The Virginia Society for the Preservation and Appreciation of High-Quality Posts

[支持核绿派 (Greens4Nuclear)]

It seems like a lot of D messaging tends to be toxic to men and how they think and vise versa with the GOP and women. This divide has only gotten larger in recent elections and I worry it getting too much larger would be bad for society.

In my school (which is overall very liberal) I def notice the start of this divide at least in terms of who kids follow on social media and what they talk about. A lot of boys who haven’t developed very strong political or ideological views yet abide to someone like Andrew Tate’s world view very literally and I could very well see them voting Republican in a few years just cause of their belief masculinity is under attack. On the flip side, a lot of women at my school seem to be drawn into a lot of the liberal political activism while having a very superficial understanding of what they’re advocating for (oftentimes it’s somehow related to womens equality/rights). It does make me worry.

Even just with masks (which were optional at the end of last school year), boys tended to not wear them while most girls did and I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

I don't think it'll grow very wide. This seems like what happens to people who overanalyze the world around them and try to make everything political.

If it alleviates your concern I got a challenge for you. Actually start counting and I think you'll find this gender stuff is much more mixed than it actually seems.

Remember confirmation bias is a thing, you notice it when someone is following the stereotype and use it to confirm your own bias and you don't notice it or think much of it when someone isn't following the stereotype.

[支持核绿派 (Greens4Nuclear)]

Re: Is greater New York City the most geopolitically diverse metro area?

This is something I’ve often thought, and the OP put it into words well. What’s interesting is that NYC, despite, at the topline seeming really to be no less Democratic than other major cities, has surprising pockets of Republican strength. The South Shore of Staten Island is particularly remarkable - it’s about 75% Trump, with some precincts over 80%. This is stunningly Republican by any measure - pretty much Appalachia-tier - let alone for a major urban area! I think you’re right that it’s probably the premier example of geographic ideological sorting in the US. Overall, I reckon that, outside of Manhattan and the trendier parts of Brooklyn, NYC whites are pretty Republican compared to those in most other major cities.

Ultra-Orthodox Jews are of course a political law unto their own, but another phenomenon that stands out as being more-or-less exclusive to NYC (the only other places I can think of where this also occurs is North Jersey, which obviously has a lot of the same dynamics as NYC, and Chicago) is the continued existence of urban white ethnic enclaves, in this case largely Italian, and you can really see them stand out on the map as being incredibly Republican compared to their neighbours. Examples would be Whitestone, Howard Beach, Middle Village, Bensonhurst, and Dyker Heights, which all have very high (relatively speaking) Italian-born populations; they received a lot of post-war Italian immigration, which probably has led to a stronger continued sense of Italian identity. The Russians of Brighton Beach have already been mentioned.

Overall, I think you see some pretty unique sociopolitical dynamics in NYC, and some that persist having died out in most other places: the survival of white ethnic neighbourhoods, white flight attitudes that seem to hark back to the 60s/70s/80s, and the continued presence of a kind of conservative, white lower middle-class culture that seems to have disappeared in many other big cities (though even in NYC it’s certainly declined - Queen’s is a lot less white than it was in the 80s). There’s definitely also some nuanced, contradictory impulses going on here: for instance, thinking about Staten Island, a lot of inhabitants probably feel a pretty strong and rooted sense of local identity - classic Italian-American ‘New Yawkers’ - and yet there also obviously a deep contempt of what the ‘city’ represents and ‘urban’ culture. (This kind of old-school racial dynamic and insular culture with a very high % born in the NYC metro is also seen in Nassau and Suffolk, which helps explain why they’re so Republican for major Northeastern suburban counties).

All this certainly speaks to the well-known cultural distinctiveness and local identity peculiar to NYC. I think the metro really must be understood as being apart from the rest of the US as far as a lot of common social and political trends and patterns are concerned. Much of the Outer Boroughs in particular are just objectively weird places.

[S019]

There is no doubt that Vance is ahead. He does have an R next to his name, while Ryan has a D next to his name.

But ask yourself the question, is it really plausible that Vance is only up by 3?

Democrats today in Ohio are in a similar position to Republicans in a state like California in 2000-2008 or so. California used to be competitive for Republicans a decade or two earlier, but since then, things had changed and coalitions had already shifted. But still, Republicans felt like maybe California could be competitive again. This was a delusion.

Similarly, Democrats in Ohio now are remembering back to a decade or two ago when Ohio was competitive, hoping against hope that somehow everything could change back to how it used to be in a bygone era. This leads to foolish mistakes like spending millions of dollars trying to win a Senate seat in an impossible state.

It is time for Democrats to put away childish things, and wake up and smell the coffee. Ohio is basically the same thing as Missouri, just a couple years behind in the transition to safe R.

