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ControlsFreak


				

				

				
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User ID: 1422

ControlsFreak


				
				
				

				
5 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2022 October 02 23:23:48 UTC

					

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User ID: 1422

ROFL if you think it was "covered" in that discussion. That thread has no real analysis or meaningful argument that they cancel out. It's just throwing up casual thoughts into basically one-liner comments, likely by non-experts. It's classic shit tier internet forum 'analysis'.

Overprovisioning is pretty huge, to the point of being both an incredibly basic thing conceptually and a significant multiplicative factor that seriously changes the splashy number.

"Doing some math, currently each satellite launch sends up 22 satellites at around 2.8 Gbps per satellite. For each launch, Starlink adds [approx] 61.6 Gbps of capacity. If we cut that up into 100/20 slices, each launch supports 616 customers at 100/20. To support 650,000 subscribers at 100/20, it would take about 1055 perfect launches."

This is not how bandwidth math works. There are some other HN comments that lean differently, but it seems that you cherry-picked ones that simultaneously lean in the direction you prefer and manage to not know how bandwidth math works.

This is relevant to much of the discussion here.

Last year, after Elon Musk acquired Twitter and used it to voice his own political and ideological views without a filter, President Biden gave federal agencies a greenlight to go after him. During a press conference at the White House, President Biden stood at a podium adorned with the official seal of the President of the United States, and expressed his view that Elon Musk “is worth being looked at.”1 When pressed by a reporter to explain how the government would look into Elon Musk, President Biden remarked: “There’s a lot of ways.”2 There certainly are. The Department of Justice, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Federal Trade Commission, the National Labor Relations Board, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service have all initiated investigations into Elon Musk or his businesses.

Today, the Federal Communications Commission adds itself to the growing list of administrative agencies that are taking action against Elon Musk’s businesses. I am not the first to notice a pattern here. Two months ago, The Wall Street Journal editorial board wrote that “the volume of government investigations into his businesses makes us wonder if the Biden Administration is targeting him for regulatory harassment.”3 After all, the editorial board added, Elon Musk has become “Progressive Enemy No. 1.” Today’s decision certainly fits the Biden Administration’s pattern of regulatory harassment. Indeed, the Commission’s decision today to revoke a 2020 award of $885 million to Elon Musk’s Starlink—an award that Starlink secured after agreeing to provide high-speed Internet service to over 640,000 rural homes and businesses across 35 states—is a decision that cannot be explained by any objective application of law, facts, or policy.

Those are real agencies bringing real claims and making real administrative judgments that will be backed by the full force of the United States of America. They are also total bullshit and not real.

there's a decent number of 2008-2013 enforcement against 'fat' ultralights.

Interesting. Any cites to criminal, felony cases? My quick internet search didn't come up with much but rumors that people were given reprimands, maybe fines, and told that they had to get rid of second seats (but that they didn't care so much if they were a little 'fat').

I've been thinking a lot on the application of the laws. A couple stories come to mind.

First, a literal friend of a friend. We were both at a mutual friend's house for dinner one night. I didn't know him before this evening, and I never saw him again afterward. It was a while ago; I can't precisely age him; I would guess 30s. He was a black man. All I really remember is that nearly the entire evening, he was talking about how unjust he thought marijuana laws were. He expressed that, because of this belief, he thought that it was his duty to continue selling marijuana in violation of the law that he thought unjust. To the point of saying something along the lines of, "I have a child now that I want to take care of, but I will absolutely go back to jail, because I have a duty to keep selling marijuana."

I remember thinking at the time that it was just a terrible pragmatic decision, because regardless of his belief on the justness of the law, it seemed implausible that his persistent violation of it would have any remotely meaningful effect. It's still above my pay grade to have any sort of judgment on the perspective where you're convinced that a law and the means by which it is being prosecuted is unjust at its core, unfairly and unjustly applied, perhaps in a discriminatory way toward unfavorables, and then having to decide what to do about it. But it helped me understand just how much opprobrium many people can have when they see such things that they consider to be abuses of what may be otherwise legitimate political power, especially when they think that a part of the abuse is, "They wouldn't put me in jail for it if I were white."

