Open Mic for the week of 8/28/2023
There’s a phenomenon where someone writes an essay about this or that but someone else wants to discuss something that has not yet made it to the front page.
This is unfair to everybody involved. It’s unfair to the guy who wrote the original essay because, presumably, he wants to talk about his original essay. It’s unfair to the guy who wants to talk about his link because it looks like he’s trying to change the subject. It’s unfair to the people who go to the comments to read up on the thoughts of the commentariat for the original essay and now we’re talking about some other guy’s links.
So!
The intention is to have a new one of these every week. If you want to talk about a link, post it here! Or, heck, use it as an open thread.
And, if it rolls off, we’ll make a new one. With a preamble just like this one.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the phrase “fake it till you make it” recently. “Fake it till you make it” is one of those pieces of advice that I have really mixed feelings about. It isn’t on the face bad advice. There is a lot of truth to it, especially in a competitive society. At the same time, the type of personality that can fake it till the make it tends to have some problems with it, especially if you want a vaguely equitable and just society. Lots of people also never really get to the make it part in terms of developing the actual skills of what they were faking but do become rather successful fraudsters. The growing number of TikTok lawyers giving some incredibly bad legal advice is an example of this.Report
Legal advice on TikTok? That sounds like an express elevator to disbarment.Report
Very common in immigration law and the different bar associations have shown very little interest in stomping down on all the non-lawyers practicing immigration law or the people giving some really bad advice on social media or a lot of other stuff. A friend of mine who practices criminal and immigration law in Wisconsin was told flat out by the Wisconsin Bar Association that they weren’t going to do anything about the unauthorized practice of law in the field of immigration law. Basically honest immigration lawyers who make one mistake are more likely to face discipline than a whole bunch of different dishonest people in the field.
There is also at least one “consulting” business in San Francisco that is a business law firm owned by a non-lawyer in all but name. The Bar Associations have basically lost the thread on controlling what would be seen as really dishonest advertisement in the past. When we were kids, I think we are about the same age, the bar association was unsure about even allowing lawyers to put their name in bold print in the white pages. These days lawyers have all sorts of side hustles that would have gotten them disbarred fast in the past.
I think that allowing lawyers to advertise was a big mistake but at the same time, I’m not sure how lawyers could reach their clients in the age of the Internet without advertisement. I suppose you can require lawyers to have some really dull webpages that look out of geocities in the late 1990s or early aughts but that would result in basically everybody seeing the entire legal profession as really behind the times.Report
Hey, if they aren’t going to enforce the law, a Lionel Hutz lawyer is just as good as a real one and a lot cheaper.Report
Quite the opposite many times. Real lawyers are generally more affordable than the Lionel Hurtz of the world or non-lawyers engaged in unauthorized practice of the law. Immigration “consultants” charge much more than immigration lawyers do.Report
Wouldn’t it be up to state attorney generals or local D.A.s to go after people for the unauthorized practice of law?Report
They could do it as well but it is a matter of dual authority I think. The fact is that it is rampant in immigration law.Report
https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/28/politics/samuel-wurzelbacher-joe-the-plumber-dies/index.htmlReport
I decided to respond to this from Chip Daniels on the 8/21/2023 open mic on the 8/28/2023 open mic because it is newer:
Lee Esq can provide more background, but the laws around immigration are designed to prohibit the flow of immigrants, not facilitate them.
I wouldn’t say that this is an entirely accurate description of American immigration law. It is more accurate to say that American immigration law is whatever compromise the Pro-Immigration forces and the Anti-Immigration forces can agree on and get through Congress. There are somethings about American immigration law that are incredibly generous and to my mind have no parallel in other systems. One of these is a type of relief from removal, the formal legal term for deportation, called Cancellation of Removal. This means that if you have a continual physical presence of the United States for at least ten years, are of good moral character (which basically means very light or no criminal record and pays taxes) and can show it would be an extreme and exceptional hardship to a qualifying USC or LPR relative; you can get a LPR status. Some type of relief like this existed since the early 20th century but has gotten less generous over the time. I am not aware of any other developed democracy having something like this in their immigration laws. There are other defenses and relief or non-citizens here without documentation, etc.
At the same time, there are parts of immigration law that are really ungenerous. One of which led to the creation of the “illegal immigrant crisis.” The main form of this is the concept of unlawful presence. That is immigrants who are adults and overstay their visa or enter without inspection are considered to accrue unlawful presence. If they get enough then they will need a waiver if they leave for consular processing. This was created by IRAIRA in 1996 and led to the explosive growth in illegal immigrants. Before that if an undocumented immigrant entered without inspection but say got a job where the employer was willing to petition for them or met a USC and married them, they could leave and consular process and come back without issue. Then the concept of unlawful physical presence was created and leaving for that interview created an additional hurdle, so fewer people wanted to leave for that interview and have to also be told to wait a year as the waiver was pending (because you need to be interviewed before you submit the waiver form) or can’t come back until the ban period ended if the waiver was denied. Naturally many people did not want to risk abandoning their spouses or kids during this process and maybe not seeing them again for years.
American immigration law has generous and ungenerous features. Too many to list even in a full post. It is a complicated mess of a system that is the result of political compromise.Report
That discussion like many wasn’t grounded in reality because people are motivated by goals other than answering ‘what should immigration policy be in the United States?” a question reasonable people can disagree about. You have a highly anti social right wing libertarian perspective narrowly focused on their own bottom line and carrying an ideological opposition to the very concept of government. You also have a social justice left trying to mold all of the disparate peoples from Spanish speaking Central and South American countries into a new racial group that they hope will become a reliable voting bloc. None of it is more than tangentially relevant to how the immigration system currently works today or how it should work.Report
I mean the heart of immigration is basically a question of whether people have a basic right to move between countries like they have a right to move within countries or whether nations have a right to control their own borders and set their own immigration policy. This is the basic debate.Report
Are we allowed to look at “how the world exists at this moment” to get a proper idea of the realistic boundaries of the answers to those questions or do we have to move into Spherical Cow Universe and only talk about how these things ought to work, theoretically?Report
I understand that’s the debate a lot of people want to have but IMO that really is sophistical midwittery run amok. As long as humans are organized into states governing physical territories there will be rules about the comings and goings of people to those territories from outside.Report
I don’t think this is entirely accurate. At least a plurality of people in developed democracies have. Decided that there are limits to what the state can do when regulating things seem as a liberty or right. Now we debate on what these liberty and rights are but limits on what a state can do even if the majority of people really want it.Report
I think you made a similar point recently, I don’t recall where, indicating that rights are arbitrary creations of the state, or I guess maybe (although I don’t like the term) social constructs. Don’t you believe that there are actual rights that point to a moral reality?Report
And how does one protect or advocate for or execute those rights if a state chooses to abrogate them?Report
That’s a very different question. I’m not saying that every society has recognized all human rights, but that all human rights existed.Report
What does this mean? Like, pick your favorite right, and explain what it means for that right to exist as a matter of objective fact, rather than subjective preference.Report
The answer depends on which theory of natural law you subscribe to. Personally, I think they’re all approximations. Plato and Aristotle tied natural law to reason, but it used to be said that there were as many new theories of natural law each year as there were publishing houses in Europe.Report
I don’t think that rights are arbitrary creations of the state but I do believe that people of different political stripes have a tendency to invoke rights as a sidestep around the issue of seeking democratic legitimacy. Like a lot of human rights advocates probably know that their policy preferences and ideas aren’t that popular with the majority of any country but like invoking the concept of human rights as a sort of magical spell that politicians can tell the citizens on why they need to do this unpopular thing and not the popular thing that the people want.Report
The libertarian idea of the free movement of goods and capital has become so widespread as to have virtually no opposition.
Today almost everyone just accepts that one sould be able to hire remote employees in India, do banking in Germany, and buy goods from China, all effortlessly and without friction or impediment.
Which makes the idea of immigration restriction incoherent. If the orderly movement of capital and goods across a border can be facilitated with regulation why can’t the movement of labor?Report
A lot of people would argue that the ordinary movement of labor is being facilitated with regulation. It is just that the developed democracies decided to prioritize highly education and skilled labor over physical labor.Report
Eh, plenty of people have criticized the free movement of goods and capital during my lifetime. You can argue that Biden’s policy on building chip factories in the United States is moving against the free movement of good and capital and a step back from the Free Trade-Davos view of the world that dominated 1980 until fairly recently. But most of those people generally have no power.
I agree with you that open borders is probably the only moral immigration stance but I can’t think of a country where advocating for it would not be political suicide. Maybe a politician here and there from a really liberal area can get away with it but not as a platform for a national party.Report
Serious question- does a country still exist if it has open borders? What happens to the social contract?
Other serious question- does open borders mean we let a heavily armed group walk across the line without question? Even if we say they can come in as long as they check their guns and ammo at the door is the border truly open?
I don’t want to be too facetious here, but in addition to real questions about what exactly goals and principles are I would hope they help illustrate why having this conversation at that level of abstraction is more than a little ridiculous.Report
There is a LONG way to go between where we are and open borders. But we have settled the goods and services question post-NAFTA. You can now load a train in Toronto and move it to Mexico city under one owner and without customs delay. That’s about as “open borders” as one can get.Report
I agree, but that gets at exactly what I mean when I say it makes no sense to constantly debate this in terms of rights or first principles, totally agnostic to policy as it actually exists.Report
Online debates tend to be from first principles though because they are made by people interested in ideological absolutes rather than practicalities. That being said, you can’t ignore the first principle though. If people do not have the right to move between countries like they can within countries than that creates a totally different regime than if they do have said right on how things are organized. Open borders should be seen more as system where there is a presumption of entry rights to a new country than a lack of this presumption.
The other problem with a severely practical approach is that it tends to be argued from a position of power and because we said so. Who defines what is the national interest? During the early 1960s, the American Musician’s Union seriously thought that having British rock bands come over for concerts was a violation of the national interest because it hurt American musicians. Kids should just listen to cover bands perform Beatles or StoneReport
There is no such thing as open borders, outside the most delerious libertarian fantasy.
it was libertarians who pointed out that so-called “Free Trade” agreements were in fact thousands of pages of carefully negotiated rules and regulations.
A “Free Labor” regime would likewise have thousands of pages of regulations governing the orderly flow of labor.Report
Yes. People still need to follow the laws of the country they are in.Report
No person is illegal, Saul.Report
And if the law of the country says you have to be a citizen or have some other official authorization in order to work there…Report
Then you make sure your system can handle the actual market demand for workers. You don’t set up and maintain a system of preference for a couple hundred thousand technology and knowledge workers with advanced degrees while refusing to grant legal entry to the millions of manual laborers you still need.Report
I say every time I am open to coming up with something to account for proven low skill labor needs.Report
well that’s you, me, Chip and maybe Saul. Lee can write the bill. Not much of coalition though.Report
We just need to get Capital on board.
Wait. They’re calling me “xenophobic”. What do I do now?Report
That isn’t open borders.
I explicitly stated that I think open borders is increasingly looking like the only moral immigration policy. However, I also said that it would be political suicide for any party to advocate for it. I realize my view is a minority position.
An open borders regime would need to include reforms to get rid of things like work authorizations but in general, it would not be a free pass to anarchy or rule breaking. You can’t move from California to Singapore and take along California’s view on recreational marijuana for example.Report
You’d also need to revamp housing/zoning policy.
We’ve already got a housing crisis. A large influx of workers will do a good job of running up rents and so any wage increases will go to landlords instead of groceries or lifestyle.Report
Open borders should better be understand as a presumption of entry rights at a port of entry while hard borders takes the opposite presumption of no entry rights at a port of entry unless earned. Open borders does not mean you can’t just cross any land border without undergoing inspection.Report
I don’t know why there needs to be such mystification over what a Free Labor regime would look like, since there doesn’t seem to be any mystery over what “Free Trade” looks like.
“Free Trade?? You mean abolish the very concept of a nation-state? Allow just anyone to buy and sell anywhere without any restrictions? Dogs and cats living together??! No way- I am liberal, but Free Trade just sounds like anarchy!”Report
“Free trade. You mean end the drug war?”
“Pfft. Of course not.”Report
Goods aren’t humans. I’m not saying you can’t get to sound positions of very low barrier to entry. I am saying you can’t just hand wave away the Lockean problems it can create without, as they say, doing the work.Report
The Lockean problems of international contracts and trade can’t be handwaved away either.
And luckily, no one is saying otherwise.Report
If an international contract is immoral, isn’t it wrong to adhere to it? Wouldn’t the moral thing to do be “ignore the contract”?Report
Same reason why every major city in the US has a supply of housing problem. The politics of this is hard.
Further, “movement of labor” is a sub-category of the politics of immigration in general and often held hostage by it.Report
You also have a social justice left trying to mold all of the disparate peoples from Spanish speaking Central and South American countries into a new racial group that they hope will become a reliable voting bloc.
This is a remarkable statement which needs a lot of unpacking.
Lets assume it is true, that the social justice left is trying to weld together a pan-Hispanic voting bloc.
What makes this a remakable statement is that this is considered to be alarming, or a crticism. Welding together disparate ethnic and cultural groups into a voting bloc is the very essence of politics- its how all political coalitions are made, from antiquity until now.
Its what the the Moral Majority did in finding comnon ground between the evangellical Protestant and Roman Catholics, turning them into a reibalbe GOP voting bloc.
When a disparate group of people can be fused together into a voting bloc, the important question is why this is possible in tht efirst place.
Why isn’t the GOP able to weld together these disparate groups into a reliable voting bloc? There has in fact been a tremendous effort on their part to do this, starting with GW Bush who earned about a third of their vote. And even now, in their anti-trans hysteria, the rightwing is trying to enlist other conservatives to their cause.
But the biggest failing of political grous in trying to assemble a coalition is treating the various members like cannon fodder, just useful idiots for a cause that doesn’t address their concerns.
Which brings us back to Gov. Abbot and Mayor Bass.
One of them is very visibly using desperate people like cannon fodder in a cheap stunt, the other is offering them welcome and sanctuary.
Why wopuld they not naturally support one, and oppose the other?Report
There are a lot of responses I can think of, but I think I will wait until LatinX catches on to enumerate them.Report
In 2022 52% of Latino voters voted for the GOP. DeSantis got 58% of the Latino vote.
What do Latinos, who largely are here legally, think of illegal immigration? I think the answer is “it’s complicated”.
“Complicated” is the opposite of “voting as a brick”.
NPR had a deep dive on one, presumably average, illegal immigrant’s experience in Texas. Being used as “cannon fodder in a cheap stunt” would have been a VAST improvement on what happened to him.
Spinning being sent to a Blue city as the first part of a horror movie has internal contradictions.Report
I’ve been thinking about the role of numbers in anti-Semitism recently or more particular how the number of Jews in the world is only fifteen or sixteen million and the number of anti-Semites is in the hundreds of millions. There are probably more people who can’t stand the Jews, white or non-white and Christian or Non-Christian and Right and Left, in the Untied States alone than there are Jews in the entire world. Often times Jews are one percent of the population or less. So the anti-Semite or at least person apathetic to the Jews could naturally retort, “why on earth should we care about whether the Jews feel alienated or included from the system we set up? They are less than 1% of the population and people don’t care that much about them. Why give them the same rights as groups that outnumber them? What are they going to do? Raise their fists up in blood thirsty rebellion? We can crush them easily.”
