hooser
2mo ago
Here's one from less than a decade ago:
The controversy began in 2013 when an IRS official admitted the agency had been aggressively scrutinizing groups with names such as "Tea Party" and "Patriots." It later emerged that liberal groups had been targeted, too, although in smaller numbers.
The IRS stepped up its scrutiny around 2010, as applications for tax-exempt status surged. Tea Party groups were organizing, and court decisions had eased the rules for tax-exempt groups to participate in politics.
[...]
A three-point declaratory judgment in the Linchpins case declares "it is wrong" to apply federal tax laws based only on an entity's name, positions on issues or political viewpoint. The judgment says the IRS must act evenhandedly, and politically based discrimination in administering the tax code "violates fundamental First Amendment rights."
One of the reasons I come to The Motte is that occasionally someone posts a link to a historical or recent event that's not at all known within my circle, but is alive and well in the memory of others. It helps me understand where people may be coming from.
hooser
2mo ago
@CrispyFriedBarnacles gave an apt example of JFK using the Fairness Doctrine to censor right-wing radio shows.
hooser
2mo ago
I would worry that IUDs would function as (literal) talismans in the minds of some women and men. "You have an IUD? Great, sex has no consequences!" Not true on a physical level (STIs/STDs) and not true on the mental/emotional/social level.
That's a good point. The consequences you list are serious, and they are carried by the person having sex (and that person's sexual partner). But if the woman has an IUD, the consequences of her sexual act won't be carried by a baby.
When I was a teen, it was generally known that one can drop by a Planned Parenthood and grab some free condoms, no questions asked. Quite a few of us availed ourselves of that option. Some didn't, but that didn't stop them from having sex. (They did ask friends for condoms sometimes.) Having a well-known option of easy-to-get free condoms didn't eliminate unprotected sex, but it reduced it.
I propose that if there was a well-known option of easy-to-get free IUD implants, then many more women would use that option, and that would greatly reduce the number of babies who must bear the consequences of their mother's sexual choices. The women who make poor life choices would still have plenty of natural consequences to deal with.
I would further propose valorizing the act carrying a baby to turn to give it up for adoption. Like in the 2007 film "Juno", for example. I honestly can't think of another popular movie, show, or book that presented giving-birth-for-adoption in a positive light, but I can think of tons that are from the child's perspective about the emotional pain of finding out you're adopted. I know some adopted kids, and they're fine. The whole mother-didn't-love-me-so-she-gave-me-up trope needs to die.
hooser
2mo ago
suggest abstinence and/or sexual discipline
Or suggest an IUD implant, those are super effective, last for a decade, and don't require sticking to a schedule (like with pills) or proper use (like with condoms). Also, IUD effectiveness leaves those others in the dust even with proper use.
Would you support making a free IUD implant to any female who wants one?
hooser
2mo ago
The only reason why he could do this was precisely because of his affiliations
The flip side was that if you do have an item not available to everyone else, that was an honest signal of great connections, and connections were the real currency.
Back in USSR, in the eighties, I have known a fashionable young woman who had a Revlon lipstick case. The actual lipstick was long gone, but Margarita "refilled" it by buying whatever lipstick she could get (she bought as many as she could of the same color) and transferring the stick into the Revlon plastic case and then shaping the end of the stick to look more like the original Revlon version. When preparing to go out, she would use the other tube; the Revlon case she kept in her purse together with the powder compact. In public, included the girls-go-to-the-bathroom-together, Margarita would pull out the compact and the Revlon and gently touch up her lips.
(The publicly overt makeup touch-up was pretty common; it's a way of signalling I-act-a-lady-so-treat-me-like-one. Not merely performance of femininity, to use the modern parlance, but also performance of class, even in a supposedly classless society.)
