- Alabama secretary of state says more voting would cheapen the work of civil rights heroes.
Why aren’t Republicans ashamed and angry when their high officials say these things? - Republican city clerk opposes early voting because she doesn’t want students to vote
“Students lean more toward the democrats.” - The Right Is Giving Up on Democracy | New Republic
It’s not just Trump; Republican party orthodoxy is more and more anti-democracy and anti-voting. - How to Fix Obamacare | New Republic
- National Chocolate Day – Lawyers, Guns & Money
The chocolate we love is produced by child laborers working in terrible conditions for almost no money. Paging Willy Wonka? - The Hillary Clinton Recession Is Going to Be Ugly | New Republic
“Republican obstructionism, internal divisions, and austerity fetishism will leave the next president no good options for dealing with a downturn.” - Donald Trump Confuses Birth With Abortion. And No, There Are No Ninth Month Abortions. | Huffington Post
- “The yells of cuckold men and fat women.”
This is the Hamlet of pathetic anti-feminist fan emails. - Kansas Ends Bad Economic News by Not Reporting It – Bloomberg View
It turns out that tax cuts for business are not magic; they’re not even good business. - Murder Ballad #6 | Tiny Cat Pants
- And another by the same author as #7, who is an OB/GYN: Term And Partial Birth Abortions: The Mythical Arch-Nemeses Of The Anti-Choice Movement | Huffington Post
- Can Cries of ‘Free Speech’ Be a Weapon? Students Say Yes – The New York Times
- Racist algorithms: how Big Data makes bias seem objective / Boing Boing
- The Phony Debate About Political Correctness
- What is the gender pay gap and is it real? | Economic Policy Institute “The complete guide to how women are paid less than men and why it can’t be explained away”
- Remember China’s Elevated Bus That Drives Over Traffic? Well, They’ve Actually Built It | Bored Panda
Just one as a proof-of-concept, but still: Sooooo coooooool. - Ask a Korean!: The Irrational Downfall of Park Geun-hye
The backstory behind the downfall of South Korea’s president is fascinating and scary. Thanks to Ben for the link. - How the Mast Brothers fooled the world into paying $10 a bar for crappy hipster chocolate — Quartz
This could be the basis for a really awesome murder mystery novel (if someone had been murdered, I mean).
Re: #12
I wonder why the term ‘bedrock principles’ is in scare quotes.
My position is that there should be no restrictions on intentionally offensive free speech. It’s very discouraging that the faculty are not teaching their students this and that the administrations are not enforcing it.
Good. A campus should not be a ‘psychological safe space’, if being such means that intentionally offensive speech is curtailed.
No restrictions? That would make universities like unmoderated internet comment threads. No rational discussion can take place without some restrictions. “Free speech” does not mean that you get to say whatever you want, whenever you want without consequences. It does not mean that you get any audience you wish to have.
I suspect due to the complainers not applying those ‘bedrock principles’ to the students who are saying things which they find offensive.
I’m in Korea right now, and you might be interested to know that Choi Sun-sil is back in the country, in custody, being questioned by the Prosecutor. There’s a video clip that’s been played over and over on TV news, of Choi being dragged by plainclothesmen past a furious mob calling for her head. She lost one of her Prada shoes in the melee, a photo of which has also been featured often on the news. The main takeaway I get from The Korean’s article is that Choi — staggering, half-collapsing, looking distraught — was not only terrified and upset, as well she might be, but putting on a show to try to get sympathy.
It didn’t work. The next day a “heavy equipment dealer” drove up from the southwestern part of the country, Cheolla province, with an excavator on the back of a truck. He unloaded the excavator near the Prosecutor’s office and tried to drive it into the building. One cop was injured trying to lob a tear gas canister at him, another got near enough to tase him, and he was arrested. ‘I tried to help Choi die because she has committed a sin punishable by death,’ Chung told police.”
My Korean friends are delighted and appalled by Park’s downfall. The mother of one of them, like many older Koreans, is a big supporter of Park and of her father Park Cheung-hee. I haven’t asked yet how she’s reacting to the revelations, but I imagine she’s standing firm.
