hooser
1yr ago
Plus, for the record, if we could engineer 'brain dead' animals that could carry out all the activities necessary to grow to full size for slaughter but were incapable of feeling any pain or pleasure, I would find this a perfectly acceptable solution as well. I don't want animals to suffer.
It's an interesting idea, but it wouldn't work. In effect, it would mean that the animal has leprosy. Humans who have leprosy (aka Hansen's disease) need to actively and consciously monitor themselves for any physical damage, because it's their inability to feel pain that leads small wounds to fester. (And they get wounds easier in the first place because the pain feedback isn't there.)
So a baby calf with something like leprosy will quickly hurt itself and get festering wounds.
That means that for this enterprise to be at all viable, you'd need to keep that calf isolated and in clean environment, and still check it over like every day for sores or cuts. That's a lot of work, and therefore not economically worth it.
hooser
1yr ago
Looking at the Wikipedia article for Anarchism, it seems that the various strains of Anarchist philosophy are still going strong. Maybe the assassination tactic died out because it proved ineffective in achieving stated objectives.
Right after WWII, there's a pivot of focus and tactics:
By the end of World War II, the anarchist movement had been severely weakened. The 1960s witnessed a revival of anarchism, likely caused by a perceived failure of Marxism–Leninism and tensions built by the Cold War. During this time, anarchism found a presence in other movements critical towards both capitalism and the state such as the anti-nuclear, environmental, and peace movements, the counterculture of the 1960s, and the New Left. It also saw a transition from its previous revolutionary nature to provocative anti-capitalist reformism.
More recent activities:
Around the turn of the 21st century, anarchism grew in popularity and influence within anti-capitalist, anti-war and anti-globalisation movements. Anarchists became known for their involvement in protests against the World Trade Organization (WTO), the Group of Eight and the World Economic Forum.
I would also include Anarchist substantial presence in Occupy Wall Street.
While having revolutionary aspirations, many forms of anarchism are not confrontational nowadays. Instead, they are trying to build an alternative way of social organization, based on mutual interdependence and voluntary cooperation.
That description reflects the actions of the self-professed Anarchists that I know, who are interested in developing and sustaining structures of governance (even on small scale) that don't have formalized hierarchies.
hooser
1yr ago
In "Man's Search for Meaning", Viktor Frankl argues that a person can weather adversity--even thrive--so long as one's experience is deeply meaningful. In contrast, a person can be living an objectively pleasant life, yet be miserable if meaning is absent.
Frankl's framework fits some of the more successful activists that I personally know, be their cause a strain of social justice or Christian prothelytizing. They are tired and frustrated, their schedule is hectic, but their life is full of meaning. And because of that, they attract others to their cause.
I have recently watched the ["Navalny"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navalny_(film)) documentary. That guy is not living the good life by my definition--he's in a Russian high-security penal colony, an outcome he knew was highly likely when he chose to go back to Russia--but I don't deny that his life is deeply meaningful to him. That's a powerful draw.
hooser
1yr ago
Congratulations on getting the NIH grant!
You are right to point out that a significant portion of gatekeepers in US Academia are very much into the DEI/woke ideology. I would guess that in some fields, they are the majority of gatekeepers. In other fields, they may yet be a minority. Since most fields in US are liberal/left, and DEI/woke ideology evolved specifically to spread in or dominate such spaces, I would expect to encounter such gatekeepers in pretty much any academic field. I would also expect to encounter gatekeepers who retain classical liberal ideals that are at odds with discriminatory aspects of the former.
Getting a specific job, getting a specific grant, those have always been a crap shoot and involved guessing the priorities of whoever comprised the hiring / grant committee. It also is, deliberately, a status game. We would like to think that academic status is about merit, but it's still status, and thus susceptible to status-affecting politics. DEI/woke has been quite effective in that game, in the milieu of liberal/left spaces. So I would expect their representation within the academic gatekeepers to increase.
To anyone who is personally worried about this trend, I recommend considering life outside of academia.
hooser
1yr ago
We did.
