Of the 45 people arrested for rioting, unlawful assembly, stolen
property, burglary or robbery on May 29 and May 30 so far, 38 had
Minnesota addresses, according to publicly available jail records
reviewed by FOX 9.
I did my own look at the numbers, and the Fox 9 figures check out. Miscommunication? Wishcasting? Who knows, but quite a pratfall to have to walk that back. I had thought at first maybe outsiders were being routed to other jails, but the about-face indicates the initial reports were wrong all along.
Update 2020-06-01: Churning some more numbers from the data set I picked up yesterday:
Of the 74 people arrested on riot-related charges (as set out in the Fox 9 criteria), 63 were from Minnesota.
Of those 63 Gopher Staters, 36 were from the Twin Cities, but 27 — nearly half — were from other towns. Violence tourism is apparently a Thing.
The motion filed on behalf of U.S. Soccer on Monday reiterated a
number of objections made throughout the lawsuit. But among the most
stark were repeated assertions that, regardless of any other
consideration, players from the two teams do not perform equal work --
either in terms of revenue potential or the actual physical labor
required.
As a result, U.S. Soccer said, women's players do not
qualify for relief under the Equal Pay Act or Title VII of the 1964
Civil Rights Act.
"The overall soccer-playing ability required to
compete at the senior men's national team level is materially influenced
by the level of certain physical attributes," the defense motion stated
at one point, "such as speed and strength, required for the job."
That
followed the original motion for summary judgment, in which U.S. Soccer
stated that women's players did not perform jobs requiring "equal
skill, effort and responsibility under similar working conditions."
That the lawsuit got this far is really astonishing, but that these things need to be pointed out is absurd:
We already have pay in athletics distributed by ability, not just in the major leagues (starters generally make more money than relief pitchers) but in the overall professional leagues (MLB players make more than minor leaguers). So the principle is not, on its face, absurd, despite attorney Molly Levison's sneering at it as the product of a "Paleolithic era" mentality.
Professional soccer players are also paid by privately owned club
teams. Megan Rapinoe, for example, plays for Seattle Reign FC, one of
nine teams in the National Women's Soccer League (NWSL). Player's
salaries in the NWSL range from about $16,000 to $46,000 annually, according to NPR.
That's not a lot, and it's certainly less than even the lowest-paid
players in Major League Soccer (MLS; the top North American men's pro
soccer league), who earn a mandatory minimum salary of $60,000.
That
pay gap isn't the result of sexism. It's what the market allows. Major
League Soccer teams drew an average of 21,000 fans last year, while NWSL
games drew about 6,000. The TV contract MLS has with ESPN and other
broadcasters generates $90 million a year. While neither league
discloses revenue figures, it's a safe bet MLS earns considerably more—and, thus, its players do too.
For women to earn what men do, it's clear they need to get butts in the seats and watching on TV. So far, that hasn't happened. (Given some of the women's teams' fans, maybe there's a reason.)
Those subsidies in fact are a big reason that the US women's team has won four World Cup titles, more than the US men's team ever (zero). Only a handful of countries pay their female soccer players, and this makes a huge difference in the quality and quantity of training the players can undertake. It puts the players in the interesting position of asking for more subsidy because they already get some.
It's hard to look at this situation and wonder what self-serving snake oil the women's team attorney offered her clients. The bottom line is still the bottom line, and at least one member of the women's team understands this:
"Fans can come to games," [Seattle Reign FC player Megan] Rapinoe said. "Obviously, the national team
games will be a hot ticket, but we have nine teams in the NWSL. You can
go to your league games, you can support that way. You can buy players'
jerseys, you can lend support in that way, you can tell your friends
about it, you can become season ticket-holders."
All the old feminist malarkey about chimerical wage gaps and the absence of women on corporate boards, in STEM fields, etc. The Harvard Business Review story on the subject is both depressing and predictable, hitting on the “we’re not showing enough women in STEM and positions of power in Hollywood” nonsense, raising the obvious rebuttal of many people believe gender inequalities in professional advancement are a reflection of women’s own choices” while failing to seriously grapple with the real arguments behind it — the usual feminist hand-wave that accompanies such facile, boilerplate dogma.
Then there’s the business of eliminating sexual harassment in the workplace. Here’s their big idea:
That’s why it’s so important that companies, philanthropists, and activists follow the lead of organizations such as TIME’S UP and the Collaborative for Women’s Safety and Dignity, both of which are committed to fighting for equity foreverywoman in the workforce. TIME’S UP is partnering with major organizations like the National Women’s Law Center and the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team to promote an unprecedented policy and advocacy agenda to expand rights and protections for women, whether they work in the C-suite or on the factory floor. The Collaborative for Women’s Safety and Dignity is focused on ensuring that survivors of sexual harassment — and women of color in particular — have a central role in creating solutions to end gender-based violence in the workplace. The Collaborative’s early ideas include building an evidence-based communications hub to help drive more-effective messaging, and seeding and scaling data-driven programs that develop leadership capacity among survivor-led movements.