That many of my fellow Jews fail to realize this and only see the anti-Semites from the other side of the political aisle rather than from the groups they seek alliance with makes it worse.Report
It would be very hard to understand anti-Semitism without a belief that there is a God who has made a covenant with Israel, and that there is some spiritual force which hates God’s will.Report
I think that modern anti-Semitism of both the Right and Left, White or Non-White, Christian, Muslim or Atheist is basically a result of three factors.
1. The association of Jews with money and power. Besides the tens or hundreds of millions of people that believe a secret Jewish cabal controls the world, you have plenty more than just can’t see Jews as an oppressed group because they associate Jews with at least being educated and comfortable if not wealthy. So we really don’t come across as a way an oppressed minority is supposed. Even beyond the money and power issue, Jews don’t behave in a way that the Wretched of the Earth (TM) are supposed to. Our behavior isn’t seen as disorderly and challenging bougie norms enough.
2. The Romantic Reverence Problem: As Dara Horn put it “People love dead Jews, live Jews not so much because they do icky things like practice Judaism.” There are lots of people, again probably more than the number of Jews in the world who just find anything Jewish really distasteful or even malign. There is a bigger group that is just apathetic and really wouldn’t find anything lost if nothing Jewish gets done again. Nearly every other group as people from outside their culture that really admires them and studies them. From what I can tell, very few non-Jews might get really into the study of Jews like they would with the Japanese or the Native Americans.
3. The Demographic issue: There are only fifteen to sixteen million Jews in the world and the number of anti-Semites in the world is probably greater by hundreds of millions. This fact scares people and makes them not want to do anything about it. If tens or hundreds of millions of people can’t stand the idea of one synagogue in Jerusalem then why fight them? Why not just give in. It will calm them down. Plus Jews could be safely alienated. Piss off minority groups that are bigger and they could fight back but Jews are usually 1% of the population or less. We can’t do much.Report
For example 2 is why so many people got upset about say the Chinese Communist Party crushing down on Tibetan culture because something wonderful was being lost but not really on the Communist crushing down on the Jewish remainders in Eastern Europe. “Who cares about a bunch of yeshivahs where they study this dull boring legalistic text that the Jews call the Talmud? That’s who.”Report
Historically they’re a safe enemy for the Church and/or the Gov.
They showcase an alternative to the church (by definition an evil thing) and they can’t be absorbed (ditto).
Visiting some random churches in Poland I see the whole “needs an enemy” thing. At one church, Halloween was in the crosshairs for being denounced as evil with all kinds of made up stuff about it.
Dungeons and Dragons was treated similarly a few decades ago.
The Church needs a reason to exist, ideally an enemy that is safe, scary, and doesn’t require banishing existing members because that costs donations.Report
Mark Meadows testified yesterday in his pre-trial motion hearing in Georgia where he’s seeking to have his state case lifted to federal court. To me the most disturbing ting he said is that, in effect the White House chief of staff has an obligation to arrange state level election meddling because he serves the President and the President asked for it. No where did he apparently acknowledge – though he appears to not have been asked – that his oath of office (like mine) is to the constitution, not an individual President. Its chilling.
More here – https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/29/politics/mark-meadows-gamble-trump-fani-willis/index.htmlReport
The NWS is forecasting Idalia will make landfall in Florida as a Cat 3 storm with a storm surge between 10 and 15 feet in the worst areas. Too soon to speculate how many property insurance companies will stop underwriting in Florida and/or go bankrupt?Report
most of the top tier nationals are already out of Florida. This will break the reinsurers and the state windpool.
And please be aware the NWS Tampa Bay office forecasters are going to ride this out after securing their houses. They could use all your positive vibes.Report
As usual, not a drop did I see.Report
America’s Trumpiest Court seeks to be a chaos agent: https://www.vox.com/2023/8/29/23849054/supreme-court-nuclear-safety-fifth-circuit-james-ho-radioactive-texas-commission
“Three different provisions of federal law give the NRC the power to “issue licenses” permitting facilities to store different forms of nuclear materials. These provisions are broadly worded. One permits the NRC to license such facilities for any use “the Commission determines to be appropriate to carry out the purposes” of a broader atomic energy law. Another permits the agency to license such facilities for “any” use “approved by the Commission as an aid to science or industry.”
Nevertheless, Ho and his fellow Republican-appointed colleagues conclude that the NRC’s decision to license the Andrews County facility was illegal for at least three different reasons. The premise of Ho’s opinion, in other words, is that he has somehow uncovered multiple flaws in a longstanding legal regime that have all somehow escaped the notice of the rest of the federal judiciary for nearly 20 years.
Realistically, the Supreme Court is likely to hear this case and reverse Ho’s decision. Much of the Fifth Circuit appears to be intentionally trying to sow chaos throughout the federal government, without any regard to consequences. But most of the justices have thus far shown little sympathy for this crusade.”Report
And the Federalist Society’s crusade to destroy the regulatory state rolls on.Report
It has seemed pretty much inevitable for some time that the Supreme Court would have to visit (or revisit) the question, “Can the federal government require a state to accept spent nuclear fuel for storage?” This Supreme Court seems reasonably likely to say the answer is no.
Another fight shaping up, I’m sure, when the Texas wind and solar power industry asks FERC to overrule some of the anti-wind and solar laws the Texas legislature passed this year.Report
What a crazy coincidence. The police chief who made the call to do the blockade during the fire in Hawaii is the same guy who was in charge of incident response during the Las Vegas shooting.Report
Wait, you mean San Francisco’s downtown decline isn’t just about liberal policies on unhoused people? Do Tell:
Report
What is that a link from?
“The reasons for downtown San Francisco’s economic troubles are multi-faceted.”
Oh, I’m sure that there are hundreds of reasons behind it.Report
https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/30/business/san-francisco-union-square-retail-closures/index.htmlReport
Thanks!
The “relatively low” part has a link to here.
Let’s check it out.
Homicide is up and robbery is up and motor vehicle theft is up… but assault is down.Report
What is our solution to the problem?Report
There is no silver bullet.Report
This is the place to try to make one!
That said, if I were a San Franciscan I’d be kinda peeved with my city being constantly used as a stand in for what the right perceives as America’s ills. And that’s coming from someone who lives in Chicago!Report
For what it’s worth, it’s not that it’s a stand-in.
It’s that every single policy is the result of more funding than you’d be able to get anywhere else at the same time as absolutely zero republican resistance.
If given free reign, what would utopia look like?
Well, it’d have people explaining that violent crime has remained relatively low in recent years compared to other major cities in the United States.
Even as the numbers show homicides, robbery, and motor vehicle theft going up.Report
On the subject of dying cities…
Sadly, Toomsboro could stand in for hundreds of rural communities across the nation, towns that bleed businesses, people and hope. Just about all of them, though, believe they possess a certain specialness that, once tapped, will resurrect civic life and personal fortunes.
https://www.jacksonville.com/story/news/2012/05/27/what-would-turn-around-dying-small-town-someone-buying-it/15865547007/
Huh. Not a Democrat to be seen. Republicans run these town, and mostly the states.
Maybe they just need some tax cuts? Or more prayer in schools?Report
Weird:
White women in rural America are dying. This memoir examines why
https://www.wxxinews.org/npr-news/npr-news/2023-04-19/white-women-in-rural-america-are-dying-this-memoir-examines-why
Maybe its the drag queens. Yeah, its gotta be the drag queens.Report
Ahh, but there is hope!
“I’m from the government, and I’m here to help you!”
‘Dying communities’ in small-town Minnesota find aid from federal grants
https://www.startribune.com/federal-grants-prop-up-small-minnesota-towns/492304501/Report
The title of that article had zero relationship to the text. Reading the entire article I have no clue what the problem even is.Report
Who is arguing that cities are “dying”?
The argument is, instead, something about “doom loops”.
What’s a “doom loop” anyway? How come this is the first time the media is talking about such a thing?Report
A doom loop is what is happening to all these small Republican-run towns across America.
I’m not saying its because of what Republicans are doing, mind you.
I’m just saying the Republican-run towns are in a doom loop.
But what’s this? Signs of a turnabout?
In the 1970s, around 15,000 people lived in Harrisonburg, Virginia. The city experienced the same setbacks of many cities its size, including a downtown that had faded so drastically that the community’s own economic development authority called it “a place to avoid … filled with crumbling sidewalks, worn buildings, vacant storefronts, and faded pride.”
“A place to avoid”! Man, that sounds bad, don’t you think? Like, really bad!
But by the late 2010s, Harrisonburg’s population had grown to 55,000. Its James Madison University had grown to 22,000 students. The city’s downtown featured 40 restaurants and $35 million had been invested in downtown buildings in a little more than a decade.
Wow, this sounds like a miracle. What could possibly have caused-
Immigrants and Refugees a Growing Part of Smaller Communities
https://dailyyonder.com/immigrants-and-refugees-a-growing-part-of-smaller-communities/2022/02/22/#:~:text=A%20mid%2D2010s%20study%20by,in%20some%20cases%20a%20comeback.
Harrisonburg’s population has become more diverse. The city is now about 20% made up of people with Latino origins. The small city has benefited, Wray wrote, from three key elements of growth: education, downtown revitalization, and immigration.
As population increases in communities large and small seem to be based in large part on an influx in people who are immigrants and refugees, cities and counties are finding strength in diversity.
Ahhhh. Strength in diversity. Has a catchy ring to it.Report
To be fair, the rate of crimes that white people notice is probably what’s really gone up. It’s been going on for years in Englewood and Back of the Yards here in Chicago, but now that it’s seen in the Loop and the Magnificent Mile, suddenly we have a problem.Report
And I am left not knowing whether this is an acceptable level of crime or not.Report
Looking at it objectively, if it’s not acceptable now, it wasn’t acceptable then. Somehow, we managed to get by in the before times.
Maybe the old saw about a liberal who got mugged is true.Report
I compared 2017-2019 to 2020-2022, adjusting for population, and got this:
Homicide: Up 20%
Burglary: Up 41%
Car Theft: Up 42%
Arson: Up 34%
Rape: Down 42%
Robbery: Down 22%
Assault: Down 3%
Larceny: Down 24%
The general pattern I see is fewer crimes involving confrontations, and more non-confrontational/stealth crimes, both plausibly attributable to more people staying home. It would be interesting to know if the increase in burglaries was mostly homes or businesses. Based on the fact that more people were staying home, I assume that there was a decrease in home burglaries and increase in business burglaries, but I don’t have the data to confirm this.
Homicide doesn’t fit the pattern, but we’re talking about a total of 18 more homicides in 2020-2022 compared to the prior three years. San Francisco’s homicide rate, by the way, is roughly equal to the national average, but it’s quite a bit higher than would be expected based on its demographics.
Larceny’s the other exception. I’m not really sure what’s going on there. I would expect it to follow the stealth crime pattern, but it’s following the same pattern as the confrontational crimes. There was a huge decline in 2020, and it’s been creeping back up since then. But I’m assuming that the modal larceny incident is shoplifting, and maybe that’s not right.Report
Thanks for doing that analysis. Definitely casts the impacts of crime in SF in a different light.Report
The issue is probably that California code declares that if you enter a structure or a locked vehicle to steal something, that’s “burglary” and not “larceny”. So if you grab someone’s purse that’s “larceny”, but stealing their purse out of a car is “burglary”.Report
Crime lowers property values, so obviously “violent crime” being “relatively low” is the source of the problem!Report
Nice. You should run for mayor on Fixing The Crime Shortfall.Report
Why do people still listen to Elmo?Report
I must not have had enough coffee because I don’t follow.Report
It has to do with the sentence right before the one you highlighted:
Report
Below is an interesting mini-documentary about the early years of Israeli television. Today Israeli TV shows are popular on streaming services but Israel was a very late in developing television. In fact, they even intentionally decided to block color television when the rest of the world was adopting it. This is because Israel’s early politicians had some very intelligentsia ideas about what was good culture and bad culture and being born in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, television was most definitely bad culture.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REaO1NK7kdgReport
I feel like this is really going to throw his alignment out-of-whack.
Report
So much beef!Report
Heh, not saying I haven’t put farm animals in a vehicle myself… but usually they are the size of large dogs.Report
The driver was charged with a mooving violation.Report
Actually no, they let him off with a horning.Report
This reporter is guilty of malpractice. The line should have been, “the occupant of the vehicle was identified as Howdy Doody”.Report
I have been really surprised by the number of news media that picked up this story. Must have been a dull week running up to the holiday weekend.
Back story… The car is modified to make room for the bull. The owner and bull have ridden like this in small town summer parades for some years. The bull is usually transported to the parade site in a conventional trailer. No one seems to know why the owner decided to take the bull out on the highway.Report
“The fear is the point”:
By Dickson’s definition, “abortion trafficking” is the act of helping any pregnant woman cross state lines to end her pregnancy, lending her a ride, funding, or another form of support. While the term “trafficking” typically refers to people who are forced, tricked or coerced, Dickson’s definition applies to all people seeking abortions — because, he argues, “the unborn child is always taken against their will.”
The law — which has the public backing of 20 Texas state legislators — is designed to go after abortion funds, organizations that give financial assistance to people seeking abortions, as well as individuals. For example, Dickson said, a husband who doesn’t want his wife to get an abortion could threaten to sue the friend who offers to drive her. Under the ordinance, the woman seeking the abortion would be exempt from any punishment.
Abortion rights advocates say the ordinance effort is merely a ploy to scare people out of seeking the procedure. To date, no one has been sued under the existing “abortion trafficking” laws.
“The purpose of these laws is not to meaningfully enforce them,” said Neesha Davé, executive director of the Lilith Fund, an abortion fund based in Texas. “It’s the fear that’s the point. It’s the confusion that’s the point.”
This is a reminder that culture war is the primary driving force now in American conservatism. There is not a shred anymore, not even the pretense, of anything about principled small government, or individual liberty. Its entirely about using the power of government to coerce and control even the most intimate decisions people can make.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/09/01/texas-abortion-highways/Report
Indeed it is, as the Alabama Attorney General has threatened to prosecute people helping others go get abortions as part of a criminal conspiracy:
https://alabamareflector.com/2023/08/31/alabama-attorney-general-doubles-down-on-threats-to-prosecute-out-of-state-abortion-care/Report
“This really is building a wall to stop abortion trafficking,” said Mark Lee Dickson, the antiabortion activist behind the effort.
There’s video of the wall!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDPG4zTdm-w&t=4sReport
Not really inspired by anything but one thing that I’ve noticed on the Internet is that you have lots of people who might not necessarily be members of the Further Left or Further Right in their beliefs or actions but they tend to be tolerate or even interested of different types of radical thinkers, intellectuals, and artists because they are interesting. Then you have people, and I fall into this camp, that tend to get really annoyed by radical thinkers because the various thought experiments are so unpractical and maybe even dangerous that civilized society shouldn’t waste time on them. This is true for the ones on the Further Left and Further Right. I’m wondering why some bog standard liberals or center-right types are tolerate of radical thinkers and others are not.Report
Here are some reasons, in no particular order:
You can be pretty close to the center in some ways and very open to radicalism in others. My own views are a mix of run-of-the-mill center-left stuff with occasional intrusions of crankery, and I don’t think I’m that unusual in that regard. Indeed, a lot of people near the median are near the median not because they have a bunch of milquetoast moderate positions, but because they have a bunch of batshit Leftist beliefs balanced out by a bunch of batshit Rightist positions.
