Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
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User ID: 551
New Frontiers in Algorithmic Racism - Tax Edition
The New York Times has an article out on the IRS algorithmically targeting black Americans at higher rates than other racial groups. The claim is that there's something in the algorithm that inappropriately biases it against black Americans. Summarized in the opening paragraphs:
Black taxpayers are at least three times as likely to be audited by the Internal Revenue Service as other taxpayers, even after accounting for the differences in the types of returns each group is most likely to file, a team of economists has concluded in one of the most detailed studies yet on race and the nation’s tax system.
The findings do not suggest bias from individual tax enforcement agents, who do not know the race of the people they are auditing. They also do not suggest any valid reason for the I.R.S. to target Black Americans at such high rates; there is no evidence that group engages in more tax evasion than others.
OK, so what exactly is causing them to get audited more if it's not individual bias, the machines are blinded to the race of the individual, and the rules are the same for everyone? Apparently some of it comes down to targeting EITC filings:
Black Americans are disproportionately concentrated in low-wage jobs. They are more likely than whites to claim the E.I.T.C. The authors wondered if that prevalence in claiming the credit might explain why Black taxpayers face more audits, because I.R.S. data show the agency audits people who claim the E.I.T.C. at higher rates than other taxpayers.
But as the research progressed, the authors found the share of Black Americans claiming the E.I.T.C. only explained a small part of the audit differences. Instead, more than three-quarters of the disparity stems from how much more often Black taxpayers who claim the credit are audited, compared with E.I.T.C. claimants who are not Black.
Unless I'm missing something, the article does not explicitly state what the relevant factors are that result in this targeting are. In what I see as typical NYT style, it does leave a breadcrumb that might be suggestive if you're ignoring the narrative quotes embedded in the article:
Black taxpayers appear to disproportionately file returns with the sort of potential errors that are easy for I.R.S. systems to identify, like underreporting certain income or claiming tax credits that the taxpayer does not qualify for, the authors find.
To me, this reads like the most likely explanation for black taxpayers being audited more frequently is that they report their income incorrectly in easy-to-detect ways. Since the IRS already has W-2 data for filers, it's probably not very hard for them to notice when someone reports their income wrong. There isn't really any elaboration that I find after this, so I'm unclear on how much this accounts for auditing disparities. The implication of the article and the quotes from "equity" advocates imply to me that we should figure out a way to make sure that white Americans are audited at least as much as black Americans, regardless of who is misreporting their income more frequently.
As cynical as it sounds, I'm beginning to hear the term "algorithmic bias" as nothing more than a form of projection - algorithm systems frequently detect something real about the world, people with racially motivated politics don't like that outcome, and they seek to shift the algorithm towards a bias in favor of their preferred group. If a program that is optimized for detecting incorrect tax filings works as intended to detect them, but turns up more black Americans than white Americans, the suggestion appears to be to change the weighting until it evens out the races, regardless of the impact on the efficiency of detecting lost revenue. The "algorithmic bias", from my reading of this would be injecting a deliberate racial preference to counter the program noticing actual disparities. I am reminded of the racial resentment scale, in which people who say that "blacks have gotten less than they deserve" are not racially resentful, while those who think things like "Irish, Italian, and Jewish ethnicities overcame prejudice and worked their way up, Blacks should do the same without any special favors" are racially resentful.
Anyway, I'll be curious to see if the study is released more publicly and details what exactly is causing the disparity.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
4mo ago
A Jewish man is making threats that I would have guessed came from a Muslim, which tells me about my bias and the level of passion on both sides of the conflict right now.
To be pedantic, this doesn't tell you about your "bias", it tells you about your entirely reasonable priors that are presumably based on your familiarity with Islamists being the primary practitioners of political beheadings. If you know absolutely nothing else other than that someone was beheaded over a conflict on religious ideology, you should absolutely have your first case be that it was a Muslim. Even after this story, I am disinclined to make a major update to that prior, as there is no student with a sawed off head.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1yr ago
The Independent goes a bit further still:
The Guardian branded the series “the most dangerous show on Netflix”, while historian Greg Jenner referred to it as “absolute nonsense which fails at the most basic level to present convincing evidence” – and yet the series has sat in Netflix’s Top 10 list for several days, currently resting at No 7 across all of film and TV at the time of writing. The documentary has raised concerns over Netflix’s own complicity in disseminating dubious or misleading information. More than this, however, it has made a compelling case for the value of the UK’s publicly owned broadcasters.
...
That’s not to say that the BBC and Channel 4 are completely without sin, of course. The BBC – in particular, BBC News – has been criticised for a perceived right-wing political bias in recent years; its handling of transgender issues has been condemned by LGBT+ rights activists on multiple occasions.