This is all boilerplate, dogma that assumes “survivor” first, as though every lame effort at a pass were the same thing as violent rape. And we can’t have a whole paragraph without kneeling before the intersectionalists (“women of color”)! She then stumps for mandatory paid time off for caregiving, never mind Sweden’s outcomes there. She observes that women are underrepresented in Congress versus their overall numbers in the population, and opines that “When you look at the data, though, you see that the problem isn’t that women don’t win; it’s that they are less likely to run.” So ... she’s going to force women to run for elected office? Randomly boot male candidates for office?
The muddle-headedness continues ever on. Why do women leave the field? They gamely try to answer:
The Kapor Center, an organization dedicated to diversity in tech,
commissioned the Tech Leavers study in 2017, a “first of its kind
national study examining why people voluntarily left their jobs in
tech.” The study found that workplace culture plays a significant role
in driving turnover — especially for women and underrepresented
minorities. Nearly two-thirds of the 2,000 respondents indicated that
they would have stayed in their jobs had their employers fixed their
culture. The study also found that culture problems are expensive — costing the industry more than $16 billion each year.
If you actually dig down to the Kapor Center/Pew survey of people who left the tech field (PDF), on page 24 you will notice a chart of all the reasons why people experienced unfairness; many of them are similar across the board (more white/Asian women were likely to complain about bad management [47%] than any other group, but it was the most popular single complaint of all surveyed), and many are similar across sexes. Particularly striking is the fact that 10% of white/Asian women surveyed had experienced unwanted sexual attention — in contrast with 7% of white/Asian men! If the big problem is inept management, it's hard to see how diversity voodoo would fix that.
The eyelids start to droop. We have read this all before, the tendentious assumption of guilt, the painful, earnest, and venal belief that shamans could right these non-problems. At last, she gets to the real point: she’s going to harangue and pressure companies to make stupid decisions based on whether they have “enough” women (emboldening mine):
Those of us eager to increase women’s power and influence can’t rely on other people’s sense of ethics or self-interest. We need to amplify the pressure they’re feeling. Three constituencies — shareholders, consumers, and employees — hold disproportionate influence over institutions. By mobilizing they can translate that influence into targeted pressure.
Translating back to English: there is no upside to companies for any of this insane program because we have nothing to offer them but pain. There is no quid pro quo for hiring more women — and frankly, there never will be, because people who think as she does operate based on a victimhood ideology that blames men for every disparate outcome, divorcing women from volition, agency, and responsibility. As John Barry writes in Quillette,
A world that has been told—falsely—for decades that gender is merely a
social construct, is a world in which a well-intentioned
multi-billionaire can throw a huge amount of money at gender equality,
despite admitting that
this is “only a small fraction of what’s necessary.” But what if the
reality is not so much a leaky pipeline as an unstoppable tidal [wave] of
women’s choices? What if money can’t make mother nature go away?
Suppose you were a progressive rent control advocate, and suppose you were an idiot — but I repeat myself. California‘s legislature, now in full thrall of the loony left, has lately passed a statewide rent control law, with all the predictable consequences thereof:
Economists and other policy experts have long criticized rent control for reducing the supply and quality of rental housing in the long-run. California's rent control bill is no exception says Michael Hendrix, state and local policy director at the Manhattan Institute.
"What we are going to get is a reason for landlords to convert apartments to condos," says Hendrix. "The net result of that is potentially more units being taken off the market, and long-term this housing crisis getting worse, not better."
Hendrix argues that landlords, when faced with limits on how much they can raise their rents, will simply take their rental units off the market, converting them into condominiums that can be sold at market price.
A study of rent control in San Francisco published in the journal American Economic Review this month found that "while rent control prevents displacement of incumbent renters in the short run, the lost rental housing supply likely drove up market rents in the long run, ultimately undermining the goals of the law."
Economics? Bah, say the progressives who imagine themselves smarter (or at least more virtuous) than landlords. Gavin Newsom cashed in on that sentiment when he tweeted his support for the measure:
Nearly a third of CA renters spend more than 50% of their paycheck on rent.
We need change.
We’re bringing the strongest protections and relief in the nation:
- A cap on your rent.
- Protections against evictions.
- Access to legal aid $$.https://t.co/ce7K0Dru0g
Of course, what makes this interesting is what precipitated the measure: rapidly rising rents. The bill caps increases at 5% plus inflation. So, how fast was rent rising in California overall? I looked at my former home turf of Orange County, and found this:
So, if we look at the Orange County figures as typical (they probably aren’t, the slope on the other two markets is slightly higher, and the LA County figure is about 31%), amortizing this backwards over the eight years covered in this graph, the annual average rent increase is 2.5%. In steeper Los Angeles County, the average annual rent increase is 3.8%. All of which is to say, the rubes have been conned again, just as they were in Oregon, which has a crazy high 9.9% annual rent increase limit.
Gad Saad reminds us that the answer to rhetorical headline questions is always "no" with his essay in Psychology Today, "Is Toxic Masculinity A Valid Concept?" Excerpt:
... [M]ost of the traits and behaviors that are likely found under the rubric
of “toxic masculinity” are precisely those that most women find
attractive in an ideal mate! This is not a manifestation of “antiquated
stereotypes.” It is a reality that is as trivially obvious as the
existence of gravity, and no amount of campus brainwashing will ever
alter these facts. Let us stop pathologizing masculinity. Instead, let
us appreciate the endless ways by which men and women are similar to one
another, as well as the important ways in which the two sexes differ.
