Ohio
The obvious answer is that ad-block block already exists. There are plenty of sites that simply do not work if you have an adblocker on, and you can't access them at all. I have no objection to adblocker-blocker - if you don't want me to consume your content on your terms, you can exclude the vast majority of adblock users (there are a small minority of a minority looking at things like adblocker-blocker-blocker but this is not a large number), and most people do not. Attention is still worth something even if it doesn't come with advertising attached, as it happens. That probably wouldn't be true if everyone used adblock, of course, but I'm not a Kantian to begin with. Your behaviour is worth examining in the context exists in more than it's worth examining under some hypothetical categorical imperative.
I accept this has vibes of 'well just because I'm not paying for security doesn't mean I can be stolen from', but I think it does reveal something about the victims of adblock. Most of them don't care enough to invest in anti-adblock technology, which makes me wonder how much harm is done, if any.
The other side of this is that why should it be up to me to examine every single content provider's advertisement policy and decide whether or not I'll read this piece of news based on whether Channel 5 in bumfuck Ohio has pop-unders? It's an unreasonable expectation in a world of content, especially in one where ads are sometimes malicious and often bloated to the point where they slow down my (admittedly older) laptop to a crawl. Why is it incumbent on me to wait for horrifically bloated ads to load and slow my computer down?
I think this argument proves too much. Imagine a counterfactual where some sites maxed out your computer mining bitcoin (wave away the technical problems for the moment) whenever you went onto them, lowering the lifespan of your machine and costing you some tiny amount more on your energy bill. Would that still be incumbent as a moral price of doing business for our hypothetical mining-supported sites? Would MineBlocker also be a moral negative? I feel intuitively that it wouldn't be and that impositions on your time and energy can be intuitively rejected (you have the right to request my browser load the ad, you don't have the right to make it actually load it) where this is no prior or implicit agreement between people.
Excellent discussion-provoking post by the way, it's frustrating to see it downvoted.
As other commenters have mentioned, Hasidic Jews are an insular community who are politically organized to give little and take lots.
They very much violate the unspoken assumption that a school is trying to make a better American citizen (loosely defined as that is) who will not take from the public more than necessary. I'd say that's deserving of higher scrutiny.
I'm amenable to this argument.
But explain to me why this same line of thinking wouldn't apply to Teachers' Unions. Especially if we swap in 'woke' ideological teachings for religion in this instance.
I think men are violent by only insofar that men are agentic. I don't think it's really possible to separate men's propensity towards violence from their tendency to exert agency in other ways and other parts of societies.
Related to this, I always find it a bit surprising how we've gendered violence of all kinds as male (even types of violence which aren't primarily male-perpetrated, like domestic violence) but almost completely fail to acknowledge that most bystanders who go out of their way to risk their lives for somebody else or expose themselves to danger to protect somebody else are also men.
Even in non-dangerous scenarios, you can see greater male helping behaviours in a public context.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2786599
"One hundred forty-five experimenters "accidentally" dropped a handful of pencils or coins on 1,497 occasions before a total of 4,813 bystanders in elevators in Columbus, Ohio; Seattle, Washington; and Atlanta, Georgia. In picking up the objects, females received more help than did males, males gave more help than did females, and these differences were greatly exaggerated in Atlanta."
In addition, this study does a review of the literature surrounding gender and helping.
"Many previous studies have found that males are more likely to give help than females and/or that females are more likely to receive it than males (e.g., Bryan and Test, 1967; Ehlert et al., 1973; Gaertner and Bickman, 1971; Graf and Riddle, 1972; Latane, 1970; Morgan, 1973; Penner et al., 1973; Piliavin and Piliavin, 1972; Piliavin et al., 1969; Pomazal and Clore, 1973; Simon, 1971; Werner, 1974; Wispe and Freshly, 1971). A few studies have found no main effects due to sex (Gruder and Cook, 1971; Thayer, 1973) and in one case males were more likely to receive help (Emswiller et al., 1971). Two studies have found cross-sex helping to be more frequent than same-sex helping (Bickman, 1974; Thayer, 1973), one has found same-sex helping to be more common (Werner, 1974), and most have found no difference. Although the relation of sex to helping may depend on the specific type of help requested, it is clear that in the preponderance of settings tested to date, males help more than females, and females receive more help than males."
Heroism is likely mostly engaged in by men. As this article notes:
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00369/full
"To this end, we investigated reactions to newsworthy, exceptional social roles that are often dealt with in the media: hero and murderer. Both social roles attract much attention and have similarly low percentages of women (ca. 10–20%). In the US, only 9% of the recipients of the Carnegie Hero Medal for saving others are women, and in Germany only about 20% of similar medals are awarded to women. This may be because there are fewer women in professions such as firefighters, soldiers, or police officers—jobs involving dangerous situations where jobholders can act heroically."