That is: there was a general pressure from administration and other professors to have some kind of DEI statement; we (the search committee) wrote the prompt ourselves, and nobody outside of the search committee read these statements. We deliberately avoided DEI/woke jargon in our prompt, which went something like: "Describe how you have adjusted your teaching based on considerations of your students' various backgrounds. Give specific examples." We wanted applicants who have a track record of appropriately adjusting their pedagogy to fit the students that are actually in their course, and that's what we looked for.
Quite a few applicants phrased their statement with lots of DEI/woke jargon--probably because they were applying for other academic positions as well and DEI statements got pretty common then. That wasn't a drawback for those whose examples were actual useful pedagogy, like the guy who made a point to reach out to struggling students, noted that many of them were black ( but also conveyed that he reached out to all struggling students). Showing facility with currently-fashionable jargon is a definite plus at a small liberal arts college, because it means students aren't going to out-jargon you. However, we did scrutinize such statements for signs that the candidate was a possible liability (like those that supported actual discriminatory treatment based on protected categories) or poor collegiality (like those who made a point to publically "call out" various shit at their institution without even approaching people in private).
hooser
1yr ago
I work at a small selective liberal arts college where both students and faculty are almost all split among the classical-liberal / left-progressive / left-radical. The ideological fights tend to happen between classical liberals and the progressives / radicals. Aside from me, no professor identifies as Republican; students who are willing to say they vote republican are <1% (students who actually are politically conservative are more like 10%, but a lot of those are international students), and staff tends to keep mum about their personal politics.
So when our Dean of Faculty asked for volunteers to develop a "bias-incident response procedure", I volunteered. And I made sure that the system would recognize incidents that marginalize people because of their political affiliations (didn't have to do much, the HR wanted to include it to cover all the bases), and that the method of reporting a "bias incident" made that possibility explicit.
Then I told everyone about it, and how I will now be on the lookout for casual remarks putting down Republicans as a group. Cause, you know, microaggressions.
It's a small campus, and word gets around. The classical liberals on campus (faculty, staff, or students) don't like the woke attempting to take over, so they think it's a grand idea to turn the tables and usurp the woke language for the benefit of Republicans. The progressives and radicals (that still speak to me) are actually cool with it once I point out the advantages to having someone around willing to argue for conservative ideas. And the ones who don't speak to me... who cares.
One of the tenets of Critical Race Theory is called "interest convergence": that the majority (e.g., "white" in US) will only support the rights of the minority (e.g., "black" in US) if there's something in it for them. Sounds reasonable to me. So I figure out how to convince the majority-on-campus classical liberal / progressive-but-not-completely-woke that it's to their benefit to protect the rights of the minority-on-campus Republicans / conservatives.
E.g.: classes are a heck of a lot more fun if you got some contrarians taking the unpopular conservative positions and letting the liberal / left / left-radical students practice their arguments for real. If you ain't got no conservatives in your class, then the liberal/progressive professor needs to take on the conservative position yourself defend it devil's-advocate style (and probably straw-man botch it), or worse: have a boring class. So clearly, ensuring that our campus is explicitly welcoming to the minority Republicans / conservatives, and that they are definitely welcome to speak up and represent their views, is to the benefit of liberals, leftists, and left-radicals.
hooser
1yr ago
UCLA Williams Institute released a report examining the number of trans-identified people over the past five years. It buried the lede in its June 2022 report: in the same five-year period while trans-ID increased 100% among youth, trans-ID among adults 25 and over dropped 21%.
This might reflect a change of what transgenderism means, in Blue Tribe circles at least.
I work in a small liberal arts college with almost all students in the 18-24 age range. Twenty years ago, if we had any transgender students or employees, they either were closeted or completely passed. In 2008-2015, we got a few students who were openly trans and really worked on presenting themselves as their chosen gender. I don't know if they had surgeries, but at least testosterone / estrogen intake was involved.
