This story about destroying Jesus and Mary statues and stained glass windows has actually been developing for a good part of a week to my certain knowledge; I was watching a woman argue that Christianity's use in colonialism meant that Christianity itself was impossibly wrapped up in white supremacy. Shaun King is at least only interested in destroying 'white Jesus' (and Mary, and priceless artworks dating back many centuries). That woman wanted to eliminate Christianity per se for practitioners' crimes against wokeness.
There remains an open question about whether we shall be allowed to convert to a more acceptable faith, perhaps one of the gay-and-trans-friendly versions of Islam, certainly not Orthodox Judaism; or whether, as in Communist China, we are required to become Scientific Atheists in order to maintain our social credit.
If you are interested in social credit. Maybe it's not the kind of treasure that's really worth having.
Well You Shouldn't, Obviously
Reason: "The CIA Can't Protect Its Own Hacking Tools. Why Should We Trust Government Privacy and Security Proposals?"
"Social Science" and Racism
A test with the imprimatur of the University of Maryland and UC Santa Barbara, which purports to help you reveal your racism to yourself, is a better example of why these 'social science' field are frauds.
Let us count the ways.
1) Scientific tests should seek to eliminate all but one variable; you control the rest so you can be clear on what has changed. This test, instead, varies its language in ways that muddy what it is measuring, e.g., asking about 'it is offensive' only some of the time, and 'it is okay to...' on other occasions.
2) That ambiguity is made much worse by the fact that 'okay' is an almost endlessly ambiguous word. It can mean anything from "yes" to "I understand" to "enough already!" to "I will do that," and many other things besides. So when you ask people to what degree they agree that 'it is okay to... X' you need to spell out what kind of 'okay' you mean.
For example, is it okay to insult a President? Well, it's legal, unless you are a serving military member; it may be morally permissible even where it isn't legal, in cases where the President may really deserve the words; it may be virtuous even where it isn't legal. Or do you mean that it's 'okay' in the sense of being socially acceptable? It is highly acceptable to insult the current president in some crowds, but completely unacceptable to insult the previous one in similar terms.
3) When they ask about what is offensive, there is no objective fact of the matter about that. People get offended, and people are different. Is the question whether I think a thing is or ought to be offensive, or whether I think that there are people somewhere in my society who would be offended (or that they ought to be, or ought not to be)? If the test cannot avoid these ambiguities, how could it pretend to be offering an apples-to-apples comparison across the responses of different readers? The readers may well have thought they were answering meaningfully different questions.
4) We begin to unravel the real purpose of the exam when we realize that answering "no opinion" counts against you every time. Having no opinion is always treated as evidence of racism. The only answers that won't count against you are the extreme ones -- double thumbs up or double thumbs down -- provided you select the correct one of those options.
5) This is not a test of racism, in other words, but a test of your knowledge of the content of an ideology. You might have no opinion about a question because you haven't thought about it before; that wouldn't be evidence one way or the other about your internal racism. What you are being tested on is having developed the right opinions, and knowing to express them as strongly as possible when asked for them.
6) In that sense the test involves the sort of demand for successful mind-reading one sometimes encounters in bad emotional relationships: if you didn't know this was a problem, that is a proof that you're wrong because you should have picked up on it. If you didn't know what I meant when I said something ambiguous, that is proof that you aren't thinking about this the right way. You should have known what I meant.
7) Finally, a lot of the questions are about fictional cases, where presumably the moral stakes are a lot lower. These cases are run into the same index as cases that affect actual human beings, as if there were an equivalence between real and pretend cases.
Yet in spite of all of this, the test is very proud of itself and its team.
Let us count the ways.
1) Scientific tests should seek to eliminate all but one variable; you control the rest so you can be clear on what has changed. This test, instead, varies its language in ways that muddy what it is measuring, e.g., asking about 'it is offensive' only some of the time, and 'it is okay to...' on other occasions.
