I don't know if it's about side-stepping the Constitution, especially in this case because it's not obviously unconstitutional. Employers can be sued for creating hostile environments for their workers through speech, and I'm not sure defining "hostile environment" in a bizarre and tendentious way is an approach that won't work Constitutionally.
I think the enforcement by private suit in the Don't Say Gay bill, and this anti-DEI bill, are intended to address one of the problems for Team Red that InMD described: it's inability to control bureaucracies.
Because it can't control bureaucracies, it wants to outsource enforcement to individuals who can bring suit, because then the bureaucracy is much less relevant.
Like broadly, in the whole Culture War around public schools?
Sure, there are numerous compromises out there, some more painful than others.
My concern is that the ones that would be palatable to Team Blue don't really address what Team Red wants, because, well, Team Red's thought leadership here has gotten crazier and crazier.
To take an example, InMD has concerns about DEI consultants in local school districts. I haven't really gone into the details with him, but his nutshell description is parsecs away from the brainworm stuff we've gotten out of the DeSantis admin on the Don't Say Gay bill.
I think it would be easy to make compromises with him on this.
That would likely help his distrust, and bring some parents along with him. But I don't think it would slow down the conservative activist class for a second, and InMD's politics are such that this would be effectively an intra-Team Blue negotiation to begin with.
It's the positional aspect that is unsupported, though.
Unless your argument is specifically that we've seen a decline in trust in teachers relative to where we were, say, five years ago, which I'll grant, but doesn't obviously support the inevitability of divorce and war.
If we want to go through the 12 Steps, first you have to admit that you have a problem.
If you want to advance the argument in this direction, I think it would help a lot to characterize the problem we're supposed to admit we have more precisely instead of just vaguely gesturing at it.
You know the thing about that first step?
It's about admitting to a very specific sort of problem.
But if you just want me to admit I have a problem, well, sure, I have a problem:
I often have trouble stopping with the second slice of pizza even though I know I shouldn't have a third.
If you’re okay with different cultures living together, well, you’re going to have some of them that have reached different conclusions than you have when it comes to moral questions.
So “any better?” becomes “according to whose culture?”
The defection that DeSantis is engaged in is against the very principles that allow different cultures to live together.
It’s only worth scolding if it was avoidable.
The political opening for DeSantis' response may be one where the libs could have acted differently to avoid it, though it's actually unclear because the messaging behind the bill has been so bigoted, and the bill itself is such vaguely written trash.
But the actual quality of the political response is on DeSantis.
Back when CRT was the panic, for example, different states tried different responses. One class of response was to ignore it as a non-issue, but another class of response was to pass legislation that would just prevent the examples that were driving the panic.
Even if you believe the examples were overblown, in the process of being handled adequately, or straight-up fabricated, the policy response was superfluous at worst,
beneficial at best.
Other legislative responses were hot stinky garbage, clearly designed to sabotage any attempt to teach an accurate history of American racism.
And it's that difference in policy responses where the agency of the Republican activists and politicians lies. Some did well, others did badly.
This seems like an opportunity to push back with a clear moral vision of your own.
OK, sure, but how does a failure to do so effectively make what DeSantis and crew are doing any better?
I think that part of the problem is that after a long enough period of arguing “this is *NOT* up for debate”, you’re going to find out that it’s not.
And if you build an entire set of parallel media institutions devoted to catastrophizing and outright lying about awful stuff the libs are doing, you may find that libs simply don't take your complaints seriously.
Did you hear that Ohio is voting on it’s own “Don’t Say Gay” bill shortly?
Sounds like a great time to scold the libs, just like the 364 other days of the year.
Yeah and that was the one that got the big sales and critical reception.
And it did a good job striking the balance between accessibility and being interesting and varied.
The Fragile was considerably less accessible and popular.
You saw a similar process with Tool.
I think there's a sweet spot between "sounds like everything else" and "most people will have no idea what they're listening to", and a lot of bands go past it during their careers for a lot of reasons, often just because they want to create and explore stuff and if it only appeals to hardcore fans they're, on some level, cool with it
GOP activists and pols decided to change things to address parent concerns?
OK sure that's how politics works.