The second example is Doug Hughes, the mailman who landed his ultralight gyrocopter on Capitol Hill. His political shtick was that he was "delivering letters" to politicians to protest campaign finance laws. But it was all over the news, a major embarrassment to the Obama administration. How could this guy just fly in to DC airspace?! It's one of the most protected airspaces in the world and there are special flight rules that must be observed in order to enter it. (He likely would not have received authorization to enter if he had asked according to procedure.)

However, those rules are just little bitty administrative rules, basically. You talk to pilots who are in the 'pilot community', and they know that you definitely take those rules seriously, because if you even accidentally break them, the minute you land, you're going to be interrogated by someone from the FAA (and possibly law enforcement) to figure out what you were up to, and the likely outcome in any event is that they're going to revoke your pilot's license.

But, uh, Doug Hughes didn't have a pilot's license for them to revoke! You don't need to have a pilot's license to fly an ultralight gyrocopter! The Powers That Be were in a bit of a pickle. They had to make an example of this guy, somehow. Their only normal recourse was to take the license that he didn't even have. Soooo, they scoured the law books, grasping for anything they could come up with. What they found was that, with the added weight of the letters, the total weight of his gyrocopter was just barely above the weight limit for ultralight aircraft, and there's a real big boy statute with real criminal felony penalties requiring a pilot's license to fly heavier aircraft. That's how they got him.

I can't help but think that if Mr. Hughes flew his slightly-overweight gyrocopter literally anywhere else, in a way that didn't bring national embarrassment to The Powers That Be, his criminal conviction would have evaporated at twenty different levels of discretion. First off, probably no one would have even known. Who the hell monitors the weight of these little guys on a regular basis? Nobody. And even if someone did notice, they might have just chuckled. "Can't believe you managed to get that beefy boi up!" Mayyyyyyyybe someone miiiiight have quietly noticed and whispered, "Hey Doug, don't do it again, or at least, don't let other people know, because I just came to the brilliant realization that it's technically illegal, that pretty cool thing I just saw you do and am otherwise giving you social props for." (It is left as an exercise for the reader to estimate the likelihood of criminal sanctions if the flight had gathered attention, but was widely viewed as being politically favorable to The Powers That Be.)

Spoilers: The jurisdiction we were in at the time of the marijuana conversation has now legalized marijuana. Recently, the FAA has basically acknowledged that weight limits have very little to do with safety and may, in fact, be detrimental to safety when it comes to regulation of small aircraft.


I recently read a couple books by William Riker, who to my knowledge, has never stepped foot on any model of the starship Enterprise. Particularly of note here is his Liberalism Against Populism, written in '87. Much of it is mathematical minutia of the the pros/cons of different voting systems and the pathologies which may follow, but in his concluding chapters, he presents a fascinating interpretation of political science/philosophy, public/social choice theory as sort of a general domain that seems to have some sense grown out of economics departments in the late 20th century.

Riker acknowledges the common refrain that economics is 'the dismal science', since it deals with allocation of scarce resources, and sort of no matter what choices you make, someone is not going to have everything they want (especially if what they want is basically everything). Of course, some people lose economically, due to a variety of factors which may or may not be under their control, but he says that social choice is the real dismal science, for at least in economics you can very often find positive sum trades sort of just sitting around all over the place. They can make things genuinely better for pretty much everyone!

In a sort of analogy, in his mind, social choice is also a study of the allocation of a scarce resource, but that scare resource is political and moral values. These are often distributed in a zero-sum fashion (think two-candidate elections). Or, as he flatly says, "Suppose that, ..., it is still the intent of each possible winner to impose some kind of external cost on the losers. Then, no matter who wins, there exists a loser who is the worse off for having participated in the political system." He contrasts economic scarcity, which means that those who cannot pay or convince a Soviet-style planning commission to allocate to them must go without, to political/moral scarcity, which "requires that the nonpossessor suffer additional punishment for nonpossession". He then leverages his long work on voting systems and 'heresthetics' to argue that it will, in fact, often lead to dissatisfaction by a majority of people. This has other implications for his political science, but I think I will stop here.