An unusual good piece in the NYT from Thomas Edsall on the new APA guidelines, quoting David French, Steven Pinker, Ryan A. McKelley, and a number of others.
In case you wondered whether Harry's was an alternative, in 2017 they, too, ran with the idiotic "toxic masculinity" trope. (I saw the tweet as recently as a couple days ago, but it's been since deleted. The subsequent deletion of the tweet might just be read as corporate ass-covering, in which case at least they understood what it was they did.
A closing point: "toxic masculinity" appears to require transmission by some cultural means, and is frequently asserted (as with the Gillette ad) to be either tacitly accepted or actively encouraged. Yet, if this is the case, why isn't there some culture where this is no longer active or has been stamped out? The whole affair looks, as described, to be a sort of conspiracy theory.
Update 2019-01-23: Ran into this City Journal piece by Kay S. Hymowitz via Christina Hoff Sommers yesterday but only today got around to reading it. This pulls in the dumb Covington High fracas and ties it back to "toxic masculinity". Money graf:
Now you could argue—and I have—that
contemporary American society has not done a great job of taming and
channeling juvenile aggression or of developing young men and women
into the best they can be, to use the words of the Gillette ad. But
“toxic masculinity” goes much farther than that. It evokes a society
dedicated to creating and stoking the raw male desire for
dominance. I’m hardly the first to point out that males engage in more
violence and dominance behavior than females in every known human
society, as well as in every primate troop. When the authors of the APA
guidelines get to the section on bullying, however, they locate its
cause in “constricted notions of masculinity emphasizing aggression,
homophobia, and misogyny,” that is, in social teaching.
... The ad’s writers miss the possibility that “boys will be boys” is not
guidance or an excuse; it’s a warning. Far from encouraging boys’
aggression, the American “patriarchy” tries in its own crude way to
squelch it, as any decent society must do. That’s why the country is
awash with anti-bullying programs and public-service announcements.
Drifting off to the Covington Catholic fracas: Ross Douthat in the NYT who steals a page from Scott Alexander. Neatly done almost to the end, where he writes himself an excuse note with "Cuck".
So now comes Gillette with a stupid ad decrying "toxic masculinity" and yammering at men, instead of, you know, selling razors. The video itself has just short of 500,000 dislikes, and 167,000 likes, suggesting the reaction is, among those who care to register an opinion, strongly negative. If this is a reaction to the increasingly unshaven millennial generation, it's hard to see how alienating your existing customer base is exactly going to help your sales.
The business of labeling all masculinity "toxic" is one that the American Psychological Association lately has taken on. Andrew Sullivan is on it:
At
the very start of the document, for example, this “traditional
masculinity ideology” (TMI) is deemed the reason why men commit 90
percent of murders (and always have in every culture and every moment in
history). That’s an extraordinary claim, and presumably requires urgent
intervention. If a terrorist group, defined as adhering to an ideology,
were to kill more than 15,000 Americans a year (the total number of
murders committed by men in the U.S. in 2017), we would surely respond
with a deep sense of urgency.
What is TMI? The definition varies
throughout the document, as it flings various slurs at half the human
race. Here’s one such definition: “anti-femininity, achievement,
eschewal of the appearance of weakness, and adventure, risk, and
violence.” Just weigh that list for a minute — and how expansive it is.
Men are exhibiting a dangerous ideology when they seek to “achieve”
things, when they risk their lives or fortunes, when they explore
unfamiliar territory — and these character traits are interchangeable
with violence. As you read the guidelines, you realize that the APA
believes that psychologists should be informing men that what they might
think is their nature is actually just a set of social constructs that
hurt them, murders thousands, and deeply wounds the society as a whole.
The APA's sordid diatribe-posing-as-therapeutic "reminded me of the way psychologists used to treat gay men: as
pathological, dangerous, and in need of reparative and conversion
therapy". He's not the only one to make that leap:
All of this, from the new @APA guidelines, is of course ideological codswallop. Pure grievance studies pseudoscience. It would be hilarious if they weren't serious about it.
But the last sentence is particularly disturbing. It's the progressive equivalent of conversion therapy. pic.twitter.com/PvLnpv26NU
So, a rural Virginia restaurant named the Red Hen refused service to Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the president's press secretary, and her party. The owner, Stephanie Wilkinson, did this on the grounds that "the restaurant has certain standards that I feel it has to uphold, such as honesty, and compassion, and cooperation". Sanders and her party left without further incident.
Waters said, “If you think we’re rallying now, you ain’t seen nothing
yet. You have members of your cabinet being booed out of restaurants.
You have protesters taking up at their house. We say no peace, no sleep.
No peace, so sleep. And guess what? We’re going to win this battle,
because while you try to quote the Bible, Jeff Sessions and others, you
really don’t know the Bible. God is on our side. On the side of the
children. On the side of what’s right. On the side of what’s honorable.