Not every weird radical position has an overwhelming Left-Right valence. I occasionally advocate for UBI, which would be a radical overhaul of our approach to the welfare state, but one that is popular more with people who are weirdos than people who are identifiably Left or Right. It’s no coincidence that the last person to get non-zero attention for UBI-boosting was Andrew Yang.
You can engage with politics for all sorts of reasons, and many of them will push you towards tolerating weird ideologues even if you have little use for their positions. Maybe you think you can harness their energy to pull your diverse coalition forward without having to concede too much. Maybe you find it entertaining to think about something other than whether a 3 cent titanium tax doesn’t go too far enough for a change. Or maybe it’s a good way to burnish your reputation as someone who is open-minded enough to just talk to anybody.
Report
Baldur’s Gate 3 comes in handy.
Imagine, if you will, someone Chaotic Good trying to have a conversation with someone Lawful Neutral. Someone Lawful Neutral will have a whole *HOST* of tics and rituals and attitudes about how these things need to be done and in what order.
Chaotic Good, instead, just knows that you just have to do the right thing. What the hell? Why do you care about the process? JUST DO WHAT IS RIGHT? HOW FREAKING HARD IS IT TO DO THE RIGHT THING? WHAT THE HELL?
People who are Lawful Good have this weird thing going on where they see someone Lawful Neutral as being closer in temperment to Lawful Good than Chaotic Good and that creates some weird dynamics as well.
But you know how far Lawful Good is from Neutral Evil?
That’s how far Chaotic Good is from Lawful Neutral. And how far Lawful Neutral is from Chaotic Good, for that matter.Report
I look at it a little bit differently. The central, load bearing column of America is the 1st Amendment, which we have spent the entirety of the country’s existence expanding in scope. If nothing else it is who we are to be able to say whatever we want. I would say that given the nature of humans, and the mystery of our minds, it is impossible to have that be our culture without also having people say and give credence to all manner of wild and crazy stuff. Now, IMO history shows us that it’s very much a price worth paying. But in terms of inevitability, think of what we are. Upright naked apes with way overdeveloped frontal lobes that at best only half wittingly catapulted ourselves out of the stone age. What would be weird is if we weren’t constantly jabbering out the noise and interference sparking around in our brains.
And to be clear this isn’t a disagreement or anything. People are cross pressured on various issues and just have all kinds of idiosyncrasies in how they see the world. The real illusion is the belief by media journo types have where everyone falls into neat little compartments and categories. That’s just their own pattern recognition system misfiring.Report
Don’t forget the pattern recognition bias in evolution. We’re pattern finding biased animals. Even when our pattern recognizing ancestors were wrong about the rustling leaves or oddly moving grass all they suffered was a momentary adrenaline spike and looking foolish. All our distance ancestors (or rather the unsuccessful siblings of our actual ancestors) who didn’t pattern recognize got eaten by predators.
The upside: intuition, discovery, nice religion and their ilk.
The downside: bad religion, conspiracy theories and their ilk.Report
I got nothing. I mean, some people are more interested in theory than others, and I’m sure some people fall for confirmation bias, or conspiracy theories, more easily, but I really don’t have any insight. So I’m going to take advantage of the opportunity and say, “I dunno, people are just like that I guess”.Report
I think the internet is also just full of thoughts and sentiments that 12 or 15 years ago would have rarely left smoke filled dorm rooms and the corners of dive bars.Report
Full of thoughts and sentiments from people who weren’t yet born 20 years ago.Report
It is simple selection bias.Report
This sounds more or less like the “high decoupler vs low decoupler” thing. Some people’s brains are more tuned to analytical/scientific approaches and can more easily discuss ideas abstractly and dispassionately, while others’ have more of a social/emotional/narrative orientation and set up high walls to anything that seems like it will violate an internal or social rule. I think this axis is mostly independent from liberal-conservative.Report
That was a really interesting piece, thanks for sharing it. I even appreciated the fair minded criticism on the decoupling position, where my gut sympathies tend to lie. That’s with the semi defense of Klein, a person I used to kind of like but now find to be a practitioner of a different form of deliberate obtuseness, and a very unconvincing one at that.Report
I’m the same way — there’s a part of me that still thinks that a disinterested observer would see the decoupling position as the superior one as a rule, but I found it a helpful nudge to think in terms of different styles rather than better vs worse. Also he does mention elsewhere that this is partly contextual as opposed to an essential characteristic — we might be high-decouplers in one context and low in another.
I do find that whenever I return to it, it reminds me that a lot of the jawing here is rather pointless — no amount of arguing is likely to move someone from one style to the other.Report
Oh yea, I agree with all that. Maybe what I would’ve added though that the writer didn’t get into is that, separate from coupling and decoupling, are questions of fact. Klein is not a historian or as far as I know any kind of subject matter expert, and his (current) worldview on identity politics is one that arises from highly revisionist, low rigor disciplines which themselves exist mainly for political reasons. The result is to grant him more charity on the particular subject than I think is due, even if the larger point holds as applied to discourse and debate.
Re: OT/LOOG I don’t think it necessarily has to change minds or first principles to be useful. It can serve as a gut check, at least as long as we maintain some ideological diversity. There is also a lot of interesting link sharing!Report
Yes, I wasn’t slamming every discussion or even every disagreement — just some of those times when there’s a lot of frustrating back and forth between people who are taking very different approaches to the question.Report
I’m definitely in the more social/emotional/narrative orientation, much to my surprise.Report
Well, you probably shouldn’t trust my take on it — looking at it now, I don’t think what I said captured it quite right.Report
I am not sure why they thought Trump would pay for them –
https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/01/politics/cash-crunch-trump-georgia-co-defendants-legal-bills/index.htmlReport
Jimmy Buffet has died: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBsPZV14I-kReport
All the Rock Adornos are out today. Yes, Jimmy Buffett wasn’t art rock but his songs were fun and catchy and he seemed to be like a generally good egg. I’m not really sure why people see this as a bad thing.Report
I was today years old when I learned that Roger Daltrey of the Who is 5’6″ tall.Report
This story is not particularly notable because it’s news to anybody here.
It’s merely notable because it might be news to the type of folks who read CNN.
Report
This story is also not news to anyone here, but probably news to the type of folks who watch Fox:
Seeing Wisconsin’s rural drug addiction crisis through the eyes of a childhood friend in our hometown
“Every area has a problem house,” Sauk County Sheriff’s Deputy Kyle Mueller said at one point as we drove through the night, surrounded by rolling fields and dark woods and the occasional house tucked in against the snow. “There’s no area that’s exempt.”
In 2022, the Sauk County Sheriff’s Department seized nearly 8,000 grams of drugs, more than it had in any of the past five years, according to an analysis of annual reports. At one time, Detective Scott Steinhorst said the problem was muted, mainly involving cocaine and marijuana, then prescription opioids. Today, according to local and statewide data, it is defined not only by meth — the undisputed dominant scourge of rural Wisconsin — but increasingly by heroin, and an alarming rise in the often-fatal fentanyl, which laces heroin and other substances.
…
Each of those stats is someone suffering with substance use disorder, and inexorably intertwined with broader issues of mental health, economic despair, and crime. Steinhorst said much of the crime his team investigates is drug-related in some way: burglary, robbery, violence, and more.
“Quite honestly, it’s an expensive habit,” Steinhorst said. “They turn to the crime obviously to feed that addiction.”
Urban areas deal with the drug trade out on the streets, and have more programs to address it. Suburban areas are more secretive, but also have more programs, and sometimes families that can afford expensive private rehab.
In rural areas, the problem is both hidden and lacking resources, law enforcement, advocates, and those in recovery agree. It festers in flophouses back in the woods and at the end of gravel driveways.Report
“Every area has a problem house”
So this issue even affects people who aren’t temporarily experiencing houselessness?
“inexorably intertwined with broader issues of mental health, economic despair, and crime”
Economic despair? Look at this chart! THE GREEN LINE IS GOING UP!!!Report
Is economic despair something that governmental policies can alleviate?
If so, what policies would you suggest?Report
Make job creation a right and not a privilege. Get rid of gov policies that get in the way of job creation. Ideally we want “let’s create a job” to be the first stick out of the bag for a company and not the last.Report
Can you share some examples of government policy impeding job creation? This sounds like a right wing talking point that needs some substantiation.Report
1) My wife can’t get enough hours as an adjunct because gov mandated benefits (that she doesn’t need) kick in.
2) Back in the day when I owned a company, we were actively wondering how many jobs we could create before it became illegal because everyone who worked or potentially might work for the company was white.
3) The gov’s idea of a guest worker program is currently for the employer to request a worker by name 18 months in advance.Report
Every time you buy something, you are creating a job.Report
1) The job is there. It’s the working conditions you don’t like.
2) No comment.
3) Bad policy. What are employers doing to get gov’t to change it?Report
Without the gov’s regulation, she could have a real full time job Instead of a hobby.
The gov has a policy it wants to implement, but it’s expensive and the gov doesn’t want to pay for it, so it insists that other people pay for it.
She gets no benefit from this. Her job is nerf’ed and even if it full time, she couldn’t use the benefits the gov insists the job be larded up with.
Yes, that’s my point.
These are examples of the gov actively working against job creation. For that matter taxing job creation directly does the same thing.
If the process is legally fraught enough that you need a compliance officer, then we have introduced serious overhead and probably priced out small business.Report
We obviously need to make people stop watching news programs that talk about how bad the economy is doing.Report
No, it was a serious question.
Do you have anything useful or interesting to say on this topic?Report
Economic despair *IS* something that the government can alleviate (though, sadly, not *CURE*… I mean, it’s not like there’s a silver bullet).
Useful? Eh, not really. Interesting? Yeah, I think so. People who have different priors might disagree, of course.Report
So can you understand the critique that conservatism is just a culture of grievance, not governance?Report
Oh, I do.
But it also seems that San Francisco is undergoing a failure of governance.
Perhaps even massive corruption.
So, as you like to point out, this critique of yours should not be limited to Wisconsin.Report
If you keep telling us you have nothing useful to say about governance, how and why should anyone take you seriously when you talk about it?Report
I define “useful” as “likely to be adopted by people in power and applied”.
And my suggestions involve stuff like “policing”.
See? Not useful at all.Report
I get that economic despair is obviously at the root of all drug abuse, because the alternative is that sometimes people make bad choices that can’t be blamed on richer people, which is just absurd, but in point of fact Sauk County seems to be doing okay economically.Report
Without even bothering to check your sources, I accept that this is true, because it seems to be universally so.
That economic factors are weakly associated with, and in no way a predictor of poor life choices. The vast majority of people in dire economic cirumstances are actually living functional, normal and productive lives.
One of the more positive things to come out of the drug war is the idea of harm reduction, that instead of judging poor life choices as a moral failing, we just try to limiit the amount of damage caused.
The other side of that argument is that there is the danger of just enabling those choices.
In sum, addiction is a land of contrasts.Report
Completely off-topic, but I have recently heard multiple radio commercials using the word “architect” as a verb: “We architected X’s website…” Any thoughts on this?Report
Its one of the many reasons why techbros, come the revolution, will be up against the wall.
Somebody somewhere decided that “Person who designs computer systems” needed a title, and lacking the imagination God gave chatGPT, they confiscated the word “Architect”, maybe because it sounded sexier.Report
I can understand deporting immigrants who break the law. I can’t understand deporting all immigrants who share ethnicity with immigrants who break the law.
That said, if we did the same, we’d free up a *LOT* of housing.Report
What is it you don’t “understand”? Or is this simply a shorthand for “I have heard the reasons given for this, they make no damn sense to me, and I disagree with it”? Rather like the common usage, which you often call out, “I can’t imagine…,” as if it were a literal confession of one’s lack of ability to comprehend other people.Report
I don’t understand lumping all of the immigrants together.
I understand saying “these particular individual immigrants are bad actors and, as such, we are going to deport these particular individual immigrants”.
I do not understand saying “Nope, some of these immigrants are bad, therefore we are going to deport all of them who share the same ethnicity”.
Note: He’s not merely deporting all Eritrean migrants dreaming of a better future for themselves and their families. He’s deporting all Africans.
It is not shorthand for any argument beginning with “I have heard the reasons given for this”. I haven’t heard any reasons given for this.Report
Maybe George Takai can explain it.Report
Maybe George Takai can explain it.
It’s always frustrating to deal with non-Anglo names, isn’t it?Report
Again, what is it you don’t “understand” about it? There’s a long history of just this sort of thing. If what you’re saying is you don’t approve, then I think most of us here would agree with you, but I can’t imagine why you think it hard to understand.Report
“People from Eritrea were bad, so we’re deporting Kenyans”?
Yeah, that’s involving enough bad logic for me to not understand it.Report
You don’t understand people having illogical beliefs and acting on them? Is your memory of your own upbringing that short?Report
Hey, “this is coherent with other things I know” is, sadly, quite logical.
The whole issue of saying something like “after the French riots, we’re deporting Swiss and Polish people”, is illogical even outside of the usual lack of logic that people tend to have.Report
So what is the difference, if you see one, between “this makes no damn sense” and “I don’t understand this”?Report
I imagine that if it made perfect sense, it’d be easy to explain.
As it is, more time has been spent on “YOU don’t understand it” than “here’s what you’re missing”.
Even Chip’s example of the Japanese Internment didn’t result in the US government interning Mongolians.Report
Do you really not “understand” that people can do senseless things? Or any of the common reasons for doing senseless things?Report
Oh, I am willing to meet on the center ground of “sometimes people do things that can’t be explained logically”. Yeah, I totally understand how sometimes people do inexplicable things.
It’s just that, usually, such things are at an individual level rather than at the national government policy level.Report
I don’t know why this would be hard for you to understand. Think about everything you believe about multiculturalism and societal trust, then picture running a country where one-third of the population wants very much to kill two-thirds of the population, and ask yourself whether you would want to increase or decrease the number of complicating factors.Report
But we aren’t in a situation where we’re deporting bad actors.
We’re deporting people who happen to be from the same *CONTINENT* as bad actors.
They’re not even from the same country!
They’re merely from the same continent!Report
MS-13 are bad actors of Hispanic origin in the US. We seek to deport all Hispanics routinely. A policy you generally remain silent to approving of. The Republican frontrunner for President called Mexicans murders and rapists after coming down his golden escalator.
Cut the horse sh!t Jay, you are not even fooling pinky here.Report
Well, we get to get into differences now.
I am okay with deporting bad actors. I imagine most of us are.
I am reconciled to deportation of the undocumented who happened to cross a border without official sanction of either the government on this side of the border or the government on that side of it.
I am not okay with deporting refugees from Venezuela because of criminality among the El Salvadorean crowd.
Like, I don’t even understand the whole “sorry, we’re going to deport you because someone from your same continent broke the law”.
