naraburns
nihil supernum
No bio...
User ID: 100
naraburns
nihil supernum
9mo ago
Justices uncritically citing statements in briefs is all too common, but it is not a phenomenon that is unique to any particular justice, nor to justices of any particular political persuasion.
Irrelevant. The question is not whether, or how often, justices uncritically cite statements from amici. The question is whether the statements they write, cited or no, are so obviously stupid that someone at the level of Supreme Court Justice should be smart enough to at least suspect them, and thus perhaps examine them more closely. To be either so stupid or so partisan as to fall prey to "too good to check" is a serious flaw in a jurist. Justice Jackson really does seem to just be kind of stupid, but as I note above--it's possible she's just very good at being dishonest. Given the evidence before me, I don't see any other plausible alternatives.
Ex Nazis who become Twitter SJWs just seem to have something off in their brains to me.
It's super consistent behavior, though; they like attention and they found a larger audience, or they tend to follow the crowd and the crowd changed directions, or, less charitably but perhaps more accurately, they like to bully others and they found a less costly way to be horrible.
I grew up in a religious community. I was always unorthodox, and was treated poorly by a lot of people who were regarded as "upstanding" for their piety. I expressed doubts about God as a kid, so no one is surprised to hear me say such things as an adult. But the same individual people who were most likely to mete out social punishment for my little heresies are still the people most likely to mete out social punishment for my heresies, only now they're various shades of woke and my heresies are political instead of theological.
Whether they've stayed in the faith or separated from it, basically all of them are ultra-orthodox woke advocates now (mostly for LGBT issues, but depending on their circumstances also for a rainbow of disabilities, with autism--or "autism"--and obesity being common pet projects in addition to the usual vapid strains of so-called anti-racism). The ones who haven't blocked me on their social media feeds are still the same bullies they've always been (I assume the same is true for the ones who took the step of blocking me, but I can't guarantee it). No amount of hair dye or piercings can hide the fact that they are still doing everything they can to punish independent thought or questioning of the party line. That it's a different party line is irrelevant except, perhaps, as a "born again" bona fide. As the Wizard sings--"the most celebrated are the rehabilitated..."
Freddie deBoer's "Planet of Cops" tells the story well, though I don't think he ever quite twigs to the shared identity of the conservative cops he complains about, and the woke cops he sees as imitating them. When he criticizes religious conservatives as natural cops, he memorably cites William Burroughs:
William Burroughs summarized the whole social conservative movement perfectly as “decent church-going women with their mean, pinched, bitter, evil faces.”
And my response is: it's still the "decent church-going women" (and, often, men), they still wear mean, pinched, bitter, evil faces. Often, literally the same actual people. They just left their old church and joined your new, political not-a-church.
Ex Nazis who become Twitter SJWs are some of the most internally consistent people in the world. If feeling morally superior to others and reveling in hating and even seeking the extermination of the right people is something you enjoy, the difference between Nazis and Twitter SJWs is little more than a palette swap.
naraburns
nihil supernum
11mo ago
So would you agree that blackface is not "anti-black" per se? Do you believe that caricatures of Jews are not "anti-Semitic" per se?
There are a thousand reasons to dress in drag as a nun other than being anti-Catholic. To criticize certain Catholic doctrines re homosexuality.
Er... maybe we have different ideas about what it means to be "anti-Catholic," but criticizing Catholic doctrines of homosexuality sounds paradigmatically "anti-Catholic" to me. Pushing back on political efforts by the Catholic church seems "anti-Catholic," especially given the Church's long political history.
And, btw, one can criticize the Catholic Church (an enormously powerful institution) without criticizing either Catholics or Catholicism.
Catholics, maybe, but Catholicism? This seems like splitting hairs incredibly fine, to the point of suggesting a motte and bailey doctrine at play. Mockery has long been a highly effective approach to criticism, and criticism is not pro-, it is anti-.
"You can keep your Catholicism, we're just going to level your Church, caricature your symbols, mock your practices--no, we're not anti-Catholic per se, don't be ridiculous!"
