NewCharlesInCharge
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User ID: 89
NewCharlesInCharge
1yr ago
James Damore made a similar argument about why women aren't well-represented in technical roles. He was making the point in part because he agreed that women ought to be better represented and that to get there would require different strategies if interest was the problem and not bias. He was hung out to dry.
You can't even be on their side and have ideologically incorrect data.
NewCharlesInCharge
1yr ago
The trial of Darrell Brooks is set to start this coming Monday, October 3. Brooks is accused of running over 77 people at the Waukesha Christmas Parade.
Brooks will be representing himself. His motion to do so was granted today. There have been a few entertaining / exasperating videos of Brooks and the Judge going back and forth on this matter.
Brooks believes himself to be a sovereign citizen. In one of the videos he's crossed out the words "I understand" and replaced them with "I have been informed of." These were on a form he had to sign that warned him of the perils of self-representation. It turns out this is a sovereign citizen thing. They believe that to say "I understand" means that they "stand under" the court and are subject to its authority. In the video granting his motion the judge finds that "I have been informed of" is functionally equivalent to "I understand" and Brooks objects, saying he never said those words.
Culture war angle: this was a big culture war story last year as people perceived the attack as both under-covered and when it was covered, downplayed. The Rittenhouse case got many orders of magnitude more coverage and had an order of magnitude fewer victims.
Additionally, on the videos I discovered that YouTube tacks on a link to the sovereign citizen movement page on Wikipedia, giving it the same treatment as COVID-19 misinformation.
NewCharlesInCharge
18d ago
It's not the individual story, it's the statistical mismatch between stories generally and reality.
If there was a murder mystery series and it turned out the murderer was a Jew 75% of the time, and it wasn't set in Israel, it wouldn't be wrong to infer that the writers must have something against Jews.
NewCharlesInCharge
3mo ago
Not only that, Biden has derided them over manufactured outrage. There was a still shot of a mounted CBP agent in the river with people crossing the border, with the agent spinning his reins to control his horse. The media promulgated this as "border patrol agent whips migrants." Biden personally said that the agents involved "will pay" for their actions: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/24/us/politics/biden-border-patrol-haitian-migrants.html
So they're really not enthused about not doing the job they signed up for, to help a President that wants them to pay for things they never did.
NewCharlesInCharge
8mo ago
As others have pointed out, there's some sleight of hand in what people mean when the say "homeless" and what the causal factors in those populations are.
When people talk about San Francisco having homelessness problems, they aren't talking about people that merely lack a fixed address. They're talking about the people living in and defecating on the streets, frequently deranged. People that have defected entirely on societal norms.
Cities like Los Angeles, Portland, San Francisco, and Seattle have much higher amounts of these total defectors than other cities. The relevant difference between these and other cities is that total defectors are more or less tolerated in those cities. You can build permanent structures on public land and nothing bad will happen. At worst, something bad like a murder happens at the camp and then you'll be kicked out and lose the materials you likely stole to construct your building. You can do drugs openly. At the moment Seattle Police aren't even legally capable of arresting people for drug possession and public drug use.
I don't know if this environment creates total defectors or merely attracts them, it's probably some combination.
NewCharlesInCharge
1yr ago
A variant of this statute has actually been tested before the Supreme Court in Virginia v. Black. They held that it is constitutional to limit intimidating speech that represents a true threat, but invalidated part of the statute that directed juries to infer intimidation from the mere act of cross burning.
The statue in the Supreme Court case appears to be the template for this one. The original referred to cross burning specifically, this one is more generic.
The Court did qualify their ruling as pertaining specifically to cross burnings and "particularly virulent form[s] of intimidation":
The First Amendment permits Virginia to outlaw cross burnings done with the intent to intimidate because burning a cross is a particularly virulent form of intimidation. Instead of prohibiting all intimidating messages, Virginia may choose to regulate this subset of intimidating messages in light of cross burning's long and pernicious history as a signal of impending violence. Thus, just as a State may regulate only that obscenity which is the most obscene due to its prurient content, so too may a State choose to prohibit only those forms of intimidation that are most likely to inspire fear of bodily harm. A ban on cross burning carried out with the intent to intimidate is fully consistent with our holding in R. A. V. and is proscribable under the First Amendment.
A general ban on burning objects, especially objects whose designed purpose is to be burnt, doesn't seem to fit.
NewCharlesInCharge
1yr ago
As a former Facebook employee, I recognize some similarities in how Twitter employees have learned to buy media narratives without question.
