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toadworrier


				

				

				
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joined 2022 September 12 04:23:06 UTC

				

User ID: 1151

toadworrier


				
				
				

				
0 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2022 September 12 04:23:06 UTC

					

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User ID: 1151

(he's confidentially told me that he fears our center-right government is looking to pick fights with academia over 'cancel culture', and he has been given a top mandate by university central to avoid anything that would give the press 'woke academia gone mad' headlines)

It's working!

Drive-by tangent.

The University presidents were either woefully unskilled or badly coached on how to handle hostile questions like this. They gave repetitive, legalistic non-answers and declined ...

Repetitive, legalistic non-answers are also what professional civil-servants give in front of such committees too, even though it's their day job. It's probably the least-worst tactic given the situation, and it prevents you getting actually skewered.

(imagine a forum with only one ongoing thread)

You mean like one gigantic thread where a bunch of mostly right-wing, onlinefolk post their culture war angst? Hard to imagine.

I am worried about the "misinformation and lies" narrative they a spruiking here. They have a proposed censors charter which does all the usual things the Europeans are trying, only worse.

The fact that merely disputing Yes narrative is being labelled "misinformation" by exactly the kind of people who likely will man the misinformation bureaucracy is a good example of why speech moderation always gets corrupted. But they government and the Green have no reason to care about that -- they have the numbers in Parliament to pass it, no matter what the rest of society thinks.

Ash, you are among the tiny minority of Australians who work in a situation where some fraction of politicians actually listen to the words you say some fraction of the time. The rest of us have to figure out various wheezes for creating a ruckus that will draw the attention of the Powers. Judicial and quasi-judicial processes like the HRC are one example.

The FBI Didn’t Persecute Hillary. It Protected Her. (Eli Lake @Tablet).

The gist is in the title, a longer gist is:

If the Durham report shows anything, it is that the FBI leadership bent over backward to protect Clinton’s campaign while launching a full investigation into Trump’s campaign on the thinnest of pretexts. In other words, the FBI was not really the Clinton campaign’s persecutor, as so many insisted over the past few years, as much as its protector.

I urge you to read the article itself, as it's about details and evidence for the claim above. It did also finally clue me in about why the secret services might be supporting the left. Before Trump was elected they were:

—hoping to curry favor with the person they expected would be the next American president.

[EDIT: _I wrongly thought my original referred to the FBI. That confused reading did in fact solve the puzzle that I had been wondering about, but is nonethless confused. I should have quoted: _]

... headquarters demurred. “They were pretty ‘tippy-toeing’ around HRC because there was a chance she would be the next President,” an FBI official told Durham.

This is very plausible. I hail from a longstanding 3rd wold democracy, and this is pretty typical behaviour. None of the elections are fair because the authorities tip them in favour of whichever side looks more likely to win. Usually this is the government of the day, but not always. In Australia, Rupert Murdoch behaved this way too with his media coverage.

Once Trump was elected, you would expect the FBI to quietly switch sides. But they might have accidentally burned their bridges. Or you might blame Trump for being too volatile and sour-minded to be worth sucking up to.

The other angle is topical: is prosecuting Trump and not Clinton a double standard? There's an argument (ping @ymeskhout) that the difference is that Trump has so brazzenly admitted guilt. Well if there's videotape Clinton also bragging about how her sever was illegal but she's above the law, then we are less likely to know about it because she really is above the law.

If the Tablet article is accurate, this casts light on this and every other putative distinction between the Trump and Hillary cases. Whatever distinction there is, it has (at least if the article is accurate) been brought out under circumstances where investigating authorities have bent over backwards to find ways to protect Hillary.

Having said that the Beeb is an interesting construct. Its funding mostly comes from the public by way of a government law for the License fee.

Just because you call it ship money a licence fee, doesn't mean it isn't a tax. The government impose it.

However its existence is part of a Royal Charter which mandates its independence from the government itself.

More importantly the BBC is perfectly willing to attack the government. But by "government" here, I mean the democratically elected institutions of the state. The BBC does however loyally represent (and is part of) the permanent state institutional structure.

So is it accurate to say it is government funded? Kind of yes, kind of no

Yes, and every kind of yes.

Really, because the university will more than likely find ways to get around this law fairly quickly

They will find work arounds, and people will challenge those work-arounds. What I want to know is how much money is on the line. If people can smell 100 megabuck payouts then they will go for it and attack at all angles. That will change the risk calculus among university admins and slowly change the culture.

But if it's just a few court losses with smallish fines, then it's business as usual.

At a guess, it's associated with working class communists. All two of them.

To their credit, the 19th century left ran a lot of educational programs for working men, and so their genuinely was a large cohort of working class people who understood and believed in socialist theory. But their main representative was the Labour party. The Communists must always have been the extremist fringe of the movement.

This is 9-0 think is actually more impressive than it sounds. The SCOTUS only wants to take a case if it needs to clean up some mess from the lower courts. So imagine you are some very high ranking appellate judge, and you make your decision only to find that every judge on the SCOTUS rules against you. You can't pretend that you made some politically controversial decision.