The USSR did not allow imports of Revlon cosmetics (or other Western brands) for general sale. Having a Revlon lipstick case meant that Margarita knew someone who knew someone who could get stuff. In the soviet economy where shortages were the norm and officially unacknowledged, that connection represented a resource far more useful than a stack of cash. Someone who can get a Revlon lipstick case is also someone who may know where to get, e.g., some beef liver for your anemic kid, or insulin for your diabetic father when the apothecaries ran out. Yes, Margarita was a very useful person to have in your network.
Back to the US present, I notice similar signals among some women who clearly don't have much income but who wear designer clothes and carry brand handbags. Like, someone who has two jobs working as a caterer and a cashier, yet has an Yves Saint Laurent handbag and wears Agolde jeans. I used to think: wow, that woman has some serious credit card debt. But now I consider the possibility that it could be a signal of resourcefulness. Like, she knows where and when some serious sales happen, or where to get barely-used brand stuff at steep discount. Unfortunately (for such a woman), the credit card debt is the more likely explanation, precisely because just about anyone can get a credit card and then buy that brand handbag and jeans.
hooser
2mo ago
hooser
2mo ago
Thank you for finding the relevant passage.
Didn't the Nazis kill plenty of Poles, Roma and Slavs, or are we now defining Holocaust to only include dead Jews?
It's a good question, which WWII civilian deaths get (or should get) counted towards Holocaust. It wouldn't count, say, a Polish man who got hit by a jeep driven a German soldier on a typical patrol route. It wouldn't count if that same Polish man got shot by that same German soldier on that same patrol route. But would it count if, instead of the patrol route, this German soldier was rounding up Polish men in the neighborhood to be transported to a concentration camp, and shot this particular Polish man who was trying to escape the sweep? Or would it only count if that concentration camp's primary purpose was extermination, and not forced labor or internment (like US internment camps for Japanese-Americans)?
Does it only count if it was done by, or on behalf of, Germans?
(I don't know, I haven't thought about it before. I do know that my family tree got substantially pruned by both the Nazis and the Soviets.)
hooser
2mo ago
Your link goes to a long wikipedia page on the life on Simon Wiesenthal. Would you please clarify where in that long article is the claim that the estimate of non-Jews killed in the Holocaust was invented without backing of evidence?
hooser
2mo ago
I think a lot of women say they want say three babies, and may even continue to say that after they have a kid, but when they faced with the mental cost of doing so, or other changes they'd have to make, they say no, even though they still might say they want three kids if asked in a stufy, but they also don't want to give up x, y, and z about their current life either.
I agree that the current TFR rate matches women's revealed preferences. I also recognize that those preferences depend on the social structures that make the choice of having children far too costly. So there are lots of women who would like to have children sooner, or have more children than they do, but who choose otherwise.
I used to work at a small liberal arts college in Southern California. Student body almost all traditional college age (18-22), 2/3 female. All lived on campus by default, with but a handful of exceptions. Many of the students planned to teach elementary school at least for some time (Teach For America or JET program), many of the female students said they planned to get married and have children themselves.
In my two decades working there, only a handful got married by the time they graduated. One gave birth towards the end of her senior year, and all the girls went ga-ga over the baby.
So here were a bunch of young women who wanted children, who biologically were in their prime for having children, who were mature and responsible enough to take care of children, but who overwhelmingly did not have them. And it's reasonable to ask: Why?
Why? Maybe because our college was not at all set up for families, or for women with children. We didn't even have a day-care on campus. The handful of women who married, and the one who gave birth, got dispensation to live off-campus and paid through the nose for rent, whereas our college gave generous means-based subsidies to students living on-campus.
Maybe it was because our bachelors program was clearly aimed for unattached young people: everyone had to take a semester abroad, impossible if you have a young child.
Maybe it was because it simply wasn't done. These were smart, responsible young people, and they have internalized the ideal pattern of college--then career-- then family.
Maybe it was because these women themselves come from parents and grand-parents that followed the same pattern, who therefore have older parents and even older grand-parents, with few siblings or cousins, and the idea that your mother, aunt, or sister looks after your toddler while you finish your education and start your career is no longer a viable option.