And saying that deporting undocumented lawbreakers is the same thing as deporting refugees from the same continent as lawbreakers is, seriously, nutty.Report
Glad you have finally caught up to immigration policy in conservative states and parties in 2023.Report
I’d say that the whole “OMG! A BUSLOAD OF 30 HUMAN BEINGS WITHOUT DOCUMENTS! THIS IS AN OUTRAGE!” on the part of progressive states and parties in 2023 is unsustainable and we’re going to find out that, okay, maybe we should not have quite so many bad actors on the part of even the nice people who are good.Report
As for my own personal opinions on immigration, I’ll copy and past the first part of a comment I wrote in 2018:
As someone who has been yowling about immigration law and how immigration-as-handled-by-the-USG sucks and how Obama had been deporting more people than any other president in history for years now, I hope that we take this opportunity to change the laws.
But none of that is on the level of “after the French riots, we’re deporting Swiss and Polish people”.Report
Good work, dum dums.
https://www.idahostatesman.com/opinion/editorials/article278304978.htmlReport
This isn’t an isolated story- I’ve heard others, of the grwoing brain drain from rightwing schools and universities. About the best comparison would be the flow of scientists and intellectuals from the Iron Curtain states.
Like I’ve mentioned before, there doesn’t exist any such thing as “Highly regarded conservative school”.Report
It’s a shame, because there’s a very real problem with left-wing charlatanism, conformism, and lack of rigor in academia, and the rot is spreading to public schools. We desperately need a critical mass of non-stupid pushback against it, but mostly we get hysterical overreactions. The route between Scylla and Charybdis is getting narrower and more treacherous with each passing year.Report
It isn’t that “Well regarded schools” are liberal, they just are not-conservative.
CalTech, MIT, there isn’t a whole lotta leftwing stuff going on there.
But just as conservatives aren’t interested in governance, they aren’t interested in conventional acheivement. This is the point I’ve made elsewhere, that conventional analyses assume that political actors and groups want objective accomplishments- jobs, prosperity, good roads and clean water- and only disagree over ways to get it.
Contemporary American conservatism is a revolutionary faction, whose sole overriding goal is to establish themselves as the top of a social hierarchy. It is entirely zero-sum, where in order for them to win, someone else has to lose.
You see it right here when I repeatedly ask conservatives for a vision of their idea policy, only to be met with crickets.
They don’t have any ideas to solve homelessnesws, or crime, or climate change, or how to create prosperity or safeguard the nation. But they do have ideas, all sorts of ideas, of how to own the libs and make them suffer.Report
Is it meaningful that the two examples you chose have reputations that depend on math, science, and engineering?Report
No, those are just two obvious examples.
For example, there is no “well regarded” conservative law school. The Claremont Institute would be the leading example, and it is a joke.
There isn’t any “well regarded” conservative medical school, humanity school, art school or truck driving school.
You could make an attempt that the humanities and law are infested with progressive thinkers, but even there, “liberal” really just means “accepting of things and people conservatives hate”.
Aside from culture war issues, almost all law and humanities teach things which aren’t identifiably lliberal, just not-conservative.
Again I have to point out that contemporary American conservatism has no other agenda or platform or goal than grievance and opposition so it can’t produce anything.
There isn’t a conservative medicine, or conservative art theory, or conservative literature because really, how can you write a novel premised on “There are only two genders and slavery wasn’t all bad”.
I mean, you can, it will just fall into that tragic bargain bin at 7-11.
its not eve that there can’t be “conservative” literature or art because the vast majority of stuff produced actually embodies much of what conservatives tell us they stand for.
Top Gun, Parenthood, Star Wars, Harry Potter…none of these are identifiably liberal, and all embody themes like patriotism, loyalty, family bonding and conformance to societal norms.
But in this climate they can’t be coded as specifically rejecting the cultural groups hated by the right, so they aren’t viewed as “conservative”. And yeah, I included Harry Potter deliberately.Report
So you discount, say, Notre Dame, Baylor, and BYU? Despite their affiliations with the Catholic, Baptist, and LDS religions, they’re not conservative?Report
Ask the conservatives. Are the legal teachings or humanities teaching at those universities identifiably conservative?
Or are we going to hear about the “long march” of progressives through the once-hallowed halls and the “rot” infesting the once-rigorous canon?Report
“there is no “well regarded” conservative law school. ”
yeah so this is gonna be like the “why are there no good Conservative movies” discussion, where we say “what about X which promotes a lot of conservative ideals” and we hear “but those things aren’t CONSERVATIVE, they’re just GOOD IDEAS”Report
Looking around online, the following are listed as either the best conservative law schools or most conservative good law schools: GMU, BYU, SMU, and the University of Chicago. I also saw LSU, ND, UVA, Duke, and Pepperdine mentioned. No idea if any of that is accurate.Report
Then why post it?Report
I would think if the right could come up with a coherent critique of what you term “the rot” in public schools, we would have seen it by now.Report
I have no evidence she’s lying, but she wouldn’t be the first activist to put a political spin on a job decision. She just got her Ph.D., and now she’s switching jobs. She decided to get a political jab in at her opponents on her way out. The ones who really scare me are the Florida teachers who quit rather than stop talking to kindergarten students about their sexuality.Report
In this case, “talking to kids about their sexuality” means having a picture of their spouse on their desk.Report
Dude, no teacher is giving the talk to kindergartners. This is utterly ridiculous and not worthy of this site. For God’s sake.
You could have just ended your comment with the first clause.Report
Eh, some stuff gets reported on. You can find randos on Reddit bragging about this stuff too.
The Warshington Post even had an article on this sort of thing last year.
Maybe it’s happening, maybe it’s not.
But it’s being reported.Report
Would you accept FBI statistics?Report
I’m willing to accept them as being good enough if you are.
The problem is that I’ll probably still be willing to accept them as being good enough next week.Report
Statistically, children are safer with a queer teacher than a straight one.
And you know this. Its been pointed out to you several times.
So what you’re doing here is lying, pushing a narrative that you yourself know is false and defamatory, smearing an entire group of people as dangerous and untrustworthy.
If I were to make similar comments about Jews or any other group, I would be banned from this site and for good reason.
So this is where I ask the moderators, why is this acceptable when the object of hate is queer people?Report
I don’t recall you providing those numbers in the past, Chip. Could you provide them now?
I’m just finding stuff like this that goes out of its way to not mention gender at all.
It also says “most often from a teacher or coach” which makes me wonder whether this eclipses the Catholic Church Scandal (even if we take per capita into account… though whether we should take per capita into account is always a dicey proposition).Report
First, you can start here:
https://lgbpsychology.org/html/facts_molestation.html
Secondly we have mopuntains of cases of hetero teachers and coaches grooming and abusing students, most often male-teacher/ female student variety.
There is a very good reason why you alternately flip from shouting “Statistics” to shouting “Anecdote!” because the facts just don’t support what you are saying.
You’re promoting a very old libel against LGBTQ people, and once again, you have to know this. \
This isn’t an opinion you hold, it’s just a lie.Report
“There is a very good reason why you alternately flip from shouting “Statistics” to shouting “Anecdote!” because the facts just don’t support what you are saying.”
I…don’t recall him flipping from shouting “statistics” to shouting “anecdote”, actually?
Like, that’s more of a you thing, actually?Report
Last week he was insisting on using crime statistics.
This week it is “some guy on Reddit”Report
Erm, you seem to have misunderstood the exchange.
There were two news stories and someone on Reddit acknowledging that this was going on and was, indeed, doing it themselves.
Now, of course, we can dismiss people who say “Hey, *I* am a teacher and *I* do that!” if we want.
But we’re still stuck with the situation that the people who argue “that’s not happening” have the unfortunate circumstance of having news articles printed of such things happening and other randos on the internet bragging about doing such things.
Of course, perhaps everyone is lying. Wouldn’t be the first time.
But “people are saying that they’re doing this thing that you’re saying isn’t happening” is a true statement.
Even if you’d like to reframe it as an accusation against the LGBT community.Report
Um, I was hoping for something a little less… um… partisan… especially given your claim that these numbers have been provided multiple times.Report
Given that it is you who is making the accusation, the burden is on you to demonstrate that queer people abuse children at a higher rate than straight people.
There are plenty of hits for “profile of pedophile” from reputable nonpartisan sources.
I didn’t see any that supported your contention.Report
I am making no such accusation.
I do find myself having words put in my mouth and they are words to which I did not consent to having them put there.
That said, it strikes me as fairly simple for you to provide numbers to back up your claims especially if your claim that these numbers had been provided in the past was a truthful one.
I do not accept this burden of proof just yet.
I’ll wait for your claim to be demonstrated first.Report
So when you make an accusation , a couple news stories an a guy on Reddit is sufficient.
But in defending the teachers, a statistical study is dismissed as unreliable.
If you want to retreat and admit that “it’s happening” means only a few isolated places and not a consistent pattern, then I’m good with that.Report
This is, indeed, how ∀ and ∃ work.
If someone argues ~∀, providing an example of ∃ is, indeed, a refutation of ~∀.
But in defending the teachers, a statistical study is dismissed as unreliable.
For someone who claimed that the FBI Crime Stats were not reliable enough to use in an argument, I am find myself baffled that, out of all of the statistics you claim I’ve been given, you pick one that seems flimsier than the FBI crime stats.
Perhaps you could fill in your arguments against the FBI crime stats here and show me how your statistics overcome your epistemic humility (and why you chose those instead of using a different source from some of the others you claim I’ve been provided).
If you want to retreat and admit that “it’s happening” means only a few isolated places and not a consistent pattern, then I’m good with that.
In this case, “it’s happening” refers to the thing that was claimed to not exist.Report
As I said with FBI statistics, a single study is not proof, and must be combined with other evidence to be persuasive.
In this case, the study I cited said there wasn’t any clear pattern of abuse; And this is backed up by the fact that for every news story about the one, we have several about the other.
So the most persuasive argument is to say that we don’t have any evidence of a greater risk to children by queer teachers.
If you think there is, you need to do some work.Report
Ah, I see.
But my argument is not that there is greater risk to children by queer teachers.
In response to someone saying “X isn’t happening”, I showed three examples of X happening, one of which was purportedly a personal testimonial of doing X.
And you’re interpreting that as me saying that gay people molest children more?
I think you’re confused.
(I also don’t think that your sources overcome the criticism you gave to the FBI crime stats. You’re stacking the deck.)Report
OK so if children are as safe with queer teachers as cishet ones, what is the problem?
Or is there even a problem?Report
There’s a problem when it comes to providing data and there is certainly a problem when it comes to literacy.
There’s also the problem with the whole evolution from “X is not happening!” to “Is X bad, though?”Report
Since there are at least 6 different versions of X, and none of them have anything to do with whether teachers re queer or not, its hard to see what the problem is.
Not that there can’t BE a problem.
Its just that in the last few hundred comments you guys have made, no one can seem to actually tell us what the problem is.Report
Here is the problem.
~∀ is false.
∃.
And, of course, the secondary problem of “∃? THEREFORE YOU MUST THINK THE FOLLOWING THINGS!!!!”Report
So…you can’t tell us what the problem is.Report
My argument is not, and has not been, “there is a problem”.
My counter-argument is ∃ to the original argument of ~∀.
“OH, SO YOU’RE SAYING”
“No. I’m not. I’m still not. And I won’t be in 5 minutes either.”Report
“You supply the pictures, I’ll supply the war.”
Citing James Lindsay as an authority?Report
…one of those links is literally just a doll existing.
The other is mostly not talking about kindergarten, and when it is it is things like ‘Students in first grade, for instance, may be prompted to consider that there are no “boy colors” or “girl colors.”’
Do you disagree with this? Do you think children should be informed there are strict gender colors?
In fact, none of these things appear to be talking about sexuality in any manner at all, but gender identity, and what they appear to be saying is ‘There are girls, there are boys, and there are people who aren’t.’
Please actually cite the things you say these articles say are happening, because right now you look kinda dumb. You have just provided links to things and claimed things that are not actually referenced in the thing you linked to.
And the reddit thing is especially stupid as a cite. Um, little kids call themselves things all the time and made dumb assumptions, kids often don’t get very firm gender identities until hitting puberty. They often do things like declare themselves firefighters. In fact, the concern of the parent, and in fact the group around that, is the possible weird stereotyping of gender WRT ‘pretty things’, not a child actually having a different gender identity for five seconds.
In fact, ‘knowing what gender you are’ (As part of a children’s general identity) is actually a very outdated milestone that is still listed at three year olds, but…it’s pretty bad at working anymore and a lot of doctors do not use it. Not because of trans kids (Although that does serious compliment it.), but because that’s something that is only clear to kids in households that strongly enforce gender roles _and_ told their kids the rules, and a lot of adults stopped doing that back in the fricking 70s. Meanwhile, the ones that do ‘understand the rules’ and pick one often seriously misunderstand them and pick based on semi-random things, like this kid did.
This isn’t even vaguely weird. Children do not have a firm understanding of gender identities at six, and often do not understand their own gender until they hit puberty.Report
Do you think children should be informed there are strict gender colors?
I think that children may be *TOLD* that there are no strict gender colors…
but, if memory serves, I’m not sure that they can be convinced.
The more agreeable ones will parrot what they’re told, of course.
Children do not have a firm understanding of gender identities at six, and often do not understand their own gender until they hit puberty.
I’m not sure that teachers adding data is necessarily of use.
Assuming it happens, of course. Maybe the stories are fabricated.Report
Are you arguing that there is some sort of magical color coding of genders? I didn’t think I had to say this, considering it’s a pretty common fact that’s been mentioned a lot around here, but gender colors flipped about 70 years ago. Red used to be for women, blue used to be for men, and lighter colors used to be for children. Little boys would be in pink, little girls in pale blue.
And if kid can’t be ‘convinced’, it’s just because other people and media in their life have convinced them of something else. Children do actually make decisions about who they believe.
I honestly can’t believe I’m having to sit here and point out that ‘What colors people like’ is not somehow decided by gender’. Hell, what colors people _know_ is not decided by gender, or even the same among people, what colors we distinguish between are a social construct, with different languages having different numbers of words for colors and blending nearby colors apart or splitting them up. (Although it’s unlikely red and blue would be the same concept, as they are so far apart.)
You do realize that’s literally the job of a teacher, right?
I don’t think that reddit story is fabricated at all, it sounds exactly like something a six year would say because they misunderstood something.
Which is, incidentally, one of the reasons we have teachers.
It also is not even vaguely anything to worry about.Report
I’m saying that gender coded colors is a social construct.
Now, I know that some people say “it’s a social construct” to mean “IT COULD BE ANYTHING! THEREFORE IT IS NOTHING!” but other people use it as a way to acknowledge culture-as-it-exists.
I mean, there’s nothing inherently LGBTQIIAA+ about a rainbow, right?Report
I guess my question then is ‘Do you think this is a good or useful social construct to teach children, or is it a social construct that teachers should push back on?’Report
Which part of this do you find objectionable? Why?
