"Empathic Correctness": Opinions As Aggression On Campus
For me, one of the greatest things about college was the exposure to new ideas, including ideas that made me uncomfortable. This is what college is supposed to be about -- or was.
Kevin Truong writes at CNS:
What began in the 1990s as political correctness - a desire not to offend others - has now morphed into what one academic observer calls "empathetic correctness" - a desire never to be offended. Even celebrities have weighed in on the debate, with comedians Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Maher saying the environment at college makes it almost impossible to do their routines without someone becoming upset.While many have pointed to helicopter parenting or the mainstream media as root sources of a politically correct culture on campus, much of the criticism is oversimplified, academics say.
According to professors and higher-education experts, the trend is driven by financial realities in the American higher education system, and exacerbated by a contemporary world in which opinions are catalyzed and publicized by the intellectual echo chamber that can exist online. With a drop in the number of college-age students, as well as decreased funding from states, increased competition among colleges and universities has resulted in an atmosphere where students are treated like consumers and more emphasis may be placed on their satisfaction rather than how much they are learning, critics charge.
Professors can feel disincentivized to bring up controversial issues up in class for fear of getting in trouble either with administration or with students that they may offend, critics say.
via @glukianoff, who, with theFIRE.org, defends free speech rights on college campuses.
Lukianoff's two terrific books: Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate
It's Free Speech We Need To Support On Campuses, Not Free Squelch
I'm one of the moderators of a members-only science forum -- one with quite a few academics as members.
Well, in response to a post linked there -- one I put up at the Applied Evolutionary Psychology Society blog -- a male member of the science forum remarked (about the experience of the author of the article I linked):
arrrg. sounds like someone went into a feminist hugbox and thought they were meeting social scientists.
"Feminist hugbox." Love that term.
But not everyone did.
A woman responded:
I think that you need to seek an education on what feminism means and to be more mindful of the terms you are using within a professional/academic forum. Frankly, your patriarchal ignorance is embarrassing.
My response to the woman:
I don't think there's just one meaning of feminism.I don't call myself a feminist -- I call myself a humanist because I'm for fair treatment for all people, meaning that if you're a man who's had your rights violated, I'll stand up for you.
I also find that feminism, as of late, often involves women demanding special rights under the guise of equal rights.
I also think [the man's] "feminist hugbox" was funny.
And finally, isn't there enough speech-squelching on college campuses? I think we need to support free speech.
I support your right to your scoldy speech, too, by the way, but I just think you should also think about what feminism "means" and whether it has, in some part, turned pernicious.
Lookie
Linkie with legs to here.
Shielding Tender College Students From Any Possible Offense
The University of New Hampshire has published a "Bias-Free Language Guide," reports the NY Daily News:
Among the terms declared off-limits is "American."Using the A-word is "problematic" because it "fails to recognize South America." Approved alternatives: "U.S. citizen" or "resident of the U.S." (Which is short for United States of . . . oh, dear.)
The guide would also replace "seniors" with "people of advanced age," "overweight" with "people of size," "poor" with "person who lacks the advantages others have," "rich" with "person of material wealth" and "healthy" with "non-disabled."
Why not just fit every incoming student with a muzzle in the school colors?
UC Prez Napolitano Talks About "Looking Into" Due Process For Men -- As If Looking For A Lost Scarf
Sexual assault accusations made against men (mostly men and a woman here or there) in college have led to their being stripped of their due process rights and having their fate decided in campus kangaroo courts.
UC's Napolitano, speaking at a Senate hearing on campus sexual assault, was asked by Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy (R) how schools could better address the rights of the accused. Ashe Schow writes at WashEx:
Napolitano jumped in, saying "we're actually looking in to that right now." This would seem to indicate that such rights were not considered previously -- certainly not last year when she convened a task force to address the issue of campus sexual assault.The University of California, over which Napolitano presides, was recently excoriated by a federal judge for providing students with an "unfair" hearing. Perhaps that is why Napolitano is "now" looking into due process rights.
When Tennessee Sen. Lamar Alexander, chairman of the Senate HELP committee, asked the panelists how to ensure a fair hearing is held involving an accusation of sexual assault, a noticeable six-second silence followed.
Napolitano again mentioned that UC was "looking into" the issue of due process rights, but the way she talked about what those rights should look like was dismaying.
"It does illustrate the difference between a student disciplinary proceeding and a criminal proceeding," Napolitano said. "The confrontation rights, for example, they should be different for students."
She also mentioned that her school was "going through that right now," an allusion a recent case in which a California judge ruled that the university provided an inadequate procedure for cross-examination. The student was allowed to submit questions only before the hearing, and the hearing panel decided which questions to ask, leaving out questions that would challenge the accuser's side of the story. The panel also provided no follow-up questions and allowed the accuser to avoid answering by claiming the questions were irrelevant.
Again, sexual assault accusations belong in the justice system and not the campus system.
Navy Offers Special Perk For People Who Reproduce (If They're Female)
The LA Times editorial board thinks this is a fabulous idea:
Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus announced in May that he was planning to increase paid maternity leave for sailors from six to 12 weeks. It was one of a number of changes designed to make his branch of the armed forces more attractive to women -- and to keep them once they signed up.Then he doubled down. When Mabus finally unveiled his new policy this month, it was even more generous than promised -- 18 weeks, effective immediately and retroactively to the beginning of 2015.
...Eighteen weeks of paid leave might seem like a financial burden for employers. But the Navy's calculation is that the one- or two-time cost (the typical American mom has two kids) is a long-term bargain that pays off in savings from not having to retrain replacement workers. When Google hiked its maternity leave, the rate at which new moms left the company was cut in half.
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Women make up about half of the U.S. workforce but only about 25% of new recruits and only 18% of the Navy's workforce. Female sailors leave the service in great numbers in years five and six, and the top reason is "family." Family is also the No. 2 reason that men leave the Navy, and Mabus is pushing for more leave for new fathers as well as for sailors who adopt children.
Here's a commenter from the LAT's site who sees the side they weren't able to:
daveffloyd Rank 1614
So, navy women have joined other women in being able to get pregnant(will they have to be married?)and then get time off. What compensation do women who do not want to get pregnant or heaven forbid men recieve?Do "we" get to figure out how much the time off is worth and will the employer compensate "us" for that?
I understand the "I want a career" and yes I can understand the "I need a child" concepts BUT why do the rest of us do without so they can have both and get extra money/paid for it.
Discrimination in the workplace is alive and well when one group can get paid time off and another can't due to gender, belief(I believe there are enough children in the world)or marital status.
What does the single person childless person get? Plus, in this world where technology changes daily what will the cost be to refresh this person's training bringing them up to speed when they are returning after 18 weeks(4 months)off?
Slinkery
Slippery when linked.
Expletives Are Just Words; No Reason To Hang Up On The Dying, Mr. 911 Operator
Although I wrote a book with fuck in the title, no, I don't think it's appropriate at all times. I won't use the word around your 4-year-old or your elderly aunt.
But the word is not a weapon. It does not shoot bullets or cause stab wounds and will not physically harm you in any way.
In other words, the 911 operator who has prissy language rules is not the person who should be working as a 911 operator.
Appallingly, Matthew Sanchez, an Albuquerque 911 dispatcher, hung up on a teen who used the word "fucking" as her friend was dying.
From ABC7LA:
A 911 dispatcher resigned after allegedly hanging up on a teen who called for help after her friend was fatally shot....Quintero and Chavez-Silver, both 17, were at a party in Albuquerque earlier this month when someone drove by and opened fire. When her friend was shot, Quintero sprang into action and called 911. But she said she was also panicked.
"I had to stop his bleeding, I had to do CPR to keep him breathing and alive," she said. "I was frantic, I was scared."
On the call, Sanchez can be heard asking Quintero if Chavez-Silver is breathing.
"He's barely breathing," she responds. "How many times do I have to [expletive deleted] tell you?"
It's then that Sanchez ends the call, telling Quintero, "You could deal with yourself. I'm not going to deal with this."
Though officials told KOAT that emergency services were already on the way at that point, Quintero said she couldn't believe the way the call ended.
"I said, 'How could he do that,' and I just dropped my phone," she told KOAT.
"Black Lives Matter" Rally; White Reporter Not Welcome
Never mind that Cleveland State University is a public university. A white reporter, Brandon Blackwell, was expelled from a "Movement For Black Lives" rally at the university.
Jason Weaver writes for The College Fix:
A reporter was harassed at a "Movement for Black Lives" rally at Cleveland State University after an announcement to the crowd that "this is a peoples of African descent space. If you are not of African descent please go to the outside of the circle immediately."That according to a video circulating which shows reporter Brandon Blackwell, who is not of African descent, quickly retreat to the back of the gathering amidst cheers from activists surrounding him, seemingly in support of the banishment.
...The video concludes with Blackwell repeatedly asking one activist to not touch his camera.
"I got 800 black people behind me, what the f**k are you gonna do?" replied the activist, while standing face to face with Blackwell.
Ugly -- and stupid.
Just as I say I'm a humanist rather than a feminist -- because I care about and stand up for people's rights, not just those of people with vaginas -- people who care about people's rights care about them regardless of skin color.
Shutting people out because they're white is racist and ugly.
And it hurts your cause.
The video:
Oh, and on a biology note, the people who threw Blackwell out for not being of "African descent" are ignorant. As Stephen Pinker writes in The Blank Slate:
So men are not from Mars, nor are women from Venus. Men and women are from Africa, the cradle of our evolution, where they evolved together as a single species.
Linkoln
A Nebraska state of mind.
Again Today! Nice Prices For People Who Sometimes Say F*ck
Today again, my book seems to be on special or at an oddly low price at Amazon -- half off, at $7.61 (list price $14.99). Not sure how long it will stay that way (might be part of a pricing algorithm at Amazon).
So if you haven't read it, please use this opportunity to get yours now: "Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck."
It's a science-based and funny book on how we can behave less counterproductively.
Along with positive reviews in the WSJ and other publications, Library Journal gave the book a starred review: "Verdict: Solid psychology and a wealth of helpful knowledge and rapier wit fill these pages. Highly recommended."
Orders of the book (new only, not used!) help support my writing on this blog and my answering questions that won't make my column.
The Drinking Age Should Be Lowered -- Fast
There's a piece I very much agree with at Newsweek.com by Jeffrey A. Tucker. Robert Cialdini has a whole chapter on how "scarcity" ramps up desire in his book Influence (a fantastic book on the science of persuasion).
Not being able to access alcohol and having being forbidden gives alcohol a cachet in college that it wouldn't have otherwise and leads to college students drinking high-powered concoctions -- much as people did with homemade hooch during Prohibition:
Most of these kids have never been socialized in what it means to drink responsibly. They are living for the thrill that comes with defiance. The combination of new freedom, liquor and sexual opportunity leads to potentially damaged lives.How do these kids get away with this? In fraternities and sororities, it all happens on private property, not public and commercial spaces, and so campus police can look the other way. Most everyone does.
Indeed, being able to drink with friends, and unhampered by authority, is a major appeal of the Greek system on campus. It's a way to get around the preposterously high drinking age. Getting around this law will consume a major part of the energy and creativity of these kids for the next three years.
As for everyone else who cannot afford to join, it's all about a life of sneaking around, getting to know older friends, lying and hiding, pregaming before parties just in case there is no liquor there, and generally adopting a life of bingeing and purging, blackouts and hangovers, rising and repeating. And so on it goes for years until finally the dawn of what the state considers adulthood.
For an entire class of people, it's the Roaring Twenties all over again.
It's all part of Prohibition's legacy and a reflection of this country's strange attitudes toward drinking in general. The drinking age in the United States (21), adopted in 1984, is one of the highest in the world. Countries that compare in severity are only a few, including Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Cameroon, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar, Sri Lanka and Tajikistan.
Most of the rest of the world has settled on 18 for liquor and 16 for beer and wine. In practice, most European countries have very low enforcement of even that. Somehow it works just fine for them.
...What we need is a normal environment of parental and community supervision so that such drinking can occur in a responsible way. Yes, kids will probably drink more often, and yes, more kids will probably try alcohol, but they can do so in an environment of safety and responsibility.
Bringing it into the light, rather than driving it underground, is the best way to solve bingeing and abuse.
I've described here before how my dad would offer us a sip of what he was drinking and how I tried drinking for the first time at my cousin's wedding because my parents were there, and I knew nothing bad would happen to me. I ended up throwing up at the side of the road. My dad laughed at me for overdoing it.
This attitude did not breed a desire to get trashed at college. Quite the contrary. When drinking hasn't been forbidden -- as it is not in France, for example -- it becomes just part of life and not part of life that you're determined to do to defy authority.
Sure, some kids will become drunks under these circumstances. But drinking itself doesn't cause alcoholism, and kids taught to drink in moderation are going to be less likely to be alcohol abusers.
It turns out that a bunch of college administrators agree with me. Tucker writes about the Amethyst Initiative:
There is an organization of college administrators who are fed up. It is called the Amethyst Initiative. Currently, 135 colleges have signed support for a lower drinking age. Their goal is not to encourage more drinking but to recognize the unreality of the current law, and how it has led to perverse consequences on campus.You know the situation has to be extremely serious to get this risk-averse crowd on board. Their statement reads:
A culture of dangerous, clandestine "binge-drinking"--often conducted off-campus--has developed. Alcohol education that mandates abstinence as the only legal option has not resulted in significant constructive behavioral change among our students.Adults under 21 are deemed capable of voting, signing contracts, serving on juries and enlisting in the military, but are told they are not mature enough to have a beer. By choosing to use fake IDs, students make ethical compromises that erode respect for the law.
t's not just about campus. It's about teens and drinking in general. The law requires them to hide in private places. Such clandestine meetings can lead to compromising and dangerous situations without reliable public oversight.
It's also about business. Convenience stores and bars, in particular, have been put in a strange position. They have been enlisted to become the enforcement arm of an unenforceable policy, which has meant haranguing customers, inventing new systems for ferreting out violators, turning the servers into cops, confiscating IDs and creating an environment of snooping and threats in a place that should be about service and fun.
Why isn't something done to change this? Those who are most affected have the least political power. By the time they figure out the ropes in American political life, they are turning 21 and so no longer have to deal with the problem.
Turning College-Aged Citizens Into Toddlers With "Affirmative Consent"
Who would have thought that in 2015, fifty-some years after the start of the "free love" 1960s, that government would be all up in college students' sex lives?
But government is -- and never mind if your kind of sex life is like mine: where consent is something you don't get on videotape or in writing or ask for before every sex act, a la "May I lick your right nipple? May I twist your left nipple and then slowly lick it?"
Wendy Kaminer writes in the Boston Globe about the affirmative consent rules imposed on college campuses by California law and that Federal money (that is, the prospect of it being withheld) is being used to force these rules on other campuses around the country.
It's unlikely that any students will consistently comply with the new rules, which are difficult to reconcile with the realities of sexual interactions, and, in any case, it's unclear what compliance might entail. New York's law requires "knowing [and] voluntary" consent, "given by words or actions . . . creat[ing] clear permission . . . to engage in sexual activity," including any "intentional [sexual] touching, either directly or through the clothing." Consent to any sexual act -- or touch -- may not be inferred from consent to prior acts, which means that consent should be repeated and ongoing. Is this law meant to be taken literally? Maybe."It's a question of putting everyone on notice that they have to be in a consensual situation," New York Assemblywoman Deborah Glick, told The New York Times. "It also sends a message to the institutions that they have to up their game on how sexual assault on campus is viewed and treated."
How dare Glick tell the rest of us how sex is supposed to play out?
Kaminer gets it right:
What's wrong with teaching students and administrators that "yes means yes"? Nothing, but affirmative consent laws are not teaching tools. They mandate punitive rules that operate like quasi-criminal laws on campus, posing serious risks of expulsion to students accused of not obtaining consent for every move or for acting on mistaken impressions of implied consent. Assault accusations will be relatively easy to sustain, especially under the minimal standard of proof now applied in campus cases. Disproving assault, by establishing scrupulous compliance with affirmative consent policies, will be much harder. How might a student demonstrate that he repeatedly obtained consent? "Your guess is as good as mine," admitted California Assemblywoman Bonnie Lowenthal, who coauthored that state's law.When advocates of these laws acknowledge the difficulty of proving consent, when they praise regulations of alleged sexual assaults for "sending messages," they're implicitly endorsing discriminatory enforcement. Affirmative consent policies are not designed to govern every encounter. They're designed to bring about findings of guilt, or responsibility when rape accusations are leveled -- mainly against men accused of assaulting women.
Lifty
Perkylinks.
Nice Prices For People Who Sometimes Say F*ck
For some reason, my book seems to be on special or at an oddly low price at Amazon -- half off, at $7.61 (list price $14.99). Not sure how long it will stay that way (might be part of a pricing algorithm at Amazon).
So if you haven't read it, please use this opportunity to get yours now: "Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck."
It's a science-based and funny book on how we can behave less counterproductively.
Along with positive reviews in the WSJ and other publications, Library Journal gave the book a starred review: "Verdict: Solid psychology and a wealth of helpful knowledge and rapier wit fill these pages. Highly recommended."
Orders of the book (new only, not used!) help support my writing on this blog and my answering questions that won't make my column.
"Affordable" Care: Some In "Covered CA" Likely To See Double Digit Premium Hikes
From the LA Times, Chad Terhune writes:
Covered California is expected to announce 2016 rates and coverage options Monday in Sacramento. Officials declined to discuss the results of their insurance company negotiations before then.California's rate increases are a closely watched yardstick for how President Obama's signature health law is performing nationwide. This year, the average increase was a relatively modest 4.2%.
Next year, premiums for the most popular Silver plans are projected to rise 5.8%, on average, in eight exchange markets outside California, according to Avalere Health, a Washington consulting firm.
But double-digit rate hikes are likely to hit some of the 1.4 million Californians enrolled, depending on their health insurer and where they live.
In all, 44% of exchange policyholders already find it difficult to pay their monthly premiums, a recent survey shows.
Yes, thanks to the "Affordable" Care Act, I still HAVE my healthcare (that I've paid for monthly, sans employer, for decades); but thanks to my now-huge deductible, I just can't afford to use it.
Oh, and about those fabulous rates. From 2014, from the LAT's Stuart Pfeifer: "Health premiums soared, Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones says."
Californians paid 22% to 88% more for individual health coverage this year than last, commissioner says.
Do the LA Times reporters not have a search index for their own paper?
From the Pfeifer piece:
At a news conference Tuesday, Jones said individuals this year paid between 22% and 88% more for individual health insurance policies than they did last year, depending on age, gender, type of policy and where they lived.The increases did not affect poor people, whose policies are heavily subsidized, Jones said. The study results released Tuesday did not include group policies such as those offered by employers.
Jones said he authorized the study of health insurance rates after receiving numerous complaints about rising costs.
"The rate increase from 2013 to 2014, on average, was significantly higher than rate increases in the past," Jones said.
The hardest-hit were young people, he said. In one region of Los Angeles County, people age 25 paid 52% more for a silver plan than they had for a similar plan the year before, while someone age 55 paid 38% more, Jones said.
Yes, 25-year-olds, you're out of college, deep in debt from student loans for college costs that are far greater than they've ever been, and you're paying for your dad's golf partner to have cheaper health care. (Aren't you glad you campaigned for Obama?)
Police Raid First, Figure Out What They're Raiding Later
This is how innocent people get killed -- when the police come in all SWAT team without asking questions first. Alex Horton, who himself conducted raids on insurgents in Iraq, writes in the WaPo about the police raid on his apartment:
I had conducted the same kind of raid on suspected bombmakers and high-value insurgents. But the Fairfax County officers in my apartment were aiming their weapons at a target whose rap sheet consisted only of parking tickets and an overdue library book....I spread my arms out to either side. An officer jumped onto my bed and locked handcuffs onto my wrists. The officers rolled me from side to side, searching my boxers for weapons, then yanked me up to sit on the edge of the bed.
At first, I was stunned. I searched my memory for any incident that would justify a police raid. Then it clicked.