I would differ from the authors here. Fewer women in dangerous professions is likely not a very big reason for the difference in heroism found between men and women, because the Carnegie Hero Medal excludes from awards of persons such as firefighters whose duties in their regular vocations require heroism, unless the act of heroism is truly outstanding. "The act of rescue must be one in which no full measure of responsibility exists between the rescuer and the rescued, which precludes those whose vocational duties require them to perform such acts, unless the rescues are clearly beyond the line of duty; and members of the immediate family, except in cases of outstanding heroism where the rescuer loses his or her life or is severely injured."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnegie_Hero_Fund
This article in Men's Health notes "nine out of every 10 Carnegie heroes have been men".
"Heroic rescuing behaviour is a male-typical trait in humans ... This study looked at news archives of local papers in the UK in order to discover what kind of characteristics rescuers possess. It was found that males were highly more likely to rescue than females were".
When it comes to men there's very much a tendency to focus on the negative manifestations of public sphere agency and ignore all the positive ways it manifests. I think in the past we had a more balanced viewpoint surrounding it, and there's been a very motivated attempt to stamp out positive perceptions of men due to an idea that these perceptions are problematic. It's very hard for me not to see the slow erasure of positive male qualities from the public discourse as being intentional.
Men are expected to commit violence on behalf of women, and to perform on behalf of women.
And you can easily see plenty of instances throughout history of women weaponising that social expectation and openly cajoling men into performing violence against others, as I mentioned in a previous comment of mine. But violence by proxy perpetrated by women is, again, largely a topic that is taboo in the public discourse.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
This looks to me like a 2002 Democratic governor pulling some stunt regarding gay marriage while their own state hasn't legalized gay marriage.
You mean like how lawfare got national gay marriage invented by the Supreme Court while 31 states, including California, Virginia, Florida, Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Tennessee, Colorado, Washington, and Hawaii had state constitutional prohibitions on it?
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Send your kid to an all black school in Baltimore or a suburb of Paris then and then report back to me if your opinion has changed.
So what? Send a black kid from a nice family to an all white school in a trailer park in West Virginia, middle of nowhere Quebec, a shitty part of Ohio. They're going to have a bad time.
You're right: Poverty is bad. A relative lack of morality or culture or whatever you want to call it is bad. Crime is bad. Drugs are bad. African Americans don't have a monopoly on any of these things, but we have double standards for crack-dealing superpredators/innocent white victims of opioid overdoses. Unemployed whites in the midwest are innocent victims of globalization who had their jobs ripped away from them, while blacks living in deprecated inner-city slums are shiftless, lazy and sucking at the welfare teat.
assman
1yr ago
TLDR: College football. 4 Team playoff good. NIL bad. Conference expansion bad and we need to get congress to fix it.
Viewership is still great AFAIK, but it seems like there are a lot of problems and complaints from the fans about the direction of College Football and I personally find it worrisome. Wondering what other people’s thoughts are and potential ideas for how they could be solved.
Playoffs. Basically, I think the playoffs are pretty much perfect the way they are. The allure of college football to me has always been how different it is from American pro sports. There are ~130 teams vying for a tiny postseason, and there are no artificial methods of creating parity like a salary cap or the draft. This makes the regular season extremely high stakes since you can only have one bad week and still hope to make the playoffs. Every major upset has a ripple effect throughout the sport for the remainder of the season. This makes it so that the regular season is the playoffs. Ohio State might have all 5 star recruits but they have one brutal loss to Purdue or Iowa and their playoff hopes are gone. This makes it so the championship winner is always the actual best team, as you have to be nearly perfect to make it, there are no situations like the 9-7 Giants winning the Super Bowl. A lot of people disagree with this and don’t like that there’s not a clear path to playoff but I think that’s what makes the sport so much fun. Every game matters, and expanding the playoffs will only dilute that. I don’t think the committee is actually biased, and the constant dickriding of G5 teams on Reddit is ridiculous. If they actually show on the field that they are a top 4 team they will make it as we saw with Cincinnati last year. I don’t think merely going undefeated against a shitty schedule should be a guaranteed playoff spot, the same people who beg for undefeated UCF with the 100th ranked schedule to make the playoff complain when Alabama plays one FCS team or Clemson makes it after going undefeated in the ACC. If Alabama could somehow play an AAC schedule where they’d go undefeated, winning every game by 40, the same G5 dickriders would say their schedule was too weak. The 4 team playoff has not produced any truly controversial winners and out of the 3 playoff games every year at least 2 are blowouts. There are almost never more than 3 teams who are legitimate contenders and expanding to 12 teams won’t change that.
