Welcome To the Police State: Charlottesville Bottled Water Edition
Let's hope the shit hits the fan, these agents get the boot, and the girls win a big-ass civil suit against ABC.
What a bunch of bullshit.
Imagine a hand palming a human face forever
Carnevale and Rose concluded that class-based policies produce higher graduation rates than either a pure merit-based system (test scores and high school GPAs) or a traditional affirmative action program.And that's not just a happy consequence of such programs--it is, I'd say, more evidence that such programs are justified. The point of AA programs should be to get at genuine merit, in the sense of something like competence as opposed to performance. That is to say, what we want is a program that will filter out/correct for advantages, preferring students with more potential but fewer achievements to those with more achievements but less potential, when the explanation for the differential is SES. Such a system won't take race into account directly, but it will do so indirectly--so long as race affects SES, at any rate.
Because we perceive the world through metaphors, all observations, theories, experiments, statements and facts have a context, including a political context. Our science is necessarily and unavoidably contaminated by our political system; political ideologies propagate through science, and science on its own is incapable of purging them. This is widely understood by people who study scientists, but less often by scientists themselves, and never by skeptics.
Skeptics like to portray science as a hermetically-sealed, self-correcting enterprise, where false theories naturally yield to conflicting evidence, and the truth will always out. To support this position they always trot out the same old anecdotes. I've lost count of the number of times I've read the heartwarming tale of the old geologist who happily dismantled his life's work once the truth of plate tectonics was demonstrated to him. However, the history of science shows that such tales are the exception, and that old theories, and old scientists, have greater stubbornness. Much more common is the scenario described by Max Planck:
"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."This "new generation", not incidentally, tends to be armed with new political attitudes.
“If Bush, the Bush administration, didn’t like somebody, they’d kidnap them and send them to torture chambers,” the renowned American scholar told Democracy Now on Monday.
“If the Obama administration decides they don’t like somebody, they murder them, so you don’t have to have torture chambers all over,” he said.This from the guy who thinks that Mao and the Khmer Rouge weren't all that, y'know, bad...
Let's start with the order. It seems to come from the court established to oversee intelligence gathering that touches the United States. Right off the bat, that means that this is not some warrantless or extrastatutory surveillance program. The government had to convince up to a dozen life-tenured members of the federal judiciary that the order was lawful. You may not like the legal interpretation that produced this order, but you can't say it's lawless.And:
In fact, it's a near certainty that the legal theory behind orders of this sort has been carefully examined by all three branches of the government and by both political parties.
Ah, you say, but the scandal here isn't what has been done illegally -- it's what has been done legally. Even if it's lawful, how can the government justify spying on every American's phone calls?
It can't. No one has repealed the laws that prohibit the National Security Agency (NSA) from targeting Americans unless it has probable cause to believe that they are spies or terrorists. So under the law, the NSA remains prohibited from collecting information on Americans.
On top of that, national security law also requires that the government "minimize" its collection and use of information about Americans -- a requirement that has spawned elaborate rules that strictly limit what the agency can do with information it has already collected. Thus, one effect of "post-collection minimization" is that the NSA may find itself prohibited from looking at or using data that it has lawfully collected.And this "minimization," Baker claims, is key. The NSA might need to collect a lot of data, but there are rules about what data it can and can't use.
Date: 7/6/2013
Sender: Longtimereader@fake.com
To: philosoraptor@gmail.com
Subject: Your bullshit
Winston,
Bomb bomb bomb. Listen, how many times do I have to tell you that you are full of shit? Uranium Sarin Will you PLEASE JUST QUIT POSTING THIS NONSENSE???? Make 9/11 look like Mardi Gras. I'm not even going to waste the electrons trying to straighten your sorry ass out anymore laser base on the moon. In short, STFU.
Death to America,
etc
The Wetumpka Tea Party, from Alabama, sponsored training for a get-out-the-vote initiative dedicated to the “defeat of President Barack Obama” while the I.R.S. was weighing its application.
And the head of the Ohio Liberty Coalition, whose application languished with the I.R.S. for more than two years, sent out e-mails to members about Mitt Romney campaign events and organized members to distribute Mr. Romney’s presidential campaign literature.
At this point, I had drifted off into Monty Python's Life of Brian, where Stan and Judith are debating whether they should stick up for Stan's "right to have babies" even though he can't have babies.
And that is what the modern feminist movement has become. Full of intersectionality, debates about middle-class privilege, hand-wringing over a good education (this is again "privilege" and not well-deserved success), and otherwise intelligent women backing out of debates and sitting around frenziedly checking their privilege.
It does nothing. It accomplishes nothing. It changes nothing.
...
Ultra-feminism's mournful obsession with words and categories is making the movement a jokeThe academic and internet feminist equivalent of the vanguard of the proletariat is turning feminism into a joke. It's not just that it doesn't accomplish anything, it's that it's also intellectually indefensible.