Ten Second News Links and Open Thread for the week of 10/17/22
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 Ten Second News.
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 on the Sidebar 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.
Hrm.
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https://www.vox.com/culture/23398795/kanye-west-ye-antisemitic-bigot-white-lives-matter-tucker-carlson-art-vs-artist
Art vs. the Artist Kanye edition. From the article:
“Even when a work of art still feels vital and accomplished despite the
misdeeds of the artist, we might nonetheless choose to withhold our
money and support from the artist in question — admire Annie Hall, say, but choose not to watch it and send Woody Allen royalties for it.
Ye’s case muddies these waters. Unlike C.K. or Cosby, Ye
has not been accused of any physical transgressions. His misdeeds are
less personal, more abstract: using his enormous platform and influence
to proliferate hate speech and racist conspiracy theories, to dabble
irresponsibly and ignorantly in politics, to harass his ex-wife in
public, to threaten her boyfriend. It can be easy to sigh and dismiss
the whole thing as Kanye being Kanye, to pull an Obama and call him a jackass and keep playing “Gold Digger” on a loop.
Ye also tends to benefit from what we might call the genius loophole. Ye is considered a musical genius, and common wisdom has it that geniuses behave erratically. So fans tend
to be willing to look the other way when he acts out, considering it the price of doing business when you’re dealing with a genius. The fact that few other stars of Kanye’s caliber ever act out in quite the way he does (imagine Beyoncé posting hate speech on Instagram!) somehow comes to serve as further proof of how exceptional he is, rather than as a sign that it is perfectly possible to be a genius without misbehaving so badly that people like me get assigned to write think pieces about the bad things you’ve done.”
When it comes to the art vs. the artist debates, I always think it amounts to interesting showings of special pleading. The author at least heavily implies that she likes Kanye’s music and thinks he is a genius of some sort.* She also implies that she did not care for previous artists like Allen, Louis C.K., or Polanski.
I don’t really care that much about what art people choose to engage with** and I’m usually not very big into hypocrisy charges but the amount of special pleading that can occur with art is quite amazing.
*This is apparently debated and I have never heard a Kanye song so I cannot comment.
**Exceptions are if the art radicalizes a person to the point of committing acts of violence.Report
For Kanye in particular, I sincerely believe he has some mental health and/or neuro-developmental disorders that have left him socially and emotionally stunted or harmed in such a way that he simply doesn’t really know how to interact with typical society.Report
Which is probably true, making it all the more alarming that the leadership of the Republican Party treats him as a well regarded ally.
The same could be said of Herschel Walker, MTG, or even Trump himself.
It’s another data point that nothing is too far, too radical, too hateful or toxic in service to their goals.Report
I think this is true but it doesn’t make it necessarily great and there are lots of articles pointing out that Kanye could very well suffer from mental illness but this does not excuse his behavior or statements.Report
This, but for 90’s Trip Hop:
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On the decline of the GAP, when I was in middle and high school (1991-1998), the GAP was the brand and seemingly a great equalizer. Nearly everyone had clothing from the gap from jeans to chinos: https://sfstandard.com/arts-culture/the-gap-one-of-san-franciscos-most-iconic-businesses-has-come-undone/Report
The GAP was for upmarket suburban kids. I think that their clothing comes across as too staid for modern youth. it was good looking but ultimately solid streetwear.Report
I think your first sentence is wrong. The Gap opened everywhere and advertised all over to the masses. It was a jeans equalizer in the 1990s. The second part is probably correct.Report
From what I remember, the GAP was upmarket and brands like Old Navy, which the GAP later brought, were down market. They did do mass advertising but they seemed mainly aiming for the upper middle class or above.Report
A handful of Muslim parents in Dearborn made the mistake of going to the PTA meetings and making noises about these newfangled books that they consider to be sexually explicit. A handful of these parents had people try to call their employers to get them fired. Or, anyway, they say that.
That’s not the interesting thing from the meeting, though. The interesting thing from the meeting was the rebuttal:
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The difficulties of running a multicultural, multireligious, multisexual policy.Report
They’re still giving the Dominion speech, but it’ll turn into the Borg speech soon enough.Report
If someone markets themselves as an an “anti-woke journo”, I am going to guess that there are things taken out of context, lacking full context, and not done in good faith. At the very least, it is an admission of an agendaReport
I have no doubt that Ms. Khan is biased AF, as the kidz say.
However, the 3 minute speech and the 90 second speech both appear uncut and both contain interesting moments despite the obvious bias of the reporter (who is also a woman).Report
Does the existence of an agenda remove all credibility, though? Is there any way to progress toward truth under that standard?Report
Good news! I found the hour-long youtube where those clips were lifted from!
The first guy starts at 21:11.
The second guy starts at 24:43.
You can see how much was taken out of context and decide for yourself!Report
This displays the isolated bubble conservatives live in.
They just assume that everyone else will just naturally be incapable of seeing Muslims as complex people with varying elements of intolerance and bigotry.
So in their minds, this is a perfect “Gotcha” moment, like having a real authentic Black man make anti-Semitic tweets. “The liberals love Black people and Muslims, so they can’t possibly criticize them! Mwuahhahah, checkmate libs!”Report
Yes. Ms. Khan is demonstrating the hell out of bubbles here.Report
Eh…not just her.Report
At least with the very online white liberals, there does seem to be a this weird thought that all oppressed groups automatically work together because reasons. After the Los Angeles City Council scandal, Vox had this line about the statements crushing the dream of a black-brown working class progressive alliance. The only place this alliance existed is in the minds of the very online but let’s forget this. So I imagine that at least some white liberals are going to be shocked to learn that many Muslim-Americans do possess very traditionalist beliefs because of whatever drama is playing in their heads.Report
Yeah, which is why I’m pessimistic about the Demography argument.
Nonwhite people are just as susceptible to authoritarian mindsets as white people.
I’d say if if someone’s view of these parents switches depending on whether they are Christian or Muslim they should probably do some reflection on just why that is.Report
In fact one of my acquittances, a classic leftist anti-Zionist Jew posted the Guardian article about the Dearborn Muslims joining forces with Christians and said he had no comment. He seems genuinely shocked that traditionalist Muslims aren’t extremely pro-LGBT because both are oppressed groups in the United States.Report
Ehhh I think it’s even beyond that. Very Online progressives have become blind to the fact that people come to the US because they view it and its culture and traditions positively, a sentiment that they have inexplicably decided is coded conservative.
The real question is why school boards in the age of Amazon seem ready to die on these hills. I have no idea what book this is at issue or the age of the students but it isn’t like books are expensive artifacts held in a few places. Anyone who thinks it’s critical their children learn about adult hook-up apps can easily make works of that nature available, regardless of what the school has.Report
I think this is a bit broad stroked but generally true. I think people come to this country for all sorts of reasons. I don’t like your “these books are available on Amazon so why bother argument” for the following reasons:
1. The adult hook-up app book is a low blow and not what these fights are about. How about the LBGTQ kid from a deeply conservative family that needs to know nothing is wrong or immoral about them? Those kids might need the books in school or the local library in order to get access? Kids don’t have credit cards of their own.
2. You can nutpick stories on twitter about the elementary school teacher that takes out Harry Potter from his or her classroom library over TERFness but in my experience lots of liberal parents still let their kids read Harry Potter. All of the ones I know do in fact. This kind of nutpicking is bad-faith BSDI kind of stuff that rests on a bed of false equivalences in terms of degree and kind.
3. Why be so certain that emboldened and empowered right-wingers won’t go after Amazon and other private sellers next?Report
Why be so certain that emboldened and empowered right-wingers won’t go after Amazon and other private sellers next?
SLIPPERY SLOPE!!!!!Report
One side might do it!Report
Would you care to address points 1 and 2?Report
Um, sure.
“Number 3 isn’t a silver bullet.”Report
That is not addressing points 1 and 2.Report
Okay, fine. “Quit being a troll. Argue in good faith for once.”
Oh, that doesn’t address your arguments either?
Well, okay. Part of the problem is the extent to which we say that parents should have jurisdiction over their children and to what degree that we say that society, instead, has a lien against them.
Like those Hasidic schools in New York. Some people think that it should be enough to just say “okay, fine, maybe they shouldn’t get tax dollars”.
Other people say “those people shouldn’t be allowed to harm their children by keeping them cloistered against The Real World”.
I think that there might be an age limit thing here, though. Like, it might be appropriate for parents to say “nope, not for 2nd graders” when it would be completely inappropriate for parents to say “not for 10th graders either!”
So, in this particular case, I’d want to know what grade we’re talking about before I’d say that it’s appropriate for the parents to be exercising this degree of jurisdiction over society’s next generation of taxpayers.
As for #2, it’s about nuts who are opposed to JK Rowling and how they haven’t bled out to the real world outside of a handful of too-online nuts that people pick.
