Gdanning
1yr ago
Ms. Daniels would be based on a legal theory that has yet to be evaluated by judges, raising the possibility that a court could throw out or limit the charges
The NYT is being overly dramatic. The law in question is falsifying business records, specifically that Trump recorded payments to Cohen as legal fees when they were actually reimbursements to Cohen for hush money paid to Daniels. That crime is a felony if done with the "intent to commit another crime or to aid or conceal the commission thereof.” The supposedly new legal theory is that that applies to other federal crimes, not just state crimes. Courts have apparently not previously ruled on that particular question, but it is hardly a stretch, given the plain text of the law. But perhaps there are reasons to rule otherwise.
Gdanning
1yr ago
First of all, unions don't prevent employers from firing bad employees or making promotion decisions based on seniority; rather, contracts do that, and only some contracts do so. Moreover, the general rule is the US is that workers can be fired at any time without cause -- i.e., at the whim of the employer. Union contracts, in contrast, permit firing only for cause. What constitutes "cause" varies, but still, here is one benefit: Those contracts not only make it more difficult to fire bad employees; they also makes it more difficult to fire a good employee who happens to get on the wrong side of a bad supervisor, or who doesn't "get with the program," even when the program is a poor one.
Let me explain in more detail.
First, it is well established that managers of companies do not always act in the best interests of the companies themselves. For that reason, giving employees the power to push back against managers can often be in the best interests of the company. See, eg, Dilbert.
Second, let's analogize with tenure in K-12 schools (which, contrary to popular belief, means only that teachers can be fired only with cause, as opposed to, as CA courts put it re teachers before they get tenure, being fired "for any reason, or for no reason.") When I taught high school, I had tenure, and hence I (and other teachers) were able to push back on all sorts of proposals by administrators which were unlikely to inure to the benefit of students (newsflash: teachers know more about their students than administrators do). Sometimes that was about budgeting -- federal law requires decisions about spending money to be made by a committee composed of administrators, teachers, and parents. Teacher representation would be pointless if teachers on the committee have to fear getting on the wrong side of the principal). Sometimes it was about the administration pushing teachers to teach how to game multiple choice tests rather than teaching real curriculum. The list goes on and on.
Now, this is not to say that teachers always act in the best interests of their students, nor that administrators never do. Ditto re the analogous positions in private companies. Nevertheless, a system in which those in supervisory roles have unfettered power is unlikely to yield anything close to optimal results.
Gdanning
11mo ago
Where is your evidence that they are anti-Catholic? You linked to their website, but there is nothing there about Catholicism at all. That is in marked contrast to the websites of actually anti-Catholic groups.
Gdanning
11mo ago
I don't understand how he was ever taken seriously,
I have never met anyone who read the book who thinks that; it is nothing if not carefully argued. Of course, most people who criticize are actually criticizing media misrepresentations of the argument.
Gdanning
1yr ago
People have been claiming that Western liberal democracy will inevitably lad to degeneracy and collapse for more than a century. It never happened. So we are supposed to think this time will be different because of Tiktok?
Gdanning
11mo ago
I read it many years ago, but this seems to be pretty good: https://www.coursehero.com/lit/The-End-of-History-and-the-Last-Man/plot-summary/
I am curious why you see Guns, Germs and Steel as something not to be taken seriously.
Note, that to me, "not to be taken seriously" implies that it can be summarily disregarded, whereas something that is carefully (and thoroughly, I should have included that as well) might be wrong, but cannot be dismissed, even if it wrong; it must be engaged with. Of course, there are some exceptions, such as works based on clearly erroneous factual premises, but that does not seem to me to describe either Guns, Germs and Steel or The End of History.
Gdanning
11mo ago
I disagree, this sort of approach is easily hackable by mining scholarly works for whatever data suits your idea, shaping it into a narrative that is trendy with the current zeitgeist, thus ensuring few people will be interested in challenging you to begin with, and the remainder is too intimidated by the sheer magnitude and obscurity of the material you've dug out.
Yes, but isn't that a claim that the argument might be wrong, rather than a claim that they must be wrong? It seems to me to be an argument for skepticism, rather than an argument for dismissal out of hand.
Didn't it spend pages upon pages talking about how lucky Europeans were because they started off with caloric and easy to cultivate crops, and easily tamable animals, only for it to turn out that ancient European plants/animals were about as useful to humans as those anywhere else, and what the authors were comparing were products of generations of artificial selection to wild plants/animals?
