country — I'm an American citizen just like you are — could have permitted what I think is a gross abuse of power in recent years. I'm one member of Congress who may be caught up in it, and I have a bully pulpit and I can fight back. I'm thinking about others who have no bully pulpit, who may not be aware, as I was not, that someone is listening in on their conversations, and they're innocent Americans.
What Harman forgot to mention during her angry rant was that she had spent years — as the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee and Homeland Security subcommittee — doing everything possible to defend, justify and expand the powers of the U.S. security state to spy on ordinary Americans. Like Schiff and Swalwell, she was delighted to see ordinary serfs spied on by their own government, and discovered her passion for privacy rights only when it was her conversations that were monitored.
If you haven't ever wondered whether government funding of research was bad for science, you haven't done research with government funds.
I have so many horrible stories that I don't know where to begin. But let's start with Congress. Congress understands that we need basic research, but we also need that research to lead to profitable businesses, and to solve urgent technological problems. So, in a lot of basic research funding, they've decided to kill 3 birds with one stone by requiring that basic research must also be applied research, and must be the basis for a profitable start-up business. In the SBIR program, which I'm most-familiar with, your grant proposal must explain how it is basic research, how it is applied research, and what clients you have interested in the product that will come out of this "basic research". If you get to Phase 2, which you must get to at least 1/4 of the time in order for SBIR grants to be profitable, your Phase 2 grant proposal must have a client lined up and committed to provide part of your funding. To get to Phase 2, you must focus on your business plan, and spend about 90% of your budget on producing a cool-looking Phase 1 demo.
There is additional scientific evidence that points to CoV-2’s gain-of-function origin. The most compelling is the dramatic differences in the genetic diversity of CoV-2, compared with the coronaviruses responsible for SARS and MERS.
Both of those were confirmed to have a natural origin; the viruses evolved rapidly as they spread through the human population, until the most contagious forms dominated. Covid-19 didn’t work that way. It appeared in humans already adapted into an extremely contagious version. No serious viral “improvement” took place until a minor variation occurred many months later in England.
Why is regulation so crippling? The public is wrongly terrified of nuclear energy, but they shouldn’t be. Radiation killed 0 people at Fukishima; the radiophobic evacuation killed >1000 (“Some 1600 of the evacuees died from causes ranging from privation in refugee camps (notably loss of access to health care) to suicide”), and the tsunami/earthquake killed >10000. Hall quotes an estimate from the Guardian that Chernobyl - by far the most serious nuclear disaster - killed “approximately” 43 people.
His theory, basically, is that the next generation - the Baby Boomers - got spoiled. Automation had come into its own, and people didn’t need to struggle for survival anymore. America was on top of the world, and there weren’t enough real challenges to work on. But people need challenges. So they made some up.
Hall says the most damaging strain, still common today, is “green fundamentalism”, the idea that human agency over nature is fundamentally bad. An early example is Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which got DDT banned on the grounds that it was causing cancer; in reality the cancer increase was from smoking, and from technology improving living conditions (the healthier you are, the more likely you’ll survive long enough to get killed by cancer). “The Green religion has essentially superceded Christianity as the default religion of western civilization, especially in academic circles”.
“[The] great innovations that made the major quality-of-life improvements came largely before 1960: refrigerators, freezers, vacuum cleaners, gas and electric stoves, and washing machines; indoor plumbing, detergent, and deodorants; electric lights; cars, trucks, and buses; tractors and combines; fertilizer; air travel, containerized freight, the vacuum tube and the transistor; the telegraph, telephone, phonograph, movies, radio, and television—and they were all developed privately.” “A survey and analysis performed by the OECD in 2005 found, to their surprise, that while private R&D had a positive 0.26 correlation with economic growth, government funded R&D had a negative 0.37 correlation!” “Centralized funding of an intellectual elite makes it easier for cadres, cliques, and the politically skilled to gain control of a field, and they by their nature are resistant to new, outside, non-Ptolemaic ideas.”
A journalist based in Basra, Iraq, recently asked me, “Would you like to come back to Iraq, if things got better?” “No,” I replied. “I am glad and grateful to be out of Iraq alive, and feel fortunate and blessed to enjoy freedom in one of the best countries in the world, the United States of America.”
But what of the solutions proposed by the majority, which would target people based on need rather than race and gender? Judge Donald conceded that “in normal times, there may be some force to the majority’s position,” but given the need to “act fast,” some imperfections are inevitable. The Congress, she said, is far better positioned than the Court to assess what is best for the nation during an emergency.”
Perhaps no one’s juvenilia should disqualify her from a job—and the reason isn’t merely that most of us said idiotic things in adolescence—but because that’s as it should be. If we are ever going to test out an extreme idea or hurtful comment, adolescence is the time to do it—a period of identity formation when we require all the feedback we can get. We demand adults behave themselves precisely because we assume this was preceded by beta-testing, a period of adaptive idiocy, when they tore through adolescence’s maze, hungering for affection, altering behavior in response to every dead end, registering each shock of pain. It seems compassionate—perhaps even necessary—to place a black box around statements made in high school and college, particularly where a young person has later disavowed them.
The area around what is now called George Floyd Square is still burned-out and desolate, isolated within a civilian-enforced police-free zone. “I am afraid. I am frustrated. I am mentally ill right now,” a local barbecue shop owner told the Star Tribune in March. City Council member Alondra Cano told the paper she hears from senior citizens who sleep in the bathtub to avoid being shot at night and whose bus routes for picking up medications and groceries have been disrupted by the autonomous zone. The Floyd family has pledged $500,000 of its $27 million wrongful-death settlement from the city to black business owners at George Floyd Square. That won’t compensate the barbecue-shop owner and his neighbors if diners and shoppers still have to dodge bullets and employees are still getting carjacked.
“The concept of mathematics being purely objective is unequivocally false,” the manual explains. “Upholding the idea that there are always right and wrong answers perpetuates ‘objectivity.’ ” Apparently, that’s also racist.
The consensus was so strong that some well-known voices saw social media accounts suspended or closed for speculating about Covid-19 having a “lab origin.” One of those was University of Hong Kong virologist Dr. Li-Meng Yan, who went on Tucker Carlson’s show last September 15th to say “[Covid-19] is a man-made virus created in the lab.” After that appearance, PolitiFact — Poynter’s PolitiFact — gave the statement its dreaded “Pants on Fire” rating.
But even after then-President Barack Obama denied that the U.S. Government would be "wheeling and dealing” in order to get Snowden into U.S. custody — “I'm not going to be scrambling jets to get a 29-year-old hacker,” he dismissively claimed during a June press conference — the U.S. Government was, in reality, doing everything in its power to prevent Snowden from evading the clutches of the U.S. Government.
Illustrating how little the U.S. cares about even pretending to abide by the standards it imposes on others, the Biden administration on Monday sent out Psaki herself to condemn Belarus’ conduct as “a shocking act” and “a brazen affront to international freedom and peace and security by the regime.” It would not even occur to Biden officials — just for the sake of appearances if nothing else — to try to find someone to do this other than the same person who, in 2013, obfuscated and defended the actions of the U.S. and E.U. in doing the same thing to Bolivia's presidential plane. U.S. officials simply do not believe that they are bound by the same standards to which its adversaries must be subjected.
But no journalist, especially Western ones, should be publishing articles or broadcasting stories falsely depicting Sunday's incident as an unprecedented assault that could be perpetrated only by a Russian-allied autocrat. The tactic was pioneered by the very countries who today are most vocally condemning what happened. Any reporting of this story that excludes this vital history and context in favor of a false narrative of this being “unprecedented” — as is true of the vast majority of Western media reports about what Belarus did — does a grave disservice to both journalism and the truth. If it is outrageously dangerous and criminal to force the downing of a plane to arrest the passenger Roman Protasevich, then it must be equally dangerous and criminal to do the same in an attempt to arrest suspected passenger Edward Snowden.