So I’m not sure what there is to address. Any example I’d give of a person saying “I removed JK Rowling from my classroom” will be dismissed as a nut. So I’m not sure what you’re asking for here.Report
Former Republican operative Tim Miller at the Bulwark looks into the Furrygate moral panic and how it is literbox of lies: https://www.thebulwark.com/furrygate-a-litterbox-of-lies/
The problem with this kind of stuff is that there is almost no way to combat it. This kind of smear is designed to hit the IDs of a certain kind of low-info voters and get them motivated to the polls. I don’t think there are a whole lot of voters out there who think “You know, I blame Biden and the Democrats for high gas prices but this furry thing is so absurd that I am going to vote Democratic in November.” Most voters who know it is absurd have made up their minds already. Furrygate is about getting marginal voters to the polls.Report
The only saving grace is that they can’t restrain themselves, but are compelled to constantly blurt out the quiet parts.
Yes, they really do want to charge women who get abortions with murder.
Yes, they really do want to imprison parents who offer gender affirming care for their children.
Yes, they really do want to destroy Social Security and Medicare.
Whether this will motivate the marginal ones, I don’t know but it is at least refreshing to see the shock of women in red states who are suddenly sitting upright and saying, “Oh, wait…the leopards mean MY FACE!”
MIMBRES, New Mexico — Gabe Vasquez’s latest campaign ad is simple to the point of austere: Black-and-white portraits of women, a melancholic piano score, and a recitation of his opponent’s stance on abortion.
“I will always protect a woman’s right to choose,” Vasquez, a Democrat, vows, drawing a contrast with his Republican opponent, Rep. Yvette Herrell.
Such a commercial could be running in any number of contested congressional seats, where Democrats nationwide are leaning hard into abortion rights as the November election approaches. Most notable in Vasquez’s pitch, however, is that it is airing, in both English and Spanish, in New Mexico’s 2nd District — the most Latino seat in the state with the highest percentage — 47.7% — of Latinos in the nation.
Just as the reversal of Roe vs. Wade has scrambled Democrats’ overall midterm playbook, it has also prompted the party to rethink its long-standing approach with Latino voters. The party is putting the abortion issue at the center, discarding decades of conventional wisdom that it would be a political loser with a group of voters that is overwhelmingly Catholic and seen as socially conservative.
https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2022-10-17/2022-midterm-election-america-unsettled-latinos-abortionReport
I think Dobbs ironically saved the Democrats from a bloodbath. It is plausible but also unlikely that it could deliver an unexpected blue wave. It is also plausible but unlikely that Republicans get a wave election.
This is a bit of a black hole election with points in favor and against both parties.
Mastriano is too scary for PA voters but the equally scary Kari Lake and Finchem could win in Arizona.Report
Mastriano looks more scary than Kari Lake.Report
Heh I had not heard of this one.
But I am not sure about the no way to combat it part. I think an ounce of self-policing is probably worth a pound of playing defense.Report
Because many schools see teaching tolerance, diversity, and other liberal values as important missions and know that their LGBT kids in conservative families that need help. I’m guessing the more liberal teachers believe that many times they need to go against the parents to help the kids because the parents are screwed up. Kids don’t have credit cards either as my brother points out.Report
That’s an interesting point that we never got into when it came to the Hasidic school debate a few weeks back.
How is the LGBT section there?
I remember the “Trembling Before G-d” documentary so it’s not like we can pretend that there isn’t a need for the gay kids in those schools to learn about oral sex and whatnot.Report
I think the problem with that is that those public schools and their personnel are fundamentally wrong and quite misguided about their role in society, which is as humble, professional public servants. The more interested they are in shaping the values of their charges and playing the savior from an after school special the less focused they are on doing their actual jobs of educating. Over the last few years I’ve become convinced that beyond very basic principles of tolerance (which in a public school setting must be both strict and mandatory) these two things really are mutually exclusive.
Now if this is a high school you’ll never see me getting particularly exercised about a book gathering dust on a library shelf, provided whatever it is falls short of pure pornography (which ironically might be the one thing that gets teenagers to go to the library, particularly if the cell phone reception isn’t good). But the younger the kids the more interest parents have in what is available. Even at the high school level I think there’s a strong interest in how much of this kind of thing gets into curriculum. The more there is the more likely priorities are messed up.
As to Amazon I think Jaybird covered the tu quoque component. But beyond that information is just freely available on a level that’s become unimaginable. I think most parents know that at a certain point they are going to lose control over what their kids are exposed to or seek out, and it’s almost certainly going to happen before they want it to. Which brings me back to my first point about how schools and school boards that take stands over these things are fundamentally misguided. I imagine they picture themselves as the heroic progressive teacher from some 80s movie, that itself may have been about an earlier era, throwing a lifeline to an offbeat, alienated student poorly treated by parents and stigmatized by peers. Oh captain my captain or whatever.
What they’re actually doing when this kind of thing comes up is putting their own hobby horses over the mission of the place, which is getting kids literate and able to do math. This is of course all to the ongoing frustration of perplexed parents that want their kids educated enough to become functional adults that might get a job one day. And as the taxpayers their priorities must prevail, especially when they also happen to be more right on the merits than those on the other side.Report
“I think the problem with that is that those public schools and their personnel are fundamentally wrong and quite misguided about their role in society, which is as humble, professional public servants. The more interested they are in shaping the values of their charges and playing the savior from an after school special the less focused they are on doing their actual jobs of educating. Over the last few years I’ve become convinced that beyond very basic principles of tolerance (which in a public school setting must be both strict and mandatory) these two things really are mutually exclusive.”
There is lots of research that shows various factors related to mental health (including rather simple but maybe-not-so-obviously-related-to-mental health like “a sense of belonging”) have major impacts on learning. It could be easily argued that setting a classroom climate of mutual respect where all students feel they have an equal and valued place is essential to the educative process, not something that draws away from it.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t excesses in pursuit of it. But the idea that we should just roll up our sleeves and focus on the three Rs isn’t really backed up by the data anymore.Report
Hey, I’ll defer to you on the research. Call me crazy, but I’d like to think we can say schools aren’t going to tolerate racism, or bullying of the kid that doesn’t conform to traditional gender stereotypes while still understanding that literature featuring grindr (which is what the guy in the video was referencing) is probably not appropriate and parents might rightfully have some concerns about it.Report
Oh, sure. I’m talking to the more general idea… not any specific instance. I don’t even know what book is being discussed.
A close friend works in textbook publishing. While his math book didn’t have the “honor” of being rejected by Florida, they did have to make adjustments accordingly, including removing all references to “Social Emotional Learning.”
Social Emotional Learning — which used to be a term we didn’t capitalize but nowadays is a term we do capitalize but whatever — is probably 95-99% stuff that no one would find controversial beyond maybe thinking it is a bit too crunchy for their liking. But because there were a couple examples of SEL that got too close to the No Woke Zone, they now have to remove all mention of it. They can still get a lot of the content in — again, its 95-99% stuff that no one would be bothered by — but they have to call it something else.
In short, it’s basically, “Don’t be a jerk.”
The problem is now all of this stuff — by both sides — gets lumped in together so now we can’t have anything nice.
I can’t get too worked up about a book casually mentioning Grindr (if that is what it did) available for high school students. I’m sure I had coming-of-age novels that made reference to a box of Playboys in the woods somewhere. But everyone has to plant their flag and here we are.
Whether that book exists on the shelf or not is ultimately of little material import. It is ALL the wasted breath and time and energy going into the conversation around it that is really taking away from things.Report
If you want to know more about the book, you can see excerpts in Ms. Khan’s thread. Note: She only learned about this stuff because LibsOfTikTok publicized it first.
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See, I would like to think an adult could take a look at something like that, say we probably don’t need this, and realize that whatever benefit it may have is likely to be greatly outweighed by its clearly provocative nature. That’s especially so at an elementary school level if that’s where it is. I think that’s the case even where we are concerned about ensuring tolerance of students who are or are in the process of realizing they are gay.
But when it is Good Actually or a Republican conspiracy…. well that’s the moment I think the plot gets lost.Report
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.
-Jaybird quoting Margaret MeadReport
That may be the self flattering way such individuals see themselves. I’m more of a never doubt the ability of bureaucrats and backbenchers to fail to understand the completely predictable consequences they reap.Report
The age really matters here. And while I take the tone of the book to be rather tongue-and-cheeky and intentionally subversive in a way that I could defend for a junior high or high school crowd, I’d actually be most bothered by the how-to guide for Grinder (or any such hookup app). I’m pretty sure the TOSs on those are for 18+ and while kids are inevitably find their way into things they are too young for, if some kid got harmed screwing around on a hookup app he learned how to use via a school library… I wouldn’t wanna be that school’s lawyer.Report
It’s funny, I didn’t even think of that, but it does add another layer to this particular work. No doubt the school librarian is a strong proponent of sovereign immunity.
To your larger point, I personally wouldn’t be concerned about an older high schooler having access to it. One assumes they have already seen everything at that point anyway. Underclassmen I’d be a little more circumspect but not losing my mind. I think middle schoolers almost certainly lack the maturity and would really question the judgment of whoever made the decision. Younger than that the problems are too numerous to list.
But I also accept that others have different thresholds than I do. I’m also not sure public schools are really the right venue for pushing the envelope on matters of sexual mores. At the very least I’d say it invites controversy. Hence my initial reaction of not getting why people want to dig in over something like this. Like, what specifically are they trying to achieve? My suspicion is that no one is actually thinking about it at all until there is some blow up.Report
This is an example of blurting out the quiet parts.