“I’m a teacher! I start gender talks as early three years old whenever kids start talking about penises and vaginas belonging to certain genders. We talk about entire body anatomy and I have age appropriate books that talk about gender identity and how we treat friends in that regard. My school is firm that every body knows best about their body, and that we are kind before anything else. While I know most schools and teachers don’t have the best understanding, it is an age appropriate conversation, as long as it is primarily kid led. Most kids I know are more interested in the vascular system than anything else, and the kids who are finding words to describe themselves, or friends, or family members, are the only ones that have real interest that lasts beyond the first discussions. I suggest the books Jacob’s New Dress, Introducing Teddy, They She He Me. Fun conversation starters.”Report
I didn’t.
I was, instead, saying “it’s being reported as happening” in response to someone saying “it’s not happening”.
I’m pleased we’re in the “it’s good though” part so very quickly.Report
Well, I guess it depends on what “it” is.
Then again, someone posting on Reddit isn’t exactly a report but okay.Report
Do you do this?Report
Do “what”?
So far, in this mini-thread alone, “it/this” could be referring to…
1.) “teachers… talking to Kindergarten students about their sexuality.” (Pinky on 9/4)
2.) “…a picture of their [the teacher’s] spouse on their desk.” (Chip Daniels on 9/4)
3.) “…giving the talk to kindergartners.” (Slade on 9/4) [Note: I don’t know what ‘the talk’ they are referring to.]
4.) A teacher “us[ing] a non-binary doll called Nash to chat to a group of 4 and 5-year-olds about gender identity.” (Your link on 9/4)
5.) The Reddit link you shared and I quoted
6.) Something from a WaPo article I can’t access.
Depending on which of those “its” you are asking about, I can tell you if I do it, if teachers I know do it, and how common place it is in early childhood classrooms. Deal?Report
Re: my comment. The birds and bees.Report
Oooh, some of those never even occurred to me!
Let’s do all six!Report
1.) Please define what one’s “sexuality” is. Then I can proceed.
2.) I do not have a desk but I have shown my students pictures of my family. It is fairly common for teachers to do this with their children in some form or fashion. I would argue this is undoubtedly a good thing for teachers to do (though would respect if a teacher opted to keep that private).
3.) There are age-appropriate ways to talk to Kindergarteners about sexual reproduction. I have done this. Many of my colleagues have done/do this. Teachers do not always handle these conversations particularly adeptly. When done well, they’re good for kids. When done poorly, the most likely harm is some combination of boring or confusing the kid, though neither one is permanent.
4.) I have not done this. I know teachers who have used non-binary dolls/stuffed animals. Sometimes they talk about their gender identity. Sometimes not. Sometimes it’s just a stuffed elephant who uses they/them pronouns.
5.) Most of that is bog standard early childhood teaching, albeit through a lens that includes (though does not seem overly focused on) gender identity. Gender identity is not always a present lens with such teaching.
6.) Can’t access.
So… the issue isn’t “Is this happening?” with waffling between, “NO!” and “YES AND IT’S WONDERFUL!” The issue is that lots of things are happening and lots of things are not happening and people — willfully or not — are conflating things that are not happening with things that are happening.
So… now I’d appreciate if you could answer MY question: Based on my responses here, which of these things that I’ve attested are happening (in my classroom or those I know of) are problematic and why?Report
Let’s run with the good old APA.
“Sexuality encompasses all aspects of sexual behavior, including gender identity, orientation, attitudes, and activity.”
As for your question:
“Based on my responses here, which of these things that I’ve attested are happening (in my classroom or those I know of) are problematic and why?”
(Note: I do not use “problematic” as synonymous with “bad” but “likely to result in news stories”.)
For #2, showing pictures of the kiddos strikes me as perfectly fine. “Here’s what my kids looked like when they were your age!” is always fun for students. I’d probably say that “I’m a member of a polycule” would veer off into problematicity.
I’d say that #3 hints at problematicity potentially being out there. “Talk to your parents” is probably a foolproof answer for preschoolers UNLESS there is a very specific kind of question that hints at something that might involve mandatory reporting.
#4 also hints at stuff that I could see as potentially problematic. The line probably goes up to stuffed animals being they/thems.
#5 Hey, bog standard is bog standard.
#6 has this paragraph:
When teachers have to speak on the condition of anonymity, I think that that is a definite “problematic” red flag.Report
Well, I’m not interested in news stories. I’m interested in what is good for children.
Maybe that explains the difference between me, a teacher, and you, someone who talks about stuff on the internet.Report
Well, I hope that you might understand the whole “this isn’t happening” and “here’s some stories that report that it’s happening” thing.
As for what’s good for children… eh. I’ve got to say that I’m regularly impressed with what teachers are able to do in the nice school districts and regularly vexed by with what teachers claim is beyond them in the not-so-nice ones.
Because, seriously, the not-so-nice ones have teachers that present pretty closely to people who have goals that don’t involve what is good for children at all.Report
“Well, I hope that you might understand the whole “this isn’t happening” and “here’s some stories that report that it’s happening” thing.”
We’re back to what “this” is. Please show me a place where this sequence occurred:
1.) Someone said, “Can you believe THIS SPECIFIC THING is happening?”
2.) Someone else said, “THAT SPECIFIC THING is not happening.”
3.) Someone provided a link showing THAT SPECIFIC THING happening.
4.) The person from #2 saying, “Well, THIS SPECIFIC THING is good, actually.”
Cuz right now we’re all sort of buzzing around the phrase “discussing sexuality with children” and no one agrees what it actually means.
Can you see how maybe that would cause some confusion around what is or is not actually happening?
So here is what I would like YOU to do: Point to actual occurrences of things you think are harmful to children as it relates to the broad umbrella of health education happening in schools. If you can provide any, I would be happy to:
A) Speak to my own experiences as regards those things happening in my classroom or classrooms I am personally familiar with
B) My feeling on those things
C) What, if anything, I think we ought to do about those things
I’ll await your response to this specific request to continue the conversation.Report
You’re jumping to “harmful” and I’d probably put the target at “against what the parents might wish”.
“But is it *HARMFUL*?”
“I dunno. It might be. It might not be. Studies are inconclusive. I do think that it’s possible to go outside of the bounds of what parents would want and I am likely to think that that is probably bad (though I will, of course, acknowledge the existence of abusive parents).”Report
A lot of parents don’t like texts which don’t include CRT and queer acceptance.
I do think that it’s possible to go outside of the bounds of what parents would want and I am likely to think that that is probably badReport
Well, the original point was over whether this sort of thing (the mushy concept of “sexuality”) was happening in Kindergarten, of all places.
And that turned into the usual evolution from “that’s not happening” to “if you’re saying this is being reported, you must oppose the stuff in the bailey!” to “define words for me!” and so on.
I think that texts that include CRT and Queer Acceptance might be appropriate for high schoolers. (Bad DEI, however, probably isn’t.)
But the original discussion was about whether it was happening in kindergarten.
And a WaPo story that talks about it happening in kindergarten turned into… well. See above.Report
Amazing, the pivot from “I think it’s bad to disregard. parents wishes” to “Here’s what I personally think should be taught”.Report
The pivot from:
“That’s not happening”
to
“here is a story where it’s happening”
to
“BUT IS THAT HARMFUL”
was a pivot.
I am not seeing my suggestions for a curriculum above. Do you have a link?Report
Well, what to do when one set of parents want X and one set of parents want NOT-X? And another set want some of X and lots of Y but everyone else wants NOT-Y?
But, fine, if you want to move the goal posts again, I will simply check out of the conversation.
My focus is as it’s always been: advocating on behalf of the best interests of children.Report
It seems to me that the even more threshold question is whether we think reasonable people can reasonably disagree on these topics in the first place. If so, we can understand that different jurisdictions will have different approaches to them, and we therefore need to take it in stride when a school board is voted out, or people start voting with their feet, due to a misalignment between constituencies and where the local authorities have landed. Conversely, if we think there is a right way and a wrong way (or many wrong ways) that must apply universally, we have a much bigger problem to sort out.Report
“Please show me a place where this sequence occurred:”
And Jaybird, do make sure you provide examples of only True Scots doing these things, because it’s so terribly exhausting when you keep digging up examples of other peoples.Report
“Well, I’m not interested in news stories. I’m interested in what is good for children.”
uh…you…I…
…Welcome to the Republican Party sir, your complimentary racism is on the table to the left.Report
If Republicans cared about what is good for children they wouldn’t be itching to throw the poor ones off of their health insurance. But of course this gets to the larger challenge the sane (or closer to it) among us have to navigate; a progressive educational and administrative state that has a propensity to stray off from the main public service mission into strange side quests no one wants or asked for versus a rump conservative movement that doesn’t much believe in or care for running decent public services at all.Report
“Well, I’m not interested in news stories. I’m interested in what is good for children.”
I’m not crazy about the terms “virtue signal” or “self-own”, but…I think you thought that that statement demonstrated that you have the higher moral ground, but instead it sounds like you’re not paying attention to the debate and/or don’t want to acknowledge evidence.Report
It’s amazing how you turned at a picture of a spouse into a picture of a kid, and then turned a picture of a spouse into a description of a polycule, somehow. You really like doing that, pretending the comparisions are the extreme, instead of the actual things that would be comparable.
Why not answer the actual questions:
1. If a male teacher has a picture of his wife on his desk, and has referred to her in ways that indicate she is his wife, is that acceptable?
2. If a male teacher has a picture of his girlfriend on his desk, and has referred to her in ways that indicate she is his girlfriend, is that acceptable?
3. If a male teacher has a picture of his husband on his desk, and has referred to him in ways that indicate he is his husband, is that acceptable?
4. If a male teacher has a picture of his boyfriend on his desk, and has referred to him in ways that indicate he is his boyfriend, is that acceptable?
5. If a male teacher has a picture of his husband and their joint girlfriend on his desk, and has referred to them in ways that indicate they are those people, is that acceptable?
There you go, Jaybird, five very simple questions. And, to be clear, we are assuming they are not describing any sort of sexual activities. We are describing teacher who says things like ‘It is our anniversary tonight, we are going out’, or ‘We went on vacation this summer to France’ or explaining who someone is in the background of a online teaching session. Mentioning them and explaining who they are to said teacher.Report
Here’s what he said:
“I do not have a desk but I have shown my students pictures of my family. It is fairly common for teachers to do this with their children in some form or fashion.”
He made a distinction between “students” and “(possessive) children”.
So I did as well.
So let’s get into this.
First off, let me say that my assumption is that this is a school district with, oh, 70% proficiency in math/reading.
If it’s one of the school districts with illiterate/innumerate students, hey. Who gives a crap, right?
“is that acceptable?”
Well, I make distinctions to whether or not *I* would care and whether or not I think that parents in the school system would take umbrage.
*I* wouldn’t care about a picture of a boyfriend/girlfriend but I probably would find serial monogamy where the picture got swiped out a couple of times a school year to be an edge case for elementary and down. Middle school is iffy. High school? I don’t care (but I see how some parents in some school districts might).
Spouses should be fine (even same-sex ones).
But if a teacher gets married and divorced multiple times in a school year, I’d see that as a red flag.
As for number five? Yeah. That’d probably be inappropriate for, oh, Middle School and lower. But, lemme tell ya, if my experience of polyamory (only from the sidelines) is any indication of anything, there will be enough drama, pictures changing, and “I don’t want to talk about that”s that the teacher would know that pictures of that sort of thing on the desk wouldn’t come up in the first place.
“Okay, Bubbles! We’re going to talk about NRE and why it ruins everything!”, the teacher said as they swapped out their picture on their desk. “We will also discuss emotional vampires.”Report
Then you misunderstood the question, as ‘their children’ was pretty clearly referring to their students. You can tell by the pronoun ‘this’, because that pronoun refers to either ‘the activity of showing my students pictures’ (Your interpretation) or ‘the activity of showing pictures of my family’ (The correct one), and we know the second is correct because the first one needs to say who the pictures are _of_, and you would not use the pronoun ‘with’ to describe that.
Whereas the second, correct interpretation says that they are doing ‘the activity of showing pictures of their family’…with their students.
How about we make a distinction of what the law should say, and talk about that? Because that’s what we’re actually discussing, a law that could be used to fire gay teachers if they mention they are gay, aka, talking about a same-sex spouse.
So to be clear, you do disapprove of this law we are referring to. Okay, good.
Edge case for what rules? Are you proposing a law?
A red flag for what?
That’s an extremely problematic term to use in regard to what’s going on here, as ‘red flag’ usually is a reference to ‘likely to commit abuse’, unless you think teachers with failed marriages need to be scrutinized more for that. I don’t think you do mean, that, but if so you probably shouldn’t be using that term, which I think you’re using because you want to indicate you don’t like something, but don’t want to outlaw it, so have invented some weird middle ground.
Inappropriate why? You do understand there actually need to be rules, right?
Your rules appears to roughly be ‘The more partners (Both serially and not) a teacher has, the more they need to be hid from the kids’…is that rule you’re trying to come up with?
Do you…actually have an explanation of why this would be bad?
You might notice I actually left divorce and breakup out of that question entirely, and I did that on purpose. Because it’s easy to come up with bad faith scenarios where all classtime is wasted explaining and re-explaining this their relationships.
And it’s bad faith because nothing is stopping it from happening in stable relationships. Teachers could spend days talking about their honeymoon in Paris, or listing all the things they love about their spouse. That actually seems more likely, assuming the premise of a teacher that is randomly talking about things instead of teaching! People generally don’t like to talk about their failures.
But let me state this very clearly: When comparing different possibility in this discussion, please assume literally every aspect of the discussion by the teacher and how they act and how long it takes and what language is used are all exactly identically in every way. (In fact, it’d be really nice if you did that in every discussion!)
Because, again, we talking about laws…or possibly rules, I’m not sure what you want.Report
Actually, let me rephrase what I _think_ you’re trying to say, or at least something I agree with even if you aren’t trying to say it:
Teachers probably should not talk with their students about relationships until those relationships seems stable-ish. E.g. they shouldn’t be expecting to have to re-explain things, unless it is ‘moving forward’, like telling the students they just got engaged, or whatever.
Or, to put it another way: If you think you’re going to get divorced, or that it’s even likely, don’t talk about your spouse. Or, talk minimally.
Now, what exactly ‘stable-ish’ means is so subjective that it would be almost impossible to have any rules about, and it would be impossible to follow anyway because people are often very bad at realizing how their partner understands the relationship. I.e., they are sure they’re engaged and just having trouble setting the data, their fiancee is already on the second affair and has no plans following through with the marriage.
But is a reasonable rule of thumb…and I suspect it’s something teachers already do. But it’s also not something we can make a law about.
And I know you may think polyamory generally works that way, but…it doesn’t always. And we do actually have to trust the judgement of teachers at some point, that if that is how it is working for them, then they will choose not to share that. In much the same way that a single dating teacher will not be talking about each and every date they go on.
So if that is actually the concern you have, be aware people do ‘agree’ with you, except we think teachers already don’t reveal things about their personal life that they don’t want students to know, like failing relationship or even just not-important relationships they just got into.
Once they get to point of telling students, they are pretty sure about it.Report
I think we’re still straddling the fence between “it’s not happening” and “it’s good”.