An even bigger mistake came earlier in the process. The current drug testing regime for vaccines consists of three primary phases, the last of which is an expensive, time-consuming, large-scale controlled experiment, in which thousands of people who get the vaccine are tracked and compared against thousands of people who get a placebo. Pfizer-BioNTech's Phase Three trial started last summer, at the end of July.
Those large-scale randomized trials help determine safety, sussing out potential complications or rare side effects in large groups of people. But it's possible to determine efficacy much more quickly, via a process known as human challenge trials, in which volunteers are intentionally, directly exposed to the virus. Human challenge trials provide actionable data much faster and with far fewer subjects than more conventional large-scale trials, making them particularly excellent tools for emergencies, when the priority is to move quickly.
I’m a fan of Dr. Dre’s music and have been since the N.W.A. days. It’s not any of my business if he wants to make $3 billion selling Beats by Dre to Apple, earning himself a place on the board in the process. But if 2,000 Apple employees are going to insist that they feel literally unsafe working alongside a man who wrote a love letter to a woman who towers over him in heels, I’d like to hear their take on serving under, and massively profiting from, partnership with the author of such classics as “Bitches Ain’t Shit” and “Lyrical Gangbang,” who is also the subject of such articles as “Here’s What’s Missing from Straight Outta Compton: Me and the Other Women Dr. Dre Beat Up.”
Speaking of profits: selling iPhones is a pretty good business. It made Apple $47.9 billion last year, good for 53% of the company’s total revenue. Part of what makes the iPhone such a delightfully profitable product is its low production cost, which reportedly comes from Apple’s use of a smorgasbord of suppliers with a penchant for forced labor — Uighurs said to be shipped in by the thousand to help make iPhone glass (Apple denies this), temporary “dispatch workers” sent in above legal limits, workers in “iPhone city” clocking excessive overtime to meet launch dates, etc. Apple also has a storied history of tax avoidance, offshoring over a hundred billion in revenues, using Ireland as a corporate address despite no physical presence there, and so on.
AOC said nothing about the State Department's ongoing defense of Israel. She condemned none of her powerful colleagues in Congress who did the same. She refused to call on the Biden administration explicitly to change its policies or denounce Biden's fanaticism on this issue. Her only previous utterance was a mealy-mouthed, barely cogent tweet in which she randomly threw the Israel/Gaza conflict into a laundry list along with “paramilitary violence in Colombia” and “the detention of children on our own border and the militarization of US police departments” to say: “the United States must seriously assess its role in state violence and condition aid.”
So when she finally worked up the courage on Monday to single out a political official for public scolding and shaming on the issue of Israel, she decided that it should be Andrew Yang:[...]Wow, she told him! But on the same day that AOC so courageously attacked Andrew Yang, there was another person, one with far greater power than he, who issued a statement virtually identical to the one Yang issued. Her name is Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House whose re-election to that position AOC supported, with whom AOC posed on the cover of Rolling Stone, and who AOC affectionately and obsequiously calls "Mama Bear.”
Is it even possible to imagine AOC attacking Pelosi with such harsh language and aggressive attacks the way she did with Yang? Is it possible to imagine AOC telling her 14 million followers that the reason Israel receives billions each year in U.S. funds — while the country's infrastructure, schools, health care and education system crumbleI — is because Obama gave Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a record-shattering $38 billion package on his way out (just as Obama broke records with military aid to the Saudi dictatorship)? Is it possible to imagine AOC making clear to her loyal flock of millions that the real parties responsible for what she says she regards as deeply immoral, even as war crimes, are — by name — Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi?
How can you be in the U.S. Congress and decide that the person you are going to attack for bad foreign policy views is a New York City Mayoral candidate instead of the dozens of people by whom you're surrounded every day, who bear actual responsibility for those policies in the halls of power you occupy? The answer lies in AOC's actual function in Washington.[...]When I interviewed her during that campaign (I was, honesty compels me to confess, one of her earliest supporters in media back then), she told me that, if elected, she would not support the re-election of Speaker Pelosi or Democratic Majority Leader Steny Hoyer to the leadership posts (one of the first things she did after being elected was vote for both). She warned in that 2018 interview with me that identity politics is often corruptly weaponized by the Democratic Party to preserve the status quo by deceptively changing its facade, using what she called "Trojan Horses” — people from marginalized groups who would trick people into believing they represented change while doing nothing more than serving the interests of Democratic donors. That was how she sold herself: as someone whose principal focus would be to work within the party to criticize, subvert and change it by denouncing its leaders.
Her real function is now exactly the opposite. The soft left has a major problem: after being promised a "political revolution” by self-proclaimed democratic socialists such as Bernie Sanders and AOC, they instead found themselves being herded into campaigning to put in the White House one of the most right-wing Democrats over the last several decades — a key architect of the Mass Incarceration State, a fanatical Warrior on Drugs, a servant of credit card companies and banks, and an advocate for virtually every U.S. war — along with his running mate, a life-long cop and prosecutor notorious for aggressive prosecutions of non-violent offenders. And as they are trained to focus more and more on the evils of Trump and his movement — The Insurrection! White Nationalism! Kids in Cages (remember them?) — the differences between this faction of the activist, online left and the Democratic Party they need to believe are their adversaries have become vanishingly small.
AOC's primary value is that she solves that psychological dilemma. With her radical lifestyle branding, militant poses, and slightly edgier rhetoric, she assuages the fears of millions of liberal-left Democrats that they have turned into their establishmentarian parents by endlessly cheering for Biden, Harris, Pelosi and Schumer. Instead, she helps them to believe they are at the vanguard of some sort of revolutionary politics of “liberation” — somehow advanced by endlessly empowering Democratic Party establishment politicians who, as this week's events demonstrate, have nothing but antipathy for their professed values and beliefs.
One person inspired by the revelations was former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who came forward to unveil an illegal domestic surveillance program, a story that won an Oscar and a Pulitzer Prize for documentarian Laura Poitras and reporters Glenn Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill. By 2014, members of Congress in both parties were calling for the resignations of CIA chief John Brennan and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, both of whom had been caught lying to congress.[...]Fast forward seven years. Julian Assange is behind bars, and may die there. Snowden is in exile in Russia. Brennan, Clapper, and Hayden have been rehabilitated and are all paid contributors to either MSNBC or CNN, part of a wave of intelligence officers who’ve flooded the airwaves and op-ed pages in recent years, including the FBI’s Asha Rangappa, Clint Watts, Josh Campbell, former counterintelligence chief Frank Figliuzzi and former deputy director Andrew McCabe, the CIA’s John Sipher, Phil Mudd, Ned Price, and many others.
KABUL—Zainab Maqsudi, 13 years old, exited the library and walked toward the main gate of the Sayed Shuhada school to go home on Saturday when she was blown backward by an explosion. When she stood up, the air was thick with dust and smoke, and she was surrounded by shattered glass.
“Suicide attack!” everyone yelled, she said, reflecting how common such attacks have become in Afghanistan. She noticed she was bleeding from her arms. An older sister took her to hospital.
“I’m not sure if I will go back to school when I recover,” Zainab, who is in seventh grade, said from her hospital bed Sunday, with her parents by her side. “I don’t want to get hurt again. My body shakes when I think about what happened.”
“I hope my legs will get better so I can walk again,” she said. “I will continue my studies. I want to become a prosecutor. The country is full of injustice, and I want to fix that.”
They bring to mind a statement in November by Dorian Abbot, an associate professor of geophysics at the University of Chicago. “Let’s fight bias in science by working hard to reduce bias, not by introducing it,” he wrote. “Let’s treat each applicant for conferences, fellowships, and faculty positions as an individual worthy of dignity and respect. Let’s treat all applicants fairly by judging them only on the basis of their ability and promise as scientists.”