They view sex in general and gay people especially as fundamentally icky and refuse to accept them as equal citizens.Report
Dearborn, man. Always blurting out the quiet parts.Report
If your position on this switches depending on whether these are Christians or Muslims, you might want to do some reflection as to just why that is.Report
Why can’t these immigrants be the EPCOT version?
Did you watch the footage of the rebuttal? I think you’d really enjoy it and find a lot to agree with!
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We discussed this 2 1/2 years ago, ftr.
You described it thusly:
Well. They’re fighting. If we wanted to call it “deliberate”, I’m not sure we have the answer to “at whose agency” question. Unless, of course, it’s “Racist White Republicans!”
Wait, “Homophobic White Republicans!”Report
The quiet part being blurted out here is how for conservatives, this entire issue revolves around identity.
From the start both you and Ms. Khan are very keen to tell us that these are not just parents, they are MUSLIM parents.
And they’re not just objecting to sex education, they’re objecting to GAY sex education.
It’s all identity grievance here with you guys. Identity defines who is good or bad, what is right or wrong.
In this case, youre telling us that gays are inherently icky and can’t be trusted around children.Report
Do you think these parents would be less exercised if the book had a ‘how to give oral sex’ section but the context and portrayal was heterosexual? I guess I’m open to the possibility but I wouldn’t put money on it.Report
Personally, I don’t see color.
But I *DO* see tensions. And I always think that it’s interesting to see whose position changes based on some perceived temporary advantage.
Did you watch the footage of the rebuttal? It’s only a couple of minutes!Report
Thats all you guys see here, is identity..
You really do see this as a “man bites dog” story that gives you an advantage over your hated Outgroup.
You think think that a Muslim identity is an important fact here and that it’s important that we are talking about gay sex.
Strip away the identity and you got just a ho hum story.Report
Jaybird has been highlighting the liberal’s response to this, not the story itself.Report
Did you watch the footage of the rebuttal? It’s only a couple of minutes!Report
My preference is also to be laid back about these things. I think parents are best served not to automatically believe every lurid tale they see on social media or their favorite right-wing news site. There also just needs to be some general perspective about what school is actually like versus the theory of what school should be. My recollection of my own public school experience (I went to public high school, Catholic k-8) is of a lot of boredom, some social melodrama that in retrospect was obviously trivial and childish, and a lot of faddish ideas that were transparently such, and which were rarely implemented more than superficially.
But I like to think I can carry two thoughts in my head at once. I think at this point it is fair to also see that there is a stream going from grad schools into educational institutions that see part of their mission as subversion of social norms, including many that are pretty sensible and mundane. That includes some radical, and under any rational examination, mostly dopey ideas, about race and sex. Unfortunately in our larger political context these people mostly identify with and are perceived as part of the Democratic coalition.
Learning to shut that down, not just because it’s unpopular, but because it’s stupid, would go a long way towards that ounce of prevention versus pound of playing defense I mentioned to Saul. Right now the perception is that deep down the Democratic establishment actually agrees with it, when I think the actual attitude is much more ambivalent. But to Normies it looks a lot like the increasing tolerance by the GOP of the QAnon people in their ranks. They’re self-evidently nuts but no one is willing to do the right thing about it.Report
“But I like to think I can carry two thoughts in my head at once. I think at this point it is fair to also see that there is a stream going from grad schools into educational institutions that see part of their mission as subversion of social norms, including many that are pretty sensible and mundane. That includes some radical, and under any rational examination, mostly dopey ideas, about race and sex. Unfortunately in our larger political context these people mostly identify with and are perceived as part of the Democratic coalition.”
I think this is true but also not true all at the same time.
I work at a crunchy, fairly “woke” private nursery school in the West Village of Manhattan. And our director — who is my age — still addresses certain emails to “Dear Lovely Ladies” because she’s southern and just has a weird flair with stuff like that. I think it’s kind of annoying and kind of problematic but… eh… it’s not going to make the news.
There are lots of dopey ideas in education coming from all directions. What’s happening right now is you have a particular flavor of dopiness (I’ll just call it woke-ness for ease) that is being pushed by zealots and which dovetails with larger political/culture war crap AND you have a standing army of opponents ready to just pillory the dopiest elements of these dopey ideas.
I tell you… if I showed you all the stupid things done in schools these days, you’d probably find many of them more individually problematic than many of these outrage of the moment Tweets. But they wouldn’t seem part of some broader “movement” and therefore less insidious OR they’re just so baked in you’d probably go, “Oh yea, that is kind of dumb and weird,” and just move on.
It’s the newness and loudness and combativeness of the woke-ness dumbness that is what makes it stand out far more than anything unique to the actual ideology or how it got here.Report
Unless something changes and teaching becomes more financially stable as career, you are going to attract an unusually large number of idealists because they are the ones who are going to go into a profession with little remunerative reward. This means that they are going to see it as their mission to teach children what they see as proper liberal values even if they scare the parents.Report
Not if they’re coached, disciplined, and eventually terminated when they go off the reservation. Which to be clear does not mean I think it would be good for teachers to have to walk an impossibly tight rope, especially to the point it makes the career miserable and unworkable. But I also think having some boundaries with politics and children, particularly the young ones, in a public school setting, is not this far fetched, crazy, impossible to implement concept. Really I think the failure to adhere to some of those boundaries is exactly what’s going to lead to teaching being put under a microscope, and I don’t think that’s a good outcome for kids either.Report
And to put a finer point on it, based on the sources we have, we’re talking about a book that apparently includes a ‘how to have casual gay sex’ section, complete with illustrations. My gut reaction is to find this hilarious. And it would be, but for the fact that it seems to give creedence to every wild-eyed conservative fear of progressivism incapable of policing itself in even the most obvious scenarios. If it didn’t exist Tucker Carlson and Chris Rufo would have to invent it.Report
Conservatives do NOT have any sort of problem with teenagers being sexually active.
They accept it, embrace it and enthusiastically point out how Joseph was an adult and Mary was 14.
Oh, GAY teens?
That’s different because homosexuality is inherently perverted.Report
Well, see my response above. Maybe such people exist but I think we may just have to agree to disagree.Report
Most Christians don’t believe that Joseph and Mary were sexually active. Beyond that, the idea of sex within marriage isn’t really a complaint among Christians. Not many would want marriages to be permitted at a young age, but generally Christians are more likely to marry young. And there are a lot of things in the Bible that aren’t put there as recommendations nor are treated as such. And there are probably five or six other mistakes in this comment.Report
We just had reports of a prominent conservative blogger, Matt Walsh, espousing getting it on with 16 year old girls.Report
What did he say?Report
Nope?Report
Here ya go: https://meaww.com/did-matt-walsh-really-suggest-16-yr-olds-be-impregnated-resurfaced-rant-shocks-internet
Busy day.Report
Don’t most Catholics secretly believe that Jesus’s father was really the centurion Tiberius Julius Abdes Pantera?
Check and mate, conservatives!Report
If Dan Brown said it, it’s probably true.Report
I think that this says something about all theists.Report
Pinky: “Most Christians” necessarily includes Protestants, many of whom, noting the Biblical identification of siblings, have no problem with the idea that Mary produced these mortal siblings by the traditional process, unlike their older brother. Since no one thinks Mary cuckolded Joseph, the natural assumption is that Joseph was the father. The Catholic tradition, long-standing, but, as far as I can tell, unofficial, is that these identified siblings were not the children of Mary and anyone, and unrelated to Jesus at all. You see this in Catholic religious art, which invariably shows a young Mary and a not only older, but just plain old Joseph.
Jaybird: No. I’m afraid to ask where you heard this. Was it between the YEC lessons?Report
My understanding is that it is basically only the Roman Catholic Church that teaches Mary never had sex in her life and Jesus’ siblings were half-siblings from an early marriage of Joseph. Other Christians believe they are younger full siblings.Report
There are, so I’ve heard, plenty of Protestant churches called St. Joseph The Groomer.Report
Most Christians are Roman Catholic, or at least it’s very close. If you add in the Orthodox and some of the more traditional Anglicans and Lutherans, you’re probably clearing 60%.Report
It’s never safe to assume that most adherents of any Christian sect, especially Roman Catholics, know or care what they are supposed to believe that makes them different from other Christian sects.
An anecdote for what it’s worth: someone I know who teaches courses on the New Testament — as Christians insist on calling it — has taught in a northeastern state where his students were mainly Roman Catholic and in a southern state where his students are mainly Protestant. The Catholics were surprised to read that Jesus had siblings. (Catholics are notoriously ignorant of actual scripture; they tend to accept what they are told second-hand from authority figures.) The Protestants knew all about it and had no trouble about it.Report
Not that anyone actually cares… but for the record:
Greek: Joseph’s sons from first marriage
Catholic: Cousins (via Cleopas)
(some) Prot: Natural born after Jesus’ virgin birth based on Matthew text.
Perpetual virginity for Mary is tradition in Greek/Catholic, only (some) Protestants abjure from that.