...
But who is holding it accountable for these decisions? As a streaming service, Netflix isn’t even subject to the same regulations that regular UK TV channels are: when viewers are offended by something on traditional TV, they can always complain to the broadcasting regulator Ofcom. Because Netflix is based in the Netherlands, it falls outside of Ofcom’s jurisdiction.
...
Perhaps Netflix jumping on the pseudoscience bandwagon was an inevitability. But it’s a stark reminder of exactly what’s being lost in television’s pivot to privately owned streaming services. It’s an issue that’s threatening to swallow social media platforms whole, too: how exactly the spread of (mis-)information is regulated. Modern companies must start drawing from the lessons of the past – it might help to understand why the BBC has lasted as long as it has.
Not only is this show bad and dangerous, it stands as an example of why we probably just shouldn't even allow private television production at all. If we're going to insist on having private television, we should probably at least turn curation of it over to the government to make sure that communication there is appropriately reviewed and approved for public consumption, less the public start getting into all sorts of wrongthink. It's impossible for me to not jump immediately to the control of information around Covid and the desire "fact check" all sorts of things that were branded "misinformation".
Anyway, all of the people telling me that the show is simply terrible and probably shouldn't even be allowed pretty well ensures that I'll give it a watch.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
8mo ago
There are very few paths more predictable than communists causing economic failure and deciding that the kulaks are to blame.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1yr ago
Secondly, a question for the community: What gets you fiercely activated, beyond what you can rationally justify?
The student loan subject, but in the opposite direction. I find it absolutely infuriating, I think people that want me to pay their willingly incurred debts are greedy and untrustworthy. I wrote more about why I think it's [so wrong here] (https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/kcsx2u/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_december_14/gg9ijd4/):
On student debt forgiveness, I'm seeing the emergence of a new framing that seems almost completely nonsensical to me. In a recent Voxsplainer, this quote is included from a policy person:
“What’s attractive about student debt cancellation in this moment is that in addition to righting a policy wrong — which is the decision to make the cost of college an individual burden when I would say it’s a public good — is that it can help stimulate the economy at a moment when we need economic stimulus. And it has significant racial equity implications as well,” said Suzanne Kahn, director of education, jobs, and power at the Roosevelt Institute and an advocate for complete federal student debt cancellation. It’s also something Biden could try to do independently of Congress, which is attractive since stimulus talks have stalled out.
I want to emphasize the use of "public good" there - this doesn't mean something that's good for the public, this is a specific economic term used deliberately. The meaning is:
In economics, a public good (also referred to as a social good or collective good) is a good that is both non-excludable and non-rivalrous.
...
Non-rivalrous: accessible by all whilst one's usage of the product does not affect the availability for subsequent use.[8]
...
Non-excludability: that is, it is impossible to exclude any individuals from consuming the good.
This is not at all what university educations look like. Not only are degrees both rivalrous and excludable, they're also positional goods that convey signaling benefit to their recipients. To make them non-rivalrous and non-excludable would substantially remove their value to the individuals receiving them. We can imagine a world that looks like that, where Harvard offers all of its classes online to anyone that would like to take them and anyone that signs up and passes receives that Harvard degree, but that looks nothing like the world we actually live in.
From my perspective, student loan forgiveness would be one of the worst policies in American history. It would:
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Reward irresponsible people that had no plan to pay debts freely entered into.
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Reward universities that conferred expensive degrees that don't have an actual return on the investment.
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Reify moral hazard and perverse incentives related to the above.
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Continue to inflate college costs due to the expectation that no one actually has to pay for anything.
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Further the class/social war by explicitly choosing to extract from non-university labor to reward the formally educated.
Almost all of the upsides seem to me to be incredibly short term and ignore normal human reactions. To me, the justifications all look like sophistry in service of smash-and-grab politics.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1yr ago
It just all seems so ugly.
On that note, I couldn't get passed his bit on Lizzo and the crystal flute. Everything about an obese woman in a skinsuit twerking with an American historical artifact seems like such a ridiculous parody of repulsive decadence that I literally cannot understand casting this as a form of "inclusive nationalism". This looks so clearly like triumphant mockery of the downfall of America's heritage that I'm baffled at an apparently sincere view of this as a Good Thing.
There's so much that's wrong about these sorts of claims regarding gender parity in sports, but something that I feel usually goes unmentioned is just how belittling and condescending it is to female athletes. The sport that I have the most personal experience with is running, so I'll focus there for this point. Running happens to be a sport where there are smaller gaps between men and women than sports that rely more on size and strength, but there remains a persistent 10-12% difference in speed at every single distance (see world records here if you're curious)). Less statistically provable, I see the same sort of differences pop up at pretty much every level of the sport, including my mediocre hobbyist level (e.g., I can run 20K in 1:18, women with similar weekly mileage, similar physical build, and similar apparent fitness run roughly 1:26-1:26).
