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User ID: 1399

hooser


				
				
				

				
0 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2022 October 02 12:32:20 UTC

					

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User ID: 1399

I work at a small private US liberal arts college. When I was part of a search for a tenure-track candidate, we asked the candidates to include in their application a DEI statement, because it was expected for all searches at the college.

Then we threw out any candidates who clearly drank the Cool-Aid.

Out went the candidate who said she moved all her black students to the front of the class, and all her white students to the back of the class. Out went the candidate who said he had a special study group only for his LatinX students.

In went the candidate that said she volunteered at a tutoring program for the local Title I school with majority of student black or latino. In went the candidate who said he stepped up his office hours for everyone, and personally reached out to invite each student who struggled in his class, many of whom were black.

If you are working in academia, having a reasonable amount of fluency in the current etiquette of the Professional-Managerial Class is a requirement of the job. Knowing when to not get carried away with the rhetoric is also part of the job. The candidates that we tossed out (like the ones above) actually discriminated against some students, so they were a legal liability for their employer.

You mentioned in another comment that your goal is personal career progress, and that you'll be with this employer for only a few years. Good, focus on that. Don't fall for anyone claiming that you should be able to "bring your whole self" to work. You are expected and required to only bring your professional self to work. So: if your employer requires X, you do X or quit. If your employer recommends X and you don't want to do X, quietly don't do X. If other employees ask you why you are not doing the recommended X, ask them politely to explain the benefits of doing X, and consider their explanations. Even if their explanation is a stream of religious/woke prosthelytizing, you can get some value from it by seeing what new terms or etiquette is going around. But someone may actually tell you something more useful (e.g., X is something your boss really cares about and pays attention to).

Am I missing something here? Do other people believe that all of these women (I’ve probably had this conversation with roughly two dozen of them) have been individually harassed on public transit, and I just have never noticed it? Despite being here every day of my life for over a decade? What is going on?

Thank you for considering the possibility that you are missing something. You are: most acts of public harassment are subtle and most women will not make a scene. (I am speaking from my experience and experience of women I know.)

Here's a specific example: I and my husband are riding a crowded train. We are standing, getting jostled around as people move around. My husband and I are facing each other, we are talking. Suddenly I feel the guy behind me grinding his clearly-erect penis into my butt.

I don't make a scene; I ask my husband to switch places with me, that's all. My husband doesn't notice a thing, nobody else noticed a thing. I look at the guy, and he just pivots away.

And, before anyone asks: yes, I firmly believe that not making a scene was the best option for me. I don't want to start a fight where I or my husband may get hurt; I don't want to report a harassment that has zero chance of prosecution.

And yes, almost all of my women friends who have lived in large metropolitan areas have at least one such story, and we are nothing special.

Also on Stanford's list: "abusive relationship" should be replaced by "relationship with an abusive person", because:

The relationship doesn't commit abuse. A person does, so it is important to make that fact clear.

Firstly, they are breaking their own guide of "Person-First", which is the section just prior to that entry. According to the heading,

"The use of person-first language helps everyone to resist defining others by a single characteristic or experience if that person doesn't wish to be defined that way.

So, shouldn't that be something like "relationship with a person who occasionally makes an action that is perceived as abusive"?

And secondly, in my experience, it really is the relationship that's abusive, where the spiral of negative reinforcements for obsessively pushing each other's buttons cannot be laid at the feet of a single partner.

At the college where I work, I have successfully used the rhetoric of microaggressions and bias incidents on the casual put-downs of republican-coded ideas. The college instituted a "bias incident" reporting system ("non-punitive" and "restorative-justice"), and the legalese-sounding description of what a "bias incident" is includes "political party affiliation".

There's a related and well known pattern in relationships, where men focus on fixing things while women talk to feel listened to, understood and valued. Similarly, it's much easier to debate a man and even vehemently call him wrong, and then pat him on the back and grab a beer afterwards. With a woman it usually gets interpreted as an attack on a deep personal level.

I have noticed a similar pattern among people I interact with, but it also overlaps strongly with the divide between those in STEM (especially engineers) and those in more Humanities-adjacent fields.

I like to categorize the patterns of discourse as "n-dimentional social chess". Imagine that you are part of a group of people who together are playing chess against an online opponent. The group discusses strategies for their upcoming move.