In another time, Mr. Abbot’s sentiments might have been applauded. Instead, more than 100 students and postdoctoral fellows at Chicago submitted a letter to the geophysics faculty asking that he be punished because his ideas “threaten the safety and belonging of all of underrepresented groups within the department.”
It was probably wrong to ask for a decluttering of an already thin curriculum. This was never going to lead to the removal of the 24 pages of waffle that sit at the start of the math curriculum, including listing bizarre and sardonically humorous nouns such as “mathematising” that involve students in “making choices” or “visualising,” as if those processes have any meaning in the abstract. It was never going to lead to the removal of the two-thirds of science objectives that are not about science content but are instead about “science inquiry” and “science as a human endeavour,” the second of which asks students to do thing like “investigate why advances in science are often the result of collaboration of many different scientists” and seems to be about turning science into one of the humanities. It was never going to rip out the flawed “expanding horizons” approach to history, and even the “whole language” approach to learning to read appears to have survived unscathed. Instead, the direction to declutter was always going to water down what little solid content was already there.
Activists (blm activists or whatever these ones are now calling themselves) fired shots through the windows because the cafe in question has first responder photos on the walls.That is, you know, photos of firemen coming out of flames and a femalecadet in army uniform.It's a cafe run by a black man who is obviously proud of the fact that people in this country have historically, and today, put themselves in the front line to protect the population of the united states.And this is seen as so reprehensible by the local well, as I would say, fascist militia groups, that he is that he has to have has to have the situation where he's got boarded up windows because people have fired rounds of live ammunition through the windows of his cafeAgain, I mean, I've seen that in the middle east; I've seen people in the middle east intimidate business owners by firing live ammunition at their properties.I've never heard of it happening in a first world city-- with the follow-on that the authorities aren't interested
http://www.mattsilver.net/2015/04/30/protein-world-pr-fail/The other paradox of populism, of course, is that any sufficiently large popular movement attracts spotlights that bring whackjobs flocking in droves. Occupy got this in spades, with every kind of conspiracy theorist vying for the media’s attention on a leaderless movement. If anything, the alt-right is even less organized than Occupy was; as such, anything that looks like organization looks like a story, especially to a scope-insensitive audience. Forget fake news; where are the calls to action for not-even-wrong news? The grain of truth in that attention-hijack cocktail you’re slurping down doesn’t make it any better than the 100% artificial kind.
I confess I don’t see any easy way out of this. Fake news, and not-even-wrong news, hijack your attention because we got too good at detecting bots clicking on ads, to the point where it became easier for sites to compete for real users’ attention. Yay, I guess? But new problems carry with them new complications. You can’t solve a problem that exists because of a cognitive bias — a heuristic that developed so that its user can expend less effort — by asking people to expend more effort. (Tried it, only works in exceptional cases.) This hugely constrains the possible solution space, even though there’s a significant Pareto improvement at simple actions like “not sharing things you haven’t read.” That sweet spot between “not enough attention to read” and “enough attention to relay” is where troll marketing scores big.
You have to understand: in 1968, many radicals absolutely believed that the United States was getting ready to collapse. One Weatherman puts it: “We actually believed there was going to be a revolution. We believed 3rd World countries would rise up and cause crises that would bring down the industrialized West, and we believed it was going to happen tomorrow, or maybe the day after tomorrow, like 1976.”
SDS leadership is disproportionately well-off Jewish kids at elite universities. The kind of people who create Facebook.
Well, in 1968 you can’t go to the Bay Area & create a killer app, so if you want to disrupt stuff you literally have to start a revolution. And that’s the equation: Paranoid fervor of chemtrail-sniffers + Silicon Valley’s faith in its ability to change the world = the Weather Underground.
They did pretty well afterwards. Bernardine Dohrn was a clinical associate professor of law at Northwestern University for more than twenty years. Another Weatherman, Eleanor Stein, was arrested on the run in 1981; she got a law degree in 1986 and became an administrative law judge. Radical attorney Michael Kennedy, who did more than any to keep Weather alive, has been special advisor to President of the UN General Assembly. And, of course, Barack Obama, twice President of the United States, started his political career in Bill Ayers’s living room.
This is the difference between the hard Left & hard Right: you can be a violent leftist radical and go on to live a pretty kickass life. This is especially true if you’re a leftist of the credentialed class: Ph.D. or J.D.
Of course, that didn’t stop President Obama, in the last days of his administration, from commuting the sentence of Oscar Lopez Rivera. The decision caused ecstasies of delight in Lin-Manuel Miranda, celebrated author (and former star) of HAMILTON, who pledged to reprise in the role in a Chicago performance especially for Lopez Rivera, whom Miranda referred to as “Don Oscar.”
Let’s not mince words: the United States of America is currently engaged in a cold Civil War.
In North Carolina, the Republican governor lost re-election, so the Republican legislature convened a special session to limit powers of the post. Democrats nationwide howled with justified outrage; as we all know, legislators who dislike a governor should flee the state to block quorum, facilitate occupation of government buildings by mobs, and have allies execute secret raids on homes on the governor’s supporters. All of those are things that the Democrats did to oppose a Republican governor in Wisconsin, and the Democrats were pretty cool with it.
Hell, Lefties said Ted Cruz was a Nazi, Mitt Romney was a Nazi, George W. Bush was a Nazi. I’ve done human rights work that had me working in proximity to the U.S. military, so at a professional meeting a Lefty called me a Nazi.
So if you tell me that I’m a Nazi, and tell me people I respect are Nazis, and tell me you’re in favor of going out and beating up Nazis, guess what? I am suddenly very interested in the physical safety of Nazis.
And I’m Jewish.
Terrorists are basically mass murderers, or people who want to be. If you think about it, there are three kinds of mass murderers, and the typology applies to political violence too. The first kind is loners. The second kind is conspiracies (which have to be very tight-knit, or somebody narcs). The third kind is guys from the murder factory. A murder factory is a self-perpetuating machine that brings in recruits and spits out killers. Islamic State: that’s a murder factory.
Murder factories are hard to build. Weatherman tried to build one. They failed. The hard Left is bigger with fifty years more experience now, and I still doubt they could make a murder factory without support from a foreign power. That leaves conspiracies for Lefties, and loners for the Right.
Other recent contexts in which the Times thought printing nigger was acceptable include movie dialogue (March 2021), a Frederick Douglass quotation (February 2021), an essay about the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre (December 2020), a David Dinkins obituary (November 2020), a review of Barack Obama's book A Promised Land (November 2020), a news analysis comparing Donald Trump to George Wallace (July 2020), and an essay on police reform (June 2020). Yet the paper's executive editor, in explaining why McNeil had to go, claimed "we do not tolerate racist language regardless of intent." If there is any sensible or even consistent standard at work here, it is pretty hard to discern.
Several legal experts with knowledge of the investigation have told NBC News they believe Mueller, following a classic prosecutorial playbook, is seeking to compel key players, including Flynn and Manafort, to tell what they know about any possible Trump campaign collusion with Russia. Mueller has brought onto his team a federal prosecutor known for convincing subjects to turn on associates. Any potential criminal liability for Michael G. Flynn could put added pressure on his father, these legal experts said.
"Any time a family member is identified as a subject that does increase pressure," said Peter White, a former federal prosecutor. "In the typical parent-child relationship the last thing any parent would want is for their child to get in trouble for something they initiated."
In his imperishable Treatise on the Art of Political Lying, published in 1714, Dr. John Arbuthnot laid down a standard for falsifiers and calumniators that has yet to be excelled:Detractory or defamatory lies should not be quite opposite to the qualities the person is supposed to have. Thus it will not be found according to the sound rules of pseudology to report of a pious and religious prince that he neglects his devotions and would introduce heresy; but you may report of a merciful Prince that he has pardoned a criminal who did not deserve it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_Roman_EmperorGermanic law was overwhelmingly concerned with the protection of individuals and less concerned with protecting the interests of the state. According to Michel Rouche, "Frankish judges devoted as much care to a case involving the theft of a dog as Roman judges did to cases involving the fiscal responsibility of curiales, or municipal councilors".