So, what's it saying about women to say that the difference is culturally constructed? Well, it must be saying that their training is, in some way, inferior. That when a Kenyan woman blazes an incredible 2:20 marathon and wins the female side of competition, the reason she's so much slower than the men is that she wasn't supported enough or didn't work hard enough or didn't eat right. That seems false, since the men and women do exactly the same thing. Or that in the 20K mentioned above, when I finish like 20th in a local race, but ran by the second-place woman in the last couple miles, she just wasn't pushed hard enough to succeed, or didn't train right. That's even more wrong though - I know her, I know she ran in high school and college (I didn't start running till my mid-20s and have never had a coach) and know that she runs more miles than I do.
This mentality that physical differences between genders are constructed strips these women of the respect they deserve. When I narrowly beat a female runner, I know that she's a better runner than me. I know that she's likely more talented than me, has likely outworked me, and that every bit of speed gain she gets is harder to come by than my testosterone-fueled improvement. The perspective that the reason I'm faster is because of culture rather than biology denies her the respect that she deserves for her hard work, instead making her an object of pity, insisting that if it weren't for some ephemeral oppression, she'd be just as fastest as the boys.
I hate it.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
20d ago
Health, Fitness, Obesity, and Politics
Something that’s been bouncing around in my head for quite some time is how people relate their politics to their personal health. This story from The Daily Beast on Wisconsin Senate candidate Eric Hovde has resurfaced this for me by providing a clear illustration of what I perceive as a current difference between the American left and right on this issue:
“Look, we have an explosion of Type 2 diabetes right now. Explosion. Obesity is off the charts. You know, we’re removing people from being responsible for their own health,” Hovde said.
“If they all of a sudden started to realize that they’re going to pay more for their health care by consuming, you know, by consuming massive amounts of soda every day or fatty foods and not exercising, maybe they would change their behavioral patterns.”
Hovde then claimed obesity was a “personal choice.”
“It’s a personal choice,” he said, “but there should be consequences to those personal choices. Fine, you want to do that, you become obese, your health care is going to cost more. Or, the quality—or not the quality, but the amount of health care may go down, because you may not have the money to afford it.
“You have to force personal responsibility back to people, and also make them smart consumers.”
The Daily Beast helpfully loops in a putative expert on the matter, a professor at NYU:
Jay said that Hovde’s comments singling out obesity as something that should raise people’s insurance rates reveals that “either you’re not understanding or you’re really discriminating against people who have a chronic disease.”
“It’s assuming that obesity is some sort of moral failing that people need to be punished for,” she said. “That’s not true.
She added: “It’s a pretty awful and dangerous thing to say.”
This is the latest spat about these sorts of things and probably lays the dichotomous beliefs out about as clearly as possible. There is a policy angle (some people think insurance should be risk-based, some don’t), but that is comparatively dry relative to the beliefs in personal responsibility and how those views extend into political beliefs. There was an old throwaway post from the dissident right blog Dividuals that stuck with me a decade later because of how clearly it captured something that I felt when I read the left-leaning positions:
One realistic way to parodize liberals / lefties / Progressives / feminists / SJWs etc. would be to present them as narcissistic, solipsistic, self-absorbed people with huge and fragile egos who demand that everything should revolve around themselves.
…
The simple fact that feminists tend to be fat would only make, in itself, a weak joke. But when you find they run around parading their fatness, and make it a political goal to make men somehow adore it – imagine it, human beings making it a political goal that other should have a positive opinion of their own personal fsckups! “I have crap for character, now praise me for it, oppressor!” Imagine programmers making it a political goal to convince people that bugs are actually good!
At the time, I wasn’t particularly right-aligned, so this wasn’t really an ingroup-outgroup thing, but an articulation of a growing frustration I had with people on the left, this absolute refusal to ever tell people to own up to their situations, take responsibility for where they are in life, and fix it. Everything, always, forever is just contingent on circumstances, completely outside of their control. While I could understand the arguments about this sort of thing when it comes to wealth accumulation or crime, to be so extreme as to not grant that people have agency over what they eat was the kind of thing that was just steadily pushing me away from having any inclination to share goals with the economic left.
Since then, there has been a steady (if not particularly large) genre of articles characterizing fitness as a right-wing phenomenon. Some of these are really silly things about how gyms are gateways to far-right extremism, but let’s look at one example that’s a little more self-serious and not obviously ridiculous:
The study found a significant correlation between those men who were heavier and stronger and the belief that some social groups should dominate others. These men were also less likely to support the redistribution of wealth, a typically left wing principle.