On the side of understanding that if we can’t protect the children, we
can’t protect anybody, and so let’s stay the course. Let’s make sure
that we show up where ever we have to show up. If you see anybody from
that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline
station, you get out, and you create a crowd, and you push back on them,
and you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.”
The first problem I see here is that of charitable reading of Waters' statement. It is in no way
clear that she intended for mobs to attack, although it is easy to read it in that way. ("Push back" is not the same thing as "push", i.e. physical assault.) But mobs do not do nuance. They are also not in charge of the venues she mentions. As Soave put it,
Waters seems to be encouraging people to form angry mobs to harass Trump
officials; if such a practice became normal, it could very well get out
of hand quickly. Besides, Waters doesn't get to decide the rules of
engagement in department stores, gas stations, and restaurants—the
owners of those properties do. I bet a lot of them would prefer if
people didn't harass other customers, regardless of whether those
customers work for Trump.
The plain problems raised by such incendiary gabble sparked a response from no less a figure than Nancy Pelosi:
In the crucial months ahead, we must strive to make America beautiful again. Trump’s daily lack of civility has provoked responses that are predictable but unacceptable. As we go forward, we must conduct elections in a way that achieves unity from sea to shining sea. https://t.co/vlpqOBLK4R
Leaving aside the problem of whether America is beautiful with only the right political leadership, Pelosi's tweet was as close to a public (if coded) rebuke as another member of the same party could ever offer.
So I went to see the surgeon today for a followup appointment following my knee surgery, a routine arthroscopy. He recommended I take an anti-inflammatory, 800 mg of ibuprofen, three times a day. Doses that large are not always well-tolerated; they have been known to cause gastric upset. Consequently, we get this:
Meet Duexis, a product of Horizon Pharma. Duexis consists of 800 mg of ibuprofen, and 26.6 mg of famotidine. Ibuprofen was patented in the UK in 1961, and expired in 1984; the US patent (3769425A) was granted in 1970, and would have expired in 1987. Originally sold under the trade name of Pepcid, famotidine has been off patent for 20 years, with generics appearing in 2001.
I checked at Sam's Club, and 200 count 20mg famotidine is currently $8.76, and 1,200 200 mg ibuprofen is available for $10.88. Assuming I take three 800 mg ibuprofen doses daily and three of the 20 mg famotidine, that would mean the latter is the limiting factor, and I could go about two months (66 days, plus two doses the next) on that. (The 1,200 ibuprofen would take me 100 days, a little over three months.)
A one month prescription of Duexis (30 days @ 3x/day) is $2,715 (per the Sam's Club pharmacy). Two months is $5,430.
Duexis is covered by US patent 8,501,228, which I assume is the reason for this insane pricing. (Horizon also granted Par Pharmaceutical a license to make a generic starting in 2023 as a result of a patent suit settlement.) This kind of apparently frivolous patent grant is disturbingly common:
When the patent reaches its expiry date, the comfortable monopoly
evaporates, replaced by cut-throat competition. Incumbents have three
ways of defending themselves. Marketing can create brand-specific
demand, dulling the temptation to switch to low-price products.
Ibuprofen illustrates this. Developed by the chemists at Boots itself in
the 1960s, the patent expired in 1984. But a year earlier Boots had
created Nurofen, branded ibuprofen. The clever mix of packaging and
advertising protected its profits. The lucrative Nurofen brand was sold
in 2006; Boots still stocks the product, which costs five times more
than its generic equivalent.
A second strategy nudges customers towards newer drugs that are still protected by patent. Omeprazole, a drug to reduce stomach acid developed by AstraZeneca in the 1980s, shows how it works. Branded as Losec in Britain and Prilosec in America, it became one of the world’s bestselling drugs in the mid-1990s. With the patent set to expire in 2001 AstraZeneca faced a drop in profits. So the company took its drug and adapted it, creating a closely related compound, esomeprazole, which it sold as Nexium. Though a clear offshoot of the original medicine, this counted as a new drug and was given a patent. A big marketing campaign and attractive pricing helped shift demand away from Losec and towards Nexium. With the help of this strategy, sales between 2006 and 2013 amounted to almost $40 billion.
A third approach is to "pay the makers of generics not to compete". None of these are in the customer's interest.
Ironically, the surgeon pointed me at a manufacturer program that was going to cut me a break if I used their particular pharmacy — oh, joy! — I only have to pay a $10 copay! But this made me wonder if my insurance was going to pay it or some part of it. In which case, am I not indirectly paying for this usuriousness?
Tim Chevalier is the kind of person who needs to be nowhere near any sort of power, yet always seeks it out. "Too much 'social activism'" sounds like an excuse.