That being said, I’m annoyed by The Korean’s references to “cults” and the remark that Choi Tae-min “called himself a pastor, but he never attended a seminary.” In the Protestant tradition, you don’t need no stinking seminary, all you need is a call from God to start raking in the bucks. Jesus himself was a self-appointed cult leader. From The Korean’s scandalized references to shamanistic rituals! in the Blue House!!! I take it he’s one of those Koreans who are ashamed of Korean shamanism and would rather be a respectable Westernized Christian, maybe a Catholic. No scandals in the respectable sects! … I just realized I haven’t heard anything about Sun Myoung Moon in quite a while. Which doesn’t mean I think Chae Tae-min was a real spiritual teacher, but I don’t think anybody is. Thanks for the link!
In”Free Speech” news, the jury in the Rolling Stones/U-Va case has found the magazine liable for defamation. That means the jury concluded there was “actual malice”, which means that they found the magazine published the claims “with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.”
It seems to demonstrate the legal risks of taking the approach of believing the alleged victim’s story no matter what. Although, I’m sure there will be some sort of appeal.
There’s a difference between functional moderation and the sort of political/content moderation that goes along with the concept of “offensiveness.” You can moderate a class to ensure the discussion remains on topic, or that no students dominate the discussion. You can regulate who people direct their speech towards to ensure no one is being unwillingly targeted to the extent it constitutes harassment.
However, when it comes to what gets discussed in student run social clubs, or what political statements a student might wish to express in a public campaign, then I think an unmoderated internet forum is exactly what it ought to be like. Students in higher education need to have a chance to learn to moderate themselves both individually and collectively, it shouldn’t be something imposed by the administration. It’s also a good thing that students be exposed to some of the ugliness of humanity and realise that it’s not all about them.
Nice try, but no. It demonstrates the legal risks of publishing a detailed reporting of the victim’s story as if it were fact-based journalism, while failing in one’s journalistic duty to do other research and follow-ups appropriately and honestly.
Somewhat random observation, but, I’m on a bullet journal group on Facebook. (Explanation of bullet journals: https://www.buzzfeed.com/rachelwmiller/how-to-start-a-bullet-journal?utm_term=.suvJ5kbGN#.reo0zeJja ). This group is mostly women, and a pretty significant portion are younger married women with kids, who include bible study in their daily schedules, and a lot who homeschool their kids. So, fairly conservative Christians, I would guess. The past few days, a lot of people have been posting pictures of pages that they made to track the election results as they come in. In the comments on those pictures, people seem to mostly be being careful to not get into political arguments, but of the people who do mention who they’re voting for, there are a lot more saying Clinton than Trump. And I’m also noticing that quite a few of the conservative Christian mothers in this group haven’t said anything about who they’re voting for, but they’re clicking “like” on the #ImWithHer comments. Not remotely a representative sample of anything, but it seems that the “conservative Christian mothers who have busy schedules, want to get more organized, and like crafts” demographic is largely voting for Clinton but doesn’t really want to talk about it. I wonder if that “don’t want to talk about it” dynamic is showing up in polls, both in terms of the answers that people give and who’s willing to talk to pollsters in the first place.
I saw a poll a while ago (can’t remember where) where they were just polling people in heterosexual marriages, and they asked both, “Who are you voting for?” and “Who do you think your spouse is voting for?” The number of wives voting for Clinton was a whole lot higher than the number of husbands who thought their wives were voting for Clinton. (The reverse effect, with husbands voting for Trump, was also there but not as big.)
The premise of a classroom environment is that the student is there to learn specific material and that the professor/lecturer/T.A. is there to teach it. On that basis the latter moderates the discussion in classes. That’s fine. If someone seeks to interfere with that process, the imposition of consequences by the teacher or the university is appropriate.
True. But what consequences are they and who gets to impose them? If the consequence is that the listeners/readers think you’re an a$$hole, fine. If the consequence is that the university sanctions you because you’ve offended someone, not fine – not fine at all. Outside of the classroom it’s not the university’s business to decide what’s rational and what’s not.