Wanna blame libs/Dems/whoever for being non-responsive?
Sure that happens too.
But when the actual bills they cough up are clear pretexts for discriminating against LGBT teachers and students, and the rhetoric they use to defend them is a mix of naked bigotry and barely controlled conspiricism, well, it's both obnoxious and foolish to blame the libs for that.
Republican electeds could write better bills, and they could defend and advance them in less repugnant ways, and their failure to do either is entirely on them.
Republican activists and politicians, as always, lack agency, much less any expectation that they conform to the bare minimum standards of human decency
I know this statement flies in the face of Rightward PC, but medical transition is, well, medical, and it has a number of impacts on the physiology of trans women, many of which are relevant to their athletic performance. My understanding is that in some sports, you see some advantage, but it's not true of all sports, and the advantage is nothing like the differences you see between men's and women's leagues.
Yeah part of the issue is that, to me, it just seems like a low salience issue, and a lot of the anxiety is, AFAICT, driven by a variation on the same old trans panic, suggesting that mediocre male athletes will transition solely to gain an advantage in women's sports, which, like, that's actually a bizarre and dumb thing to do
"This one trans woman overperforms in this one sport relative to how good she was before transitioning," is a pretty weak argument that you'd see this same pattern with all trans women even in that sport.
It's a single data point that might, if you're so inclined, prompt further investigation.
But the issue is that it’s being unfairly enforced, with some people being allowed to say and even DO some truly heinous things, while the other side can’t even make the most anodyne remarks about issues that are very far from settled, well, that’s really neither fair nor is it morally right.
For instance, the AG and governor of Texas are able to send out official letters indicating that parents of trans children should be investigated by DFPS for child abuse, and if they have agreed to their children receiving the gender affirming care recommended by most clinicians, the children should be removed and the parents should be prosecuted for child abuse.
This is sorta true but sorta not. The whole division of sports by sex was an attempt to control this, and the existence of trans athletes is posing a bit of a challenge that is being blown up into a crisis for no extremely compelling reason.
Say we do nothing. The worst plausible scenario is that trans women end up dominating some women's sports. Like that may not be the best outcome in the universe, but these are games. Why is it an emergency?
Also, of course, if you confine trans athletes to play in the league dictated by their birth sex, a lot of trans women will be unable to compete at all and trans men will have significant advantages.
It's not clear to me that's more fair or worthwhile.
So then you're just left not letting trans athletes compete at all.
To the extent I have concerns, it’s in the implication that there should be no boundaries, or that matters of sex and sexuality should be features of elementary ed, or that parental concerns need not be taken seriously.
Yeah. I think the problem here, and in a number of related places, is that the state government is deliberately degrading the trust for malicious ends.
They don't have to do that. They could make things better.
This isn't even a wacky hypothetical, and as much as I detest Republican governance, other Red State governments have addressed comparable problems in ways that will make things better, rather than worse, and should be acceptable regardless of whether you believe the underlying problem is real or just something from the Fox News Extended Universe.
When you drill down, it varies by sport, and by direction of transition. And it's a new enough subject that a lot of the data is equivocal.
Which is probably what you'd expect going into it.
And once we sort out the data, you're left with the question of what we're supposed to do with this data about performance. It's not like other physical characteristics don't have a huge impact on people's performance in sports, right?
You mean the person qualified to teach little kids how to read and do multiplication tables may not be competent (to say nothing of authorization) to counsel them on long term matters of psychological and sexual health?
They might not, but I think they should be able to mention that some kids have two mommies or two daddies, should the subject come up, and the bill at question is (AFAICT deliberately) obscuring the difference between the two.
The next section causing all the uproar also seems reasonable to me… frankly, I’d go further and make the law broader to be explicit that no sexual education is taught below grade 3, including sexual orientation and gender identity.
It's funny how an amendment to make it about sexual education before grade 3 failed then, didn't it?
I missed InMD's previous rundowns and link sets, and I might well feel differently after reviewing them, but I'd be much more worried about the cost of high profile consultants providing dubiously useful guidance than I would about the ideological bent of those consultants.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Florida “Parental Rights in Education” Bill: Read It For Yourself”
I don't know if it's about side-stepping the Constitution, especially in this case because it's not obviously unconstitutional. Employers can be sued for creating hostile environments for their workers through speech, and I'm not sure defining "hostile environment" in a bizarre and tendentious way is an approach that won't work Constitutionally.
