Not worthy of a thread News

[Simple Torture]

How dare you

[Norah]

[McParadigm]

Our school is a small diverse commuter college and there's none of this stuff either. These are trend stories. Finding a handful of scattered incidents and turning it into something huge.

Yup. A few high profile but isolated incidents open the door, and the media knows it has two sexy stories within that always go over well:

1. Dumb Americans inherently love any story implying a reduced quality of education for the upcoming generation. It fits a larger "world is falling apart since the good old days" storyline, and lets them feel less intimidated by new hires in their workforce.

2. "PC gone haywire" stories that are so absurd they give us a chance to scoff at the actual worldview while seeming to only talk about this preposterous trend. In other words, I can't be racist in public but I can totes get away with bitching about how history classes are cutting basic American history to shoehorn more diversity in.

At the end of the day, stuff like this is no different from those TV shows where they spend 6 hours interviewing people in order to get 10 dumb responses, then cut them together to say "gee, look how little these kids know about American presidents."

[Mine]

Do we have a thread about microaggression and everything that is happening on college campuses now? I read an interesting interview with Jonathan Haidt the other day. He co-wrote a column for The Atlantic called "The Coddling of the American Mind" http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arc ... nd/399356/

In the interview he talks about the lack of political diversity in higher education but then goes into the Yale protests. He sprinkles in some overblown Nazi and Mao references but makes some good points otherwise. I'll highlight some of the text.
http://www.mindingthecampus.org/2016/02 ... han-haidt/

JONATHAN HAIDT: And these were not requests. This was not a discussion. This was framed as an ultimatum given to the president – and they gave him I think six days to respond, or else. And I am just so horrified that the president of Yale, Peter Salovey, responded by the deadline. And when he responded, he did not say, on the one hand, the protesters have good points; on the other hand, we also need to guarantee free speech; and, by the way, it’s not appropriate to scream obscenities at professors.

JOHN LEO: Or the threat to one professor: “We know where you live”?

JONATHAN HAIDT: I didn’t even know about that. The president was supposed to be the grown-up in the room. He was supposed to show some wisdom, some balance, and some strength. And so we’ve seen, basically what can really only be called Maoist moral bullying – am we saw it very clearly at Claremont McKenna. The video is really chilling–the students surrounding this nice woman who was trying to help them, and reducing her to tears.

...

JOHN LEO: Well, but there’s always a possibility of truth and accuracy. I mean, why is the professoriate so…

JONATHAN HAIDT: Spineless? Nowadays, a mob can coalesce out of nowhere. And so we’re more afraid of our students than we are of our peers. It is still possible for professors to say what they think over lunch; in private conversations they can talk. But the list of things we can say in the classroom is growing shorter and shorter.

JOHN LEO: This sounds like the Good Germans.

JONATHAN HAIDT: Yes. Exactly. It is. It’s really scary that values other than truth have become sacred. And what I keep trying to say – this comes right out of my book The Righteous Mind – is that you can’t have two sacred values. Because what do you do when they conflict? And in the academy now, if truth conflicts with social justice, truth gets thrown under the bus.

JONATHAN HAIDT: Oh, yes. After the talk, I was contacted by a few social psychologists who were interested in the topic. None of them is actually conservative. We looked into a bunch of the reasons. And the biggest single reason is probably self-selection. We know that liberals and conservatives have slightly different personalities on average. We know that people with a left-leaning brain are attracted to the arts, to foreign travel, to variety and diversity. So we acknowledge that if there was no discrimination at all, the field would still lean left. And that’s perfectly fine with us. We don’t give a damn about exact proportional representation. What we care about is institutionalized disconfirmation – that is, when someone says something, other people should be out there saying, “Is that really true? Let me try to disprove it.” That is now much less likely to happen if the thing said is politically pleasing to the left.