The Dread Pirate Jussim@PsychRabbleAs prescription, this is fine.As description, it is manifestly false. Social psych is built on published p-hacked a posteriori results presented as if they were a priori hypothesis tests. This is why our replication rate is only ~50%.
Colin Wright@SwipeWrightp-hacking isn't bad as simply a data exploration technique. You can use p-hacked results as the basis for constructing a hypothesis for a NEW investigation. But you can't just publish your p-hacked a posteriori results as though it were the result of a priori hypothesis testing.
https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/what-it-takes-to-go-from-slaveryNew York’s Private Schools Tackle White Privilege. It Has Not Been Easy.
https://youtu.be/ufhKWfPSQOw“I remember after I published my book one of my first interviews was with NPR and they asked me about freedom. I said freedom was painful and confusing. I think they were expecting me to say freedom was awesome.”
But the truth was more complicated. “It was so painful to be free. I sometimes thought in the beginning if there was a guarantee to go back to North Korea and not get executed and just live on frozen potatoes I might go back.”
However, when my questions were shared outside this forum, violating the school norm of confidentiality, I was informed by the head of the high school that my philosophical challenges had caused “harm” to students, given that these topics were “life and death matters, about people’s flesh and blood and bone.” I was reprimanded for “acting like an independent agent of a set of principles or ideas or beliefs.” And I was told that by doing so, I failed to serve the “greater good and the higher truth.”
He further informed me that I had created “dissonance for vulnerable and unformed thinkers” and “neurological disturbance in students’ beings and systems.” The school’s director of studies added that my remarks could even constitute harassment.
https://reason.com/2021/06/01/when-politics-makes-it-impossible-to-plan/Meanwhile, states with stricter COVID-19 regulations have seen spikes in daily new cases. This is not the pattern you would expect to see if government-imposed restrictions played a crucial role in curtailing the pandemic, as advocates of those policies assume.
Abbott's critics did not mince words. President Joe Biden said the governor's decision reflected "Neanderthal thinking." Gilberto Hinojosa, chairman of the Texas Democratic Party, said it was "extraordinarily dangerous" and "will kill Texans."
https://reason.com/2021/06/01/the-equity-mess/To make good choices, people must have a fairly solid sense of what the consequences of those choices will be. But an ever-greater sphere of American life is subject to political risk. A lack of clarity about consequences can lead even people who want to do the right thing down dubious paths.
For more than a decade, there has been a move away from generating lasting policy through conventional means and toward short-term wins through any mechanism available. This is reflected in everything from the disintegration of the congressional budgeting process to the increase in the use of executive orders to the vestigial involvement of the legislative branch in decisions about treaties and warmaking.
https://reason.com/2021/04/22/covid-19-industrial-policy-fails-again/It may seem counterintuitive to advocate, under the guise of anti-racism, the continuation of a policy that has overwhelmingly harmed poor and minority populations most. Yet that's what union officials have been doing from coast to coast.
"The push to reopen schools is rooted in sexism, racism, and misogyny," the Chicago Teachers Union charged in December. "The culture of white supremacy and white privilege can be seen…in regards to the decision to reopen schools," wrote 140 members of the Pasco (Washington) Association of Educators in January. "The process the District has undergone, as well as the plans they have put forth for reopening, are rooted in white supremacy norms, values, and culture," asserted a subset of the Cambridge (Massachusetts) Education Association in January. "All the rich white parents suddenly concerned about mental health can take a seat," tweeted the secretary of the Oakland (California) Education Association in February.
Ms. Waters tried to rile up the crowd to protest an acquittal. “I hope we get a verdict that says guilty, guilty, guilty,” she said. “And if we don’t, we cannot go away. We’ve got to stay on the street. . . . We get more active, we’ve got to get more confrontational.”
https://www.wsj.com/video/series/wonder-land-henninger/wsj-opinion-joe-bidens-rule-of-law-problem/EC81CAC2-8605-4A4F-BEC0-6C915767BBF1The judge added that “I wish elected officials would stop talking about this case, especially in a manner that is disrespectful to the rule of law and to the judicial branch and our function.”
https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/06/17/against-dog-whistles/4. Aren’t there a lot of voters who, although not willing to vote for David Duke or even willing to express negative feelings about black people on a poll, still have implicit racist feelings, the kind where they’re nervous when they see a black guy on a deserted street at night?Probably. And this is why I am talking about crying wolf. If you wanted to worry about the voter with subconscious racist attitudes carefully hidden even from themselves, you shouldn’t have used the words “openly white supremacist KKK supporter” like a verbal tic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tortious_interferenceOn November 26, this suggestion became a mandate: The student was informed that he must be evaluated by psychological services before returning to classes. Bhattacharya repeatedly asked university officials to clarify what exactly he was accused of, under whose authority his counseling had been mandated, and why his enrollment status was suddenly in doubt, according to the lawsuit. These queries only appear to have made UVA officials more determined to punish him: Bhattacharya's mounting frustration with these baseless accusations of unspecified wrongdoings was essentially treated as evidence that he was guilty. At his hearing, he was accused of being "extremely defensive" and ordered to change his "aggressive, threatening behavior."
https://blog.simplejustice.us/2021/04/08/kieran-bhattacharya-and-uvas-macroaggressions/Bhattacharya v. Murray, CASE NO. 3:19-cv-00054, 34 (W.D. Va. Mar. 31, 2021) (“"the predominant purpose of § 1985(3) was to combat the prevalent animus against Negroes and their supporters." Moreover, the Supreme Court has expressed reservation in expanding the scope of § 1985(3) beyond race discrimination.”)
For example, a fire agency determines that a ridgetop fuel break would prevent a fire from spreading to the homes nearby. Implementing this is not a simple process. First, the agency must define the project and determine whether it can be considered exempt under one of several categories or statutes. There may also be exceptions to the exemptions. If the project is not exempt, the agency performs an Initial Study to determine potential impacts, whether those impacts are significant, and whether they can be mitigated. If so, it can prepare a Negative Declaration or a Mitigated Negative Declaration. If it can't do that, it must produce a full Environmental Impact Report (EIR). Following through to a complete EIR is a time-consuming and costly process, ranging from $200,000 to millions of dollars over multiple years. It is impossible to budget or plan for this process without some level of scoping and detailed analysis by a CEQA expert.
In her email to me, Ames doubled down on her claim that Parrett's behavior in the meeting had been frothingly out of control, writing that Parrett had "started aggressively yelling at folks in the meeting." At the time, Ames didn't know I had access to the leaked audio, in which Parrett does occasionally raise her voice to be heard but never comes across as anywhere nearly as aggressive or bullying as Ames described. When I sent Ames the audio file and asked her to point me to where Parrett yelled at anyone, a university spokeswoman who was on the thread jumped in, writing that "The audio speaks for itself but does not reflect Elisa's visible anger." Apparently, Parrett was "aggressively yelling at folks in the meeting" but it was the kind of aggressive yelling that doesn't show up on audio.
What did liberalism mean back then? As a young person helping to read off test questions as my single mother prepared for the LSATs, I had a vague idea of it as a school of thought that believed strongly in the law and due process, and was concerned with protecting the rights of people without means or clout. It seemed also to embrace art, music, and the power of free inquiry, opposed war, believed in self-determination and universal human rights, sided with unions over bosses, had copies of Catch-22 and The Autobiography of Malcolm X somewhere in the house, and laughed at both Jerry Falwell and the “This is your brain on drugs” commercial.