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As a possibly non-relevant aside, the book is about why Eurasia developed more quickly than elsewhere, rather than Europe.
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Glancing at my copy of the book, he says: "Experimental studies in which botanists have collected seeds from such natural stands of wild [fertile crescent] cereals, much as as hunter-gatherers must have been doing over 10,000 years ago, show that annual harvests of up to nearly a ton of seeds per hectare can be obtained[.] ... [In contrast,] [c]orn's probable ancestor, a wild plant known as teosinte, ... was less productive in the wild than wild wheat . . ." So he certainly at least tried to compare like with like. In addition, that is only one of three advantages he claims that Eurasian cereal plants had over wild plants elsewhere; the others, he argues, are that they are annuals, and that most are plants that "usually pollinate themselves but are occasionally self-pollinated." I don't know whether either of those attributes can be changed via artificial selection. Re animals, he notes that only 14 of the world's large (100lbs+) herbivorous animals were ever domesticated (including only 13 of 72 in Eurasia) and notes that even modern efforts to domesticate large wild animals other than the "ancient fourteen" that were domesticated failed, and makes arguments why so few have been domesticated.
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Most importantly, that is an argument that Diamond is wrong, or that that he overstates his case. But it is not an argument that "no one ever should have taken him seriously," and I note that on the Wikipedia page on the book, Joel Mokyr is cited as saying that "Diamond's view that Eurasia succeeded largely because of a uniquely large stock of domesticable plants is flawed because of the possibility of crop manipulation and selection in the plants of other regions, the drawbacks of an indigenous plant such as sumpweed could have been bred out, Mokyr wrote, since 'all domesticated plants had originally undesirable characteristics' eliminated via 'deliberate and lucky selection mechanisms'", which sounds like the criticism you are citing.* But he is also quoted as saying that the book is "one of the more important contributions to long-term economic history and is simply mandatory to anyone who purports to engage Big Questions in the area of long-term global history". And I will say that one of the strengths of the book is that is explicitly states the assumptions behind its arguments, repeatedly refers to possible weaknesses in supporting evidence, and also repeatedly suggests avenues for future research which might undermine some of its claims.
- But I note that, re teosinte, Diamond's argument is not that such changes were impossible -- they obviously weren't -- but that they took a very long time (at p. 137), which helps explain why development in the Americas lagged behind development in Eurasia (and, of course, it is the lag that he seeks to explain).
Gdanning
1yr ago
I'm curious why you describe the idea of utopia depicted in the poster as "ugly." The poster itself is not aesthetically pleasing -- the color scheme is pretty awful -- but is the scene it depicts any uglier than, say, this one?
I also don't get your claim that "Liberals at the moment seem very bad at articulating what kind of a world they want to create" -- doesn’t the poster do just that? It apparently does clearly enough for you to opine that said world is "ugly."
Gdanning
5mo ago
While I agree with the Rittenhouse verdict, the comparison doesn't work. Rittenhouse intentionally killed two people; when someone does that in circumstances other than those where self-defense is completely obvious (eg, defense of home), of course he is going to be arrested. In contrast, here there is no evidence that the killing was intentional. Moreover, the police had probable cause at the time to think that the Rittenhouse murders were premeditated.
Gdanning
1yr ago
Or another more blatant case of racial hatred:
Where is your evidence that "racial hatred" was the motive in that case? There is none in the article you link to.
Gdanning
7mo ago
How about increasing funding for asylum adjudication, so that the wait for adjudication is 6 months, not several years? That will pretty much eliminate the border issue, since it will massively decrease the incentive to enter the country and give asylum a shot. That would have bipartisan support, especially from people like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, who for all intents and purposes really control what passes the Senate.
How about a law to preserve the substance of the Pico plurality decision, which is probably no longer good law, to prevent red schools from removing ideas they don't like, and blue states from doing the same?
Gdanning
10mo ago
The parallels with gender abound. How much does the biology matter? The relationships? The performance of the role’s expected behaviors? How much should we honor someone’s self-identification? Are there any useful insights to draw from the comparison?