After that, we got more and more students who would say they are trans, but I am sure that no pills or surgeries were involved. In fact, if they didn't tell me they are trans I would not have known it, because most of them don't do anything outside of the (liberal arts college) norm of their obvious biological gender. (Guy with long hair wearing a skirt? Whatevs. Gal with short hair wearing... wait, is there even something a gal can't wear and still read female?)
By now, being trans just means that you say you are trans, both socially and in Williams Institute report:
The BRFSS module asks, “Do you consider yourself to be transgender?” with response options,
“Yes; No; Don’t know/not sure” or respondents could refuse to answer. If a respondent expresses
confusion, then interviewers provide definitions of transgender and/or gender nonconforming. If
respondents affirmatively answer the question, they are then asked if they consider themselves to
be male-to-female; female-to-male; or gender nonconforming. The YRBS module asks, “Some people describe themselves as transgender when their sex at birth does not match the way they think or feel about their gender. Are you transgender?” with response options, “No; Yes, I am transgender; Not sure if I am transgender, Don’t know what the question is asking.”
Which means that for most people who self-identified as "trans" in the past, "de-transitioning" just means "not saying you are trans anymore".
So here's my theory to explain the drop in trans-identifying adults: in 2016 when college-attending or very-online normies caught wind of this new and exciting idea--that saying you are transgender marks you edgy and cool but you don't need to do anything more expensive than claim it--there was a spike of 25-35-year-olds self-identifying as "trans"-something. Now, when the idea is old and "trans" has lost its coolness-signaling edge, that spike isn't there, and some of the people who added to the spike in 2016 no longer say they're trans.
hooser
1yr ago
If it's there, though, they'll still know it's there, even when they're not looking at it. Thus they will suffer some psychological harm they otherwise wouldn't have suffered, if it just wasn't published in the first place.
The same idea applies to using people's likeness in memes. Like for the woman in the "first world problems" meme--I am sure that being the literal poster-child of getting-upset-over-silly-things isn't what she wanted out of life.
If those memes are distributed for free--and they are--does the woman have the right to ask websites to take them down?
hooser
1yr ago
I'm not sure why you're bothering to make yourself one degree removed by making this be about your 18 year old daughter.
I am old, married, and no longer give a fuck. But I would care if it were my daughter.
I appreciate you taking the time to vividly describe the hypothetical experience. I know that your intent was to make me feel disturbed or disgusted, but that's rather the point of this discussion: it's about exploring our intuitions on the subject.
hooser
1yr ago
the worst offender being a piece that was literally just a square canvas planted black. That's it.
Yes, but which square canvas painted black was it?
It may be one of Robert Motherwell's Iberia series, painted during the Spanish civil war. Though the most famous variants have a dash of non-black paint somewhere, some don't. Motherwell's Iberia canvasses have thick black paint and look almost like a map relief.
It may be one of Ad Reinhardt's paintings. He did a lot of them. Reinhardt's canvasses tend to have very subtle patterns and shades, though the whole point of some of the canvasses is to not have any patterns whatsoever. That would be consistent with the philosophy of art-as-art he was exploring:
There is nothing there. What you see is not what you see. What you see is nothing. Nothing but shapes, lines, colors. What you see is whats in your mind. What you see is something somebody told you to look for. Look out for anything you see! Watch it! Watch out! Take care! Don’t leap before you look out.
But if you are really lucky, it was the original Black Square by Kazimir Malevich. The Black Square is one of the most influential works of modern art, ground zero for exploration of what modern artists and modern art audience mean by art. [Intentionally so](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Square_(painting)): "It is from zero, in zero, that the true movement of being begins."
If it was the Black Square, then there is an additional [bonus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Square_(painting)) for the Culture War angle:
In 2015, while viewing the Black Square with a microscope, art historians at the Tretyakov Gallery discovered a message underneath its black paint. It was believed to read as "Battle of negroes in a dark cave." The reference was linked to an 1897 comic by French writer Alphonse Allais with the caption: "Combat de Nègres dans une cave pendant la nuit" or "Negroes Fighting in a Cellar at Night." The researchers at the State Tretyakov Gallery speculated that Malevich was responding to the joke within Allais' popular work.
hooser
1yr ago
Thanks for the empathy!