[Vice President Christian Man]

The Republican Party was evil under Bush, just as it's evil under Trump. The evil has evolved, but to romanticize its past is not an appropriate response. The correct reaction to Hitler would not have been to long for the Kaiser.

[Amenhotep Bakari-Sellers]

The R party isn't evil it hasn't adapted to times and they haven't offered anything like the Gingrich Revolution like TL and balanced budgets just like under Reagan that didn't get his Star Wars McCarthy if he becomes Speaker wants the WVA pipeline and aid to Ukraine but nothing else does he want to cap tuition hikes in University does he want to reform the Student Loan process and other than changing the Electoral Count Act, how can you change Campaign finance reform and get rid of soft money zilch


But, Aid to Ukraine will still come from Speaker McCarthy and the WVA pipeline , just like under Bush W he spent the surplus on Hurricane Katrina and Rita victims and a 1.5 T tax cut but did he give us a 401 K plan with our SSA D's said that they would have passed it if they were open to their reform not Bush W reform ,no he didn't pass 401 K with SSA that's why we win65/60 M every EDay since 2006

[Since I'm the mad scientist proclaimed by myself]

It's just that the modern Republican Party is really impossible to defend intellectually or morally. There's a lot of reason to be concerned that the next presidential election could be in jeopardy if/when states try nullifying the results again (well, y'know, technically just one result, because GOP votes for House and Senate are definitely not tainted the same way Biden ballots are). And there's not much of a reason to be a Republican these days (sorry, PQG) if you're not MAGA.

Consider that Ray Goldfield, Torie, Goldwater, MasterJedi, and many others all used to don blue avatars. One of Trump's loudest critics here is someone who registered with the name GWBFan. After a certain point, the deification of a corrupt false prophet and idiot who wants to overthrow democracy, and all the doublethink required to justify that and his party's actions, become too heavy a burden. And this is simply not a "both sides" problem.

American politics is also, frankly, stupid. The archaic electoral system we have is stupid. Many, but not all, of the controversies are stupid. The culture wars of today are pretty stupid and so are the hills that people choose to die on now.

It's so stupid, that it makes you nostalgic for the early 2010's GOP compared to what we have now. And many of those Tea Party-backed Republicans are considered either moderate or establishment now. We've set the bar so low now that simply affirming that the 2020 election wasn't stolen makes you a profile in courage in today's GOP. Things just shouldn't be that way, and there are some issues where there's not a left and a right point of view, but lies versus the truth, and it's impossible for a democracy to function when everyone's entitled to their own facts.

Like with most problems today, I blame it on alienation and the effects that the social networking obsession has on people's brains.

[Fuzzy Bear]

Do you even think about what you post?

Lol of course I do. I'm not the one trying to make a false equivelance between ignoring experts to get people killed and mildly inconveniencing entitled hyper-anti-collectivists.

Like I have said a thousand times, if you don't want to take the *tiny* risk of being killed by covid, you have the right to stay home, mask, social distance, order grocery dropoff, etc. You do not have the right to force the rest of us to do the same. My choice to live my life without fear does not have to affect hypersensitive hypochondriacs who are still masking and distancing.

I choose to treat the risks from covid like the risks from driving, eating medium rare steak, going outside without slathering myself in sunscreen, etc. They are infinitesimal but real, and not worth making a big deal of.

And "experts" do not have the right to dictate politics any more than monarchs do (they don't). We can consider what they have to say and then choose to go a completely different direction. This is what democracy is for! I choose to completely disregard the psycho epidemiologists on twitter who are still freaking out that most people are no longer playing along with their hysteria.

[Vice President Christian Man]

Atlas is a lot like Twitter, you don't want to be the main character.

[Vice President Christian Man]

I get that this forum is filled with D hacks, but it’s still disheartening to see so many red avatars defending this obviously idiotic policy.

The most embarrassing moment of the 2020 Dem primary was when all ten candidates raised their hands in support of open borders. There is no issue where Dems are further from their working class roots than immigration.

I have nothing against illegal immigrants, but it’s obviously nonsensical to let noncitizens vote. If the entire nation adopted this policy, what’s stopping tens of thousands of Republicans from traveling to swing states to tip those close elections in their favor?

[Since I'm the mad scientist proclaimed by myself]

I’ve always believed that drug use was, morally speaking, a much lesser vice than other things people want to legalize, such as buying sex.

You can't be serious. Sex is a universal (or at least near-universal) human desire. And it can be completely harmless. Heroin however is only good for killing people and destroying lives. There are legitimate arguments against legalized prostitution, but saying it's a "greater vice" than a drug as hard as heroin seems like a massive stretch to me.