Specifically, the researchers found a specific correlation between the number of hours spent in the gym and having less egalitarian socioeconomic beliefs.
Dr Michael Price, a senior lecturer in psychology at the university and the lead author of the study, suggested the findings could come down to three things: The result of the men “calibrating their egalitarianism to their own formidability”, that less egalitarian men strive to become more muscular or there could be a third variable at play.
“Our results suggest that wealthier men who are more formidable physically are more likely to oppose redistribution of wealth,” he said. “Essentially, they seem more motivated to defend their resources. But less wealthy men who are still physically formidable don’t seem more inclined to support redistribution either. They’re not demanding a share of the wealth.
Vice covers the same thing, but with an oddly smug glee:
To all you gym-bro haters amongst us, come, be seated. This one's for you. Science—objective, empirically tested science, the science that tells us that the ice caps are melting—has confirmed what many of us have long suspected: Gym bros are right-wing jerks.
…
Price's findings? That rich muscle dudes are the worst! Under those rock-hard abs lie the rock-hard souls of men who doesn't believe in spreading their riches around. "It's basically your tolerance to the idea that wealth shouldn't be redistributed," Dr. Price explains. "Some people thought it was horrible; some people thought it was fine."
If there was ever a line that called for a YesChad.jpg response, it’s that one. While I am not a particularly big guy, I will self-report that I do believe my work as an endurance athlete has substantially shifted my views against egalitarian perspectives and more towards personal responsibility. Rather than modeling that as being about domination and aggression, I would propose that the mechanism is the personal sense of accomplishment and mastery coupled with knowing how much of it is a direct product of your internal locus of control. I’m not decently fast because of some random freak accident of nature - I wasn’t fast when I started running, I’m much faster now, and I keep getting faster in almost perfect concert with how much work I put into the sport. Others will fare better with less work, such is life, but we all have a great deal of control over our outcomes. So, yeah, I am inclined to believe that pursuing fitness as a hobby will tend to lead one to the right of their current positions.
The belief that fitness is a right-wing thing doesn’t stop with this sort of relatively modest claim about egalitarian tendencies though. The Society for Cultural Anthropology has a weird writeup on Gym Fascism. To go nutpicking a bit, the Manitoba University newspaper has Fitness culture and fatphobia are fascistic - Our obsession with looking the same is culling joy and body diversity:
Prof. Brian Pronger points out that almost everything that we stress about physical education centres around maximizing the body’s performance. It’s the way that we are all expected to structure our lives around our fitness regimens, and those five days a week when we’re supposed to work out must be in service to making ourselves as strong as possible.
Fitness fanaticism constipates our personal growth. Think about what it means to “work on yourself.” It often means to work out, as if your character is tied to your physical strength and muscle tone.
OK, too much nutpicking. Back to a serious journalistic outlet, Time magazine. Just before the New Year, Time published a story that might dissuade people from making an ill-advised resolutions for 2023 titled The White Supremacist Origins of Exercise, and 6 Other Surprising Facts About the History of U.S. Physical Fitness:
It was super interesting reading the reflections of fitness enthusiasts in the early 20th century. They said we should get rid of corsets, corsets are an assault on women’s form, and that women should be lifting weights and gaining strength. At first, you feel like this is so progressive.
Then you keep reading, and they’re saying white women should start building up their strength because we need more white babies. They’re writing during an incredible amount of immigration, soon after enslaved people have been emancipated. This is totally part of a white supremacy project. So that was a real “holy crap” moment as a historian, where deep archival research really reveals the contradictions of this moment.
Oh dear.
Anyway, to return to that Hovde story that kicked things off, I find it pretty interesting to think about how these things play with different crowds. Something that’s kind of obvious is that Red Tribe America is not actually very fit at all, while Blue Tribe power centers consistently have quite a few fitness-minded individuals. Nonetheless, when Hovde says that fat people are responsible for their own bodies, it seems to me that most Red Tribers basically agree and accept that they’re fat because they like burgers and beer a little too much, while the Blue Tribers recoil at the suggestion that people are responsible for eating themselves into Type 2 diabetes. This reminds me of how discussions of marriage and morality play out as well - educated elites, regardless of political persuasion, stay married at very high rates and seem to be well aware that this is the correct way to live, but are hesitant to say this about the underclass. They hold standards for themselves that they believe don’t apply to others. As far as electoral politics goes, I doubt this little newscycle item means much of anything, but it does provide a fun case study and litmus test for perspectives on the topic.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
6mo ago
I reject "getting someone drunk" as a framing that should apply to an adult. At a festival this summer, I wound up so inebriated that I had to go lie down in the shade and take a nap. Had I wanted to get up prior to sleeping it off a bit, I would have had a tough time doing so. Was I drugged? Did someone "get me drunk"? Was my wife, who was with me the entire time, responsible for my drunken state? I'm inclined to say that as an adult who has more than a passing familiarity with alcohol that I was solely responsible for my state of being.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
9mo ago
As someone who was on the other side of the argument back then, I've had some introspection about how much more consideration I should now give to the bible thumping bigots I used to dismiss, because they were right and I was wrong.