When I first joined it was eye-opening to see the contrast in what was printed in the media and what insiders had to say. The media would say one thing, and inside you'd have someone saying, "no, I wrote the code, here's a link to the code, this story is wrong." Fellow employees would mostly thank the person and express disappointment in the media.
In the last few years this changed. You'd have people at the center of some media controversy clarifying what happened, and then their coworkers would argue back, citing articles that were clearly wrong in light of the testimony and evidence from those insiders.
For Jan 6th, a media narrative developed that Trump incited the violence. The evidence, as far as I can tell: holding a rally and telling supporters to march to the Capitol and make their voice heard. That he had said to do this peaceably was either dismissed or ignored.
At Twitter this incitement narrative appears to have been received without question.
A very small group of us at Facebook pushed back on this narrative, arguing that Trump was at most guilty of moving too slowly to call for the rioters to stop. This wasn't well received. Most of the company and 100% of everyone that mattered bought into the incitement narrative, or at least pretended to.
NewCharlesInCharge
1yr ago
Last week the Washington State Supreme Court made a ruling that lowers the bar for parties to a civil case to get a hearing for a new trial based on racial bias, and put the burden on the opposing party to prove that racial bias did not affect the verdict.
Here's the Seattle Times article on the decision: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/law-justice/justices-unanimously-expand-protections-against-racism-in-wa-civil-cases/
And the decision itself: https://www.courts.wa.gov/opinions/pdf/976724.pdf
The decision introduces a framework with a couple of points:
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In civil cases a hearing for a new trial must be granted in case an objective observer (defined as one who is aware that implicit, institutional, and unconscious biases, in addition to purposeful discrimination, have influenced jury verdicts in Washington State) could view race as a factor in the verdict.
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At the hearing it will be presumed that race was a factor and a new trial must be granted unless the opposing party can prove that race was not a factor. From the decision: "At the hearing, the trial court is to presume that racial bias affected the verdict, and the party benefiting from the alleged racial bias has the burden to prove it did not."
The ruling doesn't give any guidance on how to prove that racial bias did not affect a verdict. Given that unconscious biases are included in the definition of an objective observer evaluating whether race could be a factor, even subpoenaing the whole jury and asking each juror if bias influenced them wouldn't be sufficient. Jurors could still harbor biases they are unaware of and so cannot testify to. The decision gives the party alleged to benefit from racial bias an impossibly high bar to prove that it did not.
In the case that brought about the decision these factors were cited as things that could have tainted the verdict with racial bias:
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Defense said that the plaintiff was "confrontational" and "combative" on cross examination.
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Defense said that plaintiff's witnesses all using the same phrase to describe the plaintiff as "life of the party" was suggestive that they colluded on their testimony.
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Defense suggested that the plaintiff's chiropractor may be biased because plaintiff is employed by that chiropractor.
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Defense said that the damages sought by the plaintiff, $3.5 million, and the timeline in reporting injuries to doctors, were an indicator that the trial was about financial gain.
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Plaintiff says the jury asked that the plaintiff not be present in the courtroom for the verdict. This is disputed by the judge, who said it is her regular practice to ask both parties to wait in the hallway for the verdict so that jurors can speak with the attorneys without their clients present.
The motion for a hearing for a new trial was raised at trial. The trial court said it could not "require attorneys to refrain from using language that is tied to the evidence in the case, even if in some contexts the language has racial overtones." The Supreme Court said "that reasoning gets it exactly backward."
In practice it seems like this is going to benefit the richest parties in civil cases. The losing side should always seek a new trial on this basis, even if it's a longshot based on language that few would recognize as an instance of bias.
If you can meet this low bar, which is met by such things as suggesting a witness could be biased because they employ the plaintiff, then a new trial is inevitable. That is, unless you can somehow achieve the impossible and prove that racial bias was not a factor. If you don't have enough money to afford attorneys for another trial, or even to represent you at the hearing, you're at a huge disadvantage.
The jury actually found in favor of the plaintiff in this case, just not in the amount she was seeking. She sued for $3.5 million and was awarded $9,200.
The three Supreme Court justices up for re-election this year are running unopposed.
NewCharlesInCharge
10mo ago
Excepting the death penalty, I've also taken a wholesale shift rightward. I used to hold a statewide elected office in the youth wing of the Democratic Party. The riots of 2020 and Democratic responses to them, COVID, gender ideology, racial politics, and a few other things have completely shifted my political outlook.
I used to be an atheist and now I'm on the path to Catholic baptism. The last few years have been an absolutely wild ride.