By the way, boys should be careful straddling fences, and that’s about the only thing a teacher should be explaining to kindergartners about this stuff.Report
I should have been clearer: I meant the teachers who talk about their own sexuality, not that of their students.Report
According to the WaPo piece cited by Jaybird above, that’s not going on either. What’s being taught is, like it or not, what’s happening in America.Report
So to be really clear – your objection is not to the existence of lesbians, or even civil marriage by lesbians, its to lesbians being open and honest about both those things? What do think is gained – for the children – by shoving the lesbians in question back into the closet?Report
If memory serves, during my entire school career, the number of times a teacher was “open and honest” about their sexuality was zero.
If this is an issue that we think should never come up if the person is straight, then it should never come up if they’re gay.Report
Then you were ill served by those teachers, and by a society that said they had to keep their sexuality to themselves. Because I’m guessing the straight ones could talk freely about their spouses, and even display pictures of them. Probably even discuss their How We Met stories. All of which is being “open and honest” about cis-gendered heteronormative sexuality. By forcing lesbian teachers to remove pictures of their legal spouses from their desks the issue is “coming up.”Report
Did you have any female teachers that used Mrs.? If so, they were communicating something to you about their marital status, which at the time could have only mean they were married to a man.
I’m a teacher. The expectation that a teacher’s personal life — including direct or indirect references to one’s sexuality — should never come up is wrong, in both policy and in practice. Well, until these laws emerged.Report
I never had a teacher display a personal picture. I knew which were Miss or Mrs., and that’s it.Report
“I never had a teacher display a personal picture.”
Never had? Or never noticed?
I had a student one time who was REALLY struggling with some social-emotional issues that manifested as major behavioral challenges. I learned that his parents were divorced and this contributed to his needs. I shared with him that my parents had divorced when I was about his age and that I was a divorced parent of two kids around his age as well. It helped him build a connection with me and some much needed trust that helped me better meet his needs and helped resolve his behavioral challenges. This was good for him and good for the group as a whole.
By your thinking though, I should not have had that conversation with him. Is that really the ground you want to stake out?Report
Displaying a personal picture, where it faces you, and not the students, means that yeah, it’s not visible. And, where I went to school, the kids weren’t allowed behind the teacher’s desk. In short, that’s not actually on display for student consumption. It’s being used as a “please don’t fire me, I have dependents” or as a means of marking one’s territory (and I don’t think we should encourage teachers to behave like homeless urinating on buildings.) Either are unprofessional.
Thank you for discussing the divorce issue, yeah, I can see that helping — and it does somewhat change my thinking on the issues at hand.
I do not remember teachers discussing their spouses/sexuality much, if at all, in contexts that were appropriate.Report
If our standards for “what is right in education” is “what I remember my teacher doing when I was in school”… well… I disagree.
I appreciate your willingness to reconsider your position in light of further information on why teachers might engage in this practice.
Children (really, all humans) do best when they feel seen, known, and understood. One of the best ways schools can achieve this is by showing them that they share commonalities with other community members. It is why it is important that we have men in early childhood/elementary schools and women in STEM education. It is why we share certain facts about our personal lives. It is why we encourage the children to share with one another. It is why schools have clubs and activities.
Yes, there are lines and boundaries around ALL of this… just as there are with all aspects of education. I am a better teacher — I can do more for my kids — when I can share aspects about who I am with them.
If folks really think that is dangerous to children and want to bar it… well, they are entitled to that position. But let’s be clear about what that means: no mention of family life, possibly no use of honorifics, teachers who marry and change their name not being able to do so within the school community, etc. All of that reveals personal information. So if it’s wrong, we should stop doing all of it. If it is only wrong when gay people do it or trans people do it or whatever, then the issue isn’t the sharing of information but WHO is sharing the information.Report
Human relationships are complex and it’s easy to find situations where X is appropriate and also where it’s not.
It is a false choice to say our alternatives are “everyone hides everything” and “out and proud to every student”.Report
“Is that really the ground you want to stake out?”
well, apparently you want to stake out the ground of “if a teacher in our experience ever described herself as “mrs” or “miss” then we’re hypocrites for having an opinion about discussing sexual practices with underage persons”, so.Report
And, y’know.
[L]et’s be clear about what that means: no mention of family life, possibly no use of honorifics, teachers who marry and change their name not being able to do so within the school community, etc. All of that reveals personal information.”
What do you do when someone says “yes”? When someone says “your terms are acceptable”? When they say “in order to not have my childrens’ teacher be a man who wears enormous prosthetic breasts and Devine-esque makeup and enthusiastically discusses his extreme sex acts with anyone who asks and many who don’t, I’ll accept that teachers are genderless neuters who present themselves as having no lives outside the classroom”?
Because I can see plenty of people who’d take that deal, if that’s what’s on offer.Report
Conservatives would sooner put the realm of community to the torch than share it with queer people.Report
It’s official, Richard Hanania is America’s biggest stick in the mud: https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/6660bd280f01155b07821c32bba277935d3c2bb8a40cf9490beffce2b5bb95ca.png?fbclid=IwAR0ZNPn3nrkd47Pg3Y3tzqMKyd2FsRxHzsZz74q-jiP_lT35EVDpoN0vmt4
“Jimmy Buffet taught Americans to hate their jobs and live for nights and weekends so they could stuff themselves with food and alcohol. But pride in work is what gives Americans purpose and explains our success. Deaths of despair may be considered part of his cultural legacy.”Report
I propose a pact wherein we all agree not to make the obvious play on a Jimmy Buffett song title here.Report
Richard Hanania has about as much likelihood as surviving in a corporate environment as the librarians I know. The big difference is that Hanania is willing to kiss ass to CEOs and say things that please them like the little, officious, sour-faced courtier he is.
He also decided to tweet that the Founding Fathers were not circumcised just in cause (((you know))) get any ideas about how much they belong in the United States: https://twitter.com/robkhenderson/status/1697993709046870112?s=20Report
Wait, I thought he had repented of his a$$holishness.Report
Guess again!Report
I was being snarky. For which there is STILL no HTML codelet I can bracket around words or sentences.Report
There might be some fundamental flaws with the standard cosmology on how the universe formed. We are finding galaxies that are a lot older than they should be.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/02/opinion/cosmology-crisis-webb-telescope.htmlReport
Crank time but I’m really tired of seeing basic factual errors in fiction and non-fiction. I picked up a 2014 historical novel called Gutenberg’s Apprentice because it seemed interesting, trying to compare early printing to the digital age, and receive relatively high praise from reputable book review sources. Then on page 15, there is a reference to a cook making a meal of “roast lamb, potatoes, chard, and some fowl cooked in a pie.”
Potatoes are a new world crop and the novel takes place in the mid-15th century, over 40 years before Columbus accidentally landed in the Americas and even longer before Pizarro set steps in the Inca Empire, home of the potato. Potatoes wouldn’t even become a big source of food in Europe until much later in the late 18th century. So having a reference to somebody cooking potatoes in a historical novel about the first days of Western printing is really bad. I mean really really bad. Nobody should make an error so basic.Report
Musk threatens to sue ADL over list twitter revenue. Three days ago, he promoted the bantheADL hashtag
https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/04/elon-musk-to-sue-adl-for-falsely-accusing-him-x-of-antisemitism/amp/Report
Did the ADL falsely accuse Musk and Twitter of anti-Semitism?Report
From the Story:
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That doesn’t answer my question (or I guess my questions): did the ADL accuse them of anti-Semitism, and was it false? A lot depends on the accusation.Report
I think the ADL has consistently pointed out that Twitter attracts Anti-Semites and that Musk retweets their stuff – which he does. I am not aware of any new direct accusations, and the article cited doesn’t give any.Report
The economic proof of Old Economy Steve: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/05/magazine/college-worth-price.html
For a long time, there were no good alternative measures to the college wage premium. But a few years ago, a group of economic researchers in St. Louis introduced a new one: the college wealth premium. Unlike the college wage premium, the college wealth premium looks at all your assets and all your debts: what you’ve got in the bank, whether you own a house, your student-loan balance. It addresses a simple but important question: How much net wealth does a typical college graduate accumulate over their life span, compared with that of a typical high school graduate?
These three researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis — Lowell Ricketts, William Emmons and Ana Hernández Kent — used the Fed’s survey of thousands of American households to consider the financial advantage that college graduates receive. When they analyzed the data through the lens of wealth, as opposed to income, the benefits to a college degree began to evaporate.
They split Americans into age cohorts based on the decade of their birth and categorized them by race and ethnicity. Then they used statistical regressions to predict the average wealth that families in each cohort would accumulate over a lifetime. When they looked at the college wage premium for each cohort — the standard measure — they found that it mostly held up across those divisions. In every racial group and generation, the college graduates were earning more money.
Then the researchers looked at the wealth premium, and a different picture emerged. Older white college graduates, those born before 1980, were, as you might expect, a lot wealthier than their white peers who had only a high school degree. On average, they had accumulated two or three times as much wealth as high school grads of the same race and generation. But younger white college graduates — those born in the 1980s — had only a bit more wealth than white high school graduates born in the same decade, and that small advantage was projected to remain small throughout their lives.Report
Now *THIS* is interesting.
Born in 1979 would (probably) mean that you were in the class of 1997 or 1998. and would have (probably) graduated college around 2001 or 2002. Okay, 2003. 2004 at the latest.
What happened? The “Great Recession” hit late 2007 so we’ll say 2008 for that and it lasted two years (and went global). If the cutoff was 1985, I’d say that it was that.
So it happened a few years before that… so I’m guessing… global outsourcing. I know that I watched *MY* career field get shipped overseas from Singapore to Malaysia to India to come wandering back. But that’s some serious white collar stuff. What about Blue Collar stuff? NAFTA might be one guess and my other guess would be China’s Most Favored Nation Trade Status being made permanent in September 2000 going into effect in December 2001.
And that fits the timeline.Report
I dunno. The results of a model like this can be driven by its assumptions. Using predictions of future earnings as a predictor of future earnings…doesn’t sound right.Report
Note that this paper was written in 2019, and the Survey of Consumer Finances is conducted only once every three years, so it’s based on 2016 data. The average college graduate born the 1980s would have been been born at the beginning of 1985, graduated from college in 2007 or 2008, right as the Great Recession was getting started, and then had about eight years—the first five or so in very poor economic conditions—to pay off student loans and start building positive net worth.
I think this is an error on the part of Tough, the NYT journalist; I don’t see this mentioned anywhere in the linked paper, and it doesn’t make any sense. Why would a large wage premium not translate to a large wealth premium later in life? The small wealth premium early in life is likely attributable to a lower intercept (i.e. younger cohorts start with more highly negative net worth because of larger student loans), but as long as the college wage premium remains high, the slope should remain high, and in the long run the lower intercept should have only a small effect on the wealth premium.
Obviously people with high incomes can fail to accumulate wealth if they spend it all and don’t save, but there’s no clear reason to think that’s what’s happening here, since the 1980s cohort was, after all, able to pay off student loans and achieve a small wealth premium over high school graduates in the first several years after graduation.
The 2019 SCF did a lot to dispel the “Millennials so poor” narrative that had been building over the past decade, as this was the survey year when the average net worth of Millennials was finally found to have surpassed that of Boomers at the same age. Off the top of my head, I don’t know of any research where the same age x education crosstab done here has been done with the 2019 data, but I suspect that it would show a substantial increase in the college wealth premium for the 1980s cohort. And the 2022 SCF data should be coming out soonish.Report
In fact, the college graduates among the 1980s cohort show a clear pattern of faster wealth-building than the high school graduates. Not only did they start with negative net worth, but they averaged only 7-8 years in the workforce instead of the 12 the high school graduates had, yet they were still able to catch up and surpass the high school graduates in terms of net worth by 2016. Reasonable extrapolation from this trend points to an increase in the net worth premium for the 1980s birth cohort.
Journos, man. When will they learn?Report
“Why would a large wage premium not translate to a large wealth premium later in life?”
Because if you graduated from college in 2005 and moved to the SF Bay Area in 2006, you ended up spending all that wage premium on your rent!Report
Very true – and not just in San Francisco.Report
Again, it’s not necessarily that you did spend that money, it’s that the economists believe that you have spent or will spend it.Report
Again, the economists who wrote the paper didn’t claim this—it appears to be a misunderstanding by the author of the NYT Magazine article.Report
High school graduates also have to pay rent.Report
Please do not ask me to do two hours of research to prove that the rent in San Francisco is higher than the rent in Hatboro, PA.Report
https://www.nerdwallet.com/cost-of-living-calculator/compare/philadelphia-pa-vs-san-francisco-ca
😉Report
This would be an effective rebuttal to my point if all of the following were true:
1. College graduates in high cost of living cities like San Francisco earned the national average wage for college graduates.
2. High school graduates in lower cost of living cities like Philadelphia earned the national average wage for high school graduates.
3. All college graduates, and only college graduates, lived in cities with the same cots of living as San Francisco.
4. All high school graduates, and only high school graduates, lived in cities with the same cost of living as Philadelphia.
If all of the above were true, then the college wage premium would be entirely canceled out by higher cost of living.
In reality, at most of one those is true, namely 2. People living in high-COL cities tend to have incomes well above the national average for their education level. Many high school graduates live in high-COL cities, and many college graduates live in low-COL cities.
Some portion of the college wage premium is attributable to, and canceled out by, the tendency of college-education workers to live in higher cost-of-living areas than high school graduates. But I think that portion is more like 10-25%, not 100%.
Again, the paper cited as evidence in the NYT article that the college net worth premium will remain low for the 1980s birth cohort does not actually make that claim, and in fact shows that college-educated workers in the 1980s birth cohort are in fact increasing their net worth considerably faster than high-school educated workers in the same birth cohort.
Why are we arguing over the veracity of a claim that was made up out of whole cloth?Report
When I moved to Florida the company bumped my Salary up a lot because of Cost of Living.
Same company, same position, it was purely a lateral transfer.Report
The book Millionaire Next Door did a deep dive on this with lots of research. It’s well worth a read, they went to real people with real wealth and evaluated how they as a group had done it to gather real data.
The relationship between income and wealth isn’t zero but it’s also not very strong. Building wealth requires living below your means. Most people don’t do that.
If memory serves, your typical millionaire (wealth) owns a small business, drives a pickup, and doesn’t like fancy or flashy things, and might have gone to college but I don’t remember if they’re more or less likely than most people.
Wealth is a different animal than income and they’re not strongly related.Report
Sure, but we’re talking about averaging out millions of people. Past earnings may only be moderately correlated with net worth at the individual level, but when you have a group of millions of people earnings much more money than another group of people earnings millions of people, the first group is definitely going to achieve higher mean and median net worth unless the first group is systematically much, much less inclined to save than the second group, which is very unlikely to be the case.
As I said in my original comment:
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This is intuitively true, but having read that book, I don’t trust intuition.