NIL/Recruiting/Transfers. I found the constant guilt-tripping about the poor players not getting paid to be really annoying, and generally I think the players benefit much more from the school than the school does the players. At the same time, it seems unfair that players weren’t allowed to sell their own autographs or anything so NIL seems fair enough to me in theory. But as literally everyone could’ve predicted, it provides a way for boosters to openly pay players in a way that was under the table before, and players are surely getting paid much more now than when it was in secret. Many people complain about the positive feedback loop that is college football recruiting. Many schools have natural advantages in location, resources, history of success, etc. but recently the most successful teams just keep stockpiling more and more talent. People see NIL as a way to mitigate that, where schools with a lot of wealthy boosters can improve their teams recruiting by paying for recruits. But why is that good? I think the fact that success begets success in college football is a good thing, it’s unique in American sports at least and rewards you for running a successful program and hiring good coaches. If the other schools are mad that Nick Saban is getting all the recruits then hire your own Nick Saban. It’s not like it’s impossible to break into the elite of recruiting, Dabo Swinney did it very recently during the Saban era. I don’t see how rewarding teams for having rich boosters is better than rewarding teams for being successful and investing in the program. With the free transfers and NIL, college football success gets even further removed from the on-field results. Even for the lower tier teams a school like Cincinnati could have been able to capitalize on their success in the recruiting market, but that only becomes harder when worse programs with more resources can just throw money at the players. I don’t know how this can be fixed since I don’t think the NCAA would be able to regulate what is “real” NIL vs pay-for-play, but I think it’s really bad for the sport.
Conference Realignment. Nobody seems to support it but the incentives are what they are and it seems that some sort of consolidation into a super-league is inevitable. It seems like this is the least controversial issue in that everyone hates it. Nobody wants to see UCLA in the Big Ten. My only hope is that the consolidation leads to fragmentation again, when the conferences become so geographically nonviable that we can see a “Big Ten Pacific Division” or something that’s basically the old Pac 12. But my radical solution that will never happen and probably isn’t feasible is to get congress involved! This could be the bipartisan issue that unites the country around a common goal. The red team loves college football and tradition, and doesn’t want to see the once-great regional conferences marginalized. The blue team can say why are we spending all this money to fly college athletes across the country when we had perfectly good regional conferences, and we can’t expect the USC women’s volleyball team to fly to Rutgers for a Wednesday night match.
Wondering what everyone’s thoughts/ideas/solutions are about the future of college football?
assman
1yr ago
I also support the promotion/relegation idea but it will definitely never happen. Regarding the playoff though, I think that ESPN does play an outsized role in deciding the future of the sport, particularly in regards to the conference realignment as of late. But I just don’t see evidence that they are influencing the playoff committee at all. Ohio State is probably the single biggest viewership draw and they have been left out more than once despite being one-loss conference champions. On the other hand Clemson is a smaller viewership draw compared to other giants of the sport and they have made it 6? times. There really haven’t been any controversial selections that would greatly increase viewership
JTarrou
1yr ago
It's a comment in this thread on the reddit site: i'll copypasta below, but the links probably won't work. https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/vdwwso/a_critical_review_of_open_philanthropys_bet_on/
I don't care much about tacking made-up numbers to QUALYs to fit a policy to my preferences, so I'll ignore entirely that section and speculate purely on why they made what is obviously not a cost-effective outlay of 200 million bones. The key will be in who they gave it to. So, from the links:
1:
Open Philanthropy recommended a grant of $4,000,000 over three years to Impact Justice to support its Restorative Justice Project, under the leadership of sujatha baliga. This project partners with local community organizations in cities around America to support the introduction of restorative justice diversion, before the filing of any charges in a case, to completely remove cases from the conventional justice system.
Oh look, a Harvard grad with a pretentious spelling of an ethnic name and presumably a white-passing appearance with just enough melanin to give the DIE pipplez a lady-boner. Man, am I good or what?
"Restorative Justice" being the current term for not punishing criminals at all, but asking them nicely to apologize to their victims, and then turning them loose onto new ones. This program is going to crash and burn once the press starts talking to victims who feel hard done by this approach, or they get their first all-star recidivist.
Their site is here: Note their focus listings. Not a word about victims, only the perpetrators, criminals, inmates etc. This is the same old 1960's decarceration bullshit that helped produce the crime waves that drove the backlash they're trying to reverse. This isn't justice at all, it's criminal support. The complete lack of any shrift given to victims of crime sets the tone for the entire enterprise. This is about throwing unreconstructed criminals back onto the street as fast as possible with no record, so they can be "diverted" again and again and again.
2:
Alliance for Safety and Justice - link broken main site here
The notable victory on their home page is the restoration of voting rights to 1.4 million felons in Florida. So, a DNC vote-farming operation.
The organization focuses on reforms in eight states: Florida, Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, Texas, Arizona, Pennsylvania, and California.
Gee, I wonder if those states have any outsize importance in national elections.
3:
The National Council is a network of women impacted by incarceration focused on ending the incarceration of women and girls
Women are around ten percent of jail and prison populations, so this is a small minority, and notice the focus. "Ending the incarceration of women and girls". So, same as the first grantee, only sexist.
4:
Essie Justice Group organizes women with incarcerated loved ones for criminal justice reform. Essie Justice Group plans to use these funds to build its membership, train women impacted by incarceration in advocacy, and lead decarceration campaigns in California.
So, same as the first, but sexist and only in California.
5:
TOP plans to use these funds to expand its criminal justice reform and prosecutor accountability work in Houston, San Antonio, and Dallas.
TOP is a parent organization that controls and funds numerous political pressure groups, home site is here. They are a "Justice" organization, defining that into Climate justice, Healthcare Justice, Immigration Justice, Education Justice, Housing Justice, etc. etc. etc. So, bog-standard left-wing advocacy.