I believe that sex is a much more “serious” act than giving yourself a little buzz. I’m sure you understand this, most drug users/drinkers have no problem partaking with someone who they don’t even know their name, but most sex havers have much stronger requirements for who they have sex with.

It’s important to I called buying sex a more serious “moral” vice, not a health vice. Do you seriously believe doing drugs is “immoral”? I mean, maybe, under certain circumstances. But a lot more people would be far quicker to call buying sex a bigger moral statement on a person’s character than drug use.

I'm not really looking at this in "moral" vs. "immoral" terms as I don't believe either having sex or doing drugs is inherently moral or immoral.

I'm looking at it in terms of harmful or unharmful, certainly not some vague concept of "serious" or not. While it may be the case that some (not all by any means) people see sex as a more "serious" act that means more emotionally to them, the fact of the matter is that in most cases (things like STIs which can fairly easily be protected against notwithstanding), the physical act of sex itself is less harmful than injecting yourself with heroin. The legitimate reasons to oppose buying sex would be along the lines of concern for the "sex workers" who are often exploited, not because you think sex is a seriously more harmful thing than doing heroin.

Love the "I'm sure you know this" bit btw lol. I don't do any hard drugs. Never have. Never will. I drink, yes, absolutely, and sure it "means less" to me to drink with someone than to have sex with them. But again I don't associate morality with that, and certainly don't think it changes how either one affects my physical health. If we're going to be regulating these things at all, it should be with public health in mind. Not some subjective and vague concept of "morality." And with that in mind, it actually makes more sense to regulate hard drugs than it does to regulate sex. Again, there are legitimate arguments against buying/selling sex as well, but I don't see you making them frankly.

[支持核绿派 (Greens4Nuclear)]

Re: USGD thread on the alleged shortage of electronics/electrical(?) engineers in the US

The Article is pretty weird, Purdue is a well established engineering university with a fairly good reputation. There does seem to be a problem with engineering education broadly in the united states. I think that having studies engineering both in the US and abroad i'm fairly well qualified to diagnose it. Texas A&M is a massive engineering school, it's engineering program has seen frankly ridiculous growth in recent years, the universties target is to get 25,000 engineering students by the year 2025. The problem is that this has come at expense of letting in people who frankly have no busniess pursuing an engineering education as well as ignoring the elephant in the room.

Lots of people start out engineering but the drop out rate is massive. Overhere at A&M I think almost 55% of people drop out of engineering after there freshmen year which is frankly unthinkable to me. I'm an electrical engineering major in my junion year, and not to be elitest but the quality of electrical engineering undergraduates here is simply terrible. I was talking to some of my classmates in a computer architecture class who were seemingly unware of the existence of TSMC and struggled to solve a simple k-table. I've been having to carry my lab partner through a fairly assembly and verilog lab. I don't entirely blame them given that the quality of teaching i have received so far has been fairly terrible.

I think the problem is two-fold, Engineering professors by-and large teaching undergraduates as a burden that get's in the way of their true interests. Hence they assign it tertiary priority only giving the minimum effort. The whole structure of academica works poorly with engineering, prestige and advancement is gained from publishing papers and collaborating on industrial projects but they are secondary aspects of the job. Furthermore Tenure mostly insulates professors from any consequences of poor teaching methods. This is a problem in NUS* but the University has fixed it by splitting teaching and reaserch professors into separate tracks. In A&M, disengaged professors simply curve classes hence avoiding any complaints about poor teaching.

Large parts of the poor teaching stems from professors who simply don't know English well enough to give a lecture. A lot of very brilliant Chinese professors who perform stellar reaserch simply don't know english well enough to give a proper lecture, yet are given the task of lecturing 200 or so 18 year olds who's attention span is poor at the best of times. It's not a matter of accents, I can understand even the thickest Chinese accented english but a simple inability to get across the material in a way that undergraduates can understand.

The second problem is a cultural attiude that makes failure acceptable, one of the things I found most shocking coming to A&M is the number of people who think graduating in 5-6 years isn't a big deal or undergraduates who feel that dropping a class isn't something to be careful considered. I was trying to talk a texan friend out of dropping engineering, he had been frustrated by an introductory python class. I told him that engineering is broader than programming, and being frustrated is a natural part of the college experience but my argument seemed to do the opposite and do more to convince him that he should switch to a business degree instead. In Singapore dropping or changing your major would be a huge life descion that one would have to carefully mullover and could even be considered shameful** but over here the culture seems to make it acceptable.



*National University of Singapore my alma matter

**And Engineering is not particulary prestigious in Singapore, it's considered a bit blue collar and is in fact fairly easy to enter without top marks.