This is where I wound up as well. I was aggressively in favor of gay marriage, but I have to admit that I was plainly wrong about there not being any slippery slope. I genuinely thought that gay marriage represented the end point of winning equal rights for gay people, not just another battle on the way to whatever weirdness comes next. Such is the peril of youth, I suppose.
What's wild to me is how many of the activists that I thought I was on the same side as, but am now significantly to the right of, don't seem to have any personal memory of having held a position other than insisting that government funding of trans hormones for kids was morally obligatory and constitutionally required. The number that must have actually thought that a decade ago must have been vanishingly small (the term "gender-affirming" didn't even exist yet), but it is now the bog-standard Democrat position.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1yr ago
The rapport between the friends of the group, what might be called the “vibe”, is a crucial ingredient to Mr Beast’s success.
I haven't watched him previously, but I've been peripherally aware of Mr Beast from friends that have kids that enjoy watching him. Flipping that unboxing video on, it is unbelievable awkward and strained, and frankly I don't see how it could be anywhere other way. Trying to put myself in the shoes of Mr Beast, I think there is approximately zero chance that I could sit next to my best from childhood with him wearing a ridiculous tube top, looking like a comically bad parody of a non-passing trans woman, knowing that he'd destroyed his marriage for that and be able to summon any more positive emotion than extreme pity. In all likelihood, my contempt for abandonment of family and personal disfigurement would swamp that pity. I don't think I could sit there and pretend that this is still my friend in any meaningful sense.
I continue to become more convinced that this should never have been openly tolerated, much less celebrated.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
11mo ago
Really gives the impression of an organization doing its level best to be transparent and honest. Can you imagine still questioning their integrity after looking at that?
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
6mo ago
California has a likely new Senator, and her background is a doozy if you're someone as cynical as I am about political figures. With Diane Feinstein having died, Gavin Newsome can now select anyone he'd like, and had promised that the position would be selected from a strict affirmative action pool of black women. He apparently failed to find anyone that actually lives in California that fits the bill, so he has instead selected Maryland resident Laphonza Butler for the position. What, you might ask, are her exquisite qualifications that would make her the top candidate for such an important position? Wiki's summary suffices:
Butler began her career as a union organizer for nurses in Baltimore and Milwaukee, janitors in Philadelphia, and hospital workers in New Haven, Connecticut. In 2009, she moved to California, organizing in-home caregivers and nurses, and served as president of SEIU United Long Term Care Workers, SEIU Local 2015.[4][5][6]
Butler was elected president of the California SEIU State Council in 2013. She undertook efforts to boost California's minimum wage and raise income taxes on the wealthiest Californians.[4] As president of SEIU Local 2015, Butler endorsed Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Democratic presidential primary.[7]
In 2018, California Governor Jerry Brown appointed Butler to a 12-year term as a regent of the University of California.[6] She resigned from her role as regent in 2021.[8]
Butler joined SCRB Strategies as a partner in 2018. At SCRB, she played a central role in Kamala Harris's 2020 presidential campaign. Butler also advised Uber in its dealings with organized labor while at SCRB.[9] She was known as a political ally of Harris since her first run for California Attorney General in 2010, when she helped Harris negotiate a shared SEIU endorsement in the race.[4][10]
Butler left SCRB in 2020 to join Airbnb as director of public policy and campaigns in North America.[11][5]
Butler was named the third president of EMILY's List in 2021. She was the first Black woman and mother to lead the organization.[12][4]
EMILY's List is an American political action committee (PAC) that aims to help elect Democratic female candidates in favor of abortion rights to office. It was founded by Ellen Malcolm in 1985.[4] The group's name is an acronym for "Early Money Is Like Yeast". Malcolm commented that "it makes the dough rise".[4] The saying refers to a convention of political fundraising: receiving many donations early in a race helps attract subsequent donors. EMILY's List bundles contributions to the campaigns of Democratic women in favor of abortion rights running in targeted races.[5][6]
From 1985 through 2008, EMILY's List raised $240 million for political candidates.[1] EMILY's List spent $27.4 million in 2010, $34 million in 2012, and $44.9 million in 2014.[3] The organization was on track to raise $60 million for the 2016 election cycle, much of it earmarked for Hillary Clinton, whose presidential bid EMILY's List had endorsed.[7]
Chalk up a win for patronage models of politics! This is someone whose entire career is built on raising money for politicians, culminating in heading a powerful PAC that is more explicitly built around money, money, money even in their very naming than any other PAC I've seen. Obviously, anyone paying attention knows that PACs are always about raising money and that's their express purpose, but I don't think I've seen one literally just make their name an acronym for the patronage enthusiasm. Big donors give money to politicians and get what they want and the organizer for acquiring that wealth is awarded with a seat in the Senate. In all, I see three things of note that are often the subtext of various choices and decisions, but I rarely see so blatantly:
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The appointment will be explicitly about race and gender. If you're anything other than a Black Woman, you need not apply.