That seems implausible to me.
naraburns
nihil supernum
8mo ago
It seems pretty clear to me what happened. The Florida Department of Education of thinks it’s perfectly fine to teach AP Psychology without the gender identity and sexual orientation stuff, and the college board thinks those topics are integral to the course and cannot be omitted.
This is clearly not what happened. The FDE statement doesn't say the gender identity and sexual orientation stuff must be omitted; the relevant law is quite clear that such instruction may be offered in grades 9-12. The College Board appears to be claiming that its material is not age-appropriate for high schoolers, or at least that the Florida Law is likely to deem it so. But there is no apparent basis for the College Board to believe this. The statute is arguably vague, but if they weren't just playing culture war politics the College Board should be arguing that its material is age appropriate, not that the law forbids its inclusion.
naraburns
nihil supernum
11mo ago
Is this just bullshit jobs or is it just that you disagree with the thrust of the work being done?
More the former than the latter, though I am less certain than you seem to be that these are meaningfully different things. I regard most administrative positions in higher education, as well as most federal regulatory positions, as bullshit jobs--specifically, "box tickers" and "taskmasters." When you say "actual things being done and work produced," you're assuming something for which I see no evidence. You can say "those administrators are not just filling holes" but that's very nearly all I ever see them doing--filling out paperwork no one ever likely read, just in case someone else files a lawsuit that will make no substantial difference to anyone except, maybe, a successful plaintiff in search of an easy payday. If it is your position that the litigiousness of American society, and its attendant bloated insurance market, is actually a good thing, then sure--we have a real, substantive value disagreement. But if that's not your position, then your argument here is ill-aimed.
(The "bullshit" part is also substantially demonstrated by 77% of the complaints being made by a single person. I have no idea who that person might be. Charitably: a top-notch attorney at an important law firm in Washington, D.C., who is capturing most of the "Title IX complaint" market, maybe? The right intake process could probably make this happen. I just have a hard time seeing it actually playing out this way; unless their "sometimes founded" complaints turn into outrageously large payouts on a pretty regular basis, it would be very difficult to fund such a venture. Part of the mystery of averaging 20 complaints a day is, who is funding that?)
naraburns
nihil supernum
9mo ago
the evidence you cite does not distinguish her from the norm
It does, in precisely the way I claimed. Not in the way you took it, which was wrong, which I have explained; sorry I can't explain it better, but I'm not sure it matters because I can't actually tell whether you have failed to understand, or are only pretending not to understand.
I hope no one reading this thread overlooks the parallels between your error and Jackson's, and the particular way you both approach your respective errors.
naraburns
nihil supernum
6mo ago
Or maybe they just think you're an asshole and your ideas are laughably wrong?
That's not an "or." They obviously think that. It's the fact that they only seem to think that when CNN tells them to that is, at best, awfully suspicious.
There's a certain thread of intellectual narcissism that reads 'I am so obviously correct, and yet all the smart people are disagreeing with me. They must be too scared to admit the truth, unlike me who is courageous and bold!'
There's also a certain thread of history that goes "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." Socrates (well, Plato) laid it out in the Republic, when he suggested that men and women could be intellectual peers, and warned his students not to laugh at the idea simply because everyone else did. Many people who believe themselves to be correct are wrong. But laughing at them doesn't make them wrong, and it doesn't make you right. Sneering and laughing are not thoughts, they are thought-terminating clichés--which is all your comment has offered here.
Nah, man, they just think you're wrong, and have spent thousands of pages explaining why, and don't want you at their parties anymore because you're kind of annoying and mean.
They have not spent thousands of pages explaining why Byrne is wrong, they have steadfastly refused to engage, and tried to prevent people like Tuvel from doing so. Part of the impetus behind all of this was the cancellation of Byrne's book. Like, did you even read the article?
There is also an ambiguity in the way you've written your post, where the "you" is arguably general, but could also be directed toward Byrne, but could even be directed toward me. I don't know whether you wrote it that way on purpose, but it sure does come across as an artful bit of trolling, especially since your only point appears to boil down to a sneer-by-proxy.
