Friday, November 29, 2019
AAUP: "A Tale of Two Arguments About Free Speech on Campus"
The American Association of University Professors (AAUP)
offers a long article by Michael C. Bahrent, “A Tale of Two Arguments About
Free Speech on Campus”, link.
The article talks about the alarm risen by a group called
FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.
The article develops the idea that the current generation of
professors and students don’t value free speech they way people did around the
time of Y2K.
They see personalized speech is more useful to the already
well-off, who generally don’t like to “take action” and have no shame in
demonstrating. Furthermore, the distraction of individualistic speech makes it
very difficult for campuses to become inclusive of groups of previously less
desired people.
There is also a way the political climate on a typical campus
compounds this.
The Left is demanding relief from a hypercritical attitude
that classifies individuals as simply winners and losers and tries to justify a
superficially meritocratic hierarchy. Yet, within the intersectional groups the
Left tries to form, they would find they have to set up their own hierarchies.
But they insist it makes some sense, that if you can shut
down all speech that simply seems critical of someone for not being as
competitive sexually as someone else, you could stop bullying and sequences that
have horrific results. In their view, my
own William and Mary expulsion was the result of this talk, rather than from
morally legitimate claims I could myself become a mooch on the larger group.
Wednesday, November 27, 2019
A word of "Warning" and the effectiveness of anonymous speech (well, whistleblowing)
“Anonymous” says that he or she (“they”) remains anonymous as
the author of “A Warning” (published by Twelve) so that readers may focus on
the content and not the personhood . Alexander Hamilton and James Madison remained
anonymous for part of the time leading to ratification of the Constitution,
they said, CBS News story. The author may reveal their identity in January.
“A threat to America,” according to a senior Trump
administration official.
The book says, “everyone is chief of staff except the chief of
staff” and speculates that Pence might get dumped.
The president is reported to have considered naming illegal
migrants as “unlawful combatants” for Guantanomo Bay.
My own book would have had no political impact (on gays in
the military back in the 90s) had I remained anonymous “to protect the family.”
Sunday, November 24, 2019
Richard Stengel's "Information Wars": He would weaken platform immunity and Section 230
Today, Fareed Zakaria, on Global Public Square on CNN, interviewed Richard Stengel, author of
“Information Wars: How We Lost the Global Battle Against Disinformation and
What We Can Do About It”, 2019, Atlantic Monthly Press, 368 pages, Amazon.
Zakaria described hate speech laws in Germany to the United
States today. You can be prosecuted for displaying Naza items in Germany. Private platforms may censor you but the First
Amendment makes it impossible to make it illegal.
Stengel says that if you travel around the world, people find
it remarkable that in the US hate speech is tolerated. Why are people allowed to burn the Koran in
public in the U.S.?
The answer is partly that the U.S. embraces individualism
more than other countries. The U.S. officially is less interested in protecting
people as members of groups as for the limitations they may feel.
Stengel also suggested that social media platforms should be
held responsible for hosting hate speech and that Section 230 should be much
reduced. He also suggested that we need to teach media literacy in schools, and noted the Pizzagate scandal in 2016 as an example of American gullibility.
Saturday, November 23, 2019
Article in conservative magazine resembles Damore's, causes ruckus at Indiana University when a professor tweets a link to it
I’m going to treat this as a “booklet” because of its topicality.
An Indiana University business professor drew demands
for his firing after he tweeted this UNZ article about campus environments by Lance
Welton, “Are Women Destroying Academia? Probably”
It says that the article is 1500 words long, but it
doesn’t look it.
The article suggests that males are more likely to be geniuses
because of male instability and inpredictability and dependence on logical processing
with less attention to feelings or agreeableness.
But Welton is right in that
students need to learn to deal with other people’s ideas even if they could be threatening. I’ve seem this my whole life.
Maybe, that sounds like James Damore’s ideas, but in
this case the particular professor who wrote the tweet has more issues with
homophobia, reportedly. Furthermore, Damore suggested inclusiveness of everyone on an individual basis, simply not quota-consciouesness.
When I was in grad school at KU in the mid 1960s a
female student finished and went on to a PhD program at the University of
Illinois.