  • "Zero-dimensional social chess": you focus solely on the merits of the proposed strategies in defeating the online opponent. It doesn't matter who proposed which strategy; you evaluate each proposed strategy solely on its own merits.

  • "One-dimensional social chess": you keep track of who said what. You are doing this to help you evaluate the merits of proposed strategies (like, giving more weight to strategies proposed by people with more experience playing chess).

  • "Two-dimensional social chess": you keep track of who said what, and how they said it. You are doing this because you are aware that, within your group, people are jockeying for social status. So you keep track not only of who said what, but what that means for everyone else in terms of social status within the group.

  • "Three-dimensional social chess": you not only keep track of who said what (and how they said it), but also who didn't say what (and how they didn't say it). You are doing this because you are aware that the group members are jockeying for social status, and you also assume that they know that everyone else is doing it too. Therefore you expect to see shifting alliances, communicated subtly through the phrasing of support, or withholding support where it was expected.

  • "Four-dimensional social chess": you not only keep track of who said what (and how they said it), but also who didn't say what (and how they didn't say it), but also have a good working theory of the level of n-dimensional social chess that each person in the group is at.

I find that (at least in my social circles) most engineer groups (and majority-male groups) tend to play two-dimensional social chess; most humanities-adjacent groups (and majority-female groups) tend to play three-dimensional social chess. People who move fluently between engineers and humanities circles either play four-dimensional social chess and code-switch, or play one-dimensional social chess and are blissfully unaware of the status games.

The trope of a frustrated girlfriend saying "If you don't know what's wrong then I am certainly not going to tell you!" would be my example of a situation where the girlfriend by default plays three-dimensional social chess and can't imagine that others (including her boyfriend) don't. So she's definitively not playing at four-dimensional social chess, since she fails to have a good working theory of her boyfriend's level.

[Edit: Edited the lower categories, upon further reflection. Zero-dimensional social chess is just chess, with some pooling of strategies. One-dimensional social chess takes relative expertise into account, but it's still all about the chess. With n>1, the "social" part becomes a competing goal.]

This example fits the following narrative pattern:

  1. An institution X used to have broad support, but now we* recognize it as harmful or bad, though they* still defend it.

  2. Breaking news: evidence E that X was far worse than we* knew! (But not worse than we* can imagine!) So X was altogether evil!!

  3. (Whisper among us*:)

    • "Isn't that evidence kind of weak? I mean, X still evil, but ..."

    • "Shh! X was evil, don't undermine the narrative! They* will latch on to it!"

[* For some variation of we and they.]

Once the narrative transitions from "X bad" to "X evil", any questioning of evidence E that precipitated that transition is questioning that X is evil, as opposed to merely bad (from the narrative's perspective).

In the Kamloops graves case, there is a competing impetus: physical anthropologists and archeologists (who are part of we* in this case) very much want to preserve their status as scientists, so they have a strong stake in upholding the rigor of their methods. The Wikipedia entry for Kamloops Indian Residential School reflects this process. The "Possible Unmarked Graves" section is written in a cautious neutral tone, and points to specific plans for corroboration of the evidence:

In May 2022, Casimir said that a technical task force had been formed "of various professors as well as technical archeologists" and that work on an archeological dig and possible exhumations could soon begin... [...]

As of May 2022, no remains had been excavated, leaving the initial claim unverified.

The Kamloops graves case, therefore, is a very interesting case to watch, and I thank you for putting together such a great effort post on its progress.

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.

Once you acclimate to London, I recommend visiting Vienna. You'd be like: what? why did I ever think London was clean!!

I very much appreciate posts like yours, which give a personal, unusual (to me) in-depth perspective on something that I regard as a given. I was in India some years back for over a month, and I still remember coming out of Los Angeles airport (LAX) and being stunned how clean it is. How clean the air is. And the water--I can drink it straight from the tap! And the LA traffic... so orderly! Cars stay in their lane! Cows are nowhere on the freeway!

Best of luck to you and your girlfriend.

Brasilian president Jair Bolsonaro pledges to respect the Constitution after the election loss. I am posting this here as an example of where culture war gets actually rather civilized. The race between Bosonaro and Lula was tight, and the former could have made serious trouble re. transition of power. Since that link is pay-walled and I have yet to figure out how to get archive.org to take a snapshot of what I am seeing, I will reproduce the parts that I find interesting.

Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro on Tuesday vowed to respect the constitution after he lost the presidential election to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, ending a tense silence of 45 hours in which he had refused to acknowledge the results even as his allies urged him to do so.

Mr. Bolsonaro didn’t comment on his loss in Sunday’s runoff vote in a press conference in Brasília, the capital. His chief of staff, Ciro Nogueira, flanking Mr. Bolsonaro in the briefing, told reporters that the president had authorized him to begin the transition process that would end with Mr. da Silva’s inauguration on Jan. 1.

“I will continue complying with the orders of the constitution—it’s an honor to be the leader of millions of Brazilians who, like myself, believe in economic freedom, religious freedom, free speech, honesty and the green and yellow colors of our national flag,” said Mr. Bolsonaro, speaking to reporters from his official residence.

Mr. Bolsonaro thanked the more than 58 million people who voted for him Sunday, saying that protests by truckers across the country Tuesday in support of his government were the result of “indignation and feelings of injustice over the electoral process.”

Mr. Bolsonaro has spent much of the past few years raising allegations of fraud in Brazil’s electronic-voting system and warned that this year’s election could be stolen from him, without presenting evidence.

[something something stocks, because it's Wall Street Journal]

The 67-year-old former army captain came close to winning, but ultimately lost Sunday’s runoff election to Mr. da Silva, a leftist former president, in the closest presidential race in Brazil’s history. In the final tally, Mr. da Silva, a 77-year-old former trade-union leader who served two terms as president ending in 2010, garnered 50.9% of the vote, 2.1 million more votes than Mr. Bolsonaro, who got 49.1%, according to the country’s electoral court.

Though Mr. Bolsonaro had pledged shortly before the Oct. 2 first round of voting that he would only accept the outcome if the vote was clean, prominent allies had quickly recognized the result after electoral authorities counted the more than 120 million ballots Sunday.

[someone possibly well-known in Brasil calls for Bolsonaro to concede]

Mr. Bolsonaro’s short speech came as Mr. Garcia and other politicians called on him to acknowledge the outcome to help tame protests by truckers across the country who blocked major highways in a show of support for the president. Brazil’s traffic police said it was investigating cases in which its own officers had sided with the truckers.

As of midday Tuesday, truckers had erected more than 200 blockades across Brazil, the federal traffic police said, including at São Paulo’s international airport, where flights were canceled after the main access road was blocked. The authorities said they had cleared hundreds of others.

I am in US. There is one thing I expect my president to do: step down. So kudos to Brazil.

Graduate students in the University of California (UC) system have been on an official strike for the past five weeks. They are unionized by United Auto Workers (UAW). The union representatives have reached a tentative agreement with the UC representatives.

The tentative agreement would give graduate student workers in two United Auto Workers bargaining units an increase in minimum pay from about $23,250 to about $34,000 for nine months of part-time work.

"Part-time work" here means 20 hours per week. That's the official cap for UC graduate students receiving stipends. Translating into hourly pay: the graduate students will go from earning $30/hour to a bit more than $43/hour.

So, culture war angle:

On the one hand, I don't trust government representatives negotiating with representatives of government-employed union members to fully represent taxpayer interests. In particular, I fully expect that everyone negotiating on behalf of UC was fully sympathetic with the striker's cause, and not strongly motivated to maintain low costs.

On the other hand, graduate student workers tend to provide specialized services. So a reasonable question (that I don't have an answer to yet) would be: how much would a professional grader of introductory writing courses charge? What about one for differential calculus? What about one for organic chemistry? From that perspective, $43/hour sounds like not such a bad deal.

For extra culture war angle, the LA Times quotes some tweets from graduate students unhappy with the deal. I will include one that does raise an interesting point:

“It gives us a raise that’s enough to disqualify us for govt assistance programs and bump us to the next tax bracket, but not enough to cover those new costs,” according to the tweet.

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).

Here's a summary by Zvi Mowshowitz of publicly-known facts regarding the firing of Sam Altman, as of Monday morning. The board has not yet made known the reasons for the firing besides the vague and broad claim that Altman "was not consistently candid in his communications with the board", and it seems that they are not making an effort to stand by their reasons.