One of the reasons we are very immigrant friendly is that we are actually serious about, and effective at, keeping illegal immigrants out. Don't conflate immigration with not enforcing the border.

I think the academia has been preparing for this for years, moving from "objective metrics with AA bias on top" (like SAT scores, but the passing score is different for different races) to "plausible deniable 'holistic' judgements"

This is where the fun starts, but does not end. This is an anti-discrimination ruling. In broad strokes, anti-discrimination is an area where America has been building up jurisprudence for decades cracking down on any behaviours that might indirectly behave like discrimination.

The Ivy's will certainly try that kind of indirect discrimination, but lawyers from around the land will be looking for lucrative test cases, and they'll be doing it in an environment where the top court in the land has just told the world that anti-discrimination law cuts both ways.

I think you'd need to unpack the details of that assertion if it is to carry much weight.

recent ones found the numbers were more like 59%.

As far as I know, both sets of polls are sampling bias all the way down.

Graphs of the vote by locality show that places where you expect Aboriginals to live went pretty heavily "yes". Hard to tell how to translate that into a percentage-of-aboriginals, but 80% wouldn't surprise me. More importantly, this method is disproportionately sensitive to the votes of outback Aboriginals, which means it undercuts the idea that only city-dwelling elite Aboriginals supported the Voice.

Scott Alexander might be afraid of Taylor Lorenz. But the human race is not made up of Scott Alexanders.

Germans are generally unaware of how low their wages are.

I don't understand what the motivation behind attempts to have it scrubbed would be. ... So the only benefit of scrubbing it now would be making it harder for the public to find

So you answer your own question!

In one of history's little winks almost the first book this happened to was 1984.

Some copyright SNAFU meant that Amazon had distributed the thing when it wasn't allowed to, so they disappeared it off people's Kindles. This wasn't an attempt at censorship, other editions were readily available, but it was a clear case of memory-holing.

I agree with all this, but I want to add a caution from the perspective of immigrant Australia.

It's normal common in my immigrant community to:

  1. Assume any slight by a white person is racism and thus be angry at "this country"
  2. To have dual citizenship and/or believe a passport is just a piece of paper 2a. The word "patriotic" means "patriotic to the old country"
  3. To prefer the signs and symbols of the old country (sporting teams, flags, regalia etc).

This combination is far more common than my own eccentric notion of actually being a patriotic Australian.

All of this sounds like it's the polar opposite of what @AshLeal is claiming, but no. The people I'm talking about are perfectly well acculturated and behave well among other Australian folk, work on common projects with each other.

People who do listen to their lawyers don't thus get have senior policemen covering up their crimes for them.

Now that article might be wrong about accusing the FBI of covering for Hillary, but then your comment doesn't address that at all.

and it's important to note that almost no one disbelieves the allegations, but also that Ken Paxton won reelection by double digits while under indictment for bribery and fraud.

What's the dynamic here?

In a Banana Republic, voters tolerate this sort of thing because they know that corruption investigations only happen because of political will. So even if your man is corrupt, caring about it would be unilateral disarmement. In the US, this is more or less the situation already with Trump, but I'd imagine Texas politics is too one sided for that to be the issue.

One-party states can easily be corrupt -- after all there's no effective opposition. But what leads to voters shrugging it off like that? Why are they so desperate to elect this particular man?

So what if the Euros have socialized healthcare? At least in the UK (not EU, I know), the NHS is absolutely swamped

I agree with your point generally, but the NHS is a really unfair thing to saddle Europe with. It really is socialised healthcare, and it works as well as communism usually works. Britain is a great place to visit, but don't get sick.

The rest of Europe is better. Germany for instance has normal GPs and also compulsory health insurance a bit similar to Obamacare. That produces some overservicing because everyone is finding ways to milk the insurance companies, but overall that better than the communist underservicing you get in Britain.

DeSantis has done lots to hobble woke indoctrination in education and also to energise citizens against it. That's been his most powerful point of leverage as as a state governor. The Presidency has different points of leverage.

Ironically Hanania has done more than anyone (except maybe Chris Rufo) to document how much of the modern woke-imperium is upheld by American law, especially civil rights law. Hanania is also the one who pointed out how much of that is actually done through executive orders. Any republican could deal a big blow to that, and their respective track records show DeSantis is likely to actually do it while Trump is not.

So I don't think things will change.

Courts around the western world have been remarkably deferential to this nonsense. And the US courts are (uncharacteristically) more timid and deferential than those in other common-law countries. This is driven in part by a progressive belief in an activist, technocratic state and in part by conservative distrust of judicial activism.

Conservative jurists seem to be slowly coming to their senses. And ithelps good if there is a broader groundswell to support them. I'm glad to see your post -- it's part of that groundswell. But don't be too disheartened - there's incremental progress to be made, and you are helping.

South Korea even had a female head-of-state.

So did Pakistan.