We’re in “the rabbit and tortoise race” territory. When we select for higher income, we’re also selecting for college education, but that probably makes you more likely to take a safe salary and less to own your own business.Report
I think this is right, and there is a core ‘what is the question we are trying to answer’ component to this discussion. One is whether a college degree is on average ‘worth it’ economically compared to no college degree. Another, trickier, but arguably more important one is whether it makes more sense for a person smart enough to earn a communications degree at x non competitive public college or to become a plumber instead.Report
Just to add, another question is what is the value of the degree in an environment where 35% of the work force has one, and how is that different from ~20% (1970s) or ~15% or less (1950s).Report
Yeah, we’re mixing up our inputs and our outputs again and we’re not noticing that there’s a difference between getting a degree at a SLAC and getting a degree at Landmark Community College and we’re comparing high school grads to the kids from the SLAC and not from LCC.Report
According to Forbes, 84% of the Forbes 400 have college degrees, compared to 33% of the general adult population. Even if you account for the fact that some of them inherited their wealth and went to school in part because their parents were already rich, high school graduates are still underrepresented among the wealthiest self-made Americans.
Yes, obviously there are some exceptionally talented people who drop out of or never attend college and then go on to great success, like Bill Gates, but the top x% of college graduates do better than the top x% of high school graduates, for any value of x.Report
There are 400 people in the Forbes 400.
The US has 22 million people with a wealth of a million or more.
8 out of 10 millionaires come from low-income families.
3% received an inheritance of $1 million or above. 79% of millionaires did not receive any inheritance from their family or relatives.
93% of millionaires polled by Ramsey Solutions claimed they did not become rich due to their salary but rather by working hard and avoiding debt.
Only 31% of respondents surveyed had a $100,000 annual income at some time in their careers. One-third never made $100,000 a year at any point in their career.
https://finmasters.com/millionaire-statistics/Report
$1 million net worth isn’t a very significant amount of money anymore, at least by the time one is nearing retirement age. $1 million in 1975 would be >$5 million in today’s dollars — what do the stats say about hitting that number?Report
For 5 million… 1% of the total US population, or around 1.4 million households, had a net worth of $5 million or more.
Unfortunately that doesn’t tell us how they did it.
The deep dives I found were for a million so that’s what I’m stuck with… and to be fair that’s not a terrible number.Report
If your house is paid for, $1,000,000 net worth isn’t that much of a stretch by the time you reach retirement.Report
Sure, but as far as I can tell, you were saying that college dropouts were more likely to start their own businesses and strike it rich. You were appealing to outliers, so I showed you the most outlying outliers.
Anyway, the Ramsey survey also found that 88% of millionaires had college degrees.
It says that 80% come from middle- or lower-income families, not from lower-income families. It would be very surprising if 80% came from low-income families, because this would imply that people from low-income families were greatly overrepresented among millionaires, which is implausible given that heredity is a thing. And what is “upper-income?” Top 20? Top 10%? Top 2%? Not defined in the report.
You got the income stats mixed up a bit. Copying and pasting from the actual report’s PDF:
So 2/3 made $100k in at least one year, and 31% averaged that over the course of their entire careers. That’s not extraordinarily high, but it’s also unclear whether these numbers are adjusted for inflation. If 31% averaged at least $100k in nominal dollars, that’s quite a lot of money. But even adjusted to 2017 dollars, far less than 31% of the population average more than $100k over their whole careers.
The claim I’m making here is really very banal, namely that having a higher income makes it easier to build wealth, and that on average, people with higher lifetime incomes will have higher net worth. Do some people build a high net worth despite earning a modest income their whole lives? Sure! Do some people retire in poverty despite earning high wages their whole lives? Sure! But when we’re dealing with large groups of people and not individuals, the law of large numbers wins out.
Keep in mind, also, that Dave Ramsey is a finance guru. He has an incentive to spin the results in a way that minimizes the role of salary and maximizes the role that financial savvy plays. I’m not saying he’s lying, per se, or that encouraging people to be financially responsible is bad, but the omission of key definitions and methodological details points to some attempts to make income seem like less of a factor than it really is. Note that of the top 5 occupations, teacher is the only one that’s not known for salaries that are well above average.Report
One heck of an update on SBF’s early time in prison.
Some really interesting stuff in there. Shkreli has some insights, I guess.Report
Yeah well, when you do the crime . . . .Report
Good news!
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Josh Gad and Jonah Hill must be fighting over this role.Report
The Mayor of NYC should probably read the poem on the base of the statue in his city.
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This idea that Texas should have closed borders to undocumented migrants is an interesting one.
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Ooooh! AOC has called Adams out!
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Videos Show Angry Neo-Nazis Cursing and Screaming Slurs During March in Florida
I’m posting this for the update:
UPDATE 9/4/23 11:52pm: The original version of this article quoted a marcher as saying, “We’re all DeSantis supporters!” without including his second remark, “Fuck Ron DeSantis! Ron DeSantis is a joke. Ron DeSantis is a joke.” The story has been updated.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/neo-nazis-florida-march-1234817532/Report
Apologies for the fact that I the only copy I could find was in that cesspit, but take a look at this video, wherein he refers to “k____s, J_wry, capitalism, billionaires” as his enemies.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll keep saying it until it sinks in: Anticapitalism, antisemitism, and CRT all come from the same place: A fallacious assumption that when some people are doing better than others, the only possible explanation is that the people who are doing better are cheating somehow, and holding back the others.Report
Off-topic technical note… The multiple copies of this comment all ended up in moderation because the URL behind the “this video” link contains the forbidden n*zi word. WordPress is nothing if not zealous about finding those words.Report
Yeah, I figured that out eventually, after thinking maybe it was choking on “Jewry.” I’m surprised that you saw the multiple copies, because I deleted all but one. Thanks, for fishing it out!Report
I’ve been working on a moderation filter to do a couple things that WordPress doesn’t. That has required me to look regularly in the Trash folder, where I saw the other copies.Report
“Mass immigration will “destroy” New York City unless something is done about it, Mayor Eric Adams has warned.”
https://www.rt.com/news/582550-new-york-mayor-migrants/
“Earlier on Wednesday, the mayor’s deputy for health and human services, Anne Williams-Isom, argued that migrants were attracted by New York City’s right-to-shelter law, which she described as “like our little secret” once but now something “the whole globe knows.”
Nearly 60,000 migrants currently occupy beds at the city’s homeless shelters, according to the New York Times. An estimated 20,000 of their children are expected to start attending the city’s public schools this week.Earlier on Wednesday, the mayor’s deputy for health and human services, Anne Williams-Isom, argued that migrants were attracted by New York City’s right-to-shelter law, which she described as “like our little secret” once but now something “the whole globe knows.”
Nearly 60,000 migrants currently occupy beds at the city’s homeless shelters, according to the New York Times. An estimated 20,000 of their children are expected to start attending the city’s public schools this week.”
How can this be when everyone knows immigration strengthens the economy?Report
From your link: The mayor is pleading with the gov for work permits for migrants, so they could start working. (close to a quote)
This brings us back to what I was saying about stopping the gov from destroying jobs.Report
Maybe, just maybe, this issue is that our existing process cannot handle the influx. So, either the influx needs to be reduced to what the system can handle or the system needs to be changed to handle the influx.Report
Many of us have been saying tis for years, but the people the system supports and feeds employees to on the sly seem fine with it that way it is.Report
What value do these “work permits” add? This is a self inflicted problem.Report
Tesla’s dirty little secret on California’s I-5
https://www.sfgate.com/centralcoast/article/tesla-interstate-5-supercharger-power-plant-18343119.php
Expensive EVs charging up at a site that uses a diesel generator. Yah, that’s the clean energy we need. 30 mins to charge up? Shesh. If you just put a diesel generator into the actual car…wait…that pollutes the environment.Report
“Bullied trans teen ran away, was sex trafficked after school kept gender transition secret from family: suit”
https://nypost.com/2023/09/04/virginia-school-kept-teen-gender-transition-secret-suit/
This person has an excellent take. I’m not posting a link, just the essay, which starts below. Given this community’s tendencies, the comments would be about where it came from not about the message. I want the message Hagar makes to go through, not debate the host site. You should read it. Warning–profanity.
Today’s article is a heck of a ride. Buckle up, my friends. I’m sure some of you will agree with me, and others will not. Regardless, it’s an interesting and informative (and horrific) story that needs to be told, because I firmly believe it’s happening on many fronts. As with everything I write about, there are problems on both sides, and blame, and shame.
Virginia School Kept Teen Transition Secret
A Virginia high school student ran away from home and was sex-trafficked through multiple states — in part because her high school failed to tell the child’s parents she identified as a male and was relentlessly bullied for it, a suit alleges.
Anytime a media outlet starts with “sex trafficked through multiple states,” you know it’s going to be a shit show. I feel so bad for the child involved. There are so many failures in this, at so many levels, that it’s really difficult to lay it out. I’m going to try, though.
Let’s look at the facts of this case. Please remember this is all “alleged”.
Sage, the child in question, is said to be a long-term sufferer of mental health issues. Now that may be because of her gender confusion, because of home issues such as abuse or neglect, or any number of other things. I could not find anything explaining the reason for the mental health issues. The article mentions she had a “troubled childhood,” which could mean anything from caring and strict parents who wouldn’t let her date at 13, to parents who beat her for setting the table wrong. We don’t know.
Sage was 14 when this happened, in 2021. She went to school, and began to be bullied on the bus. Again, it’s unclear whether she was bullied because she was identifying as male, or because of her slight build. What we do know is that several boys on her bus, “…threatened to rape her until she ‘liked boys,’ threatened to hold her out of the bus window by her hair unless she apologized and threatened to shoot her…”
Let’s start right here. Those boys, regardless of anything else, should be charged with something. Anything. I don’t care if Sage identified as a fish. Threatening someone with rape, physical assault and battery, and death is wrong. There is no way to make that innocent. If it happened (and apparently the school acknowledges it did), then why were those boys permitted to be on the bus? Why was Sage’s mother not told about the boys’ behavior? Why were the boys not expelled, or better yet, charged with assault and battery? What the heck was the bus driver doing during this? I have so many questions, long before we EVER get to the issue of being trans.
Sage told guidance counselors. She told them about the abuse, and that she identified as a boy. The staff did not tell Sage’s mother about either part of the incident. Instead, the staff told her to use the boy’s bathroom. I’m sorry, what?
Now we reach the trans part. Sage, who was 14 at the time, says she identified as a boy. Whether this led to the bullying or (more likely in my opinion) the bullying led to the new identification isn’t clear. I can certainly understand why someone who was being bullied by males would want to then BE a male. Being a part of the bullies instead of the object of their derision is a very simple way of getting away from bullying. The boys apparently continued to touch her and threaten her with knife violence and rape, while thrusting her against hallway walls.
The bullying was so bad that OTHER parents began to make reports. Let that one sink in. There were other parents aware of this bullying, while Sage’s parent was kept out of the loop. It wasn’t until almost three weeks later that Sage’s mother was told about Sage using the boy’s bathroom, but failed to explain about the gender identity issue. The counselor just told her about self harm injuries on Sage’s body. It was a few days later when Sage’s mom discovered a hall pass with a male name on it and Sage finally came clean to her mom about the entire thing. Sage claimed that she was only using the boys bathroom because the counselor had told her to do so.
All of this, weeks and weeks of bullying and questions about her self-identity, led her to have a psychotic break. She ran away, and ended up being abducted by a male she didn’t know, who raped her and took her to Washington DC. There, the stranger handed her off to other adult males who drugged and raped her repeatedly. Those men took her to Maryland and left her with “…a registered sex offender who kept her locked in a room after raping her and sex-trafficking her out to others…”
Baltimore authorities “rescued” her. But because her parents weren’t “sufficiently affirming” of Sage’s gender identity, she was sent to a juvenile facility for boys. There, we have more of the same: drugs, rape, physical threats, and denial of medical and mental health care. Escaping that place, she got picked up by another predator, with more rape, drugs, and added to that, starvation and torture. It was January of 2022 when she finally was returned to her mother in Texas.
This poor child. I cannot imagine. I am horrified by this entire story.
The school failed to a) report bullying, b) punish bullying, c) inform parents of issues with their child. Why did they do this? I can actually answer this question. The school (rightly or wrongly, doesn’t really matter) believed that if Sage were to tell her parents that she was having body issues, they would abuse her in some way. I know this is what the school was thinking because it’s what the Left, as a whole, believes will happen.
As someone who’s “been there, done that” on a number of topics, I can say that the fear is a real thing. It’s based on real stuff. I remember living through the 80s, when being gay or bisexual meant you were treated like you were a child molester. When being pagan meant people who professed to be Christian did things like whip Bible verses tied to rocks through your front window, and burned crosses on your front lawn. When playing Dungeons and Dragons meant you were an evil monster who had to be yanked out of school and castigated. When those of the female persuasion were assumed to be on a “secretarial track” or a “Mrs. Degree track,” and nothing else.
I know that friends and family who have kids who profess to be trans (and it doesn’t matter if they are, or if they’re just confused) who are terrified because they live in Red states and are now in a situation where they feel like they have to deny their kids’ concerns or they could lose their kids entirely.
I will say, I do not believe that children should be taking hormones or getting surgeries to change their gender. We don’t let kids get tattoos or drink alcohol, because they aren’t old enough to make rational decisions. Why would we let them change their bodies in such a huge way? But on the other side of that, is the knowledge that kids are going to do what kids are going to do. If you don’t want them to sneak behind your back and get off market testosterone behind the tracks (because frankly, that’s where I see this going… if we could get pot and hash when we were in high school, there’s nothing stopping our kids from getting hormones today), you have to support them. That means accepting certain age appropriate things.
If a kid wants to wear clothing of the other gender, let them. Be clear, they’re probably going to get bothered at school, but who cares? Teach them to stand up for themselves, and let them wear whatever clothes they want, provided it meets the school’s clothing policies. No one is going to be damaged because a boy wore a skirt or a girl wore a pair of boys’ slacks. Explain that our bodies and minds continue to mature until about age 25, and that just as we ask them to avoid alcohol until they’re adults, we’re asking them to avoid medical manipulations until they’re adults. Why? Because they could change their minds. And here’s the thing… if you support them in every other way, they are less likely to push for medical manipulations.
Support is the answer to what’s going on. If Sage’s mom had been allowed to support her, the outcome might have been incredibly different. When a kid tells you they’re not the right gender, arguing with them isn’t going to give you a win. All it’ll do is alienate your kid, and push them to do the very things you don’t want them to do. It makes the whispering voices of their friends sound louder and more rational. Instead, offer a helping hand:
“You think you’re in the wrong body? That must be hard. You know I don’t deal well with this kind of thing, but I love you, and I support you no matter what. Let’s get you in to see a therapist. No, not because you need to be convinced you’re in the right body; because you are worried you’re in the wrong body, and that’s got to be a huge mental health blow. Instead of ignoring it, let’s pay attention to it, and find you someone reasonable to talk to. I know a large number of trans oriented teens are depressed and sometimes suicidal, and I want to help you not be either of those things, and therapy is the best way to start this out.”
Acceptance, help, love, and honesty. These are the things that keep communication lines open with our kids. I’ve yet to see a Republican or Right leaning person hate their kid just because they profess to be trans… but I know a few who struggle with it, trying to figure out how to deal with it. Kids are going to be kids, and in the vast majority of cases, I suspect these kids will happily go on being whatever gender they were born to if we can just be supportive and loving as they work through stuff.