There are no insights to be drawn from the comparison, because you never stop to define what a "mom" is. If "mom" is defined as "the person from whose womb a child sprung," then step-moms are not moms, and nor are women who use surrogate mothers. If it means, as you hint is can, "the person who nutured you in the manner that our society associates with motherhood," then a step-mother can be a mother. As can arguably a man. And different definitions can be used in different contexts; for the purpose of determining who has the right to due process before being deprived of parental rights, a stepmother who has not adopted her stepchild might not be deemed to be the child's mother. But for purposes of determining who gets to go to mother-daughter day at the ballpark, she probably is.
Similarly, whether a transwoman is a "real woman" depends entirely on the definition one uses. And, that, of course, is the root of the dispute. People on the right think that self-identification is completely meaningless, while those on the left think that it is the whole thing, at least for the issues that they care about. And, of course, self-identification is often all that defines group membership in many contexts. But obviously not all.
Brutalism hasn't been in vogue for 40+ years. See recent Pritzger winners.
Edit: No, concrete boxes are not the only acceptable architectural form. Frank Gehry does not design concrete boxes. Nor does Rem Koolhaas. Nor does Santiago Calatrava. Nor does Renzo Piano. Nor does Daniel Libeskind.
And of course there is a wide variety of styles represented here
Gdanning
7mo ago
- I don't understand why you frame it as which side gets to hurt the other more, as opposed to both sides benefiting from ensuring that their ideas are not censored.
- Have you not heard of cancel culture, and the like? Do you think that only conservatives try to censor ideas that they don't like? A law that prevents censorship benefits all sides.
Gdanning
1yr ago
He is being charged with a state crime, not a federal one. The federal crime is re campaign donations .
Gdanning
1yr ago
halting drag activities in children's spaces is trans genocide for both sides
Drag =/= transgender. Not even close.
Gdanning
9mo ago
If the problem is that teachers are stupid and allergic to nuance, then structural changes are not going to have much effect. We're going to have to attract smarter, less nuance-resistant people to the teaching profession. And that is going to mean raising pay substantially. Because when I was teaching, we had plenty of smart, nuance-friendly Teach for America teachers, but the vast majority of them left to go to law/medical/business school.
Gdanning
1yr ago
What other explanation seem likely to you for shooting a 5 year old?
The most obvious, as you note later, is that he has some sort of mental health issues. That is certainly what you would have inferred, had the perpetrator and victim been of the same race.
just like there's "no evidence" Kansas Man was racially motivated,
I guess it depends on what you mean by "racially motivated." The shooter clearly was in fear of the victim. Now, of course, I don't know this guy. He might be fearful of all strangers, like the wife [note: the wife, not the husband] in this case. Or, there might have been something independent of the victim's race that caused him to be in fear. But, I as I am sure you know, many people -- especially older people in places like Missouri -- are more fearful of young black males than of other people, and hence might use force against a young black male in a situation where they would not have used force were the victim of a different race. In fact, there are people on here who have pretty explicitly argued that such use of force is justified. In that sense, the race of the victim is a cause of such shootings, and so can be described as "racially motivated." The hard part is that being more frightened of young black males than, say, young Asian males is rational. Indeed, depending on the level of fear, it can be simultaneously rational and racist. The question of how to judge such person, both morally and legally, is a difficult question, and one that might actually yield a fruitful discussion. What I do not believe is likely to yield a fruitful discussion is making unsupported claims about unrelated cases.
Gdanning
1yr ago
I don't know that "copes" and "identities" are mutually exclusive. Many identities, including some ethnic identities, are copes of some sort. A kid who identifies as Hui in China might well identify as Chinese if he moves to the US if the only other Asian kid in school is Han. Someone who never identified as a member of a group is more likely to do so when circumstances change. And, someone who is told or feels that he does not belong in group X or group Y is going to look for another group to identify with. And, an effeminate guy who is straight is not clearly in any particular prexisting group, so it is hardly surprising that he will end up identifying with a new group of similar people. You are describing >how binary gender identity develops more than you are undermining the legitimacy of the identity.
And, the people you describe -- women with few secondary female characteristics and men lacking in male capabilities and virtues -- clearly don't fit neatly in either gender and almost certainly have attributes of the other gender. You are basically acknowledging that some middle group with attributes of each gender exists, so it seems that you are mostly objecting to the name. And note that society already acknowledge that there are women with male gender (not sex, but gender*) attributes: they are commonly called tomboys.