[Vice President Christian Man]

It's a bit of a cliché comparison to draw at this point but, as others have pointed out, the parallels really are eerie. A far-right demagogue, after four disastrous years in office, is defeated - by a disturbingly narrow margin - by an ageing veteran politician making a surprising comeback in the twilight of his career. It's nearly exactly like the Klagenfurt am Wörtherse mayoral election in 1966, where the incumbent, who was controversial for his policy of pumping mustard gas into primary schools, was eventually defeated by the liberal alternative (a former SS officer).

I guess this is what Marx meant when he said history repeats itself.

[GeorgiaModerate]

But another problem with this is that people like ProudModerate2, Runeghost, and Joe Republic seem to have an intense dislike for anyone who expresses even a remote tendency to "#bothsideism". Understand that they consider the Republican Party to be inherently evil, and any opposition or criticism of Democrats and their priorities is regarded with opprobrium. This view overrides any and all other considerations.

Look, it's as simple as this. People, organizations and political parties need to be judged on their words and actions. PERIOD. They also need to be judged as fairly and as unbiased as reasonably possible. "Both-sideism" is the insane stupid idea that no matter what - LITERALLY, no matter what - one person or party does, you can't criticize them without being partisan and unfair.

If we follow this to it's logical extention - hypothetically of course - then a party could support lynching trans people and socialists, or, if we want to go in the opposite direction, lynching people who wear MAGA apparel in public or protest climate change. You would not be allowed to call that party evil, or bad, or "gone too far", because that would be partisan, and therefore unfair. That's what "both-sideism" is. I know it's a faux-pas to invoke Nazi Germany, but saying "the Nazi party is evil" in 1930s Germany would be considered partisan and unfair according to the ideology of "both-sideism".

It's a flawed way of thinking, because it assumes that the Democrats are properly representing left wing ideas in good faith, nothing else, and the Republicans are properly representing right wing ideas in good faith, nothing else. That's how I viewed North American political parties when I was 11 years old. It's a comical and untrue way to look at things, and only serves as a way to introduce politics to young children.

If you offer "both-sideism" views on topics, people are going to tell you that your ideas are stupid. Because they are. That doesn't mean that you yourself are stupid. You strike me as a rather intelligent individual. I hope you move on to better ideas

[支持核绿派 (Greens4Nuclear)]

Whenever people bring up legacies I'm always reminded of the DeBoer piece asking why anyone in the world would ever trust Harvard.

The Affirmative Actions these schools do, the diversity they tout, you can certainly assume that a lot of it isn't due to accepting poor kids from Haarlem or Humboldt Park. They absolutely will pick and choose among wealthy domestic and international students from places like Nigeria and Brazil. Someone like Eduardo Saverin counted towards their ability to show that they're increasing diversity, for christ's sake.

 The legacy admissions we like to use as a gotcha? It doesn't matter, they would almost certainly put their thumb on the scales of some other rich scion whose parents are willing to write a check.

These are not schools. They couldn't give a single **** about educating tomorrow's leaders. Their entire goal is to keep admissions limited, acceptance rates lows, and the process sufficiently obscured that they can pick and choose who will help their endowment most. They are businesses.

[Horus]

Support children being themselves, give total freedom of expression and figuring out what they want, there's no harm in that and it's a good thing.

But active medical intervention to delay the natural development of healthy bodies shouldn't happen. There's a real problem that a large number of adolescents feel dissatisfied with the gender roles they feel coerced into (which is understandable given boys being exposed to toxic masculinity and not able to express weakness, girls exposed to increased sexualization, objectification, and not being taken seriously, etc), but that the trans community that feels like their escape from that, instead pushes people onto a path of medical transition. In the minds of trans activists, discomfort with those gender expectations = gender dysphoria, and the only solution to it is full-on social and medical gender transition, which people often won't appreciate all the negative consequences of for a long time.

I feel that medicating adolescents needs to stop, but also that to improve people's mental health the communities they turn to need to stop pushing medication as "the solution". I view it as part of the same disturbing trend as online social media bullying, the prevalence of identification with fake mental disorders, the amount of alarmism in today's world, and overall a sharp decline in adolescent mental health. It's a crisis and nothing's being doing about it. Though it's hard to know what can be done about it.

[支持核绿派 (Greens4Nuclear)]

Sure. My point is that it's easy to believe LGBT people swung right in 2020 but left in 2022, because this election was fought much more on issues where LGBT people, statistically, have very left-wing opinions.

It also matters which social issues. It is vital to keep in mind that as with other minority groups we are not really talking about those who are representative of the median member.

The difference between the GOP winning 30% of the LGBT vote and 15% is that 15%, who by definition are still to the Right of 70% of LGBT voters, and likely to be at least somewhat further to the Right even on social issues.