It’s true that some of the spectacular science fair
type achievements have been from young males (Jack and Luke Andraka, Taylor
Wilson, John Fish) but I’m not sure if I have a real sample and have looked at
the female accomplishments. I may be
biased in simply hanging around or paying attention more to people who appeal
to me personally.
Labels:
diversity programs,
periodicals,
university papers
Sunday, November 17, 2019
"More for Less": Andrew McAfee's book explains how modernity can survive adjusting to climate change
Today, on CNN’s Global Public Square, Fareed Zakaria
interviewed Andrew McAfee, author of “More for Less: The Surprising Story of
How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources – and What Happens Next”, 352
pages, from Scribner, publisher link.
The author points out that we are producing much more wealth
with fewer resources, and that our need for energy consumption has plateaued.
Zakaria had started the interview by noting that today’s young
adult generation wonders if it will be called upon to demonstrate the “personal
virtue of restraint”, and give up flying, driving alone, air conditioning, and hot
showers, and especially meat.
Tuesday, November 12, 2019
Atlantic: "A Nation Coming Apart", collection of essays for the December 2019 issue; a second civil war?
The December 2019 issue of the Atlantic will be called “A Nation Coming Apart”. I got a link for
it and apparently my paywall status let me see
all of it. It would be advisable to pick
up the print – but typically that means getting to a Barnes and Noble or
similar bookstore. The email had a
subtitle, “How to stop a (second) civil war”, or, as Tim Pool says, at least an
insurgency.
There are three parts, each divided into several essays.
Yoni Applebaum writes about “How America Ends” and focuses
somewhat on how non-whites will become a majority. She also discusses the collapse of the GOP,
and notes that authoritarianism or fascism or communism will come when
center-right parties collapse and lose sight of their principles and behave
like identarian tribes. The right often
comprises groups who have lost power and privilege to change, whereas the left
comprises intersectional groups who are vengeful about the sins committed
against them in the past.
Johnathan Haidt talks about the “Dark Psychology of Social
Networks”. Visitors are gripped by the
latest clickbait scandals and lose sight of longer-term goals and principles,
because of the speed of news. Many people are not mature enough to recognize “junk”,
and better educated people are often unaware of the way “the masses” process
things when overwhelmed or manipulated – through their tribes. Even David Pakman
made a video in early 2019 admitting that many voters don’t understand anything
and are swindled easily.
Here the writers suggest (1) stop evaluating the performance of individual content pieces with Likenomics (Instagram is already experimenting with this (2) reduce use of unverified accounts (or bots -- this means everything source should be idenitifed, at least like private registration of domain names; it's not quite the same as the Twitter verification check) (3) eliminate low-quality posts and comments.
Here the writers suggest (1) stop evaluating the performance of individual content pieces with Likenomics (Instagram is already experimenting with this (2) reduce use of unverified accounts (or bots -- this means everything source should be idenitifed, at least like private registration of domain names; it's not quite the same as the Twitter verification check) (3) eliminate low-quality posts and comments.
Tom Junod has a piece about Mister Rogers and personal
localism. People are often disinterested in “neighbors” and more interested in
the faraway worlds they have snatched for themselves.
Gay libertarian writer Johnathan Rauch discusses “too much
democracy” and says that “direct primaries” and various other changes have led
to primary seasons that attract extremists and ideologues and not people who
can win and actually govern.
Danielle Allen describes “The Road to Serfdom” and James
Mattis has a similar piece “The Enemy Within”.
An important idea is localism and the way people participate socially in
solving problems.
A lot of us (myself
included) have become global and projected our rationality on media platforms on
our own and ignore calls from local advocacy groups for help because they seem
partisan and beneath us. It’s like the non-profits need more people marching
and demonstrating and fewer bloggers filming them without joining in.
Adam Serwer cloases this out with “Against Reconciliation”, talk
of another Reconstruction, to stop the idea that remaining in a historically
privileged class is a birthright.
Monday, November 11, 2019
"The Science of Living Longer", supermarket book from Time
Take a look at a special edition of “Time”, “The Science of
Living Longer”, in supermarkets until around the end of November.
The editors are Siobhan O’Connor and Jeffrey Kluger.
There are 16 photoessays or chapters, divided among three
sections, “Mind”, “Body”, “Life”. There are 96 pages (a common length for this brand).