"I had [her] on the back of my bike and we need to go through the Square, but they've got it barricaded off, right?" says Spang. "This white lady, I think she was from inside one of the checkpoints they got there, she's like, 'You can't ride through here.' I'm like, 'I live here and my daughter's school is here.' She's saying something about how I'm being disrespectful and I should go around on another street."Spang, a full-blooded Native American (half Crow, half Northern Cheyenne) rode through anyway, as he has for the four years he's lived in the South Minneapolis neighborhood.
https://www.theatlantic.com/press-releases/archive/2020/09/atlantic-earned-300000-new-subscriptions-year/616258/one of the most important things this interview illustrates—one reason it is worth noting at length—is how Newman repeatedly poses as if she is holding a controversialist accountable, when in fact, for the duration of the interview, it is she that is “stirring things up” and “whipping people into a state of anger.”
This disparity of openness has some implications worth pondering. First, it illustrates what the Brookings Institution was palpably alarmed at discovering last summer: "In reality, there is no relationship—visually or statistically—between school districts' reopening decisions and their county's new COVID-19 cases per capita. In contrast, there is a strong relationship—visually and statistically—between districts' reopening decisions and the county-level support for Trump in the 2016 election."
https://reason.com/2020/09/04/youre-not-allowed-to-film-the-fight-for-control-over-who-reports-from-portland/If you widened the lens to capture, say, a guy battering a building with a fire extinguisher or a girl spitting in a cop's face, you would be accused of being "a fash"; would be shadowed in the crowd or told point-blank you were going to get your ass kicked; would have your phone or camera stolen because "YOU'RE NOT ALLOWED TO FILM!" and "PHOTOGRAPHY EQUALS DEATH!"; and would later find photos of yourself posted to social media, sometimes by journalists who, mistaking activism for journalism, whistled out anyone deemed not on-message.
All of these things happened to me. The activists, with ample support, sang in one voice in Portland: They were the ones who were going to tell the story.
She ended up being shut out almost entirely by former friends. “At the time I lived in Seattle in sort of a queer scene,” she says. “My friends were cool leftist queers who now think I’m a literal Nazi.”
“Katie was told by an editor at a national publication she writes for, that she just can’t write there that often,” says Jesse, “because the staffers get mad every time they do.”
This gets to the core of what’s happening in newsrooms. “It’s 25-year-old staffers and web producers who basically decide what gets aired,” Singal says, pointing to episodes like last summer’s firing of New York Times editor James Bennett (for running an editorial by Republican Tom Cotton) and the more recent firing of McNeil.
There are even those who think that objective, rational linear thinking—math—is a facet of “whiteness.” I view such an attitude as racist, not least because it discounts the work of non-white mathematicians as well as the obvious fact that math courses are often more popular with minority students than with white students. However, if you really did believe that math was somehow an expression of an oppressive white culture, why teach it at all? Or at least, why teach it well?If that’s your attitude then ineffective teaching methods are not a bug but a feature.
When the school’s Sexual Violence Prevention Committee subsequently issued a statement accusing @BrockCivis of promoting “racism,” and denouncing “ongoing settler-colonial violence,” @BrockCivis replied with a quote from historian Gerda Lerner to the effect that sexual violence against women has existed in all societies known to recorded history, and then added that university groups should stop exploiting “human tragedy.”
I am certainly not attempting to “cure” their gender identity, even if that is how legislators might seek to criminalize my work. In many cases, I observe a shift from the start of our conversation, at which point medication and surgery had felt like the only option. After the fact, young people I have spoken with have told me that what they appreciated was that I did not simply affirm them robotically, but asked them to reflect on a decision that would change their lives forever. In cases where these children hated who they were, my goal was to get them to stop the hate, rather than to remake their bodies. This isn’t conversion therapy: It’s conversion therapy’s antithesis.
Late Night With Stephen Colbert did a parody of that 2017 ad that was barely distinguishable from CNN’s actual posture. “They’ll tell you to ignore the emails that explicitly show the banana took a meeting with a Putin-connected Russian lawyer,” the Colbert version says, before ending: “This isn’t a banana. It’s an apple. A really stupid apple.”
“One of the ironies that I experienced in my own career was that I received more automatic respect when I first began teaching in 1962, as an inexperienced young man with no Ph.D. and few publications, than later on in the 1970s, after accumulating a more substantial record. What happened in between was “affirmative action” hiring of minority faculty. … I happened to come along right after the worst of the old discrimination was no longer there to impede me and just before racial quotas made the achievements of blacks looks suspect. That kind of luck cannot be planned.”
Lowery wrote, “American view-from-nowhere, ‘objectivity’-obsessed, both-sides journalism is a failed experiment. We need to fundamentally reset the norms of our field. The old way must go. We need to rebuild our industry as one that operates from a place of moral clarity.”
https://reason.com/2018/05/17/nuclear-power-trumps-wind-and-solar/First of all, some Democratic leaders have this particular way of saying they're "listening to the science" and then implementing whatever policies they wanted to implement anyway, regardless of whether it's actually where the science leads. Sanders himself claims to want to reduce and eventually eliminate the use of fossil fuels, but will proudly ignore the science that says you need nuclear power to do so. Like many politicians, Sanders supports science to the extent that science supports him.
In 1807, Britain declared all slave trading illegal. The king of Bonny (in what is now the Nigerian delta) was dismayed at the conclusion of the practice."We think this trade must go on. That is the verdict of our oracle and the priests. They say that your country, however great, can never stop a trade ordained by God himself."
As it turned out, my experience in the library was just the beginning. In my new position, I was told on multiple occasions that discussing my personal thoughts and feelings about my skin color is a requirement of my job. I endured racially hostile comments, and was expected to participate in racially prejudicial behavior as a continued condition of my employment. I endured meetings in which another staff member violently banged his fist on the table, chanting “Rich, white women! Rich, white women!” in reference to Smith alumnae. I listened to my supervisor openly name preferred racial quotas for job openings in our department. I was given supplemental literature in which the world’s population was reduced to two categories — “dominant group members” and “subordinated group members” — based solely on characteristics like race. Although I have spoken to many staff and faculty at the college who are deeply troubled by all of this, they are too terrified to speak out about it. This illustrates the deeply hostile and fearful culture that pervades Smith College.The last straw came in January 2020, when I attended a mandatory Residence Life staff retreat focused on racial issues. The hired facilitators asked each member of the department to respond to various personal questions about race and racial identity. When it was my turn to respond, I said “I don’t feel comfortable talking about that.” I was the only person in the room to abstain.Later, the facilitators told everyone present that a white person’s discomfort at discussing their race is a symptom of “white fragility.” They said that the white person may seem like they are in distress, but that it is actually a “power play.” In other words, because I am white, my genuine discomfort was framed as an act of aggression. I was shamed and humiliated in front of all of my colleagues.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CARES_Act$350 billion to bailout the 50 States and the District of Columbia. The allocation formula uses the unemployment rate in the fourth quarter of 2020. Therefore, states like New York and California –who had strict economic lockdown policies and high unemployment – will get bailout money. States like Florida and South Dakota – who were open for business – will get less.$128.5 billion to fund K-12 education. The CBO determined that most of the money in education will be distributed in 2022 through 2028, when the pandemic is over.