The two big issues in 2020 were crime and Covid. In both cases, while the median LGBT individual is to the left of the nation, and activist groups are likely to the left of the median LGBT individual, much less the nation, anyone who has been active in gay social circles, especially white, well-off, ones can testify that there is a non-insubstantial segment who would

1. Resent the extensive Covid lockdowns which closed gyms, businesses, and effectively shut down a large part of their lives.

1b. Identify Covid excesses and restrictionists with an anti-fun contingent within the community and activist circles they have likely clashed with on multiple occasions.

2. Have more conservative stances on quality of life issues including crime, and perhaps less than progressive attitudes on racial matters.

It is pretty easy for any right-wing party, even a relatively culturally conservative one, to get to 30% of the LGBT vote and around 40%+ of the gay male vote provided they do not explicitly attack LGBT issues.

Even if they are individually socially liberal it is not like they care all that much about abortion limits unless and until it is linked to attacks on themselves. The GOP, rather than reassuring them that they were not next, did the opposite.

The Leipverse is a somewhat useful barometer of what high-engagement, LGBT, relatively upscale and/or college educated, Caucasian, XY, English-proficient US nationals/residents think

[支持核绿派 (Greens4Nuclear)]

Returning to the subject of Brazil, so as not to get too far off topic. I think the left here follows the same path. Lula is the last bastion of the "deep left". The "new left" is copying the US/Europe model and its new leaderships are all like that.

However, as Brazilian demography is different, the result will be a massive loss of votes, as the majority of the Brazilian population is poor and does not have higher education. The right does not seem to have any desire to improve the educational level of Brazilians and the left without votes.

Which for me always raises the question: why? Why does the left in country after country keep doing this? What on earth makes left-wingers in places like Brazil think that it's a model that will succeed there when it's toxic even in the societies for which it was designed?

You know the saying “all Chiefs and no Indians?” Sometimes I think that aptly describes a lot of what passes for the Left: all intellectuals/highly motivated activists and no (or rather, not nearly enough of a) working class base. Of course, this has always been a major issue with the Hard Left in advanced, politically stable industrial democracies; in those countries, extremism under most circumstances is by definition a fringe position.

Really though, it’s the failures and/or political defeat of the center left and a loss of historical memory, I suspect, that alienates (heh) a lot of disillusioned, often highly educated but also economically and socially precarious young people from the political center. You can see this in the US where the one politician who seemed to “get it” from the perspective of many younger people was born in 1941 and has been committed to left-wing politics for over half a century. That goes back to what you said about the Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Greenspan consensus which, needless to say, Obama and Biden subscribe to (even though the latter has turned out better than expected on that front as President, to some extent). This is a lost generation in terms of left politics—and in the US (I can’t speak to other countries) robust center-left politics, and I haven’t even touched on deindustrialization and the evisceration of organized labor…

Finally, as far as a lot of more progressive and left-leaning younger people are concerned, the feeling of being burned by Barack Obama’s Presidency and the Democratic Party broadly, in the face of endless wars, the Great Recession, and an increasingly mask-off far-right Republican Party, has had a radicalizing effect—radicalized by events. “Scratch a cynic, find a disappointed idealist.”

The Leipverse is also a useful barometer for what grievances high-engagement, non-LGBT but still otherwise eccentric in terms of dating and relationships due in part to ASD, (culturally) Catholic, relatively upscale and/or college educated, Caucasian, and male US nationals/citizens may have with contemporary left-of-center political parties.

[President Johnson]

2012 would be the big one for the modern GOP; it forced a reckoning that many socially-conservative stances that would've been winners in the recent past were unpopular, and because Romney ran what was (considered by most in the party to be) such a picture-perfect campaign, there was a scramble to look for alternatives. 2012 also fed into Democratic narratives about the reasons they had an advantage in society (since it substantially was won on the grounds of high turnout from very blue minorities and youth), so that also caused panic. (I think in the long run 2012 also kind of broke Democrats a little, actually, because they have attempted to analyze every result since 2012 as if it were 2012 again, and it's been very tough for them to admit that "high turnout among minorities and youth" is just not a sustainable winning strategy).

2016 also did, but I think less so than 2012. In 2016, the Republicans ran what was (considered by most in the Democratic Party to be) a comically bad campaign, making every mistake in the book; they still won, but in a flukish way as a result of a high third-party vote which was unrepeatable. There was then a conceit within the Republican Party that this sort of campaign would be usually successful, which was wrong and has bitten the party in the ass on some occasions. Democrats reacted nihilistically and decided that "nothing matters", and moved left on fiscal/economic issues, resulting in some blunted victories.