Earlier in the week, the managers of my apartment complex moved me to a model unit while a crew repaired a leak in my dishwasher. But they hadn't informed my temporary neighbors. So when one resident noticed the door slightly cracked open to what he presumed was an unoccupied apartment, he looked in, saw me sleeping and called the police to report a squatter.
Sitting on the edge of the bed dressed only in underwear, I laughed. The situation was ludicrous and embarrassing. My only mistake had been failing to make sure the apartment door was completely closed before I threw myself into bed the night before.
...When I later visited the Fairfax County police station to gather details about what went wrong, I met the shift commander, Lt. Erik Rhoads. I asked why his officers hadn't contacted management before they raided the apartment. Why did they classify the incident as a forced entry, when the information they had suggested something innocuous? Why not evaluate the situation before escalating it?
Rhoads defended the procedure, calling the officers' actions "on point." It's not standard to conduct investigations beforehand because that delays the apprehension of suspects, he told me.
Rhoads also defends the approach on grounds of officer safety. But civilian safety should be a priority, too -- to the point where you sometimes, yes, delay or even miss the apprehension of suspects...until you're sure that you've, say, got the right apartment and have evidence that the people in it are guilty of something other than overdue library books.
RELATED -- my fun experience with LAPD officers playing SWAT.
Oh, and did I mention that I was the victim here? A woman hit my parked car. No, my parked car did not leap up out of the space and slam into hers. Which is why her insurance company ended up giving me $661 for the damage her car did to mine.
So...why was the LAPD outside my house at 11 p.m., using their patrol car loudspeaker, "Amy Alkon, come out of the house"?
Oh, it's such fun to pretend you're the SWAT team when there's a 51-year-old woman in the house who is only guilty of being a few days behind in giving her dog a bath. (I don't do drugs -- though I support what should be your right to do them. I even stop at stop signs. Completely.)
Yet, cop car loudspeaker: "Amy Alkon, come out of the house!"
Oopsy, Amy knows her rights. "Nothing doing!" (Assholes!)
Limpy
Linkie with an ingrown toenail.
Sandra Bland: With The Full 52 Minute Tape, The Thug Cop's Wrongdoing Is Clear
We don't have laws that demand you speak in a cheery and kowtowing tone to a cop.
Yet, not doing that seems to be what led to Bland's arrest and subsequent death in jail -- maybe with a few scoops of DWB: Driving While Black.
Ty Burr posts the 52-minute video and the story at the Boston Globe -- the parts of the story you probably haven't seen or heard:
The second [half of the story] comes several minutes later, the camera continuing to record as Bland's car is searched, and Encinia, sitting in his vehicle, can be heard discussing the incident with his sergeant. Here is where we hear the trooper revise the narrative of what has just occurred, unconsciously or not, so that he can come out the level-headed good guy.At 23:35 on the tape, he says "I tried to de-escalate her and I wasn't getting anywhere at all. . . . I tried talking to her, calming her down, and that was not working. I'm trying to get her detained, trying to get her to calm down, just calm her down, stop throwing your arms around. She never swung at me, just flailing, stomping around, and I said, all right, that's enough, and that's when I detained her."
This is in flagrant contradiction of everything we've just witnessed; it is, quite simply, a lie. At no time did Trooper Encinia attempt to "de-escalate" the situation with Bland. On the contrary, he pushed it forward until it exploded -- until he exploded.
Still talking with his supervisor, Encinia is heard reading the definitions of "assault" and "resisting arrest," trying to decide which charge would best fit. 27:00: "I kinda lean toward assault rather than resist. I mean, technically, she's under arrest when the traffic stop is initiated. You're not free to go. I didn't say 'you're under arrest,' 'stop, hands up.' That did not occur. There was just the assault part."
Welcome to American roadside justice, where you're arrested the moment you're pulled over and they figure out what for later. 33:58: Encinia is laughing by now. The sergeant apparently asks if he was hurt in the incident. "I got some cuts on my hand," he replies. "I guess it is an injury. I don't need medical attention. I got three little circles from I guess the handcuffs when she was twisting away from me." This will later morph into further proof that Bland assaulted Encinia. Again the trooper insists, "I only took enough force as seemed necessary -- I even de-escalated once we were on the pavement."
He seems to believe it by now. It sounds good, true, strong. He has convinced himself he's a decent guy. That he did the right thing.
Absolute abuse of power.
Here's the 52-minute tape, starting with Texas state trooper Brian Encinia's chatty warning to the woman he pulled over before Bland:
A Woman Who Spends Her Time Creating Tech Stuff Instead Of Cataloging Insults
Oops! She forgot to be a victim!
Meredith L. Patterson writes at Medium:
Growing up with autism is a never-ending series of lessons in how people without autism expect the rest of the world to relate to them. This goes double for those who -- like me -- went undiagnosed until adulthood: the instructions are far less explicit and the standards are higher. "Stop drumming your pencil, don't you know you're distracting people?" "Don't be so direct, don't you know you're being insulting?" "Put yourself in her shoes -- when are you going to develop a sense of empathy?" Invariably, the autistic behaviour is marked as less-than, called out as needing to change. So we adapt; we learn to keep our "abnormal" attitudes and behaviours to ourselves in the hope of blending in, and when we discover communities where, by chance, we fit in a little better without having to try so hard, we cling to those safe spaces like a drowning man clings to a lifebuoy.I stumbled into my first such space when I was eight, and its name was FidoNet. I didn't think of myself as a programmer back then, just a girl who liked fractals and science fiction and BASIC on my IBM PCjr, but the virtual world of BBS message boards made orders of magnitude more sense than the everyday world of classrooms, sports teams, church groups and grade-school social dynamics.
Nobody on FidoNet ever told me "no girls allowed" -- or even implied it, at least to an extent that I might have picked up on -- and as a result, the assertion that "technology is a boys' club" has always been foreign to me. Sure, I was always one of a scant handful of girls in the after-school computer or science club, but none of that mattered when there were NASA missions or flight simulator games to geek out on. I was well into my twenties before anyone of any gender thought to remark on the rarity of a woman being interested in the finer points of, e.g., C++ memory management; I'd come from the Midwest to my very first tech conference, and at the time I was far more amazed by the sheer concentration of people who were interested in C++ at all. I made friends largely by virtue of not knowing who I was supposed to be impressed by. I was there because I loved working with technology, and I gravitated to people who shared the same passions. Everything else was background noise.
I have since been made painfully aware that my experience is atypical. Every time, it has been a woman who has done so. Every time, it has been a lesson in how the woman I am talking with expects the tech world to relate to her and other people like her.
...Ironically, I have been discriminated against in the tech world because of my gender; I just didn't notice until it was brought to my attention long after the fact. Several years ago, I posted an idea for a new feature to the developers' mailing list for an open-source project I used. It got one reply -- a few questions from another list member -- and the thread ended there. Those questions helped me refine my thinking about the feature, and over the next few months, I implemented it. Much later -- after I'd presented my implementation at a couple of user groups and conferences -- one of the commit-bit holders for the project mentioned to me that there had been some additional discussion of my proposal, on the private commit-bit holders' mailing list. There had been interest, but one of the committers had dismissed the idea out of hand because a woman had proposed it. It was the funniest thing I'd heard in months -- I literally doubled over laughing at how nonplussed he must have been to see it not only implemented, but implemented to rousing success.
The world will not always be your oyster. Not if you're a woman, not if you're a man.
What do you do? Instead of whining, you keep doing -- till you're so good they'd hire you if you were a tree frog.
The Difference Between The Israelis And The Palestinians
When Israelis commit crimes against Palestinians or those Israelis who seek peaceful coexistence with them -- the Israelis are prosecuted by their government.
This happened recently when two brothers were given heavy sentences for their arson at an Arab/Israeli preschool.
When Palestinians commit crimes -- horrible crimes -- against Israelis, they get money from their government.
From a CBN News piece, "Cash for Killers: US Funding Palestinian Terrorists?" by Erick Stakelbeck:
"Peace doesn't have a chance because peace doesn't pay," said award-winning investigative journalist Edwin Black. "Because anytime that they want some income, all they've got to do is commit an act of terrorism."In his latest book, Financing the Flames, the New York Times bestselling author details how the Palestinian Authority rewards terrorists who have killed Israelis.
"As soon as a terrorist commits an act of terrorism against an innocent civilian in Israel -- whether that's cutting the throat of a child or stabbing a man standing at a bus or blowing up a building," Black said. "As soon as that man does that, he goes on a special salary from the Palestinian Authority, under Palestinian law -- a law known as the Law of the Prisoner."
The more Israelis killed, the bigger the financial reward.
"He gets a graduated salary depending on how heinous the crime is," Black continued. "If he kills five people and gets five years, he gets one salary. If he kills double that number and gets double the sentence, he gets double the salary. And so this actually incentivizes the misery, mayhem, and carnage that the terrorists commit."
Slurpee
Linkie with brain freeze.
Great Tits!
No, sorry, just science.
Female Officer Fails To Make Military Cuddly Enough For Women, Is Dismissed
Cathy Young writes at Newsday about U.S. Marine Lt. Col. Kate I. Germano, dismissed because of accusations of "hostile, unprofessional and abusive" behavior toward recruits.
Female recruits, that is.
Whom she felt should have to meet a few standards and not have lesser standards applied to them than are applied to men. For example:
When Germano took over as commander of an all-female battalion of recruits on Parris Island, she discovered that 21 percent of those recruits failed to meet qualification standards at rifle marksmanship, compared with 7 percent of male recruits.Traditionally, lower standards for women in this area (in which women are capable of achieving the same skills as men) had been tacitly accepted as the norm. Germano would have none of it. She set out to raise women's rifle qualification rates -- and, in a year, improved them from 79 to 91 percent.
In other areas, too, Germano pushed higher standards and equal expectations for women.
She also didn't let women have...yes...chairs!...at the end of a training course, in case the poor dears were tired, while men were made to stand.
Some officers described her as "firm but fair." But some found her approach too authoritarian and even abusive. Apparently, one of her transgressions was telling female trainees the men would not respect them or take orders from them if they could not meet high standards of physical performance. A report obtained by the Marine Corps Times claimed that such a message "reinforced gender bias and stereotypes."Apparently, Germano also deviated from the party line on sexual assault by emphasizing prevention and telling trainees that heavy drinking put them at risk. This led some women to claim they would not feel "safe" reporting an assault.
After complaints from some recruits, there was an investigation and a command climate online survey, completed by about two-thirds of the battalion, in which half of the respondents said the leadership failed to promote a climate of respect and trust. Germano says the complaints came from disgruntled low performers and the survey was skewed because it allowed multiple voting.
Germano's supporters say she was penalized because male commanders were put off by her bluntness and her aggressive efforts to promote coed exercises. The Times followed its report on her ouster -- which omitted the complaints about her supposedly "victim-blaming" message on sexual assault -- with an op-ed criticizing the Marines' "culture of hypermasculinity" as an obstacle to women. But it seems that what Germano ran into was a culture of hypersensitivity.
The Real Sexual Double Standard -- The Meaningful One -- Is In Sexual Assault Accusations
From Ashe Schow at the WashEx:
Across the country, young college men are being accused of sexually assaulting young college women based either solely on an accusation or occasionally on flimsy witness statements.No one is arguing that sexual assaults never happen. But the degree to which the definition has been broadened in order to "fix" the "epidemic" has ensnared many young students who are not the monsters the media would have you believe.
...If two people get into a fist fight, both can file charges -- there's no "first to file" standard. If there is a clear instigator, the charges against them might hold up better. For campus sexual assault, all that matters is who accuses -- usually the woman, especially if she has had feminist professors or Title IX coordinators help her reinterpret a drunken hookup as rape.
...Schools go out of their way to prove that men who have been accused weren't too drunk to consent but that women who are accusing were too drunk. Policies are also written to ensure there are clear guilty and innocent parties, i.e., that the accuser is innocent and the accused is guilty, despite evidence showing that both were unable to give consent.
At some point this double-standard must be addressed -- and ended.
Sloppy
Messylinks.
Man Ashamed Of His Own Balls (Wherever They Might Be) Engages In Overthink And Masochism Over Backyard Weenie Roasts
Yes, I'm blogging about that pathetic Slate piece by pathetic "I'm a male feminist" Joseph Brogan, who lays down paragraph after paragraph about his shame in heating food outside on a grill.
I still suspect he'll come out in a couple days and say this was all a big joke -- "Hey, dummies, didn't you get that it was satire?"
Here's a sample -- brief, since you've probably already read the thing, and also, because it's such a pathetic read:
I hate how much I love to grill. It's not that I'm inclined to vegetarianism or that I otherwise object to the practice itself. But I'm uncomfortable with the pleasure I take in something so conventionally masculine....I take food prep a little too seriously, curtly brushing others out of the way when I step up to the kitchen counter. In my online dating days, I tried to spin this fault as a feature, describing myself as "a finicky, meticulous cook." On reflection, I'm probably just kind of a jerk, but when I'm grilling I worry that I've become something even worse. Am I shoving others out of the way because it makes me feel like a man? Have I become some sort of monster?
Yes, a real Dr. Mengele of the hot dog roast.
Feminism, as of late, is largely about making men feel badly for being male -- when you can't have them demoted or forced out of jobs for "crimes" that they didn't actually commit, as in the cases of Sir Tim Hunt and Bora Zivkovic before him (whose name has yet to be cleared -- but needs to be).
But when feminists aren't making "male feminists" (which is a bit like being a black, Jewish, white supremicist) ashamed for being male, these dutiful pussymen step up and self-shame...sometimes in lengthy Slate articles like this one.
More from Brogan's gnashing, complete with obligatory anthro wordery:
[Men's] grills become symbolic meeting points. They enable what scholars call homosocial contact, a kind of same-sex intimacy that deflects the supposed dangers of sexual contact between men but allows them to confirm their masculinity by excluding women.
I got a little girlwoody when he used the word "homosocial." (Translation: It's a bro thing.)
This is the most pathetic piece I have read in a long time.
I still suspect the guy was joking.
Music Hall Supposedly Should Have Known That 28-Year-Old Would Behave Like An 8-Year-Old
Medical resident Dr. Rajan Verma fell and died while sliding down a banister at Buffalo's Tralf Music Hall. 
His mother is suing the concert hall -- blaming them for his death because they put a "sticky substance" on the banister to deter adult asses (uh, concertgoers) from sliding down it.
From WIVB:
From Courthouse News's Kevin Lessmiller:
"Defendants improperly used a 'sticky substance' such as double-sided tacky tape to increase friction on the banister and deter concertgoers from sliding down it," the complaint states. "Unfortunately, this 'sticky substance' caused decedent Dr. Verma to lose his center of gravity and caused him to drop in between the staircase and the wall."In addition to the sticky substance, the lawsuit also blames the concert hall's design for his death.
"Given the prior conduct of multiple concertgoers and the fact alcohol is served on the premises, it should have been anticipated that concertgoers would 'ride the banister' and that they could possibly fall between the wall and staircase," the lawsuit states. "By having sufficient space between the wall and staircase rail to allow a person to fall, defendants Acquest Theater and Acquest Development were also negligent in preventing the fall that ultimately took the life of decedent Dr. Verma."
Mom's suing for $2.5 mill for "wrongful death."
The death of a 28-year-old is tragic -- but the death of accountability isn't a good thing, either.
via @Overlawyered
Bitchy! It's What's For Breakfast! (Don't Scrape My Bumper!)
I taped this on my car window on on Monday, after three cars nearly scraped mine while trying to park behind it after we all have to move our cars for a few hours of street cleaning.
I saw them -- three ginormous vehicles that wouldn't have fit into the space -- because I have to wait in my car after I move it back until a little before noon (grr, annoying), so I won't get a ticket.
To give you a little background, now that Venice, where I live, has become "hot," we get a lot of assholes parking on our street.
Rude drivers (visitors, not neighbors) scrape my bumper while parking, and one recently sideswiped my car -- including doing some damage to my driver's side mirror -- and I'm sick of it.
I don't hit or scrape people's cars; in fact, I sometimes will do eight little mini-turns so I get out of a space without any nickage of another person's vehicle...which is just rude as hell.
Oh, and I did witness one jerk of a girl hitting my car. Her insurance company ended up giving me $661 for the damage, which I used to buy a plane ticket (annoyingly pricey!) to the ev psych conference in Missouri instead of fixing my vehicle. (Priorities!)
What can I say? Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck Don't Scrape My Fucking Car.
(My agent refers to me as "Emily Postal.")
Worst Product Name Ever -- Or Close
Guessing cultural illiteracy by the namer. Hoping for it, anyway!
Another -- from a tweet by Steven Jones:
@jones4440
@amyalkon @dustbury Speaking of product names, Sears had a line of ladies' jeans named Sag Harbor.
Do they have coma patients come up with these names?
Loopy
Wackolinks.
Cops Who Can't Keep Their Cool
If you need people to be achingly polite to you when you're on the job, get a job serving tea at The Four Seasons.
Ashley C. Ford tweet:
@iSmashFizzle
Me: It's not illegal to be rude to cops.
Them: Well, if you poke a bear, what do you expect?
Me: That's why we don't make bears cops.
Sandra Bland voicemail left for a friend: "...How did switching lanes with no signal turn into all of this, I don't even know."
What's Wrong With Princesses?
Why is it supposedly damaging and awful that girls like pink and want to play "Princess"?
What if they just aren't into the toys that are supposed to funnel them into STEM careers?
Regarding boys and girls' different toy preferences and those trying to push girls into more STEM-directed play, we're sending a message of "boys' toys = good; girls' toys = bad," observes evolutionary psychologist Steve Stewart-Williams in a 2012 post at PsychologyToday.com:
Is it realistic to think we can re-engineer girls' preferences so easily? And what's so terrible about their preferences, anyway? New options are always good - but does the pink aisle really need to be disrupted?
He's writing about "GoldieBlox," a construction toy designed specifically for girls. The manufacturers of GoldieBlox have high hopes for their new product. Their aim is 'to disrupt the pink aisle and inspire the future generation of female engineers.'"
He quotes Emily Jashinsky from a post at AEI:
The efforts of GoldieBlox may truly be empowering to a minority of girls who indeed prefer tinkering to tailoring and building to Barbies. But the message that the company sends in this viral video--intentionally or otherwise--demeans and condescends the 'pink aisle' play preferences of most girls. And it seems to be premised on the false (and arguably sexist) conclusion that princess play is less intellectually stimulating than Lego-stacking. What's most important is that we value equally the play preferences of young girls and boys and respect their choices--whether a little girl enthusiastically nurtures her baby doll or happens to prefer blocks.
Emily Jashinsky adds at AEI:
If GoldieBlox can successfully inspire more interested girls to pursue STEM careers, I applaud their efforts. Just as long as they don't mock the average girl's love for her Barbie in the process. My advice: don't distress if your daughter would rather play with dolls than building sets- and don't try to reengineer her play preferences either.
A tweet to me that puts the toy thing perfectly:
@rckiser
@amyalkon It's perplexing the idea that "We should value boys and girls equally, as long as [girls] act like traditional boys."
And from one of my posts from a few years back:
Why should we push women to be, say, physicists (to correct some perceived imbalance -- as if the gender of a researcher should matter) if they'd rather be, say, veterinarians? Or...sell advertising space. And, as Steven Pinker asked at the Human Behavior and Evolution Society conference in Austin, Texas, a few years back, if we're pushing women to go into physics, should we also be pushing men to go into talking and helping professions?
For a terrific book on male/female sex differences, read Joyce Benenson's Warriors and Worriers: The Survival of the Sexes
Here's my New York Observer piece referencing Benenson's work, in which there's a mention of how even female chimps engage in what seems to be doll play. And surely not because they saw commercials for Barbies on Saturday morning TV.
And finally for a little more of the truth about girls, here's a link to the radio show Dr. Jennifer Verdolin and recently did on the evolution of "mean girls" and how to beat their system.
The First Amendment Is There To Protect Assholes, Not People Who Go Around Saying "Have A Nice Day!"
The same goes for the rule of law and city codes rather than the rule of bullies.
But, per links from Walter Olson, the Mayor of Boston has come out as a business suit-wearing thug.
