Is this nutpicking (i.e. in a large bureaucracy it's expected that there will be miscommunications and dropped balls when dealing with large numbers of events) or is it Trump's minions saying FU to the judge?
If it's "completely lawless" then we should find lots and lots of this sort of thing.
If it's nutpicking (or if you prefer, "never event picking") then this sort of thing has always happened, even under Biden, but we haven't paid attention to it because it's rare.
DavidTC: ...it is accompanied by _overtly bigoted decisions_...
It says a lot about the current debate that I can't tell if "bigoted" means "treating people unequally" or if "bigoted" means "insisting on treating people equally".
That last would mean, "no anti-whiteness training". DEI has the rep of promoting the idea that whites are responsible for inequality because they're white, inequality needs to be measured by outcomes, and whites need to shut up and accept the opinion of minorities on reality.
Chris: black people are approved for credit at a much lower rate.
Serious question, why is that? Modern credit practices are likely run by robots. I'd hope no one put "race" into the math model.
If I'm wrong and someone did put race in there, then that's great news because we have an easy solution
Another possibility is there is a flaw with the disparity studies.
Oh, and please source this. My one minute internet search found lots of studies but they all seemed to have the flaw that they weren't adjusting for anything.
IMHO elite colleges should be stripped of the ability to set racial quotas and we should stop pretending they don't. We outlawed this sort of thing for good reason.
The best solution is daylight.
Have colleges come up with a point system and publish it. If they want to include a "poverty" category in there, then fine but they have to document what they're defining as "poverty".
If they want to include a "discrimination" category then that needs to be "proven discrimination against that person personally" and not "group membership".
An example of what's unacceptable is Harvard's subjective "personality" test which magically all Asians don't do well on and all Blacks do.
Chris: By invoking an individual vs group rights framework, you elide all of those questions entirely, which is awfully convenient.
My framing cuts through the self serving nonsense. "Fair" should be defined at an individual level, not at a group outcomes level.
Chris: The anti-DEI folks seem to fall into two camps...
Put me in camp 3 then. Disparities exist, but that's fine and expected if they're the result of a fair system.
Different cultures have different levels of parental involvement. It is expected for the children of involved parents to do better. That's why various ideologies need to exclude cultural effects.
Similarly a gender pay gap is unacceptable if it's the result of pay discrimination but acceptable if it's the result of free choices.
Chris: group rights vs individual rights is a straw man
I disagree. The entire "structural injustices" ideology, which includes Young's work, has gotten into measuring oppression by looking at group outcomes.
They even have vast amounts of work trying to justify why they mostly can't point to individual discrimination anymore.
So we're supposed to believe Red Lining still has massive ongoing effects even though it was outlawed in 1968, however parental marriage and other cultural issues are to be ignored.
Chris: I think they’re pretty basic societal values, the sharing of which are necessary for the common ground required for conversation and in fact the basic fairness and justice,
The conflict is over whether or not group rights are more important than individual rights.
If you believe that a group has the "right" to be successful according to it's percentage of the population, then for you justice and fairness include being ok with quotas and such.
Thus opposing quotas is racist even though quotas means checking someone's skin color before deciding if they're going to go to college and so on.
This handwaves cultural impacts and individual responsibility as unimportant because the group is what matters.
If your definition of "basic societal values" is individual rights being more important than group rights, then you create a "fair" process that will have "unfair" group results.
"If you don't believe what I believe then you are a racist" is not very convincing, nor is it an answer for the legit criticism about those ideologies.
I have an electronic journal, it's a simple text file. I keep it for my own benefit so I can remember what I've worked on and put down notes on how I fixed stuff.
DavidTC: ...affirmative action.
...But I don’t remember anyone, and certainly no elected Dem, saying ‘This is horrible! I approve of some sort of scoring system that explicitly includes race in it! We demand the courts allow this!’ Maybe they did, maybe I missed it.
19 years ago Michigan outlawed Affirmative Action.
And the law was ignored. The colleges came up with a more complicated "holistic" system that produced exactly the same results. Which means the same people (i.e Team Blue) were using the same quotas (i.e. percentage of population) and we've spent the last 19 years with Team Blue defending that in lockstep.
The only thing that changed was the language. So no, Team Blue won't say "we insist on a scoring system", they will say "we insist on a complex holistic system that makes race one factor of many and oops, it just coincidently results in the same outcome".
The lesson learned should be that removing this is going to be like outlawing someone's religion. Trump is correct to assume that there will be massive pushback, because that's what we've seen before.