Regardless of what I think are the personal pros/cons of his strategy, the jurisdiction in which marijuana man lived eventually decided to allocate some scarce political/moral resource to him. Doug Hughes was an incredible loser in the negative sum game of obtaining scarce political/moral resources and punishing one's enemies in the process. He may eventually be vindicated by the FAA on moral grounds, though he had to pay a steep price in the meantime (as I assume marijuana man already had; I recall him saying that he would go 'back to jail' as if he had already been).

Regardless of what I think are the personal pros/cons of Trump's strategy, his case (the case of political and moral allocation, not that of his legal trial) has yet to be decided. The Powers That Be will use every tool at their disposal to deny him any allocation of political/moral value, at least for now, even if that involves scouring the books for anything, even if that means going after him for something that would have disappeared as an issue for anyone else by twenty different offramps.

Riker tells me that the only answer liberalism gives to anyone who is unhappy with this current allocation of political/moral value is to vote people out. He tells me to not worry too much, because a majority of people are usually unhappy with the allocation of political/moral value anyway. He tells me only to worry when people start thinking that they're getting an even shittier deal by participating in the political system and acknowledging it as a suitable means by which to allocate scarce political/moral value. Unfortunately, this is what I hear when I hear Megyn Kelly talk to Tucker Carlson.


Epilogue

I sometimes get angry that so many people violate so many laws in ways that genuinely hurt others. I sometimes get angry that so many of those people are never prosecuted, due to twenty different offramps. I sometimes get angry that other bullshit laws exist and that people get unjustly prosecuted under them. I sometimes get angry that the most common way to play the political game is to punish one's enemies, making the whole thing a negative sum endeavor. I might also even get angry when some political losers start to reject the entire edifice that is built on things that I sometimes hate and get angry at. I used to get more upset at that last one; ya know, the whole 'damaging to our democracy' bit. And sure, I can still see how such degradation can occur, leading to all sorts of political dysentery. But man, I am starting to lean in the direction that when everything is obvious bullshit, "I get mad about every bullshit thing I see," might not be the way. After all, as the video says, I'm just some fuckin' guy, and probabilistically, I'm highly likely to be in the dissatisfied majority most of the time.

Testing for fertility would be an extremely invasive process that is also rather error-prone, both points being especially damaging when applied at scale to the entire population. Continuing to not condone same-sex marriage implicates none of this, as the state can simply look at the 'sex' field in the government-issued documents that the government already has, which is not at all invasive in light of what is already required of marriage applicants. This 'gotcha' was never anything more than an ill-thought-out 'gotcha'.

It's especially silly wrong when one considers that there are actually situations where, believe it or not, the state requires individuals to show that they're infertile in order to get married. That is, in many states, close relatives are allowed to get married if they can show that they are infertile (they would otherwise be prohibited from marrying). This reasoning follows pretty simply from the idea that the state is using marriage policy to encourage responsible procreation as well as the dual objective, discourage irresponsible procreation. The state acknowledges that there are strong liberty and privacy reasons why they cannot simply ban sex between close relatives, but thinks that such activity leads to irresponsible and dangerous procreation. Perhaps one might think that it is enough of a deterrent to simply remove the stamp of 'marriage' from such couples (though on your theory, one can't imagine what the grounds of such a move would be in the first place), but it has actually long been recognized that the state can go even further, using marriage policy to incentivize such couples to perhaps even pursue sterility by artificial means. Obviously, such a goal does not exist for homosexual couples; they seem to be just irrelevant for the purposes of marriage policy. There is no plausible way to argue that since the state uses marriage policy to encourage close relatives to sterilize themselves rather than procreate irresponsibly that they must somehow also incentivize homosexual relationships for no apparent reason.

See the discussion here.

translating σῶμα as 'reality' is certainly an odd move

This is the glaring odd move. You translate σῶμα as 'body', which is in agreement with more literal translations as well as how the NIV translates it throughout Colossians (and elsewhere). It's especially glaringly messed up when you look at other uses of σῶμα from the author of Colossians. [Emphasis added for the location of σῶμα.]

1:18 And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy.

1:22 But now he has reconciled you by Christ’s physical body through death to present you holy in his sight, without blemish and free from accusation—

1:24 Now I rejoice in what I am suffering for you, and I fill up in my flesh what is still lacking in regard to Christ’s afflictions, for the sake of his body, which is the church.

