toadworrier
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User ID: 1151
toadworrier
4mo ago
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.
toadworrier
9mo ago
(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.
toadworrier
6mo ago
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.
toadworrier
5mo ago
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.
toadworrier
9mo ago
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.
toadworrier
3mo ago
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.
toadworrier
6mo ago
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.
toadworrier
9mo ago
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.
toadworrier
11mo ago
I think you'd need to unpack the details of that assertion if it is to carry much weight.
toadworrier
6mo ago
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.
toadworrier
8mo ago
Scott Alexander might be afraid of Taylor Lorenz. But the human race is not made up of Scott Alexanders.
toadworrier
11mo ago
Germans are generally unaware of how low their wages are.
toadworrier
9mo ago
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:
- Assume any slight by a white person is racism and thus be angry at "this country"
- 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"
- 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.
toadworrier
10mo ago
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.
toadworrier
11mo ago
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?
toadworrier
9mo ago
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.
toadworrier
10mo ago
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.
toadworrier
8mo ago
South Korea even had a female head-of-state.
So did Pakistan.
toadworrier
10mo ago
Australian Covid hysteria quietly died in Christmas of 2021. The governments ruined the Christmas of anyone travelling across the border, only for Omnicron to come and sweep the country. Within a few months nearly everyone had had the disease and found it to be no biggie.
Politicians quietly rolled back all the mandates etc. But in Canada they were still doing it and were only talking about changing things when the Truckers hit.
toadworrier
5mo ago
Third, they are facilely _un_cynical in a way that grates on Irish people - I have yet to get through a conversation with a Brazilian without them telling me about their "dream of Europe" in such a gormless way as would make a beauty pageant contestant squirm.
Do Irish people object to the this because they think the Brazillian is bullshitting, or do they object because they suspect the Brazillian is being honest?
toadworrier
9mo ago
The Korea thing interests me. I always thought that was a pretty left-wing country by rich-world standards. But I guess it's all about the deltas. Maybe Koreans are all for unions, but as a result they've been so powerful that everyone is sick of them now (kind of like Britain under Thatcher).
toadworrier
11mo ago
Gender ideology asks people to assert things that aren't actually true and to accept this untruth promulgated through public institutions,
The same is true for affirmative action. Which is how we got into this mess.
toadworrier
5mo ago
I am always wary of non-profits.
I agree with this, but also remember the original mission. OpenAI got it's initial dose of mind-share, talent and OPM because it was supposed to save the world from centralising AI in the hands of a winner-take-all company.
IMHO that was a dumb strategy for achieving a valid goal from the beginning, but a straight-out for-profit company would have been completely opposite to the mission.
It's working!
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