This isn't the 1st time i read about there being a difference between the brains of liberal leaning and conservative leaning person. But if he accepts this as fact, isn't the whole idea of the need of more diversity in the field completely useless? If it's accepted that there is a correlation between political leaning and academic/professional field choice, how can you make an argument that the issue behind the lack of diversity is attributable to hostility towards the group who is less likely to pick the field in the 1st place.

[Simple Torture]

My favorite spin off of the "safe spaces at colleges" thing is that middle-aged comedians like Jerry Seinfeld are lamenting that they don't feel like they can perform at colleges anymore. Dude: no one currently enrolled at a college or university gives a shit about who you are! I don't think he's ever stopped for a second and considered that his less-than-warm reception at collges isn't due to something politically incorrect about his act, but because young people just don't find him funny.

[Mine]

Why the hell does he even care? He was still the highest paid comedian last year. It's not like he's running out of audiences.

[LoathedVermin72]

This OPEC business doesn't sound good.

[Green Habit]

The Idaho Legislature pisses me off so much when they pull shit like this. So many of these guys would complain hard if the feds took control like this away from the states, but show pure hypocrisy when it comes to local government. Gah.

http://www.idahostatesman.com/news/poli ... 55021.html

[Dscans]

JONATHAN HAIDT: Oh, yes. After the talk, I was contacted by a few social psychologists who were interested in the topic. None of them is actually conservative. We looked into a bunch of the reasons. And the biggest single reason is probably self-selection. We know that liberals and conservatives have slightly different personalities on average. We know that people with a left-leaning brain are attracted to the arts, to foreign travel, to variety and diversity. So we acknowledge that if there was no discrimination at all, the field would still lean left. And that’s perfectly fine with us. We don’t give a damn about exact proportional representation. What we care about is institutionalized disconfirmation – that is, when someone says something, other people should be out there saying, “Is that really true? Let me try to disprove it.” That is now much less likely to happen if the thing said is politically pleasing to the left.

This isn't the 1st time i read about there being a difference between the brains of liberal leaning and conservative leaning person. But if he accepts this as fact, isn't the whole idea of the need of more diversity in the field completely useless? If it's accepted that there is a correlation between political leaning and academic/professional field choice, how can you make an argument that the issue behind the lack of diversity is attributable to hostility towards the group who is less likely to pick the field in the 1st place.

I think it's more of a viscous cycle type of thing, type of thing. If conservative professors in the social sciences are the minority, they are more likely to feel like outcasts and leave the field and the dwindling numbers and "hostility" will discourage would-be conservative professors who might then choose a different field. So the already small numbers will only get smaller.

What causes the lack of diversity isn't as important as the fact that it exists and creates a monoculture, which becomes a disservice to the whole field. At a college I used to work at, my friend was an English professor who ran the writing concentration. He once lamented that since he pretty much was the only professor for the writing courses, taught most of the rhetoric courses, and was the faculty advisor to the campus literary magazine, students who majored in the writing concentration were basically getting a degree in him. He said the best thing for the program would be to hire another English professor who disagreed with everything he said.

[Mine]

I think it's more of a viscous cycle type of thing, type of thing. If conservative professors in the social sciences are the minority, they are more likely to feel like outcasts and leave the field and the dwindling numbers and "hostility" will discourage would-be conservative professors who might then choose a different field. So the already small numbers will only get smaller.

I believe it's more nuanced than that. As i understand it it's not limited to professors either.
I don't think social studies in general are a field well suited for conservatives as they are still the side that history keeps proving wrong on social issues. It's not a trend that was ever reversed. I can see how someone who's conservative views are actually strong enough to be relevant in academic work would feel ostracised. I think social conservatism is an extremely unforgiving premise for a career in social studies because it's not likely that those views will be confirmed through research or that they would be met with wide consensus if they were. It's something inbuilt in the fields themselves for obvious reasons.