Interesting commentary from @iamcuriousblue:
Now THIS is an interesting development. I didn't know that Tim Chevelier was with Google or played a role in the Damore case, but it fits. I can confirm that Chevelier/Catamorphism is a particularly nasty SJW troll. > https://t.co/23l1KtNMZa@jaspergregory
In particular, Chevelier was one of the more aggressive members the online mob Kitty Stryker raised up to attack Madison Young a few years back. He made a point of contacting groups Young was a part of to try to get her booted. @jaspergregory
So Chevelier definitely has this pattern of horizontal hostility, of trying to get people fired, or kicked out of organizations. Not surprising that he was at Google that he would have been one of the people stirring the pot against Damore. @jaspergregory
It is interesting to see Chevelier sue on the same grounds that Damore did, and on general principal I'd support it. However, based on what I know about Chevelier's history, I suspect there was more to it than the suit admits. >
Tim Chevelier's targeting of Madison Young and her participation in HackerMom's over Young's disagreement with the infamous Antioch College sexual offense policy. https://t.co/6ROZmHDo1y
The last section of Molly McKew's Wired essay about the recent DOJ indictment of Russian influence in the 2016 is a conclusion in search of supporting evidence:
4. What impact did it have?
We’re only at the
beginning of having an answer to this question because we’ve only just
begun to ask some of the right questions. But Mueller’s indictment shows
that Russian accounts and agents accomplished more than just stoking
divisions and tensions with sloppy propaganda memes. The messaging was
more sophisticated, and some Americans took action. For example, the
indictment recounts a number of instances where events and
demonstrations were organized by Russians posing as Americans on social
media. These accounts aimed to get people to do specific things. And it
turns out—some people did.
How many? Did the material change the minds and votes of undecided voters? These questions she lacks answers to, but that it did is taken as an article of faith. It explains the nutjobbery of CNN in this excerpt:
The Russians must be licking their chops watching stuff like this happen.
Does CNN realize it may be unwittingly facilitating what the actual goal of the "interference" seems to have been? https://t.co/00I7aNttvf
Via Slashdot comes an absurd rant from Scott E. Page in which he rails against the very idea of meritocracy:
The multidimensional or layered
character of complex problems also undermines the principle of
meritocracy: The idea that the ‘best person’ should be hired. There is
no best person. When putting together an oncological research team, a
biotech company such as Gilead or Genentech would not construct a
multiple-choice test and hire the top scorers, or hire people whose
resumes score highest according to some performance criteria. Instead,
they would seek diversity. They would build a team of people who bring
diverse knowledge bases, tools and analytic skills. That team would more
likely than not include mathematicians (though not logicians such as
Griffeath). And the mathematicians would likely study dynamical systems
and differential equations.
Page here actually argues that there can be no such thing as meritocracy when problem domains are so broad and complex; "no test or criteria applied to individuals will produce the best team", he claims.
But the problems with this criticism should be obvious. First, Page injects his own bias ahead of hiring managers, who he claims have a flawed understanding of what it is that needs to be done by a particular employee. Yet, if hiring managers don't know what a given position requires, how does Page, who is removed from the process entirely, get to claim he knows better than they?
The second problem is the bait-and-switch nature of his definition of "meritocracy". Page has gained notoriety and accolades for his allegedly ground-breaking work showing that there can be no such thing, and in fact that diverse teams produce better results than purported "meritocracies".
Q. The
term “diversity” has become a code word for inclusion of racial, ethnic
and sexual minorities. Is that what you’re talking about? A. I
mean differences in how people think. Two people can look quite
different and think similarly. Having said that, there’s certainly a lot
of evidence that people’s identity groups — ethnic, racial, sexual, age
— matter when it comes to diversity in thinking.
Page quickly shifts gears from claims of a quantitative judgment to a qualitative one (emboldening mine):
Q. In your book, you advocate affirmative action, an unpopular social policy these days. What’s your argument?
A. That it’s a flat-out good because, as I said earlier, it makes everything we do more powerful.
For
a while, I chaired admissions in the graduate political science
department at the University of Michigan. We didn’t just look at high
test scores. We looked at things like whether an applicant had worked
with Teach for America. We wanted to bring in people who had experiences
and modes of thinking that would improve everyone else.
At
a university, people learn from each other as well as their professors.
Another suburban kid who was raised to score high on tests doesn’t add
all that much to the mix.
Page elsewhere points to a paper he coauthored in 2004 as alleged proof of this theory, using absurdly simplistic models of problem solvers in which diversity trumps competence. Ultimately, it's Page's bait-and-switch that makes this so infuriating: he claims diversity of knowledge is important, but argues for a sort of watered-down quota system based on diversity of identity. Unsurprisingly, Page's paper is cited 753 times, according to Google Scholar. It is a kind of grasping at straws for the identity politics crowd, who have precious little in the way of proof to cling to in their voodoo cult.
It is possible, I suppose, for a graduate program to have less value than the one Donna Riley heads, yet it is hard to imagine. Engineering and Engineering Education are two different things, with different needs, and yet here she is, earning an “NSF CAREER award on implementing and assessing pedagogies of liberation in engineering classrooms.“ I have no idea what that might mean in practice, but as Campus Reform informs us, she has gone full-out for duckspeak in the academic peer-reviewed publications:
The leader of Purdue University’s School of Engineering Education recently declared that academic “rigor” reinforces “white male heterosexual privilege.”
Donna Riley, who previously taught engineering at Smith College for 13 years, published an article in the most recent issue of the journal Engineering Education, arguing that academic rigor is a “dirty deed” that upholds “white male heterosexual privilege.”