The blogger at Coyote Blog, who picked up Walter's link, notes that the Boston Mayor's announcement -- that Donald Trump will never get permits in Boston -- shows how corrupted business licensing is by politics:
Boston mayor says Trump will never get any city permits because of his political views.If Donald Trump ever wants to build a hotel in Boston, he'll need to apologize for his comments about Mexican immigrants first, the Hub's mayor said."I just don't agree with him at all," Boston Mayor Martin J. Walsh told the Herald yesterday. "I think his comments are inappropriate. And if he wanted to build a hotel here, he'd have to make some apologies to people in this country."
Olson adds:
And no, I'm not exactly thrilled with Mayor Walsh for making me take Trump's side in an argument.
More from Olson:
P.S. Now the NYC sequel, from Mayor Bill de Blasio: no more city contracts for the guy with the wrong opinions [The Hill]
These Mayors seem under the impression they were coronated, not elected.
And no, I don't care if the guy said we should feel babies to the squirrels, piece by piece. If he meets the fiscal and other standards imposed by law to get contracts, he should get contracts.
Also, I'd vote for my desk before I voted for Donald Trump. And no, I'm not kidding.
Lurky
Shadowylinks.
Newly Released Dashcam Video: Disgusting Abuse Of Position By Cop Ends In Sandra Bland's Death
This cop is, plain and simple, a power-mad shit in policewear who used his position in law enforcement to abuse a woman when she didn't kowtow to him quite the way he wanted her to.
His behavior on this tape -- in the situation turned into Bland's arrest and led to her subsequent death in jail -- is beyond disgusting.
And note that the guy pulled her over for failing to flip her turn signal when changing lanes, not because he saw a bunch of illegal arms falling out of her trunk.
At one point, King Cop eve orders her to put out her cigarette -- a cigarette she was smoking inside her own car while waiting for him to come back with her ticket.
I liked her spirit -- she questions why the hell she would have to do that...in her own car.
Watch the rest -- the abuse by this rotten cop -- that led to this spirited, intelligent, woman, guilty of no crime, spending three days in jail that led to her death (possibly at her own hand, by hanging).
The WaPo story with more details is here.
"The Silence Of The Shams": The Respected Science Writers Involved In The Wrongful Ruin Of Tim Hunt
This is an amazing long read by Louise Mensch, who is admirably relentless in trying to see the truth come out about the horrible injustice done to Sir Tim Hunt.
She titled it "The Silence of the Shams," and quotes Professor Nicholas Nassim Taleb's bestseller, Antifragile, which includes note on ethics in the beginning of the book:
If you see fraud, and do not say fraud, you are a fraud.
Mensch calls out respected science writers like Pulitzer winner Deborah Blum and RetractionWatch's Ivan Oransky for their shameful part in the pillorying that was done to Hunt. (FYI: I had email contact with Oransky a few years ago -- asking him to go after a researcher for what I believed to be clear evidence of plagiarism.)
Regarding what was done to Hunt, inspired by what Mensch laid out in her piece, I've tweeted to both Blum and Oransky (Tuesday night, Pacific Time at around 7:30 p.m.) asking for an explanation.
And I noted that both Oransky and Blum were part of the mob that piled on former Sci Am blogs editor Bora Zivkovic, whose life was basically ruined by a similar sort of injustice (similar to what was done to Sir Tim Hunt). And never mind that nothing he did met the standards for what he was being accused of -- sexual harassment.
My sense of why so many supposed skeptics pile on in these cases? It's a form of religion -- religion without the god in it -- in which these so-called "skeptics" are such fundamentalists for Social "Justice" and feminism and the like that they are blind to even the remotest interest in the truth and actual justice.
And my call to everybody out there -- let's all be more like Louise.
And remember the words of Taleb:
If you see fraud, and do not say fraud, you are a fraud.
Some of my tweets on this to Oransky and Blum -- not in order (and do note the dates on the individual tweets): 
Another set:
Indeed...Deborah and Ivan, what are your explanations?
Linkity
Uppity, like me.
The Ridiculousness Of Military Bases And Places Being "Gun-Free Zones"
We make our military sitting ducks for the likes of the Chattanooga shooter.
Bob Owens, author of the ebook "So You Want to Own a Gun," writes at the LA Times:
Despite being active-duty servicemen with military weapons training, few of the victims in these attacks had an opportunity to defend themselves, thanks to Department of Defense Directive 5210.56, enacted in 1992 under President George H.W. Bush.That policy strictly limits the military and civilian personnel who can carry firearms at military facilities to those in law enforcement or security roles. U.S. bases and recruiting centers have been "gun-free zones" ever since.
The directive made sense at the end of the Cold War, when the risks of sabotage to nuclear missile sites and command-and-control facilities were thought to be lower. The world has changed since then, and we now find ourselves embroiled in a global war on Islamic extremism.
Non-state enemy actors, including Islamic State, are pursuing the strategy of radicalizing converts within the United States to carry out attacks on Americans. Although we cannot harden every possible terrorist target in a nation as large as ours, there is proverbial "low hanging fruit," which means we can make some targets less vulnerable with minimum effort.
One of the easiest safeguards would be for the Obama administration to revise the gun rule that has made military targets such easy prey to armed attackers.
...Such a policy would ensure that there would be an armed deterrent to acts of terrorism on military targets, even at those facilities too small to warrant dedicated military or civilian security personnel.
On larger bases -- many encompassing hundreds of thousands of acres -- these armed ranking officers could provide immediate defense until existing base security arrives.
Dumb comment at LAT site from "Archibald":
Typical NRA approach to solving a deadly problem: Arm everyone.Memo to NRA: Guns are designed for only one purpose: To kill animals or people.
(The NRA gun-nut response is, "I have been shooting targets for decades and haven't killed anyone yet." The gun was designed to kill. How a person chooses to use it is the person's choice.)
People with guns kill people.
We need sane restrictions: limit magazine sizes, ban military assault rifles (AR-15 etc), background check, including closing the gun-show loophole. The FBI admitted that it failed to conduct the background check for the Chattanooga terrorist in a timely manner. If more funding is necessary to assure that background checks are performed in a timely manner, then a special tax on ammunition should be imposed. The tax could be named, "Safety First: The Background Check Tax."
We need fewer guns, not more guns.
Heroin is also illegal. A half mile from my house, you can buy it from a man on the street corner.
If You Don't Parent Your Children, Others Will Do It For You
A Maine diner owner, Darla Neugebauer, yelled at an underparented child who was screaming in her diner -- while the parents just sat there, doing nothing. From the Daily Mail/AP:
She wrote on Facebook that the girl's parents ordered her three full-sized pancakes, but put the plate out of her reach, causing the girl to cry.
Kacie Yearout and Amanda Hill, WCSH report [with annoying autoplay video]:
The owner of Marcy's Diner says after 40 minutes of listening to the child scream, she had had enough. She asked the family to leave, when they didn't -- she screamed at the child to stop. The child's mother said her 21 month old wasn't doing anything out of the ordinary, and she's defending her actions as a parent.
Guess what: If your 21-month-old cannot be in a restaurant without screaming like a goat being slaughtered, well, sorry, you should stay home for a few years -- until she's fit for others' eardrums.
And now, from the "parent," Tara Carson, and then, Neugebauer's response:
...Tara Carson, on a family vacation from New York, took to Marcy's Diner's Facebook page to complain about her experience. She wrote, "This lunatic of an owner behaved in the most unbelievable manner by screaming in the face of my child and kicking her out of the restaurant."Neugebauer's response to the post has elevated the conversation, leading some people to say they are boycotting the restaurant. She wrote, "After your third attempt to shut her up I asked you to pack up either your rotten child or take the so important pancakes to go... but noooo you just sit there and let your f---ing screaming kid go!" The post ends with, " Yes I am f---ing crazy & you are lucky I didn't get really f---ing nuts because being physical is not something I cower from."
The kid is the source of the behavior but the rottenness is all on the parents.
The Actually "Marginalized Voices" On Campus
Jonathan Haidt has written and discussed this -- how academics are, by and large, politically liberal and not accepting of conservative colleagues or conservative views.
There's a piece in TIME by Tai Fortgang that originally ran on The College Fix about the ways students enjoy "left-wing privilege" on campus.
(In case you're wondering, I'm neither left nor right but a fiscally conservative libertarian who believes in gay marriage and that you have a right to use drugs and engage in prostitution with other consenting adults.)
Fortgang writes:
Among the great ironies surrounding the state of academia is the continued insistence on hearing more and more "marginalized voices" and increasing "diversity" on campus, as if there is some kind of archaic conservative establishment making that difficult to do.One would likely be hard-pressed to find a more left-leaning group than college professors and admissions officers, who prioritize pulling marginalized groups out of their marginalization and adding people of diverse cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds to campus conversations.
Yet in their efforts to achieve a more egalitarian conversation, left-wing academics and their students completely ignore (at best) and marginalize (at worst) students and the rare colleague who disagree with them politically.
And therein lies the ultimate irony: The very voices that decry inequality in all its manifestations either accept or turn a blind eye to the stunning dearth of conservative academics and the de facto censorship of right-wing students on overwhelmingly left-wing campuses.
Were it some other group suffering such a marginalization, there is no doubt that the left would be up in arms, crying discrimination and demanding rectification.
Some might even call such a monopoly on prevailing campus orthodoxy a type of "privilege," defined as an asset "of value that is denied to others simply because of the groups they belong to," to quote Peggy McIntosh, the matriarch of privilege's modern construction.
As LibertarianHome tweeted:
@LibertarianHome
Left-wing privilege: never choosing "between writing what I believe and writing what will get a good grade"
Testosterone, The Hormone Of Aggression -- Also A Helping Hormone?
At SocialEthology.com, ethologist Dorian Furtuna posts:
Men with a high level of testosterone in their blood will suddenly become more generous towards their group members and, at the same time, more aggressive towards the foreign rivals; they will be more willing to risk for the sake of their group, to engage in competition and fights for the common good and to punish those who cheat or refuse to fight for the group's cause.This altruist behavior of self-sacrifice usually applies only to competition and intergroup conflicts. Therefore, testosterone does not necessarily induce antisocial attitudes and actions, but is rather involved in a much more complex behavioral mechanism, which has an adaptive role [Diekhof et al., 2014].
Linkeroni
With extra gluten -- all the gluten they take out of all those products now in the supermarket.
Weather Retort
Excuse me, Weather, but this is Venice, California, not the fucking Everglades.
To explain, you become a weather weenie after you've lived here (in So Cal) for, oh, 20 minutes.
Though it's humid here now, typically, we don't have "weather"; we have fires, mudslides, earthquakes, and freeway chases.
Smith College President Learns That You Can Be Too "Inclusive"
Smith College president Kathleen McCartney caught heat for an email she sent to the student body, saying "all lives matter" rather than using the slogan "black lives matter," referencing the deaths of Eric Garner and others.
Fox News's Maxim Lott writes:
"We are united in our insistence that all lives matter," read the e-mail,in which she made clear she was strongly behind the protests, writing that the grand jury decisions had "led to a shared fury... We gather in vigil, we raise our voices in protest."But she soon received backlash from students for her phrasing. They were offended that she did not stick with the slogan "black lives matter."
The Daily Hampshire Gazette, which first covered the story, quoted one Smith sophomore, Cecelia Lim, as saying, "it felt like she was invalidating the experience of black lives."
In response to student backlash, McCartney apologized in another campus-wide email Friday, saying she had made a mistake "despite my best intentions."
She wrote that the problem with the phrase lay in how others had used it.
"I regret that I was unaware the phrase/hashtag "all lives matter" has been used by some to draw attention away from the focus on institutional violence against Black people," she wrote.
Hi, you're a bunch of college students -- mostly at an age where you're considered adults. Read it in context, you idiots.
Yes, kiddies...context matters.
via @Mark_J_Perry
Letting Go Of A Sick Pet
Are we doing too much for our sick pets?
That's the question Meilssa Dahl asks in a moving piece at NY Mag's Science of Us, headlined "I Spent Thousands to Keep My Sick Cat Alive. I Don't Think I'd Do It Again":
In hindsight, I can see the point I should've shifted course to planning a good death for Kitty rather than stubbornly fighting for her life. Last summer, the chest taps started increasing in frequency -- once, she needed three in a month. "These are not benign and have the potential to cause bleeding," the emergency vet wrote in the medical records after the third one, adding that each tap created inflammation and scar tissue.And yet her vets and I decided to stay the course; even as the taps increased to every other month, the cardiologist (whom I liked very much) and I never spoke of prepping for the end of her life.
But then, even veterinarians struggle with these decisions. Rollin believes he hung on too long to a German shepherd he once had; the dog developed a degenerative spinal disease, and after a while, it couldn't walk. "I'd come home six, seven times a day and move him, so he didn't get bedsores," Rollin said. "I think now: Was that the right thing to do? I think, now, that I waited too long."
(The "Rollin" Dahl references is Bernard Rollin, a professor of philosophy and animal sciences at Colorado State University.)
I understand all too well where Dahl was coming from. I loved my late Yorkie Lucy, and I was heartbroken when, at age 15, she developed renal failure.
I, too, would likely have done what Melissa did -- tried every measure to keep her alive -- because that's our impulse. You love a person or a wee creature and you want to keep them alive.
The question is, is that for you or for your pet, and are you hurting your pet rather than helping him or her by doing it?
I answered that question in my book, "Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck," turning to Dr. Barbara Oakley's wise thinking on "pathological altruism" -- intentions to help that actually hurt.
Do random acts of judicious kindness.Sometimes, we engage in knee-jerk goodness--goodness that ultimately isn't so good. An act that, on the surface, seems kind, generous, and helpful may actually be none of these.
For years, I sneered at the term "putting your dog to sleep" as a nefarious euphemism that helped people feel better about killing a dog that had become inconvenient for them. If you value life and love your dog, keeping him or her on the planet as long as possible seems like the right thing to do. It did to me--until the vet told me that my darling fifteen-year-old Yorkie, Lucy, was in kidney failure.
We weren't at the end yet, he reassured me. He gave me meds and instructions on caring for her, but I came home in tears and called my friend Debbie. She started to cry, too, and then told me what she'd learned in putting her beloved elderly bichon, Marley, to sleep a few months before.
It took her three times going to the shelter to go through with it. That third and final time, when she saw what a peaceful process it actually turned out to be, how they really do just fall into a deep sleep as they're going out, she realized that she'd been wrong to hang on to Marley for as long as she did and that she'd done it for her benefit and not Marley's.
By telling me this, she helped me understand that being judiciously good means recognizing that keeping your dog alive when he or she no longer has a very good quality of life is prolonging suffering, not prolonging life.
About a month later, one awful morning when I saw that Lucy was struggling to keep her furry little butt up, this meant that I was prepared to do the right thing, right away.
A few hours later, when the vet opened, I rushed her there, and as I held her, petted her, and cooed to her, he gave her an injection, and she closed her eyes and floated away.
I still miss her terribly and completely, down to her tiny little musty wet doggy smell, which now only faintly lingers in some of her sweaters, but I take solace in realizing that I gave her both a good life--the best I possibly could--and a "good death."
Also from the book, Barbara Oakley on "pathological altruism" -- intending to do good that ends up doing harm:
Engineering professor Barbara Oakley studies the area of psychology that this sad situation with Lucy could have fallen into, altruism gone wrong: attempts intended to help that instead result in unanticipated harm--for the recipient, for the helper, or sometimes for both.For instance, we may tell ourselves that we're doing good when saying yes to someone's request for help feels better at that moment than saying no. Oakley, in a paper on "pathological altruism" for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, gives the example of a brother trying to overcome an addiction to painkillers. "When he goes through withdrawal, you get more painkillers to help him feel better, and you cover for him when his work supervisor calls. You genuinely want to help your brother, but the reality is that you are enabling his addiction."
...Oakley notes that we are especially blind to the ill effects of overgiving when whatever we're doing allows us to feel particularly good, virtuous, and benevolent. To keep from harming ourselves or others when we're supposed to be helping, Oakley emphasizes the importance of checking our motives when we believe we're doing good. "People don't realize how narcissistic a lot of 'helping' can be," she told me. "It's all too easy for empathy and good deeds to really be about our self-image or making ourselves happy or comfortable."
And again, frankly, had my friend Debbie not shared her wisdom with me on this -- her wisdom from her love for her dog and her attempts to keep him on the planet -- I would not have done right by Lucy. Just out of being a dumb human whose "reasoning" is biased by knee-jerk emotions. (And we're all "dumb humans," driven by cognitive biases -- cognitive shortcuts -- that seem to work for us in one situation and then get applied by our energy-conserving brain in others.)
I do try laugh about the hard stuff in life, if I can, and I'll share a little story that came out of this. Gregg handled the paperwork and details at the end. (Wonderful Gregg, my boyfriend.) Probably not wanting to go cheap, he picked out this, I dunno, 12-inch urn, and asked me to pick the particular design.
Well, Lucy, my late Yorkie, weighed about three pounds.
Me: "Honey, I think the rule is...the urn can't be bigger than the dog."
We downsized.
Humpy
Sexlinks.
University Of Wisconsin's Bias/Hate Speech Policy? In Short, Just Duct-Tape Your Mouth Shut For Four Years
UW urges students to "report bias/hate incidents."
What, you may ask, qualifies as bias/hate speech at UW? Well, pretty much anything you could say but "Pass the salt."
Definition of Bias/Hate:
Single or multiple acts toward an individual, team, or their property that have a negative impact and that one could reasonably conclude is based upon actual or perceived age, race, color, creed, religion, gender identity or expression, ethnicity, national origin, disability, veteran status, sexual orientation, political affiliation, martial status, spirituality, cultural, socio-economic status, or any combination of these or other related factors.Bias/Hate incidents include, but are not limited to: slurs, degrading language, epithets, graffiti, vandalism, intimidation, symbols, and harassment; that are directed toward or affect the targeted individual or team.
Incidents of Bias or Hate contribute to a hostile campus environment and can occur even if the act itself is unintentional or delivered as a joke, prank, or having humorous intent.
Yes, even a single joke can be considered harassment.
Of course, the real definition of harassment -- the legal one -- includes "severe and pervasive" behavior, as in repeated. Which is what those of us who have a shred of reasonable in us understand harassment to be -- basically, refusing to leave somebody alone.
And, of course, the real danger here is to free speech and free inquiry. To say they've put a chill on it is an understatement.
And, standing back from all that, boy, that campus sounds like a laugh riot.
What is this, the University of Stalin?
via @AdamKissel
Whatever Happened to Religious Freedom?
This atheist wants to know.
This despite the fact that I see plenty of evidence for the existence of dog (she's sitting in my lap as I write this) and zero evidence for the existence of god, and find believing in god about as adult as believing in Santa.
In other words, no supporter of religion; big supporter of religious freedom and freedom of association.
Roger Pilon, VP for legal affairs at Cato and director of Cato's Center for Constitutional Studies writes in the WSJ about the Oregon cake bakers -- religious people fined for refusing to bake a cake for a gay wedding, and other such cases:
How did we get to this point? Freedom of association--the simple idea that people are free to associate, or not, as they wish--certainly isn't what it once was.We've never had that freedom in its purest form, but the main restraints were once limited and reasonable. Under common law, if you held a monopoly or were a common carrier like a stage line or railroad, you had to serve all comers. If you represented your business, an inn for instance, as "open to the public," you had to honor that, though you didn't have to serve unruly customers and could negotiate what services you offered.
These rules left ample room for freedom of association more broadly, albeit with serious exceptions like Jim Crow, the deplorable state-sanctioned discrimination enforced by the heavy hand of government.
Forced association of the kind at issue with the Kleins and Giffords is a product mainly of the civil-rights movement of the 1960s. Believing, probably correctly, that the only way to break institutional racism in the South was to prohibit public and private discrimination, Congress passed civil-rights laws that forbid discrimination in wide areas of life on several grounds--such as race, religion, sex or national origin. States have also passed such laws, including those that in many jurisdictions now prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.