I think there's a lot of stupid stuff happening in this article, but this may be the most egregious:
Whites of all economic classes are being displaced or prevented from moving up the socioeconomic ladder. Smart, ambitious, young whites are the ones who are hit hardest, and that’s traditionally who you want as a revolutionary class.
I don't know how anyone can say with a straight face that smart, ambitious young people of any color face any truly objectionable obstacles to living a life of choice and value. This is probably one of my biggest annoyances with grievance culture and identitarianism generally: it is a philosophy of total Nietzschean ressentiment, a gospel of pure unanchored envy. "I want more, I deserve more" is a whinge that is just totally hollow coming out of the mouth of anyone with an IQ over, say, 95. There are ample opportunities to be pursued; people just don't want to bear the associated costs. They want things handed to them. Put every single white person into North America and Europe, expel everyone darker than Sardinian fisherman, and I would expect everyone to quickly settle to within a stone's throw of the socioeconomic strata they occupied previously. Nobody is keeping you down, but you.
And sure--anti-white racism is real, and can be every bit as virulent and destructive on an individual level as any other kind of racism. So let's not be racist. There are many interesting arguments for separatism. But right here in the United States people are already free to enjoy some amount of separatism, if they care enough to look for it. There are black majority colleges, Asian majority cities, whole damn swathes of desert owned by pseudo-sovereign American Indian tribes--what's to be gained from cutting ties with them any further? Wealthy, predominantly white suburbs with good schools and attractive amenities are a real thing, and if you're a white person who can't afford to move to them, that's because you haven't earned a place there, just like the non-whites who complain about the existence of wealthy white suburbs. The problem isn't that CNN is run by a bunch of self-loathing racists (though it is almost certainly true that CNN is run by a bunch of self-loathing racists), the problem is that people can't accept that their problems are almost never the result of systemic anything, and almost always the result of their own internal inclinations and capacities.
I have big, big complaints about the ways we deal with race in the United States, but I do my best to make those complaints from a place of principle--and the principle that governs much of my thinking is that attaching your self-conception or your politics to a group identity instead of to individual merit is stupid. My political enemies are wrong because they think that Blackness and Queerness and Whiteness are important. White identitarians are the poster children of "battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster." They embody everything they think they can destroy. They are often the enemies of my enemies, but the fact that I regard leftist identitarians as a depressing blend of idiocy and mendacity does not make me willing to abandon my principles to join hands with white identitarians. Theirs are not arguments I'm willing to support unconditionally, as soldiers; theirs are arguments I reject for the same reasons I reject leftism.
You can't convince me that white nationalists are right without convincing me that social justice warriors are right, too--and the reverse is also true.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1mo ago
The Harkonnens absolutely were shown as perverse and brutal
They really weren't, though. Pointlessly killing underlings is Darth Vader level "brutality." Gladiatorial combat is merely Roman. There was a hint at cannibalism, a hint at sadism, but "these are outrageously wealthy people who get high while they rape and torture slave children with impunity" was presumably soft-pedaled due to there being too many recent real-life analogies for Hollywood's (or the general public's) comfort. Most importantly, though, they are depicted as being out of control, rather than frighteningly in control. The Harkonnens of Villeneuve's Dune barely rate as comic book villains, to the point that viewers have to be told, rather than shown, that Feyd-Rautha is a "psychopath"--a word that never appears in the original book at all.
I liked what Villeneuve did with Feyd-Rautha very much. "Feyd-Rautha as a psychosexual Darth Maul" turned out lot better than the usual "Feyd-Rautha as a somewhat more competent Joffrey Baratheon"
My memory from the books is that Feyd-Rautha was, while certainly Harkonnen, actually both competent and powerful, in contrast to Rabban. It was his reliance on underhanded fighting tactics that made him an otherwise-comparable foil to Paul (who decides to not use the Voice during their battle, though he could easily have done so). I don't mind his portrayal overmuch, but portraying him as a skilled and even potentially noble fighter ("you fought well") is a definite and unnecessary departure from the text.
casting him as intergalactic Joe Biden showcases that we're seeing a late-stage empire waiting to be pushed down
Yes, but it fails to cast him as a formidable enemy. He was practically sleepwalking. I mean--this scene would have been much better, where Fenring declines to serve as the Emperor's champion:
Paul, aware of some of this from the way the time nexus boiled, understood at last why he had never seen Fenring along the webs of prescience. Fenring was one of the might-have-beens, an almost Kwisatz Haderach, crippled by a flaw in the genetic pattern -- a eunuch, his talent concentrated into furtiveness and inner seclusion. A deep compassion for the Count flowed through Paul, the first sense of brotherhood he'd ever experienced.