What causes the lack of diversity isn't as important as the fact that it exists and creates a monoculture, which becomes a disservice to the whole field. At a college I used to work at, my friend was an English professor who ran the writing concentration. He once lamented that since he pretty much was the only professor for the writing courses, taught most of the rhetoric courses, and was the faculty advisor to the campus literary magazine, students who majored in the writing concentration were basically getting a degree in him. He said the best thing for the program would be to hire another English professor who disagreed with everything he said.

I agree with you friend, but it's a different scenario. There can still be diversity within a field even if it's primarily made of people who adhere to one broad political option and it isn't mandatory that the political beliefs define academic work. The conclusion in the article is that the specific field would remain progressive even if the conservative beliefs were better represented. This means that even if diversity was achieved by a series of concious choices it would likely revert back to where it was.
There's even a risk of creating an artificial balance that ends up being an even bigger disservice to the field. There is a risk in over representing certain views, beliefs and opinions when they aren't properly informed.

This made me think of Kim Davis. I remember her saying she was a Democrat but doesn't feel represented by the party any more. This shouldn't mean that Democrats should take a more homophobic stance to accommodate the Kim Davis' of America. Her belief isn't equally valid as is of those people who supported and made possible for homosexuals to legally marry. I would guess that gay issues are a big part of the tensions between the progressives and conservatives in social studies.

[Jorge]

Really fucking bizarre stuff going on in Colombia right now.

http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/C ... -0041.html

A major police corruption case rocking Colombia is heating up as the head of the national police force is set to face an inquiry over his alleged involvement in the creation of a male prostitution ring serving lawmakers, while a government official implicated in the sex scandal resigned on Tuesday.

Police Director General Rodolfo Palomino, previously accused of asking police officers for sex, will now be investigated for accusations of illicit enrichment and illegal spying, Colombian Investigator General Alejandro Ordonez announced on Tuesday.

Palomino denies accusations of propositioning officers for sex and has further rejected allegations of involvement in the prostitution network, which has been referred to unofficially as “The Fellowship of the Ring.”

[Mine]

really fucking bizarre indeed

[tragabigzanda]

The Idaho Legislature pisses me off so much when they pull shit like this. So many of these guys would complain hard if the feds took control like this away from the states, but show pure hypocrisy when it comes to local government. Gah.

http://www.idahostatesman.com/news/poli ... 55021.html

Wait, are you from Idaho? If so, what part? My dad's whole family is spread throughout.

[BurtReynolds]

Anybody follow that iPhone thing?

http://www.businessinsider.com/john-mca ... ign=buffer

[b_i_revisited]

Anybody follow that iPhone thing?

http://www.businessinsider.com/john-mca ... ign=buffer

This is a pretty tough call actually. If a court orders it, and Apple refuses, it creates an interesting and somewhat dangerous precedent of corporations openly exempting themselves from the law on the grounds of "suck it", but Cook is absolutely correct that once the backdoor exists it cannot be undone and at least a dozen nations and assorted criminals and "hacktivists" will be able to exploit it in weeks, if not days.

[stip]

I just have a hard time believing Apple can't access that information themselves.

[contamination]

Wish I lived in France:

http://money.cnn.com/2016/02/18/news/fr ... index.html

[b_i_revisited]

Do we have a thread about microaggression and everything that is happening on college campuses now?

I've found this piece to be enlightening on this topic... and explains a significant amount of the behaviors of the progressive left on social media:



The economics of political correctness
Kristian Niemietz
30 April 2014

Over the past few years, spiked online magazine has consistently and robustly defended the principle of free speech against the censorship demands of the politically correct, whatever quarter they may come from. It is great, of course, that there is at least one magazine in which the phrase ‘I believe in free speech’ is unlikely to be followed by a ‘but…’, and more likely to be followed by an ‘even for…’. But while I fully support the spiked line, I also think the spiked authors sometimes misinterpret the intentions of the ‘PC brigade’, and would like to offer an alternative interpretation rooted in boring, old-fashioned textbook economics.