But uncertainty arose concerning the relation between those laws, plus others, and religious liberty. Could a state withhold unemployment benefits from a Native American who used peyote--an illegal drug--for religious purposes? Hoping to resolve such questions, a nearly unanimous Congress passed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act in 1993. Twenty-two states have since passed similar laws, but the issue remains vexed. Witness the Supreme Court's decision a year ago upholding Hobby Lobby's challenge to ObamaCare's contraceptive mandate, and the uproar over Indiana's religious freedom restoration act a few months ago.
The question at hand, then, is whether and how modern antidiscrimination laws limit the constitutional and statutory right to the free exercise of religion. Even after Obergefell, there are clear cases--on statutory, to say nothing of constitutional grounds--in which religious liberty will trump antidiscrimination claims. Clergy opposed to same-sex marriage surely will not be forced to perform or open their facilities to such ceremonies, although some in the LGBT movement are already pressing for churches to lose their tax-exempt status if they do not.
Pilon points out that the bakers didn't deny service in their publicly open bakery to gays; they just denied them custom creative work on the grounds of their religious beliefs.
Slinks
Stealthfood.
Where Privacy Ends And Content Begins: Gawker's Vile Outing Of A Private Person
"Where Privacy Ends And Content Begins" is the title of a section on the right to privacy in my book, "Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck."
It's relevant right now because of Gawker's despicable outing of the brother of a former Obama official for allegedly trying to pay a gay escort for sex. The man's brother is married and has children. And he's a magazine exec, not a politician.
At reason.com, Robby Soave gets it right on the horrible violation of the man's privacy. The story apparently came out after the now-outed man (allegedly) backed out of sex with the escort after it became clear that the escort wanted to extort him for help with his housing situation:
The escort then went to Gawker's Jordan Sargent, who gleefully carried out the blackmail threat by publishing the story and (presumably) outing [the man].[The man] is not a government official; he is not running for office; he does not have a record of hypocrisy on gay issues. The usual excuses one could propose to justify such treatment don't really apply here.
Some Gawker writers are defending the story; others are not. Natasha Vargas-Cooper, a writer for Gawker affiliate Jezebel, wrote: "Stories don't need an upside. Not everyone has to feel good about the truth. If it's true, you publish. ... I'm EXTREMELY suspicious of those who do not want press to have an antagonistic relationship to people in power."
That's a fair point, but it doesn't come close to justifying the decision to turn a family's struggles into front page news. There's just no compelling public interest here whatsoever.
Exactly right. Here's that excerpt on this from my book that explains when it is fair to yank somebody's privacy. (The reference to Brandeis and Warren starts earlier in the chapter, quoting their 1890 Harvard Law Review article on privacy):
Where privacy ends and content begins
Sometimes it is fair game to yank somebody's privacy: to publish their name, image, or whereabouts or other information about them that they'd rather not have made public. Harvard's Digital Media Law Project advises that the law protects you when you publish information that is newsworthy, meaning that there's "a reasonable relationship between the use of the (person's) identity and a matter of legitimate public interest."
Brandeis and Warren pointed out that politicians and other public or quasi-public figures have, to a great extent, "renounced the right to live their lives screened from public observation." They explained that the details about a would-be congressman's habits, activities, and foibles may say something about his fitness for office, whereas publishing something about, say, a speech impediment suffered by some "modest and retiring individual" would be an "unwarranted . . . infringement of his rights."
Still, private individuals sometimes do things that justify our stripping them of their privacy. Say some lady parks her BMW convertible in a handicapped space (sans disabled plate or placard) and jogs over to the dry cleaner. She's gambling that no ticket-giver will come by before she's back. She's also taking advantage of how, anywhere but in a small town, we're largely anonymous to the people around us, removing the natural constraint on rude behavior--concern for reputation--that's in place when people you know can see the hoggy things you're up to. We restore the reputational cost by webslapping her: taking her picture and blogging, tweeting, and Facebooking it in hopes of shaming her (and compelling other inconsiderados who see the posts) into parking like less of a douche in the future.
A webslapping is also in order for rude people who have voluntarily given up their privacy by bellowing their cell phone conversation so loudly that everyone seated around them in a restaurant is forced to listen to it, which makes it a public conversation. You don't, however, have the right to blog, tweet, Facebook, or otherwise broadcast a quiet conversation you're able to overhear between people seated behind you, assuming they aren't talking about a plot to blow up the State Department.
You likewise have no right to blog the sex acts or allegedly proposed sex acts of a private person -- one whose work has no bearing on the rest of us -- simply because you find out about them. It's rude. Also, it's evil. (And that's not a word I toss around lightly.)
Related: Michael Wolf on Gawker head Nick Denton's way of running his business.
Land Of The Pussies -- Pussies Raising Pussies
How pathetic is it that we actually need legislation in this country so parents will not be prosecuted for allowing their kids to walk to school -- unaccompanied by a parent or a team of armed guards? (Which I did just about every day of elementary school, save for maybe the first few days of kindergarten.)
Lenore Skenazy writes at reason.com:
Libertarian-leaning Republican Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), a supporter of the Free-Range Kids movement, has proposed groundbreaking federal legislation to protect the rights of kids who want to walk to school on their own.That's right: a Free-Range Kids provision made its way into the Every Child Achieves Act, a reauthorization of major federal law that governs funding and regulation of elementary education in the United States. The Free-Range Kids portion of the law would permit kids to walk or ride their bikes to school at an age their parents deem appropriate, without the threat of civil or criminal action.
Laws like this one could prevent--or at least deter--local officials from waging harassment campaigns against parents who want give their kids some autonomy. If this had been the law of the land when the Meitivs allowed their kids to walk home by themselves in Maryland, it might have forestalled the whole shebang. (Though, admittedly, the kids were coming back from the park, not school.)
Slinky
Stair-falling linkietoys.
Obviously Falsely Accused Man Freed After Two And A Half Years -- When It Becomes Wildly, Wildly Clear He Was Guilty Only Of Being A Good Samaritan
Dahlia Lithwick writes on Slate about the horrifying case of Mark Weiner, who just had his rape conviction vacated after he spent two and a half years in prison:
The story began on a December night in 2012. Weiner, then a 52-year-old man who managed a local Food Lion and attended night classes at a local community college, stopped and picked up 20-year-old Chelsea Steiniger, who was walking from a convenience store to her mother's house. Steiniger's boyfriend, Michael Mills, had just informed her that she could not sleep at his apartment, which did not permit guests after a certain hour, so she was angrily headed to stay with her mother. It was cold, it was dark, it was late. Weiner saw her and offered to drive her to her mother's house, picking her up directly across from the local police station.Mark Weiner's version of events: He drove Steiniger to her mom's house and went home.
Most of the rest of the trial narrative unfolds through the sequence of texts Steiniger sent her boyfriend as they drove to her mom's place.
At 12:10 a.m., Steiniger texted her boyfriend that "some dud[e]" was giving her a ride. At 12:18 a.m., she texted, "he tried to get in my pants." At 12:21 a.m., she texted, "just pulled up he wont let me out of the car."
At 12:23 a.m., the texts allegedly start coming from Weiner instead of Steiniger, the first one reading: "[S]he doesn't have her phone." And at 12:27: "Shes so sexy when shes passed out." At 12:28: "She was a fighter ill give her that much." At 12:36: "Ill let her wake before i let you talk to her."
When a panicking Mills texted back at 12:38 a.m., "w[h]ere are you taking her," Weiner allegedly responded: "[S]hes in my house she said she was cold so IMMa warm her up."
Steiniger testified that Weiner, while driving past the mother's house, managed to knock her out at about 12:22 a.m. with a chemical-soaked cloth that worked in 15 seconds, at which point he began sending the taunting texts to Mills. Including a text using the word IMMa--not the most common expression for white, 52-year-old Food Lion managers.
That's right: Over the course of four minutes, Weiner allegedly incapacitated Steiniger, took control of her phone, and texted her boyfriend, all while driving to a rural property late at night.
There was "a growing mountain of exculpatory evidence." As Lithwick put it:
The fact that there was a trial at all is remarkable.
But there was a trial, and the exculpatory evidence never made it there; was never turned over to the defense. This includes evidence from cops who traced the phone's whereabouts and saw it was nowhere near the abandoned building Steiniger claimed she was taken to, for example.
But the prosecutor "believed" (and believed and believed) Weiner's accuser, Steiniger, despite how obvious it was that she was lying.
Mark Weiner has lost more than two years with his young son and with his wife, he's lost his job, he's lost his family home, and he's lost every penny he ever had in savings or retirement accounts....If anyone suggests that the fact that Mark Weiner was released this week means "the system works," I fear that I will have to punch him in the neck. Because at every single turn, the system that should have worked to consider proof of Weiner's innocence failed him.
...Mark Weiner's freedom did not come about this week because the system worked. It came about because the system protected the system from abject embarrassment. That isn't justice. That's just sad.
Is There No Area Of Our Lives Govt Won't Invade? Seattle Trash Snooping To Ticket Residents For Incorrect Binning
They're looking to see if you put your carrot peels in the "wrong" bin.
Guess what: Stuff earmarked for recycling is often dumped in the same place all the rest of the garbage is.
The notion that recycling is more than a feel-good program for those participating in it is dubious, noted John Tierney in the NYT in 1996. (This is a somewhat sloppily entered version of the piece.)
The citizens of the richest society in the history of the planet suddenly became obsessed with personally handling their own waste. Believing that there was no more room in landfills, Americans concluded that recycling was their only option. Their intentions were good and their conclusions seemed plausible. Recycling does sometimes makes sense--for some materials in some places at some times. But the simplest and cheapest option is usually to bury garbage in an environrnentally safe landfill. And since there's no shortage of landfill space (the crisis of 1987 was a false alarm), there's no reason to make recycling a legal or moral imperative. Mandatory recycling programs aren't good for posterity. They offer mainly short-term benefits to a few groups--politicians, public relations consultants, environmental organizations, waste-handling corporations--while diverting money from genuine social and environmental problems. Recycling may be the most wasteful activity in modern America: a waste of time and money, a waste of human and natural resources.
I also loved the bit noting that trees are planted specifically to be harvested for paper!
To try and conserve trees by recycling paper is like acting to conserve cornstalks by cutting back on corn consumption.
Regarding recycling, this duo at MIT begs to differ.
And about the Seattle case, Jack Broom writes at the Seattle Times:
A group of privacy advocates is suing the city of Seattle, arguing that having garbage collectors look through people's trash -- to make sure food scraps aren't going into the garbage -- "violates privacy rights on a massive scale."...Since January, Seattle residents have been directed to place food scraps in the same bins as their yard waste, so that the material can be composted, instead of into garbage cans, where it would end up in a landfill.
...Ethan Blevins, an attorney with the Pacific Legal Foundation, said courts have held that even law-enforcement agencies need warrants to look through people's trash.
When the ordinance took effect in January, garbage haulers were instructed not to rip open garbage bags to inspect their contents, but to pay attention to what they could see in transparent containers, loose or coming out of bags.
If it appears that more than 10 percent of a trash can's contents are either food waste or recyclables, the drivers are to leave behind a tag, informing the resident of the violation.
Fines would be issued in the later part of the year.
Our free country becomes less and less free as we take the easy way out of problems -- legislation.
There are ways to persuade people to do societally beneficial things -- and scientific research on behavior is helpful in figuring out these ways. Seeing pictures of the dried-up lake beds and dying farmland inspired me to work harder to save water, like by taking very short showers.
Also, I rent, but if this were my house, I'd rip up the tiny lawn, plant native plants, and water them with "gray" water. (As it is, I water them with a pan of water from the Sous Vide -- not because I'm afraid of being ticketed, but because I'm inspired to do what I can.)
via @RadleyBalko
Chattanooga Shooter's Blog -- Surprise! -- Points To Islam As Motivation For Shootings
Islam demands the death or conversion of "the infidel" and the spread of "The New Caliphate" around the globe (and the removal of people's civil liberties).
The Quran contains at least 109 verses that call Muslims to war with nonbelievers for the sake of Islamic rule. Some are quite graphic, with commands to chop off heads and fingers and kill infidels wherever they may be hiding. Muslims who do not join the fight are called 'hypocrites' and warned that Allah will send them to Hell if they do not join the slaughter.Unlike nearly all of the Old Testament verses of violence, the verses of violence in the Quran are mostly open-ended, meaning that they are not restrained by the historical context of the surrounding text. They are part of the eternal, unchanging word of Allah, and just as relevant or subjective as anything else in the Quran.
The context of violent passages is more ambiguous than might be expected of a perfect book from a loving God, however this can work both ways. Most of today's Muslims exercise a personal choice to interpret their holy book's call to arms according to their own moral preconceptions about justifiable violence. Apologists cater to their preferences with tenuous arguments that gloss over historical fact and generally do not stand up to scrutiny. Still, it is important to note that the problem is not bad people, but bad ideology.
There are many Muslims who don't know this or don't understand the calls to violence or simply wouldn't participate.
The problem is, unlike the Bible, which is seen as a historical document, written by men, the Quran is taken to be the word of Allah, infallible and unquestionable.
So these Muslims are seen as "bad Muslims," not correctly practicing Islam by those who would do violence on the rest of us.
And it is not surprising that we constantly hear of Muslims slaughtering others for Allah. My question: How long does this need to go on, and how many more people need to be slaughtered before we stop parroting the notion that Islam is a "religion of peace"? It is anything but, and it inspires constant slaughter on the part of its followers. Again, not all -- but enough -- especially if you or your loved ones are one of the victims.
Katie Zavadski quotes Chattanooga shooter Mohammad Youssef Abdulazeez's blog at The Daily Beast:
The first post was entitled "A Prison Called Dunya," referring to the temporal world. In it, Abdulazeez uses the hypothetical example of a prisoner who is told he would be given a test that would either take him out of his earthly prison--or send him into a more restrictive environment."I would imagine that any sane person would devote their time to mastering the information on the study guide and stay patient with their studies, only giving time for the other things around to keep themselves focused on passing the exam," Abdulazeez wrote. "They would do this because they know and have been told that they will be rewarded with pleasures that they have never seen."
This life is that test, he wrote, "designed to separate the inhabitants of Paradise from the inhabitants of Hellfire."
And how lucky for those Marines that ISIS called for slaughter during Ramadan, which ends Friday, July 17.
Oh, and see this link (also above) for the difference between passages in the Bible calling for violence from those in the Quran:
Mutter
Linkmumbles.
Canadian Man Faces Six Months In Jail For Disagreeing With Women On Twitter
Yes, really. And no, that is not an exaggeration.
Pass a law and it can be used -- sometimes to help people and sometimes to hurt people. Laws curtailing free speech are some of the most dangerous and damaging.
For example, Canada's draconian anti-harassment laws are being used against a man who merely disagreed with feminist activists on Twitter.
Paul Joseph Watson writes at informationliberation:
54-year-old Greg Elliott could be charged with criminal harassment simply for expressing his opposition to a campaign by activists Steph Guthrie and Heather Reilly to publicly shame a young man in Northern Ontario.Father of four Elliott was arrested in 2012 and fired from his job as a graphic designer after he opposed Guthrie and Reilly's plan to generate "hatred on the Internet" targeting the designer of an online video game which allowed players to simulate punching feminist blogger Anita Sarkeesian in the face.
Elliott felt that the two activists' plot to publicly shame the young man "was every bit as vicious as the face-punch game," and could cause the young man to commit suicide, urging Guthrie and Reilly not to follow through.
Guthrie and Reilly then claimed that Elliott's refusal to endorse the plot (he had previously helped Guthrie's feminist group by offering to design a free poster), represented "criminal harassment."
Under Canada's draconian anti-harassment laws, the victim merely has to claim that the offending conduct made them "fear for their safety."
In other words, if Elliott is convicted, feminists in Canada could claim that anyone who disagrees with or offends them is engaging in "criminal harassment" and demand they be sent to prison.
Guthrie and Reilly also claimed that Elliott was engaging in harassment merely for tagging them in tweets. At no point did Elliott make any remarks directed at the two that could be construed as sexual harassment, hate speech, or violent rhetoric, according to Toronto Police Detective Jeff Bangild.
Now, playground meanness seems to have become illegal for adults in Canada:
The very worst comment that Elliott made in reference to the activists was a tweet in which he indirectly referred to the women as "fat" and "ugly".
Here's the National Post's Christie Blatchford on this:
And Blatchford in the Nat Po:
After hearing closing submissions Tuesday from Chris Murphy, who represents 54-year-old Greg Elliott, Ontario Court Judge Brent Knazan is expected to rule on Oct. 6.In the balance rides enormous potential fallout for free speech online.
Who would have believed that the world would be doing such a U-turn from from civil liberties in 2015?
If You Can't Find Racism, Invent It! Man Deems Our National Parks Racist
For the most part, I did not go on nature hikes as a child. Why not? Because my parents were not interested in going on nature hikes.
And I say "for the most part," because my parents are nerds, and we went for a week every summer to University of Michigan family camp ("Michigania"), up north in Michigan. There, we stayed in cabins and ate in a mess hall, and my parents went to lectures and I went off into the woods from time to time.
Well, Glenn Nelson writes in The New York Times about a problem he was able to invent -- the racist leanings of our national parks and/or the supposed perception of the racist leanings of our national parks by "African American" people.
(To assume people with "black" skin are from Africa is to not know anyone from, say, St. Lucia. Or to be so PC that your thinking ability is almost entirely turned off.)
Nelson on the racial horror in our parkland:
The national parks attracted a record 292.8 million visitors in 2014, but a vast majority were white and aging. The most recent survey commissioned by the park service on visitation, released in 2011, found that 22 percent of visitors were minorities, though they make up some 37 percent of the population.This suggests an alarming disconnect.
It does?
Most professional basketball players seem to be black. The population of our country is largely white. Does this suggest..."an alarming disconnect"?We need to demolish the notion that the national parks and the rest of nature are an exclusive club where minorities are unwelcome.
The place to start is the National Park Service. About 80 percent of park service employees in 2014 were white. The parks' official charity, the National Park Foundation, has four minority members on its 22-person board.
Minorities did not exceed 16 percent of the boards or staffs of some 300 environmental organizations, foundations and government agencies included in a 2014 study for Green 2.0, an initiative dedicated to increasing racial diversity in such institutions. Minorities hold fewer than 12 percent of environmental leadership positions, and none led an organization with a budget of at least $1 million, the study found.
The National Park Service is the logical leader to blaze a trail to racial diversity in the natural world.
Why is "racial diversity" important? Why shouldn't we just care about whether qualified people are being turned down for jobs?
Love this:
We need to inspire people like Jordan Quiller, a 21-year-old African-American who had never seen a mountain until he moved into one of the Rainier-monikered Seattle neighborhoods at the end of last year. He's never visited a national park, but would like to.Three national parks lie within a three-hour drive of Seattle. "It takes a little planning," Mr. Quiller said. "I just haven't gotten around to it."
Because...racism!
@deneenborelli
Blink
I think, therefore eye patch.
Judge: Sexual Regret On A Woman's Part Should Not Be Judged Sexual Assault On A Man's Part
Yet another unbelievable case -- just a different flavor of injustice to a man on campus than the Amherst case.
The Amherst case is the one where a passed-out guy to whom a woman gave a blow job was himself accused of sexual assault for what happened to him and was thrown out of school. Yes, he was the victim of the assault, blacked out drunk, but she said she didn't consent -- to an act she performed on him while he was drunkenly unconscious.
Ashe Schow writes about the current UCSD case at the WashEx:
A California judge just issued a win to proponents of due process in campus sexual assault hearings.Judge Joel M. Pressman deemed a University of California-San Diego campus hearing "unfair," ruling that the hearing panel limited the accused student's right to due process.
The accused student, listed as John Doe, had sued the university after being suspended for sexual assault without due process. John claimed that his right to cross-examine his accuser and adverse witnesses was limited, and Pressman agreed.
John was only allowed to submit questions to the hearing panel to be asked of his accuser, named in the lawsuit as Jane Roe. Of the 32 questions submitted by John, only nine were asked, and only after the questions were reviewed by the hearing chair.
