Even as a child (or maybe especially as a child) I felt that these two very famous guys looked alike.
And they had the same first name, too:
Walt’s hair was a bit thicker than Walter’s. And Walt was smilier, too.
Then again, he had more to smile about.
A jury found that conservative professor Theresa Wagner was discriminated against by the University of Iowa Law School and denied a job promotion because of her politics, but she can’t collect because the Dean was found by the jury to not be responsible, and the university itself can’t be sued for political discrimination.
The article doesn’t say why there’s no cause of action against the university for political discrimination, and in a quick search I couldn’t find an explanation elsewhere, but I assume it’s because it’s not a specially-protected right such as race or gender, although I’m not sure why the First Amendment wouldn’t give her a cause of action against a state university. If anyone understands the legal reasoning here, please describe it in the comments section. All I can find about it so far is that “federal law does not recognize political discrimination by institutions.”
One part of the history of Wagner’s case that particularly interests me is the use of the word “despise” here:
“Frankly, one thing that worries me is that some people may be opposed to Teresa serving in any role, in part at least because they so despise her politics (and especially her activism about it),” Associate Dean Jonathan C. Carlson wrote in 2007 to the law school’s dean, Carolyn Jones.
Why not use the word “disagree” instead of the word “despise”? Well, we know why; the word “despise” is far more appropriate. I think, actually, it’s not strong enough—perhaps “hate and despise” or even “want to eliminate from the face of the earth” would fit better.
At any rate, it’s hard to believe this wouldn’t affect a hiring and/or promotion decision. As David Bernstein writes at Volokh, “color me skeptical”:
There is at least one way to clear the air. Surely, as part of its defense against the Teresa Wagner’s claim that she was discriminated against based on her conservative views, the law school’s lawyers prepared an exhibit showing all of the right-of-center faculty candidates to whom the law school had offered positions over, say, the decade before Ms. Wagner’s lawsuit commenced. After all, if a significant list of such candidates existed, that would be good circumstantial evidence that the law school didn’t discriminate on the basis of ideology, and thus didn’t discriminate against Ms. Wagner. The exhibit, in turn, would be public information, so if Prof. Hovenkamp or someone else at the law school would forward me this list, I’m sure my cycnicism will be easily overcome. Folks at UI should feel free to send that exhibit, or any other such list, to me at dbernste [at sign] gmu [dot] edu.
(And by the way, I’m pretty confident that there are a lot more law professors who “believe” that their faculties should make more of an effort to increase their ideological diversity than there are those who will actually recruit and vote for such candidates in practice).
UPDATE: I have a friend at a top law school who assured me that his colleagues would never discriminate based on ideology. In fact, he added, he was about to push a candidate with “right-wing” political views, and he was sure the faculty would be interested. A while later, I inquired as to how things went. The answer: “Remember how I said my colleagues wouldn’t discriminate based on ideology? I was wrong.”
To give you an idea of the lack of ideological diversity at the school, there’s this:
According to Ms. Wagner’s lawsuit, the law faculty at Iowa in 2007 included a single registered Republican among its 50 or so members. The Republican professor was appointed in 1984. In 2009, The Des Moines Register found that there were two registered Republicans on the faculty.
However, as the Times article points out:
It may be…that liberals are simply more likely than conservatives to seek positions at law schools. There are plenty of conservative lawyers at firms, in government service and on the bench.
Yes, it’s possible. But if so, why do you think that might be? Do you think they might realize they are unlikely to be hired and/or promoted, or that all their colleagues might “despise” them? And might that help them decide not to go there in the first place, particularly since teaching at a law school can involve earning a lower salary than they are likely to make in the public sector?
When I was nine or ten years old I was given an individual IQ test by a family friend who was getting her PhD in child psychology, and having to administer the test to a certain number of children was part of her training. No one told me the name of the test (my guess is that it was the WISC), but it took quite a while to take and was rather fun, because unlike pencil-and-paper tests it involved a lot of give-and-take between us.
It’s funny how well I remember the test after all these years. Part of the strength of the memory was the fact that the test didn’t resemble any others I’d ever taken before. In later years I recognized some of the question types—for example, those thought problems where you had to ferry some combination of potentially incompatible things or animals across a river in a boat, and you could only make a certain number of trips.