Freedom of speech does not mean that you get to force people to listen. But it also does not mean that someone else gets to decide who you can listen to and who you cannot. It DOES mean that a school administration cannot decide that a speaker who offends one group (e.g., homosexuals) cannot speak on campus but that another speaker who offends another group (e.g., conservative) can. The fact that a given speaker offends a group of people on campus – and whether deliberately or not is immaterial – is not proper grounds for preventing that person from speaking on campus, whether the speaker is someone on that campus or is an outside person that another group on campus is inviting to come and speak. If it is a private school it seems to me that it is a violation of academic freedom and the concept of what a university is for. If it is a publicly funded school it seems to me to be a violation of the First Amendment.
In my marriage my wife voted for Trump and I’m voting for Jill Stein.
That same poll had something like 15% of people who said they didn’t know who their spouse was planning to vote for, which just made no sense to me. I know who pretty much everybody in my family is voting for, up to several third cousins and a couple of fourth cousins. (Or, at least, if anybody in my extended family is planning to vote anybody other than Clinton, they haven’t yet been foolish enough to mention it on Facebook or at any family gatherings over the past year.)
Ruchama, I know my parents don’t keep track of who each other is voting for, because I had a conversation with my mother about a month ago and she didn’t know who my dad was voting for (and might still not know, because she didn’t know who he’d voted for as of election night in 2012, either).
For whatever it’s worth, they do discuss politics but consider their votes to be a matter of personal privacy, and don’t ever lay eyes on each other’s ballots (they do mail-in a few weeks ahead of time) or compare notes afterward. I have the same upbringing: I would never ask either of my parents or my extended relatives who they planned to vote for, although I’d be open to the conversation if they decided to tell me. I can guess who some of my family members are voting for based on their Facebook posts and my knowledge of which political views tend to align with support for which candidates, but I’m far from certain, and would probably put “don’t know” on a survey for most of them.
It might be a cultural thing, in this case among moderately conservative West Coast upper-middle-class white families. I have some friends who don’t discuss voting preferences openly with their families, either. They/we tend to have political discussions in the abstract, and don’t go into specifics about our actual choices on the ballot.
On the other hand, I know some of my friends know exactly who their relatives are voting for, so I’m sure that attitude is far from universal.
Interesting. When I was growing up, politics was pretty common discussion material in my house. By the time I was seven or so, my dad had to have a talk with me about how some people are Republicans, and those people include the parents of my best friend, and I shouldn’t repeat some of the things I hear at home when I’m over at their house. (I think I told my friend that Ollie North was a liar. I’m pretty sure I had no idea what that meant.)
So, I voted. I voted Green for strategic purposes, Democrat for the House, Republican for the Senate, Green for the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District (there’s 6 million people in Chicago and the surrounding suburbs living on land that was half swamp before we got here; dealing with drinking water, sewage and flooding actually is pretty involved), and NO on all the judges on the judicial retention ballot. The good ones will survive that, but hopefully it’ll push the bad ones over the edge.
The first ballot I ever cast was for then-Rep. Shirley Chisholm in the 1972 Massachusetts Democratic Presidential Primary. I’ve missed exactly one primary election and no general or municipal elections since then. There’s going to be more residual anger and resentment after this election than after any other I’ve voted in, hands down. I think there’s less trust in the fairness and legitimacy of this election than there was after Bush/Gore. Governing after this is going to be tremendously difficult for whoever wins.
I voted. (In only one of the three states where I’m currently registered, because no matter how often I tell New Jersey that I don’t live there anymore, they keep me listed as a registered active voter.) Mostly followed the local Democratic party’s recommendations, but disagreed on a couple of judges. And I got a sticker.
The new voting machines are boring. I liked the old ones with the lever, that went ker-THUNK when you cast your ballot. That felt like you were really doing something. The new machine just shows you a digital picture of a flag.
In Illinois you have a choice of a paper ballot or a touchscreen machine. Given my experiences and knowledge of programming, cybersecurity and networking I always use a paper ballot.
We’ve got the scantron-type machines.
An Issue Whose Time Has Come: Sex/Gender Influences on Nervous System Function – The Journal of Neuroscience Research publishes a freely accessible issue” dedicated to sex differences in the brain.
I’d even say you’re not completely correct either.
This case shows the danger of acting on belief alone. The story was printed in the magazine and then the fraternity was punished with no investigation in between.