2:11 In him you were also circumcised with a circumcision not performed by human hands. Your whole self ruled by the flesh was put off when you were circumcised by Christ,

2:19 They have lost connection with the head, from whom the whole body, supported and held together by its ligaments and sinews, grows as God causes it to grow.

2:23 Such regulations indeed have an appearance of wisdom, with their self-imposed worship, their false humility and their harsh treatment of the body, but they lack any value in restraining sensual indulgence.

3:15 Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, since as members of one body you were called to peace. And be thankful.

It's clear that σῶμα is used in two senses in this letter, either referring to a physical body of an individual or referring to a 'body of Christians'. So when you say:

Colossians 2, however, is an argument against rigorism

That seems somewhat reasonable. So, if we were to look at something like a more literal KJV translation (pulling out the the 'is', which, uh, isn't there), we see something like:

Let no man therefore judge you in meat, or in drink, or in respect of an holy day, or of the new moon, or of the sabbath days (which are a shadow of things to come) but the body of Christ.

It's pretty easy to read this as saying, "Just don't pay attention to what non-Christians are saying. Just stick with what the Christians are doing." This still allows the group of Christians to accept/reject different days/foods/etc., but that they need to look internally within the group rather than what the Jews/Greeks are saying. It takes a lot of stretching to pull on what is basically one inelegantly constructed sentence here to get to the pretty sweeping conclusions that I think @Hawaii98 wants to make.

Nah. There are some good translations. The world's top experts do those. Just some of the world's top experts really strain to put their interpretation in there. To be flippant like you, it's the 'hey honey, come look, I found a few experts who say that caloric intake has nothing to do with weight loss' meme except unironically it's you.

Wow, I forgot how utterly terrible many translations of that passage are. Huge oof when you look at the Greek, then back to this translation, then back to the Greek. Just amazingly atrocious attempts to squeeze in the translators' preferred beliefs.

Children can't consent

This is stated without argument. I cannot believe you made it this far after having actually read my OP and not realized how this is something that must be explained.

Children can make decisions for themselves, but they can't consent, not in the way we mean when we talk about sexual consent.

What is your theory? You need to explain why this is, conceptually.

Someone who is held at gunpoint by a rapist still makes a decision about whether to allow rape to happen or to fight back and probably die. The decision to allow it to happen is not consent, even though a decision was made; 'decision' and 'consent' are not synonyms, in this case.

Correct. This is the freedom prong in Westen's parlance. He gives a conceptual explanation of why this is the case. That conceptual reasoning does not explain why "children can't consent". You need to explain a different one.

The author is not applying consent-only ethics to transition, which doesn't preclude them from applying it to sex and saying children can't consent to sex.

I'm not saying that the author is applying a consent-only ethic to transition. I don't know where they stand on that. But how these concepts work in related areas can be relevant. Regardless, you still say:

The 'it's extremely harmful to children' part has nothing to do with consent ethics, it's explaining why the 'sliding doors' metaphor doesn't apply to pedophilia the way it applies to transition (in the author's formulation).

You're so so close. Since the 'extremely harmful to children' part has nothing to do with consent ethics, as you say, then if a person espouses a consent-only sexual ethic, then the whole bit is just irrelevant for the question of pedophilia! We'd have to delete that part of the sentence. It can't tell us anything about pedophilia or an ethical difference between pedophilia/transition, because it simply tells us nothing about the ethics of pedophilia. I think what you'd have to construct is an argument along the lines of, "I don't espouse a consent-only sexual ethic, so harm is why pedophilia is bad. And then, [argument about transition that coheres with the rest of the project, which could perhaps be what you're calling 'sliding doors']." But we have to lay out explicitly what concepts hold where and why.

No real need to do that at this point. Charges filed now? Easy peasy to push the timeline for the trial (or at the very least, sentencing) until after the next election. It's always hard to make an argument that they're being unfair by just taking too long (people do try, but it never really works). This will certainly be Joe's last election of his life, so as long as they can get themselves to November 6, 2024, he never has to see the inside of a jail cell, and the topic will completely disappear from any discussions in future elections. This is the correct game theoretic play, regardless of what any omniscient planner might think is otherwise good/bad for the country.