I don’t think in those days they actually informed kids of their IQ scores, although I have some vague recollection of having been told I’d done very very well indeed on the entire exam, every single part of it—that is, except for one subset of the test. I don’t know what that part was called, but I know it involved cartoons.
Cartoons were already my nemesis. I didn’t like them, although they were ubiquitous on TV. I didn’t like watching the creature being flattened and then springing back up again. I didn’t like the characters walking off cliffs and not realizing it for a moment, and then falling. I didn’t like the pummeling and the mayhem; I felt it as more real than I knew it should be perceived. And in some strange way I sometimes even had trouble following the plot.
Was that because I wasn’t interested? Or was it because I was repelled, or because I was particularly cartoon-challenged? Probably a combination of all three, because the phenomenon persisted into adulthood and involved even some cartoons whose content didn’t especially repel me. I used to like animated Disney movies, but have never liked Pixar, in part because the images seem “wrong” to me in some difficult-to-define way.
Sometimes there’s too much going on visually in cartoons, too; I get distracted. I sometimes fail to get the joke in non-animated cartoon squares (like the ones in a magazine) because I focus on the wrong detail or misinterpret details in odd ways.
This problem doesn’t seem to beset me in life or in any other form of humor; it seems limited to the world of the cartoon. I probably “get” most of them in the end, but it can take longer than I think it should. I tend to lose patience with them, too.
My difficulty on that subset of the long-ago IQ test didn’t surprise me in the least even then, because I’d already perceived those questions on the exam as having taken me longer to answer than the rest, and/or I’d resorted to guessing. That section also had contained more exercises that I’d finally decided to give up on because they seemed insoluble to me. The format was that I was given a series of small stacks of cartoon drawings, each set containing perhaps five drawings in all, and I was supposed to put each pile in chronological order as in a comic strip and then tell the tale of what was happening.
The pictures started out easy, but after a short while the each group seemed very confusing. What was I supposed to pay attention to? Was the man coming or going, and why? Was he sitting first and then standing, or the other way around?
On thinking about it now, I did a search for the phrase “IQ test put pictures in order” and sure enough, up popped something similar to what I remember. And sure enough, it also gave me a headache almost immediately just to look at the page and make the effort, even all these years later.
According to the text, this cartoon-ordering test is solved by college students on average in about a minute. Not by me. How about by you?
There’s something so off-putting about it that I almost can’t look at it, the pictorial equivalent of trying to unscramble a series of nonsense words or listening to an orchestra tuning up for too long.
All of the preceding was a very roundabout way of explaining why it was that this New Yorker article about how we perceive cartoons was of special interest to me, especially this part of it:
“It’s a holistic thing,” Restak said. “You can’t just look at one part of this picture. If someone has what’s called simultagnosia, they look at this and say, ”˜Oh, it’s a boy trying to steal a cookie!’ ” He described the parts of the brain that help people comprehend such things. “The occipital, that’s where the cartoon is seen. The parietal gives you the ability of seeing the whole picture. And here’s the important part for the cartoon: the temporal pole. It contains perhaps hundreds of thousands of scripts, or schemas”¦. This is the occipital area; this is the where. In the diagram I showed you, the picture of a kitchen, it gives you the whole totality of it; it tells you what the things are: the dishes, the water, et cetera. The dorsal, which is this part on top, is important for scanning the cartoon, what scripts are being evoked, what’s coming out of the temporal pole. This all occurs before reading the caption.”
I looked up “simultagnosia,” and I don’t have it. Fortunately, I’m not that bad. But something’s going on, although I had no difficulty understanding any of the cartoons in the article.
I’ve always rather liked those single-frame type of cartoons, though (unlike comic strips or animated ones), especially if they have captions. Captions seem to cue me with words on where to place my focus and attention. I have no difficulty appreciating art, either, so it’s not some general pictorial problem.
Years ago the New Yorker had one of its cartoon caption contests. I can’t find a picture of this one online, but it gave the entrant choices. The square consisted of the standard cartoon subject of couch and psychiatrist sitting behind it with notepad, and then a series of other characters (I recall a dog, a screwdriver, a woman, a man, and there were probably a few more as well) from which you could choose. You could place any one of the characters anywhere on the drawing, and then come up with a caption.