Personally the cousin theory is the most consistent scripturally, textually, historically and contextually blending all three.Report
No. I’m afraid to ask where you heard this.
The same place Chip heard that Mary was 14.
He can confirm, if you care to ask about his information.
(Lemme guess: “If people are concerned about Chip’s information, they can ask him about it.”)Report
Huh? I thought you were kidding about this. Tradition can speculate about Mary’s age – she had to be some age. But you can’t speculate about what Catholics secretly believe, at least not without being creepy.Report
If she wasn’t 18, it was officially weird.
I base this on American mores in 2022.
Also: Have you heard about this Mohammed guy? You wouldn’t believe what they say about Aisha!
Wait, maybe the LGBT allies should bring her up to the Muslims in the audience.Report
Creepy is as creepy does.Report
I don’t think you know where Chip got the idea that Mary was 14. I also doubt that Chip knows or can confirm what your sources of information are. And I’m not interested in Mary’s age, or what Chip thinks he knows about it. I’m interested in what you said, which is that Catholics believe (secretly or otherwise) that a Phoenician-Roman soldier was the biological father of Jesus.
I know Celsus said it, but Origen disputed it and Celsus’s work no longer survives. which suggests that his views have not found much acceptance. It is not the official view of the Roman Catholic church, and of the literally thousands of Catholics I know, none of them ever expressed or hinted at this belief and probably none of them knew anything about Celsus, let alone a wandering Phoenician-Roman soldier.
But rather than explain where you got this strange idea, you deflect. We’ve seen this movie before.Report
I doubt that Chip knows what his own sources of information are.
Neither do I know mine.
That said, I always thought that Pantera was a cool name for a rock band. I had no idea it was coded blasphemy!
Or secretly coded to be a band that Catholics could listen to while Baptists were stuck listening to Stryper.
“It is not the official view of the Roman Catholic church, and of the literally thousands of Catholics I know, none of them ever expressed or hinted at this belief and probably none of them knew anything about Celsus, let alone a wandering Phoenician-Roman soldier.”
What part of “secretly” is opaque to you?
You could believe it right now and also believe that you had to keep it hidden.
“But rather than explain where you got this strange idea, you deflect. We’ve seen this movie before.”
It has to do with the concept of “meta-ethics”. (It did in those previous movies as well.)Report
Give an evasive witness enough rope and he will eventually say something mind-bogglingly stupid or batshit crazy.
My work is done hereReport
I prefer mind-bogglingly crazy.
(“Meta-ethics” usually are, though. I mean, a belief that yardsticks be used to measure more than one thing? Madness.)Report
All Catholics absolutely believe that and are also secretly followers of his band from the 90s, including weak later efforts like Reinventing the Steel.Report
It’s hard to explain to outsiders, but it has something to do with the Ontological Proof of Phil Anselmo.Report
*devoutly makes the sign of the cross*Report
I blame the influence of Marx for this. If your model of political conflict is the Marxist Dialectic, naturally you will think of politics as being about conflict two, stable, mutually antagonistic factions.Report
On the other hand, sometimes politics is a conflict between mutually antagonistic factions. Not always stable ones though. As Chip notes, there is not always a reasonable middle ground on issues especially issues of social and cultural conflict over what society and daily life should look like. You can’t technocrat your way out these conflicts.
There does seem to be a certain kind of wonk or policy person that really dislikes the issue above and wants it all to go away. They often end up wanting to treat the polity as a corporation where we are all employees and they are the lead cheerleader/manager for production. “Can’t we all just be on Team New Zealand or Team Sweden or Team France or Team United States and focus on GDP/shareholder growth?” The answer to this is no. You can’t treat social conflict like an HR department mediation between two employees.Report
You misunderstand me, two factions is too few, not too many.Report
You don’t need Marx to have a conflict between two, stable, mutually antagonistic factions. This existed in the United Kingdom for a long time before Marxist analysis was a thing. Same with the United States. You just need a large enough electorate and an issue that divides like slavery.Report
Political faction != political party. Indeed, that misconception is exactly what I’m criticising. Any political party that isn’t absolutely tiny will have many constituencies that support it. These constituencies may all agree that their party is better than the other party, but they will undoubtedly have policy preferences that conflict in some places. That idea is what I am taking issue with – that everyone who votes for the Democrats (or for that matter the Republicans) will all support the exact same policy goals, rather than party politics being about an ongoing political mediation between allied but distinct groups.Report
Ah, I get it., Many of the very online hold to a Marxist Dialectic interpretation of politics and this makes it really difficult for them to understand that while Muslims might vote Democratic because of Republican Christian nationalism that doesn’t mean they automatically hold “In this house beliefs” on LGBT rights.Report
That’s valid, but there’s also an online assumption that your identity (modern definition) dictates your party. That determinism is also Marxist.Report
I agree, the Essentialist nature of the dialectic is also at play here.Report
How would you define essences in a Marxian or even Hegelian dialectic?Report
Musty?Report
I have heard them described as smelling vaguely like a minx or perhaps a fisher.
More seriously, I’ll never cease to be amazed at how ridiculous libertarian (to say nothing of conservative) beliefs about Marxism are. It’s as though they’ve never read Marx, or in fact any actual Marxist (because of course they have not).
There is a reason, obviously, that most major existentialists were also Marxists, and that’s because Marxian (and Hegelian) “essentialism” is in no sense a fixed, immutable thing (like, say, the atomic weight of gold), but a process of not only revealing, but constructing, meaning (in a broad sense). The dialectic is, in fact, a process, and while it is an interplay opposites, it is in this way no different than virtually all western metaphysics after Aristotle (with obvious exceptions like Nietzsche, later process philosophers, folks that people around here would think of as PoMo, like Deleuze, or as folks here are perhaps more familiar with, in fuzzy logic). Just like Aristotle, you start with a and ~a, but instead of stopping there, you add how the relationship between a and ~a changes both a and ~a. In Hegelian terms, you have the thing (a), its negation (~a), and then through the relationship between the thing and its negation, the negation of the negation (that is, in Hegel, a reveals itself further, and deeper, or more completely, through its interaction with ~a).
In Marx, this takes on an historical and materialist character, so that a and ~a are what they are, and will become what they will become, through their relations with each other (and both what a is, and what is not a, are processes that change as they interact).
And to be clear, ~a is not simply one thing, but all things that are ~a, and the dialect is about how a becomes what it is, continually, through its relations to all things that are not a, not because they are necessarily antagonistic in some adversarial sense, but because everything is always in the process of becoming by interacting with other things
To make this clearer, you can think of it like this: a hammer becomes a hammer when it interacts with things that aren’t hammers, like humans, nails, and things humans want to put nails into, and what a hammer is, or what it can be, changes depending on how it interacts with those other things.
To see how this shows a lack of essentialism in social categories, consider the incredibly large literature on what even is the working class, and what even is the bourgeois, in the current stage of capitalism, where the social relations between workers and the owners of the means of production look very different in many ways from what they looked like a century or more ago, and, will continue to evolve because these groups (to the extent that they still meaningfully exist) will continue to change as they continue to interact with each other.
Also, anyone who tells you that Marxism, or critical theory, is essentialist about identity, and in particular, racial identity, has never read a word of either.
Anyway, libertarians should read more Marx and Marxists. Conservatives should just learn to read ;).Report
The Left no longer has required reading, though.
The old Left does. Or did. Back when they did not yet break when they turned off their alarm clock wrong.Report
Every left group I’ve ever known has had education sessions and reading groups. Some actually have required reading. Others are built almost entirely around reading and education.
In my experience, the average leftist is better read than the average member of any other broad political faction.
Sure, there are a lot of ignorant young leftists online, but that’s true of every group on the internet now.Report
I’m glad to know that the old fellers are still keeping on.
I hope that they attract enough young blood to keep the torch lit.Report
Left groups, from universities to the big organizing groups, have all seen huge influxes of young people over the last 6 years, must of whom, in my experience at least are eager to learn.Report
This is not only not how Marx’s dialectics (or, in fact, any dialectics) works, but is in some ways (especially stable part — dialectics only works if they are dynamic, always changing as a result of their relations — but to some extent also the “two” and “mutually antagonistic” parts) exactly the opposite of the way it works, so I wouldn’t blame whatever you’re blaming on dialectics.Report
This is what liberalism looks like:
Gil Cedillo, Kevin de León stripped of City Council committee posts over racist leak
Acting Los Angeles City Council President Mitch O’Farrell removed Councilmembers Kevin de León and Gil Cedillo from an array of council committee assignments on Monday, in yet another attempt at pressuring the two men to resign.
With Cedillo and De León refusing to step down, O’Farrell said the two had been removed from committees that deal with real estate development, housing, homelessness and other issues.Report
I suspect this might be a virtue is its own reward category. It seems incredibly hard/difficult to get it to register to ordinary voters that this is a party functioning.Report
And yet we do it all the time on the left side of the aisle.Report
Slate has an article about the need to liberalize the practice of law so that more people can have access to justice. I’m sympathetic but I’m also in a field of law filled with non-lawyers posing and practicing as lawyers. They mess up the immigration cases in fatal ways a lot. There are also plenty of lawyers doing scummy things.
https://slate.com/comments/news-and-politics/2022/10/blue-states-legal-services-lawyers-fail.htmlReport
A *VERY* interesting investigation here.