Fenring, reading Paul's emotion, said, "Majesty, I must refuse."
Rage overcame Shaddam IV. He took two short steps through the entourage, cuffed Fenring viciously across the jaw.
A dark flush spread up and over the Count's face. He looked directly at the Emperor, spoke with deliberate lack of emphasis: "We have been friends, Majesty. What I do now is out of friendship. I shall forget that you struck me."
Paul cleared his throat, said: "We were speaking of the throne, Majesty."
The Emperor whirled, glared at Paul. "I sit on the throne!" he barked.
An emperor of a late-stage empire waiting to be pushed down does not sleepwalk through the confrontation with Paul. He desperately claws at every possible escape, even as the walls close in around him.
I don't understand the point about Irulan.
Irulan is described thusly:
Paul's attention came at last to a tall blonde woman, green-eyed, a face of patrician beauty, classic in its hauteur, untouched by tears, completely undefeated.
I would describe Florence Pugh as a bit sturdy for the role, her features too dark, and her hair was atrocious--it looked like she just never washed it. Her tracheomalacia makes her voice earthy rather than haughty. Ten years ago I'd have said Emily Blunt or Natalie Dormer. Today, maybe Anna Taylor-Joy? Pugh, I honestly don't know how she keeps getting jobs, she's by far the least-interesting player on the screen in everything I've ever seen her in.
Personally I thought that the part with Paul taking the worm juice could have been handled (a lot) better and Dave Bautista was kind of wasted in this movie.
I feel like most of the "Other Memory"-related plot points are included grudgingly, like Villeneuve knows he can't just abandon those entirely but kind of wishes he could. There are throwaway lines about knowing the past and predicting the future but unless you've read the books, I can't imagine getting much out of those. And if you haven't read the books, I can imagine being really confused about everything touching on the Water of Life. And they never address the "sandtrout" at all.
naraburns
nihil supernum
8mo ago
Then why do we have the vote buttons?
I'm pretty sure the truest, most honest answer to that question is "because they came with the codebase."
My recollection is that there was a fair bit of discussion about this (codebase generally, and voting specifically) a year ago, when we took the exodus from reddit. There is a lot of stuff @ZorbaTHut wanted to do that we couldn't do right away. There were several possible codebases considered. We didn't really have the resources and time to build something up from scratch.
Once a day you should get a "The Motte Needs You" prompt; that is the bare foundation of the user feedback system Zorba has envisioned, and ideally the future of moderation and even perhaps AAQCs. But it is a work in progress; Rome wasn't built in a day and Zorba's current budget is about $200 per month plus whatever time he can steal from his employer and his family and himself. There are others who have very helpfully contributed to the code on a volunteer basis, and in fact anyone can do that provided they have some knowledge of coding (so: not me!); there's a Discord and everything.
What's unhealthy about being gay or lesbian? I guess transgenderism is different because it's kind of defined as dysmorphia even by its activists, but I don't see anything unhealthy about homosexuality.
Well, what's "unhealthy" about anything? Is it "unhealthy" to eat bacon? Apparently yes. Why? Because it shortens your lifespan and creates other complications. Does being homosexual shorten your lifespan?
In short, yes. I have deliberately linked the response of the authors of the relevant study to what they call "homophobic groups [who] appear more interested in restricting the human rights of gay and bisexuals rather than promoting their health and well being." Their only goal was to demonstrate the needs of the gay community, not to strengthen any homophobic agenda. Furthermore, advances in HIV treatment have surely raised that number in the last few decades, but the fact remains that practicing homosexuality is a lifestyle with health consequences similar to those we associate with smoking, sedentary lifestyles, bad foods, etc. Which we typically do not ban, but do often seek to regulate, or at least socially disapprove.