6:
The Open Philanthropy Project recommended two grants totaling $2,500,000 over two years to Color of Change and the Color of Change Education Fund to support prosecutorial reform and work related to the film “Just Mercy.”
Home site here. They describe themselves as a "racial justice" organization working to "build Black Power and Black joy". Given the prominence of BLM slogans and "defund the police" banners and ads on their page, I'm guessing they're on for the decarceration as well, and much more.
7:
The Open Philanthropy Project recommended three grants totaling $7,800,000 over two years to The Justice Collaborative (TJC), via the Tides Foundation and Tides Advocacy, for general support.
Home site here. It's full of word salad bullshit that is at once both vague and ridiculous. This is the last paragraph of their posted mission statement:
America’s incarceration crisis and our inability to help our neighbors meet their basic needs both trace back to a culture of dehumanization. To end that toxic politics and build an America with freedom and dignity for all of us, starting with those who are the most vulnerable, we need to rewrite the rules to shrink and transform our criminal legal system and put stability within everyone’s reach.
This is a blueprint to do it.
Narrator voice: There is no blueprint on the site. If you click on the link that says "blueprint", it just routes you back to the statement claiming there is a blueprint. Perhaps with 7.8 million dollars, they can write up a blueprint. Of course, they are a subsidiary of the Tides Foundation, itself an immensely rich organization that pulls in half a billion dollars a year.
So, now that we've looked at the various organizations, what can we deduce giving $200 mil to them might have been for? It's certainly not going to move the needle much on criminal justice reform, even if you think all these schemes are totally new and groundbreaking and haven't been tried a hundred times already and failed in flames. It's certainly not finding low-profile high-value projects that bigger funding outfits have missed, they're paying into the Tides foundation!
What do they get for $200 mil? My guess, credibility on the left as a hedge against getting painted as secret Republicans. Perhaps a seat at the table of all these wildly rich advocacy organizations that serve as funding and jobs programs for the left in general. This is "Altruism" debased to simple partisan politics. This is the Atheism + of rationalism.
Rov_Scam
1yr ago
What reports? Even so, ignoring the court and getting a default judgment puts him in a pretty precarious position. If he had lost the case on the merits he could make any discovery regularities part of his appeal. Now that's going to be much more difficult because the only avenue of appeal he has is whether judgment in default is inappropriate. While courts have vacated default judgments, the arguments usually revolve around whether the action in question is appropriate for the relief granted or when the default happened because the plaintiff didn't take appropiate due diligence to ensure notice. For example, in Ohio there are a good number of properties where the oil and gas rights have been severed from the surface. Some landowners whose property was subject to such severances attempted to get these rights back by filing quiet title actions against the owners of the orphaned OG interests and getting default judgments in their favor. The appeals court ruled that (if I remember correctly) the quiet title actions were inappropriate because the plaintiffs had no colorable claim to the oil and gas and that furthermore, they didn't make a diligent attempt to locate the current owners and provided notice by advertisement. The whole thing was obviously a "gotcha" to get rights they weren't entitled to, and the appeals court saw it for what it was. The Jones case is a fairly straightforward case of defamation and there's no real argument that Jones only didn't comply because his attorneys were unaware of what they were supposed to do.
Gdanning
1yr ago
Instead all we have is speculation on what an objective observer could "easily conclude" the deputy would have done had Sum asked, and we treat that as if it is what had happened.
You say that because you are not familiar with Fourth Amendment jurisprudence. What we actually have here is a court doing what courts do in Fourth Amendment cases, and have done for at least 55 years, since Terry v. Ohio: Determine whether a reasonable person would have believed he is free to leave, or more precisely in this case, free to terminate the encounter. Florida v. Bostick, 501 U.S. 429, 435-436 (1991) ["when a person "has no desire to leave" for reasons unrelated to the police presence, the "coercive effect of the encounter" can be measured better by asking whether "a reasonable person would feel free to decline the officers' requests or otherwise terminate the encounter"]
In other words, courts do exactly what the court said: Try to determine what a reasonable person think the cop would say if he said, "Go away. I don't want to talk to you"? That is precisely what it mean to say "I believe that I am free to leave."
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
If polling aggregators are a thing you find interesting, here are links to 538's 2022 Election Forecast page and RealClearPolitics' Election Central 2022 page.
If you're going to be glued to the television/internet tomorrow evening, and want to know what races to watch as early indicators, here's an hour-by-hour breakdown from Decision Desk HQ, and their General Results homepage. The night will begin at 7 PM EST with a trio of key Congressional races in Virginia, and the Governor and Senate statewide races in Georgia. At 7:30, start looking for returns from North Carolina and Ohio.
One of the reasons DDHQ is one of the best locations for US election returns is that their analysis pays particular attention to margins of victory, not just winners and losers, in forecasting outcomes on election night. Sure, a particular county might always vote Republican, but if the margin is R+5 on the night in question, that's very bad news for Republicans if the county was R+15 in 2016. You'll also see a lot of "if this race is called early for the Democrat, that's good news for the D party; but if the call is delayed, that's good news for Rs" or vice versa, depending on the race in question.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
I posted the following earlier in the CW thread; reposting here in case someone finds the reference links useful.