(The point is: after 2012, Democrats decided that "we can just do this every time", and so fell into a series of traps. After 2016, Republicans decided that "we can just do this every time", and so fell into a series of traps. The Republican version of this is mostly worse, in that 2016 wasn't even a real popular-sentiment victory, but at the same time many candidates feel like they don't have the personality to try to ape Trump '16, while every Democrat tries to ape Obama '12 and this is often not a thing that works.)

[Torie]

Lots of people here need to read Thomas Frank's book What's the Matter with Kansas?.  It actually gives some insight as to how the Democrats managed to actually lose their status as the party of the Working Class (an unthinkable thought in my youth). 

With the decline of the Political Bosses and Organized Labor, the Democratic Party has become, disproportionately, the party of Lawyers, especially Trial Lawyers.  Much of what is called "The Swamp" is actually a massive network of Law Firms and Lobbying Firms (often headed by lawyers) that are very much attuned to the special interests of their clients, while being incredibly disconnected from the broader swath of society.  The Republicans, on the other hand, have (at least until recently) very much been the "Business Party".  They're certainly the party of SMALL business, and they are (still) the favored party of Corporate America (so long as we're not talking about Trumppublicans). 

Whatever you want to say about "businesspeople", I would argue that entrepreneurs and corporate types, as a rule, have their finger on the pulse of the average citizen far more than the lawyer and consultant class do.  This doesn't mean that they're necessarily more altruistic, but their BUSINESS depends on knowing what people want, what they can afford, what they view themselves as "needing" versus "wanting", etc.  Small business owners are far more living "where the rubber meets the road" on any number of issues, and this constituency is an almost exclusively Republican constituency.  And the Small Business Owners that are elected to office are almost exclusively Republican in most places.  (This goes back to the New Deal when Big Business could afford to accomodate New Deal regulations that were burdensome on Small Business.) 

This makeup makes the GOP the party more attuned to the pulse of America.  Whether they use that to serve or manipulate is another matter.  But the GOP is FAR more aware of what the average American thinks these days, and it gives them an advantage, even when they advocate issue positions that the average person might not support if they looked at the issue.

That is a standard Fuzzy stupidpost.

I actually think Fuzzy got it mostly right. The Dem decline with the WWC was/is in tandem with the decline of private sector unions and more "globally," globalization (and now it may be spreading to CWC (persons of color working class, in particular males). It is happening all over in the industrial democracies, and was/is entirely predictable and understandable. I suspect Dems will be raising more money than Pubs from now until eternity. Look for the Pubs to get more interested in campaign finance reform, formally one of their bete noirs.

What Fuzzy got wrong was his lawyer bashing. Lawyers are just so much more skilled at manipulating the system, and partisans on both sides would do well to suck up to them. You can write that down for future reference.

Fuzzy bashing is infra dig and getting boring. Why don't you all move on to say, Torie bashing? Or the better to make it a target rich environment, join Fuzzy in bashing all of the lawyers around here. You know they irritate you. Do it!

[支持核绿派 (Greens4Nuclear)]

There are a few things here that are worth pointing out.

• The tech industry, obviously, has switched to remote work more than any other sector of the economy. It remains to be seen what things will be like in the long term (personally, I'm expected to go to the office three days a week but in fact go four days a week because I like being in the office), but certainly things will not return to the state of affairs in 2019, and that would disproportionately affect
  San Francisco.
• It should not come as a shock that the center of the most Asian metropolitan area in the contiguous United States would be slower to return to normal than other cities.
• The Bay Area is one of the least centralized metropolitan areas in the country. I do not know of any other metropolitan area in the country where so many skilled white-collar workers live in the urban core and commute outward to the suburbs. Downtown San Francisco is much less economically significant to the region than someone unfamiliar with the area would expect.

The article discusses the last point but not really in a way that I found satisfying. It mentions that San Francisco is 40 miles from Silicon Valley but says very little about what that means: that San Francisco, unlike nearly every other major city in the country, is basically peripheral to the primary industry in its metropolitan area. A different article might be centered around this quote rather than shunting it to the end:

The city, and business groups like Advance SF, are trying to reframe the urban core as a more residential and entertainment district that draws from throughout the region and may in the future involve the conversion of office buildings to residential use.

The obvious thing to take from this is that it doesn't make sense to think of San Francisco as an employment center (which it has not been for quite some time) and that its future is as a cultural center. I think that this is true of major cities in general. I also think that most people would rather spout their pre-loaded narratives about California than actually discuss this point.

[支持核绿派 (Greens4Nuclear)]

Is it okay to give a serious answer to a bronze thread?

Stop underestimating me.

Fine.

There are two possible reasons both related to institutional bias.