"But sexuality is a part of people's core immutable identity!" I'm skeptical of that, for reasons that aren't important to this argument, but I definitely hear the same thing from obese people, who I've known to talk about food the way that some homosexuals talk about the impossibility of just not doing that. I'm not sure I can accept that it is dehumanizing to be told that your preferred behaviors are unhealthy or even socially forbidden, but I am comfortable that it is unpleasant, and the consequences of letting people eat bacon or have consensual unprotected anal sex in public places with total strangers are in many cases low enough that the costs of forbidding that behavior is more than society should bear. But let's set aside the prevalence of sexually transmitted infections in homosexual men, the high comorbidity of psychiatric disorders that does not seem to be abating as societal acceptance improves, and the effects of promiscuity which apply to everyone but more to homosexual men than any other demographic...
Is infertility "unhealthy?"
This is the final motte of the natural law theorist. Organisms are generally healthy when every part is performing its "proper function." Many parts of you have the function of keeping you alive; if your heart stops pumping blood, it's curtains. Some parts are more utilitarian; if your eyes stop translating photons into useful neurological information, you're not going to die (at least not as a direct result), but you might talk to your doctor about approaches to restoring them.
So what's the proper function of your sex organs and attendant "sexual attraction" neurocircuitry?
Obviously, homosexuality is not infertility of the gonads. But homosexuals (at least if they are strict about their homosexuality) must rely on artificial reproductive technologies for sexual reproduction in the way that people with poor vision must wear glasses to see. Given the prevalence of fertility clinics, it would be weird to say that infertility is not a question of being "unhealthy" (indeed, one highly successful approach to fertility treatment for the obese is: lose weight). One does not visit the fertility doctor when everything is working as nature intended arranged via processes of natural selection over millions of years. There is no effective, humane "treatment" for homosexuality, but--imagine if, in 1899 A.D., someone discovered an easily-farmed plant in the rainforest with sap that reset the neurocircuitry of human sexual attraction to "reproductive sex" mode. How would history look different?
Now, before I get dog-piled with "but causation" and "but elective sterilization" and "but anti-natalism" and "but bisexuals" and all the other entirely-too-obvious "buts" (I will not make a cheeky comment about "but" sex here dammit sorry sorry):
I don't think any of this matters very much. We did not discover a magical sexuality-changing tree sap in 1899, we do have a variety of interventions to circumvent the costs of our preferences and desires, including "unhealthy" ones, and perhaps most importantly, I eat bacon. Literally, and also metaphorically, where "bacon" is a stand-in for all the many ways I fail to do what is optimally healthy, because for whatever reason it's not who I am, no matter what my rational mind tells me I should prefer in my own best interests. I echo the letter from the lifespan study: the point here is not to excuse any mistreatment of any individual based on the character of their sexual appetites.
But you said you "don't see anything unhealthy about homosexuality," which statement would seem to me to require a very constrained definition of "unhealthy," much more constrained than we apply in basically any other context.
naraburns
nihil supernum
10mo ago
303 Creative is a freedom of speech chase, not a religious freedom case.
What kind of speech (or silence) are we talking about, here? Are you one of those people who pedantically interjects that the civil war was a state's rights issue, not a slavery issue?
For whatever it's worth, my choice of words there was deliberately poking at the number of people calling this an "LGBT rights case." Because of course the case is sufficiently about that, that it's not entirely inaccurate to characterize the case that way, and yet flip that rhetoric on its head and certain people are bound to get worked up...
You seem to think that 303 Creative was an enforcement action brought by the state of Colorado against the company.