If polling aggregators are a thing you find interesting, here are links to 538's 2022 Election Forecast page and RealClearPolitics' Election Central 2022 page.
If you're going to be glued to the television/internet tomorrow evening, and want to know what races to watch as early indicators, here's an hour-by-hour breakdown from Decision Desk HQ, and their General Results homepage. The night will begin at 7 PM EST with a trio of key Congressional races in Virginia, and the Governor and Senate statewide races in Georgia. At 7:30, start looking for returns from North Carolina and Ohio.
One of the reasons DDHQ is one of the best locations for US election returns is that their analysis pays particular attention to margins of victory, not just winners and losers, in forecasting outcomes on election night. Sure, a particular county might always vote Republican, but if the margin is R+5 on the night in question, that's very bad news for Republicans if the county was R+15 in 2016. You'll also see a lot of "if this race is called early for the Democrat, that's good news for the D party; but if the call is delayed, that's good news for Rs" or vice versa, depending on the race in question.
robotsvanillika
1yr ago
Trump was never going to announce his run at a random rally in Ohio.
People talk, still, about the moment that he came down the escalator in trump tower. Of course he’s going to make a huge show of his announcement by doing it at mar a lago.
It depends on the wording of the marijuana legalization initiatives.
The Ohio Marijuana Legalization Initiative was an Ohio initiated constitutional amendment on the ballot for November 3, 2015, where it was defeated.
Voting yes would have legalized the limited sale and use of marijuana and created 10 facilities with exclusive commercial rights to grow marijuana.
Voting no was a vote to leave current laws unchanged. Possession or use of marijuana for any reason remained illegal.
Issue 3 was accompanied on the ballot by Issue 2, which was added by state lawmakers concerned that the amendment would have granted a monopoly to the facilities.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
1yr ago
I knew a guy in my frat who did this. It actually worked pretty well for a while, we all thought these super hot blondes who went to state schools in Ohio kept commenting on his posts that they "missed him" on all the posts about going to conferences and shit.
He even posted, then took down and apologized for, a photo of his penis cumming on a girl's face "#sheknowsimpostingthis." And some of the dumber brothers were briefly like, wow respect!
That was his downfall, however, as someone recognized the dick from pornography and began taking the whole fugazi mess apart. Pretty soon we knew all the posts about conferences were stock photos from Oxford or Harvard's website, all the blondes didn't exist; not long after he was expelled for living in the college club offices over the summer, and filling the rooms with jugs of urine.
Today I guess the play would be to hire onlyfans types to do it, right? Then they're "real".
gorge
1yr ago
(...part 2...)
Newspapers articles seem to corroborate this narrative of gradual movement toward women's lib. As I read these articles, one thing I noticed is that in general it seems like the King and the government were trying to please both sides. They were trying to show the U.S. and the West that they were becoming more "modern" and treating women well, but also trying to show Islamic conservative critic that they were still obeying Islam. So maybe while the government would throw a sop to the conservatives by banning women from TV, the government would at the same time push women's education and employment -- but would say this is for economic reasons and not social reasons and not in violation of Islamic law. Ultimately, the latter was far more important toward ending patriarchy. Let's review the history through some articles.
From a 1981 article:
Expatriates call them ''religious police'', but a better term would be vigilantes. The House of Saud licences their busybodying as a useful release valve for the fundamentalist religious fervor which the Shah and Sadat both tried to suppress. And the honor and respect they are accorded by the Saudi Government helps to conceal the reality of change.
The House of Saud is getting ready for the 21st century. There is a singer on Saudi television who remembers when he used to have to sing in secret. Veteran expatriates remember how, 20 years ago, it was not permissible to smoke in the street, and how cigarettes were purchased under the counter, in plain brown envelopes. In April 1981, a committee of Islamic legal scholars ruled that a Saudi woman must be allowed to unveil in front of her prospective bridegroom: ''Any man forbidding his daughter or sister to meet her fiance face to face will be judged as sinning,'' the committee declared.
Italics mine -- note the government is playing a double game of assuaging the conservatives while telling the NY Times and Westerners that they are "progressing."
From another 1981 article:
As the Saudis race to invest their oil riches in ambitious economic-development programs, the roles played by Mrs. Fawzan and many other urban women indicate that the traditionally conservative Islamic social structure is gradually yielding to change.
What this means is that beyond the overall Government policy of encouraging female literacy and education, there are few specifics concerning the promotion of employment or career opportunities for women. A Government commission is reportedly examining areas of work to be officially approved for women. Women who run boutiques or beauty parlors may run the risk of having their businesses closed down, even if temporarily, by the so-called religious police or members of the Society for the Preservation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice.
...The recently disclosed third five-year plan calls for the participation of women in the development of the country, although few specifics are offered. Officials such as the Minister of Planning, Hisham Nazir, one of the most prominent technicians, are known to espouse the position that since more than 50 percent of the potential labor force of 2.5 million are female, the increased employment of women could help Saudi Arabia become less reliant on foreign labor.