“One of rigor’s purposes is, to put it bluntly, a thinly veiled assertion of white male (hetero)sexuality,” she writes, explaining that rigor “has a historical lineage of being about hardness, stiffness, and erectness; its sexual connotations—and links to masculinity in particular—are undeniable.”
Is “Engineering Education” now a sinkhole into which any idiot may fall? If Ms. Riley is any indicator, it seems like a sort of bug light for those who glean that engineering is somehow important to society, yet lack a certain felicity with numbers, analytical capacity, and rational habits of mind, her Chem E. degree from Princeton notwithstanding. Being so long ago, she seems to have either forgotten all of it, or held a grudge that they made her work so hard. The dean of Purdue’s engineering school, Mung Chiang, has an anodyne web page which makes no mention of her or her bogus accomplishments. The postmodern barbarians are at the gate, but they have not yet acquired the real keys to power.
Update: What a staggering bibliography she developed for her NSF CAREER award; one day I'm sure the Mech. E. department will gaze in wonder at "Power/Knowledge: Using Foucault to promote critical understandings of content and pedagogy in engineering thermodynamics", and the even more wonderfully named, ""You're All a bunch of fucking feminists": Addressing the perceived
conflict between gender and professional identities using the Montreal
Massacre". Presumably, "other ways of knowing" will involve unicorns or manticores, although I do not recommend flying aboard any aircraft designed using such a regimen.
There is a key detail here, one that eludes reason and pervades belief: that true or false, it’s true.
Perhaps what made Lindin’s twit different is that she openly said what many knew but denied. This has been the case for years with Title IX. This was the case when women, after Jackie in the Rolling Stone/UVA story, after the Mattress Girl melodrama, still argued in support of their victims. That these claims were false was of no consequence. They were true as long as women chose to believe they were true.
We are at a crossroads. Soon enough, this will become apparent, but it will take some more time before the cowed and fearful come to the only conclusion possible. There is no tenable way to allow this game to be played, whether in work, in school, on the streets or in the home, without committing yourself, you family, your future to potential doom.
You did nothing wrong? Great. You lose anyway. Explain to your friends, your spouse, your children that you aren’t a rapist, but they still won’t have food on their plate, shoes on their feet, because your job, your reputation, the future you spent your life building, was wrongfully taken from you because women are victims and should be entitled to their “truth” despite your innocence.
I consulted with friends — female developers — and talked to my daughter about how to handle the situation in class. I suggested that she talk to you. I offered to talk to you [the instructor]. I offered to come talk to the class. I offered to send one of my male friends, perhaps a well-known local programmer, to go talk to the class. Finally, my daughter decided to plow through, finish the class, and avoid all her classmates. I hate to think what less-confident girls would have done in the same situation.
Yet of course, the one thing that arguably needs to be done is to bring it to the attention of the teacher. In the original essay, that, apparently, had no place in the discussion; he was supposed to just figure it out on his own somehow, even if the abuse had happened outside of his knowledge. This is crazy*.
*It wasn't clear that this already happened when I first read the piece, before the second update appeared. In fact the daughter went to the teacher, who in turn went to the principal, who ... called the girl to his office and told her he wasn't going to do anything. Now, you can argue that's the wrong thing to do, that the teacher should have intervened — but it also points out a flaw in her response as well, to the extent that you won't always have someone around to stick up for you.
122354.5.
(a) A
pet store operator shall not sell a live dog, cat, or rabbit in a pet
store unless the dog, cat, or rabbit was obtained from a public animal
control agency or shelter, society for the prevention of cruelty to
animals shelter, humane society shelter, or rescue group that is in a
cooperative agreement with at least one private or public shelter
pursuant to Section 31108, 31752, or 31753 of the Food and Agricultural
Code.
(b) All sales of dogs and cats
authorized by this section shall be in compliance with paragraph (1) of
subdivision (a) of Section 30503 of, subdivision (b) of Section 30520
of, paragraph (1) of subdivision (a) of Section 31751.3 of, and
subdivision (b) of Section 31760 of, the Food and Agricultural
Code.
(c) Each pet store shall
maintain records sufficient to document the source of each dog, cat, or
rabbit the pet store sells or provides space for, for at least one year.
Additionally, each pet store shall post, in a conspicuous location on
the cage or enclosure of each animal, a sign listing the name of the
public animal control agency or shelter, society for the prevention of
cruelty to animals shelter, humane society shelter, or nonprofit from
which each dog, cat, or rabbit was obtained. Public animal control
agencies or shelters may periodically require pet stores engaged in
sales of dogs, cats, or rabbits to provide access to these records.
(d) A
pet store operator who is subject to this section is exempt from
the requirements set forth in Article 2 (commencing with Section
122125) of Chapter 5, except for the requirements set forth in Section
122135, paragraphs (3) and (4) of subdivision (a) of, and paragraphs (5)
and (6) of subdivision (b) of, Section 122140, and Sections 122145 and
122155.
(e) A pet store operator who
violates this section shall be subject to a civil penalty of five
hundred dollars ($500). Each animal offered for sale in violation of
this section shall constitute a separate violation.