Sorry to have given you that impression, but no--I've never thought that at all.
the whole issue of whether or not anyone asked for a wedding website is essentially a red herring
Yes, very good--this is why I found the CNN article, and its downstream effects on conversation in my vicinity, noteworthy.
naraburns
nihil supernum
10mo ago
And of the recent decisions, this is likely to be the only one with any effect. Harvard has already all but announced it'll use Roberts's talisman to get around the affirmative action decision. Biden has already announced he's going to work around the student loan decision AND smack "defect" as hard as he can on the deal which ended the payment moratorium.
This is my feeling as well (hence my opening comment about doubting the impact of most of this week's cases). What will limit the impact of this case, of course, is just the facts of commerce; most people are pretty happy to take money for whatever, and there are so many alternative cake bakers, web designers, etc. that the freedom to refuse service will generally amount the freedom to get out-competed.
There really does seem to be a bit of a gulf between enforcement on progressive versus conservative court victories. The Supreme Court enforces a novel approach to marriage and we start throwing political dissidents in jail. The Supreme Court says "stop discriminating by race, you can consider its impact in individual lives but you can't make it a determinative factor" and Harvard effectively flips them the bird and says "who's gonna make me?" Not that it would probably be great optics for the right, but can you imagine the president of Harvard going to jail for contempt of court here?
I honestly don't know what Roberts is playing at, in these cases. He seems to have managed to achieve results that are easy to report in maximally inflammatory ways, potentially imposing political costs on right-wing candidates, while failing to generate any rulings that seem likely to noticeably and impactfully protect the interests they purport to protect.
naraburns
nihil supernum
11mo ago
This is a bit of a cumbersome explanation so here's a instance of a Title IX lawsuit that came up in a cursory google search. James Haidak was a student who recently sued his university for having a biased procedure when it expelled him following accusations by his ex-girlfriend, and on appeal he won on the grounds that he was never given a chance to defend himself in any kind of hearing etc., and now presumably it is the role of Title IX coordinators to ensure the their own universities have adequate procedures in this regard so they don't get hit by similar suits. So even if all their work now sits in a drawer forever they were actually doing something.
This is a great example, which very much supports my position over yours. Why the hell was Haidak kicked out in the first place? Because Title IX has been interpreted to require universities to referee adolescent relationships! Title IX created the problem (via campus administration), and Title IX "fixed" the problem (via the judiciary)--an exceptionally clear case of digging a hole, then filling it in.
The key question of course is whether that many of the lawsuits they spend their time protecting against are substantial, or mostly trivial.
No. The key question is whether the benefits of Title IX outweigh the costs.
Title IX cases etc. did actually increases access to college sport for women, which seems to indicate that more than box-ticking is being done, even if in some instances the work is over something that one could consider rather trivial in the grand scheme of things.
In a hypothetical world where there was no such thing as Title IX, how do you think college sports would look today? Universities have undergone all sorts of changes in response to cultural revolutions and the realities of supply and demand. Did Title IX just make obligatory something that would have happened organically? Did it hasten an ongoing process? If so, then the regulatory cost was onerous and the fact that we're still paying it is stupid. Did Title IX instead fundamentally re-engineer a piece of American society, forcing a change to which Americans would have otherwise never consented? If so, then the price was even more onerous, paid in liberty instead of dollars. As far as I can tell, Title IX itself can only either have been unnecessary (in which case: it spawned mostly bullshit jobs), or necessary, in which case it is seriously objectionable on other grounds.
naraburns
nihil supernum
22d ago
As others have said--Honda Civic, assuming they're as readily available there as they are in the U.S. Remote start has been available since 2008 models, rear view cameras have been standard in the U.S. since the 2013, and the infotainment system is competent. Heated seats available on some models since 2020, which is probably newer than you can get in the price range you're talking--but they do exist. If you want to shave the price a little further, Toyota Corollas are similarly reliable and equipped. Given my own life experience, I doubt I'll ever buy a non-Japanese model again.
It has been decades since I heard anyone seriously praise a BMW, and in the price range you're talking, I can't imagine you'll see many comfortable BMWs unless the UK has a very different used car market than the US right now.
naraburns
nihil supernum
4mo ago
I would guess that most of the people complaining are more concerned about who he was running against. And for some of those people, more specifically the race of that person.