NewCharlesInCharge
8mo ago
I'm reading N.S. Lyon's magnificent piece, The China Convergence, and I'm reminded of one of the distinctions he makes. Rule by law versus rule of law. In the latter the law itself is the arbiter of justice. It has no biases not contained in its words, neutral parties merely apply the law to the facts and a result nearly produces itself.
In the former, rule by law, the law is a tool for the ruling class to enforce its will. Exceptions in both directions are expected. It's the ruling class that gave the law its power, and they can take it away or modify it as they see fit.
NewCharlesInCharge
1mo ago
Autism is another example, women with autism/aspergers didn't match the DSM criteria which were designed around mostly male subjects, and took a while to be recognized and receive treatment at the same rates.
Tangential, but I find this strange. It's a condition that we don't know the cause of, nor is there anything like a lab test or imaging to confirm it. It's all based on observed behavior.
For males there's one set of behaviors that are used to confirm diagnosis, and for females another.
How can you make the determination that this is actually the same condition?
NewCharlesInCharge
4mo ago
We see it now that folks on the left have a fond nostalgia for the dawn of the social movements of the 60s, and never mention where those ideas ended up: Jonestown, NAMBLA, Black Panther Party and its spin-offs torturing and assassinating one another, bombings, kidnappings, Foucault fucking little boys bent over headstones in Algerian cemeteries.
The country rejected the leftist social revolution when it elected Reagan, and that seemed to give permission to much of the left to forget the excesses, focus their hate on Reagan, and wish for another Woodstock.
NewCharlesInCharge
11mo ago
The Western governments really, truly weren't, as some conspiracy theorists claimed, trying to use the pandemic to re-engineer the society; more than anything, they just wanted the pandemic to go away and to return to "life as it was".
I think government leaders largely deferred to public health authorities, and those public health authorities saw this as the opportunity of their lifetime to Do Good and Make A Difference. Bureaucrats being bureaucrats, they weren't keen to acknowledge any shortcomings or limits to their knowledge, and put their hands in all the pies they could fit in. Many of those bureaucrats had a very ideological take on what Doing Good looks like. My state banned fishing and then later on one of its counties promoted having sex through a hole in a shower curtain.
NewCharlesInCharge
9mo ago
I saw on observation on Twitter that even the worst riots have about a five day lifespan. Watts, Newark, Rodney King, and so forth would all burn out as the rioters basically got tired of rioting. Something with staying power beyond that would be something worth worrying may become more than a riot.
That casts the 2020 riots in a different light. While most of the individual riots didn't have staying power, a few did. The assaults on the federal courthouse in Portland happened every night for about three months. CHAZ/CHOP lasted about three weeks.
NewCharlesInCharge
1yr ago
The fixed version highlights the absurdity of the original: https://twitter.com/politicalmath/status/1648299180945801218
NewCharlesInCharge
1yr ago
I recently watched "The Outfit," which was a pretty well done mystery/thriller set amongst 1950's Chicago gangsters. Also an Amazon production.
Late in the film a group that had previously only been referred to by name shows up, and they're black. The characters are still interesting, central to the plot, well-acted, etc. But knowing Amazon's diversity rules, it kind of breaks the fourth wall. I know of no notable group of black Chicago mobsters during this era. I do know about Amazon's rules. So, this probably wasn't an independent artistic decision, but rather the result of those rules.
It's like watching R-rated movies edited for TV, or movies that are dealing in very adult material but hold back because they want a PG-13 rating. It takes you out of the story momentarily while you contemplate the production process.
NewCharlesInCharge
1mo ago
A Catholic news site I followed kind of posted about the same topic today. Nothign to do with Catholicism, the author is just an Anglophile:
https://www.pillarcatholic.com/p/a-perfect-week-ironic-invites-and
There’s scandal in the air in London.
The country’s chief spy, the head of MI6, has found himself front page news, along with the head of the British civil service, who has been hauled before a parliamentary committee to answer questions, under pain of perjury.
The scandal reaches further still into the upper echelons of the establishment, implicating members of the cabinet. Even the King has been named.
Pressure is mounting on those tainted, and the tone in the media is approaching full-blown McCarthyite paranoia.
From the outside looking in, you might well assume a dangerous threat to national security has been unearthed — a spy ring worthy of a le Carré novel, or conspiracy of McCarrick-level proportions. But, at least in the eyes of some, it’s actually worse than that.
All these men, and they are all men, stand accused of belonging to the Garrick, a somewhat famous, and famously men-only, private London club, after the membership rolls were obtained and published by the Guardian newspaper.