When Maribou worked at the bookstore, they had this software for books. You know, you might not know that the Resident Evil Pocket Guide is selling for ~$40 but when you added your Resident Evil Pocket Guide to your inventory, this software scraped the web for the prices of all of the other books and priced your books accordingly. No more of this thing where you looked at the cover price, saw that it was $20, then you set your price for 50% of cover price plus a buck. Nope! They saw that the books were selling online for $40 and would price it accordingly.
“This drove up book prices!”, she told me. “Until book prices crashed.”
Well, they have that for rent now.
Report
They’re…lookng at comps. Everyone in real estate looks at comps. (“Bah Gawd, is that Tarek El Moussa’s Music?!”) Everyone selling *anything* looks at comps.Report
I don’t understand.Report
When you buy a house, the appraiser does not appraise the house based upon a platonic understanding of it’s intrinsic form… they look at what ‘comparable’ houses sold for in an area.
‘Good’ appraisers work the comps to get the property to appraise in the right range for the loan… of course this sets off a virtuous/vicious cycle where houses sell for what comps appraise for, which sets another comp to ‘validate’ that that’s the proper valuation.
Seeing that ‘comp’ properties are being leased at $XX adjusts the market to that $$ which can set-up the vicious circle of comps justifying comps – until they can’t.Report
I totally misunderstood “comps”.
Too much time in Vegas, I guess.
Okay, I dig the criticism, then. I guess we’re merely now in a place where the algorithm is much more efficient and has no qualms when it spits out a number. It’s the humans that say “that can’t be right… I’ll knock off a couple bills.”
The computer has no such compunction.Report
Sure, it’s gerrymander by feels/zip-code vs. gerrymander by Complex data analysis/street… once you surpass a certain level of sophistication the name we gave it before doesn’t quite mean what we do now.Report
“30% on rent? We’re leaving a lot of money on the table!”
If history is any guide, this tends to end in only but a handful of ways… very few of which are pleasant.Report
Eh, rents clear pretty quickly as they are, well, rents… the danger, so to speak, is if people chase rents by moving capital into areas where the rents are unsustainable.
Perpetually high rents owing to other structural issues? Sure, those end in riots.Report
Another day, another grifter. Tulsi “leaves” the Democratic Party and goes campaigning for a far right loon: https://twitter.com/EricCortellessa/status/1582178259693096961?s=20&t=GMRXpzAG3vLK9HgJzTF47QReport
Nick Fuentes goes on his own anti-Semitic rant inspired by Ye: https://twitter.com/RightWingWatch/status/1582028599812820992?s=20&t=HXW51xyLv8hYDvHPlXOVRAReport
Lauren Boebert killed a dog
https://twitter.com/AmericanMuck/status/1581776109997559808?s=20&t=Xppn-ZstiJkGZD67U1G6bAReport
I, too, deadass cannot stop laughing at this.
Report
Here’s where the trans bigotry is at, with more to come:
Rachel Gonzales, 39, has thought a lot about what she would do if child welfare agents came to her home in Dallas to investigate whether her 12-year-old daughter is receiving gender-affirming care. She’s hired an attorney, given all three of her children the phone number, and told them to call the lawyer if anyone shows up when she and her husband are away from home.
But Gonzales is not making plans to move west from Texas, even after Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a law recently making California a “sanctuary” for families with transgender children.
“I don’t know if I would say we’re comfortable, but we are unwilling to move our children, who are thriving in their school and have tons of friends,” she said. “And it’s absolutely ridiculous to upturn their lives because of political theater.”
Families like Gonzales’ face a dilemma as governors and lawmakers in conservative-led states propose or enact policies intended to limit or halt access to sports teams, school facilities and medical treatment for transgender students and in some cases threatening to punish families.
Where they can’t directly punish trans families, they force them into exile. But as with all cases of people fleeing a repressive regime, only the lucky or privileged can leave.
Kathie Moehlig, executive director of Trans Families Support Services, a San Diego-based group that co-sponsored the California bill, acknowledges that “folks that are moving here from other states are in a privileged percentage of people.” But over the eight years since her group launched, her team has heard from 3,000 trans people and their families across the country who wanted answers to questions such as where they can get medical care or how they can live safely in their own states, she said.
Moehlig points to a variety of recent measures that have raised trans Americans’ anxiety level. Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt signed a bill Oct. 5 that will effectively end medical care for trans minors at one of the state’s largest hospital groups. Florida banned the use of Medicaid funds for transgender healthcare, regardless of age, in August. An Alabama law that makes it a crime for doctors to prescribe drugs to minors is on hold pending a court review.
https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2022-10-18/california-sanctuary-state-trans-kids-moving
And don’t let them protest that this is merely about the edge cases: Notice how they push for it “regardless of age”, or even when it is nonsurgical, and according to some reports, even when it is merely providing emotional support and affirmation.Report
Twitter locks staff stock accounts in anticipation of deal
Report
Dave Smith, Founder and CEO of Cotopaxi, wrote a post on why his company is leaving San Francisco.
A sad story retold a hundred times by now but what I found interesting were the responses:
Without getting into the whole issue of who is right and who is wrong, I’m mostly noticing a complete and total disconnect.Report
Indeed, it’s all “stop complaining and you should be helping those unfortunates more”. Yah, like the organized crime wants a free meal of leftovers and a day job sweeping the sidewalk outside the store.Report
The disconnect is that the citizens haven’t gotten serious about reducing homelessness, much less its underlying causes.
They will wail and moan, but in the end, any proposal, any proposal at all, is met with implacable opposition.Report
Unfortunately, this citizen decided to exit and move his business (and whatever jobs he provided) with him.
Good news! You no longer have to deal with his toxicity in San Francisco!Report
Like I said.
He will, and has already, lost a lot of money due to homelessness, and will continue to suffer because of it.
But he, like millions of others, would rather suffer the slow death of a thousand cuts than enjoy the benefit of a solution.Report
will continue to suffer because of it.
Seems like he’s already sacrificed his rooster to Asklepios on that one, Chip.Report
Responding to JB trolling is a fool’s errand. That being said, it is a wickdly hard policy problem. People see massive homeless camps as a sign of societal breakdown and disorder. Most people really dislike disorder. I don’t think SF will go reactionary on the issue but even solidly blue states and cities can’t seem to muster the political will to do what needs to be done on homelessness. Maybe because it requires too much. I don’t know.Report
I don’t think SF will go reactionary on the issue…
I wish a muthaf*cka would!
No seriously, I wish some jurisdiction somewhere would go full metal fascist and decide to round up all homeless people and put them in camps.
Oh, wait, the jails are full…
Oh, I got it, we build a bunch of new prisons! And well, we gotta staff them with guards of course, and state of the art surveillance and security features. And we need to feed the prisoners, and give them medical care, and wait hold on a minute, this price tag can’t be right there must be a decimal point in the wrong place!Report
Eh. If a single jurisdiction in Cali went “full metal fascist” the homeless would simply decamp to the next jurisdiction over.Report
Do you have a spare bedroom? Imagine if everyone in San Francisco who had a spare bedroom took in *ONE* homeless person.
They could eliminate homelessness overnight.
When will people decide to *SOLVE* the problem instead of wishing for someone else to do something?Report
Nobody seems to want to talk about the nationwide police wildcat strike.Report
The open border is Satan’s way of taking control of the world. The ones who want us eating insects, cockroaches, and that while they dine on the blood of children…Those sort of people, they’re not going to win.Report
Nine environmental protesters glued themselves to the floor of the VW museum in Germany yesterday. At the end of the day, the museum workers turned off the lights and heat and went home. Protesters complained that they weren’t given a bucket.Report
So you’ve probably all seen this:
It’s Too Late To Scrub GOPer Who Allegedly Masturbated Near Preschool From Ballot
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/too-late-remove-gop-candidate-masturbate-ballot
TL;DR: Republican dude parks near a school and proceeds to whip it out and jerk off.
He will almost certainly not lose any significant number of Republican voters as a consequence.
But no, the takeaway isn’t that Republicans love masturbating in public any more than the takeaway from Herschel Walker is that they suddenly love abortion.
The takeaway is that they can think of nothing, literally nothing, that would provoke them to vote for a Democrat. Corruption, rank incompetence, cruelty, wife beating, abortion, public masturbation…Nothing is to them more horrific than the prospect of being governed by a Democrat. In fact, they would prefer to put the nation to the torch rather than see it fall into the hands of a Democrat.
And the funny thing is, when you ask them why, they fumble and stammer and change the subject and can never explain quite why it is. They can never conjure up a scenario of why life under Democrats would be so bad, other than vague hazy allusions to maybe a bad economy or something maybe, I dunno, but they remain convinced, absolutely certain that anything is better than a Democrat.
Of course, when I provide the obvious answer, they flinch and yelp with outrage.Report
Let me guess: you wrote a story about how honorable the Democrats are for trying to get one of their own removed from the ticket, then you noticed the R?Report
This is where you lay down your marker and define your priorities, and tell us what would be “too far” for a Republican such that you voted for a Democrat like Joe Biden.Report
Actually let me make it simpler, and invite everyone to weigh in.