Do not weakman in order to show how bad a group is. Especially when that group is "this forum," please.
naraburns
nihil supernum
7mo ago
There is in truth much to be said for a simple, honest effort at a clear-eyed explanation of a potentially complicated situation. It's not always clear to me why people nominate what they nominate--some users use it as a "super upvote," certainly--but one common way to get a lot of nominations is to be honest, clear, and thorough. We have a fairly sizeable silent readership--people who make accounts, submit reports, and click the quokka without ever writing a single post of their own. And while they apparently don't mind the heavier culture war stuff, they absolutely love it when posters present information as you did here: facts about something that is interesting but that is being spun so hard by legacy media outlets that good information is actually hard to find.
(For an example on my own part, I am totally mystified by the way that legacy media will report on major Supreme Court decisions without linking back to the actual court documents, freely and publicly available online, and often without even giving a case name or other identifying information. Like, what the fuck kind of reporter are you, if you can't even report the most basic facts about something? [Answer: a New York Times reporter, of course!])
Or to try to say this in fewer words: often the thing people find most compelling about the Culture War thread is posts that downplay, obviate, or otherwise evade the culture war angles.
naraburns
nihil supernum
9mo ago
I'm afraid I don't know what you're referring to, though it sounds like maybe asking you to explain would potentially violate your concern.
naraburns
nihil supernum
10mo ago
Except that you don't have any evidence of academic malfeasance nor shitty scholarship; as I noted, a search of google scholar turns up nothing.
Look, this is not really a fight I'm interested in having, but in my opinion Google Scholar is shit and I never use it for anything because it is shit and I don't know anyone who does use it for anything because it is shit. To my mind, by far the most useful academic tool to appear in the last, I'm going to say 20 years, is just Archive.org's online library. Probably some people love Google Scholar so this is just me having thoughts about a thing, but I haven't got any other response for you here. I've never seen anyone try to prove anything of worth by citing to "Google Scholar says" so I'm just kind of dumbfounded about it. Maybe I am just old, that is often a problem when matters of technology come into play, but there you have it. Google's front page search is orders of magnitude more valuable to my scholarship than Google Scholar has ever been.
But I don't do STEM, so, you know. YMMV.
And, surely, it is not sloppy quotation practices which make you deem them full of shit, is it?
See, this is where you misread me so completely I have to wonder about my communication skills. It's very much the sloppy quotation practices, for me. It's very much the bad scholarship that I hate. The weird culture war stuff is bad, too, but it might be helpful for me to suggest that when I refer to these scholars as my "outgoup," I am about 60% thinking about the fact that they work in colleges of education, rather than thinking about their political alignment qua outgroup. That is, these are education scholars, often with Ed.Ds, while I'm a philosopher who sometimes writes analytically on education.
It's hard to not launch into a rant about this, honestly. And it feels like a failure of professional courtesy to be like, "oh, those teaching academics are the worst" when I'm sure the engineers or the business professors or someone feels the same about me. But the scholarship that comes out of these colleges of education, like, it's just so bad, basically all the time. And it happens to have kind of played havoc on my day, today, and I thought others might find it interesting to see a specific case, about specific people, making a specific mistake, that is kind of emblematic of the larger criticisms leveled against them.
naraburns
nihil supernum
4mo ago
It's not only a gaming platform, that's why.
Thanks--today I learned!
When a moderator says to you:
All of this is to say: whatever you are up to, you have attracted the attention of the mods, and while this post in itself is borderline (you basically repost the article with minimal commentary), you are starting to look like a bad actor. Whatever game you are playing, start being upfront and stop looking like someone who's not posting in good faith (and is likely a previously banned poster).
And not even a day later you again repost identitarian bait, with minimal commentary, as a top-level post, I have to assume you have opted to ignore the warning.