Here, you are making it sound like the author is using the metaphor of competitive swimming to say that choosing a gender identity is trivial and non-sacred

Nope. In fact, I pointed out here that the author seems to think that it is not trivial and is, in fact, important. My other topic areas are to illustrate the idea that people very casually slide along this scale depending upon topic area and the point they're trying to make.

But Wertheimer here doesn't at all seem to me to be saying

I think you might be a bit confused. Wertheimer did not write the linked NYT article. Wertheimer wrote the linked philosophy of ethics book.

No one knows which of these paths is actually going to be best for the child in the long term. We can speculate endlessly about the road less traveled, but we can't actually know what that life would be like and whether it would be better than the one we have now.

Precisely. The force of this sort of reasoning seems to vary considerably depending on which problem domain we are dealing with. That was the point of my OP.

We're pretty damn sure that it's almost always very harmful, we have the data on that.

Note that this is not any sort of theoretical argument about a child's ability to consent. So we're right back to my last comment. Can we insert, immediately before this sentence, that you are disavowing a consent-only sexual ethic, which would then enable this sentence to possibly have some normative force in the remainder of the argument? If not, like I said, you got some 'splainin' to do.

I mean, your comment was imagining a completely fictitious interlocutor and concluding bad faith for all of them. Literally zero "evidence" for any bad faith to be "evident", except the type of evidence you have conjured up in your mind for your fictitious interlocutor. Glad to know both what your standard of evidence is (literally imaginary) and what your interpretation of the spirit and rules of this forum is.

In that context, the question isn’t a gotcha, but indicative of ignorance of utilitarianism.

Or a rejection thereof, which could be based on a number of different grounds. But nah, some people would rather just assume bad faith in their interlocutors when an issue cuts them too personally. That is particularly present here.

Unfortunately, I will likely only defend my own statements. Sorry if that's not the most satisfactory to you.

So, the context of many of my comments here, and which I did mention a couple times, is that there are an extremely large number of people who believe in a consent-only sexual ethic. They want that to be enshrined in law, and they argue for such a thing. I would even say that Wertheimer is in that camp. Therefore, perhaps more circumspectly stated, I would argue that Wertheimer's position on child sex (among a few other similar positions) is a gigantic fault line within his own project of mapping out a consent-only sexual ethic. It is instead perhaps a "consent-dominant except for some other cases where it's something like harm reduction or some other consideration" sexual ethic, which may end up being fine on its own terms, but it is not a consent-only sexual ethic.

I would argue that the position of someone who claims to follow a strict consent-only sexual ethic across the wide variety of problem domains but then wants to switch from that only for this domain is untenable. It's part of the reason why I would not currently say that I ascribe to a consent-only sexual ethic. As such, I do actually think that your characterization is quite close to a legitimate complaint. When you say:

Other people ran with your statement to say 'since progressives don't have a coherent account of why pedophilia violates consent, they must be in favor of pedophilia and should just admit it'.

I think the modification which makes it a biting criticism would be 'since progressives don't have a coherent account of why pedophilia violates consent and they claim to hold a consent-only sexual ethic,' well, I don't know that I'd quite say that they must be in favor of pedophilia and should just admit it... but I would say that they got some 'splainin' to do.

This is probably what I think was most lacking from the 3min clip I saw. Should have gone straight to reversed hypotheticals or had a bank of actual, real world cases where they policed mere opinions. Start off with the most basic reversed hypothetical: "Would calling for the genocide of African Americans be a violation to the campus code of conduct?" Then move down the chain, even all the way to the meme, "Would displaying a poster saying, 'It's okay to be white,' be a violation of the campus code of conduct?" Get them on record. Double bonus points would be if they could point to actual examples on those campuses. In fact, that the questioner did not move to actual examples on those campuses of speech being policed makes me lean slightly more toward thinking that, in reality, the universities may be ever so slightly better on this score than I would have thought before, but that's perhaps only an epsilon movement, because I think that if I did take the time to dig in to past cases, we'd likely be able to show definite hypocrisy.

I think we're in agreement. You don't think that one can say that slavery, torture, pedophilia, etc. is wrong with any normative effect.1 Most other people disagree, which is why they then go on to explain why they think that one can indeed say that these things are wrong, in a normative sense, rather than simply resting on their personal vibes.