...A number of women say that the key to change is more education. ''Education is the basis of the change that is taking place in Saudi society for women,'' Mrs. Rouchdy said. ''But for the most part Saudi women do not want to change their social norms. They don't want to run away from Islamic values and from religion. They are saying, We don't want the superficial aspects of Westernization but only the scientific part of it.''
In 1982 Saudi Arabia got a new king, who was depicted "as the leading figure in a progressive, modernizing faction within the tradition-minded monarchy."
We should keep in mind that of course Saudi Arabia is still very patriarchal and has very high brith rates at this point. The changes described in the previous two articles are just a beginning.
Leading on to 1989 we see more of a movement leftward, which is supported by the King and the government:
While this remains a country where women are veiled in public, cannot drive cars and must seek permission of husbands or other men who are relatives before traveling abroad, education and modernization have made Saudi women a force that neither the Government nor the religious authorities can ignore.
Elegantly dressed and armed with a doctoral degree in education from Ohio State University, Miss Dekheil, who uses her maiden name, is, at 28 years old, the director of an interdisciplinary program at a Government institute that trains women for jobs by sharpening their skills or teaching new ones.
She is one of a new breed of Saudi women dealing with the Saudi Arabia of 1989: A country with nearly a million girls going to school, 100,000 of those in higher education. They are graduating into a conservative society where traditions holding them back from an active role in the economy are slowly coming down. Saudi Arabia's women are becoming doctors, engineers, social workers and computer operators.
...Miss Mosly, who is also married and uses her maiden name, has defied many customs, going to a boarding school in Lebanon at age 4 and studying engineering, then coming back to find a job at Aramco nearly 21 years ago. She runs a department of 186 people, including 50 Saudi men who report to her.
In the battle between progressives and traditionalists, the Saudi Government, known for moving ever so cautiously, appears to be leaning toward a slow integration of women in the work force.
The Saudi Government gave a clear signal when it conferred its most prestigious award, the King Faisal Award for Islamic Studies, on Sheik Mohammed al-Ghazali, an Egyptian religious scholar who has taken a strong stand defending the rights of women to work and seek higher education.
From a 1990 article, Saudi Arabia is officially extremely patriarchal, birthrates still very high, but women's lib creeping in:
Although almost 30 years old, she is still forced to live with her family, since in Saudi Arabia it is against the law for her to live alone as an unmarried woman. If she chooses to leave the country, she said, the only way she can get a passport or board a plane is with her father's written permission.
Legally, neither she nor any other single Saudi woman can go out alone, drive, work with men, travel alone, stay in a hotel, go out to eat, or do anything else alone that might allow them to somehow encounter a man on their own.
The woman who said she was frustrated sipped a whisky at a private party, danced and, after a long conversation, confided that she was divorced and recently had a lover.
But, she said, Government officials had found out about the relationship and investigated her. Her father threatened to lock her in the house and one of her brothers threatened to kill her.
...Drinking alcohol, dancing, mixing of the sexes and a great deal else is officially prohibited here as non-Islamic. In spite of such formal strictures, drinking, dancing and a great deal else that is non-Islamic regularly goes on behind closed doors.
...A Western diplomat told of his astonishment on attending a private party of well-connected Saudis recently. Wine flowed and the men and women were arguing loudly about everything from politics to food when, his Saudi host said, "Watch this."
The lights dimmed and two beautiful women, veiled and clad in sheer but discreet dancing robes, appeared and "danced the most sensual dance I have ever seen," the diplomat said. After a few minutes, he said, he realized that the dancers were the wives of Saudis who were present.
"I still can't figure this place out," the diplomat said.
Again, Saudi Arabia is still more patriarchal than the West (and has higher birth rates), but being "investigated" and "threatened" is still more liberal than being executed (as the adulterous Princess of 1977 was) or stoned (as the New York Times claims was the practice in the 1950s and 1960s).
From 1991, now in debt to the West after the Gulf War, the King is liberalizing by forming citizen councils:
King Fahd of Saudi Arabia has announced a series of changes in the Government to take place by January, including the formation of a council of Saudi citizens with whom the royal family is to consult in ruling the country, the introduction of a written body of laws and greater local autonomy for the provinces.
He told Saudis for the first time that Saudi Arabia had to borrow billions of dollars to meet what he described as the huge cost of the gulf war. He asserted, however, that the debts would not affect the welfare of citizens.
(...part 3 continues as a reply...)
Trump's polling and performance in the midwest, something which was necessary for the GOP candidate to win, and something with which every other candidate in the heavily contested primary did far worse in
Trump captured just enough Obama voters in the midwest to win. Which of the other likely candidates was going to do that? Not Cruz, not Rubio, not Jeb, not Kasich outside of Ohio. And that's assuming they would have performed as good as Trump did in other states outside of their "native" regions. Trump, alone, was the person pushing polices which most Americans cared about but which the other candidates were doing their best to ignore (immigration and trade being the main ones).
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1yr ago
It would be ridiculous not to expect Democrats voting in Republican primaries. It also usually wouldn’t be “shenanigans.”