I want to emphasize: in absolute terms, this post is "not bad." It's not great, it does challenge both "speak plainly" and "avoid low-effort participation," as well as "make your point reasonably clear and plain" (though this post is in that regard maybe a slight improvement on the last one). That it does those things as a top level post is an aggravating factor. The CW thread is not a dumping ground for posts other people have written on topics that are maximally inflammatory. It's a place to test your thinking, which to a great extent demands that you do some thinking in an open and public way. Gradually accruing the annoyance of the sub by being a one-note piano while evading effortful engagement with others is, if nothing else, egregiously obnoxious.
So let's start the banning at 48 hours.
naraburns
nihil supernum
8mo ago
There are a lot of writeups on the "1 in 4" claim. Here is a particularly critical one which concludes:
Now, much more could be said about caveats, but using just the information we have so far, we can see that a more accurate headline would look something like this:
Approximately 1 in 4 of 19% of a Non-Representative Sample of Women Who Responded to a Non-Representative Survey of 27 Colleges (Out of Roughly 5,000) Reported Experiencing Sexual Assault, Where “Sexual Assault” is Taken to Mean Anything from Being on the Receiving End of an Unsolicited Kiss to Forcible Penetration at Gunpoint, Regardless of the Particular Context
Most of the time when I have pointed this out to someone touting "1 in 4," they've been pretty quick to retreat to the rhetoric of "even one is one too many." Women have a lot more to fear from men, than vice versa, and very nearly all women have a story they can tell you about sexual mistreatment (that may or may not rise to the level of "assault"). So it is perhaps understandable why people might be susceptible to exaggerated claims on the matter--but also, the pattern is common across a variety of objectionable activity; police brutality is also far less common than people tend to believe, for example.
naraburns
nihil supernum
9mo ago
But it would be absurd to say "driving a pickup truck is more unhealthy than driving a Prius (for the driver)" without extra caveats.
This response makes me feel like you read the snippet without bothering to read my post, which consists in substantial part of exactly the kinds of caveats you're talking about.
Furthermore the original use of "unhealthy " in the thread in cake's post used a different definition altogether (likely ideologically based)
This response suggests to me that you just don't understand how the "natural law" mentality pervasively underpins conservative thinking. When someone refers to a lifestyle as "unhealthy" when they also mean something like "immoral," they are (often unconsciously) drawing on millennia of moral judgments evolved in advance of germ theory and other forms of contemporary medical understanding. I suspect that religious prohibitions on pork and prostitution and homosexuality are grounded in the same kinds of intergenerational social evolution as traditions for preparing manioc. Modern science allows us to grasp (at least some of) the causal factors better and so mitigates the consequences of our historically unhealthy choices.
(Imagine how much less pleasant, and how much more potentially illness-inducing, anal and oral sex were in times and places lacking reliable access to clean water--much less soap, antibiotics, anti-virals, etc. Even heterosexual sex was dramatically more risky--but many of those risks could be more easily mitigated through lifelong monogamous pairings.)
Of course the standard caveat now is that we do have access to clean water etc. So why talk about past problems when doing so could stigmatize homosexuality needlessly? Well, mostly there's no need, any more than people need to get on my case concerning my bacon consumption, or for driving a less-than-maximally-safe vehicle. But sometimes it is valuable to understand why people have the intuitions they have about things, to see that the people who disagree with you are not malicious bigots with baseless concerns, but human beings wrangling with facts about the world you have chosen (perhaps quite justifiably!) to elide from your own calculations.
The carrots are a big part of the problem.
I feel like we had an AAQC not too long ago about this, but I can't remember the details now. The gist was something like "the opportunity costs of childbearing and childraising are just insanely high and keep getting higher because there are so many other things to do that generate more immediate rewards." In particular, allowing women into the workforce came up, possibly alongside Elizabeth Warren's Two-Income Trap book.
The value of raising children has become the inverse of the "privatize gains, publicize losses" business strategy. People who raise children bear the actual costs of perpetuating civilization, while everyone reaps the reward. We don't valorize motherhood, but perhaps more importantly, we don't punish childlessness.
The comment I'm thinking of referenced someone's argument that "I would never do this of course but likely the most effective way, and maybe the only truly effective way, to increase birthrates is to just ban women from the workforce."
EDIT: Oh, hahah, it was my post actually. Here's the quote from the article I linked:
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