My purpose in walking through this analysis is to point out that this is the kind of discussion that the country and the Congress should be having at this moment — and that many of us hoped would happen with the arrival of a moderate, dealmaking president.But what we have been treated to instead are mindless talking points (“Go Big”) politically inspired lines in the sand ($1.9 trillion in stimulus, a $15-an-hour minimum wage, $1,400 rebates) and transparently partisan proposals to reward the Democratic base, buy off White working-class voters and avenge the partisan outrages of the Trump era. Instead of bringing a polarized country together after a narrow election victory, Democrats seem determined to spike the football in the end zone.
https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/all-black-lives-matter-a-reader-forumWhen men control an institution and women have little influence or power, all kinds of negative things often result, as we have seen throughout history: abuse, hazing, bullying, strict hierarchies, etc. But I have come to believe that when women begin seriously outnumbering men so that they hold most of the influence and power, there are other problems that begin to take hold.Women are, for the most part, completely aversive to any hierarchy, regardless of whether said hierarchy is based on merit or not. They tend to be obsessed with “being nice” and not hurting anyone’s feelings, are often very hostile to the mere voicing of opinions that differ from those of the group, and will generally give all attention and rewards to whichever person makes the greatest claims to sympathy. I’m sure it all flows from their instincts to protect and love their children at all costs, but it can translate into perverse behaviors at the group level.
The second reason for CRT’s triumph is that it’s super-easy. Social inequalities are extremely complicated things. A huge variety of factors may be in play: class, family structure, education, neighborhood, sex, biology, genetics and culture are some of them. Untangling this empirically in order to figure out what might actually work to improve things is hard work. But when you can simply dismiss all of these factors and cite “structural racism” as the only reason for any racial inequality, and also cover yourself in moral righteousness, you’re home-free. Those who raise objections or complications or cite nuances can be dismissed by the same easy method.
Then there’s the deep relationship between CRT and one of the most powerful human drives: tribalism. What antiracism brilliantly does is adopt all the instincts of racism and sexism — seeing someone and instantly judging them by the color of their skin, or sex — and drape them with a veil of virtue. You don’t have to correct yourself when your tribal psyche makes you more cognizant of someone’s visible racial differences, and pre-judges them. You don’t have to resist this any more. You can give in to your core nature, and feel pride, rather than shame. You get to have all the feels of judging people entirely by their involuntary characteristics, while actually dismantling racism and sexism! What’s not to like?
Bishop Joseph Strickland, of Tyler, Texas, wrote on Twitter late last year that the Moderna vaccine was “not morally produced” because of its connection to abortion and Catholics should therefore reject it. Last month, he tweeted, “The fact remains that ANY vaccine available today involves using murdered children before they could even be born. I renew my pledge…I will not extend my life by USING murdered children.”
Here is a quote from Yoom Nguyen, owner of the Lotus Restaurant in Minneapolis, who just witnessed a second assault on his business: “Watching looters bust down our family restaurant is so heartbreaking. Senseless, they’re doing it while laughing and smirking. Not gonna lie, I damn near shot a man tonight. He threw that fucking rock at my family photo and looked right at me. I said ‘you motherfucker …’ tears immediately rolled down my face. I just can’t no more. I’m thankful I walked away but Fuck y’all.” This is how violence metastasizes. And as I’ve watched protests devolve over the summer into a series of riots, arson expeditions, and lawless occupations of city blocks, along with disgusting and often racist profanity, I’ve begun to feel similarly. And when I watched the Democratic Convention and heard close to nothing about ending this lawlessness, I noted the silence.
https://reason.com/2021/02/23/neera-tanden-omb-mike-pesca-cancel-culture-sexist-racist/"It's troubling that people are more offended by being called racist than by the actual racism in our society," he said. "Allegations of being racist, even getting direct mailers in their mailbox, is not on par with the consequences of actual racism."
Other Slate staffers that spoke to Defector expressed frustration and anger at Pesca's insistence on having that particular conversation. "I don't want to be in a workplace where people feel emboldened to have this argument. People's humanity is not an intellectual debate," one said.
When I asked Tara if social contagion could be the cause of the nonbinary movement, she paused for long enough that I thought she may have hung up the phone. “Yes,” she said. “But I can’t really say that to anyone.” The professional risks are too great.
https://davidthompson.typepad.com/davidthompson/2019/11/the-unspanked.htmlAnd so the Mao-lings who are shrieking at Polite Guy demand to know, “When have you ever been oppressed?” And they ask this while laughing at his assault, mocking his politeness, and shortly before assaulting him themselves.
None of this was great for girls or women—particularly not if they were women of color or immigrants or if they fell outside conventional bounds of femininity or sexual propriety. But it was good for officials who wanted to tighten U.S. borders and nationalize law enforcement. It helped usher in the first federal immigration restriction, the Page Act of 1875, which banned women from East Asia from coming here "for the purposes of prostitution." Later, it helped give us the 18th Amendment, banning alcohol. And it gave us the Mann Act of 1910, which criminalized bringing a woman across state lines for "prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose."
Groups like the National Organization for Women and other avatars of mainstream mid-century feminism "lobbied to repeal sexist laws, wrote model legislation, and met with police and members of the judiciary to educate them about women's frustrating and traumatizing experiences with the legal system," write Levine and Meiners. "But anti-violence feminists from the left, especially women of color, were adamantly opposed to outsourcing vengeance to the state." These feminists "learned from experience that prisons do not end violence, but instead perpetrate and perpetuate it, while destroying individual lives, families, and communities."
To decide if the police are efficient, one must question the ethical suppositions which act as the rationale and source of wisdom for the present system. Because efficiency can be defined only with reference to desired goals, underlying premises need to be carefully examined. Indeed, the greatest portion of today's police problems can be traced to either the fact that few people really know what they want the police to do or to the fact that people have exceedingly hazy or dogmatic reasons for asking police to do the tasks selected as "proper."
In another vein, Daniel Gutman, dean of New York Academy of the Judiciary, estimates that 75 percent of street crime is committed by drug addicts. Accurate or not, his estimate testifies to the power of the state to work in opposition to its intended purpose. In an attempt to reduce actions it mistakenly considers "crime," it has created a class of "criminals" who become much more inclined to steal for their high. Most pleasure drugs are inexpensive to fabricate. The laws against their sale, far from removing them from the market, simply become part of their cost, a tax of sorts: a misery tax.
If the non-existent threat of retribution does not deter theft, how about the prison system? Does it scare the dishonest away from a life of crime? Does it rehabilitate those who weren't scared? Of course not. It is common knowledge that prisons are breeding grounds for criminals. And the recidivism rate demonstrates that jail is little threat to those planning to commit a crime for profit.
And however different postmodernists, evangelicals, Islamists, Muslims, crystal-healers, and Trump supporters might be, there actually is one thing they have in common: all these groups have great gender balance. You’ll never find a Wiccan circle or a gender studies class that accidentally ended up as 100% male.And computer scientists, mathematicians, economists, utilitarians, libertarians, movement atheists, skeptics, transhumanists, cryptocurrency enthusiasts, et cetera – are an equally sundry non-coalition. But they also have something in common: a serious skew towards men.And if you accept the implict assumption that good opinions = gender balance and sexism = gender imbalance, then forever and always the crystal healers and Trump supporters will have a clear badge of being good people and responsible citizens, and the utilitarians and economists will be, on a collective level, sexist jerks. And it sure seems like this is a point in favor of the crystal healers and Trump supporters if you’re trying to figure out who to trust.
When 20% of high school kids taking the AP Computer Science test are women, and 20% of college students majoring in CS are women, and then 20% of people in the tech industry are women, maybe “demographics are a thing” is a better hypothesis than “the tech industry is uniquely full of gross sexist nerds”.
The correct way to respond to a low-trust environment is not to double down on proceduralism, but to commit yourself to the “it does exactly what it says on the tin” principle and implement policies that have the following characteristics:* It’s easy for everyone, whether they agree with you or disagree with you, to understand what it is you say you are doing.* It’s easy for everyone to see whether or not you are, in fact, doing what you said you would do.* It’s easy for you and your team to meet the goal of doing the thing that you said you would do.
