hilzoy
@hilzoy.bsky.social
I can imagine minding if, say, one of my TAs decided to teach naked. (For all I know, this might have been happening all along, since I do not check.) What I can't imagine is thinking that, say, a trans woman dressed nicely is "not professional."
That request was granted (and it never came up, since the grad student did not want to be my TA either.) But I suspect it would not have been granted had I made such requests every semester.
I get assigned mine, though on one occasion I have asked not to have a particular grad student as my TA.
He says he requires professional attire, and "cross-dressing" is not professional. He also requires people to be law-abiding, and medication abortion is illegal in TX.
Obviously, I do not endorse any of this; just letting you know his stated rationale.
It's actually worse than that. The philosophy professor is also suing not to have to hire TAs who engage in what he refers to as "cross-dressing" when teaching, or who have received medication abortion pills by mail.
A philosophy prof. & a finance prof. are suing the government so that they don't have to excuse a student's absence from class to get an abortion, so that they can tell their TAs how to dress, & so that they don't have to adjust their use of pronouns to accommodate students' "delusional beliefs."
Philosopher: Missed Class to Get an Abortion? Not Excused.
A philosophy professor and a finance professor at the University of Texas at Austin have joined with the state in a lawsuit against the Federal government, particularly the US Department of Education’...
dailynous.comAlso (actually said once to someone who went on to become an MSNBC prime time host): No, I am not going to tell you the answer to the trolley problem.
Also: "Actually, we have already heard all possible jokes involving the phrases "the Humean condition" and "the original position."
Hi, I'm an ethicist! My greatest hits are "How do you know that values are subjective?", "Thinking that there is a real right and wrong does not mean that you instantly become judgmental" and (because I'm a philosopher) No, Descartes did not think that when you stop thinking, you stop existing.
Hi, I'm a forest ecologist.
My greatest hits include "No, that tree isn't a thousand years old", "The trees aren't talking to each other underground", and "Planting more trees won't fix all our problems and in some places makes them worse".
Do you require that the physician list pregnancy as (part of) the cause of death? You surely get an undercount. Do you count people who are pregnant at the time of death? Surely an overcount. You could deploy teams of specialists every time a pregnant person dies, but that would be VERY expensive.
Per the article, the problem is that cause of death is reported by attending physicians, and their reports are not always accurate. (It's sometimes easy to say that a death is pregnancy-related, but imagine that the causal story is more complicated. Pregnancy exacerbated an existing condition, etc.)
So it appears that the rise in maternal mortality in the US over the last two decades was mostly a statistical artifact. The racial disparities, however, are real however you measure them.
www.propublica.org/article/what...
What to Know About the Roiling Debate Over U.S. Maternal Mortality Rates
A new study challenged the accuracy of public health data on deaths related to pregnancy and childbirth — and the narrative of high and rising U.S. maternal mortality rates. An unusual public dispute ...
www.propublica.org
Gift link: Jamie Raskin.
www.nytimes.com/2024/05/29/o...
Opinion | Jamie Raskin: How to Force Justices Alito and Thomas to Recuse Themselves in the Jan. 6 Cases
Can they really decide for themselves whether they can be impartial?
www.nytimes.comOne reason the "Biden hasn't earned my vote" people make me crazy. For all its flaws, the Democratic Party is the difference between "two steps forward, one step back" and "one step forward, two steps back." And that difference is ENORMOUS.
I think a lot of the people I dealt with had not read the relevant research, and were inclined to take the idea that they needed to resolve conflicts as a sort of personal insult.
I know; I wrote my tweet while you were writing basically the exact same thing.
This is true. -- I once served on the COI committee for our medical school, and the number of times we had to explain to people that there really is evidence for unconscious bias, and thus they could be seriously conflicted even if they would never ever consciously skew their research, was amazing.
I'm inexpert on legal or judicial ethics, but I am extremely very much a content expert on #ConflictsOfInterest and #MotivatedBias & what I continue to find amazing is the willful ignorance otherwise sophisticated actors engage in re the ways in which our relationships motivate us to be biased.
1/
It's fun in a small, twisted way. But then the alternative is complete rudeness.
Except recusal, and other versions of "if you must have that relationship, you don't get to do this at all."
In that case it has not changed that much, as you can tell if you ask someone who says that it stands for Southern heritage whether they mean e.g. Louis Armstrong or MLK. In my experience it quickly becomes clear that Blacks don't count.
It's quite specifically about the absence of JUDGES, the people we normally appeal to for justice in society. And it is therefore a very strange thing for a Supreme Court Justice, in particular, to say.
But why THAT euphemism? Locke is quite clear: since in the state of nature we have no courts to appeal to, Heaven is the only place to hear our pleas for justice. A tyrannical regime places itself in a state of war with us, thereby returning us to the state of nature, where only Heaven can hear us.
If Alito believes that, then that is even worse than if he flew the flag as a hat-tip to Jan. 6 and, again, he should resign immediately.
