The News Thread

Haha, yes--thanks. It is funny because there are actually two arguments here:

1. Theoretical discourse on things like infrastructure is as important as infrastructure. Urban planners, architects, public policy experts, regulatory/legal experts all deal in practical matters, but they also publish in journals and discuss theoretical issues/challenges confronting their fields. I firmly believe that those theoretical discussions are as important as the "actual" (read: physical) work that gets done.

2. I also believe that intellectual discourse on race relations is as important as bridges, but that's a very different argument than #1. That would require laying out how histories of racial discourse and race relations (in America, for simplicity's sake) have influenced ground-level racial activism (from Dred Scott through the Civil Rights movement and beyond) and legal reform. It would also require an argument for how the development of knowledge itself is as important as building shit. And then, of course, you run into issues over how people feel about the political dynamics surrounding said knowledge. All told, I firmly believe that racial discourse is an indispensable element of modern society--both for the changes it has inspired and for the controversy it continues to stir up. That doesn't mean that no one misuses or misunderstands racial discourse; but then, people also misuse roads and bridges. That they apply to different spheres of social life doesn't make one more valuable than the other.

If I'm being honest, my first point was simply that the theoretical discussions happening between city planners, architects, public policy experts, engineers, etc. are as important as the actual work/building that gets done. I consider that discourse to be "intellectual." The humanities side of things was secondary. It's also worth pointing out that Dak and I have a recurring argument about the value of the humanities, so some of that crept in here.
 
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Dak said:
I'm not really a fan of Kavanaugh but this guilty until proven innocent shit is the destruction of the rule of law we keep hearing Trump is responsible for. Kavanaugh was already a US Federal Judge and no one cared. Suddenly a SCOTUS appointment is pulling the supposed aggrieved out of the woodwork. All of this shit is far past the statute of limitations and the ability to effectively investigate. Even if Kavanaugh is 100% guilty A. It's not provable and B. It's past the expiration date.
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So you're okay with putting a rapist on the supreme court for life just because it's 'past the expiration date'?

HamburgerBoy said:
The reality is that men that seek power are going to be disproportionately overrepresented in sexual crimes, which often have a power dynamic themselves. I didn't see many lefties disavowing Ted Kennedy, Bill Clinton, etc and all of their rapey behavior. Republicans already know that Trump is a rapist as well. Who gives a fuck? Wake me when politicians, particularly those on the left that often oppose such efforts, start supporting broad sousveillance laws and self-defense laws so that people can actually fight back against their rapists.
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How exactly is Bill Clinton a rapist? Also, so what? The fact that our leadership is often made up of sociopaths doesn't mean they should be given free reign to do whatever the fuck they want.
 
Einherjar86 said:
I now see why you posted the STEAM link. I think that's a hyperholic claim. STEM and the humanities are far more in dialogue today than they were fifty years ago, when C.P. Snow's theory of the "two cultures" reigned supreme. At that point in time, the humanities had no need to be interdisciplinary. As they realized that necessity over time, they actually became more interdisciplinary. I'm not sure why that professor thinks they're more divided than ever before, when it's true that initiatives like STEAM and other efforts are seeing increased communication between fields.
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Well it may well by hyperbolic, and it would make sense that one of the key STEAM initiators would oversell its need. But I couldn't find any sort of significant rebuttal to his claims.


Einherjar86 said:
Yes, communication doesn't always mean something is fixed. But the point of dialogue isn't necessarily to produce a single solution to a problem; it's to articulate a field in which problems may be solved. You say that humanities academics have no skin in the game, which isn't true at all. They have educational skin in the game, and in many ways their positions are more precarious than those in STEM (especially now that tenure is being awarded less and less frequently). Part of forming discourse is teaching students the language, arguments, and stakes of particular disciplines.
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Good response, specifically the part about articulating a field. I disagree about the skin in the game part though. Tenure isn't necessarily awarded based on solving non-academic problems. The tenure issue is a bureaucratic problem, which is internal to academia.

Back to the field. Different aspects of the humanities may help with articulating a given field, but the humanities aren't a homogeneous suite. Even the disciplines themselves aren't internally homogeneous (at least Psych is very much like this; undergraduate psychology is mostly a poor preparatory program for graduate psychology). Philosophy is the easy go to for broad applicability, particularly ethics. Your interest in speculative fiction obviously has potential relevance for Silicon Valley. But that leaves out a lot of the humanities. Learning a foreign language to expand a business internationally is technically utilizing the humanities, but I don't think that's exactly what STEAM proponents are talking about.

Einherjar86 said:
When humanities academics interact with city planners, there may not be consequences whose blame reaches directly back to the particular academics on particular boards. But over time, effects do have consequences. Your definition of "skin in the game" means some kind of direct, immediate consequence. But like teaching assessment, you can't do it in the span of a single year. It can only develop over time. The same is often true of complex issues being discussed in the abstract, whose effect filter through to others.