I am obviously not nearly that disengaged from politics. More broadly, having done my time in the philosophy major salt mines, I find the level of abstraction involved in rationalist discourse a little untenable. You wind up in a situation in which because there are so many chickens on the planet and chickens are typically raised in deplorable conditions, minor improvements to the living standards of chickens weigh very heavily in the universal moral calculus. However, exactly how overwhelmingly significant a small improvement in chicken welfare is will end up hinging on the precise math of how you do the chicken-vs.-human utility calculus.Similarly, rationalists believe that existential risk — the kind of risk that would lead to human extinction — is overwhelmingly important, so incredible stakes can rest on the question of whether there’s a 0.1% chance or 0.001% chance of something ending in human extinction.
And critically, by “highly recommend it to you” I do not mean “I agree with all the takes.” I think contemporary society is willing itself into a state of incredible stupidity by wanting to evaluate the worthwhileness of reading something purely on the basis of whether or not it’s correct. When I was in high school, I used to like to peruse issues of National Review, The Weekly Standard, The New Republic, The Nation, and Mother Jones at the library. I would learn new things in every issue. And it was a good habit to get a wide range of takes on politics.
He also said that one of the officials startled him by questioning the lack of "equity" among those he had vaccinated."Are you suggesting that there were too many Indian names in that group?" Dr. Gokal said he asked.Exactly, he said he was told.
For example, when we talk of Jews publicly, outside the walls of synagogues and certain churches, we do not refer to them as “God’s chosen people,” although many Jews believe they are. Nor do we, when engaging a broad, diverse audience, casually proclaim, “Mary is the mother of God.” At risk of offending believers, we say, “Jews believe they are God’s chosen people” or “Christians believe Mary is the mother of God.” We can all engage with those statements — Christians, Jews, and others alike. We do this to avoid forcing non-believers into silence. We do this to lay bare a set of competing beliefs or interests so that we can subdue these conflicts or arrive at a compromise.
Economic goods are mostly good in a commonsense way, even if they include (as Adam Smith suggested) trinkets and baubles that give pleasure to superficial minds. In any case, money is useful, and economics is pretty solid when it confines itself to money. But in politics it is misleading to describe principles and policies as mere preferences, for unlike vanilla and chocolate, they oppose each other. It is as if vanilla lovers wanted to do away with chocolate instead of merely preferring it while still liking or tolerating another choice. Neither preference cares about prevailing over the other because in principle they do not exclude each other. "Voters' preferences" are not really preferences; they are contentions not merely in favor of one's own but also, and mainly, against another's views. A preference does not perhaps need an argument, but a partisan contention does need one, indeed consists in one.
"Neoliberalism — the hegemonic ideology of the transatlantic elite — pretends that class has disappeared in societies that are purely meritocratic, with the exception of barriers to individual upward mobility that still exist because of racism, misogyny, and homophobia," writes Michael Lind in his 2017 essay "The New Class War." "Unable to acknowledge the existence of social class, much less to candidly discuss class conflicts, neoliberals can only attribute populism to bigotry or irrationality."
Lind describes the conservative backlash to identity politics in essentially Marxist terms. Consciousness of one's place in the hierarchy of intersectional oppression displaces consciousness of class, subdividing worker solidarity. Multinational corporations and Big Tech, as vehicles for "woke capital," can thus shift profits abroad and offshore production with impunity, so long as they signal their commitment to the social-justice cause of the moment. The Twitter left's problem with Nike, for instance, is not that they employ sweatshop labor, but that they would design a sneaker with the Betsy Ross flag.
Those are certainly laudable goals for a feminist movement, which is precisely why you may be wondering: *Isn’t that what feminists have been doing this whole time?*It is. Feminists the world over have agitated for greater freedoms for women, putting the right to be free of male violence at the center of their work and steadily rejecting the argument that patriarchal abuses are excusable in any culture.
“The Quran is burned in the West, but yet they’re giving us polio drops? If they don’t respect our faith, why would they do this for us?” said Lal Zada, a small-time businessman, while visited by vaccinators at his home on the outskirts of Peshawar. “There are a hundred other diseases. What makes us suspicious is this focus on just one illness.”
"Raising the minimum wage by a substantial amount would price working poor people out of the job market," wisely editorialized The New York Times. "It would increase employers' incentives to evade the law, expanding the underground economy. More important, it would increase unemployment: Raise the legal minimum price of labor above the productivity of the least skilled workers and fewer will be hired."That's as important an insight now as it was when it was written in 1987. Unfortunately, since then the Gray Lady's editorial board has had its economic savvy surgically removed and replaced by a fuzzy wad of good intentions.
Since the early 1990s, progressives of various stripes have embraced carbon pricing as the go-to approach for addressing climate change. In doing so, they have effectively admitted that conservatives were right all along.But the polarized nature of our political culture has meant that many conservatives have responded to this victory by treating it as a defeat — by taking the left's embrace of carbon pricing as a sign that the right should reject the idea. This is a sad commentary on the condition of our politics, as well as an obstacle to reasonable tax and energy policy. It is time conservatives returned to their roots and took up this cause once again.
Revolutions, in this empirically driven conception, are not made by Marx’s romanticized immiserated proletarians having reached their breaking point, but rather, by aspiring status-seekers and would-be intellectuals stymied by structural roadblocks that prevent their advancement through acceptable, conventional routes. Consistent with Turchin’s thesis, terrorism — the ultimate outlet for malcontents — is also normally not driven by ignorance or poverty, but rather, by a “lack of adequate employment opportunities for educated individuals.”
https://newdiscourses.com/2020/12/university-woke-mission-field-dissident-womens-studies-phd-speaks-out/“A high average of general education is perhaps less necessary for a civil society than is a respect for learning.”
"I tell this to people we work with all the time, particularly young people," Lanning says. "You have to realize something: we are a luxury class. We're not doing anything important. The important people are picking up your garbage, fixing your medical problems, growing your food, supplying electricity. Those are the important people in civilization; they actually provide a benefit. We're just entertaining people. It's complete luxury; they don't need us."
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/an-extended-interview-with-oddworlds-creator-lorne-lanning/"It's kind of like my stance on the death penalty," Lanning says. "Philosophically, I'm fine with the death penalty. I think lots of people deserve not to be here with the rest of us. Practically, I'm concerned about who has that power. If we have such a thing, is it going to be abused and are we just going to shut up political dissidents and stuff like that? Unions are kind of similar."[...]"What would happen to this industry is it would put out most of the small people, but the big ones would survive just fine."
But the other reason I didn't do it was...well, suppose Power comes up to you and says hey, I'm gonna kick you in the balls. And when you protest, they say they don't want to make anyone unsafe, so as long as you can prove that kicking you in the balls will cause long-term irrecoverable damage, they'll hold off. And you say, well, it'll hurt quite a lot. And they say that's subjective, they'll need a doctor's note proving you have a chronic pain condition like hyperalgesia or fibromyalgia. And you say fine, I guess I don't have those, but it might be dangerous. And they ask you if you're some sort of expert who can prove there's a high risk of organ rupture, and you have to admit the risk of organ rupture isn't exactly high. But also, they add, didn't you practice taekwondo in college? Isn't that the kind of sport where you can get kicked in the balls pretty easily? Sounds like you're not really that committed to this not-getting-kicked-in-the-balls thing.No! There's no dignified way to answer any of these questions except "fuck you". Just don't kick me in the balls! It isn't rocket science! Don't kick me in the fucking balls!
"It is more and more dangerous to lose an election," economist John Cochrane, a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution and an adjunct scholar of the Cato Institute, wrote in September. "The vanishing ability to lose an election and not be crushed is the core reason for increased partisan vitriol and astounding violation of basic norms on both sides of our political divide."No sane people would consent to a political system that works as a weapon against them; they would try to escape its power. One of the virtues of the original decentralized American republic and its federalism was that if you didn't like the laws and rulers where you lived, you could go elsewhere.
https://reason.com/2021/01/13/reviving-sedition-prosecutions-would-be-a-tragic-mistake/"It is more and more dangerous to lose an election," economist John Cochrane, a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution and an adjunct scholar of the Cato Institute, wrote in September. "Regulation has supplanted legislation, and dear colleague letters, interpretations, and executive orders have supplanted regulation… The vanishing ability to lose an election and not be crushed is the core reason for increased partisan vitriol and astounding violation of basic norms on both sides of our political divide."