Imagine Candidate A, who is a thoroughly repellent human being- wife beater, child abuser, crooked and selfish. But he generally abides by the norms of liberal democracy.
Imagine Candidate B, who is honorable and honest. But B supports a policy X which is so horrible that you would vote for Candidate A.
What is your “X”?
I’ll start.
X for me is stripping rights from American citizens, like anti-abortion laws, or curtailing voting rights or supporting religious laws over secular laws. Our nation can withstand the occasional scoundrel, but not the reduction of rights.Report
I don’t think there’s an X for me this side of imminent existential threat to the country. A candidate can easily lose my vote but that wouldn’t make me support his opponent.Report
So only an existential threat to the country would compel you to choose the Democrat.
Not, reduction of rights for millions of people.
Not systemic injustice.
Not poverty and imiseration.
Not even outright chattel slavery.
Nothing, right up to the line demarcating “existential threat”.
I believe that makes you a moderate Republican.Report
I’m sure your position on that high horse will encourage others to participate. But remember that I consider your party to be the side of all those things I listed (and, you know, the slavery thing was unambiguously yours). However I’ve been around long enough to know that bad people get into office sometimes and the whole system doesn’t collapse, so we can survive a bad term of nearly anyone.Report
All those things? You only listed one.
And taking your assertion at face value, an Evangelical Republican could outlaw parochial schools, or mandate forcible abortions for indigent women, and you would still be compelled to vote for them.
Are you sure that your definition of “existential threat” isn’t concealing some assumed exemptions?Report
I was looking at your list: reduction of rights, injustice, poverty, et cetera.Report
“And the funny thing is, when you ask them why, they fumble and stammer and change the subject and can never explain quite why it is. They can never conjure up a scenario of why life under Democrats would be so bad, other than vague hazy allusions to maybe a bad economy or something maybe, I dunno, but they remain convinced, absolutely certain that anything is better than a Democrat.”Report
Me? I don’t talk about ideology enough? I’m too ambiguous?Report
Yeah, you are.
List for us, the specific rights that liberals would infringe.
List the systemic injustices that a liberal administration would inflict.Report
I’m just going to say “right to life” because it’s late, and I don’t want to type much, and I hope that maybe you’ll consider it.Report
2 – Affirmative action – it’s racist and only increases racial tension.
3 – The borders (this one goes mainly under immiseration but also injustice).
4 – Crime. I’ll include 99% of all the riots in the past few years.
5 – Every gender thing you’ve been pushing in schools. I remember when society was debating sex-ed in schools, we always figured you’d at least get it right.
6 – Schools in general. The extent of the covid shutdowns is on you. The FBI being called in against parents who protest at school board meetings, also you.
7 – Gun rights.
8 – Student loan forgiveness with a really tenuous legal justification.
9 – Energy / environmental policies that don’t make sense without a lot of nuclear or an improvement in battery tech. Bad ideas. But they make the injustice / infringement list because the regulations that promote them are an overreach.
10 – Church/state issues – There’ve been several recent court cases where you put more covid restrictions on churches than on secular gatherings, or provided state funding for secular schools but not religious.Report
Do you believe a secular government is obligated to fund religious schools?Report
I believe that our government isn’t allowed to discriminate against private schools on the basis of their religious affiliation.Report
The Constitution prevents Congress from enacting laws discriminating against the practice of any religion; likewise it prevents the declaration of an official state religion. As a result religious schools (of any stripe) are not now nor ever will be state institutions, and Congress and the state legislators are duty bound to fund state institutions and state actions for secular public purposes. Thus they can not pass state revenues obtained by taxation to religious schools.
Sorry to burst your bubble.Report
Carson v Makin (I described it poorly, but it’s the case I was referring to.)Report
Thanks for the clarification.
Notice that decision is about funding for education in a very rural state when no public education alternative exists. In that rare case, the school is acting as a public institution in as much as its the only option.
That’s vastly different then appropriating funds for deployment of masks and air filters in schools for Covid mitigation or for funding capitol improvements to religious schools.
I know you really want religious education to be on par with secular education, but the Constitution doesn’t allow that because you’d have to establish a state endorsed religion.Report
Notice what’s missing from this list.
Any sort of actual injustice or oppression, any sort of actual victims.
You list policies that you think are arguably unwise or have poor outcomes, but fail to explain whose rights are being violated. Where are the victims of oppression in this list?
The failure is especially bizarre given the Manichean terms that conservatives set out, that Democrats represent an existential threat to America and must be stopped even at the cost of democracy itself.
What you’ve done here is reinforce my point, that conservatives are really upset that they have to share power with people they feel are unworthy of equality.Report
You know who the victims are of abortion. Affirmative action hurts all of society while targeting Asians, Jews, and whites. Our immigration policy sets up illegal immigrants for a hard time but also rewards them while punishing those who attempt to come in legally. Crime has plenty of victims and injustice – I shouldn’t have to spell that out. Children are victims of the gender nonsense as well as everything else happening in schools, and the parents have their authority undercut. Gun rights are foundational. Student loan forgiveness and energy policy, I got a little lazy on those two, but they’re both examples of government by fiat. Church/state issues, again, foundational.Report
Again, you’re not letting the victims speak for themselves, but instead propping them up as cardboard cutouts.
“Hurts all of society” is just you taking your particular distaste and imposing it upon the rest of us.
Show your work.
Show us the people who can testify to the oppression and violation of rights of say, gun control or immigration policy,.
Show us an actual victim of “church/state issues”.Report
Do we really need to dig up indigenous children who are penalized for escaping from indeterminate detention camps?
Because that’s the future with “gun control.”
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-12-01/multiple-people-escape-howard-springs-quarantine-facility-darwin/100663994
Not quoted in this article is the assertion that the children may have to stay quarantined for longer for escaping — this makes the quarantine punitive rather than for public health.Report
You’re right that “hurts all of society” doesn’t name actual victims. That’s why I said “hurts all of society while targeting Asians, Jews, and whites”. Affirmative action is a method of discrimination and is thus unjust and against our principles, but also has specific victims.
And are you arguing that there have been no restrictions on gun rights? The laws themselves describe violations of gun rights.Report
Show. Me. A. Victim.
Let us decide for ourselves whether their charge of oppression is valid.Report
They certainly do in Texas, where parents who seek to love and affirm their children by working with doctors and psychologists on gender affirming care for their children – which is a deeply personal issue full of all sorts of individual liberty considerations – are considered child abusers by the state and subject to criminal prosecution for loving their children and seeking to help them become full, integrated whole persons.Report
Nuclear Winter is more horrifying than most scenarios I can imagine.
If you could find a Republican (like, say, Graham) who was for Nuclear Winter, I’d vote for the other guy.
Assuming you could find a Democrat willing to buck the party. Sadly, I’m pretty sure Tulsi’s out. A profile in courage, that woman.Report
An interesting look at how WFH is here to stay in some locations and how that changes GDP: https://sfstandard.com/business/mayor-breed-sf-budget-officials-acknowledge-remote-work-is-here-to-stay/
“The report focused on the ripple effects of vacant commercial real estate—which makes up around 18% of assessed (or taxable) real estate value in the city. Property taxes are San Francisco’s single largest source of local tax revenue, contributing more than $2 billion to the city’s general fund.
Permanent remote work “will impact virtually every aspect of San Francisco’s economy,” the report states, noting that office-based industries generate nearly 75% of the city’s GDP.”
SF because of tech, might be more affected here than other metros but the article also states that this is a nation-wide issue. “Despite waning worries about the pandemic, office attendance remains low: Back-to-office numbers from key-card access company Kastle Systems show San Francisco hovering around 40%, near the bottom of the list of U.S. cities. An analysis of foot traffic data by Placer.ai found that ‘the office recovery essentially plateaued, with many employers settling on some form of hybrid work.'”
When I get calls from recruiters about positions, I always ask them if it is WFH or hybrid and turn down offers where it is a no. From what I’ve heard in big tech companies Google/Apple/Facebook, the companies have tried to impose come to the office schedules 2-3 times a week are meeting mass passive resistance. The tech companies do not want to give up their position but are also not punishing because they do not want to deal with mass resignationsReport
Feds likewise are being compelled to go back – mostly because we lease a lot of offices through GSA from private developers and at some point if we don’t all go back we will have to pay less rent.
Interestingly it’s up to each agency to determine exemptions for remote work full time and that means we have literally hundreds of different policies, all allegedly OPM compliant. There is no move to massive sanction yet but we are not yet free if the office scourge.Report
Before the pandemic, I had two meetings a week. A long one on Monday and a short one on Thursday.
Now I have THREE MEETINGS A DAY.
If they want us to go back to the office, they’re going to have to offer something very precious indeed: only two meetings a week.Report
In my limited experience, being back in the office does reduce the number of formal meetings, which largely increased because of the lack of informal ones.Report
I think part of this is a language issue – when a colleague chats me or emails me and asks for a one on one video call, I don’t think of that as a meeting. Its just the virtual replacement for the hallway conversation. And because its virtual its usually focused in ways the hallway stuff isn’t.