Spiked authors believe that PC is driven by a loathing for ordinary people. According to spiked, PC brigadiers view ordinary folks as extremely impressionable, easily excitable, and full of latent resentment. Exposure to the wrong opinions, even isolated words, could immediately awaken the lynch mob. PC, then, is about protecting ‘the vulnerable’ from the nasty tendencies of the majority population.

But if PC was not really about protecting anyone, and really all about expressing one’s own moral superiority, PC credentials would be akin to what economists call a ‘positional good’.

A positional good is a good that people acquire to signalise where they stand in a social hierarchy; it is acquired in order to set oneself apart from others. Positional goods therefore have a peculiar property: the utility their consumers derive from them is inversely related to the number of people who can access them.

Positionality is not a property of the good itself, it is a matter of the consumer’s motivations. I may buy an exquisite variety of wine because I genuinely enjoy the taste, or acquire a degree from a reputable university because I genuinely appreciate what that university has to offer. But my motivation could also be to set myself apart from others, to present myself as more sophisticated or smarter. From merely observing that I consume the product, you could not tell my motivation. But you could tell it by observing how I respond once other people start drinking the same wine, or attending the same university.

If I value those goods for their intrinsic qualities, their increasing popularity will not trouble me at all. After all, the enjoyment derived from wine or learning is not fixed, so your enjoyment does not subtract from my enjoyment. I may even invite others to join me – we can all have more of it.

But if you see me moaning that the winemakers/the university have ‘sold out’, if you see me whinging about those ignoramuses who do not deserve the product because they (unlike me, of course) do not really appreciate it, you can safely conclude that for me, this good is a positional good. (Or was, before everybody else discovered it.) We can all become more sophisticated wine consumers, and we can all become better educated. But we can never all be above the national average, or in the top group, in terms of wine-connoisseurship, education, income, or anything else. We can all improve in absolute terms, but we cannot all simultaneously improve in relative terms. And that is what positional goods are all about – signalising a high position in a ranking, that is, a relation to others. This leads to a problem. Positional goods are used to signalise something that is by definition scarce, and yet the product which does the signalling is not scarce, or at least not inherently. You can increase the number of goods which signal a position in the Top 20 (of whatever), but the number of places in that Top 20 will only ever be, er, twenty. Increasing the number of signalling products will simply destroy their signalling function. Which is why the early owners of such a signalling product can get really mad at you if you acquire one too.

We have all seen this phenomenon. Those of my age (1980 vintage) have probably witnessed it for the first time in their early teens, when an increasing number of their schoolmates tried to look like Nirvana singer Kurt Cobain, and being a fan of that band lost its ‘edginess’. ‘Being alternative’ is a positional good. We cannot all be alternative [1]. Literally not.

Now remember how the ‘early adopters’ responded when Nirvana fandom went mainstream, and their social status was threatened, because there are clear parallels with PC: some of them went on to more extreme styles; others tried to repair the broken signal by giving endless sermons about the differences between ‘those who are in the know’ and ‘the poseurs’.

PC-brigadiers behave exactly like owners of a positional good who panic because wider availability of that good threatens their social status. The PC brigade has been highly successful in creating new social taboos, but their success is their very problem. Moral superiority is a prime example of a positional good, because we cannot all be morally superior to each other. Once you have successfully exorcised a word or an opinion, how do you differentiate yourself from others now? You need new things to be outraged about, new ways of asserting your imagined moral superiority.

You can do that by insisting that the no real progress has been made, that your issue is as real as ever, and just manifests itself in more subtle ways. Many people may imitate your rhetoric, but they do not really mean it, they are faking it, they are poseurs. You can also hugely inflate the definition of an existing offense. Or you can move on to discover new things to label ‘offensive’, new victim groups, new patterns of dominance and oppression.

If I am right, then Political Correctness is really just a special form of conspicuous consumption, leading to a zero-sum status race. The fact that PC fans are still constantly outraged, despite the fact that PC has never been so pervasive, would then just be a special form of the Easterlin Paradox.