2) That ambiguity is made much worse by the fact that 'okay' is an almost endlessly ambiguous word. It can mean anything from "yes" to "I understand" to "enough already!" to "I will do that," and many other things besides. So when you ask people to what degree they agree that 'it is okay to... X' you need to spell out what kind of 'okay' you mean.
For example, is it okay to insult a President? Well, it's legal, unless you are a serving military member; it may be morally permissible even where it isn't legal, in cases where the President may really deserve the words; it may be virtuous even where it isn't legal. Or do you mean that it's 'okay' in the sense of being socially acceptable? It is highly acceptable to insult the current president in some crowds, but completely unacceptable to insult the previous one in similar terms.
3) When they ask about what is offensive, there is no objective fact of the matter about that. People get offended, and people are different. Is the question whether I think a thing is or ought to be offensive, or whether I think that there are people somewhere in my society who would be offended (or that they ought to be, or ought not to be)? If the test cannot avoid these ambiguities, how could it pretend to be offering an apples-to-apples comparison across the responses of different readers? The readers may well have thought they were answering meaningfully different questions.
4) We begin to unravel the real purpose of the exam when we realize that answering "no opinion" counts against you every time. Having no opinion is always treated as evidence of racism. The only answers that won't count against you are the extreme ones -- double thumbs up or double thumbs down -- provided you select the correct one of those options.
5) This is not a test of racism, in other words, but a test of your knowledge of the content of an ideology. You might have no opinion about a question because you haven't thought about it before; that wouldn't be evidence one way or the other about your internal racism. What you are being tested on is having developed the right opinions, and knowing to express them as strongly as possible when asked for them.
6) In that sense the test involves the sort of demand for successful mind-reading one sometimes encounters in bad emotional relationships: if you didn't know this was a problem, that is a proof that you're wrong because you should have picked up on it. If you didn't know what I meant when I said something ambiguous, that is proof that you aren't thinking about this the right way. You should have known what I meant.
7) Finally, a lot of the questions are about fictional cases, where presumably the moral stakes are a lot lower. These cases are run into the same index as cases that affect actual human beings, as if there were an equivalence between real and pretend cases.
Yet in spite of all of this, the test is very proud of itself and its team.
Why Use This Test?The fraud is bigger than the test; the real fraud is that these people have been taught to think of what they are doing here as valid, reliable, professional work. They're the real victims; probably they each paid tens of thousands of dollars into this fraudulent scheme. They'll be paying off that debt for decades, and look where it got them.
1. Free....
2. Validity and reliability. Empirical testing and factor analysis has shown the validity of the Racism Test. The evidence has been published in scientific journals and has good scientific validity.
3. Based on peer-reviewed research. The present test is based on peer-reviewed research, as published in notable scientific journals and conducted by professional researchers at the University of Maryland and University of California Santa Barbara.
4. Statistical controls. Test scores are logged into an anonymized database. Statistical analysis of the test is conducted to ensure maximum accuracy and validity of the test scores.
5. Made by professionals. The authors of this free online test are certified in the use of numerous psychological tests and have worked professionally with personality and psychological testing.
SlateStar Down
The New York Times brought about the destruction of one of the great blogs.
The second reason is more prosaic: some people want to kill me or ruin my life, and I would prefer not to make it too easy. I’ve received various death threats. I had someone on an anti-psychiatry subreddit put out a bounty for any information that could take me down (the mods deleted the post quickly, which I am grateful for). I’ve had dissatisfied blog readers call my work pretending to be dissatisfied patients in order to get me fired. And I recently learned that someone on SSC got SWATted in a way that they link to using their real name on the blog. I live with ten housemates including a three-year-old and an infant, and I would prefer this not happen to me or to them. Although I realize I accept some risk of this just by writing a blog with imperfect anonymity, getting doxxed on national news would take it to another level.That is most disappointing. We are in a moment in which great works of art, and here the humanities, are destroyed by mobs (or in this case a reasonable fear of the mob). The Times should be ashamed of its role here, insofar as they are capable of shame.