The Garrick, founded in 1831, is what in London is commonly called a “gentlemen’s club,” a term which I gather means something rather different and less genteel over here in America.
It’s one of a handful of such places that have survived into the third millennium, long past their heyday of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
They once flourished as places for men (yes, men) of different sections of society to meet, eat, drink, and sleep it all off in town. Each club has (had) its own core constituency, be it the military, the literary set, politics, and so on.
The Garrick has long had social cachet beyond its links to the world of theater and the arts, making it something of a target for fashionable criticism, though it’s not the first such club to come under fierce public scrutiny.
White’s, the club for properly posh chaps, had its turn a few years ago, with then-Prime Minister David Cameron having to resign his long-time membership in shame after being shocked, shocked, to discover they didn’t let ladies in.
After leaving office, “Call Me Dave” — as we used to refer to him in my time at Tory HQ — joined Pratt’s, an even posher club, where all the staff are referred to as “George” by custom. As it happened, Pratt’s let women in a few years after Dave joined, though I assume the members address all the new ladies as “Nanny.”
London men’s clubs are an object of occasional fascination and fury in the U.K.
People, and it should be acknowledged it’s usually a certain kind of lady, get very steamed up about them whenever they remember they still exist.
According to the popular imagination, clubs are dens of quiet power-broking and deal-making, shadowy old-boy networks, wood-paneled venues where favors are exchanged and patronage is doled out.
They are malum in se for their sexist admissions policies, of course, but made even worse because they are locking out ladies from the true corridors of power, where the real decisions are made.
But the sexism charge is silly, really.
That men (and women) behave differently in mixed company, and sometimes like a time and place to socialize among themselves, shouldn’t be controversial. Ladies’ nights out are a social staple for about half the people I know, and if you need convincing that dudes (or chaps) liking to hang out isn’t sinister, I doubt I’m the one to convince you.
More to the point, proper clubs for women exist, too, some of them, like the University Women’s Club, are very nice and just as old as the men’s, and they come under no political scrutiny or media ire.
The real suspicion, and the real anger against the men’s versions, is about power and influence. But that’s nonsense, too.
The reality is that clubs intended to facilitate “networking” and mutual advancement do exist, but they tend to be set up by and for women, as a reactionary move against what they imagine goes on at places like the Garrick. And thus they tend to fail — at least in London.
One such enterprise, Chief, opened a swanky London outpost last year, promising a women-only space for the senior ranks of the sisterhood to meet and mingle with like-minded “executives.” But it had to shut down last month for lack of interest, despite offering the chance to split spritzers with the likes of Amal Clooney and Gloria Estefan — or maybe because of that.
I’m not surprised places like Chief tank, since they are exactly what many people wrongly imagine London men’s clubs to be all about, and they sound awful. Real clubs continue to exist not because the members can use them to “network,” but because they’re some of the last places in Western urban life where “networking” is forbidden.
In fact, all the London men’s clubs I know have actual rules banning business talk. Full disclosure: I am a member of one such club, and used to be a member of another — neither as chic as the Garrick or as well-bred as White’s, though I’ve been a lunch guest at both.
What I love about my club is that, as I’m a socially awkward person by nature, it's a place where I am, as a matter of policy, welcome at any table and in any conversation, and always considered a friend.
While critics like to imagine hushed conversations to stitch up promotions and curry influence, I’ve instantly forgotten what anyone does for a living, if ever they told me. The banter is usually obscure, rather than topical. The finer points of trivia on my true passions, cricket and watches, are common subjects.
You’d struggle to call the atmosphere “conspiratorial,” or even especially dignified.
On one occasion, albeit several years ago, another member challenged me over lunch to recite Edward Lear’s poem “The Owl and the Pussycat” from memory and I had to be gently but insistently reminded by the maître d' not to stand on the dining room furniture, after I got too into my declamation and mounted my chair halfway through the second stanza.
The truth is, the kind of people who like to “network,” rather than socialize, make for terrible company — they instrumentalize human interaction, rather than enjoy it. It makes them insufferable, even to each other.
Those people are why places like Chief fail, and it’s why places like the Garrick and the University Women’s Club won’t let them in. They are, ironically, the very people you join a club to get away from.
And their demands to be let in are probably the single greatest impediment to single-sex clubs changing their rules. It’s not that clubs like mine can’t conceive of female members fitting in around the place — or can’t think of women who’d make good company — but they suspect those aren’t the kind of women who would be applying.