That said I was working remote form my “office” before the pandemic, so how I do my daily business didn’t change that much.Report
I assure you, when I say “meeting”, I don’t mean “conversation with a coworker”. If I were using that definition, I’d not have said “I had two meetings a week” when I was talking about the beforetime.
I mean “multiple people in a Zoom call.”Report
I think a lot of the impulse to have meetings is driven from the insecurity people have, due to not running into each other in the hallway. Also, when people put a meeting down on a schedule, they feel obligated to invite the whole team when a hallway conversation could have been between two people.Report
Or a really well crafted emailReport
My Most Esteemed Colleague:
No. You can’t do that with Linux. You can’t do that with Windows. They couldn’t do that at Hogwarts.
Yours,
JayReport
but HPUX?
open source is a mixed bag from my perspective… but holy sh*t did Linux sweep the floor.Report
Not quite.
Dude wanted something done right, done cheap, done fast, and portable.Report
No. You can’t do that with Linux.
Always a dangerous thing to say. Does it require reinventing physics? If not, then we might be able to do it. After all, we have the source code. What’s your budget and schedule look like?
In some cases it might be easier than most of us suspect. The first project where I built something tricky on Linux, I exchanged e-mail with the guy at Swansea U that oversaw the network code. “Cool,” says he after I described it. “We added promiscuous Ethernet sockets in the last release, that can probably do what you need. I’ll send you a copy of my notes.”Report
It involves breaking The Iron Law.Report
Which Iron Law (of the several)?Report
“Pick Two”Report
Thankfully my company has fully embraced WFH. We’re keeping our HQ as a hub but subleasing out the other offices with no plan to renew. I go in once or twice a month if there’s a gathering of some sort just to say hello, and get a little face time.
The quality of my life has improved drastically. Sometimes my wife and I just look at each other and ask how we used to do it. I hope employees force employers to adapt. All the old school types that don’t like it can go soak their heads in their antique water coolers.Report
The Federalist goes Bolshevik
https://thefederalist.com/2022/10/20/we-need-to-stop-calling-ourselves-conservatives/Report
“The conservative project has failed, and conservatives need to forge a new political identity that reflects our revolutionary moment.”
Well, they’re right about the first part. You’d think that they’d call for something reactionary instead of revolutionary, though.Report
Seeing this sentiment pop up in more and more and more places:
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Something something saying the quiet parts out loud something something.
One wonders if these contra-democracy statements will be enough to move our resident conservatives to consider voting for Democrats. I mean if this isn’t an existential threat:
then I don’t know what is. Because that sort of massive criminalization of body autonomy will require a massive police state and the full restriction of individual liberty. For that matter, this isn’t exactly a rule of law/democracy enhancing position:
But I suspect our resident libertarians will go about with their usual “well, you have to understands” and our resident conservatives will simply ignore the oppressive illiberal undemocratic bits of this.
And perhaps most ironically they will continue to assail “cancel culture” while fascists like this get published and amplified by he very technology companies he allegedly rails against.Report
For my part, I’d say something like “game this out, this ends one of two ways.”
Former League Alum Jamelle Bouie has a lovely little op-ed in the NYT today. Here’s the part that makes me purse my lips and ask if he has gamed this out:
(emphasis added)
I’m pretty sure that we absolutely positively do *NOT* want to use that as our yardstick.
Maybe for one narrow issue and maybe we want to do it within this particular window… but we sure as heck don’t want to adopt it across the board.
Pauline Kael was on to something.Report
In that quote this is actually the key sentence:
Because what that Federalist piece is advocating is significant erosion of the liberty of the masses in service of a societal reordering to an end of a few very powerful men having their way with the masses – which is exactly where we were supposed to NOT go when the nation was founded.Report
Pick your significant erosion.
NO NOT THAT ONEReport
The erosion f the economic liberty of oppressors and oligarchs is not my concern – and frankly I welcome it if that erosion leads to more liberty from economic oppression for our lower class citizens. DItto abortion rights, or gun control or a thousand other things where the citizenry is in remarkable consensus that is in opposition to the ruling classes around here.Report
I don’t know about this remarkable consensus you’re seeing. Everyone thinks there’s a great silent and/or marginalized majority that agrees with them. The reality is always way more muddled and incoherent.Report
What’s the consistent polling on support for abortion up to 15 weeks? Whats the polling for universal background checks? WHat’s the polling on gay marriage?
And how doe sthat compare to the positions staked out in this polemic and the positions now being advocated for by republican legislators in red states.
Its not hard.Report
Oh I think the polemic is disconnected from reality. I also agree that the kinds of total bans on abortion advocated are so unpopular as to be fairly categorized as fringe.
I’m just saying it’s dangerous to read polling as an endorsement of particular policy preferences, to say nothing of an entire platform. We all know how complicated that gets.Report
It’s an interesting read. When I read it, I was wondering what Marchmaine would think of it. I hope he checks it out and gives his opinion.
I find it contradictory. On one hand, it says that there aren’t enough civilized people to call this a civilization; on the other, that espousing restorationism is a path to electoral victory. If A then not B. Fifty years from now, abortion should be nearly completely illegal, and drag queen story hour should be recognized as child endangerment, and I think there’s a pathway to that. I think it’s even likely. But I doubt it’s a political path.
That said, it also misreads our current politics. Since 1994, the White House, both houses of Congress, state houses and governor’s mansions, and the courts have been basically split down the middle. In a few weeks I expect the panicked articles to subside, to be followed by the irate “they’re not doing enough” articles. If you can’t handle two rough years, move to a country with a different political system.Report
I’ve referenced here a few times, the essay written a decade ago by Dennis G from Balloon Juice,” Not A Tea Party, A Revolutionary Party” where he nailed this that the modern conservatives are in fact revolutionaries who reject the legitimacy of the existing system.
Didn’t think I would see it screamed out by conservatives themselves, though.Report
I actually think Freddie put it best in an old essay of his you can still find here:
http://bbs.stardestroyer.net/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=148582Report
The mask is definitely coming off.Report
Something for us all to ponder:
If roving bands of Morality Police whipping women for not wearing the
hijabproper gendered clothing is the loud part that they openly boast, what are the quiet parts, the things they plan which are currently only whispered about?ReportWell, it finally happened. Conservatives got so fishing stupid that they turned into leftists.Report
Talk about not gaming something out:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/oct/17/texas-lax-gun-laws-us-mexico-borderReport
It looks like everything about that stat is wrong.
https://www.atf.gov/file/144886/downloadReport
Well GAO doesn’t generally get these things wrong, see pages 12 and 13 of the GAO source report that the Guardian used.
https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-21-322.pdfReport
One big problem is “and submitted for tracing”. A quick look around the net, and it seems like only about 1 in 5 guns seized in Mexico are submitted to the US ATF for tracing. It varies by the kind of gun and the region. So, the illegal firearms from the Mexican Army or the Central American makes found in the south, they’re not sent to the US for tracing. And it’s more like 50% of the traced ones that were found to have originally come from the US and another 20% that passed through. So maybe 10% of the seized guns originally came from the US.Report
GAO accounts for that fact in their report, noting that the Mexican Attorney General is only one agency that seizes weapons and could request tracing. They note that the several other US agencies (like INS) seize weapons but submit but are inconsistent in sending them in for tracing. GAO made recommendations to ATF to do something about the data inconsistencies. Sadly those sort of recommendations don’t have the force of law unless Congress intervenes.Report
All right. With all that noted, do you think that The Guardian did a good job reporting? I can’t get to the whole article, so maybe they take that into account. But also that first sentence of your excerpt says that the cartels that Abbott complains about have found another route – which implies that the cartels didn’t used to do this pre-Abbott. Then it cites 2014-2018 data. Again, maybe the whole article clears this up.
ETA: Actually, I think you did the same thing, framing it as “not gaming something out” as if this was a response to Abbott.Report
My “not gaming it out” is in part about Abbot’s rhetoric – he claims to want secure borders but signs and supports lax gun laws that make the borders insecure. While I have no doubt there was an illegal gun trade route south before he was in office, I also have no doubt neither he nor any of his supporters spent any nanoseconds, much less minutes – considering the interplay of easy to obtain legal guns and cartel violence.Report
From the GAO report: “About 36,000 (64.4 percent) were handguns (i.e., pistols and revolvers), which Mexican officials told us are commonly recovered in northwest Mexico, across the border from California. About 19,000 (34.5 percent) were long guns (i.e., rifles and shotguns), which Mexican officials told us are commonly recovered in northeast Mexico, across the border from Texas.”
All right, if 10% of the guns in Mexico originally came from the US, and the above suggests that 2/3 of those come from California, and 1/3 from Texas, that brings Texas down under 4%. If I were governor and someone told me that I could increase access to guns in my state but the neighboring country’s supply of guns would increase by 4%, I’d jump at it.Report
More back-of-the-envelope calculations: The article uses the estimate of 500k guns bought in the US and transported to Mexico. If Texas accounts for 1/3, that’s 165k. There are about 1.6 million guns purchased in Texas every year. So Texans benefit from the gun laws by 9:1.Report
Josh Shapiro is standing aside while the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia is grabbing homeless kids and kids in foster care apparently and experimenting on them with gender transitioning; something that’s irreversible.Report
This woman was ahead of her time:
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Do we have any architects/construction worker types who can fact-check this thread?