"That's insurrection against the United States of America," MSNBC's Joe Scarborough declared after an angry mob overran the U.S. Capitol. "If Donald Trump Jr., Rudy Giuliani, and Donald Trump are not arrested today for insurrection and taken to jail and booked—and if the Capitol Hill police do not go through every video and look at the face of every person that invaded our Capitol and if they are not arrested and brought to justice today—then we are no longer a nation of laws and we only tell people they can do this again."
Yet American liberals swoon for this authoritarianism. And they are now calling for the use of the most repressive War on Terror measures against their domestic opponents. On Tuesday, House Homeland Security Chair Bennie Thompson (D-MS) urged that GOP Sens. Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley “be put on the no-fly list,” while The Wall Street Journal reported that “Biden has said he plans to make a priority of passing a law against domestic terrorism, and he has been urged to create a White House post overseeing the fight against ideologically inspired violent extremists and increasing funding to combat them.”
"Indeed, a Parler executive told me that of the thirteen people arrested as of Monday for the breach at the Capitol, none appear to be active users of Parler. The Capitol breach was planned far more on Facebook and YouTube."
It may seem unfair to make an example of Trump when several previous presidents have gotten away with violating the Constitution and otherwise abusing their power, without suffering any consequences. FDR got away with internment of Japanese-Americans in concentration camps, Woodrow Wilson engaged in massive violations of civil liberties, and—most recently— Barack Obama's started two wars without the congressional authorization required by the Constitution. And these are far from the only examples.But the more lax we have been on such matters in the past, the more imperative it is to make up for lost time now. If we live in a neighborhood where criminals routinely get away with murder, the right way to deal with the next murderer we catch is not to let him go, but to impose a severe punishment, so as to show that the days of impunity for murderers are over. The same point applies here. We need to make an example of Trump in part precisely because we have been too soft on earlier presidential wrongdoing.
In the control group, with no pressure to conform to actors, the error rate on the critical stimuli was less than 1%.[1]In the actor condition also, the majority of participants' responses remained correct (63.2%), but a sizable minority of responses conformed to the actors' (incorrect) answer (36.8 percent). The responses revealed strong individual differences: Only 5 percent of participants were always swayed by the crowd. 25 percent of the sample consistently defied majority opinion, with the rest conforming on some trials. An examination of all critical trials in the experimental group revealed that one-third of all responses were incorrect. These incorrect responses often matched the incorrect response of the majority group (i.e., actors). Overall, 75% of participants gave at least one incorrect answer out of the 12 critical trials.[1] In his opinion regarding the study results, Asch put it this way: "That intelligent, well-meaning, young people are willing to call white black is a matter of concern."
This is a feminist women’s college, where one might think that administrators would be educated about the need to reject coercion, intimidation, and brute force as negotiating tactics. Yet here they were, apologizing to their tormentors. Having been married to an abusive husband, I’m sadly familiar with the temptation to justify one’s own abuse by insisting that the problem “must be me.” I never thought I’d see that same attitude exhibited by the women charged with educating my daughter.
On his first day at TASS, Vladimir was handed a United Press International story about a U.S. company that was promoting a high-quality tire and offered to replace older tires free of charge. Vladimir wanted to kill the story but his boss rewrote it. The new version read: “In the crafty capitalist market, firms frequently offer low-quality products. This is why a well-known American firm was forced to replace tires that were of inferior quality.” The headline was “Deception of Buyer.”
When asked about children, Ms. Wences replied that for her, they were years away.“Probably around 34 or 35,” she said. “That age range seems ideal to me.”
“I have a very supportive circle,” Ms. Wences said, adding that if she wanted to go through with having a baby, her boyfriend’s parents would probably help. “But what is the point of having a child if you can’t enjoy it?”
For now, Ms. Wences said she was focused on finishing her bachelor’s degree in psychology.
Ms. Wences once bragged to a friend, as they walked on school grounds just before a snowstorm, that her father was the one who sprinkled the salt crunching under their feet. Her father, Enrique, later told her not to talk about his work.
https://quillette.com/2018/12/04/the-new-patriarchy-how-trans-radicalism-hurts-women-children-and-trans-people-themselves/Fact: As a percentage of enrollment, there are more female science majors in Burma, Oman, and Morocco than in the countries of Scandinavia.Fact: American women are 15 percent less likely to reach a managerial position in the workplace than are men—but in Sweden women are 48 percent less likely, in Norway 52 percent, in Finland 56 percent, and in Denmark 63 percent.
"Flunking economic theory the first time around, I later realized, did have a benefit," he wrote in his 2010 memoir Up From the Projects. "It convinced me that UCLA professors didn't care anything about my race: They'd flunk me just as they'd flunk anyone else who didn't make the grade."
A corporation is never going to take a stand for values on the edge of social acceptability when it can just reflect wider society. At best, it’s going to back a cause that already has the press and politicians behind it. This isn’t virtue signalling because a corporation does not have virtue. It’s PR. It’s an identity a marketing team tries to create and project.
In turn, this sometimes throws activists who are used to using the language of the underdog. Finding out that you’re the cultural mainstream rather than the rebel alliance can be a hell of a shock to the system. But the fact that every time they demand statements they get them in sombre black and white text shows it.
A more interesting question is why they’re so desperate for the companies they buy from to write these meaningless statements. All I can think of is that people are so bound up in brands as part of their identity that they need them to reflect and validate their views, rather than simply provide them with goods and services.
https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/The-role-of-deliberate-practice-in-the-acquisition-Ericsson-Krampe/69df93e5e361c089d3ec41a1e4b37f77984bcd6e“On this issue, Canada bears unshirkable responsibility,” Mr. Cong said. “Hence we have constantly urged the Canadian government to recognize the situation, seriously reflect upon and correct its mistakes, and release Ms. Meng Wanzhou as soon as possible.”
A marriage, however, isn’t the Pain Olympics.As you’ve seen, this line of thinking keeps you stuck.Pain is not a contest, and suffering shouldn’t be ranked.
But, just to notice the caliber of who we're dealing with, consider:“I recognize only one name among the signatories,’’ he tweeted. Such an argument, Byron T. Ahn, a linguistics professor at Princeton, wrote in a tweet of his own, amounted to “a kind of indirect ad hominem attack.”The most appropriate fallacy here would be irrelevant appeal to authority or popularity; this is not an ad hominem. I tire of an academia that, when it does make an effort to know critical thinking, makes very little effort; and an uncritical journalistic establishment that puts all its non-neutrality in politics, rather than in thought.
“If you tell me you’re going to kill me, I have to kill you first because I have to take you at your word,” Collins said. “I don’t want to die.”
https://areomagazine.com/2019/05/06/yes-the-intellectual-dark-web-is-politically-diverse/his theoretical framework is polarizing, since it is rooted in language and not in actual life. The realities of the world are under no obligation to adhere to our linguistic restrictions, and only an ideology could justify such an inherent contradiction as the idea that stereotyping people is the answer to ending stereotypical prejudice.
The four companies are members of a powerful pro-coal trade association that in 2014 called climate change a “hypothesis” and argued that carbon dioxide—the air pollutant that causes global warming—was as much as 400 times more beneficial to humanity than it was harmful.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) advocated a retaliatory strike, but Mr. Trump has resisted the call.“Ask Lindsey…how did going into Iraq work out?” Mr. Trump said when asked about the senator’s views.