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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   37968 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 8, 2024

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I understand and have understood what you’re saying, but I just don’t think “suspiciously little pressure” is a good descriptor here. The schools weren’t influential after the change! They were shoved to the side altogether and granted only the slightest bit of attention. Pressure had to come from outside the org, because that’s where the injured parties were.

  1. My whole point is that pressure and influence are not the same thing. Sympathetic organizations get lots of influence without much pressure, and unsympathetic organizations can exert practically limitless pressure without gaining any influence. The schools and pilots were sidelined, not because they weren't applying pressure, but because the FAA wasn't sympathetic to them the way it was to the NBCFAE. I honestly have no idea what you think my point is, if you think the fact that the schools weren't able to influence the FAA afterwards is counterevidence. The schools, pilots, etc. had plenty of political power, to the point of beating the FAA in both the legislative and probably the judicial systems, but no amount of pressure can translate into influence in a hostile organization.
  2. The schools literally are outside the org? I don't get what you're saying here, you seem to be saying the schools couldn't be influential because they were inside the FAA?
  3. Just to be clear, you seem to be focusing on the schools alone. When I've brought them up I've consistently done so solely as an example of one of many forces arrayed against the pressure exerted by the NBCFAE. The pilots, voters, congress, and the judicial system are also part of that group. I don't particularly care whether the pilot schools in particular pressured the FAA or were sidelined or whatever--my point is that despite virtually every other political entity involved with the FAA pressuring it to reverse its hiring change, it somehow was "pressured" more by the NBCFAE, which indicates that this has less to do with pressure and more to do with the organization already wanting to make those changes. Note that I include passive pressure here--the FAA knew these changes would be unpopular and tried to keep them hidden, which I consider pressure from most of these orgs to not make such changes in the first place.

I extended, and extend, little charity to those who made the mess.

Let me quote the places where I think you extend far too much charity to the people who made this mess.

He has been saddled with a messy, stupid lawsuit built on bad decision after bad decision, from predecessors who--between a rock and a hard place in the impossible task of avoiding disparate impact while preserving objective standards--elected to take the easy road and cave to political pressure to implement absurdities.

In this one sentence alone, you:

  1. Characterize the actions of those who made this mess as "mistakes," implying the consequences were unforeseen and/or unintended.
  2. Imply that they basically did the best they could in their situation
  3. Blame their final decision on political pressure

The next paragraph does basically the same thing.

...it represents a decades-long process of institutional failure at every level. A thousand things had to go wrong to get to this point, and if people want to harp on it—let them. But this is not a fundamentally partisan issue. Virtually nobody, looking dispassionately at that questionnaire, wants to defend it.

  1. You characterize the mess as "institutional failure", implying innocent mistakes rather than malice
  2. Again, you say things had to "go wrong". The problem is not that anything "went wrong" it's that the wrong people were put in power. From their perspective everything except getting caught went right.
  3. You call it nonpartisan, apparently using a nonstandard definition of the word. Maybe your objective is to promote peace and reconciliation among your readers, but in the process you also imply that the original actors were not in fact hyperpartisan activists.
  4. You flatly deny the existence of the many, many people who do want to defend the questionnaire. There is literally an active lawsuit involving people spending tens of millions of dollars defending that questionnaire. The NBCFAE and FAA together probably had at least hundreds of employees and students involved in this who would not only defend the questionnaire but actively created and took advantage of it. I personally know plenty who would directly defend that questionnaire, and all of them are super partisan.

As you said:

I think it's a grave misreading to take it as me absolving anyone of responsibility or treating it anything as other than a blatantly corrupt institutional failure on all levels.

Reading the above excerpts, do you really still stand by this? You called this everything but corruption. You directly stated in multiple places that it was not corruption that caused this. You literally said the predecessors "caved to pressure" which is emphatically not corruption.

Anyway, all of this is stemming from you coming one step away from calling me a liar for a framing you would have presented differently. I am not persuaded, and given the amount of time I spend criticizing progressives and trying to build alternatives, it takes an incredibly strained reading of my position to treat me as fundamentally aligned with them.

I've come one step away from calling you a liar for your framing, because your framing is one step away from a lie. Specifically, the part I most take issue with is your assertion that the leaders were pressured into this rather than doing it of their own free will. I think you're still using "pressure" in a very nonstandard way, so let me be more clear about what I mean here.

  1. "Pressure" means political pressure, e.g. lawsuits and institutional consequences if an entity does not have their demands met.
  2. "Influence" means how much control you have over the hearts and minds of an org. If everyone in the FAA is devout Catholic then the Pope will have unlimited influence over the FAA, while still being unable to exert practically any pressure on them at all.
  3. The NBCFAE clearly had more influence over the FAA than student pilots and pilot schools did, because the FAA listened to NBCFAE demands even knowing it would go against what student pilots etc. wanted.
  4. Student pilots and pilot schools clearly exerted more pressure over the FAA than the NBCFAE did. They obviously have more political leverage than a random activist group, and in the end they triumphed.

I draw this distinction between pressure and influence because it is the whole crux of the issue. You cannot fairly characterize the ringleaders of this situation as being "pressured" into doing this if the only "pressure" applied is a couple toothless letters from a small activist organization. If their decision is based on what I call influence, not pressure, then it is still in the end their responsibility, whereas if it's caused by what I call pressure then it's somewhat understandable.

The pilots and pilot schools had to exert a literally unstoppable amount of pressure on the FAA, going all the way to Congress, just to reverse a policy instigated by a single letter from the NBCFAE. They weren't pressured into it.

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