The horrifying thing is that this girl was allowed to bring a case of sexual regret and her hidden and unspoken desires not to participate in a sex act and characterize this a sexual assault by the guy. I was reading the ruling the other day, but the file is no longer at the link, so I got this off Scott Greenfield's blog:
"Jane stated that she physically wanted to have sex with [the accused] but mentally wouldn't." This reservation, Pressman wrote, should not be seen as John's fault, "particularly if she is indicating physically she wants to have sex."
Greenfield explains:
This is a critical starting point, as it's one that is almost invariably denied and decried. "Sexual assault isn't about post-hoc regret," the argument goes, but it was here. For those who contend that any formulation of consent will somehow prove foolproof, consider that the female student here, as found by the college hearing panel, "stated that she physically wanted to have sex . . . but mentally wouldn't." What does that mean?The judge took it to mean that Roe physically indicated a desire to have sex, but Doe was to be held accountable for Roe's secret mental state, as she determined afterward as her regret sank in, and complained about four months later? Well yes, that's exactly what it means to the college disciplinary panel.
Despite this finding, and Doe's denial, the hearing panel concluded that John Doe was guilty and suspended him.
And most disgustingly, when the guy refused to take responsibility (and punishment) for something he didn't do, Schow explains that the university kangaroo court-ers decided to really sock it to him:
Upon the finding of responsibility, John was first sanctioned to a one-month suspension and required to attend sexual harassment training and counseling. He was also told never to contact Jane again, "due to the potential for ongoing harm to the complaining witness."After John appealed the ruling, his sanctions were increased to a one-year suspension (meaning he would have to reapply to the university), put on non-academic probation and required to attend ethics workshops - on top of the original sanctions.
When John appealed that decision, his sanctions were increased yet again to a one-year-and-one-quarter-suspension.
I'd like to see young men who are put through this start getting lawyers and suing the hell out of these universities. Only when it's more costly to apply these sick, Kafkaesque principles of injustice than to get the federal funds for following the Obama admin's reading of Title IX will colleges stop doing it.
Here's A Healthy Environment For A Feminist Pawn, Uh, Little Boy, To Grow Up In
Paul Joseph Watson tweet:
On a related note, the last person who snarled about my "privilege" attended Yale. Me? I once took the train there and walked around.
via @CathyYoung63
Are We Better Off It We "Buy Local"?
Econ prof Donald Boudreaux does a great little quick video on the urging to "buy local":
Lunky
Clumsylinks.
TSA Spends Money On New Stupidity: (Since When Does Criminal History Correlate With Wanting To Blow Up Planes?)
Via Freedom to Travel USA, the TSA is piloting a new, real-time criminal history program of aviation workers at a few select airports. A new idiotic one.
Which of these people had a criminal history? Not Timothy McVeigh. Not the crew of 9-11. Not the shoe bomber. Not the underwear bomber.
Maybe Granny got convicted of pot possession back in her days in Ann Arbor at the University of Michigan. Yeah, let's give her some extra scrutiny at the airport so we can continue to pretend we have security and not just a giant jobs program for politicians pretending to do something and repurposed mall food court workers.
Related: My piece on why the TSA is so dangerous for our civil liberties.
Dildo-landia!
Hundreds of dildos have popped up -- uh, are hanging from power lines -- in Portland, Oregon, much the way people in the hood sometimes throw tennis shoes over power lines. (They're strung together and just hanging there, though in a permanently erect condition.)
From typo-laden Inquisitr.com (because it has a far better picture than prim Yahoo.com):
Passersby are amazed, embarrassed or just plain amused to see a hundreds of sex toys dangling visibly from the power lines. The dildos, in shades of white and orange, have been hung all over town.Making for quite the photo opportunity, the dildos have been hung up on the power lines in pairs and there are literally hundreds of sex toys on display.
A tweet:
@JustOGG #Portland: All fun & games until your 6 yr old child asks, "What are those?" as they point to the dildos in the sky.
How Social "Justice" Is Actually Social Stalinism
Writer Cathy Young, whose real last name is probably a bunch of consonants having a bumpercar war, is from Russia. (Or so I'm guessing, anyway.)
She recently interviewed a Russian novelist for The Daily Beast and was struck by his description of a district Communist Party committee meeting. She noted "an uncanny resemblance" to the Social Justice crew.
Young notes, "The online gang-ups on accused transgressors against political correctness ... have become a common feature of the 'social justice' community."
She continues:
The tragicomic scene, which takes place in a provincial Soviet town in the fall of 1941, shows a meeting of the district Communist Party committee which holds hearings on several cases of alleged violations of the Party code of conduct.It's all here: the casual, innocuous remark interpreted as offensive; the demand for confession and repentance; the notion that maintaining one's innocence or trying to minimize the "offense" compounds guilt; the escalating, absurdly ballooning accusations in which everything the accused says or does is taken as further proof of guilt; the pressure on members of the community to join the mob to demonstrate their own allegiance to the One True Ideology; the lack of human sympathy elevated to a virtue; the notion that proper "humanism" is not manifested in compassion but in "relentless war on all manifestations of hostile ideas."
Ugly.
It's the religion of "shut up and do as we say -- and even think as we say." And even then, you might not be safe.
Murky
Linky waters.
Why White People Shouldn't Wear Cornrows -- No, Not Because They Shouldn't "Steal" Black Culture
The real reason white people shouldn't wear cornrows, courtesy of me?
Mainly because they tend to look like shit if you've got dark hair with white scalp peeking out.
But "Hunger Games" star Amandla Stenberg (Rue in the first "Hunger Games") takes Kylie Jenner to task for wearing cornrows in an Instagram selfie because, guess what:
Stenberg: when u appropriate black features and culture but fail to use ur position of power to help black Americans by directing attention towards ur wigs instead of police brutality or racism #whitegirlsdoitbetter
Love this ridiculous idea. How many black people have no idea of the political significance of corn rows -- or, for another example, why being a black Muslim is absolutely absurd, considering Islam's ugly legacy of racism and black slavery.
From Think "Progress" [scare quotes are mine], Carimah Townes writes about Stenberg's video, "Don't Cash Crop On My Cornrows":
It should come as no surprise that 16-year-old Stenberg lent her voice to the conversation, as the starlet recently released a video about cultural appropriation called 'Don't Cash Crop on My Cornrows." In it, she talks about the ties between black hair -- twists, braids, cornrows, locks -- and black identity. Linking those styles to the formation of hip hop culture, she explains how the presence of black artists who wore these styles became popular over time, inspiring white celebrities to follow their lead. The problem with this cultural appropriation, Stenberg argues, is that white people are adopting and capitalizing off of elements of black culture while ignoring the systemic oppression of the people they're emulating."That itself is what is so complicated when it comes to black culture. The line between cultural appropriation and cultural exchange is always going to be blurred, but here's the thing: appropriation occurs when a style leads to racist generalizations or stereotypes where it originated, but is deemed high fashion, cool, or funny when the privileged take it for themselves," she said. "Appropriation occurs when the appropriator is not aware of the deep significance of the culture they're partaking in."
No, you do not need to know the significance of your hairstyle to wear it -- nor do you need to acknowledge and apologize for the fact that Henry Ford was an anti-Semite if you drive a Ford.
More of Stenberg's gems, as explained by Townes:
Stenberg's statement on Instagram is a continuation of this theme. On the surface, Jenner's photo may seem harmless. But much of her brand and image is built around her hair, so she's profiting off of a style that black people are criticized for wearing....The problem isn't Jenner's hair, per se. It's the fact that her image is rooted in black culture, but she's never acknowledged those underlying influences. Months ago, Jenner's filled lips sparked a social media debate about beauty double standards for white and black women. Girls across the country joined in on the Kylie Jenner Lip Challenge to make their lips more plump -- leading black women to post photos of their natural features, which have been ridiculed in the past. Jenner is knowingly or unknowingly profiting off of beauty standards that black women and black men are degraded for.
...This isn't to say that white women -- and men -- can't experiment with different (hair)styles. The point is that they need to be more conscious of what those styles mean to the people who birthed them, and be verbal about longstanding social inequalities and institutional racism.
The video with ridiculous Stenberg shows her with straightened hair -- which some black women criticize as "appropriating" "white" culture.
What does this hairstyle mean? Not a fucking thing. Nor is there any meaning when I use a flat iron on my Jewfro. Beyond "straight hair looks sleek, shiny, and pretty."
What Stenberg is asking is this -- that you gnash and feel terrible about your "privilege" every time you engage in something that came from someplace that isn't your particular "culture." Which means...we're all supposed to feel ashamed every time we eat a taco?
The video with Stenberg:
"Anger Face" -- The Suggestion Of Whupass As A Form Of Bargaining
At BodyLanguageProject.com, C. Philip interviews evolutionary psychologist Aaron Sell about his research on the "anger face," which he finds conveys strategic benefits. An excerpt from Sell's response:
Ultimately the function of the emotion of anger is to bargain for better treatment. It comes online when others treat you worse than you feel entitled to. One way of making someone value you more is to show how bad you can hurt them. That's part of what the anger face does. There are other strategies too; in cooperative relationships anger triggers a kind of removal of cooperation (e.g. the silent treatment, the cold shoulder) whereby you demonstrate to the person what their life would be like if you withdrawal from the relationship. This kind of anger is much more common, but the anger face doesn't appear during these interactions. If you imagine the last time your wife was angry at you, her face probably looked like a driver's license. The blank face is a kind of angry face when you expect a smile.
Heartbreak Just Got Cheaper: Do It (Mostly) Yourself Online Divorce Documents
Sudhin Thamawala writes for AP that a Silicon Valley company, Modria, is creating online divorce and other documents that people can fill out and then take to an attorney, making attorney costs far cheaper:
Officials in Ohio are using Modria's software to resolve disputes over tax assessments and keep them out of court, and a New York-based arbitration association has deployed it to settle medical claims arising from certain types of car crashes.In the Netherlands, Modria software is being used to guide people through their divorces.
The program walks couples through more than two dozen questions, including how they want to co-parent any children they have. It suggests values for spousal support and notes areas of agreement. A second module allows them to negotiate areas of disagreement. If they reach a resolution, they can print up divorce papers that are then reviewed by an attorney to make sure neither side is giving away too much before they are filed in court.
Hundreds of couples have gone through the system since it launched in February, said Larry Friedberg, Modria's chief marketing officer.
...A Michigan company, Court Innovations, is using similar technology to resolve traffic disputes. In four court districts in the state, people ticketed on suspicion of running a red light or speeding can go online and provide an explanation in hopes of getting the ticket thrown out or a lower fine. Prosecutors review the information and make a decision that can be transmitted electronically to the alleged scofflaw for acceptance or rejection, said MJ Cartwright, the company's CEO. The system has had more than 800 users so far, almost all of whom have resolved their cases online, she said.
In LA, the system is corrupt. You send in proof, as I did, that your car actually was registered in October when they gave you a ticket. I figured it was a slam-dunk. I sent in a copy of my registration slip -- showing that my car was registered; in fact, that I'd paid for another whole year in July!
Didn't matter. That's because, as I've heard from others in LA (including a commenter here), the question isn't whether you're innocent of the particular traffic violation; it's whether you're stupid enough to think that that, in any way, matters.
Soupy
Gruel to be kind.
Tonight's "Science News You Can Use" Radio, LIVE, 7- 7:30 pm PT
On tonight's show, cohosts Amy Alkon and Dr. Jennifer Verdolin discuss "The evolution of Mean Girls & how to beat their system."
We'll lay out the science on why Mean Girls are so mean, why "Lean In" is advice that can backfire on a woman, and how women can succeed in love, friendships, and careers.
Listen live at 7pm PT or pick it up afterward in podcast -- at this link.
No Child Left Behind -- Not Even If They Really, Really Deserve To Be
In New York City, there are allegations of grade fraud, reports NBCNewYork. Failing students are getting their grades changed to passing ones to improve the graduation rate at a NYC high school:
The NYC Department of Education is investigating after some students and teachers say there has been a pattern of grade changing and other unusual practices at a Queens high school.Peter McGroary, a former student at William Cullen Bryant High School in Astoria, couldn't believe his eyes when he went to pick up his transcript.
"It said I had passed my gym class when I had failed," McGroary said.
McGroary, who dropped out of the school, admits that he was a no-show for his gym classes, yet he still passed the class somehow.
McGroary's gym teacher, Peter Maliarakis, says he didn't change the grade but believes someone else did.
...Maliarakis and others say grades are being changed to help the school get a better graduation rate, and that the pressure to change the grades of absent or failing students is coming from the school's principal. One school record shows a chronic absentee student who was averaging a 45 passing with an 85, simply for doing extra credit.
Why fix the problem when you can defraud your way to a solution.
Oh, wait -- because kids' whole lives, and not just your job and salary, are at stake?
The problem starts much earlier than high school, but not addressing it enables it in persisting.
And being able to "magically" change grades keeps kids who need extra help from getting it.
More about the school from Wikipedia (a page which sounds like it got some edits from some teachers or others involved with the school):
The school has 2,652 students enrolled; the ethnic make-up of the school is 48.3% Hispanic, 27.7% Asian, 2.5% White, and 19.7% African American. The school has a four-year graduation rate of 27% and an attendance rate of 89%[1]The school has a low progress report grade in comparison with its peer school, but it is also true that is serving a population of students with higher needs and a lot of freshman that entered the school are below proficient.
In 2010, New York City Department of Education gave the school a letter grade of C.[2] On April 26, PEP voted to close this school down, and a lot of good experienced veteran teachers are being rated unsatisfactory and others are being chased out with the purpose of hiring out of college teachers who may not be proven effective.
Mayor Bloomberg on his speech on January 2012 decided to close down this school together with other 23 schools under the turnaround model, although it was granted the transformation model at the beginning of 2011 without doing any negotiating. The turnaround model has not be proven effective in any district in the country, and research suggests that it may even be counterproductive.
On June 29, 2012 William Cullen Bryant High School was selected not to be closed down, by an arbitrator who deemed it unfit to close down the school. The school will retain its name, as well as its teachers if they chose to come back.
The Newly-Minted Totalitarian Left: Millennial Social Justice Advocacy
Some wise observations by Aristotelis Orginos at Medium.com about the authoritarian left -- which I've renamed the "totalitarian" left, per this blog item I posted a few days ago:
Millennial social justice advocates have warped an admirable cause for social, economic, and political equality into a socially authoritarian movement that has divided and dehumanized individuals on the basis of an insular ideology guised as academic theory. The modern social justice movement launched on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, Jezebel, Slate, Huffington Post, et al. is far more reminiscent of a Red Scare (pick one) than the Civil Rights Movement.When George Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four (and here some will lambast me for picking a white male author from a historically colonialist power despite the fact that he fought and wrote against this colonialism), he wrote it to warn against the several dangers of extremism on either side of the political spectrum. Orwell's magnum opus is about authoritarianism on both ends of the political spectrum. If the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice, then the arc of the political spectrum bends toward authoritarianism at both ends.
The very fact that I am drawing a connection between the text most referenced when discussing politics-gone-bad is a problem in itself. But it warrants further exploration.
2+2=5 "In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy."
 -- George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-FourThis particular brand of social justice advocacy assaults reason in a particularly frightening way -- by outright denying it and utilizing fear-mongering to discourage dissent. There is no gray: only black and white. One must mimic the orthodoxy or be barred forcibly from the chapel and jeered at by the townspeople. To disagree with the millennial social justice orthodoxy is to make a pariah of oneself willingly. Adherence to the narrative is the single litmus test for collegiate (and beyond) social acceptance these days.
...The version of millennial social justice advocacy that I have spoken about -- one that uses Identity Politics to balkanize groups of people, engenders hatred between groups, willingly lies to push agendas, manipulates language to provide immunity from criticism, and that publicly shames anyone who remotely speaks some sort of dissent from the overarching narrative of the orthodoxy -- is not admirable. It is deplorable. It appeals to the basest of human instincts: fear and hatred. It is not an enlightened or educated position to take. History will not look kindly on this Orwellian, authoritarian pervision of social justice that has taken social media and millennials by storm over the past few years.
I think a big part of the problem is that what was formerly a "culture of debate" on college campuses has become the culture of debate not allowed/debate is racist and mean!
If you aren't schooled in debate -- for example, how to debate and the fact that it's an integral part of a free (and healthy) society -- it's easy to veer off into finding debate disagreeable and mean instead of essential for making problems (and society) better.
Oh, and by the way, without debate, the ugliness that would have been debated doesn't go away; it just goes underground -- where it can't be seen, heard about, or challenged.
Good job, millennial SJWs!
Smink
Summer fur-for-all.
Blow By Blow
At TotalSororityMove.com, Veronica Ruckh on "45 Thoughts Going Through Your Head While Giving A Blow Job." A few samples:
"Should I wave?""That makes me sound like a cannibal."
"A trim would have been nice. I'm not dealing with a pube stuck in my throat for 36 hours....again. Worse than popcorn kernels."
and...
22. "Did I put my laundry in the dryer?"
Slate Writer Claims Texas Eyebrow Threading Deregulation Will Plunge State Into Dickensian Nightmare
Evan Bernick writes at FEE:
Over at Slate, Mark Joseph Stern warns that a Texas Supreme Court decision invalidating a requirement that commercial eyebrow threaders undergo 750 hours of training -- 320 of which were admittedly unrelated to threading -- will plunge Texas into a Dickensian nightmare, where judges will have free reign to strike down humane and necessary laws designed to protect workers.Stern's histrionics should not be taken seriously. The Texas Supreme Court did its job, insisting upon a rational, evidence-based explanation for restrictions on liberty that is protected by the Fourteenth Amendment as well as by the Texas Constitution.
As Justice Don Willett explains in an erudite and inspiring concurrence, "The Court's view is simple, and simply stated: Laws that impinge your constitutionally protected right to earn an honest living must not be preposterous."
Such judicial engagement is required to protect what liberal Justice William O. Douglas once referred to "the most precious liberty man possesses."
Although eyebrow threading, a traditional South Asian practice, consists only in using cotton thread to remove eyebrow hair, Texas roped the threaders under the same licensing requirements that are applied to conventional cosmetologists who perform a wide variety of services such as waxing, makeup, and chemical peels.
The Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation issued $2,000 penalties to threaders across the state and ordered them to quit their jobs until they completed 750 hours of coursework (not a second of which is devoted to eyebrow threading) in private beauty schools, costing between $7,000 and $22,000, and pass two examinations (neither of which tests eyebrow threading).
The Slate piece goes all hysterical, claiming eyebrow threading causes staph infections and more. Really? I once had this done. They're using a thread to twist off your hairs; they aren't performing surgery. This piece seems to debunk the Slate piece's claims.
The previous Texas regulation on this was basically like requiring a brain surgeon to go to cooking school and master the soufflé before he could legally cut into your head.
Hello, idiocy! Mark Joseph Stern: hyperventilating nanny state hystericist.
via @reasonpolicy
Gloopy
Augustus-y links.
Has Anyone Ever Been Killed By A Cup Of Lemonade?
By a bake sale brownie? And even if someone were injured by these things -- unlikely -- isn't it an individual's responsibility (and choice) to vet their food and decide, "Oh, they must have listeria-ball fights in their kitchen"?
Texas food regulations are ridiculous. From The Economist:
ZOEY and Andria Green, who are seven and eight respectively, only look innocent. With their baby faces and cunning, they managed to lure patrons to their illicit enterprise: a lemonade stand outside their home in Overton, Texas. The girls were in business for about an hour in June, selling popcorn and lemonade to raise money for a Father's Day gift, before local police shut the operation down. Not only were they hawking without a $150 "peddler's permit", but also the state requires a formal kitchen inspection and a permit to sell anything that might spoil if stored at the wrong temperature. As authorities are meant "to act to prevent an immediate and serious threat to human life or health", the officers understandably moved swiftly in....Regulating the sale of goods made in ordinary kitchens is a "grey area", says Emily Broad Leib of the Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic. So states are passing "cottage-food laws" allowing people to sell "non-potentially hazardous" foods, such as baked goods and almost anything canned, from their homes. But the rules are often odd or fussy, and no two states are alike.