*You err in saying "Instead of admitting that they lack the attributes of their gender, they claim that they both male and female" -- they lack the attributes of their sex, not their gender. Gender = a set of roles, behaviors, etc, generally expected by society of the members of each sex. By calling themselves non-binary, they are indeed admitting that they lack the attributes of the gender associated with their sex.
it seems the only question here is whether parents should be allowed to overrule librarians, and I don't see why the answer to that should be "no" whether we're talking about blue, or red parents.
No, that isn't the issue. The issue is whether a majority of parents can silence all views with which they disagree, and whether schools should only provide information on one side of political issues. That certainly is not the norm. Most school districts, be they red or be they blue, have "controversial issues" policies which require teachers to teach such issues objectively, and to provide views on all sides. Even the supposed "anti-CRT" laws generally do not ban those ideas from class but instead provide that discussion thereof is perfectly fine if "instruction is given in an objective manner without endorsement.".
And, you would be OK if your kid's school only taught Das Kapital, and only had Marxist works in their libraries, and blocked all websites other than those that gave Marxist interpretations of history, economics, politics, etc?
Whether or not both sides will benefit from lack of this kind of "censorship" will also depend on whether librarians tend to have a bias towards one side or the other
School boards, not librarians, are ultimately responsible for deciding what books can be in libraries, and school boards often are asked to remove books which are not politically correct.
Gdanning
7mo ago
the standard assumes he can get away with it forever.
This is little more than a suggestion that the index would be more accurate if it discounted a woman's earned income somewhat in order to account for the possibility that a woman with no earned income might recover from her husband. A fine suggestion, but the index's failure to do (assuming it indeed fails to do so) hardly delegitimizes the entire endeavor.
Gdanning
10mo ago
what exactly does a white person owe a state that actively discriminates against them?
Maybe ask these guys?
Gdanning
1yr ago
No, no, no. The course description sets out the topics and skills to be covered. (As I noted in my post). HOW those topics are covered -- the curriculum -- is up to the individual teacher. It is simply not true that "anything" can be taught, and in fact the College Board requires AP teachers to submit their syllabi to the AP Course Audit to ensure that they are actually covering those topics and skills.
Gdanning
7mo ago
then please explain how this law would prevent librarians from curating away books they don't like,
The point is that, in the absence of the law, libraries will not simply be able to remove books with views they don't like; they will have the right to do so. In contrast, if the law is passed, they risk losing funding or worse if they do so. Will it absolutely prevent them from doing so? No, just as laws against murder do not absolutely prevent murders.
yes I would be a lot more ok with that than having these decision made by a single librarian.
You are avoiding the issue. The issue is not by whom it should be done, but rather whether it is ok with it being done at all.
It also looks like you were trying to address the other part of my comment but didn't get around to it?
No, there was just a formatting problem. I have edited it for clarity.
A couple of weeks ago, in the week of Jan 16 thread, there was a discussion of the kerfuffle re Florida refusing to offer the pilot of AP African American Studies. There were a couple of minor developments last week. First, the course description is available here
Second, Florida specified its objections here
Now, I am not a fan of most "studies" courses, because, in my limited experience, they tend to lack rigor and often push a political viewpoint, which is both a disservice to students and, to the extent that students are required to parrot that viewpoint, a First Amendment violation when the course is taught in public schools (and in private schools as well, in California). I have not looked closely at the course description for the AP class, so I don't know if it has those flaws. That being said, this decision by Florida seems to be more a part of the DeSantis for President campaign than a principled objection. That is because the course description is not a curriculum, and the course description, like all AP course descriptions, says:
I have attended several AP trainings in my day, and can attest that they make a big deal about individual teachers being given autonomy, as long as their syllabus addresses the content and skills set forth in the course description. So, none of the readings complained about are required, and teachers are free, as required by Florida's "Stop WOKE Act" to assign readings on all sides of the issues in question.
And, btw, the claims on the other side that Florida does not want to teach African American history is also nonsense, because teaching of African American history is mandated in FL schools
Edit: PS: There is a very odd complaint in the Florida DOE's list: It objects to a reading by one author in part because, "Kelley's first book was a study of Black communists in Alabama." Not, 'an adulatory study," but merely a "study." It is like objecting to a reading by Donald Horowitz because he wrote a study of ethnic riots.
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