Keep up the good work, spiked team. But bear in mind that you are up against a powerful economic force.

[Mine]

http://phys.org/news/2016-01-italy-high ... h-mob.html

Italy confirms higher cancer, death rates from mob dumping

An Italian parliament-mandated health survey has confirmed higher-than-normal incidents of death and cancer among residents in and around Naples, thanks to decades of toxic waste dumping by the local Camorra mob.

The report by the National Institute of Health said it was "critical" to address the rates of babies in the provinces of Naples and Caserta who are being hospitalized in the first year of life for "excessive" instances of tumors, especially brain tumors.

The report, which updated an initial one in 2014, blamed the higher-than-expected rates on "ascertained or suspected exposure to a combination of environmental contaminants that can be emitted or released from illegal dump hazardous waste sites or the uncontrolled burning of both urban and hazardous waste."

Residents have long complained about adverse health effects from the dumping, which has poisoned the underground wells that irrigate the farmland which provides vegetables for much of Italy's center and south. Over the years, police have sequestered dozens of fields because their irrigation wells contained high levels of lead, arsenic and the industrial solvent tetrachloride.

Authorities say the contamination is due to the Camorra's multibillion-dollar racket in disposing of toxic waste, mainly from industries in Italy's wealthy north that ask no questions about where the garbage goes as long as it's taken off their hands—for a fraction of the cost of legal disposal. In recent years, Camorra turncoats have revealed how the racket works, directing police to specific sites where toxic garbage was dumped.

In 2014, parliament passed a law mandating the National Institute of Health, a public institution under the Health Ministry, to report on the rates of death, hospitalization and cancer in the 55 municipalities in the so-called "Land of Fires."

The new report, released Dec. 30 report with little fanfare, confirmed what residents have long known, the Rev. Maurizio Patriciello, a priest in the area, wrote Saturday in Avvenire, the newspaper of the Italian bishops' conference which has long advocated on behalf of the area's residents.

"Can we claim victory? Absolutely not," he wrote. "In this shameful, sad and painful story, we have lost everything. The government above all."

ps. crops from the area are known to have been sold to big brands that export their products, tomato sauce and frozen food in particular

[Mine]

https://medium.com/life-tips/why-i-left ... 7b804c21f1

Why I Left the Right: How Studying Religion Made Me a Liberal

It was January 20, 2001, and I was at George W. Bush’s inaugural ball. I had spent months campaigning for him, and it had not been easy. After the Florida electoral debacle complete with “hanging chads,” Katherine Harris (and her fifteen minutes of shame), and ultimately the Supreme Court’s Bush v. Gore decision, I was finally enjoying the fruits of my labor as I celebrated the new president that I worked to get elected.

My role in the campaign wasn’t glamorous, but I was a twenty-year-old political science, religious studies double major who saw this election as the beginning of my work for the Right. I had recently appeared on MTV’s reality show, Road Rules, where I represented the worldview of conservative evangelicals in all its virginal, Christian glory in a very public way (complete with an episode detailing my “downward spiral” that amounted to me swearing once and stealing a pair of bowling shoes). Now I wanted to turn my moment in the spotlight into something meaningful.

During the campaign, I attended Young Republican meetings, drove Bush’s trusted advisors, Andrew Card and Karen Hughes, in the motorcade when they came to town, and now I was working the inaugural ball as the celebrity handler for special guest, Drew Carey. During the evening, he admitted that he wasn’t actually a Republican, but a libertarian. “Good enough,” I thought to myself, “As long as he isn’t one of ‘those liberals.’” I believed my involvement in the campaign was just the beginning of my efforts to promote the conservative movement and perhaps my own career as well.