1 - This leaves you in the unfortunate position that when you want to say that a pedophile shouldn't be allowed to diddle kids, you can pretty much only say, "I don't like it," without any rejoinder available to their response of, "So what? I do."

If someone said that tax evasion was bad because it violates Social Contract theory, responding with 'Well, Social Construct Theory on it's own doesn't tell us why pedophilia is bad, so why don't you just admit that you approve of pedophilia?' I think we would all recognize that as an improper argument.

Yeah, I didn't do that sort of thing, and I don't think anyone here is doing that, either. (I haven't thoroughly followed all of the discussion that has followed.) In your example, there seems to hardly be any conceptual link whatsoever between the two items. I attempted to construct a core conceptual link between several topics of discussion, which is ruminating on how seriously we take various activities/identities in different contexts and how that affects our willingness to simply let others make choices on those issues. I think it is that link that is sorely missing from your attempted analogy to Social Contract Theory/pedophilia. (Though if someone could come up with an interesting conceptual link between the two, I would be interested to hear it, not knowing yet whether I would ultimately view the link as compelling.)

The traditional philosophical inquiry is to simply ask whether what you're proposing actually satisfies what we mean when we use words like "morality" or "normativity". I don't think they do. Was slavery, owning other people as property, free to rape and do all sorts of other things to them, wrong? One usually wants to say, "Yes," and then must answer the question, "Why?" If we are restricted to saying, "Well, there could totally be other societies with different vibes where slavery is totally okay," it seems to not be very satisfying (besides still having to answer questions like, "How would we even determine the answer to such a question? Are we just looking at the state of affairs in the ruling class? Are we somehow constructing a measure that incorporates the opinions of the slaves? How would this project even work?"). Repeat with all sorts of slavery-adjacent things, torture, pedophilia, etc. If you want to say any of those things are wrong, rather than simply say that you personally feel like they give you bad vibes (due to whatever personal inclinations or formative experiences you might have had, which could easily be radically different in what others might describe as morally-abhorrent societies), then you need to at least attempt to answer, "Why?"

Do we have to convert every fucking thing in the world into dollars and cents? "Oh, you like looking at the sunset, well now that'll cost you!"

Most of the time, sunsets are public goods, because it is extremely difficult to generally prevent people from observing them and your observing it does not impinge on my ability to observe it. Obviously, if people think there is a One True Best Location for observing a sunset, but like only ten people can fit there, then it becomes rivalrous and probably excludable, too. At that point, there's going to be some mechanism that meters who can use that particular location at sunset, whether it's people having to spend time by showing up two hours before sunset to grab one of the ten spots or people having to spend money to grab one.

It is also very common in development disputes to contest visual obstructions. If someone wants to build a high rise, but it will block the view of the sunset for a group of folks who used to be able to see it, the building will be contested. Here, the traditional solution is to, again, convert the dispute into dollars and cents, having the developer pay the obstructees to compensate them for their loss. In this case, they're getting a monetary benefit for their loss, rather than having to pay for their privilege, but it's relatively similar.

On a similar note, I just recently listed to this old old podcast, which raised several reasonable sounding concerns about things like National Park schemes for nature preservation. Worth a listen.

That said, this effort is likely as dumb as most carbon offset schemes, which Matt Levine routinely (and hilariously) lambastes. Definitely worth the read regularly if you're not already.

you will never get a satisfying, rational justification for why you can’t have sex with your teenage daughter because one doesn’t exist.

I disagree. But I agree that the problem of morals in general, including this one in particular, is an extremely steep challenge for rationalist atheists. Don't let them hear you say that too loud, though; they get super defensive 'round these parts.

I think there are two ways to proceed. Either we can tell the women's movement that their complaint is dumb, that sex is like tennis, and that we're going to reject their complaint and roll back to the world where sending employees to strip clubs is A-OK (and make this cohere conceptually with the rest of the project we're engaging in)... or we can accept the women's movement complaint, and, uh, figure out how to make it cohere conceptually with the rest of the project we're engaging in.

Regardless, I think you skipped right over the "orgy experience" hypo, and I don't think you're going to be able to minimize that hypo to the point of throwing it away completely by just casually saying that it's a dumb women's movement complaint.