You play the rhetoric of the patronizing adult well. That language suggests that there's some kind of basic logic to your argument that I simply refuse to see. But your argument has no basic logic; it reflects your personal biases, which reflect a basic logic back to themselves. It makes perfect sense to you, and therefore should make perfect sense to everyone else. Instead of asking me to grow up, I think you should consider the assumptions built into your criticisms.
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re: patronizing adult "This isn't even my final form" :lol:. I agree that the very dispersed structure of academia can create these disconnects. That should be a point of reform, but of course then we run into the perverse incentive issue - furthermore this is another example of the disconnect between the "real world" and academia. Academia has no good mechanism for self-monitoring/cleaning. On the other hand, there can be very visible persons who could be held accountable; various High Modernist academics listed in Seeing Like A State are good examples.

Einherjar86 said:
Innocent until proven guilty matters when someone is on trial for criminal acts. Kavanaugh isn't on trial in a criminal court; he's being considered for the supreme court. As long as accusations keep flying, it's a serious blow to his credibility as a judge. It's another thing entirely to say he deserves to be in jail.

If only we could keep track of all the possible harassers throughout the legal system. The supreme court is a narrow and very visible area. Furthermore, a supreme court judge wields significantly more power than a regular judge; and if we're going to assess who deserves more scrutiny, a supreme court judge makes sense.
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"As long as accusations keep flying". Accusations aren't worth the carbon dioxide they come with without proof. This "believe accusers" stuff that's come along with the poundmetoo movement is social cancer. There's an important difference between "listening to" and "believing".

The SCOTUS is a final arbiter, but they hear very few cases. I'm concerned about Kavanaugh's legal opinions, but ultimately he probably wields less power on a panel of 9 hearing few cases than a panel of 3 that hears more cases. I'm also certain that he won't be any worse than Democratic appointees.
 
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Dak said:
Back to the field. Different aspects of the humanities may help with articulating a given field, but the humanities aren't a homogeneous suite. Even the disciplines themselves aren't internally homogeneous (at least Psych is very much like this; undergraduate psychology is mostly a poor preparatory program for graduate psychology). Philosophy is the easy go to for broad applicability, particularly ethics. Your interest in speculative fiction obviously has potential relevance for Silicon Valley. But that leaves out a lot of the humanities. Learning a foreign language to expand a business internationally is technically utilizing the humanities, but I don't think that's exactly what STEAM proponents are talking about.
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I know the humanities aren't a homogeneous suite. This is one of your favorite points to make, I feel like, but it usually doesn't actually respond to the discussion at hand. When I say "intellectual discourse," I'm not implying that all academia, or even the humanities, are the same. I'm using it as shorthand to suggest that very particular facets of academic discourse often come in contact with society's pragmatic interests, and that various interdisciplinary measures can be found at various institutions.

I'm not saying that all academics' opinions are valuable in every aspect of society. An urban planner's knowledge is going to be more valuable than a literary critic's for a city council or committee discussing plans to build a casino; but a literary critic's knowledge is more valuable for a committee discussing high school curricula, or board discussing ad language. My argument has never been that race theorists are as valuable as urban planners or public policy experts in every possible context.

Dak said:
"As long as accusations keep flying". Accusations aren't worth the carbon dioxide they come with without proof. This "believe accusers" stuff that's come along with the poundmetoo movement is social cancer. There's an important difference between "listening to" and "believing".
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Completely disagree. Your entire perspective on proof here is batshit.

A. You want proof but also acknowledged that proof can't come into play here. If it did--i.e. if she showed up with a taped recording, like one of Weinstein's victims did--you'd accuse her of inviting harassment in order to catch Kavanaugh in the act. Therefore, even though she has "proof," she's of disreputable character. No way for her to win that argument.

B. "Proof" is for juries and legal cases. We're not discussing Kavanaugh's criminality. We're discussing his fitness to serve on the supreme court. You don't need proof for this because it's clear, as you've already said, that "something happened." If that's clear, then we don't need to know exactly how long he held her down for, what kind if liquor he drank, how drunk she was, etc. etc. Something happened, and that's enough to question his nomination. It's not enough to put him in jail, however.

C. You seem to buy into this notion that women just be comin out the woodwork to accuse him because they don't like his views on abortion, or some such. If this was true--i.e. that we can dispose of public figures whose views we don't like--it would be happening way more than it does. The fact that it's happening more now speaks to our society's attempt to make up for years of shutting down accusers. That's not liberal weepy bullshit, it's what has actually been happening in this country for a long time. For too long it's been the accused who have the benefit of the doubt, when (also for too long) that's because accusers were actively dissuaded, if not prevented, from coming forward. Why would there be "proof" from that time when it was an era in which accusations like hers would have been disastrous for her? (although, of course, she did tell friends and colleagues, as several have testified) She made a conscious choice, so I'm not saying she had no agency; but her choice, due to circumstances at the time, shouldn't prohibit consequences for Kavanaugh now.

Your complete distrust of women in this case is more suspicious to me than the fact that more are coming forward. You've set up a case in your own mind in which there's no viable position for an accuser to take. I find your diagnosis of the "social cancer" to be the more serious "social cancer."

Dak said:
The SCOTUS is a final arbiter, but they hear very few cases.
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And yet their decisions set precedents for innumerable cases down the line.
 