The situation is ripe for some juicy conspiracy theories, and I would love to hear some. Why would a group of (I assume) intelligent and competent people on the board make such a drastic and dramatic firing that was sure to cause an excrement storm, and then not be able or willing to defend their actions to the public? Would disclosing their actual reasons cause the very thing they were trying to avoid? Did their actions prevent an untested AGI escaping into the wild? Inquiring minds want to know!

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.

Perhaps in reality the ultimate causes of this dissonance are that modern-day sexual mores are completely stupid, so deeply incoherent that acceptance of any one of them will necessarily lead to cognitive dissonance when contrasted against some other

That observation is a very useful starting place. When I find myself in a similar confusion, I try to switch my perspective to a more traditional view by imagining it involving my kin. Like: "What would I want to do to the guy who did this to my 18-year-old daughter?"

If a guy uploaded to pornhub a realistic sleazy deep-fake porn with my daughter's image and distributed the link within my community, I'd be contemplating the percussion sound of a baseball bat striking his kneecap.

Now that I have an anchor to my reaction, I can explore its possible reasons.

The modern US culture is (broadly) a culture of dignity, where "sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me" is an aspirational ideal. If I aspire to this ideal for myself and my hypothetical 18-year-old daughter, then the sleazy deep-fake porn is "words" that I and my daughter ought not allow to hurt us. We would then treat the incident as we would one where someone created a fake Linked-In account for my daughter, or a controversial blog post written in my daughter's name, or if someone hacked my daughter's Twitter account and posted some unsavory tweets in her name.

In a culture of dignity, I would assume that my daughter's dignity cannot truly be compromised by something she didn't do (in this case: make a sleazy porn video). I would understand the need to correct the record--have pornhub take down the video, issue a clarification within our community --and I would regard that task as an annoyance.

However, underneath that culture-of-dignity veneer lurk centuries of cultures of honor. It doesn't take much for me to get into that mindset. By creating the deepfake porn and distributing it among my community, the guy compromised my daughter's honor--altered for the worse her reputation among my community--and by extension he compromised my honor. Swift baseball-to-the-kneecap plus spreading the word about the retribution is pure restorative justice.

(But what if the guy didn't distribute the deepfake? Like, what if I found it by browsing his laptop? The threat of distribution is there. So my gut response is to get immediately angry and see that he erases the video and promises never to do that again. Presumably, if I am browsing the guy's laptop, the guy is part of my community and I will have social levers to ensure compliance.)

The question is then: what culture does my community have?

If it's Blue Tribe PMC: my daughter's reputation will rise by spreading word about (a) her stoic response to someone's attempt at reducing her dignity, (b) our levelheaded pursuit of legal means of redress, and even (c) our high-brow discussions on why our culture regards sex as shameful in the first place.

If it's Red Tribe Appalachia: out comes the baseball bat.

The "Twitter Censorship Files" (WSJ, archived link) promise to shed some light on the Hunter Biden's Laptop Saga:

The Twitter documents published by Mr. Taibbi include part of what appears to be a memo from James Baker, the Twitter deputy general counsel. “I support the conclusion that we need more facts to assess whether the materials were hacked. At this stage, however, it is reasonable for us to assume that they may have been and that caution is warranted,” Mr. Baker wrote.

He continued that “there are some facts that indicate that the materials may have been hacked, while there are others indicating that the computer was either abandoned and/or the owner consented to allow the repair shop to access it for at least some purposes. We simply need more information.”

With an election so close, any delay helped the Biden campaign, which was trying to squelch the Hunter Biden story that raised questions about what Joe Biden knew about Hunter’s foreign business dealings. Twitter went ahead and suppressed the story across its platform, going so far as to suspend the New York Post’s Twitter account.

Apparently, no light can be shed without heat. Matt Taibbi agreed to certain conditions in obtaining the files:

Very shortly, I’m going to begin posting a long thread of information on Twitter, at my account, @mtaibbi. [...] There’s a long story I hope to be able to tell soon, but can’t, not quite yet anyway. What I can say is that in exchange for the opportunity to cover a unique and explosive story, I had to agree to certain conditions.

The conversation is therefore veering towards journalistic ethics rather than the content. That WSJ op-ed I linked to above leads with the following:

Elon Musk’s release of internal emails relating to Twitter’s 2020 censorship is news by any definition, even if the mainstream media dismiss it. There will be many threads to unspool as more is released, but a couple of points are already worth making.