(f) For
purposes of this section, a “rescue group” is an organization that is
tax exempt under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code, and
that does not obtain animals from breeders or brokers for
compensation.
As we've already seen, there's a lot of ways to hide revenue in 990s, including as executive salaries and other compensation. The way this bill is written would appear to permit puppy mills to rebrand themselves as "rescues" (or to create new intermediary "rescues") who would launder the dogs, shifting the actual profit center. Because of the perverse way USDA APHIS rules regulate commercial dog breeders, ironically it would be small-scale breeders (PDF) who would be most affected by the new language:
Q. Under the final rule,
what is the new
definition
of a retail
pet
store?
A.
In the final rule, “retail pet store” means a place of
business or residence at which the seller, buyer, and
the animal available
for
sale
are
physically
present
so
that
every
buyer
may
personally
observe the animal
prior
to purchasing
and/or
taking
custody
of it after
purchase. [Emboldening in the passage above is mine. - RM]
By
personally
observing the animal, the
buyer
is exercising
public
oversight
over
the animal
and in this
way
is helping to
ensure
its health and
humane
treatment.
Retailers
who sell their pet
animals
to customers
in face-
to-face
transactions
do not have
to obtain
an
AWA
license because their
animals
are
subject
to such
public
oversight.
Under the
AWA
regulations,
a “retail
pet
store”
is
also a place
where
only
the
following
animals
are
sold or offered
for
sale as pets:
dogs,
cats,
rabbits,
guinea
pigs,
hamsters,
gerbils,
rats,
mice,
gophers,
chinchillas,
domestic
ferrets,
domestic
farm
animals,
birds,
and
coldblooded
species.
Essentially, this eliminates small-scale breeders from selling in California, because their puppies are not from a "rescue", and because they meet the APHIS definition of "retail pet store". That this is approximately insane is par for the course; it is, after all, California.
In the interests of clarity, a brief discourse on the subject of two words I see frequently in various conversations around the Internet: "tone policing" and "gaslighting". Both could have legitimate uses, but as typically employed, they reflect poorly on the user. Despite claims to the opposite, they are in fact efforts to silence discussion.
That's all nice, but it also fails a critical test: if you want to persuade people of your position, you need to take their interests and viewpoints in mind. That is, to object "tone policing" is the sound of the speaker failing to tailor the message to the audience — and demanding that audience listen and agree anyway. You want to call people names, yell at the top of your lungs, have a tantrum in public? Fine, but don't expect anyone to pay attention to your position, let alone adopt it. Is your purpose to persuade, or vent?
That is, ultimately, they must answer the question, do I want to be a jerk in order to make a point? For a longer-form meditation on tone policing that involves Arthur Chu, the now-ancient hashtag #StopClymer, and whales not getting cancer, Scott Alexander's "Living By The Sword" has some interesting (if perhaps overlong) examples. He wraps up thusly:
... [I]f you elevate jerkishness into a principle, if you try to
undermine the rules that keep niceness, community, and civilization
going, the defenses against social cancer – then your movement will
fracture, it will be hugely embarrassing, the atmosphere will become
toxic, unpopular people will be thrown to the mob, everyone but the
thickest-skinned will bow out, the people you need to convince will view
you with a mixture of terror and loathing, and you’ll spend so much
time dealing with internal conflicts that you’ll never get enough blood
supply to grow large enough to kill a whale.
The whale-killing remark stems from an observation that whales don't apparently get cancer; one possible explanation for this is that cancers are not all that good at cooperation, and so "whales survive because they are so big that their cancers get cancer and die." (He mentions in the text that this is possibly not the case, but ad argumentum it serves his purpose for social structures as well.) That is, non-cooperative actors in a society, if they get to be numerous enough, start succumbing to their intrinsic fractiousness and selfishness. It looks something like this, on-screen:
Gaslighting
Derived from the 1944 feature Gas Light; Wikipedia expands: "The plot concerns a husband who attempts to convince his wife and others
that she is insane by manipulating small elements of their environment,
and subsequently insisting that she is mistaken, remembering things
incorrectly, or delusional when she points out these changes." That is, the husband tries to make his wife think she misremembers factual events.
Used thus, "gaslighting" is a valuable (if infrequently applicable) term. Yet all too frequently, we see "gaslighting" used as a sword to dispatch others' interpretations of events, as though the speaker's version were the only one possible. Kris Nelson's definition at Everyday Feminism is instructive (formatting is original):
In short, gaslighting
is a form of psychological abuse “in which information is twisted or
spun, selectively omitted to favor the abuser, or false information is
presented with the intent of making victims doubt their own memory,
perception, and sanity.”
Essentially, gaslighting is a tactic used to destabilize your understanding of reality, making you constantly doubt your own experiences.
It gets better:
Furthermore, gaslighting is commonly used to discredit the lived experiences of mentally ill and neurodivergent folks, which is both abusive and ableist.
Several points here:
It is incumbent on the speaker to convince others of their interpretations of events.
Disagreements on those interpretations are not "abusive".
Maybe you are just plain crazy, which is why others doubt you.
The first definition of gaslighting (about factual events) is useful; the second (about interpretations) is manipulative.