CiG said:
Same with the term "gun nut."

Not into gun culture myself but anybody who conflates law abiding gun ownership as per the constitution with nutcases who use guns to hurt people, quite often with guns they're not lawfully in possession of, is a lump of shit.
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You should really visit the US more. You would see how off the mark you are.

And nobody outside of the fringes conflates gun nuts, let alone regular gun owners, with murderous nut cases.
 
TechnicalBarbarity said:
Have you been to California?
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Eh, that plays to my point though. California is pretty left-wing and, because it's huge, the fringes are rather populous. Still, I would say that the legitimate gun nuts don't help their image by stockpiling ammunition for when they, you know, need to overthrow the government. The most the left has in that regard is whatever cans of tear gas they can quickly throw back at police.
 
Black Orifice said:
Eh, that plays to my point though. California is pretty left-wing and, because it's huge, the fringes are rather populous. Still, I would say that the legitimate gun nuts don't help their image by stockpiling ammunition for when they, you know, need to overthrow the government. The most the left has in that regard is whatever cans of tear gas they can quickly throw back at police.
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Most of them (in Appalachia at least, which is what I'm familiar with) just want to be left alone. Any hoarding is more of the paranoid defensive variety. Are they delusional? Probably, but an armed populace is a (slight) deterrent to government mis-action. Any serious resistance to tyrannical action would actually come from dissenting military who actually have the arms/skill/structure to do anything.
 
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Or stockpiling it in case the price increases exorbitantly which is in the works right now in Congress. I think it's still in committee though.

Ammo prices are at a low right now so it's the right time to stock up. That's not being a nutcase. That's being wise with your spending.

Edit: additionally, sometimes people buy in bulk so they don't have to worry about buying ammo for a while. This is important of you set a budget for it.

Bottom line: There's absolutely nothing wrong with preparedness for the unknown
 
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I will eventually buy some sort of firearm for home use, but I'm not in a hurry or anything. I don't think stockpiling tons of guns or ammo is really necessary either.
 
The term 'stockpile' is ambiguous. What is an amount of ammunition or firearms that you would consider 'stockpiling'?

For some people, 500 extra rounds is stockpiling. For others, that is how many rounds they use each time they go to the range.

The average American gun owner has 7 firearms. How many is too many? What if they have different applications?
 
Einherjar86 said:
A. You want proof but also acknowledged that proof can't come into play here. If it did--i.e. if she showed up with a taped recording, like one of Weinstein's victims did--you'd accuse her of inviting harassment in order to catch Kavanaugh in the act. Therefore, even though she has "proof," she's of disreputable character. No way for her to win that argument.

B. "Proof" is for juries and legal cases. We're not discussing Kavanaugh's criminality. We're discussing his fitness to serve on the supreme court. You don't need proof for this because it's clear, as you've already said, that "something happened." If that's clear, then we don't need to know exactly how long he held her down for, what kind if liquor he drank, how drunk she was, etc. etc. Something happened, and that's enough to question his nomination. It's not enough to put him in jail, however.

C. You seem to buy into this notion that women just be comin out the woodwork to accuse him because they don't like his views on abortion, or some such. If this was true--i.e. that we can dispose of public figures whose views we don't like--it would be happening way more than it does. The fact that it's happening more now speaks to our society's attempt to make up for years of shutting down accusers. That's not liberal weepy bullshit, it's what has actually been happening in this country for a long time. For too long it's been the accused who have the benefit of the doubt, when (also for too long) that's because accusers were actively dissuaded, if not prevented, from coming forward. Why would there be "proof" from that time when it was an era in which accusations like hers would have been disastrous for her? (although, of course, she did tell friends and colleagues, as several have testified) She made a conscious choice, so I'm not saying she had no agency; but her choice, due to circumstances at the time, shouldn't prohibit consequences for Kavanaugh now.

Your complete distrust of women in this case is more suspicious to me than the fact that more are coming forward. You've set up a case in your own mind in which there's no viable position for an accuser to take. I find your diagnosis of the "social cancer" to be the more serious "social cancer."

And yet their decisions set precedents for innumerable cases down the line.
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The rational perspective here is that we don't have enough information to believe either persons account of what did or did not happen. I saw a poll stating that 36% of people believe Ford and 30% believe Kavanaugh. So 66% of people are making decisions based on what? Politics?

I never said there couldn't be proof. There could be something, but I'm at a loss for something that would have last this many years. It's true that rape and sexual assault victims have been historically denied sufficient access to justice, but that doesn't mean we ignore the possibility of more past and future Crystal Mangums. Specifically now in this "MeToo Moment", we are beginning to see more and more claims about public figures. If it works, it will continue to happen. It hasn't worked until recently so we didn't see much of it. Bill Clinton is still allowed to leer at young women in full view of the public.

On a completely separate line of thought: Should you be judged for your fitness to do anything in middle age based on drunken teenage behavior?

Black Orifice said:
Any use of the term "cultural decline" or any sort of equivalency is an automatic red-flag, imo.
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Like all of the handwringing about the DECLINE OF DEMOCRACY we've been blasted with for the last two years?
 
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