1.This goes back 50 years and was claimed by a liberal police officer who was a conspiracy theorest but he did have some evidence. (Liberal conspiracy theorists were a lot more common in the 1970s.)  Preston Guillory was a LASO police officer who participated in the Manson raid at Spahn Ranch one week after the Tate/LaBianca murders said that the Los Angeles county and city of Los Angeles police made sure to weed out politically liberal police officers during the screening process.

He quit the police believing that the raid was some kind of cover up (two months of planning, over 100 officers and two helicopters involved in the raid itself and everybody arrested ended up getting released a few days later.) After quitting the force he was asked in a newspaper interview something like if the police were uncomfortable with having a former police officer and avowed conspiracy theorist publicly speaking and he replied something like "the only thing makes the police uncomfortable with me speaking publicly is that they're shown having let a liberal slip through their screening process."

So, many police forces might intentionally weed out liberals.

2.Many police tend to focus on 'moral' crimes with the vice squad and drugs. This focus likely encourages right wingers to join the police and to discourage liberals. If the police focused more on corporate crime and scammers, there might be a lot more young liberals joining the police. So, even if the police forces can't weed out liberals directly any more, there are still ways to discourage them from joining.

The institution protects itself from unwanted intrusions.

[Badger]

Most people have 0 concept of what actually happens with abortions and why people elect to get them.

"Late-term abortion" is a buzzword for the right. First of all, this is about 1% of abortions. And do people even know what having an abortion that late into pregnancy means? It means the mother would die during childbirth, or the baby has an almost certainly fatal birth defect. Often these are Trisomy 13/18 babies - most of whom, if they survive birth at all, live 5-15 days in excruciating pain. My cousin is an OBGYN. She held so many babies as they died gasping for air because their parents refused to terminate the pregnancy, and after birth found it too emotionally difficult to be with the child. So you tell me, what would be the more humane route here, to terminate the pregnancy, which at that stage essentially involves putting them to sleep and inducing labor, or to have a baby die, in pain, with a stranger?

This is a harsh and disturbing thing to post, I know, but I think people should realize the reality of what abortion is. It's not some lady walking in when she's in labor saying "I didn't know I was pregnant get this out of me!" It's usually a painful choice the mother doesn't want to have to make. And it often comes down to choosing termination of pregnancy as the more humane option. I know that is hard for some of you to grasp, but is forcing the baby to go though these things really humane? Beyond them, think of the trauma that's been induced on the parents...then think of the trauma induced on doctors, who hold infants while they die. The framing of abortion by religious movements is disgusting and unbelievably disrespectful to the pain people have gone through. Life is precious, but so are the lives of the mothers and their families.

[Since I'm the mad scientist proclaimed by myself]

Thanks to Harry for actually interrogating this article rather than just firing off some lazy predetermined takes based on the headline like everyone else replying to this thread.

Based on the quotes here, it looks like the article is being deliberately misleading. It does not appear true that the school was "denying students the right to use those awards to boost their college-admission prospects and earn scholarships." At very least, this assertion is incompatible with the statement further in the article that the school chose "to withhold the information from parents and inform the students in a low-key way"; in other words, based on this statement, students were told directly rather than being publicly acknowledged in a ceremony, and parents are upset because they had to find out through their children.

I think that this is an admirable goal, because the parents who send their children to this school are pathological and they shouldn't be encouraged. I didn't attend a selective high school like this one, but I did attend a demographically similar high school that was known for producing very high test scores, and by a huge margin the number one concern about the school from both teachers and students was a perversely competitive atmosphere that was harmful to students' well-being. At a school not to far from mine there were multiple clusters of suicides that were linked to this problem.

If the issue is that students feel like their self-worth is being tied to their academic results, the obvious solution is to deemphasize public adulation of "high-performing" students. Despite what the article claims at the beginning, there doesn't seem to be any evidence that this actually harmed any students' chances of admission to their universities of choice. Students were notified of their national merit results by e-mail, which is the way that students get all information relevant to college applications. If their parents are mad that their children didn't check their e-mail, that's their own problem.

As for the school's quoted strategy of "equal outcomes for every student, without exception," equality of outcome is literally the purpose of the Virginia Governor's School program, of which this school is a part. Governor's Schools do not exist as a reward for the best students so that they can look even better for Ivy League schools; they exist to equalize educational outcomes for high-achieving students throughout the state, so that students in remote or poor schools are not held back due to lack of resources. I know people from rural Virginia who attended other Governor's Schools in the state for this reason. Obviously the purpose of the program is not being accomplished at Thomas Jefferson, a school that in the richest part of the state that mostly serves rich kids.