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The Democrat party apparatus does not care in the slightest whether this person represents California, states are a stupid anachronism anyway.
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The appointment will go to someone that has demonstrated loyalty and usefulness in assisting with the funneling of hundreds of millions of dollars to preferred sources.
On the one hand, it's all rather offensive, but on the other hand, I can think of no better Senator from California than a transient grifter that makes her living off of identity politics.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
10mo ago
She did not come off particularly sympathetically in the video.
It comes off quite a bit differently knowing that she's six months pregnant, just got off her 12-hour shift, and that the theft was on the part of the guy harassing her. What's she supposed to feel like? She would probably be better served by stating the claim plainly rather than becoming emotional, but if I had just worked a long shift, had some scumbag trying to steal a bike from me, and some other guy recording the incident for fun and profit, I might lose my capacity for calm indifference to the situation.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1yr ago
Something that's striking about some of the rewrites is that they're not just striking ostensibly verboten words, but actually making the writing worse. The first example from the table that @buffy_bot helpfully provides below:
Like all extremely old people, he was delicate and weak
Like most extremely old people, he was delicate and weak
First, note the moronically pedantic nature of this change - you can picture the dweeb interjecting, "ackshually, not all extremely old people are delicate and weak". To a first approximation, all centenarians really are delicate and weak, with the best counterexamples still being people that don't have half the strength of their youth and that can suffer severe injuries from falling down. More importantly though, it changes the rhythm and feel of the sentence in a way that I can't quite articulate, and not for the better.
The removal of anything to do with "fat" is a good example of what we were talking about with regard to victories of fat activists yesterday. I don't think they've actually made any inroads on convincing people that there's nothing wrong with being fat, but they have convinced people that ever referencing fat negatively in writing is a sin that's just short of using a racial slur.
“It was easy. I smuggled them over in large packing cases with holes in them, and they all got here safely… They all speak English now”
“They’ve told me they love it here”
Again, notice that this is just plain worse. It's not just getting rid of something that's putatively offensive, it's scrapping the underlying content, making it flat and dull. The original sentence gives you a vivid image of how the hell the oompaloompas wound up there (and it's not a pretty image). The update says nothing meaningful. This is a theme across these, replacing well-crafted sentences that call to mind an image with some simple descriptor conveys only the sequence of events. Perhaps the sensitivity editors all suffer from aphantasia and lack the capacity to visualize a scene from a few words; I can't decide if this explanation would be more or less charitable to them.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1yr ago
His entire career, indeed his entire life is built around the anti-racist grift. I cannot even articulate how little sympathy I have for it finally inconveniencing him. If you push for your struggle sessions, everyone should dearly hope that you are one day forced to stand as the enemy. In my preferred world, his ridiculous jobs wouldn't exist at all, but I'll settle for the grievance-based institutions he's helped build turning against him.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1yr ago
There isn't a person alive today who has done as much for black americans as the lowliest, whitest, most racist private in the Union Army.
Somewhat related, I thought the vandalism of the Hans Christian Heg statue in Madison captured the spirit of the Black Lives Matter movement better than anything else that happened that summer. Let's understand who Heg was:
Hans Christian Heg (1829-1863) was a Norwegian American abolitionist, journalist, anti-slavery activist, politician and soldier. He was born at Haugestad in the community of Lierbyen in Lier, Buskerud, Norway, where his father ran an inn. His family emigrated to the US in 1840, and settled at Muskego Settlement, Wisconsin. After two years as a Forty-Niner in California following the California Gold Rush, Heg returned to settle in Wisconsin.
Heg is best known as the colonel who commanded the 15th Wisconsin Volunteer Regiment on the Union side in the American Civil War. He died of the wounds he received at the Battle of Chickamauga. A 10 ft (3.0 m) high pyramid of 8 in (20 cm) shells at Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park marks the site on the battlefield where Heg was mortally wounded.