This is also a great example of the limits of sympathy [1]. My reaction to the event was closer to "oh well, that's the subway for ya". I dealt with it, and shrugged it off. Whereas another woman experiencing the same event may end up traumatized and vowing never to ride public transit again. There is no way to know what effect an identical event would have on two people without them telling of it.
(Though one can use a probability distribution based on statistics... I just realized how geeky that sounds, but I stand by it.)
[1] I keep having to remind myself which is which:
Sympathy (which comes from the Greek sym, meaning "together," and pathos, referring to feelings or emotion) is used when one person shares the feelings of another; an example is when one experiences sadness when someone close is experiencing grief or loss. Empathy is also related to pathos. It differs from sympathy in carrying an implication of greater emotional distance. With empathy, you can imagine or understand how someone might feel, without necessarily having those feelings yourself.
hooser
1yr ago
Norms around school bullying are definitely changing. Here's a sample from Wall Street Journal: "When kids exclude peers from group chats and texts, is that bullying? (With lots of "yes" answers from various authorities.)
hooser
1yr ago
Nice effort-post! And thanks for doing the hard work of examining qualitative evidence.
Your main point is: (A) there's been a lot of female empowerment in Saudi Arabia over the past half-a-century, and (B) that's what explains the coincidental drop in fertility rates.
I agree that evidence indicates a substantial rise of female empowerment. To back up your qualitative evidence: Gender Inequality Index has a sharp drop in 2013, going from higher than Iran to on-par with Russia. "This index covers three dimensions: reproductive health, empowerment, and economic status." For comparison, I have included other countries: USA is lower than Russia but higher than Japan, which in turn is higher than South Korea, which by 2015 is on par with Sweden.
I looked at other measurements in Our World In Data, but many of those measurements don't take into account that almost 40% of people in Saudi Arabia are migrant workers, most of whom are men.
However, I am far from convinced that female empowerment is the main cause of the drop in fertility rates.
There is a strong correlation between fertility rate and child mortality rate, and this is likely causal. If you want to eventually have three adult children and each baby is likely to reach adulthood, then you only need to have three babies; but if half of babies die before adulthood, then you better plan to have six babies.
In Saudi Arabia, child mortality starts dropping in the 60's and 70's, and fertility rate start dropping in the 80's. That's the kind of generational delay I would expect: people get used to the fact that kids aren't dying like flies, and adjust accordingly.
The correlation between female empowerment and fertility rate could have the opposite causal explanation: as it became less necessary for women to have lots of babies in order for a few of them to survive to adulthood, the society can empower women to marry later, get more education, and participate more in the labor force.
hooser
1yr ago
I wish the nascent yet-to-prove-it's-viable cultivated meat industry the best of luck, because I am excited about the possibilities of what might happen if they manage to pull it off.
Imagine: celebrity steaks that are actual meat from celebrities! Want a bite of Ryan Gosling? Now you can!
Ever wanted to try panda meat but have obvious ethical and legal barriers? Now you can!
Or: Ever wonder what an alicorn would taste like? Our food artists have combined muscle cells from a horse, an eagle, and a rhinoceros.
hooser
1yr ago
That's a reasonable guess, but doesn't apply to me. My experience renting in California is during the time that I had a reasonably-paid and very steady full-time employment. When I rented from corporate landlords at "luxury" apartment complex, I didn't get my deposit back two-out-of-three times. When I rented from individual landlords, I didn't get my deposit back one-out-of-two times. At each of those locations, I cleaned the apartment after all my stuff was moved out, prior to handing back the key during the inspection.
By now I give at least even odds that I won't get my deposit back when I move.
hooser
1yr ago
Perspective from the relevant location is much appreciated. I hope you will post follow-ups.
hooser
1yr ago
Oh, I agree with your premise! Where we disagree is on whether the casting already accomplished this goal. Luke MacFarlane is a hottie and played the role of conflicted boyfriend especially well. Billy Eichner is no Timothée Chalamet, but rom-coms frequently have the girl main protagonist not be conventionally beautiful. Which was important to the plot.