Magic Words
Both of these terms are forms of something Freddie deBoer called "magic words", which supports a style of argumentation he calls "We Are All Already Decided" (emboldening mine):
This is the form of argument, and of comedy, that takes as its
presumption that all good and decent people are already agreed on the
issue in question. In fact, We Are All Already Decided presumes that the
offense is not just in thinking the wrong thing you think but in not
realizing that We Are All Already Decided that the thing you think is
deeply ridiculous. And the embedded argument, such as it is, is not on
the merits of whatever issue people are disagreeing about, but on the
assumed social costs of being wrong about an issue on which We Are All
Already Decided. Which is great, provided everybody you need to convince
cares about being part of your little koffee klatsch. If not, well….
All of this, frankly, is politically ruinous. I meet and interact with a
lot of young lefties who are just stunning rhetorically weak; they feel
all of their politics very intensely but can’t articulate them to
anyone who doesn’t share the same vocabulary, the same set of cultural
and social signifiers that are used to demonstrate you’re one of the
“right sort of people.” These kids are often great, they’re smart and
passionate, I agree with them on most things, but they have no ability
at all to express themselves to those who are not already in their
tribe. They say terms like “privilege” or “mansplain” or “tone policing”
and expect the conversation to somehow just stop, that if you say the
magic words, you have won that round and the world is supposed to roll
over to what you want.
The problem, then, is that such calls do not address an opposition audience so much as they signal virtue. They talk past those who need convincing. They ignore actual facts and counterargument. And they are irreparably smug.
“Socialism failing to work as it always does. This time in Venezuela.
You talk about giving everybody something free and all of a sudden
there’s no food to eat. And who do you think is the richest person in
Venezuela? The daughter of Hugo Chávez. Hello. Anyway, 0 and 2.”
Probably worth noting, though, that Scully is wrong about why
Venezuela is in such a bad place right now. It’s not socialism. It’s (a)
a horrible currency policy that is not unique or required by socialism;
(b) rampant speculation on currency which is a pretty capitalist sort
of thing; and (c) politicians who fear making hard choices because of
electoral consequences which, again, is not unique to socialism.
Also: the people in charge of Venezuela since Chavez are part of the
more business-oriented wing of the party and the rampant inflation that
has led to shortages was fueled with kerosene in the form of currency
subsidies to business in Venezuela, particularly the oil industry. If
you want to make a case that propping up big oil is a socialist thing
that’s fair, but if you’re doing it to disparage Venezuela and elevate
that which we do in the US of A, don’t go looking at how we treat Big
Oil here. It might make your argument . . . complicated.
I have no idea what he means by "business-oriented wing of the party", but it doesn't seem to have any effect on the operation of the state, which has since seen fit to seize and loot that country's equivalent of Best Buy. Some "business".
Socialists are so intellectually slippery that they could crawl through a
barrel of pretzels without knocking the salt off. It’s socialism until
it doesn’t work; then it was never socialism in the first place. It’s
socialism until the wrong guys get in charge; then it’s everything but.
Under socialism, do you shoot the cow or just milk it 24/7? One thing I
know for sure: When the milk runs out, socialists will blame the cow.
Maybe the reason why socialists don’t like personal responsibility is
that they don’t want to be held personally responsible.
"[S]ocialism", he concludes, "is nothing more than a nebulous fantasy. It’s a giant
blackboard in the sky on which you can write anything your heart desires
and then just erase it when embarrassing circumstances arise." Just so. The rebranding of Venezuela has already begun.
Ezra Klein has a penchant for being spectacularly ignorant and wrong, but is nevertheless unafraid to opine on such subjects, viz. healthcare. A couple days ago I encountered a typing of his which purported to make the case that Peter Thiel's funding of lawsuits against Gawker is a bad thing, because, money:
Billionaires might have the resources to fund endless lawsuits that bury
their media enemies beneath legal fees, but that doesn't mean they
should use that freedom. There's plenty that billionaires can do that
they shouldn't, and the more frequently and gleefully they cross that
line, the likelier they are to eventually lose the ability to cross it.
But of course, this would not be possible if Gawker didn't have journalistic standards that would make a whore blush. Klein makes the reasonable point that at one time, we did not allow third parties to finance lawsuits — that practice is known as champerty, and was forbidden under the old English common-law regime. But as even Klein admits, citing Walter Olson (all emboldening mine):
...[T]he law used to bar unrelated third parties from paying someone else
to engage in litigation and financing a lawsuit in exchange for a share
of the damages.
But those laws have fallen out of favor over the past 50 years, in
part because lawyers began to see easy access to the courts as being in
the public interest. This was driven in part by the rise of public
interest litigation — think, for example, of an environmental group
finding a third-party plaintiff to sue a company to stop an
environmentally sensitive development project.
So live by the sword, die by the sword, as it were. But so far, at least, all of Klein's perceived threats to Gawker are entirely illusory, or caused by their own sleazebag tendencies. I have a hard time crying for them.
Update 2016-05-30: Comes an excellent summary of why this is a nothingburger, or at least, why the broad public treats it so, by Cathy Young, with many examples of why Gawker is ragingly hypocritical here.