The thinking is that there were alternatives other than killing 48k people.
The problem with that line of thinking is it amounts to the idea that Israel should suck up terrorism and/or that it doesn't have the right to defend itself. More importantly, in the context of WW2, the allies weren't obligated to kill one of their own civilians killed every time an axis civilian was killed... and even this is ignoring we don't know how many of those 48k were civilians.
And we're starting to wake up to the problem I pointed out a year plus ago. Hamas wasn't destroyed, but Israel is still more or less in charge. So Israel isn't going to allow military bases (i.e. hospitals) to be rebuilt or allow other "dual use" materials/facilities to be sent in. Further very few want to rebuild "civilian" structures that Hamas will occupy and Israel will then destroy.
At this point Israel will focus on keeping Hamas weak, which probably means not rebuilding Gaza.
And shouldn't. There are lots of reasons to oppose what he's doing. However invoking God just makes it harder to compromise and be reasonable and we should expect the other side to do the same thing.
On “Open Mic for the week of 2/24/2025”
Or more specifically, "several reported incidents" sounds a lot more like "reporting never events" than "FU judge".
"
Maybe a Gas leak?
"
So it's happening at about the same rate as the cops killing unarmed civilians?
"
Is this nutpicking (i.e. in a large bureaucracy it's expected that there will be miscommunications and dropped balls when dealing with large numbers of events) or is it Trump's minions saying FU to the judge?
If it's "completely lawless" then we should find lots and lots of this sort of thing.
If it's nutpicking (or if you prefer, "never event picking") then this sort of thing has always happened, even under Biden, but we haven't paid attention to it because it's rare.
"
Gene Hackman is dead: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cewkkkvkzn9o
On “Musk vs Gore”
DavidTC: ...it is accompanied by _overtly bigoted decisions_...
It says a lot about the current debate that I can't tell if "bigoted" means "treating people unequally" or if "bigoted" means "insisting on treating people equally".
That last would mean, "no anti-whiteness training". DEI has the rep of promoting the idea that whites are responsible for inequality because they're white, inequality needs to be measured by outcomes, and whites need to shut up and accept the opinion of minorities on reality.
On “Open Mic for the week of 2/24/2025”
Chris: black people are approved for credit at a much lower rate.
Serious question, why is that? Modern credit practices are likely run by robots. I'd hope no one put "race" into the math model.
If I'm wrong and someone did put race in there, then that's great news because we have an easy solution
Another possibility is there is a flaw with the disparity studies.
Oh, and please source this. My one minute internet search found lots of studies but they all seemed to have the flaw that they weren't adjusting for anything.
"
IMHO elite colleges should be stripped of the ability to set racial quotas and we should stop pretending they don't. We outlawed this sort of thing for good reason.
The best solution is daylight.
Have colleges come up with a point system and publish it. If they want to include a "poverty" category in there, then fine but they have to document what they're defining as "poverty".
If they want to include a "discrimination" category then that needs to be "proven discrimination against that person personally" and not "group membership".
An example of what's unacceptable is Harvard's subjective "personality" test which magically all Asians don't do well on and all Blacks do.
"
Chris: By invoking an individual vs group rights framework, you elide all of those questions entirely, which is awfully convenient.
My framing cuts through the self serving nonsense. "Fair" should be defined at an individual level, not at a group outcomes level.
Chris: The anti-DEI folks seem to fall into two camps...
Put me in camp 3 then. Disparities exist, but that's fine and expected if they're the result of a fair system.
Different cultures have different levels of parental involvement. It is expected for the children of involved parents to do better. That's why various ideologies need to exclude cultural effects.
Similarly a gender pay gap is unacceptable if it's the result of pay discrimination but acceptable if it's the result of free choices.
"
Chris: group rights vs individual rights is a straw man
I disagree. The entire "structural injustices" ideology, which includes Young's work, has gotten into measuring oppression by looking at group outcomes.
They even have vast amounts of work trying to justify why they mostly can't point to individual discrimination anymore.
So we're supposed to believe Red Lining still has massive ongoing effects even though it was outlawed in 1968, however parental marriage and other cultural issues are to be ignored.
"
Chris: I think they’re pretty basic societal values, the sharing of which are necessary for the common ground required for conversation and in fact the basic fairness and justice,
The conflict is over whether or not group rights are more important than individual rights.