If I were in charge of marketing this movie... it would probably tank harder, because I don't know the first thing about marketing. But Monday-night arm-chair quarterbacking is as American as Apple Pie, so:
I would market it hard to young heterosexual women, with lots of hints to suggest that they can use this movie as a potential litmus test on whether their date is willing to signal openness to leftie liberal ideals regarding sexuality. Since the movie's ultimate morality lesson is about monogamous commitment, the date's response to that would also be useful.
hooser
1yr ago
Yes, the father figure would be less likely in such an arrangement. On the plus side, it increases the odds of an uncle figure.
hooser
1yr ago
Seems like a part of a general trend within the US Armed Forces.
Two days ago the secretaries of the Army, Navy, and Air Force have jointly published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. Since it's behind paywall, I will quote the entire thing and boldface the part that stands out to me as relevant to this conversation:
An all-volunteer military has defended the U.S. for nearly 50 years. America’s soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines and guardians stand shoulder to shoulder with allies and partners to defeat tyranny, prevent war and defend the freedom that allows democracy and prosperity to thrive.
As the U.S. refocuses on rising challenges from China and Russia, the armed forces are confronting a generational recruiting shortfall. As global threats loom, our respective services face a shrinking pool of qualified and willing applicants. Military communities are increasingly isolated. A strong U.S. job market in which there are nearly two open positions for every person seeking work increases the difficulty of attracting recruits. But the nation needs defending, even when the job market is historically strong.
As the civilian leaders of the Army, Navy and Air Force, we join to ask every young American to consider serving in the U.S. military. If you seek a life of purpose and passion, if you hope to invest your talents in a cause bigger than yourself, if you want to belong to a community of people who also choose to serve, you can find that connection and more in the armed forces.
This is an exciting time to serve. Since the end of the draft gave way to the all-volunteer military in 1973, new technologies have emerged that shape how we engage with those who seek to do us harm. Today more than ever, the armed forces need data scientists, coders and engineers as much as we need pilots, submariners and infantry. If you join, you’ll get the chance to change lives, use technology and develop skills that the private sector can’t match. You’ll serve in every part of the world, protecting freedom and responding to crises with the skills to make a difference. Our goal is to recruit and build a force that looks like America, and so we are working to strengthen and support diversity, equity and inclusion for all who serve. Whether you serve three years or 20 years, there are ample opportunities for tailored professional and personal development. You’ll do work that matters.
We know that there are misperceptions about the military that might keep people from joining. We are providing unparalleled training and educational opportunities for our service members and investing billions of dollars in housing and quality of life, while also changing policies that are more in step with what this generation has come to expect from the best institutions. We are finding new ways to help young Americans meet our necessarily high standards.
To do all these things, we are counting on policy makers, schools, religious institutions, and families to reinforce the importance of service and the opportunities it provides. Members of Congress, we ask for your support as we work on solutions to the recruiting challenge. We ask civic leaders and educators to open your communities to active-duty military and veterans, especially in places where we haven’t adequately invested in the past. To parents and families, we ask that you give us the opportunity to share all that we’re doing to make the military even more of a place for the next generation to grow and thrive, including our unprecedented commitment to making the military a place where all who serve can be free from harassment, discrimination or abuse.
To our veterans, we ask that you tell your stories of service to the greatest nation in the world. Most of all, we ask young Americans to join us—and to write your own stories of service to our nation.
The military can and must do more to recruit and retain America’s finest, but we need America behind us. We must ask ourselves how we can help ensure that there is a new generation able and inspired to carry on the nation’s proud, selfless and distinguished legacy of service. You can write your own story of service to the country.
Ms. Wormuth, Mr. Kendall and Mr. Del Toro are, respectively, secretary of the Army, Air Force and Navy.
Kanye's pronouncements on Jews are derived from the currently-prevalent American-Black mythologies, such as those of the Nation of Islam. Kanye does have ideological allies, but they have very little pull among the current PMC.
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