I had a sudden inspiration. I took the dog and placed it lying down on its back on the floor, facing away from the shrink, leaving the couch empty (the dog was drawn in such a way that you could easily do this, because each character was designed to recline). The dog was saying to the psychiatrist, “No, not the couch; there’s still too much guilt!”
I didn’t win, but I still like that cartoon.
And Google being the handy thing it is, a search revealed these. I still prefer mine, but they have a similar idea:
…tonight.
I am so psyched!
Daylight Saving Time begins this evening—technically, tomorrow morning—at 2 AM. So set those clocks forward and enjoy the extra hour of daylight at the end of the day.
…you’ve got one in Rand Paul.
I’m not familiar enough with Paul’s positions to know whether I agree with him in general or not. I certainly am not especially keen on his father, although I do subcribe to a great deal of the libertarian approach. But I am in complete agreement that we need someone—or rather, a lot more than one—with the courage to stand up and do more to fight against the opposition rather than cave to them for the sake of collegiality, and who isn’t afraid to look a bit ridiculous in the process.
Truculence for truculence’s sake is not my goal, either, and it has to be done with intelligence. But it must be done. And yes, Paul’s cause was doomed; it was a sort of stunt. But it shows a spirit that’s needed, although that’s hardly all that’s needed.
That was one of the best things about Sarah Palin when she was first chosen to run, and it’s something I really admire in Wisconsin’s Scott Walker and Arizona’s Jan Brewer as well. Christie certainly used to have it (not sure exactly what’s going on with him lately), as did Giuliani (one of the reasons I supported him long ago). It was one of the things I actually liked about Newt Gingrich, although the Grinchyness of his demeanor took away a lot of his appeal to the sort of voter he would have to attract. Reagan and Thatcher, of course, had it in abundance.
A Michigan elementary school is defending its decision to confiscate a third-graders batch of homemade cupcakes because the birthday treats were decorated with plastic green Army soldiers…
…Fountain said his wife delivered the cupcakes to the front office. The secretary complimented her on the decorations and then took the cakes to Hunter’s class.
“About 15 minutes later the school called my wife and told her the couldn’t serve the cupcakes because the soldiers had guns,” Fountain told Fox News. “My wife told them to remove the soldiers and serve the cupcakes anyway ”” and I believe she may have used more colorful language.”
The school complied and confiscated the soldiers ”” sending them home with Hunter in a bag.
“I was offended,” Fountain said. “I support our soldiers and what they stand for. These (plastic soldiers) are representations of World War Two soldiers ”“ our greatest generation. If they aren’t allowed in our schools ”” who is?”
Principal Susan Wright released a statement to local media defending the decision.
“These are toys that were commonplace in the past,” she wrote. “However, some parents prohibit all guns as toys. In light of that difference, the school offered to replace the soldiers with another item and the soldiers were returned home with the student.”
“Living in a democratic society entails respect for opposing opinions,” she stated. “In the climate of recent events in schools we walk a delicate balance in teaching non-violence in our buildings and trying to ensure a safe, peaceful atmosphere.”
Fountain said it was beyond outrageous to compare American soldiers to deranged mass murderers.
Outrageous, but commonplace. And of course we must cater to those who would do so rather than those who would try to point out the difference.
I haven’t yet read the book Triumph Forsaken, but it sounds like a fascinating so-called “revisionist” history of the Vietnam War.
And this comment at the Amazon link treads familiar ground, does it not?:
A key contributor to the downfall of the regime was anti-Diem press coverage, the type written by Stanley Karnow, David Halberstam, and Neil Sheehan, among others. One might think that reporters who spent their time covering a country from the inside might be counted on to offer significant insights, but a congressional fact-finding mission in 1963 found the in-country American reporters to be “arrogant, emotional, unobjective, and ill-informed.” Karnow, Halberstam, and Sheehan all relied a great deal on a Vietnamese journalist named Pham Xuan An, a stringer for Reuters. He helped the journalists interpret political events, always in a light unfavorable to Diem. The Americans did not know that Pham was a Communist agent who had been instructed by the party to become a journalist in order to influence Western media views of Vietnam.
Here’s a fine article by the book’s author, Mark Moyar (here’s his website).
And this seems of interest, although I haven’t read it, either.