If you believe that a group has the "right" to be successful according to it's percentage of the population, then for you justice and fairness include being ok with quotas and such.
Thus opposing quotas is racist even though quotas means checking someone's skin color before deciding if they're going to go to college and so on.
This handwaves cultural impacts and individual responsibility as unimportant because the group is what matters.
If your definition of "basic societal values" is individual rights being more important than group rights, then you create a "fair" process that will have "unfair" group results.
"
My company tried to force everyone to go back to the building then they realized the building wasn't big enough to hold everyone.
"
Chris: I’m saying the way GG played out... looks a lot like the way anti-DEI has played out.
I never followed GG so I lack the references.
However thus far I don't see DEI being defended on it's merits. Worse, from the times we've talked about it here, I don't think it can be.
That suggests we should simply get rid of it, no matter how many claims of "back DEI or you're racist" there are.
If that's the strongest argument, then it indicates that there is no actual argument.
"
I'm not defending GG.
I'm suggesting that there are legit problems with DEI (etc) and one can reasonably have problems with those ideologies.
"
Sure.
Maybe someone is motivated by racism when they say they think Obama's children don't need affirmative action.
However if that accusation is the only way to defend that result, then you have no argument. Ergo racist or not, they're correct.
"
He's claiming that to be [anti-“woke”, anti-“CRT,” and anti-“DEI”] you have to be pro-GG or look like that.
"
"If you don't believe what I believe then you are a racist" is not very convincing, nor is it an answer for the legit criticism about those ideologies.
On “Open Mic for the week of 2/17/2025”
I have an electronic journal, it's a simple text file. I keep it for my own benefit so I can remember what I've worked on and put down notes on how I fixed stuff.
It's a gift to my future self.
"
JB: I don’t know that learning to code remains good advice for the same reason it was good advice in 2005.
It's still great advice.
Spreadsheets didn't doom Accountants. Inhumanly good Robotic Surgical Arms haven't replaced Surgeons.
AI will be a tool the software engineers use, it will not replace us. My 1st daughter using AI on a regular basis and I use it on an irregular basis.
Tools increase the productivity of the person using them. Ergo there is more demand for that kind of work and the people who can do it.
The level of technology in society is going up, not down. The need for software to run that technology is going to go up, not down.
"
Learn to Code is excellent advice. I've given it to all my daughters and to various interns I've talked to over the years.
"
Zionism is a political movement which says the Jews should have a state.
Are they trying to define anti-Zionism as something other than calling for Israel's destruction?
"
DavidTC: ...affirmative action.
...But I don’t remember anyone, and certainly no elected Dem, saying ‘This is horrible! I approve of some sort of scoring system that explicitly includes race in it! We demand the courts allow this!’ Maybe they did, maybe I missed it.
19 years ago Michigan outlawed Affirmative Action.
And the law was ignored. The colleges came up with a more complicated "holistic" system that produced exactly the same results. Which means the same people (i.e Team Blue) were using the same quotas (i.e. percentage of population) and we've spent the last 19 years with Team Blue defending that in lockstep.
The only thing that changed was the language. So no, Team Blue won't say "we insist on a scoring system", they will say "we insist on a complex holistic system that makes race one factor of many and oops, it just coincidently results in the same outcome".
The lesson learned should be that removing this is going to be like outlawing someone's religion. Trump is correct to assume that there will be massive pushback, because that's what we've seen before.
"
The thinking is that there were alternatives other than killing 48k people.
The problem with that line of thinking is it amounts to the idea that Israel should suck up terrorism and/or that it doesn't have the right to defend itself. More importantly, in the context of WW2, the allies weren't obligated to kill one of their own civilians killed every time an axis civilian was killed... and even this is ignoring we don't know how many of those 48k were civilians.
And we're starting to wake up to the problem I pointed out a year plus ago. Hamas wasn't destroyed, but Israel is still more or less in charge. So Israel isn't going to allow military bases (i.e. hospitals) to be rebuilt or allow other "dual use" materials/facilities to be sent in. Further very few want to rebuild "civilian" structures that Hamas will occupy and Israel will then destroy.
At this point Israel will focus on keeping Hamas weak, which probably means not rebuilding Gaza.
"
And shouldn't. There are lots of reasons to oppose what he's doing. However invoking God just makes it harder to compromise and be reasonable and we should expect the other side to do the same thing.
Further the Church is hardly an expert in ethics.
"
The opioid addiction scandal was mostly doctors prescribing badly.
Presumably that's a thing in other situations.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.