(As an aside: ever since I was fifteen, I worked hard to hide hangovers from my mom. She got way too excited whenever I threw up in the morning. Really wanted those grandchildren.)
(As a second aside: yes, I shoplifted booze. My older over-18-but-under-21 friends assured me that it's better that I do it rather than them, because at worst I would have juvenile detention.)
My point is that revealed preferences of women regarding children depend on the institutions that those women inhabit, and currently those institutions make it very costly for young, smart, responsible women to have their desired children during their peak fertile years, even though those women really want to have children.
hooser
2mo ago
What's 4H, by the way?
4-H is a youth organization, very popular in rural US. They promote animal husbandry in particular. I go to the local 4-H Fair, where the kids show off their goats, chickens and such in very friendly competitions. Right after the fair, our local supermarket has 4-H Fair beef and lamb.
The children raise animals as food, not pets. There was quite a culture war controversy last year when a California girl put her goat up for auction in a 4-H Fair and then refused to give it up to the bidder.
hooser
3mo ago
my vote never counts in these elections anyway, and doubly so in Massachusetts
If you are in a solidly Blue/Red state and not excited for either of the major party candidate, you can make your vote count by voting for a third party candidate. It gives that party greater clout to influence the platforms of the major parties. Plus, if their candidate gets more than 5% of the national vote, that party gets access to some federal funds for the next election.
hooser
3mo ago
...convert umbrellas or walking sticks into effective melee weapons by attaching a sharp point to them.
Or maybe bring back the shillelagh, an Irish traditional walking stick / bludgeon weapon.
hooser
3mo ago
She could choose not to have sex.
That's exactly what's been happening: the trend among young people is to have sex less. It's even possible that the political divergence between young men and women will contribute to this trend.
While I, of course, support adoption infinitely over abortion, we have to face facts and realize that foster systems and adoption have statistically significant higher rates of abuse etc. It takes a lot of love and effort to raise a child, it takes even more to raise someone else's child.
I agree that the ideal is for both parents to raise a wanted child. In case of an unwanted pregnancy, the best outcome is for it to somehow become wanted.
Healthy babies are in high demand for adoption, and don't last in the foster system. Normalizing the option of carrying the pregnancy to term and then giving the baby up for adoption not only would reduce numbers of abortion but would help satisfy this demand. I doubt that adopted healthy babies are more at risk of mistreatment than babies who stay with their mother, and a quick online check bears that out.
The other advantage of normalizing giving-baby-up-for-adoption option is that a woman goes through massive biological changes during pregnancy which increase the likelihood of her wanting to keep the baby after all. That's the unwanted-pregnancy-becomes-wanted-baby scenario.
hooser
3mo ago
That is why one should not have sex unless they are prepared to face the potential consequences.
I agree.
Whatever the prevalent culture war rhetoric around sex and abortion, it seems that young women are actually more likely to follow that ideal than previously. Teen birth rates are way down, a quarter of what they were in 1991. Teens are less likely to have sex than before, those who do have it later than before, and with fewer partners source. The number of abortions is down by about a third, compared to early 90's.
These trends don't count as a culture war win for conservatives because they weren't achieved through wider adoption of conservative ideals. But these trends are a definite win for the goal of reducing the deaths of unborn children. Wider adoption of IUD's will further reduce these deaths.
hooser
3mo ago
"Abortion" is a stand in for the wild claim that "they" are trying to "take away" unspecified "rights."
Your characterization is highly uncharitable. When we talk about "abortion rights", we are talking about the right to an abortion.
For a young woman that has any sex life, the possibility and consequences of getting pregnant loom large. If the woman doesn't want to have children (yet), abortion is the safety net of last resort. The most commonly available birth control methods--condoms and pills--have a typical-use failure rate of 13% and 7%, respectively. That's the proportion of women who become pregnant within the first 12 months after initiating the use of that birth control method. Even with perfect use, those rates are 2% and 0.3%, and every woman should ask herself how sure she is that she is using them perfectly. IUD's have much better rates (1%), and 10% of US women of reproductive age have them installed, and hopefully that number keeps going up; nevertheless, that rate is not 0.