Growing up immersed in the evangelical community, I was so familiar with the Christian rhetoric and worldview that it never occurred to me that they might be getting it all wrong. During the late eighties and throughout the nineties, evangelicalism hit its stride communicating and promoting a very specific message that amounted to a chorus of sound bites about “family values,” militarism, and the pro-life movement. The group’s unified theological positioning inspired the mobilization of American evangelical voters, and influenced countless election results.

As I stood there in my purple satin, floor-length gown and then-in-style white eye shadow watching the new President dance with his First Lady, I was inspired by what I thought was a going to be a move toward increased personal responsibility, a shift from the distracting Clinton/Lewinsky circus, and a return to the philosophy of the patron saint of right-wing politics, Ronald Reagan. What I didn’t realize was that I soon would become one of “those liberals,” and that the very thing that inspired my conservatism, would now be the thing that caused it to topple: my faith.

I was more than just your garden variety Christian; I attended church several times a week, sought guidance from my pastor in private meetings, and after my reality TV stardom, spoke to church youth groups about how to stay “pure” in this “sinful” world. As I began studying religion at the University of Pittsburgh, people in the church warned me about what could happen under the influence of the liberal intelligentsia. The bias of “godless liberals” teaching at universities was reason enough to avoid traditional education. I believed them when they said academia skewed to the left, but surely a faith as strong as mine could stand up to academic scrutiny.

What happened, however, wasn’t an abandonment of my faith, but a shift in my understanding of Scripture. While I had always read the Bible and knew large portions of it by memory, I had relied on the expertise of my religious mentors (some of whom were simply laypeople teaching Sunday School or Christian education classes) to help guide me through its interpretation. The more I read the text through unfiltered eyes and the more I learned about scholarly investigation, the less sense their point of view made. Their old Jesus looked nothing like my new Jesus.

I could no longer reconcile Jesus’s calls for non-judgment, loving your enemies, and taking up your cross with many of the Religious Right’s positions on social services, women’s rights, and the LGBT community. Even though I felt alone in my theological shift, I was not. A recent Pew Research Center poll puts the evangelical retention rate at 65%, and while we don’t know to what extent education plays in the decision of a believer to leave a tradition, I suspect the fears of many of my religious peers regarding secular education were not unfounded. It isn’t just general education that can shift beliefs; indeed a recent study by Baylor University researcher Aaron Franzen found that increased reading of the Bible correlated with greater passion for social justice — a trait typically associated with liberalism.

Having my worldview fall apart like a house of cards was unnerving, but it only increased my desire for knowledge about the theology of my youth. I continued to study religion, and I received my PhD in Religious Studies two years ago. Now I no longer identify as an evangelical, but I study them for a living.

Only after my doctrinal evolution did I realize I no longer aligned with the political conservatism for which I once literally campaigned. Jesus was a champion of the poor, the weak, the meek, and downtrodden. He encouraged his followers to “sell their possessions” and give them to the poor. He hung out with hookers and crooks. The lifestyle of Jesus didn’t look anything like the politics of the Right.

My transition to the left didn’t happen overnight, and sometimes I felt like a deserter. The man whom I worked to get elected no longer represented my politics or my piety. As I continue to observe the curious twists and turns of evangelicals, particularly during this election year, I remain fascinated by the ways they reconcile their theology with their policy. Evangelicals do not represent a monolith, but they traditionally align with conservative politics. Much has been made of Donald Trump’s evangelical supporters due to his personal life reflecting anything but the “family values” they espouse, but Christians often choose the policy over the person. From Ronald Reagan’s divorce to Mitt Romney’s Mormonism, evangelical Christians give passes to those whose rhetoric is most in line with their philosophy and who they believe can win the election, even if that person’s biography isn’t in line with their religious doctrine.

My journey from Young Republican to less young Democrat did not come from a crisis of faith, it came from finding inspiration in the life of Jesus. Once I removed the dogmatic lens that had informed my biblical interpretations I found a figure that defended a prostitute and ate with the poor. The life of Jesus simply didn’t reflect the agenda of the political right, so now neither could I.