The Conservatives’ Nightmare: ‘Respectful Disagreement’, But Between Social Equals

by 12:10 pm. It has 257 Comments.

The NYTimes recently hired the “provocative” Bari Weiss (as far as I can tell, because Bret Stephens was getting screechy about being the punchline to every ‘reactionary FTFNYT columnist shows his arse in public again’ joke). Earlier this week, Weiss produced her longest, most provocative piece so far, and boy did it get the hate-clicks!

Lots of the responses are funnier, and far better thought out, than the original piece. I’ve been collecting links to share, but it was a twitter side-spat that sparked my chain of thought…

Andrew Sullivan, once again being cruelly repressed with a highly-compensated platform at a widely-read center-liberal print/media publication:

… I remember a different time — and it wasn’t so long ago. A friend reminded me of this bloggy exchange Ta-Nehisi and I had in 2009, on the very subject of identity politics and its claims. We clearly disagreed, deeply. But there was a civility about it, an actual generosity of spirit, that transcended the boundaries of race and background. We both come from extremely different places, countries, life experiences, loyalties. But a conversation in the same pages was still possible, writer to writer, human to human, as part of the same American idea. It was a debate in which I think we both listened to each other, in which I changed my mind a bit, and where neither of us denied each other’s good faith or human worth.
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Late Night Open Thread: “Conservative” GOP “Men of Principle”

by 2:54 am. It has 17 Comments.


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One principle, to be exact: “How can I best conserve my cushy job?”

…Moore, who was twice ousted as chief justice of the Alabama state Supreme Court, has largely based his Senate run around his promise to make life difficult for Washington’s entrenched class, including his own party’s leadership. Moore has pledged to oppose Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, among other things. But the fundraising pact is a formal behind-the-scenes step by the establishment to support Moore, after unsuccessfully spending millions to defeat him in Alabama’s primary.

The new fund, Alabama 2017 Senate Victory Committee, will allow Moore to raise $80,500 at a time from individual contributors…


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Let me understand your plan

by 10:06 pm. It has 47 Comments.

What are the odds that Corker sticks to this?

Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN), who announced last week that he won’t seek re-election next year, told NBC News he will not vote for a tax reform package if “we’re adding one penny to the deficit.”

He added: “I am not going to be for it, OK. I’m sorry. It is the greatest threat to our nation.”

My guess is Republicans come up with some kind of creative accounting that “allows” them to say that not one penny is being added to the deficit and Corker then votes for the thing.

But maybe since he’s retiring he can show some backbone. I doubt it though.


The martyrdom of St. Googlebro

by 11:11 am. It has 207 Comments.

Bobo says the Google CEO should resign for firing Googlebro because science:

When it comes to the genetic differences between male and female brains, I’d say the mainstream view is that male and female abilities are the same across the vast majority of domains — I.Q., the ability to do math, etc. But there are some ways that male and female brains are, on average, different. There seems to be more connectivity between the hemispheres, on average, in female brains. Prenatal exposure to different levels of androgen does seem to produce different effects throughout the life span.

In his memo, Damore cites a series of studies, making the case, for example, that men tend to be more interested in things and women more interested in people. (Interest is not the same as ability.) Several scientists in the field have backed up his summary of the data. “Despite how it’s been portrayed, the memo was fair and factually accurate,” Debra Soh wrote in The Globe and Mail in Toronto.

Geoffrey Miller, a prominent evolutionary psychologist, wrote in Quillette, “For what it’s worth, I think that almost all of the Google memo’s empirical claims are scientifically accurate.”

Why does Bobo think he knows anything about what the mainstream view is in any area of science? He has no training as a scientist. Quillete and Globe and Mail are both right-wing publications, not scientific journals of any sort. Soh has a PhD but is not a researcher, she writes for Globe and Mail and for Playboy. Geoffrey Miller is not a prominent researcher — there is no way you can call a 1993 PhD who is now an associate professor at UNM “prominent”. And he’s best known for this:

On June 2, 2013, Miller posted a tweet on Twitter stating: “Dear obese PhD applicants: if you didn’t have the willpower to stop eating carbs, you won’t have the willpower to do a dissertation #truth”.

Update. By the way, I don’t think it matters whether what Googlebro said is true or not. Most job situations are such that if you wrote a 100% accurate memo out about your co-workers you can would (rightfully) be fired immediately. (If you had to write a memo about your co-workers, you’d be much better off lying.) This is a very good point from a former Google employee (h/t commenter Walker):

What you just did was incredibly stupid and harmful. You just put out a manifesto inside the company arguing that some large fraction of your colleagues are at root not good enough to do their jobs, and that they’re only being kept in their jobs because of some political ideas. And worse than simply thinking these things or saying them in private, you’ve said them in a way that’s tried to legitimize this kind of thing across the company, causing other people to get up and say “wait, is that right?”


HR incentives and the Mooch

by 4:00 pm. It has 200 Comments.

I’ll stomp on Betty for a moment:

Scharden should be freuded here.

Unless someone is in uniform and is receiving a direct order to serve at the White House, why would anyone work for Trump. The competent have mostly disqualified themselves by signing multiple never-Trump letters during the campaign. The hacks are being forced out by Bannon. And now the boot-lickers see that boot licking is not enough if they are manifestly incompetent.

This is not normal.


WTF but his e-mails edition

by 11:20 am. It has 378 Comments.

I just can’t figure out what is out there that makes releasing this tweet a good idea. Read about 3/4ths of the way down:

Update 1: A respected NatSec attorney’s reaction:


Degrading the public sphere (data edition)

by 4:26 pm. It has 18 Comments.

Hannah Recht is one hell of a data visualizer and story teller on healthcare. She is assembling the bare county maps for Bloomberg and then she tweeted the following on Wednesday:

She goes on to explain how and why the government map is fundamentally wrong. It is a combination of people not being familiar with the data and an intent to deceive through malice or laziness.

American public data resources are an incredible asset. They are being degraded as we speak. This is why everyone who could yank a file from November 9-January 20, 2017 yanked files. We feared that there would be massive data degradation. And the solution of archiving public resource files on non-government servers is a reasonable solution to the feared problem of forgetting the past. It does nothing for the ongoing fear that current files will not be collected, corrupted or hideously and deliberately mis-interpreted.

This is just one small example in a domain where I have knowledge and passion. We know it is happening elsewhere such as the EPA and voting rights too. I think the safe assumption is that it is happening everywhere.