The same sort of people who are offended by the idea of all-male clubs tend to be even more offended by the idea of a club that just doesn’t want them, personally, and the tendency of clubs (like the Garrick) to attract lawsuits if they just think out loud about changing their rules is quite real. Being a single-sex space provides a modicum of legal protection in this regard.
I know some women I’d happily propose for membership, and their capacity for both claret and lyrical verse exceeds my own. But in truth, they’d probably never think of applying.
Groucho Marx famously said he didn’t want to belong to any club that would accept him as a member. The best sort of people usually feel that way, male or female. The trouble is that the reverse also tends to be true.
Clubs, really, are for the rest of us — the ones who just want a place that feels like home, safely away from, you know, other people.
Is that so wrong?
NewCharlesInCharge
10mo ago
The feds have already said that via Title IX they'll strip funding from schools that don't treat transgender kids as their self-identified gender.
So, if you don't want your kid in a mixed-sex locker room, you either have to pull them from P.E., or pull them from the public schools. You're not legally prohibited from doing that, but it's costly. You either take on the burden of home schooling or have to pay tuition to a private school.
The feds have a sneaky way of using money to get their way. They held highway funding hostage to get states to raise their drinking ages. Maybe they'll threaten to withhold medicaid funding unless states adopt laws allowing CPS to treat non-affirming parents as abusers.
NewCharlesInCharge
11mo ago
Fishing ban: https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2020/mar/25/statewide-fishing-ban-ordered-by-washington-wildli/
It lasted until May 5. No accommodation for people who obtain significant amounts of food from catching their own.
Shower curtains for sex: https://lynnwoodtimes.com/2020/12/07/covexxx-19-has-king-county-public-health-gone-too-far/
NewCharlesInCharge
1yr ago
Compare this with the universal revulsion heaped upon Shkreli for breaking rules which are apparently frequently broken, but without losing any investor money.
He did raise the price on a life saving drug, but he was sticking it to insurance companies that were obligated to buy it. For Medicaid and the uninsured the price was either about the same or lower than before.
NewCharlesInCharge
1yr ago
The marginal voter has a high propensity to break for Democrats. This explains blue tribe cheerleading about the voting for the sake of voting. Get out the vote campaigns help Democrats.
NewCharlesInCharge
1yr ago
I think most people who support euthanasia have an ideal case in mind: the person is not going to survive much longer, they're in constant, terrible pain, and so it's a mercy to allow them to end their lives.
This is similar to animal euthanasia. If a dog's existence consists entirely of only suffering, most people seem to think it's a mercy to end its life, even if we have no way to know if that's what the dog wants.
However, to euthanize a dog who isn't in that state, and hasn't shown itself to be irredeemably dangerous, seems monstrous to most people. Imagine a person who has grown bored of their dog and so kills it.
This seems much closer to the bored-of-my-dog case than the life-is-endless-suffering case.
I have to wonder if this woman would be alive had she been exposed to different ways of thinking about adversity rather than to be medicated so heavily that she complained she couldn't feel anything anymore. It seems the doctors had nothing else to offer her.
NewCharlesInCharge
1yr ago
CanadaBC BritishBC NipponHK
These are non-standard ways to refer to these entities, at first I thought you were referring to some kind of official Twitter account of British Columbia.
NewCharlesInCharge
1yr ago
A key difference between these situations is that there's no corroborating evidence for Cassidy's claim. It's not the case that the Presidential limo was seen suddenly swerving on camera, and Cassidy's claim is an explanation for what happened.
In the case of the Bidens, we have the email where Hunter is to hold 10% for "the big guy" and Bobulinski is explaining who the big guy is. We also, as far as I know, have no alternative theory on who "the big guy" is. Who else is in Hunter's orbit is a good candidate for "the big guy?"
A month or so ago I remember someone here linking to the discovery documents in the Missouri Attorney General's lawsuit against Joe Biden, alleging the government is violating First Amendment rights by colluding with tech companies to censor the speech of private citzens. Those docs are here (warning: 711 page PDF).
At the time I was shocked at how this wasn't apparently a big story. It's trivial to scroll through the email exchanges and find examples of government agents reporting content to tech companies, who would then take the content down. There are obvious First Amendment issues that at the very least need to be publicly discussed, but most likely need to be prosecuted.
Well, it's finally getting some press. Lee Fang at the Intercept published an article today that, among other things, references these docs: https://theintercept.com/2022/10/31/social-media-disinformation-dhs/. The article also includes details on the organizational structures involved, including many documents out of DHS that detail their anti-misinformation operations.
A couple of choice quotes:
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