When I expressed these fears to the reporter, he said that it was New York Times policy to include real names, and he couldn’t change that. After considering my options, I decided on the one you see now. If there’s no blog, there’s no story.
Do Not Trouble the Ghost of Andrew Jackson
Protesters / insurgents tonight met up with a stronger response than they were expecting. The President is idly mentioning that this targeting of Federal monuments is a serious felony, which you might not have realized from the last few weeks.
I read that the Old Guard hopefully issued bayonets and ammunition when this first started. Andrew Jackson would approve.
I read that the Old Guard hopefully issued bayonets and ammunition when this first started. Andrew Jackson would approve.
The audience as instrument
Bobby McFerrin riffs on the Tom Hanks floor-piano toy scene, while instructing us on the pentatonic scale.
Tesla in Texas
Some weeks back, Elon Musk threatened to move at least some Tesla manufacturing operations to Texas, having lost patience with the California COVID program. He's reported to be well advanced in negotiations for a site in Austin that might add 5,000 local jobs. As usual, there's a bidding war, perhaps pitting Austin against Tulsa, Oklahoma, for tax concessions.
I'm not generally a big fan of buying business with personalized tax breaks, but this article mentioned a concession that might make the usual tawdry bargain worth it: Musk is devoted to the "direct sale" model, while Texas is still wed to the dealer-protection racket. Musk would demand an exemption from that law, if not an outright appeal. Get that camel's nose right under the tent, I say, and start shoving.
Also, it would be fun to watch Austin progressives try to reconcile their conflicting views about Musk--job creator! Gay! Hostility to COVID submission! Non-approved social views! Rich guy!--not to mention their approval of "clean" cars and suspicion of factories.
I'm not generally a big fan of buying business with personalized tax breaks, but this article mentioned a concession that might make the usual tawdry bargain worth it: Musk is devoted to the "direct sale" model, while Texas is still wed to the dealer-protection racket. Musk would demand an exemption from that law, if not an outright appeal. Get that camel's nose right under the tent, I say, and start shoving.
Also, it would be fun to watch Austin progressives try to reconcile their conflicting views about Musk--job creator! Gay! Hostility to COVID submission! Non-approved social views! Rich guy!--not to mention their approval of "clean" cars and suspicion of factories.
This should be interesting
Yesterday police tried to answer a call in the Seattle Open-Air Faculty Lounge about a shooting that killed one and put another in the hospital in critical condition, but they're turned back by a mob.
Today, I see flag-waving bikers are headed for our newest experiment in brotherly love and tolerance here in the Amerika.
Today, I see flag-waving bikers are headed for our newest experiment in brotherly love and tolerance here in the Amerika.
Flavortown, Ohio
A petition.
Midwest cuisine must have gotten a lot better than I remember if that's even a serious discussion.
Midwest cuisine must have gotten a lot better than I remember if that's even a serious discussion.
Formulas
"The image does not reflect our values" is a handy way to justify acts of symbolic extirpation of whatever group happens to be in the crosshairs on a given day, without having to explain any tortured so-called reasoning. In the beginning of an iconoclastic movement, people make at least a token effort to explain that an image is stereotyped or otherwise insulting. Now all that's necessary is to mutter "image" and "values," then destroy the thing while giving the stink-eye to whoever is presumed to have been associated with erecting it in the first place, or perhaps to anyone who objects or even acts befuddled about the rationale for its destruction.
It's important to conduct these ritual destructions quite often, according to increasingly bewildering standards, in order to keep everyone off balance and remind them who makes the rules.
It's important to conduct these ritual destructions quite often, according to increasingly bewildering standards, in order to keep everyone off balance and remind them who makes the rules.
The DACA decision makes no sense
I've read it now, and I've read the dissent. The majority opinion is baffling. The dissent is written in an English I can understand and seems to be making straightforward points.
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