...Resistance to loosening the rules largely comes from health officials, who worry about the risks of unlicensed kitchens. But cottage-food laws have mushroomed in recent years without any boom in botulism, says Baylen Linnekin of Keep Food Legal, a lobby group. Advocates argue that raising sales caps and reducing red tape would not only help to satisfy a growing demand for all things artisan, but also encourage more small-scale entrepreneurs. Research from the Institute for Justice, a libertarian group, found that California's more relaxed cottage-food law of 2013 launched more than 1,200 new businesses within a year. In Texas, where lawmakers eased home-made food rules in 2013, more than 1,400 people are now licensed to sell their treats from home.
Alas for the Green girls, lemonade is not covered by Texas's cottage-food law, as it might spoil if it is not properly stored. But the pair have learned a valuable lesson about commerce and regulation. They discovered that if they gave the lemonade away free, but put a box on the table for tips, they could still make money because the "payments" thus became donations. Their father must be proud.
By the way, the idiocy is thinking that because big food companies are inspected that they are safe.
via @E86HotWheels
Stage Actor Patti LuPone Separates An Asshole From Her Cell Phone -- Without Breaking Character
Love this. In "Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck," I write about Lawrence Fishburne stopping "The Lion In Winter" to go off on some dick on his cellphone.
Kenneth Terrell and Sara Hammel wrote in US News in 1999: "During a performance last March of the Broadway play The Lion in Winter, an audience member's cell phone rang. After putting up with the annoyance for 20 seconds, actor Laurence Fishburne stopped the scene and boomed: 'Will you turn off that f - - - ing phone, please?' He got a rousing ovation."
The latest in stage actors who aren't putting up with this crap is Patti LuPone. Erik Piepenburg writes in The New York Times:
When the woman seated at the end of the second row texted -- and texted and texted -- during the show, Ms. LuPone took action. Without breaking character, Ms. LuPone walked into the audience and took the woman's phone. "She didn't know what was going on," Ms. LuPone said in a phone interview on Thursday. "I should be a sleight of hand artist." (The phone was returned after the show.)Q. So what happened Wednesday night?
A. This woman -- a very pretty young woman -- was sitting with her boyfriend or husband. We could see her text. She was so uninterested. She showed her husband what she was texting. We talked about it at intermission. When we went out for the second act I was very close to her, and she was still texting. I watched her and thought, "What am I going to do?" At the very end of that scene, we all exit. What I normally do is shake the hand of the people in the front row. I just walked over to her, shook her hand and took her phone. I walked offstage and handed it to the stage manager, who gave it to the house manager.
...Q. If you could see it, then the rest of the audience probably could, too. It takes one screen to disrupt an entire theater.
A. I don't know why they buy the ticket or come to the theater if they can't let go of the phone. It's controlling them. They can't turn it off and can't stop looking at it. They are truly inconsiderate, self-absorbed people who have no public manners whatsoever. I don't know what to do anymore. I was hired as an actor, not a policeman of the audience.
...Q. How did the audience react when you took her phone?
A. They got it. She was totally seen texting because she was in light. Some people gasped when I took the phone. Some people applauded.
It is completely, completely distracting to have somebody on their phone in the movies -- and especially -- when a stage performance is on, to both the actors and the audience.
I just can't believe or even understand the day-to-day arrogance a person has to have to do this right in front of actors on stage.
Friends, Citizens, Ungrateful Dumbasses...
Thirty-three percent of Americans are unable to name any First Amendment right. Maren Williams writes at the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund:
One third of Americans cannot name any of the five freedoms guaranteed in the First Amendment, according to results from the Newseum Institute's annual State of the First Amendment survey. While it's encouraging that speech is the freedom most commonly identified by respondents, fully informed citizens should understand how that right interacts with the other four: religion, press, assembly, and petition....In light of current events surrounding cartoon depictions of the Prophet Muhammad -- including attacks on French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in January and the Muhammad cartoon contest in Garland, Texas, in May -- this year's survey added a new question asking whether respondents think "cartoonists should be allowed to publish images of Muhammad even though those images could be offensive to some religions." Sixty percent were in favor of allowing the cartoons, while 32% were not. Respondents under 30 years of age were much more likely (77%) to support allowing the imagery, as were non-religious individuals at 71%. Only 48% of Democrats were in favor, as opposed to 66% of both Republicans and Independents.
That's right, fewer than half of Democrats were in favor of free speech -- of allowing cartoonists to publish images of Mohammed. Seems Republicans are a bit more progressive than the "progressives."
Ask how many Americans would be willing to stand up for our civil liberties. You probably would rather not know the answer.
In related news, Democratic Rep. Alan Grayson is really, really confused about the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, and is proposing a rewrite of the latter. He hopes to bring to life his fantasy of a world where the worst thing one encounters all day is a little glitter farted on one by a passing unicorn. Jessica Chasmar quotes him in the Wash Times:
Writing for The Huffington Post, Mr. Grayson argued that the original Declaration of Independence is outdated and has already laid to rest the tyrannies of King George.Thus, "[w]e need a new declaration of independence," Mr. Grayson declared, offering up his own version of the founding document.
"We hereby declare our independence from bigotry, in all its evil forms," he wrote. "We declare our independence from racism, sexism, homophobia, language discrimination and chauvinism. Everyone has equal rights, no matter where you're from, what you look like, what language you speak, and whom you love. Everyone deserves respect."
Everyone absolutely does not deserve respect; many people and their ideas deserve derision. You don't make the world a better place by killing free speech; you make it a place where a lot of people ultimately end up dead.
via @adamkissel
Linkhog
A distant relative of warthogs.
Sex Acts Including Spanking Just Banned In UK Porn
This is crazy.
I love what the blonde protester in the hat they talked to (in the news video) says: "If it's between two consent..." (she catches herself) "well, two three, four..." consenting adults, it's entirely up to them who's doing what..."
I laughed at her suddenly remembering to include group sex, but she's right about the consenting part.
Christopher Hooten writes in the Independent UK:
Pornography produced in the UK was quietly censored today through an amendment to the 2003 Communications Act, and the measures appear to take aim at female pleasure.The Audiovisual Media Services Regulations 2014 requires that video-on-demand (VoD) online porn now adhere to the same guidelines laid out for DVD sex shop-type porn by the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC).
I didn't know they had "guidelines" -- aka nanny state bans on stuff sold in stores. How crazy. 2014, and they're telling consenting adults what porn they can watch?
Seemingly arbitrarily deciding what is nice sex and what is not nice sex, the board's ruling on 'content that is not acceptable' (p.24) effectively bans the following acts from being depicted by British pornography producers.
These include some pretty vanilla stuff -- stuff mommy and daddy may engage in in the average date night in the suburbs:
SpankingPhysical or verbal abuse (regardless of if consensual)
Role-playing as non-adults [Amy explains: you're adults having sex, but maybe daddy has been "a bad boy"]
Physical restraint
Humiliation
At what point do residents of the US and UK start to worry that they're living in a police state?
Oh, and Hooten points out how idiotic this is. It's not going to stop people from watching porn. It's just going to stop people in the UK from legally making money from producing it. (Thanks -- we in California's porn capital need all the tax dollars we can get!)
While the measures won't stop people from watching whatever genre of porn they desire, as video shot abroad can still be viewed, they do impose severe restrictions on content created in the UK, and appear to make no distinction between consensual and non-consensual practices between adults.
And again, the reasoning given by nanny state legislators is "Because the children!..."
"In a converging media world these provisions must be coherent, and the BBFC classification regime is a tried and tested system of what content is regarded as harmful for minors."
Guess what: You have a kid; it's your responsibility to deal with all the "harmful" in the world. You shouldn't have the state curtailing the rest of us from acts between consenting adults. (It's your body; rent it if you want to.)
via @theprophetv
The Wildly Fallacious 1 in 5 Campus Rape Stat Isn't A Victimless Lie
Harm is done to those least able to defend themselves when funding and attention goes where it isn't truly needed -- like for all the rapes that aren't happening on campus compared with all the rapes that are happening to poor, inner-city women.
Reading the Federalist, I came upon a December 2014 story about the DOJ sexual assault stats released late last year. I've blogged about them before, but with all the furor about the supposed rape epidemic on campus -- to the point where feminists are starting to deem it fairness when men's due process rights are being removed -- I thought it was important to re-emphasize exactly how "epidemic" this epidemic is.
As The Federalist staff puts it, the report "officially puts to bed the bogus statistic that one in five women on college campuses are victims of sexual assault"
The full study, which was published by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, a division within DOJ, found that rather than one in five female college students becoming victims of sexual assault, the actual rate is 6.1 per 1,000 students, or 0.61 percent (instead of 1-in-5, the real number is 0.03-in-5). For non-students, the rate of sexual assault is 7.6 per 1,000 people....The higher rate of victimization among non-students is important due in large part to recent accusations that U.S. colleges and universities are hotbeds of so-called "rape culture," where sexual assault is endemic, and administrators and other students are happy to look the other way. The bogus "1 in 5″ statistic, which was the product of a highly suspect survey of only two universities and which paid respondents for their answers, has been repeatedly used as evidence of this pervasive rape culture on college campuses across the country.
Even more striking is that according to the BJS data, the likelihood of sexual assault has actually been trending downward across the board since 1997.
Per a public health paper I proofread for a friend years ago, the women most at risk for being raped are poor women and especially poor homeless women in the inner city.
Sorry, have you heard of any "Take Back The Night" marches for them?
There's a terrific passage in Christina Hoff Sommers' terrific book, "Who Stole Feminism," about where all the money and attention is going -- and the good it's doing:
Having heard about an outbreak of rape at Columbia University, Peter Hellman of New York magazine decided to do a story about it. To his surprise, he found that campus police logs showed no evidence of it whatsoever. Only two rapes were reported to the Columbia campus police in 1990, and in both cases, charges were dropped for lack of evidence. Hellman checked the figures at other campuses and found that in 1990 fewer than one thousand rapes were reported to campus security on college campuses in the entire country. That works out to fewer than one-half of one rape per campus. Yet despite the existence of a rape crisis center at St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital two blocks from Columbia University, campus feminists pressured the administration into installing an expensive rape crisis center inside the university. Peter Hellman describes a typical night at the center in February 1992: "On a recent Saturday night, a shift of three peer counselors sat in the Rape Crisis Center-one a backup to the other two. . . . Nobody called; nobody came. As if in a firehouse, the three women sat alertly and waited for disaster to strike. It was easy to forget these were the fading hours of the eve of Valentine's Day."
Oh, and interestingly, though there's some disputing of the statistics, it seems the people most likely to be raped are men in prison.
If feminists are truly for equality and equal protection, where are the marches to stop prison rape?
And no, contrary to the disgusting thinking, "Oh, they're in jail; they deserve what they get," we have a justice system that assigns punishment; prison rape should not be a part of it. We have a duty, when we put a person behind bars, to see they are only serving the sentence handed down by the judge; that they are not being sexually tortured by their fellow prisoners.
SF Min Wage Raise: What Goes Up...Must Yank Other Things Up With It
Economist Mark J. Perry blogs at AEI:
Who-d a-thunk it? SF minimum wage increased 14% and local Chipotles just raised prices by 10-14%.
Perry paraphrases David French, vice-president of the National Retail Federation:
"There simply isn't any magic pot of money that lets employers pay higher wages just because the government says so, without making adjustments elsewhere like cutting workers' hours, reducing their non-cash fringe benefits, and/or passing the higher wages along to consumers in the form of higher prices."
Welcome to paying about $1 extra for each burrito bowl.
My fave cafe just raised the price of my coffee kind of a lot. I don't blame them -- they realized it was costing them and they needed to. But this means I kind of think twice about how often I go there, and I think that will happen with people when they see their fast food is $1-ish more than they were just paying.
Lump
Lazylinks.
Feminists Gobsmacked By What A Cesspool Feminism Is
They had a big feminist confab at Barnard College that -- predictably -- turned into "Can you top this discrimination?"-fest. Michelle Goldberg writes in The Nation:
The women involved with #Femfuture knew that many would contest at least some of their conclusions. They weren't prepared, though, for the wave of coruscating anger and contempt that greeted their work.Online, the Barnard group--nine of whom were women of color--was savaged as a cabal of white opportunists. People were upset that the meeting had excluded those who don't live in New York (Martin and Valenti had no travel budget).
There was fury expressed on behalf of everyone--indigenous women, feminist mothers, veterans--whose concerns were not explicitly addressed.
Some were outraged that tweets were quoted without the explicit permission of the tweeters.
Others were incensed that a report about online feminism left out women who aren't online. "Where is the space in all of these #femfuture movements for people who don't have internet access?" tweeted Mikki Kendall, a feminist writer who, months later, would come up with the influential hashtag #solidarityisforwhitewomen.
About the white hate -- and self-loathing white hate -- within feminism:
There are also rules, elaborated by white feminists, on how other white feminists should talk to women of color.For example, after Kendall's #solidarityisforwhitewomen hashtag erupted last fall, Sarah Milstein, co-author of a guide to Twitter, published a piece on the Huffington Post titled "5 Ways White Feminists Can Address Our Own Racism."
At one point, Milstein argued that if a person of color says something that makes you uncomfortable, "assume your discomfort is telling you something about you, not about the other person."
After Rule No. 3, "Look for ways that you are racist, rather than ways to prove you're not," she confesses to her own racial crimes, including being "awkwardly too friendly" toward black people at parties.
This is probably because she's gnashing about her "privilege" all the time. Personally, I'm "awkwardly too friendly" to anybody new at a party, mainly because it's hard to introduce yourself to new people, but I don't like to let that stop me.
And hilariously, I just had a black woman tell me to "check" my "privilege." That's because I called her out for sending me -- a stranger -- a moochstarter request for a film she was doing. (I write about this in "Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck" -- that if you wouldn't feel comfortable walking up to a total stranger in a cafe and asking them for $10, well, then it's probably rude of you to do just because it's so easy online.)
Oh, and this particular chickie snarling about my "privilege"? Yale-educated. (I wish I'd been "privileged" enough to attend Yale, but my middle-class parents, who generously paid for my college education, told me the limit was in-state tuition at University of Michigan, which was actually pretty affordable in the 80s, when I went to college.)
Back to the topic of this post: Feminism, more and more, seems to have turned into a mass form of covert narcissism, where people use how oppressed, disabled, and weak they are to get attention -- and power.
(If you can't make it by working to get there, make it by whining!)
And actually, it seems this isn't a new thing:
Many second-wave feminist groups tore themselves apart by denouncing and ostracizing members who demonstrated too much ambition or presumed to act as leaders.
This is right in line with sex differences found in the research of Dr. Joyce Benenson, Dr. Anne Campbell, and others -- those who don't toe the PC line and instead take an evolutionary and evidence-based to sex differences.
Back to Goldberg's piece, and regarding the earlier incarnations of this:
As the radical second-waver Ti-Grace Atkinson famously put it: "Sisterhood is powerful. It kills. Mostly sisters."In "Trashing: The Dark Side of Sisterhood," a 1976 Ms. magazine article, Jo Freeman described how feminists of her generation destroyed one another. Trashing, she wrote, is "accomplished by making you feel that your very existence is inimical to the Movement and that nothing can change this short of ceasing to exist. These feelings are reinforced when you are isolated from your friends as they become convinced that their association with you is similarly inimical to the Movement and to themselves. Any support of you will taint them.... You are reduced to a mere parody of your previous self."
Yes, ladies, amazingly, the tools used to gain unearned power over men can be turned on you by other feminists for exactly the same purpose.
Whoopsy!
via @JacquesCuze
"Americans Are Getting Too Comfortable With Thought Control"
The next step after "You can't say that!" is "You can't think that."
This push toward silencing increasingly is the slippery slope on college campuses and in society at large. We need to shine a light on it and recognize it for how dangerous it is to free thought, free speech, and even continuing as a free society. And we need to stop just shrugging our shoulders and do something -- even if it just involves giving money to free speech defenders like theFIRE.org.
It also helps to understand the difference between authoritarians and totalitarians, which Tom Nichols explains in The Federalist:
Simply put, authoritarians merely want obedience, while totalitarians, whose rule is rooted in an ideology, want obedience and conversion. Authoritarians are a dime a dozen; totalitarians are rare. The authoritarians are the guys in charge who want to stay in charge, and don't much care about you, or what you're doing, so long as you stay out of their way....Totalitarians are a different breed. These are the people who have a plan, who think they see the future more clearly than you or who are convinced they grasp reality in a way that you do not. They don't serve themselves--or, they don't serve themselves exclusively--they serve History, or The People, or The Idea, or some other ideological totem that justifies their actions.
They want obedience, of course. But even more, they want their rule, and their belief system, to be accepted and self-sustaining. And the only way to achieve that is to create a new society of people who share those beliefs, even if it means bludgeoning every last citizen into enlightenment.
A recent example of this?
Quartz.com journalist Meredith Bennett-Smith, who disagrees with writer Cathy Young about sexual conduct codes on U.S. campuses, and thus wants the Washington Post never again to publish the "horrendous rape apologist" Young in its pages.
We need to start calling out and shaming those who attack free speech. They may be attacking it in an individual but we need to understand the attack on individual speech for what it is -- or can ultimately be -- an attack on all of ours.
I recently disagreed with a piece Cathy Young wrote, but here's the thing: I don't have to like everything a person says or does to respect them overall. This is adult thinking -- that you understand that people are complicated and you accept that you aren't always going to agree with them unless you and they are a couple of inflatable Judys.
(In case you're wondering, that describes exactly none of my friends and really nobody I know.)
Linkier
I think there's something sticky caught on this blog post.
"Affirmative" Sex Life Ruining: What Was Romantic For Me 13 Years Ago Can Now Get You Expelled As A Campus Rapist
I like to joke that I got my boyfriend at the Apple computer store, and I really did. Flirted with him at the store at The Grove, and then he took me for soda at the adjacent Farmers Market (not really a farmer's anything -- more of a covered market). And then, several hours later, he had a plane to catch, so he walked me to my car -- and grabbed me and kissed me.
It was one of those awesome romantic moments you see in chick flicks.
And no, he didn't just kiss some random woman out of the blue. I'd been looking at him probably googoo-eyed for hours. He's not an idiot or a pussy, so he grabbed me and we made out in the parking lot. I loved it.
Well, things change, and what's changing fast is that all the fun and spontaneity are being governmentally sucked out of sex and romance on campus. (Prediction: Next stop, off-campus, as in, state attempts to apply this to the rest of us.)
The latest is from a story in the Star Tribune by Maura Lerner about all the "affirmative consent" policies the government is forcing colleges to adopt through the threat of a denial of funding:
The University of Minnesota is joining a national movement requiring students to obtain "affirmative consent" from their sex partners or risk being disciplined for sexual assault.The policy change, sometimes known as the "yes means yes" rule, has been sweeping college campuses across the country since California passed the first such law last year.
The U's new rule, which is poised to take effect this month after a 30-day comment period, says that sex is OK only if both parties express consent through "clear and unambiguous words or actions." Absent that, it would fit the U's Âdefinition of sexual assault.
So far, the plan has prompted little dissent at the U. But nationally, critics have derided such policies as absurd and dangerous, particularly when it comes to protecting the rights of the accused.
"Once that accusation has been made, it's somehow up to the accused person to prove they did have consent," said Robert Shibley, executive director of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), a civil liberties group in Philadelphia. "What that means is that they're guilty until proven innocent."
What's happening is that it isn't just a "person" who's forced to prove this but a man. Men are the ones being accused of rape -- even in the case of a guy who was passed out at Amherst, and then, amazingly, was accused of sexual assault by the woman who blew him while he was out cold. And then he got expelled for it.
The bottom line: If you're a man accused of sexual assault on campus, due process and you are not going to meet.
Alison Berke Morano, a Florida political strategist who helped launch the "Affirmative Consent Project" (get your ugly t-shirt now!) is thrilled to bits at the spread of these sick "affirmative consent" rules.