Every young woman who is having any sex with a man has to ask herself what will she do if she gets pregnant. It's no surprise that so many want to keep abortion as an option.
Plenty of pro-life advocates understand this perspective, and are taking a constructive approach. Around where I live, I see bill-boards advertising support services for any woman who is pregnant and is willing to carry the baby to term. They arrange health services and adoption (if the woman wants to give the child away), or connect to support services for mothers with infants.
I don't know how good any of these services are, but I like the principal of this approach. There is a huge penalty for a young woman to complete the pregnancy (financial, physical, and mental), and this supportive approach reduces some of that penalty.
hooser
1yr ago
Here's a summary by Zvi Mowshowitz of publicly-known facts regarding the firing of Sam Altman, as of Monday morning. The board has not yet made known the reasons for the firing besides the vague and broad claim that Altman "was not consistently candid in his communications with the board", and it seems that they are not making an effort to stand by their reasons.
The situation is ripe for some juicy conspiracy theories, and I would love to hear some. Why would a group of (I assume) intelligent and competent people on the board make such a drastic and dramatic firing that was sure to cause an excrement storm, and then not be able or willing to defend their actions to the public? Would disclosing their actual reasons cause the very thing they were trying to avoid? Did their actions prevent an untested AGI escaping into the wild? Inquiring minds want to know!
hooser
1yr ago
Looking at the Wikipedia article for Anarchism, it seems that the various strains of Anarchist philosophy are still going strong. Maybe the assassination tactic died out because it proved ineffective in achieving stated objectives.
Right after WWII, there's a pivot of focus and tactics:
By the end of World War II, the anarchist movement had been severely weakened. The 1960s witnessed a revival of anarchism, likely caused by a perceived failure of Marxism–Leninism and tensions built by the Cold War. During this time, anarchism found a presence in other movements critical towards both capitalism and the state such as the anti-nuclear, environmental, and peace movements, the counterculture of the 1960s, and the New Left. It also saw a transition from its previous revolutionary nature to provocative anti-capitalist reformism.
More recent activities:
Around the turn of the 21st century, anarchism grew in popularity and influence within anti-capitalist, anti-war and anti-globalisation movements. Anarchists became known for their involvement in protests against the World Trade Organization (WTO), the Group of Eight and the World Economic Forum.
I would also include Anarchist substantial presence in Occupy Wall Street.
While having revolutionary aspirations, many forms of anarchism are not confrontational nowadays. Instead, they are trying to build an alternative way of social organization, based on mutual interdependence and voluntary cooperation.
That description reflects the actions of the self-professed Anarchists that I know, who are interested in developing and sustaining structures of governance (even on small scale) that don't have formalized hierarchies.
hooser
1yr ago
This example fits the following narrative pattern:
-
An institution X used to have broad support, but now we* recognize it as harmful or bad, though they* still defend it.
-
Breaking news: evidence E that X was far worse than we* knew! (But not worse than we* can imagine!) So X was altogether evil!!
-
(Whisper among us*:)
-
"Isn't that evidence kind of weak? I mean, X still evil, but ..."
-
"Shh! X was evil, don't undermine the narrative! They* will latch on to it!"
-
[* For some variation of we and they.]
Once the narrative transitions from "X bad" to "X evil", any questioning of evidence E that precipitated that transition is questioning that X is evil, as opposed to merely bad (from the narrative's perspective).