At the very least, he should think before he starts talking about the old meanings of a flag. Washington flew that flag because he believed that the government of England had forfeited all right to allegiance, and therefore the Americans could not appeal to English courts and hope for justice.
In particular, we need to Appeal to Heaven when the courts have become so corrupted that they can no longer dispense justice. This is an odd thing for a Supreme Court Justice (or his wife) to think, and if Alito does think it, he should resign immediately.
Second, Alito writes that "the use of an old historic flag by a new group does not necessarily drain that flag of all other meanings."
OK, let's talk about those other meanings. The Appeal to Heaven comes from Locke. We need to appeal to heaven when we have no one to appeal to on earth.
If reasonable people might disagree, then a reasonable person MIGHT think he should recuse, and so in that case he would be required to recuse. Alito's moving the goalposts here should not pass without comment.
Two more small points about this. First, Alito bases his conclusion that he should not recuse on the claim that a reasonable person would not conclude that he should. But the standard is what a reasonable person MIGHT believe, not what a reasonable person WOULD believe.
Justice Alito has sent a three page letter on his household’s flag practices to the Senate. He again blames his wife and says he won’t recuse himself from any cases.
I wonder if it might something to do with the fact that pens, pencils, etc. can be used as weapons, whereas it's not clear how you'd hurt someone with a pastel or chalk.
It is also possible to explain to your spouse that if she flies a flag that seems to indicate a view on a topic likely to be the subject of a case that comes before you, you will have to recuse yourself.
Because, again, what mattered was not whether his decisions would in fact be influenced by such things; it was whether an ordinary reasonable person, reading about his attendance at such a party or fundraiser, would THINK that it had affected his decision.
It's about faith in the courts.
Had an elected official invited him to an apolitical party? Nope. Was a fundraiser for a worthy cause carried out under the auspices of a political group, or for that matter any other group that might appear before him? Can't go.
It was limiting, but that was what the job required.
Justice Alito has a very cramped view of what a reasonable person might believe.
My grandfather was a judge. He stayed away from doing anything that was even very remotely connected to politics, since he knew that what mattered was not his motivations, but what a reasonable person might think.
Justice Alito has sent a three page letter on his household’s flag practices to the Senate. He again blames his wife and says he won’t recuse himself from any cases.
This is wonderful news, especially since part of Mountain Gorillas' habitat is in Eastern Congo, which is not really safe for any living thing.
Gorilla species makes resurgence after decades of habitat degradation: 'Seeing them for the first time was like a dream come true'
Through the hard work of the International Gorilla Conservation Programme, mountain gorilla populations are on track to keep growing.
www.thecooldown.comMangroves protect the interior from damaging hurricanes. Shame protects the body politics from people like Trump, or would, if either he or his supporters had any shame. Thus vanishing mangroves as metaphor.
And he was never the kind of person who could just keep his head down. He had to oppose the system he found himself in.
In a decent world he would have been a decent person, I think. Likewise, in a world in which there was any non-awful group that opposed torture unconditionally.
The alternatives were various parties that thought that maybe there had been a wee bit too much torture, or just keeping his head down. This group, for all its MANY MANY sins, opposed torture unconditionally. (He and many people he knew had been tortured.)
It was tragic all round. He was a member of a group that suffered horrible injustice; he tried to succeed through education and show people that members of that group were not stupid and ignorant as others claimed; for dumb reasons he got kicked out of his elite program, so turned to this group.
I specifically think this about the legacy, in the South, of having been enslavers. That does deep and awful things to people, and those things take a long, long, LONG time to undo.
One of my deep background beliefs is that some kinds of social change are really, really hard, and take place only glacially. This is why I was so gobsmacked when people responded to Obama's election by saying "maybe we are done with racism now!"
"In 2020, deputies exchanged messages about creating a challenge coin, a commemorative token commonly shared by members of a particular unit in the military or law enforcement. Lieutenant Middleton initially suggested that their coin feature images of a noose and a Confederate flag."
Really confused, because I've been assured by the Manhattan Institute that this sort of thing isn't tolerated, and therefore doesn't happen.
www.nytimes.com/2024/05/29/u...
‘Did You Tase Him in the Face!?’ Inside ‘Goon Squad’ Deputies’ Group Chat
Years of messages from an encrypted WhatsApp text thread show conversations of sheriff’s deputies, including those who terrorized Mississippi residents.
www.nytimes.com
Wow.
Think about how much precision you need to get the tooth to grow *in the right place*. There are malignancies that cause various kinds of tissue to grow in an unregulated clump, and these clumps sometimes have teeth. That bodies know how to avoid that, and that we can harness this, amazes me.
Interesting dental news, she typed for the first time ever.
newatlas.com/medical/toot...
World-first tooth-regrowing drug will be given to humans in September
The world's first human trial of a drug that can regenerate teeth will begin in a few months, less than a year on from news of its success in animals. This paves the way for the medicine to be commerc...
newatlas.com
Rick Perlstein. It me.
It also very, very good.
My Political Depression Problem—and Ours
Granular study of the ever-more-authoritarian right didn’t demoralize the author as much as reaction from the left.
prospect.org