If schools (and Leftists) knew that the answer to trans leaning kids was love, acceptance, help, and honesty… they’d lose all their ammo. So long as they believe (and in many cases, rightly so, I’m afraid) that home life as a trans leaning kid would be untenable and possibly abusive, they have all they need to continue hiding this kind of stuff from parents. I don’t want to give them anymore ammo, thanks. I want no more excuses for hiding things from me, as a parent.
I’m horrified at what happened to this poor kid. Whether Sage turned out to be male or female presenting doesn’t matter. The school allowed bullying to go above and beyond that, into abuse, assault, and battery. The boys should have had their asses handed to them. They should have been expelled, or put in jail. The school’s hiding of the entire thing likely squashed any possibility of Sage getting the justice she deserves against her aggressors. Lies and deceit are the icing on the cake made by these boys. But the actions began with the boys, and it’s a shame that their abuse and threats are lost in this narrative.
Once more, our schools, teachers, administrators, and counselors have failed. This is another mental health case that has largely fallen into the cracks. Why? It doesn’t fit the narrative nicely. The kid with mental health issues didn’t go shoot a bunch of people. Instead, they ran away and got abused for it. I really don’t know what else to say.
While “fear of right leaning parents” was a (small imo) factor, it does not trump the RIGHT of the parent to know this stuff. And whether the parents were right or left or north of Venus doesn’t matter. The bullying and later assault and battery should have been reported immediately. That assault has no “side”. We can argue that “right leaning parents are too strict” or “left leaning parents allow kids to do whatever they want,” or even “some parents don’t discipline their kids, and their personal beliefs are so poorly expressed in front of their kids that the kids misunderstand and go out and act on misinformation”. None of it matters, though. Sage was abused, and the school was at the center of it. If communication had happened, it is much less likely that Sage would have run off.
There’s a new law being suggested by Virginia lawmakers, one they are coining “Sage’s Law”. Some are calling it a “parental right” law, but it seems to me it’s a family law, designed to protect family units, but not to the point of stupidity. The law, if it makes it, will “…prohibit schools from encouraging children to hide gender identity changes from their parents. It would provide counseling services to those students who identify as a gender different from their biological sex, and it would make, at a minimum, one of the student’s parents aware. If there is a suspected risk of suicide, social services must be contacted by school officials.” I haven’t yet found the text of the actual law, so I only have the article to go on, but so far it sounds pretty darn good.
Children are the responsibility of their parents, first and foremost. Parents only “lend” that authority, in a very limited fashion, to schools while their children are on the premises. To leave a parent out of the loop on something as huge as gender dysphoria, abuse, rape, threats of bodily harm, and death threats is just disgusting. I understand there are a handful of parents out there who are psychotic enough to do horrid things if their child said they were gay or trans, but they still need to be informed. If they’re not capable of parenting, THEN the state can step in and take the child out. But “capable of parenting” is not the same as “accepting of everything the child wants and desires,” and the state needs to recognize that, both socially and legally.
Parental rights are the reason I don’t teach children without their parents’ consent (I am pagan, and have been a minister and religious/spiritual teacher and counselor for many years, and yes I have formal education to back that). My kids have grown up with paganism. One is agnostic, the other is a devout heathen. One is straight as the day is long, and the other is gayer than a $3 bill. I love them both (and the adult children who are out on their own now). When my heathen brought one of their friends to a class I was teaching, I turned the young person away. My heathen was angry with me, but I asked this: “Do you want some Christian or Muslim parent to have the right to teach you behind my back? Do you want them to have the right to spirit you away to some mosque or church without my ever knowing? Nope… so don’t do it to other people’s kids.” Kids under 16 aren’t welcome without a parent actively involved in the class with them. Kids between 16 and 18 can come on their own, with parental permission, and that means I talk face to face with the parent or parents in question, and that parent attends at least one class to know what it is I’m teaching. I know what rights I demand for MY kids, and so I am rabidly protective of those rights for other people’s kids.
Of course, my kids have always felt okay telling me stuff. That’s because I’m “lefty” enough that they know it’s cool. I’ve done it all, when I was younger, and I’m quite the heathen in any number of ways even today. But I’m not my kids’ friend. Not until they’re adults, anyhow. I’m the parent. That means I do unpopular things frequently. Like make them read articles like this one. Why? Because they’ll take it to school and feed it to their friends. And I like to know that common sense words are getting into the minds of kids who have essentially been bred to be factory workers.
I know this rambled. It’s been a long few weeks. I’m still reeling over this case, over the abuse piled onto the kid in it.
Hagar out.Report
This is what you get when you put the presumption in favor of the state instead of parents. There’s no denying parents can well good f— their kids up. But when you’ve got public school personnel and legal bureaucracy projecting woowoo from tumblr it goes from unfortunate but individualized dysfunction to industrial scale screw ups like this. Everyone at that school who knew anything about it should be fired and never allowed to work with children again. Same with whatever nut bag(s) made these decisions in the Baltimore juvenile system for that matter.Report
Its clear that no one involved in this case behaved well.
If we say that parents hold primary responsibility for their child, then its fair to ask why the child didn’t want their parents to know. Its fair to ask why the child felt the need to run away from home.
And while its easy to just assert that “parents have rights”, it doesn’t address the question of what to do if the parents are not supportive, and create such a toxic environment the child feels the need to run away.
Suppose the school did inform the parents, and the child ran away and ended up trafficked. Doesn’t the school have a duty to protect a child from reasonably foreseeable consequences of being outed?
We can’t demand schools intervene in a family by telling the parents, then wash our hands of the foreseeable consequences.Report
Outed as what exactly? A child being severely bullied by peers at school, which the school itself was apparently incapable of policing, and quite probably made worse by sending her to the boys bathroom where she would be more vulnerable to attack? A child in the midst of some kind of personal or mental health crisis? Yea, we really need to make sure minors don’t come out of the closet on that sort of thing, not until they’re good and ready.Report
I didn’t say the school shouldn’t have notified the parents.
I’m saying that they shouldn’t stop at that, but take responsibillity to make sure that the bullying doesn’t continue at home and to make sure that the child is given adequate supportive care.Report
People this incapable of understanding or controlling what is going on right in front of them cannot be the judges of anyone’s home life.Report
Agreed, but I thought the whole problem was that the school was incapable of understanding or controlling what is going on right in front of them
If they are incapable of understanding what is going on in front of them, how are they going to alert the parents to bullying, much less a teen who is troubled or transitioning?
Isn’t the goal here to have schools be competent to know the diffrence between a minor scuffle and persistent bullying, a moody teen from a seriously troubled one, and the difference between a strict parent and an abusive one?Report
This article reads like the school knew darn well these things but felt the right thing to do was to not get the parents involved because the parents might not be sufficiently woke.
That might be harsh spin where the parents were a problem, it might also be reflective of reality.
My youngest is a lot more involved with school councilors than normal. She might see her three or four times a year.
If that’s who you’re expecting to ride to the rescue instead of a parent then there’s a problem.Report
The incentives are wrong.
The level of available information for any specific child is less than good.
Who specifically do you mean when you say “the school”? How is this going to work? Who is supposed to be accountable? If it’s “the system as a whole” then the answer is “no one is accountable”.
And these counter points assume there are no bad apples in the system.Report
It also fails to account for situations like this one where the obvious right answer was to get that girl out of this school and away from these people, including the guidance counselor.Report
I didn’t give enough detail.
1) The incentives are wrong
The school loses money if they lose the student. Ergo they fight to keep the student even if the best thing for the student is to go elsewhere.
The incentives are group or institutional but “the student” will be an individual. If we change the incentive to “help X trans students every year” then the school had better darn well find X trans students even if they don’t exist and even if “help” isn’t needed, wanted, or appropriate.
Parents become experts at dealing with their kid. Schools become experts at dealing with “normal” (i.e. common) situations. The school might have no one who knows what to do with this.
Read between the lines and the councilor probably was trying to do the right thing, but they lack the tools, expertise, relationships, and time to do well at this.Report
I hear you and I’m not really disagreeing. But part of what I’m saying is that the school is by design very unlikely to ever say ‘maybe we are the problem here.’ In this case it went so far as to project and/or rationalize what was going on as some kind of magical adventure into uncharted gender identities before considering that maybe, just maybe, we should put a stop to the group of boys viciously harassing this girl before jumping to all these
conclusions they aren’t even qualified to make. Like, who is the problem here? The parent that could hypothetically not react to their child’s decisions in a way not deemed (by who exactly?) to be sufficiently supportive? Or the school that’s got an out of control discipline prohlem it isn’t fixing and staff going way off the reservation and hiding that conduct? These are not equivalent concerns, not remotely.Report
I don’t think anyone here is defending the decision to not report the bullying.
The thorny issue is what is the school’s responsibility when the parent is the bully?Report
Who gets to define bullying? Parents have a lot of leeway to be not great parents before it becomes criminal, and in any case you can’t have everyone guilty until proven innocent under a discretionary process they aren’t even aware is being administered.
Really this whole story illustrates exactly why such an approach is a problem. Like, is this girl ‘trans’ in the sense that we are certain she will live the rest of her life presenting herself as a man? Or is this a symptom of the really bad sex-based harassment she was facing at school that no one was stopping? No one knows, but there’s no way it can ever be untangled without parental involvement, and definitely not by teachers and school administrators or guidance counselors or whatever.Report
Wait, aren’t you the guy saying the school should have stopped the bullying?
And now you’re asking who gets to define bullying?
You’re right, the line between “horseplay” and “bullying”, or “strict parenting” and “child abuse” is very hard to define.
But we want and need schools to spot bullying and child abuse, and deal with it.
And yes, in many cases, parents ARE assumed guilty until proven otherwise. Like, its right there in black letter law that at the first indication of abuse, the state is required to swoop in and separate the kids until they can figure out what’s going on.
Sorry, that’s just the system we have.Report
In theory. In practice, not so much. My crazy sister in law is a good example.
Big picture, there’s a golf club test. The court has limited bandwidth. Every family law judge is going to be dealing with a parent who is beating their kid with a golf club.
That’s roughly the level of abuse you need to get the court’s attention. So if you’re trying to make the case that they should be treating X child-abuse more seriously, then you’re also trying to make the case that they should be treating golf club abuse less so.
So is what is happening worse than the parent hitting their kid with a golf club? If yes, then congrats, the system as it is will deal with it by taking the kid. If no, then not so much.Report
First, this is pendantic nonsense on ‘bullying.’ Schools can certainly maintain discipline. You were talking about a school somehow deciding a parent was ‘bullying.’ Maybe you should read the story.
Second, parents are not ‘presumed guilty.’ Even in situations where the authorities intervene in cases of suspected abuse there is process and people are informed of the actions and given opportunities to respond. You’re saying it’s ok for school personnel to lie to parents at their discretion and not tell them about extremely serious situations involving their children. That is not the system we have.Report
I never said anything of the kind.
And yes, it is black letter law that if there is any sign of abuse (such as a child threatening to run away) then the school is obligated to report to the state.
But big picture, the essay Damon linked to is calling for schools to be more active in protecting vulnerable adolescents and be quicker to intervene, and I agree with it.Report
You aren’t talking about a hypothetical.
Right now, schools are mandatory reporters of abuse.
Meaning that by law, they are required to spot signs of abuse and report them.
As if that weren’t difficult enough, now some people are asking the schools to go one step further, and report signs of gender dysphoria to parents.
How anyone would know what that looks like, is anybody’s guess. Like, “Dear Mr & Mrs. Schmoe, we have noticed Suzie is wearing a lot of flannel shirts and jeans lately”?
I’m justy pointing out that if we want schools to be sharp enough to spot signs of abuse and bullying and gender dysphoria and mental anguish in adolescents, and we empower or even mandate that they intervene in a family by reporting these things to parents, we should also ask them to take responsibility for any foreseeable consequences.Report
I’m not sure how I would have handled one of my kids being trans, asking the school to “foresee” my reaction is unreasonable much less “taking responsibility” over what I do.
Given how many times I’ve seen the schools drop the ball while dealing with my kids, I think getting the school to be competent is challenging enough without also asking them to predict the future.
Schools are just spear carriers.
The issue we’re facing is: What do we want to happen when parents don’t support trans youth.
Presumably the normal rules apply, so beating them is obviously a problem… but what should happen when they care deeply about their kids and want to do the right thing but view the right thing as convincing the kid to accept their body as is?Report
My kid came out of the closet to me when she was 20. I handled it with the same level of concern and drama as when I found out she was left handed. She expected that.
I think we can’t use her not wanting to tell her parents as proof of anything.
Given what happened to her, probably poor evaluation of risks.
There are strong hints that she was mentally ill before any of this, the mentally ill make bad choices.Report
I am honestly surprised that there is as much pushback on New Mexico on this as there is.
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Also from David Hogg.
It’s not that surprising; it’s going to be invalidated by the first court that it’s appealed to, so why be tarred with that brush?Report
Local sheriffs Little Bill from Big Whiskey, and Wyatt Earp from Tombstone, were not available for comment.Report
Gimme that brush! Gimme!Report
That was before SCOTUS ruled that carrying guns has always been an absolute right.Report
Public Health Emergency?
When did it start and when will it be over? If we’re suspending the Constitution until Team Blue feels safe and/or criminals obey the law, then that seems like it will take a lot longer than her term. It’s also a problem for our other rights.Report
It’s crazy, which is why even gun control advocates are running away from it. Unlike, say, Vivek’s promise to declare birthright citizenship kaput and deport US citizens, which is likewise crazy and unconstitutional and has gotten almost no pushback from the Right. It’s good not to be a cult.Report
Not much point in “pushing back” against ideas which are that crazy. Often they’re virtue signaling to an ignorant minority.
Although here the governor actively holds office and seems to be trying it.Report
…”virtue signaling to an ignorant minority.
Although here the governor actively holds office and seems to be trying it.”
You’re talking about Ron DeSantis telling people not to get vaccinated, right?Report
Sure. Encouraging vaccine hesitancy is unwise for multiple reasons, even if the Surgeon General of Florida is probably right in healthy children don’t really need Covid vaccinations.
Now I’d say what the other governor is doing as multiple steps past just virtue signaling. Establishing that the gov can, on a whim, remove core Constitutional rights from one group based on the behavior of another group?
That would cause problems if it stands.Report
I’m old enough to remember a time when the idea of a ban on concealed/ open carry for anyone outside of LEO or security guards was the actual norm in many places.
I guess we didn’t have the Constitution back then. Or maybe we did, but we didn’t have what we have now which is some sort of living Constitution which changes with every emanation and penumbra.Report
The argument for banning those isn’t even slightly related to public health. Not unless someone wants to show that mass shooters are spur of the moment types who are law abiding enough that we can regulate them this way.
In the context of the Wild West, where people are getting drunk in bars and shooting it out with the guy sitting next to them because they’re both drunk; banning carry makes sense and can solve problems.
However that’s not our current reality.Report
We also had abortion bans and other non “enlightened” laws. I believe that “living constitution” was used by a lot of liberal folks, justices included.
Don’t bitch about a SC that had a long history of “inventing” laws that agreed with your political beliefs only to find you lost an election and the other side got Justices to either walk them back or “invent” laws you now disagree with. That’s the trouble of relying on Justices to do the work, not Congress.Report