Let's understand that Wisconsin was not a slave state, never had slaves, and frankly had no material stake in the fate of black Americans. Heg fought and died to stop what he regarded as a moral atrocity. He is memorialized at one of the corners of the Wisconsin State Capitol because these are exactly the traits that any decent person would admire. When the Summer of Floyd commenced, the statue was treated thusly by rioters:
On Tuesday, June 23, 2020, the statue was vandalized by protesters, incensed by the arrest of a member of Black Lives Matter, as demonstrations in Madison turned violent.[16][17] Vandals used a towing vehicle to pull the statue down. It was then vandalized, decapitated, and thrown into Lake Monona. The words "black is beautiful" were spray-painted on the plinth, just above Heg's name.[18][19][20]
...
Unlike Confederate statues removed during the George Floyd protests, this statue was of a Union soldier and abolitionist,[23][24] The Associated Press reported that "it seems likely that few Wisconsinites know Heg's biography".[23][24] Protester Micah Le said the two statues paint a picture of Wisconsin as a racially progressive state "even though slavery has continued in the form of a corrections system built around incarcerating Blacks."[21] Two protesters interviewed by the Wisconsin State Journal said that toppling the statues was to draw attention to their view of Wisconsin as being racially unjust.[25] Black student activists had called for the removal of the statue of Abraham Lincoln at University of Wisconsin–Madison in early June 2020, and repeated those calls after Heg's statue was toppled.[26][27]
I can think of no better representation of this movement - ignorant, entitled, ungrateful, destructive, and aggrieved. I cannot capture the prevailing mood of the movement better than they did themselves in destroying and discarding a statue and replacing it with "black is beautiful" - they made the world uglier in a small way and told us that it was beautiful.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1yr ago
I'm not a partisan in this debate. I think it would be good if gas stoves get eased out in the near future...
This framing speaks volumes about how the Overton Window gets set on these sorts of arguments, in practice. The extreme positions are that stoves should be banned immediately or that people should just be allowed to choose what stove they'd like. The centrist position is that a federal government agency should just make it cumbersome, expensive, and inconvenient to have a gas stove, leading to their eventual phaseout.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1mo ago
Legalizing gay marriage was seen as a radical leftist movement, but the actual result was that all the gay people - and most importantly, gay artists and icons and culture warriors - stopped living as radical counter-culture outsiders challenging every pillar of the nuclear family, and switched to being respectability-politics-first normies living quiet lives in the suburbs with 2.5 adopted kids. Conservatives had to give up on oppressing gay people, but managed to bring them largely into the tent of traditional marriage and neoliberal economics and so forth.
Is this how you remember the sequencing? As someone that was vigorously in favor of legalizing gay marriage, I recall the path being inverted from this, where the respectability politics had already happened and the big selling point was that our gay and lesbian friends are not degenerate weirdos, they're totally normal and just want the same thing that straight couples have. This was a pretty good selling point! It convinced me handily, and I certainly see couples that live exactly like that now. The problem is that the aftermath of that win was not declaring victory and slapping a Mission Accomplished sticker on the Pride flag, it was moving onto trans politics, leading up to the modern day "trans kids", trans "women" in women's sports, and so on. At this point, I've basically been convinced that I was wrong, the slippery slope people were completely right, and that simply winning on the one cause and then moving on with normalcy was never an option.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
3mo ago
There’s a powerful strain of authoritarianism on the Right, manifesting in contexts ranging from January 6 to the laws in various red states that make it harder to vote.
This stuff is genuinely infuriating. Say what I will about the J6 rioters, they weren't driven by "authoritarianism", they literally just thought they won and were being cheated. Likewise, say whatever anyone else will about telling people to bring their ID when they go to the polls, it's not "authoritarian".
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
6mo ago
Direct discussion of drugging was missing from the first trial — which ended in a mistrial when a jury deadlocked on all three counts — with Mueller instead having to imply it through the testimony of the women, who said they were woozy, disoriented and at times unconscious on the nights they described the actor raping them.
Wow, there's no way that wooziness, disorientation, and passing out could be explained by mere alcohol, these women must have been drugged!
Seriously, how the hell is anyone supposed to defend themselves from this other than simply replying, "uhhh, yeah, they might have been real drunk, we were indeed partying"? I keep looking at cases like this and trying to figure out how I could possibly exonerate myself if someone I hooked up with from a party 20 years ago claimed that I "drugged" her, and I've got absolutely nothing. In this case, one of them was evidently his girlfriend at the time; I really have no idea how I could defend myself if my wife decides a decade from now that having sex after we both got home bordering on a blackout drunk New Year's Eve was actually "rape".