No, never mind how you want your sex life to work, whether you think it's sexy to have some guy you've been making eyes at for hours grab you and kiss you. If you're a man and you so much as grab and hold the hand of the person you're on a date with without written consent, you could be facing sexual assault charges and get expelled from school. (And yes, this is supposedly intended to apply to women, too. Supposedly.)
Here's a bit from Alison's packet to ruin your sex life (at least in the way I want to have sex, which is spontaneously and not by being asked to fill out a permission slip). 
via ifeminists
Is Our Government About Protecting Rights Or Acting As A Giant Wealth Transfer ATM?
Glenn Reynolds asks (and answers) that question in his USA Today column on the Declaration of Independence:
Rather than rights coming from the government, government exists to protect rights. Government, in the declaration's explanation, exists to protect rights, and rather than subjects enjoying rights with the consent of the government, the government itself rules only by the consent of the governed. And when the government fails to live up to its duties, and the people no longer consent to it, it becomes illegitimate and subject to replacement by something the people like better.As Dan Himmelfarb noted in The Yale Law Journal 25 years ago, not much contemporary attention is paid to this. I'm sufficiently cynical to think that the lack of attention isn't an accident, but rather a consequence of not wanting to address the questions that the declaration's second sentence raises, which bode poorly for our ruling class.
Does our government now have, as its principal function, the protection of people's rights? Or is it more of a giant wealth-transfer machine, benefiting the connected at the expense of the outsiders? And, most important, does our government enjoy the consent of the governed? (According to a 2014 Rasmussen poll, only 21% think so.) What would the drafters of the declaration say?
So is a new American Revolution in order? As our Founding Fathers knew, revolutions are chancy things and often make things worse. And as the declaration itself notes, "All experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed."
Even so, it might be a good thing for our ruling class to spend a little time pondering the Declaration of Indepence, and its principles. There is more to government than graft. May they recognize that in time.
I find that it's hard as of late to get people off the couch to care or do anything. Again, just look at all the sheeple obediently "assuming the position" -- to be searched like a jailed felon -- at TSA rights-grabbing stations at airports around the country.
Linkity
Splitz.
Flip-Flops Are The Donorcycles Of Rubber Shoes
Friend wearing them: "I was walking across the street, and then I was on the sidewalk, face down."
My Pin on the subject -- from "Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck."
A Wallaby Ate Their Brains? Free Speech Goes Down Under In New Zealand
New Zealand passed an idiotic and dangerous law against online meanness, opening up the floodgates for the opportunistic to shut down speech on the Internet and beyond (since speech that starts elsewhere is often reported in Internet posts.
How long before the mere reporting of discomforting speech is also a criminal offense in NZ?
Richard Chirgwin writes at The Register:
The country last night passed a controversial bill, the Harmful Digital Communications Bill, in the hope of stemming "cyber-bullying".The bill creates a regime under which digital communications causing "serious emotional distress" are subject to an escalating regime that starts as "negotiation, mediation or persuasion" but reaches up to creating the offences of not complying with an order, and "causing harm by posting digital communication."
The most serious offenders would face two years in jail or a maximum fine of NZ$50,000 (US$33,900).
...The bill covers posts that are racist, sexist, or show religious intolerance, along with hassling people over disability or sexual orientation.
...The regime will be enforced by a yet-to-be-established agency that will make contact with publishers and social media platforms, and if it can't resolve a complaint, the agency will be able to escalate it to the district court.
There's a safe harbour provision for Web sites, and here's where the free speech arises. A platform like Facebook or Twitter (if they bothered) can opt into the safe harbour - but only if they agree to remove allegedly offending material either on-demand or within the bill's 48-hour grace period.
...InternetNZ told the outlet that the bill should be kept under review: "the risk is of unintended consequences, or chosen balances of rights not working out in practice."
Duh.
My other post from today -- on Michael Eisner contending that funny and beautiful don't usually come in the same woman -- could be construed as "sexist."
And I'm sure I've shown "religious intolerance" when I've blogged about the nature of Islam -- how it, for example, commands the slaughter of gays and apostates, and has adherents obediently following through on those directives. (Somehow, I find, oh, hanging gay teens -- as Iran did -- and Muslims pushing gay men off buildings for Allah hard to "tolerate," imagine that.)
via @overlawyered
Confessing To Faking It Without Breaking It
Anybody confess to a guy that they've been faking orgasms?
Or, if you are a guy, how could a woman tell you this -- with good results?
(There are women who fake it on a hookup and then -- whoopsy -- have the hookup turn into a relationship. And then they keep faking it, not wanting to hurt the guy's feelings or explain that they lied.)
Your thoughts and experiences?
You Might Not Like It, Ladies, But Is Michael Eisner Wrong?
Michael Eisner got the ladies of Twitter all atwitter for saying one of those things nobody's supposed to say -- or even think.
The Hollywood Reporter "staff' reported that former Disney CEO Michael Eisner, speaking at the Aspen Ideas Festival, said that it's hard to find both funny and beautiful in the same woman:
During an onstage conversation with Goldie Hawn, he theorized on why she'd been so successful: "From my position, the hardest artist to find is a beautiful, funny woman. By far. They usually--boy am I going to get in trouble, I know this goes online--but usually, unbelievably beautiful women, you being an exception, are not funny."For her part, Hawn replied that she might owe her comedic talents to the fact that she thought of herself as an "ugly duckling" when she was young.
"You didn't think you were beautiful," Eisner said. "I know women who have been told they're beautiful, they win Miss Arkansas, they don't ever have to get attention other than with their looks. So they don't tell a joke. In the history of the motion-picture business, the number of beautiful, really beautiful women -- a Lucille Ball -- that are funny, is impossible to find."
Is that not something we've all experienced? That women who are gorgeous from the get-go learn that they don't have to do much to get ahead in life -- not much beyond swinging their hair.
Look at all the gorgeous semi-idiots who are TV newstalkers. They aren't there because they killed it in journalism school but because they have the perfect face (and enough of a voice to go with for TV).
I'm no Angelina Jolie, but funny comes naturally to me -- naturally as a person who had no friends until 15, had to sleep on a door in New York (because I couldn't afford a bed), and went through a string of humiliating experiences from about 0 to 30-something.
When this is your life, you have two main choices: Kill yourself or make it funny.
Lippy
Talkbackielinks.
Hey, All You Snobs, Annoyed At People Taking Selfies...
Disney theme parks recently banned selfie sticks on supposed "safety" grounds (after some guy stuck his out while on a ride, which is prohibited in the park).
What's next, we ban texting because some people are jerks about it? Distracted walking!
And recently, a lady at a crowded event I went to nearly killed me when I tripped over her oxygen tank. What's next, ban breathing?
The reality is, humans are highly innovative and will find many creative ways to idiotically endanger their lives.
The way you deal with this guy's behavior, Disneyland, is that you say there are fines for doing dangerous things with selfie sticks, like sticking them into the mechanics of the roller coaster. Of course, this is really about the litigiousness we experience. Even the stupidest people are able to get lawyers to sue businesses blind, and never mind when they're to blame.
Regarding all the snobbery about selfie sticks and selfie-taking, as I write in "Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck," people like to sneer at even discreet, noninvasive cellphone use as a sign of our civilization's slow suicide (along with food items that are deep fried that shouldn't be and shows about New Jersey housewives and the apparently endless supply of Kardashians).
The reality is, it's bad manners trying to control other people's behavior when it in no way rudely impedes you or anybody else. If somebody isn't standing right in the way of foot traffic, blocking it, then maybe ease up your sneers at their selfie taking.
And...maybe consider the benefits of it, especially in places like Disneyland: Getting the entire family in the shot. As in, Dad stops being the person consistently missing from the kids' childhood photos.
I think that's nice.
The Perfect Gift For The Infantilized Woman Who Has (Almost) Everything
With feminists now demanding to be treated as eggshells, not equals, you might take the babywoman thing full circle and get your favorite feminist a coloring book with images like this. 
Yes, this thing actually exists -- or will soon.
Priscilla Frank reports at the HuffBlow about an upcoming "badass feminist coloring book for the powerful ladies in your life."
Of course, when ladies are actually badass, they tend to want, oh, a gift cert for the gun range or a manual on customizing the Harley, not one with "inspirational" line drawings of unattractive women accompanied by sayings too mundane to bother reprinting here.
But great news! The creator, Ijeoma Oluo, has already beaten her Moochstarter goal of $4K. Her statement:
"I really want to communicate how diverse feminism is and must be in order to create lasting and effective positive change," Oluo concluded. "I wanted to shine a light on feminists that you may never have heard of -- who don't always fit the middle-class liberal cis heterosexual white woman image we usually see. I want people to see the beauty in feminism, not a conventional beauty that often hurts women, but a beauty that comes from strength, resilience, kindness and empathy. Also, I really just want to give this to my feminist friends, as a celebration of community and solidarity."
I think that's a tear in my eye.
Here's my fave of the drawings:
Yes, I believe the lady has a bit of a 5 o'clocker.
And yes, surely what really matters in the world is that we make men's and ladies' room signs indistinguishable by having the little man and woman icons dressed exactly the same. (Are we expected to intuit the vagina in the pants-wearing lady icon or just hope we don't walk in on some guy whipping it out at the urinal?)
Meanwhile, across the world, other women are concerned about bathrooms, too.
via @CHSommers (who actually is badass)
The Linkard Of Oz
There's a man with a pumpkin for a head just to the left here somewhere.
My Mother Doesn't Approve Of My Lifestyle. Should I Sue Her? (Gay Couple Scored $135K Off Disapproving Christian Bakers)
I was supposed to stay in Michigan, join Temple Beth El, work at an ad agency, marry an accountant, and live in some really dull suburb like Novi. Oops.
I did find a wonderful guy from Detroit (got him in the Apple computer store at The Grove 13 years ago), but we're not married and have no plans to get married; I hightailed it to NYC ("that cesspool!", as my dad called it), and lived in a series of terrible apartments while giving free advice on a Soho street corner and rollerskating around the city and doing questionable things with questionable men.
I now live in Venice (a few houses down from a 60-something man who wears a fluorescent pink bob wig and skating skirts), write books with "F*ck" in the title, and drink wine that is not screw-top Manischewitz. (Not sure how troubling that last one is, but it does deviate from the standard Alkon family drinking practices.)
Well, disapproving of gay marriage and standing behind this by not baking a cake for a gay wedding has led to a $135K fine for a Gresham, Oregon bakers Aaron and Melissa Klein.
Oh, and I should trot out my gay rights pedigree here -- I'm for gay marriage and gays having all the same rights everybody else does, and have been blogging about that pretty much since I started blogging in around 2000. (Which is why I don't feel compelled to rainbow up my picture anywhere.)
Anyway, the couple was fined this money for the "emotional damage" they supposedly caused by telling the marrying couple no on baking a cake for them.
Oh, come the fuck on. "Emotional damage"? Because somebody doesn't approve of how you live? Mom...there will soon be a process server knocking at your door!
Scott Shackford, who, let's just say, is also not exactly a gay-hater, writes about this ridiculousness at reason:
First of all, the state agency recommended, remarkably, that the Kleins also be required to pay for the emotional damages caused to the couple by media coverage and social media reactions to the case, because the Kleins appeared in the media a couple of times to defend and explain themselves. They wanted the bakers to have to pay further because of the emotional toll of conversations and media coverage over much of which the Kleins had absolutely no control. Fortunately, the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor and Industries ruled against additional damages. The $135,000 is based just on the result of the Kleins telling the couple they would not make them a wedding cake.The second thing I want to alert folks to is the absurd way this order describes the emotional damage done to this couple. It's something to keep in mind when we talk about issues like hate speech laws and trigger warnings and whether it's appropriate to act as though the government is responsible for protecting people's feelings. Here's a chunk of the text, and there's a lot like it in the full order:
Respondent's denial of service made her feel as if God made a mistake when he made her, that she wasn't supposed to be, and that she wasn't supposed to love, have a family, and go to heaven. ... [She] interpreted the denial to represent that she was not a creature created by god, not created with a soul and unworthy of holy love and life. She felt anger, intense sorrow, and shame. These are reasonable and very real responses to not being allowed to participate in society like everybody else.It was a cake. A cake! She has not been rejected from society. There is no actual argument or evidence presented that their ability to live their lives fully has been impaired by one rejection. In fact, they got a free cake from semi-famous television baker Duff Goldman out of the publicity the state wanted to fine the Kleins for. She sounds like she was driven nearly to suicide because she was rejected by a couple of bakers. I wonder what would have happened if these ladies stumbled across the Phelps family somewhere. They would end up in comas!
Much of the ruling is written in this vein, even though it also acknowledges at one point that testimony from one of the women was prone to exaggeration, and she gave testimony that was contradicted by others. They only considered her testimony when it was completely undisputed or corroborated by others.
I'm an atheist. If you want to deny me service because you don't, say, think somebody who will "burn in hell" deserves to eat your food, you have at it. Your business, your creation, and despite ridiculous state laws, I don't have the (natural) right to force you to create something for me.
And as Scott rightly points out in this month's print edition of reason:
Many wedding businesses are falling all over themselves to compete in this new and potentially profitable market. There is little indication that gay couples actually need the government to force resistant religious bakers to fire up their mixers in order to have the wedding of their dreams.
The court's order -- forcing the Kleins to pay $75K to one member of the couple and $60K to the other -- is like a signal to people who are gay to abuse business owners of faith the way a few rotten people in wheelchairs abuse the Americans with Disabilities Act to score cash off businesses (like a hamburger stand that was forced to close when the owner didn't have the money to bring the restrooms up to ADA code).
Supply And Da Man
Pennsylvania's governor, Tom Wolf, vetoed a bill allowing liquor privatization, claiming that the state monopoly...benefits consumers!
Welcome to the fantasy view of the nanny state and basic economics.
Jacob Sullum blogs at reason that the governor claimed that competition would raise prices!
He also worries that letting private businesses sell beer and wine would result in "less selection for consumers."According to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Wolf and his fellow Democrats "warned that prices would rise as private businesses sought profit." In other words, private merchants will jack up prices because they want to make money--unlike the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board (PLCB), which seeks only to raise revenue. If you think those two motives sound pretty similar, you are smarter than Pennsylvania's governor, who fails to recognize that the relevant difference between these two models for distributing booze, when it comes to how high prices can be raised, is the presence or absence of competition. Other things being equal, more competition leads to lower prices, so it is hard to see why Pennsylvanians would have to pay more for a bottle of whiskey if the state monopoly were replaced by profit-driven businesses competing against each other.
If you compare the prices charged by the PLCB to the prices charged by, say, Total Wine & More across the border in New Jersey, you'll find that customers generally pay more for liquor in Pennsylvania: for example, just picking three products I often buy, $30 vs. $25 for Bulleit rye whiskey, $52 vs. $44 for 10-year-old Ardbeg Scotch, and $44 vs. $37 for Herradura reposado tequila (all in 750-milliliter bottles). Total Wine also has a bigger selection: 354 varieties of Scotch, for instance, compared to fewer than 100 at the PLCB. Is there any reason to think Total Wine could not offer similar prices and variety to Pennsylvanians?
Lincoln
Linkin', pre-Internet.
Bora Zivkovic, Ruined By A Baseless Victim Feminist Attack: Catherine, His Wife, Finally Speaks -- Explains The Devastating Effects On Their Family
I blogged yesterday about victim feminist power grabs: using a combo of identity politics and what I call eggshell feminism -- the new demand for women to be treated as eggshells, not equals -- in order to have unearned power over men and even to destroy them. (There are women, too, whom they go after, but the victims are mostly men.)
Here's a bit from my blog item:
Victim Feminism: A New Form Of Extortion
A trend seems to have arisen: Women (mostly) are using accusations against men (and sometimes women in power) as a way of having unearned power.
These accusations typically don't meet any sort of standard for the "crime" committed and they tend to not seem the slightest bit reasonable to anyone not hypnotized by identity politics. Yet, they often seem to have surprising traction.
Take the case of former SciAm blogs editor Bora Zivkovic -- accused of sexual harassment and pilloried for it on social media and elsewhere, until he was out of a job and pretty much ruined. The only problem? What he did never met any legal standard for sexual harassment -- or even any reasonable standards.
But women said he did it and their accusations stood. And then a herd of supposed skeptics -- self-proclaimed skeptics known as science writers -- simply nodded their heads on Twitter in unison and decided to schedule an Internet-wide witch-burning. (Never mind that nobody ever got Bora's side of the story.)
What kind of woman takes advantage of the power of the "J'accuse!"? Not a woman of power and position. Not a woman who is going places. A woman who has failed to make much of herself or her life. A woman who doesn't have the grades or the chops or who hasn't done the work.
She sees an opening, though, an opening in our careless passage of laws, for example, like Title IX, which was supposed to be about giving girls soccer time in high school but is now used, for example, to remove due process rights of men accused of sexual crimes on campus.
It's truly sick.
I've gotten to know Bora since this happened, because I was one of a (literal) handful of people standing up for him, for due process for him, and for somebody to ask for his side of the story. (I've been trying to get someone to do a reported piece on this -- it's not what I do -- and was looking to NY Times media reporter David Carr, a former colleague from the alt weeklies, and then Carr died.)
As I noted above, what Bora did in no way met any legal or reasonable standard for sexual harassment -- a crew of harpies who accused him just said it did; and all these supposed "skeptics" who make up the science-writing community just piled on.
Getting to know Bora -- a tiny, Asperger'sy guy with a big heart and a deep love of science, who just wanted to include everyone -- I can see that he has the antithesis of a predator personality. The more I get to know him, the more I see that this is a horrible injustice that must not be left to stand. I want others to understand this.
Well, his wife, Catherine, could remain silent about this no longer and, yesterday, left a long comment on my above blog item. Here it is:
The injustice of what was done to Bora is almost too painful to bear. Both I and Bora have been dangerously close to suicide (at different times) since this disaster happened. The torture of the irony here is that Bora is 100% innocent. Not only was NO action meeting the legal definition of sexual harassment committed, but there was also not a trace of inappropriate comments or behavior ever to escape Bora's person. Ever. EVER. And the people who know him, the thousands he has unselfishly and freely given his time to, know this. If we had the resources, we could PROVE his innocence. If we ever have the chance to sue any and every body involved in this crime, we will nail you for every last penny you have. One has to do only a surface investigation into the sordid life of Monica Byrne to see that her depravity reaches far and wide. We know three different men in the Triangle, who are not only strangers to the science community, but also strangers to each other, and all have said that Monica is a known pathological liar, none were surprised by her actions, and one even suggested that the reason she falsely accused Bora is that she failed to get him to sleep with her. If she can't bend a man to her will, she will set out to destroy him, just as she spent her time in NYC riding subways "hunting" for flashers, as she relates in the story she told at The Monti. Just as she has been crying like a little bitch because she didn't get her way with Wired. Read the reviews of her novel on Amazon and you will see that she is one sick bitch. Look at her 100+ 'sexy' dress poses' selfies and you will clearly see that she uses her sexuality to manipulate and control men. It is really rather disgusting.And how about Kathleen Raven? Talk about a pussy. She is a major pussy. Bora actually considered her his best friend and trusted her implicitly. The (one sided) snippets from the emails she posted really succeeded in making Bora look like some kind of pervert. But the fact is that he was having a private conversation with her about his adolescent sexuality, and what it is like for young people growing up in a culture that affords them no real privacy for sexual exploration. Young people in Belgrade (at least at that time) didn't have their own apartments or live together before marriage. You basically either had your spouse move in with you and your parents, or you moved in with your in-laws, after marriage, of course. Ironically, in his culture sex is considered normal and natural and nobody faints if you say the word "erection." Kathleen Raven is a sneaky little bitch. More than once, she coyly asked Bora "are you attracted to me?" I have seen the Twitter DMs. I have read her emails and texts. Her hands are not clean. Although they came close to actually having an affair, it never got physical. And the reason is that Bora refused because they were both married. I do think they had what I would call an emotional affair. They were in constant contact, they both lit up like Christmas trees when they met at conferences, Bora once even credited Kathleen with "saving our marriage," because he had someone to talk to who understood.