There are 18 open primary states. Alabama, Arkansas, Indiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, N. Dakota, Ohio, S. Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas were fully open and voted red in 2020. Anyone living in one of these states would be well within their rights to vote in the Republican primary. I expect them to vastly outnumber any partisans going undercover in closed states.
I did it this year, and I’ll do it again in 2024. Texas is still hugely Republican-biased, and I’d quite like to get some input on the election. Plus I get to vote against Ken Paxton and Greg Abbott twice.
doglatine
1yr ago
I work with African 'elites' on a regular, sometimes daily basis, and many remind me more of Lao than they do the laborers.
Yeah, this resonates with me; I had some excellent West African study abroad students while teaching in the US, for example, who were consummate professionals and very serious (not uncommon for them to wear suits and ties to class!). More broadly, thanks to signaling and countersignaling I think you get a lot of cleavage between the culture and norms of a nation's elites and the behaviour of its mainstream culture, to the point where there are even inverse correlations (example: in my experience American international elites tend to be slimmer and fitter than their British or Irish equivalents, despite - or rather because of - the greater prevalence of obesity among working class Americans). All that said, you can't run a country with elites alone, so the culture of the general populace matters, and it's hard for me to watch EoD without feeling at least some pessimism about Congo's near-term development.
Consider then the Congolese day laborer, who makes no such assumptions. He lives in the jungle, where it is sometimes dangerous but usually warm and comfortable. Cold beer and decent food are solid pleasures.
This reminds me of the 'bee sting effect' as used by economists to understand the behaviour of people living in poverty. Imagine you have two people, A and B, and both have bee stings. Person A has 2 bee stings, and Person B has 6, and you can get each sting treated for $20 a pop. The idea is that Person A perversely is more likely to seek treatment, because there's a realistic pathway to being "bee sting free", whereas Person B might just drown their sorrows in booze or similar. A related phenomenon is why you're much more likely to get a dent fixed on your car if you only have one than if you have ten. With this in mind, you might think that your average Congolese day labourer has an extremely limited and precarious set of pathways to serious economic empowerment, whereas Lao has lots, and that this explains the difference in their behaviour, which as you say, might not be irrational.
There is a film, American Factory, about a Chinese factory attempt in Ohio.
I think I'll be watching this one tonight.
Yeah, there's a long history here. I'm squishy enough on the matter that I'm not entirely happy with Brandenburg v. Ohio's test, but I don't think there are any really plausible reads that make the publicly-known posts clear violations.
I expect Musk is more directly under pressure from German/EU environments where this does violate standing law -- German law in particular has a ton of rules related to fascist symbols -- which has been Musk's publicly repeated standard, but it also shows the problems with that standard.
((And, tbf, I'm 50/50 on whether Ye's having a genuine mental breakdown and/or doing some Springtime With Hitler-level punking, but the odds of the former are high enough that I could see the argument for intervening as a friend, albeit perhaps a better argument for intervening with the help of some men with white coats bearing extra-long sleeves.))
FarNearEverywhere
1yr ago
The left wants the status quo ante of Roe v. Wade and wants trans people to be left alone
And I might even have believed that, were it not for things like the Kermit Gosnell case, and now the whole "Drag Story Hours" rubbish. Are trans people disproportionately represented in modern drag is a theoretical discussion I have no idea about. But taking primary school children to drag shows for some nebulous notion of "allyship" or even worse is stupid. If anyone suggested "let's bring kids to strip clubs because sex work is real work" then they'd be pilloried. "Let's bring kids along to a club with signs like this in the background, but oh no it's nothing sexually-tinged at all, how dare you say that you bigot" is the new orthodoxy.
And then we get stupid, stupid clashes like antifa versus Proud Boys because both sides want an excuse for a rumble, and some UU church was dumb enough to provide them with one.
So "the left just wants trans people to be left alone" is not going to wash anymore.
Young men commit the vast majority of violent crime in every population on earth.
And are we going to acknowledge the flip side of this, too? I always find it a bit surprising how we've gendered violence of all kinds as male (even types of violence which aren't primarily male-perpetrated, like domestic violence) but almost completely fail to acknowledge that most bystanders who go out of their way to risk their lives for somebody else or expose themselves to danger to protect somebody else are also men.
Even in non-dangerous scenarios, you can see greater male helping behaviours in a public context.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2786599
"One hundred forty-five experimenters "accidentally" dropped a handful of pencils or coins on 1,497 occasions before a total of 4,813 bystanders in elevators in Columbus, Ohio; Seattle, Washington; and Atlanta, Georgia. In picking up the objects, females received more help than did males, males gave more help than did females, and these differences were greatly exaggerated in Atlanta."
In addition, this study does a review of the literature surrounding gender and helping.