In Chapter 1 (Alice Park), there is a chart on pp 16-18 showing
how different parts of the human body age.
One surprising finding, collagen in the skin that gives
smoothness and elasticity declines 1% a year. That means by age 30 it would have
declined more than 12%. Obviously from
general observation, this seems to be quite variable. Beto O’Rourke, at 47, looks young (being thin
helps). Too much sun probably
accelerates it. The replacement of
muscle with fat accelerates after age 40 (which is about when most major league
baseball careers end). Brain concentration,
for chess players for example, hits its summer solstice from ages 25-28. But real decline may tend to start at around
age 70 (without an actual disease like Alzheimer’s). There are other oddities not often discussed
openly, like the fact that many (especially white) men typically notice loss of
hair from their legs by age 40. In the past, cigarette smoking may have made
this problem much worse. This may be a little more common for men who go bald
(on the pate) genetically, or when men are overweight.
On brain maturity, because the brain is still “pruning” and
focusing on what it is good at, mental illness has become a risk in the age
18-25 group.
On p, 68-70, Dave Beal says that the Twin Cities,
Minneapolis-St Paul MN, is one of the best cities for longevity (after a few
blue zones in Italy and in California’s central valley). I lived there
1997-2003 and just revisited.
People live longer if they age in the area where they grew
up. People tend to return to earlier
memories or contacts, even after a long adult life.
Long-term married (and never divorced) men tend to live
longer than single or divorced men, and that is less true for women. It may be true for gay male couples. While never married men tend to fare worse, there
are remarkable exceptions, such as individualists or artists or scientists very
focused on their own work.
Monday, November 04, 2019
NYTimes booklet by a mom on recruiting teenagers by "racists" (October), rather firm in warning parents
Joanna Schroeder has
a rather strident booklet-article in the New York Times Oct. 12, 2019, “Racists AreRecruiting. Watch Your Sons.” There is a tagline, “Parents need to understand
how white supremacists prey on teen boys, so they can intervene.”
Caleb Cain would later relate on his recruitment and then
deradicalization on the David Pakman show. I think I've used his video ("Faraday Speaks") on YouTube before. It did not seem that the views he had been exposed to were all necessarily extreme, at least in the beginning. But he added that teens generally aren't mature enough to see the flaws in how they are being manipulated (but neither do alo of adults).
Schroeder pointed out one specific technique, calling boys “too
sensitive” to specific remarks about people who are less competitive.
On the other hand, you can point out that other teens (more
likely some PoC) can be recruited by similar techniques into conventional gangs,
or sometimes the far Left. It all depends
on the circumstances in the home and surrounding community.
Teens who do accomplish things in school or family-connected
or sometimes faith-based activity (scouting, sports, music, drama, science
fairs, etc.) can build a sense of personal identity and resist “tribal”
pressures to please their peers. These
things have to happen at least partly in the real world apart from the
Internet.
The other thing is the ability to do abstract thinking (like
that starts with math). That happens
much sooner for some teens than others.
That’s what you notice about the Parlkand teens, for
example, how they could abstract from what happened and build a movement on
their own.
Picture: Tennessee Civil War park SW of Nashville, my trip, May 2014/
Sunday, November 03, 2019
Foreign Policy issue makes strong arguments for open borders
Bryan Caplan has a booklet-like article in Nov. 2019 Foreign
Affairs, “Open Borders Are a Trillion-Dollar Idea”. Cato has already been
tweeting it around.
Yup, most of the objections are political and cultural. Immigrants commit less crime (as a totality),
and add skills and willingness to work. They know how to run small
businesses. Their kids pick up English
immediately.
Yet, Open Borders have come to be viewed as a placard of the
radical Left. You have to have
countries, sovereignty. Well, maybe you
don’t forever, but you can’t make changes that quickly. You can perhaps settle intentional
communities within and make them autonomous.
Last night, at a post-Halloween party I happened to spot
someone who had been at one of these abolish-ICE protests. Yet he was perfectly intact, steady, seated
in his own life. Not everyone on the “Left”
is as crazy as the neo-liberal YouTube channels (Tim Pool) claim. The truth is
half way between Pool and Pakman.
Of course, there’s another side to it. Maybe the poorest countries need to keep some
of their talent so they can recover.
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