In the Kamloops graves case, there is a competing impetus: physical anthropologists and archeologists (who are part of we* in this case) very much want to preserve their status as scientists, so they have a strong stake in upholding the rigor of their methods. The Wikipedia entry for Kamloops Indian Residential School reflects this process. The "Possible Unmarked Graves" section is written in a cautious neutral tone, and points to specific plans for corroboration of the evidence:
In May 2022, Casimir said that a technical task force had been formed "of various professors as well as technical archeologists" and that work on an archeological dig and possible exhumations could soon begin... [...]
As of May 2022, no remains had been excavated, leaving the initial claim unverified.
The Kamloops graves case, therefore, is a very interesting case to watch, and I thank you for putting together such a great effort post on its progress.
hooser
1yr ago
In "Man's Search for Meaning", Viktor Frankl argues that a person can weather adversity--even thrive--so long as one's experience is deeply meaningful. In contrast, a person can be living an objectively pleasant life, yet be miserable if meaning is absent.
Frankl's framework fits some of the more successful activists that I personally know, be their cause a strain of social justice or Christian prothelytizing. They are tired and frustrated, their schedule is hectic, but their life is full of meaning. And because of that, they attract others to their cause.
I have recently watched the ["Navalny"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navalny_(film)) documentary. That guy is not living the good life by my definition--he's in a Russian high-security penal colony, an outcome he knew was highly likely when he chose to go back to Russia--but I don't deny that his life is deeply meaningful to him. That's a powerful draw.
hooser
1yr ago
Congratulations on getting the NIH grant!
You are right to point out that a significant portion of gatekeepers in US Academia are very much into the DEI/woke ideology. I would guess that in some fields, they are the majority of gatekeepers. In other fields, they may yet be a minority. Since most fields in US are liberal/left, and DEI/woke ideology evolved specifically to spread in or dominate such spaces, I would expect to encounter such gatekeepers in pretty much any academic field. I would also expect to encounter gatekeepers who retain classical liberal ideals that are at odds with discriminatory aspects of the former.
Getting a specific job, getting a specific grant, those have always been a crap shoot and involved guessing the priorities of whoever comprised the hiring / grant committee. It also is, deliberately, a status game. We would like to think that academic status is about merit, but it's still status, and thus susceptible to status-affecting politics. DEI/woke has been quite effective in that game, in the milieu of liberal/left spaces. So I would expect their representation within the academic gatekeepers to increase.
To anyone who is personally worried about this trend, I recommend considering life outside of academia.
hooser
1yr ago
We did.
That is: there was a general pressure from administration and other professors to have some kind of DEI statement; we (the search committee) wrote the prompt ourselves, and nobody outside of the search committee read these statements. We deliberately avoided DEI/woke jargon in our prompt, which went something like: "Describe how you have adjusted your teaching based on considerations of your students' various backgrounds. Give specific examples." We wanted applicants who have a track record of appropriately adjusting their pedagogy to fit the students that are actually in their course, and that's what we looked for.
Quite a few applicants phrased their statement with lots of DEI/woke jargon--probably because they were applying for other academic positions as well and DEI statements got pretty common then. That wasn't a drawback for those whose examples were actual useful pedagogy, like the guy who made a point to reach out to struggling students, noted that many of them were black ( but also conveyed that he reached out to all struggling students). Showing facility with currently-fashionable jargon is a definite plus at a small liberal arts college, because it means students aren't going to out-jargon you. However, we did scrutinize such statements for signs that the candidate was a possible liability (like those that supported actual discriminatory treatment based on protected categories) or poor collegiality (like those who made a point to publically "call out" various shit at their institution without even approaching people in private).
hooser
1yr ago
I work at a small private US liberal arts college. When I was part of a search for a tenure-track candidate, we asked the candidates to include in their application a DEI statement, because it was expected for all searches at the college.
Then we threw out any candidates who clearly drank the Cool-Aid.
Out went the candidate who said she moved all her black students to the front of the class, and all her white students to the back of the class. Out went the candidate who said he had a special study group only for his LatinX students.