"Many previous studies have found that males are more likely to give help than females and/or that females are more likely to receive it than males (e.g., Bryan and Test, 1967; Ehlert et al., 1973; Gaertner and Bickman, 1971; Graf and Riddle, 1972; Latane, 1970; Morgan, 1973; Penner et al., 1973; Piliavin and Piliavin, 1972; Piliavin et al., 1969; Pomazal and Clore, 1973; Simon, 1971; Werner, 1974; Wispe and Freshly, 1971). A few studies have found no main effects due to sex (Gruder and Cook, 1971; Thayer, 1973) and in one case males were more likely to receive help (Emswiller et al., 1971). Two studies have found cross-sex helping to be more frequent than same-sex helping (Bickman, 1974; Thayer, 1973), one has found same-sex helping to be more common (Werner, 1974), and most have found no difference. Although the relation of sex to helping may depend on the specific type of help requested, it is clear that in the preponderance of settings tested to date, males help more than females, and females receive more help than males."
Heroism is likely mostly engaged in by men. As this article notes:
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00369/full
"To this end, we investigated reactions to newsworthy, exceptional social roles that are often dealt with in the media: hero and murderer. Both social roles attract much attention and have similarly low percentages of women (ca. 10–20%). In the US, only 9% of the recipients of the Carnegie Hero Medal for saving others are women, and in Germany only about 20% of similar medals are awarded to women. This may be because there are fewer women in professions such as firefighters, soldiers, or police officers—jobs involving dangerous situations where jobholders can act heroically."
I would differ from the authors here. Fewer women in dangerous professions is likely not a very big reason for the difference in heroism found between men and women, because the Carnegie Hero Medal excludes from awards of persons such as firefighters whose duties in their regular vocations require heroism, unless the act of heroism is truly outstanding. "The act of rescue must be one in which no full measure of responsibility exists between the rescuer and the rescued, which precludes those whose vocational duties require them to perform such acts, unless the rescues are clearly beyond the line of duty; and members of the immediate family, except in cases of outstanding heroism where the rescuer loses his or her life or is severely injured."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnegie_Hero_Fund
This article in Men's Health notes "nine out of every 10 Carnegie heroes have been men".
"Heroic rescuing behaviour is a male-typical trait in humans ... This study looked at news archives of local papers in the UK in order to discover what kind of characteristics rescuers possess. It was found that males were highly more likely to rescue than females were".
When it comes to men there's very much a misleading tendency to focus on the negative manifestations of their tendency towards public sphere agency and ignore all the positive ways it manifests. I think in the past we had a more balanced viewpoint surrounding it, and there's been a very motivated attempt to stamp out positive perceptions of men due to an idea that these perceptions are problematic. It's very hard for me not to see the slow erasure of positive male qualities from the public discourse as being intentional.
And also the next problem with your point is that it basically ignores the role women play in creating violence. Men are expected to commit violence on behalf of women, and to perform on behalf of women. And you can easily see plenty of instances throughout history of women weaponising that social expectation and openly cajoling men into performing violence against others, as I mentioned in a previous comment of mine. But violence by proxy perpetrated by women is, again, largely a topic that is taboo in the public discourse.
You got there just before me 😁 So, this happened faster than I expected, but everyone downthread saying he'd never be arrested/it wouldn't be for years, seems we were all wrong.
As to why now right before the hearing? No idea, unless (1) somebody (Ellison?) dropped a lot of testimony into their laps so they could do it now or (2) they had reason to suspect he wasn't going to turn up but was going to do a runner or (3) it's simply because there has been so much talk going around about "he donated all this money to the Democrats, he's bought his freedom" and this isn't a good look for the current administration to be suspected of 'get away with crime thanks to bribery'.
EDIT: News just in! Allegedly he refused to testify before the committee, so looks like if he wouldn't co-operate, he's going to face the consequences:
Former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried is refusing to testify at a hearing this week about his company’s implosion, the Senate Banking Committee said Monday.
Attorneys for the crypto platform’s founder have also said Bankman-Fried, who is based in the Bahamas, will not accept service of a subpoena to compel his testimony before the panel, senators said.
Bankman-Fried is scheduled to appear at a House Financial Services Committee hearing on Tuesday that will focus on his company’s collapse.
In a joint statement, Senate Banking Chair Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio and ranking member Pat Toomey, R-Pa., said they have “offered Sam Bankman-Fried two different dates for providing testimony before the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee, and are willing to accommodate virtual testimony.”
For Anti-Evil Operations specifically, this should link to the most recent post removed by AEO that they've heavily references as a WTF moment, as at best a violation of the use-mention distinction and at worst actively counterproductive. bsbbtnh's post here is not the sort of thing I'd want to turn the forum into a long-lasting debate on, but in addition to the post's removal claims to have received a week-long suspensions.
Unfortunately, most older AEO activities look like the underlying post have fallen off the API that camas uses for indexing, or the full account was hit in ways that make the posts show up as deleted for camas purposes. The first four AEO actions were in response to a thread about a mass-shooter (I think the Dayton Ohio mass shooter?), which were significantly less controversial at the time, and seem to be in the first category. The oft-reference straight-of-wikipedia 'age of consent' list seems to be in the latter category.
Then there's the incredibly bad blocking implementation, that two years in Reddit still hadn't actually formalized those new 'advocacy of violence' rules that were supposed to be out in two weeks, that the mods were getting admin mails asking if they had any questions and then never responding, so on.
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