Understood? Since Kathleen didn't hesitate to throw me under the bus, I will tell you the story of her ex/abusive boyfriend: apparently this fellow had some unsavory rape fantasies that he persuaded Kathleen to allow him to "act out" with her. Although she gave her consent, she said she was extremely traumatized by this sex play. That isn't surprising. It sounds horrible. But this is classic Kathleen Raven logic. Say yes, decide it was a bad idea, cry wolf. It is worth noting here that Kathleen was under a HUGE amount of pressure from Maryn McKenna and Emily Willingham (everybody's favorite!) and a few other women to make these public accusations about Bora. She totally dissed Bora's friendship and loyalty and folded to the party politics. In my book, that makes her a great, big PUSSY. And tell me, if you will, that if she was so intimated by Bora, why did he have an invitation to come and visit her in her home? The visit was planned for the week after Bora was "outed." How quickly things change! Finally, if you have watched the video of the Double X session (which, ironically, Bora organized) you can clearly see that after Kathleen publically accuses Bora, a little smile/smirk breaks out on her face. If you know anything about microexpressions, you know that this is a classic "tell" for lying. I know what I say is true because I was here. And I was there. I watched the whole thing unfold. I even warned Bora: bad idea, keep your distance, you can't trust her. But everybody who knows Bora knows that he is totally gullible, always gives the benefit of the doubt,and trusts everyone. At least he used to.
What people don't know is that a lawyer forced Bora to publish that "apology" and would not allow him to use his own words or defend himself. So his fate was sealed, his guilt certain. A handful of brave women came to his defense. Interestingly, this did not include the women that knew him best, like Bethany Brookshire (we danced at her wedding! She started her blog on his laptop! She KNOWS better) and Janet Stemmwedel (she had been aching to be on the Science Online board for a couple of years, Bora and Anton were actually planning to add her as the organization grew, but she took this opportunity to turn against Bora and try to stage a SciOn coup). Sorry, Janet, when two people have an idea, do the work (LOTS of fucking free work), and make a great baby, you can't just TAKE that baby and claim it is your own. All of you should be very, very ashamed for ruining one of the best conferences in the country.
Almost NO men stood up for Bora because they knew they would be committing career suicide. There was one notable exception: Anton. Anton was Bora's closest friend and partner. During the early weeks, we probably would have died without his loyal support. However, when he wrote an incredibly thoughtful, fair, and profound piece about the issue (in all of it's complexity) and published it around New Year's Day, he was attacked so visciously, with so much mocking and hatred, that even he questioned the innocence of Bora, and proceeded to put a fairly substantial amount of distance between himself and Bora. This was a real low point for us. We lost so many friends for whom we cared deeply. It was disturbing to see all those "journalists" sincerely believing that they knew the Truth without asking Bora ONE SINGLE QUESTION.
The funny (but not too funny) thing is that Bora is one of the rare true male feminists. He achieved gender equity with everything that had his name on it (his blog network, Science Online, his annual best of science blogs anthology....and he refused dozens of invitations to participate on panels all over the world because the panels did not include one single woman speaker.
Bora was born to teach. Partly out of love, and partly as community service, he has been teaching freshman biology at a local college for twenty years, including during the time he worked at Scientific American. This is a situation in which there is a REAL power differential. However, in all of those years, he has not had one single complaint (not even from the creationists in his classes, many of whom he converted to accept evolution based on the evidence he taught). Not one complaint. In fact, he consistently has the best evaluations on campus.
I know Bora better than any of you ever will. I know that he lacks the machismo and even the self-confidence to bully or harass any person in any way. Do you seriously feel that he is a threat? He weighs 125 lbs! About 50 lbs less than the average woman at a conference. ANYBODY could take him down, if necessary. But it would never be necessary because that is just not who Bora is.
Bora LOVED his job. He worked 18 hour days most of the time, and ALWAYS seven days a week (unless he was on his beloved Amtrak train.) Bora cared deeply for almost everyone. And he has always been unfailingly polite to the few people he can't stand. I admit that he is the goofy guy who stands there talking to you for ten minutes without realizing his elbow is in your potato salad. But what can I say? He's on the spectrum. So many people owe their careers or book deals to him. I can't count that high.
But where oh where is the loyalty to Bora? Not even Bora so much as the pursuit of, and loyalty to the truth? His boss at the college heard the rumors and read the slander, but she is wise in the ways of the world and knows that the person being described as a "serial sexual harasser" was not, is not, and will never be Bora. Is it possible that the rest of you are so utterly and completely gullible and stupid that you can not see that there is no way Bora would have behaved in such a crude manner? Yes. I actually do believe that most of you are THAT stupid.
All of you that have been complicit in this crime are guilty of ruining our life. You have succeeded in rendering Bora unemployable. You have humiliated our children, and pushed us both to the very edge of suicide and divorce. You have taken four people out of the middle class and sentenced us to a life of poverty. Because of you, there are children going to bed hungry (our daughter is down to 83 lbs and she's anemic. She is not anorexic. She is hungry. She is afraid to eat because she's afraid there will be nothing left. YOU DID THIS TO HER. TO US. And for what?
To all of you who were complicit in this lie, beware! Evil begets evil.
Somebody out there needs to find Moses (or Jesus) and recognize this grave injustice. Somebody needs to refuse to participate in this witch hunt and offer Bora a decent job with full benefits. Monica Byrne and Kathleen Raven need to grow up, admit their lies, and publicly apologize. Bora deserves the restoration of his life, his work, and his good name.
Posted by: Ccziv at July 2, 2015 11:31 AM
What's beyond crazy and what's sick is that we've gotten to the point where accusations of sexual harassment are simply believed out of hand. There has been a push from within feminism to never question an (alleged) victim.
Well, the truth is, false accusations are made, and part of a fair investigation is questioning whether there's validity to an accusation and not simply looking on the calendar to schedule the witch burning for the accused.
This needs to change, and it will only change when people lay themselves on the line to speak out for those who have been denied due process (legally, socially, and on social media). There were (literally) a handful of people, including me, who spoke up for Bora. I did get emails from academics who were very much on his side -- privately -- but said they could not afford to speak out publicly.
Well, it's the fact that few speak out that makes it dangerous for those who do. And despite the danger -- and I know it has hurt me, careerwise, to speak out -- sometimes you just have to do it because somebody has been unfairly victimized and speaking out is the right thing to do.
About These Campaigns To Yank Women Into Science
A quote from Judith Kleinfeld on Psychology Today on claims of sexism in science and the campaigns to yank women into jobs they don't seem all that interested in being in:
We should not be sending [gifted] women the messages that they are less worthy human beings, less valuable to our civilization, lazy or low in status, if they choose to be teachers rather than mathematicians, journalists rather than physicists, lawyers rather than engineers.
Where's the campaign to bring more men into kindergarten teaching?
It's Legal To Curse Out A Cop, But Cops Still Arrest People For It
There's that pesky First Amendment thingie, and as long as you aren't threatening the cop, your pottymouthisms are legal.
However, Terrell Jermaine Starr writes at Alternet:
Courts around the country consistently rule in favor of defendants who find themselves behind bars for using profane, but protected speech against law enforcement....While it is not known exactly how many of these arrests are the result of profanity being used toward police officers, it does reveal a trend of hyper-policing that troubles Sanders.
"As long as they are not breaking the law, people are allowed to have their First Amendment right to say, 'Fuck the police.' It's reality. 'Fuck the police. I hate all cops.' Is it a nice thing to hear? No. But is it legal? Sure it is. There is no law against that," he said.
via Jay J. Hector
Donkeylinks
Bray to go.
We Need More Of This -- Professorial Solidarity Against Victim Feminism And Craven University Administrators
Nobel Prize-winning scientist Hunt was forced out in what writer and broadcaster Roger Dimbleby rightly refers to as a "disgraceful" rush to judgment.
Admirably, Dimbleby quit his honorary fellowship at UCL to protest what was done to Hunt.
James Meikle reports at The Guardian:
Dimbleby said: "The college has a long and honourable tradition of defending free speech, however objectionable it may be. Sir Tim made a very poor joke and it quite rightly backfired. He then apologised for that," he told the Times....[Hunt] admitted he had made an "idiotic joke" during a conference in Seoul, South Korea, but insisted his remarks had not been fully reported and that he had the support of hundreds of female scientists.
Meanwhile, his accuser, Connie St. Louis's account does not match that of others who were there.
In fact St. Louis's main accomplishment seems to be lying about her accomplishments. In that, seems to fit the profile I just wrote about regarding women who use the power of "J'accuse!" to gain unearned power over men:
What kind of woman takes advantage of the power of the "J'accuse!"? Not a woman of power and position. Not a woman who is going places. A woman who has failed to make much of herself or her life. A woman who doesn't have the grades or the chops or who hasn't done the work.
But let's get back to what Dimbleby did, standing up in solidarity with Hunt. No, most professors can't afford to support a colleague by leaving their position. But they can band together and speak up.
Regarding banding together against the mob, I recently spoke at the Human Behavior and Evolution Society conference, in a session with the tireless and courageous medical bioethicist Alice Dreger. My talk was on the "behavioral immune system" and how scientists can protect themselves when they are attacked by ideologues -- attacked not because their science is bad but because they are an easy target (like Asperger'sy Bora Zivkovic was) or the ideologues simply don't like their findings.
A bit from my talk relates in this case:
The problem is, when you're first attacked, the fight looks terribly one-sided. They're a group and they're all coming after you. It's scary.The thing is, you have a group, too. This room is a group. We see ourselves that way -- as a group in physical terms -- when we come together for a conference or other event. But we need to identify as a group beyond our physical grouping -- identify as science people, evolutionary science people -- and as a collective for defending science, evolutionary science, and evolutionary scientists. The way we do that is by banding together to defend fellow scientists when they are attacked by ideologues.
The good news is, research by Henri Tajfel and others finds that it takes very little for people to do that -- to see one another as teammates; we just have to see the slightest thing that allows us to identify with the others. (As I explain in "Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck") social psychologists David DeSteno and Piercarlo Valdesolo found that even seeing somebody wearing the same color wristband as you allows you to see them as on your "team"; as "one of us." So here's my effort at priming you in that direction -- that pink paper that each of you got. It contains some tips from me but it's something else, too. It's a mark of being part of the Evolutionary Sciencepeople Group. Use this to see one another as fellow group members so you can take a more Three Musketeers/all for one and one for all approach when one of us under attack.
Dimbleby took a first step but others need to start standing up for their fellow researchers who have the victim feminist, social "justice" Twittermob go after them.
Standing up as a group against the mob is how craven administrators at universities see that the mob's target is not so easily and seamlessly knocked off the wall.
And this, not any desire for fairness or justice or support of the free speech and inquiry that is supposed one of the foundations of a university, is what keeps the administrators from indulging in the quick witch burnings they prefer of anybody the mob points their fingers at.
UPDATE, via @DeanEsmay: More solidarity.
Victim Feminism: A New Form Of Extortion
A trend seems to have arisen: Women (mostly) are using accusations against men (and sometimes women in power) as a way of having unearned power.
These accusations typically don't meet any sort of standard for the "crime" committed and they tend to not seem the slightest bit reasonable to anyone not hypnotized by identity politics. Yet, they often seem to have surprising traction.
Take the case of former SciAm blogs editor Bora Zivkovic -- accused of sexual harassment and pilloried for it on social media and elsewhere, until he was out of a job and pretty much ruined. The only problem? What he did never met any legal standard for sexual harassment -- or even any reasonable standards.
But women said he did it and their accusations stood. And then a herd of supposed skeptics -- self-proclaimed skeptics known as science writers -- simply nodded their heads on Twitter in unison and decided to schedule an Internet-wide witch-burning. (Never mind that nobody ever got Bora's side of the story.)
What kind of woman takes advantage of the power of the "J'accuse!"? Not a woman of power and position. Not a woman who is going places. A woman who has failed to make much of herself or her life. A woman who doesn't have the grades or the chops or who hasn't done the work.
She sees an opening, though, an opening in our careless passage of laws, for example, like Title IX, which was supposed to be about giving girls soccer time in high school but is now used, for example, to remove due process rights of men accused of sexual crimes on campus.
It's truly sick.
The latest set of stories about these increasingly prevalent witch hunts are in an article by Michelle Goldberg in The Nation. One professor, LSU's lauded Theresa Buchanan, was fired, in part, for saying "fuck, no!" in class.
Yes, that's right. Upon hearing these words, the tender ears of some college student simply caught fire right there in the classroom and she was wheeled out on a stretcher. (Kidding. You knew that, right?)
Buchanan's other "crimes":
Making a joke about sex declining in long-term relationships, as well as using the word "pussy" in an off-campus conversation with a teacher.
And then there's this little bit of student opportunism:
Last fall, David Samuel Levinson, the author, most recently, of the literary thriller Antonia Lively Breaks the Silence, taught a course called "Introduction to Fiction" at Emory University, part of a two-year fellowship he'd been awarded there. Blunt and scabrous, he prides himself on being frank with his students. "My class is like a truth-telling, soothsaying class, and I tell them no one is going to talk to you like this, you will never have another class like this," he says.One student, he says, a freshman woman, sat besides him throughout the course, actively participating. At the end of the semester, he gave her a B+, because, although she worked hard, her writing wasn't great. "They don't really understand that they can do all of the work, and turn in perfectly typed up, typo-free papers and stories, but it doesn't mean they're going to get an A, because quality matters, talent matters," he says.
While he was on vacation over winter break, he got a Facebook message from her. He ignored it, figuring it was a complaint about her grade. She started sending him imploring e-mails asking him to reconsider her B+. Finally, he says, he got an e-mail from the director of his program saying, "You need to take care of this. You don't want this to escalate."
The student, he learned, was threatening to bring him up on sexual harassment charges. "Oh, I felt unsafe," he whines, imitating her. The director, he says, told him, "I know this is bullshit, you know this is total bullshit, since you're gay, [but] you really don't want to deal with this bullshit. Just give her the grade." Asked about this, the director says, "I don't recall that, but I do recall advising him that as with all faculty, per our policy, that this was up to his discretion and thus his decision to make."
Overprivileged brats and identity politics, more and more, are shoving out free speech, free inquiry, reasonableness, and decency.
Free speech is the loser here, and once it starts getting rolled back, things generally don't just stop and go the other way.
Oh, and if you are over 12 and can't handle "fuck" and "pussy" without feeling some sort of trauma, your mommy and daddy shouldn't be allowing you to go to college -- or be letting you out of your yard without your caregiver.
Daniel Pink: Why You Should Always Skip Your Children's Baseball Games
A video with Pink on why parents should get out of the way. Hear him out on why it's better for kids that you're not there.
Something to consider, even if you can't give up the baseball game-going habit: To foster independence, kids should have kid life and not have mommy and daddy there at every turn. The notion that this is normal turns parenting into helicopter parenting and parents into frazzled people who don't have lives...I was going to say "until their kid goes away to college," but this sort of parent is the one who goes with their kid to the job interview.
via @AdamMGrant
Alligator Shoelinks
I'll take the handbag to go with, please.
Mission Creep In Thugville: TSA Tweets Photo Of Passenger's Cash-Filled Bag, Tips Off Another Govt Agency To Come Steal It
Christopher Ingraham writes in the WaPo about the TSA -- supposedly there to protect us from terrorism -- regarding one of their executhugs' tweets from the other day:
Earlier today, Transportation Security Administration spokesperson Lisa Farbstein sent the following tweet from her verified account:
Oh, and she's alll laughy-laughy in her picture. "Ha, ha, ha, there go your civil liberties, Americans!"
The photo, from the Richmond airport, shows a passenger's luggage containing $75,000 in cash. Farbstein asks, "Is this how you'd transport it?" Most people would not, but there is nothing illegal about simply checking a bag containing $75,000, or carrying it with you on the plane. Passengers aren't under any obligation to report large sums of cash unless they're traveling internationally, though the TSA recommends that passengers consider asking for a private screening.Asked about the incident via e-mail, Farbstein said that "the carry-on bag of the passenger alarmed because of the large unknown bulk in his carry-on bag. When TSA officers opened the bag to determine what had caused the alarm, the money was sitting inside. Quite unusual. TSA alerted the airport police, who were investigating." Farbstein didn't respond to a question about whether posting photos of the man's luggage and property violated his privacy, nor did she offer any more details on the situation.
It is none of the government's fucking business whether you are carrying cash and how much. There are reporting requirements (for sums over $10K) if you are leaving or entering the country. But if you are simply leaving one state for another, and if there's no evidence the money will, say, explode on the plane, grubby government thugs should not be all up in your dollar bills.
And here's a joke -- the notion that the TSA workers could assess anything besides their vast luck in getting a nice salary for playing dress-up (in cop Halloween costumes) and then missing 95 percent of the devices undercover inspectors smuggled past them. In Ingraham's blog post, he writes:
A 2009 TSA blog post explained what the TSA does when agents encounter large sums of cash.Sometimes a TSA officer may ask a passenger who is carrying a large sum of cash to account for the money. You have asked why such a question is posed and whether a passenger is required to answer.
In reacting to potential security problems or signs of criminal activity, TSA officers are trained to ask questions and assess passenger reactions, including whether a passenger appears to be cooperative and forthcoming in responding.
TSA officers routinely come across evidence of criminal activity at the airport checkpoint. Examples include evidence of illegal drug trafficking, money laundering, and violations of currency reporting requirements prior to international trips.
Sorry, in my experience with the caliber of people who take jobs at airports groping their fellow Americans' genitals and violating their civil liberties for money, well, I would estimate that my average daily temperature exceeds the IQ of every TSA thug who felt me up at the airport.
By the way:
In this case, the cash was seized by a federal agency, most likely the Drug Enforcement Agency, according to Richmond airport spokesman Troy Bell. "I don't believe the person was issued a summons or a citation," he said. "The traveler was allowed to continue on his way."
In other words, there was not enough evidence of a crime in order to arrest the person, but the legalized government theft that is "civil asset forfeiture" has a different standard: You must prove your money innocent of being earned criminally -- which can cost you tens of thousands of dollars or more. Many victims of this government thuggery realize that they lose less in just letting the government keep what it stole from them.
Terrible, tragic. Not what America is supposed to be. But it's what it is.
via @RadleyBalko
Chait Takes On Douhat's Weak Attempts At Arguments Against Gay Marriage
The key points -- from Chait's NYMag piece:
The lightning-fast progression of marriage equality from fringe cause to popular, Constitutional right will be studied for years to come. The movement owes its success to any number of things, but surely preeminent among them is the clarity of its core rationale. Preventing gay people from marrying each other serves no coherent purpose. Allowing them to marry harms nobody.The same-sex-marriage ban was never a premeditated social policy. It simply reflected an age-old abhorrence of homosexuality, and the instinctive or religiously inspired impulse to treat same-sex romance as a sin to be stamped out.
In other words, the problem was that -- as anybody with three brain cells to rub together could understand -- their objection was on religious grounds. Oopsy, doesn't quite work with that Constitution thingie. So...
Opponents of same-sex marriage have had to reverse engineer public-policy justifications, and the result was utterly feeble. Ross Douthat's Sunday New York Times column, making a kind of final summarizing statement of a defeated position, reveals the right's inability to muster a remotely compelling argument for its position.
And then there's my favorite "argument," that gays getting married hurts the marriages or potential marriages of straight people. Riiiight. So, you're a woman who wanted more than anything to get married and have a family but because all those yicky soddomites are doing it, you're having none of that. Chait:
This speculative-at-best, ridiculous-at-worst assumption that same-sex marriage corrodes straight marriage creates the premise for the second piece of Douthat's argument: It's acceptable to ban same-sex marriage for the sake of straight marriage. Douthat leaves this part of the argument unexplained in his column. But it's even harder to accept than the first part. Assume that his first premise is correct, that permitting same-sex marriage will somehow lead fewer straight people to get or stay married. Is that really an acceptable basis to deny gay people equal rights? They must be excluded from an institution whose joys have been extolled (by social conservatives more than anybody) and whose legal privileges are significant, in order to spread a nebulous socioeconomic benefit to straight America? What kind of social contract between citizens could justify such a one-sided burden?
Linkier
Slinkier with an s-shaped leak.