In went the candidate that said she volunteered at a tutoring program for the local Title I school with majority of student black or latino. In went the candidate who said he stepped up his office hours for everyone, and personally reached out to invite each student who struggled in his class, many of whom were black.
If you are working in academia, having a reasonable amount of fluency in the current etiquette of the Professional-Managerial Class is a requirement of the job. Knowing when to not get carried away with the rhetoric is also part of the job. The candidates that we tossed out (like the ones above) actually discriminated against some students, so they were a legal liability for their employer.
You mentioned in another comment that your goal is personal career progress, and that you'll be with this employer for only a few years. Good, focus on that. Don't fall for anyone claiming that you should be able to "bring your whole self" to work. You are expected and required to only bring your professional self to work. So: if your employer requires X, you do X or quit. If your employer recommends X and you don't want to do X, quietly don't do X. If other employees ask you why you are not doing the recommended X, ask them politely to explain the benefits of doing X, and consider their explanations. Even if their explanation is a stream of religious/woke prosthelytizing, you can get some value from it by seeing what new terms or etiquette is going around. But someone may actually tell you something more useful (e.g., X is something your boss really cares about and pays attention to).
hooser
1yr ago
I think you're right about that this is where we disagree. If we take doing science as "making progress on our ability to predict and manipulate the physical world", well that applies to the electron microscope salesmen, academic departmental secretaries, directors of corporate research orgs, plumbers who install chilled water systems in labs, the maintainers of python and r, and any number of other people who contribute in some small way to the broad economic activity of advancing science.
Excellent point! My follow-up question is therefore: what actual utility is there in distinguishing some of the jobs (professions? tasks?) that progress our ability to predict and manipulate the physical world as "scientist"?
I do think that this utility exists and is important. It reminds me of Feynman's description of cargo cult science:
In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head to headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas--he's the controller--and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they're missing something essential, because the planes don't land.
In an organization whose purpose is to progress in our ability to predict and manipulate the physical world--and which has a solid track record of effectively making this progress--who are the people that are essential to the enterprise, and who are in necessary supporting roles?
If the latter: do they require transferable set of skills that are not particular to this specific enterprise? The plumber who installs the chilled water system is such; so is the CPA in HR; so is the janitor. The lab manager (like, in a chem lab) would need to have specialized knowledge to do her job, but it's still transferable set of skills (solid Bachelor's level knowledge of chemistry plus great organizational skills). These people do useful work that enable the enterprise, but they are not essential.
It's useful to reserve the term "scientist" for the former--those who are essential to the enterprise--to keep the telos of their profession foremost in mind. It's useful, because the scientist's telos is frequently in direct contradiction with goals people have (e.g., getting that publication after you put in so much effort into that experiment, if only those couple of observation points weren't undermining your hypothesis). Let me quote Feynman once more:
But there is one feature I notice that is generally missing in cargo cult science. [...] It's a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty--a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you're doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid--not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you've eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked--to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated.
Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them. You must do the best you can--if you know anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong--to explain it. If you make a theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well as those that agree with it. There is also a more subtle problem. When you have put a lot of ideas together to make an elaborate theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it fits, that those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the idea for the theory; but that the finished theory makes something else come out right, in addition.
In summary, the idea is to give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgement in one particular direction or another.
hooser
1yr ago
Try: "I find your phasing... problematic." (Followed by a dignified silence.)
Seriously, though, if your purpose is to improve your own communication skills--and that's a laudable purpose to have--I recommend seriously adapting Socratic method. Ask questions, and genuinely listen to their responses. If they talk about broad ideas, come up with realistic concrete scenarios, preferably based on your own life or someone you know. If the terminology gets in the way of communication, suggest "tabooing" a particular word and see if it improves communication of ideas.
By the way, I recommend reading Plato's dialogues. The character of Socrates is great at walking the narrow path between a devil's advocate and a troll, and it falls to other characters to voice "common-sense" ideas.
I would use an electro-magnetic pulse (EMP). And looks like the Pentagon is on it.
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