Is there some steelman explanation I'm missing for how this could plausibly be a legitimate trial with legitimate evidence? It seems like it's literally some women that got drunk and had sex with Masterson that decided a decade later that they were actually drugged, without even the slightest bit of physical evidence for the claim. Never mind being sufficient for a reasonable doubt, I just flat out don't believe them at all.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
8mo ago
Röbynn Europe
Nominal determinism strikes again.
Almost all (if not all) of her ex-boyfriends have been white men. In a 2011 interview with Vice, the interviewer notes...
Never ask a white nationalist or a social justice warrior the race of their partner, as they say.
I really don't even know what to say on the cases themselves. They're so absurd, so comically ridiculous to me that it's hard to articulate much other than a point and sputter. Likewise for the $1.8 billion awarded to potential teachers in NY that were victimized by their inability to pass a test. When you reward black incompetence and grifting, you're going to get more black incompetence and grifting.
Genuinely, it is hard to come up with anything to say that isn't already immediately obvious to any casual observer. My main reaction is that after all the sturm und drung about our sacred democracy, the people that want this are doing everything in their power to destroy the remaining legitimacy of Our Democracy. Of course, this thinking is about on par with the elephant in StoneToss.
Second is that I can barely contain my contempt for the legal profession and all of its fake pseudo-philosophizing. Hundreds of pages. They wrote hundreds of pages on this. Does anyone believe that hundreds of pages were necessary to arrive at this conclusion? Whether you think January 6 was an "insurrection" that disqualifies Trump or not, it's pretty obvious that you view isn't going to be based on careful line-item reading of endless history and text. In writing so extensively on the topic, the justices clarify that they're just liars concocting elaborate explanations for doing what they want to do anyway.
Finally, I would predict increased potential for violence, and it sure does seem like the people in charge are pushing the envelope, but after 2020 and its fallout, it's hard to imagine the American right doing much other than the elephant from StoneToss routine.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
7mo ago
I had a conversation over the weekend with a friend that is now compelled to write "Türkiye" in all formal documentation and I must confess that I'm absolutely baffled by why anyone is agreeing to play along with the petty power games of renaming the country. Many, many countries have different local names than what they're referred to as internationally or in other languages, and pretty much no one cares about these distinctions as anything other than petty provincialism. I will be very surprised if the residents of Deutschland start taking offense to being called Germany, or if the English decide to call the pasta homeland Italia. I have no intention of demanding that Mexicans who say "Estados Unidos" knock it off and learn some goddamned English. Nippon doesn't usually go by Nippon internationally, and if it did, that would still just be a weird Anglicization of the actual Japanese.
I know I'm going to look like a total boomer, and a low-class one at that, but I will still be writing Turkey and India for the foreseeable future, along with ordering Chicken Key-Ehv rather than Chicken Keeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeev.
The new House Speaker, Mike Johnson, is an Evangelical Christian that has positions and stances on homosexuality that I do not share (I confess, I remain a Millennial lib that has no problem with gay people doing gay things). Nonetheless, this CNN video where they discuss his positions on homosexuality and conversion therapy just seems so bizarre to me. In it, they refer to the idea of someone going from gay to straight as "debunked", quote Johnson saying, "there's freedom to change if you want to", and "homosexual behavior is something you do, not who you are".
Despite my own inclination to completely accept gay people qua gay people, I find nothing objectionable about Johnson's statements and see them as a much more accurate model of reality than what the CNN crew is expressing. I have zero doubt that sexual preferences and predilections can be substantially altered through a combination of conditioning, cognitive therapy, and repetition. I'm agnostic on whether this could allow someone who has a natural inclination towards homosexuality (or heterosexuality) to groom attraction for the sex that they didn't initially prefer, but it's not obvious to me, and I don't think there's good reason to say that it's deboonked as though this is just a common stylized fact. Likewise, even if it proves impossible to change one's underlying preference, it certainly remains true that one can elect to follow a different pattern of behavior than their natural tendency. I might have a natural tendency to hook up with a flirtatious woman at the bar while I'm on a work trip, but Mrs. O'Dim wouldn't appreciate this and I value her so much more than some stupid hookup. Were I a religious man, I might be inclined to view my religious obligations through the same sort of lens.
But really, the thing that keeps hitting me with dissonance isn't even the above points, which I can at least countenance reasonable counterarguments to, but the incongruity with the belief that gender itself is a mere social construct that is fully malleable to an individual's stated preference. A man attracted to other men cannot become a straight man, but he can become a straight woman. Do the people articulating this view not notice that this is at least a difficult pair of propositions to adhere to? Do they see no conflict? Do they understand the conflict, but believe that it's a question that's been solved by The Science, so better to just trust The Science and move on? Cynically, I think it's mostly that expressing the opposite view will get you bullied and fired.
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