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They should just continue doing what they’re already doing:
The city already operates a whole bunch of free public restrooms, some of them even available 24 hours a day and fit within the 150-square-foot footprint at Noe Valley.
The cost to the city is nothing.
According to the San Francisco Department of Public Works, it has a deal with the company JC Decaux to provide the self-cleaning public potties for free in exchange for advertising revenue made from the units.
By the end of this year, brand new ones will be getting installed throughout San Francisco to replace the aging ones — all for free. Report
So the 1.7 million dollar toilet *WAS* a rip-off?
I guess it’s good that it got cancelled, then.Report
It turns out they were being built by Halliburton, and the toilet seat alone was $600.
So yeah, it was cancelled.
But they are planning to add it as part of the “Public Safety/ Crime Prevention” budget, and since no supervisor is willing to to defund the police, it will be built, probably with a larger budget.Report
I find myself still not knowing whether the information in the thread was accurate, though.
Was it, as far as you can tell?
Is 1build lying? Not taking things into account?Report
There’s not enough information to know what the thing that was asked for, should actually cost that much.
But the comparison to military contracting isn’t just snark.
As with the $600 toilet seat, what is asked for is often the problem and government contracting is rife with wastenfraud.
But asking to defund an agency…well, you can tell us how popular that is.Report
There might not be enough information to know, but would someone with enough experience be able to make an estimate?
Like, for example:
Report
That’s what they are saying here. They are saying that something doesn’t add up, and they are asking for what accounts for the missing million bucks.
But we don’t need to know, really.
The city has demonstrated they can provide public toilets at no cost to the taxpayers, so why another one needs to be built for any cost at all is unexplained.Report
This particular toilet was cancelled, yes.
But I’m asking you because you’re an architect kinda guy who does this work:
Was 1build right (or right enough)?
Does something not add up, assuming that the information that they’ve provided is accurate?Report
First of all, 1Build really doesn’t know much more than I do.
They aren’t a part of the project, no one asked them to estimate costs, they just jumped in as a tool to promote their estimating software.
But I assume their costs are correct, based on what they assumed, which is as tautalogical as it sounds.
Like, what was in the requested 1.7 Million?
DId it include operating costs? For one year, or for some longer period?
We don’t know.
Did it include some sort of land purchase or lease or easement?
We don’t know.
Or did the people who requested it, just want to cover themselves by overasking and underpromising- Asking for a huge budget and only binding themselves to a easy-to-accomplish goal.
We don’t know.
Or was there some sort of graft and corruption going on?
Again, we just don’t know.Report
They went on to include stuff like traffic lane closures and traffic control fees and whatnot:
Are the estimates that they’ve made in line with what you would expect?
Or are you no more knowledgeable than I am when it comes to pricing this stuff out and it would make sense for me to defer to them instead of you (because, admittedly, you don’t know about these costs)?Report
They are quoting unit costs which are found in half a dozen online databases like Dodge or Means.
Which is fine, they are promoting their own proprietary database which I assume is correct.
But we have no way of knowing what the 1.7 was intended to buy in the first place.Report
But we have no way of knowing what the 1.7 was intended to buy in the first place.
Beyond knowing that it was intended to be a public toilet?
And cancelled as soon as information such as the above was made public?Report
See my questions at 2:56.Report
Well, let me see what the story says:
So all I’m left with is the bid from 1build saying “that’s way too much!” as well as everyone else pointing out that they, too, are surprised by the amount.
Sadly, I can’t find anyone defending the price. You’re the closest I’ve come to finding someone willing to do that.Report
Do you really need to reach a conclusion right now, though?
I don’t feel any need, because in my experience these “Outrageous!!1!” stories tend to fall apart after some period of scrutiny.
Like the “2 Million dollar hot cup of coffee”, or the “Burglar slips and sues the homeowner” or any of those other kinds of stories, sooner or later the real story comes out and its quite a bit different than the initial headline.
Or sometimes its worse, like I alluded to in asking “What was requested?”
Like the “640 Dollar toilet seat”. It really did cost $554.85, and no, it wasn’t a ripoff. The problem was that the Navy asked for a custom designed and built one for something like 50 units, and the contractor really did spend that much engineering and production time.
So the problem often becomes, “What are you asking for and are you allowing for simpler solutions?”
But we don’t know that yet, and probably won’t for some time.Report
Given that the bid for 1.7 million has been withdrawn, I don’t know that we need to reach a conclusion at all.
I don’t feel any need, because in my experience these “Outrageous!!1!” stories tend to fall apart after some period of scrutiny.
I was asking you to give scrutiny to the bid!
So the problem often becomes, “What are you asking for and are you allowing for simpler solutions?”
1build offered a bunch of simpler solutions and they said that they tried to make their bid as expensive as possible given the information they had and they weren’t able to get in the ballpark of 1.7 million.
Indeed, the people offering free toilets (paid for by advertising) also seem to be communicating that it’s possible to build a toilet for less.
I still haven’t found a defense of the bathroom.
Just something like “I don’t know, you don’t know, and it’s not possible for the people who say that that’s too expensive to know either.”Report
Don’t you get it, Chip? Jaybird is asking for serious professional services without providing the usual incentive. It’s something he does.Report
I’m more than happy to take 1build at their word, CJ.
They seem to believe that it is possible to know whether the Parks and Rec wanted too much for the toilet and, get this, gave evidence for why they thought that.
If it’s not fair for me to ask Chip to chime in on that without me giving him money, that’s cool.
I’m good with what they said. If someone wants to say “I have a different opinion on that” for free? I’d welcome that.
But, yeah, if this is something I’m going to have to pay for, I’m good with what 1build said (certainly taking into account all of the other stuff in the article linked).Report
Your happiness may be the point for you; it’s not the point for people being asked to do real professional work for nothing.Report
Fair enough.
I saw some information that confirmed my priors and I said “whoa, whoa, whoa… maybe I should ask someone who knows something about this whether my priors ought to be confirmed!”
I now know that doing that sort of thing is selfish.
Thank you, CJ.Report
It’s a matter of degree, and how much you can ask of people. Or is that too subtle?Report
So something like “at a glance, are 1build’s numbers crazy?” is asking too much?
Or is even asking that question asking a legal question that I should pay you a retainer before asking?Report
If you’re asking what people can do “at a glance,” fine. But it never ends there. Just look at this very thread.Report
In the future, I’ll only ask non-experts what they think when they look at the data provided.
Enthusiastic amateurs.
Seriously, I’m good with that.Report
Using the information we have to either attack or defend the requested 1.7 Million is just stupid.
We just don’t know enough to say at this point.Report
Let’s say that we don’t want to attack *OR* defend it, but just say “yep, it was not worth what they tried to charge”?
And in our search for whether or not it was, noting that we see dozens of arguments that it was not worth that and one person who says “we don’t know that they were trying to do something *CRIMINAL*.”
And reaching a tentative conclusion that, yep, it was not worth that given the informed opinions we are able to gather (including those linked above).Report
You still don’t have enough information to say that.
Like I’ve said three times now, you have no information on what was included or not in the 1.7 figure.
The LAT article from KenB below gives a bit more information, where it appears that the $1.7M number wasn’t actually a cost estimate, but a budget placeholder for something as yet undefined.
The city says it is just carrying that number, and will ultimately present a design.
Which may, or may not, cost $0.00, $1.7M, or some other number in between.Report
While it’s true that I have no information on what was included or not in the 1.7 figure, I *DO* have information for what 1build included in their estimate.
The information that I wanted about 1build’s information was whether they were obviously lying about their bid.
I’m now pretty confident that they weren’t obviously lying. Their database is within acceptable tolerances of the other databases that other people use.
The LAT article from KenB below gives a bit more information, where it appears that the $1.7M number wasn’t actually a cost estimate, but a budget placeholder for something as yet undefined.
So we agree that building the restroom for $1.7 million is insane and not even the people who asked for $1.7 million agree that the restroom would cost that. They asked for the cost to build plus a lot of extra money for padding.
I am at ease with that conclusion.Report
FWIW this article from before it was nixed has more background and what was offered as justification: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-10-20/san-francisco-will-spend-2-years-and-1-7-million-to-build-a-bathroom-can-you-hold-it
Note that this was a request from the city to the state for a bucket of money — common enough in funding requests to aim high and hope you get a big enough fraction of what you asked for. From the article it doesn’t sound like they put a lot of time into a careful estimate.Report
“Jaybird is asking for serious professional services without providing the usual incentive. It’s something he does.”
lol
tired: “asking me to back up my dumbass take is Sealioning Harassment!”
wired: “asking me to back up my dumbass take is A Demand For Free Professional Services!”Report
The house I jog past on Sunday afternoons has had its price lowered again.
I know that the buyer put a new roof on it, gave it a new kitchen, new front door, new coat of paint, and might have revamped the deck in the back.
We are edging ever closer to it not having been worth trying to flip.Report