I've written more about this school and the Governor's School program previously:

I am skeptical of the social benefit of special schools for gifted children, but in this case I feel qualified to opine because I have known many Thomas Jefferson alumni and some parents. By and large, the high schools that the 80% Asian student body would have otherwise attended are strong by the relevant measures: they score strongly on standardized tests and they send a large number of children to prestigious universities.

As NickG points out, the purpose of Virginia's specialized schools is at least in part to give disadvantaged students opportunities for scholastic success, but judging from the demographic data it's apparent that most of its students would be just fine at their home schools. Certainly none of the myriad alumni I've known would have been seriously disadvantaged attending the local high school. For those students, attendance at TJHSST isn't even helpful in terms of admission at prestigious universities, because every private university has an informal limit on how many students it accepts from a particular school. For the Northern Virginia Asians I know, attendance at Thomas Jefferson serves purely as a signaling device for parents to convey how successful their teenaged children are. I can think of no possible reason for the state to facilitate this.

By contrast, the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy (another school I have some familiarity with) has an admissions policy designed to ensure that the student body is representative of the state in terms of gender and geographic origin. There are still plenty of Asian kids from rich suburban families, but there are also plenty of kids from urban or rural areas who receive access to advanced education and (perhaps just as significantly) cultural capital that they would otherwise lack. If there are to be special gifted schools, it would serve society for them to look much more like that.

My view is that Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology doesn't serve its stated goals and doesn't fulfill any useful function for society. It should be shut down and its students should attend their neighborhood schools instead. It would be better for those students, although their parents would feel bad because they wouldn't be able to use their children's school to show all their friends what great parents they are.

[支持核绿派 (Greens4Nuclear)]

I am not sure why this thread has become a thread about career advice rather than a thread about the discipline of history and historians. Since it has turned out this way, I will offer my own: I think it's a mistake to view an education received at a university in an exercise in learning facts. It's an exercise in learning and mastering various defined skills and, ideally, acquiring certain attributes, such as discipline.

If you want to learn about facts, there is no need to pursue higher education. You can read books in your spare time or listen to podcasts etc. The main downside of being an autodidact is that it is pretty challenging to learn how to construct a mathematical argument or to conduct research in a lab or to use archival resources without explicit instruction. For instance, it is quite useful, if one wants to learn about mathematics, to be graded - that's feedback from an instructor. At some point, in your career, you might approach an "unsolved" problem. Even if it's almost trivial, it might be that you will be the only person capable of checking your own work - ideally an education helps you do this on your own.

This is all to say that I think that, far too often, people decide to pursue a college major because the subject matter is interesting to them. This can easily turn into "I majored in X because X is easy to major in". Obviously, your own aptitude and interest needs to be taken into account, but I majored in Math with a 4.0 GPA, even though I hated Math in High School, because I knew why it was useful for me to do this. It required a lot of studying and was challenging. I see this as a positive, not a negative - I actually acquired skills. I recommend seeking a major to acquire skills, not because "I want to learn about facts in a subject".

[支持核绿派 (Greens4Nuclear)]

I'm not interested in discussing guns here. When I got home from work this afternoon, my father was watching the local news in the other room. I'm not sure if the shooting being discussed was the one in Half Moon Bay or the one near Los Angeles, but I heard a question from the host. "Even though the attacker was also of Asian descent, how does this compound the fear felt in the AAPI community?"

I wrote a few months ago about the way that proponents of the "Asian hate" movement can use it to further any number of agendas, but the unifying idea is that Asian-Americans need to be scared. Public figures are careful to avoid saying whom or what exactly Asians should be scared of, but if you go on social media you see that people stop talking in euphemisms: it's black people, who supposedly have an insatiable hatred of Asians and make cities unsafe for them.

I'm sure that there are plenty of well-meaning people who earnestly believe that hate crimes against Asians are a serious problem and don't realize what they're doing by propagating these ideas. I could hear this today with the local news anchor frantically struggling to fit these events into the received racial messaging. The logical conclusion we should take from this attempt to contextualize these as anti-Asian hate crimes is that we should assume that these mass killings perpetrated by Asian men were borne out of racial hatred against Asians. It doesn't matter that that doesn't make any sense. At this point the notion of "Asian hate" has been codified as racially uplifting, which means that its factual basis is irrelevant.

I didn't repost this because I agree with Xahar that "Asian hate" enabling anti-black and anti-big city prejudice beyond reasonably warranted caution is bad, or with his implicit arguments on Hindu identitarianism in the blog post he linked. It's because it makes absolutely no sense to describe mass killings of East/Southeast Asian looking people by men of East/Southeast Asian ancestry who are part of the local AAPI community as "anti-Asian hate crimes" when there's no evidence that the perpetrators were driven by prejudice against members of their racial/ethnic/cultural communities.