I think the enforcement by private suit in the Don't Say Gay bill, and this anti-DEI bill, are intended to address one of the problems for Team Red that InMD described: it's inability to control bureaucracies.
Because it can't control bureaucracies, it wants to outsource enforcement to individuals who can bring suit, because then the bureaucracy is much less relevant.
"
Like broadly, in the whole Culture War around public schools?
Sure, there are numerous compromises out there, some more painful than others.
My concern is that the ones that would be palatable to Team Blue don't really address what Team Red wants, because, well, Team Red's thought leadership here has gotten crazier and crazier.
To take an example, InMD has concerns about DEI consultants in local school districts. I haven't really gone into the details with him, but his nutshell description is parsecs away from the brainworm stuff we've gotten out of the DeSantis admin on the Don't Say Gay bill.
I think it would be easy to make compromises with him on this.
That would likely help his distrust, and bring some parents along with him. But I don't think it would slow down the conservative activist class for a second, and InMD's politics are such that this would be effectively an intra-Team Blue negotiation to begin with.
But can I compromise with Team Red on this?
I'm not even sure what Team Red wants here.
"
It's the positional aspect that is unsupported, though.
Unless your argument is specifically that we've seen a decline in trust in teachers relative to where we were, say, five years ago, which I'll grant, but doesn't obviously support the inevitability of divorce and war.
"
OK so the argument is that there's a lack of trust in (public school) teachers. Somehow this lack of trust in teachers leads to "divorce or war".
Man I really wonder how we survived all those years with the DMV.
"
I'm not sure we do. Because trust and collaboration don't exist independently the people who are trusting and collaborating with each other.
So which specific relationships are becoming less trusting?
"
If we want to go through the 12 Steps, first you have to admit that you have a problem.
If you want to advance the argument in this direction, I think it would help a lot to characterize the problem we're supposed to admit we have more precisely instead of just vaguely gesturing at it.
You know the thing about that first step?
It's about admitting to a very specific sort of problem.
But if you just want me to admit I have a problem, well, sure, I have a problem:
I often have trouble stopping with the second slice of pizza even though I know I shouldn't have a third.
"
The defection that DeSantis is engaged in is against the very principles that allow different cultures to live together.
The political opening for DeSantis' response may be one where the libs could have acted differently to avoid it, though it's actually unclear because the messaging behind the bill has been so bigoted, and the bill itself is such vaguely written trash.
But the actual quality of the political response is on DeSantis.
Back when CRT was the panic, for example, different states tried different responses. One class of response was to ignore it as a non-issue, but another class of response was to pass legislation that would just prevent the examples that were driving the panic.
Even if you believe the examples were overblown, in the process of being handled adequately, or straight-up fabricated, the policy response was superfluous at worst,
beneficial at best.
Other legislative responses were hot stinky garbage, clearly designed to sabotage any attempt to teach an accurate history of American racism.
And it's that difference in policy responses where the agency of the Republican activists and politicians lies. Some did well, others did badly.
"
OK, sure, but how does a failure to do so effectively make what DeSantis and crew are doing any better?
And if you build an entire set of parallel media institutions devoted to catastrophizing and outright lying about awful stuff the libs are doing, you may find that libs simply don't take your complaints seriously.
Sounds like a great time to scold the libs, just like the 364 other days of the year.
On “Grunge Was the 90s Music Palate Cleanser, Not Its Highlight”
Yeah and that was the one that got the big sales and critical reception.
And it did a good job striking the balance between accessibility and being interesting and varied.
The Fragile was considerably less accessible and popular.
You saw a similar process with Tool.
I think there's a sweet spot between "sounds like everything else" and "most people will have no idea what they're listening to", and a lot of bands go past it during their careers for a lot of reasons, often just because they want to create and explore stuff and if it only appeals to hardcore fans they're, on some level, cool with it
On “Florida “Parental Rights in Education” Bill: Read It For Yourself”
GOP activists and pols decided to change things to address parent concerns?