The first is that Mr. Musk would do the country a favor by releasing the documents all at once for everyone to inspect. So far he’s dribbled them out piecemeal through journalist Matt Taibbi’s Twitter feed, which makes it easier for the media to claim they can’t report on documents because they can’t independently confirm them.

I saw the movie with my husband (who apparently would do anything for love). It was funny and entertaining, and I was pleased to see how well this move upholds essentially conservative ideals of monogamy and sacrifice for the sake of your partnership within the context of very permissive do-who-you-want-so-long-as-everyone-consents sexual norms.

"BROS" has a bog-standard rom-com / sex-com story arc. A quirky, passionate, somewhat neurotic, career-driven girl man is convinced that he is satisfied with his non-experience of love (though plenty of tinder hook-ups). He meets a hottie popular guy who is his exact opposite (conventionally gorgeous, popular, chill). They get together, in the opposites-attract sort of way. They get split up, in the opposites-repel sort of way. They get together again, because opposites-still-very-much-attract, and in the process each gives up something very important to them for the sake of making their now-monogamous relationship work.

Woven into the story are funny scenes that depict the awkward tinder negotiations, awkward logistics of group sex (really, there is nothing porny about this movie), and drama-drama-drama that one could foresee any attempt at opening an LGBTQ(letters-letters-maybe-a-2?-letters)-specific museum.

You may be absolutely right about the marketing of the move. I wouldn't know, I have not seen anything other than a trailer before we went to see it.

Kanye has no ideological allies, because he is taking a culture war stance from two centuries ago, of which one side has already emerged victorious.

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.

For those less familiar with decision theory, this not an abstruse philosophical question - it's simply a mathematical fact with probability approaching 1 (specifically, 0.49^n for large n), SBF will destroy the world.

Correction: the probability that SBF will destroy the world under these circumstances is 0.49 + 0.51*0.49 + 0.51^2 * 0.49 + 0.51^3 * 0.49 + ... + 0.51^(n-1) * 0.49, where n is however many times he plays that game. That's cumulative probability of the geometric distribution.

(Whereas 0.49^n goes to 0 as n goes to infinity.)

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.

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.

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?

And training the AI on the actual person's breasts isn't required for the result to be highly similar to what they actually look like topless, at least for some women, considering at least some people's breasts are visually similar to other people's breasts. Thus a person who has not already consented to having topless photos of themselves present anywhere on the internet can have topless images of them created to what is indeed a very high degree of verisimilitude to their actual naked form, using i.e. pornstar's breasts as training data.

Porn stars not only self-select based on their agility in smoothly changing positions in front of cameras--incidentally, a skill shared with politicians--but also for how good they look naked. If an AI image generator is trained on naked bodies of porn starts, its AI-completed naked version of me will look amazingly better than I actually do.

Women's breasts, in particular, come in a variety of shapes, and they are frequently not symmetric. Older women's breasts tend to be flat--think more like those pictures in the old National Geographic depicting women in some far-away hunter-gatherer tribe. The nipples and areolae come in various shapes and sizes, and change with temperature. Some have inverted nipples. Practically all of this variability is hidden by the kinds of clothes women wear, especially if they are into padded bras.

The distribution of body fat also varies significantly for overweight women, and this is also mostly hidden or distorted by clothes.

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.)

I have a similar proposition for women: regardless of sexual preferences, many women interested in raising a family would be happier in a same-sex marriage with another woman.

Hear me out.

There are a lot of women in US who want both children and a career. If you are such a woman, it's not that difficult to find another woman with similar goals. If the two of you get along as BFFs, why not get married? If neither of you are into women sexually, that makes the arrangement even more stable: there will be no miscommunication on expectations of sexual intimacy between the spouses.

If both of you want your own biological children, you can plan out a pregnancy schedule. If one of you is way more into pregnancy than the other, that's cool too. The studs could be long-term boyfriends, male friends-with-benefits, or sperm-bank donors. The advantage of studding with long-term boyfriend is that he's even likely to pitch in financially for the child.

For male role models, bring into the fold male friends you actually admire, as opposed to those you find hot. Could be your brothers or male cousins, could be the baby-daddies, could be close male friends.

There are plenty of cultures where mothers (and grandmothers) are the stable center of the family and fathers are on the periphery. Same-sex marriage between two women interested in raising a family mirrors such an arrangement.

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.