OK sure that's how politics works.
Wanna blame libs/Dems/whoever for being non-responsive?
Sure that happens too.
But when the actual bills they cough up are clear pretexts for discriminating against LGBT teachers and students, and the rhetoric they use to defend them is a mix of naked bigotry and barely controlled conspiricism, well, it's both obnoxious and foolish to blame the libs for that.
Republican electeds could write better bills, and they could defend and advance them in less repugnant ways, and their failure to do either is entirely on them.
"
Republican activists and politicians, as always, lack agency, much less any expectation that they conform to the bare minimum standards of human decency
On “Woman, Controversial Woman”
Trans women are not men.
I know this statement flies in the face of Rightward PC, but medical transition is, well, medical, and it has a number of impacts on the physiology of trans women, many of which are relevant to their athletic performance. My understanding is that in some sports, you see some advantage, but it's not true of all sports, and the advantage is nothing like the differences you see between men's and women's leagues.
"
Also, trans people are a small minority. Consigning them to leagues of their own may mean that they just don't get to compete in a lot of places.
"
Yeah part of the issue is that, to me, it just seems like a low salience issue, and a lot of the anxiety is, AFAICT, driven by a variation on the same old trans panic, suggesting that mediocre male athletes will transition solely to gain an advantage in women's sports, which, like, that's actually a bizarre and dumb thing to do
"
"This one trans woman overperforms in this one sport relative to how good she was before transitioning," is a pretty weak argument that you'd see this same pattern with all trans women even in that sport.
It's a single data point that might, if you're so inclined, prompt further investigation.
"
For instance, the AG and governor of Texas are able to send out official letters indicating that parents of trans children should be investigated by DFPS for child abuse, and if they have agreed to their children receiving the gender affirming care recommended by most clinicians, the children should be removed and the parents should be prosecuted for child abuse.
"
This is sorta true but sorta not. The whole division of sports by sex was an attempt to control this, and the existence of trans athletes is posing a bit of a challenge that is being blown up into a crisis for no extremely compelling reason.
Say we do nothing. The worst plausible scenario is that trans women end up dominating some women's sports. Like that may not be the best outcome in the universe, but these are games. Why is it an emergency?
Also, of course, if you confine trans athletes to play in the league dictated by their birth sex, a lot of trans women will be unable to compete at all and trans men will have significant advantages.
It's not clear to me that's more fair or worthwhile.
So then you're just left not letting trans athletes compete at all.
Why is that better?
On “Florida “Parental Rights in Education” Bill: Read It For Yourself”
Yeah. I think the problem here, and in a number of related places, is that the state government is deliberately degrading the trust for malicious ends.
They don't have to do that. They could make things better.
This isn't even a wacky hypothetical, and as much as I detest Republican governance, other Red State governments have addressed comparable problems in ways that will make things better, rather than worse, and should be acceptable regardless of whether you believe the underlying problem is real or just something from the Fox News Extended Universe.
On “Woman, Controversial Woman”
When you drill down, it varies by sport, and by direction of transition. And it's a new enough subject that a lot of the data is equivocal.
Which is probably what you'd expect going into it.
And once we sort out the data, you're left with the question of what we're supposed to do with this data about performance. It's not like other physical characteristics don't have a huge impact on people's performance in sports, right?
On “Florida “Parental Rights in Education” Bill: Read It For Yourself”
They might not, but I think they should be able to mention that some kids have two mommies or two daddies, should the subject come up, and the bill at question is (AFAICT deliberately) obscuring the difference between the two.
"
The problems are the vagueness and the novel enforcement mechanism through private litigating.
This also makes statements from the bill's architects much more important when it comes to assessing how the bill will play out.
"
Yes it was aimed at second graders
"
It's funny how an amendment to make it about sexual education before grade 3 failed then, didn't it?
"
You know the state standards the bill refers to do not exist, right?
"
I missed InMD's previous rundowns and link sets, and I might well feel differently after reviewing them, but I'd be much more worried about the cost of high profile consultants providing dubiously useful guidance than I would about the ideological bent of those consultants.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.