I had never before heard of reporter Marguerite Higgins, who wrote a book on Vietnam. She was one of the first women allowed to report from war zones, a veteran of World War II journalism. This is from Halberstram’s Wiki entry:
The Pulitzer Prize-winning Korean War correspondent Marguerite Higgins was the staunchest pro-Diem journalist in the Saigon press corps and she frequently clashed with her younger male colleagues such as Neil Sheehan, Peter Arnett and Halberstam. She derided them as “typewriter strategists” who were “seldom at the scenes of battle”. She claimed they had ulterior motives, claiming “Reporters here would like to see us lose the war to prove they’re right.”
Mark Moyar, a historian, claimed that Halberstam, along with fellow Vietnam journalists Neil Sheehan and Stanley Karnow, helped to bring about the 1963 South Vietnamese coup against President Ngé´ Äé¬nh Diem by sending negative information on Diem to the U.S. government, in news articles and in private, because they decided Diem was unhelpful in the war effort. Moyar claims that much of this information was false or misleading. Sheehan, Karnow, and Halberstam all won Pulitzer Prizes for their post-war works on the war.
Sometimes it seems as though these people can influence wars even more than presidents do. And it’s funny (and not funny haha) how the same names keep recurring over and over.
Here’s another of those perennial articles listing the blockbuster books that were initially rejected by publisher after publisher.
I remember I used to own a book that was a collection of editors’ rejection letters for great classic and popular works. It made for entertaining reading—comforting as well, back in the days when I was sending out my own fiction and poetry.
One case I particularly remember, although it’s not on the above list, was that of James Alfred Wright, a man you probably know better as James Herriot. His books of veterinary vignettes are vastly entertaining and really well-written, too, little masterpieces of their genre, and have rightly been extraordinarily popular ever since their publication. But their publication took a while. I can’t find the story online, but they certainly were not grabbed by the first editor who read them, despite their obvious broad appeal and high quality.
The whole thing makes one wonder whether publishers have any sense at all. Perhaps editors are so busy trying to finesse the moneymaking part of it that they lose sight of what people might like to read and why. Like hidebound generals, they’re always fighting the last war, trying to re-create the last best-seller, and have become afraid of their own shadows and of what they perceive as risk.
And no, this isn’t sour grapes. I haven’t sent out any of my “creative” work in over a decade; really don’t even think about it as a rule. It seems so archaic, trying to please the gatekeepers whose minds were running along a different track than mine, and who only accepted an infinitesimal percentage of submissions anyway. And the copying expense, pre-home-computer! And the postage (including the SASE, or “self-addressed stamped envelope”) pre-email! And the waiting time! Some periodicals replied quickly, sending rejection letters back with such force and vigor that I imagined them as having bounced off a springy backboard. Others would sit on things for many months and then finally reply with the ubiquitous form letter, if they even deigned to grace me with the courtesy of a reply.
Worst of all were the near-misses. Somewhere in my musty files I have a series of “we almost took this but not quite, and please send us more” letters from fairly well-known publications. That and a dime (or two bucks and change at Starbucks these days) will get you a cup of coffee, and in fact many of these publications are now either defunct or no longer publish short stories, which was the genre I was submitting.
The worst experience of that type was a publication which had accepted a story of mine pending my changing a couple of sentences, which I promptly did and sent it back. They were going to pay me three thousand dollars, too, which was quite a bit at the time (late 80s?)—or even now, for that matter. But then I got a letter from them saying they had changed editors and were no longer going to be accepting or publishing fiction at all. I seem to have entered the field right on the cusp of the decline of the magazine short story.
It all seems like ancient history to me now. I’ve grown accustomed to having the freedom to write what I want to when I want to, and to publish it myself—and, most importantly, to have an audience with whom to converse. Back then, the few times I got something published (always in somewhat obscure journals), it was like dropping it in a deep and murky well. It sank without a trace, and I have no idea whether people even read it or not, and if so, what they might have thought of it. I much prefer blogging, even though I’m not getting three thousand bucks a pop.
[NOTE: The title of this post refers to this French phrase, which I learned in art history class long ago.]
John Hinderaker points out how the latest study of the relation between gun control laws and homicide rates uses the statistics therein to make a certain policy point, and how they could just as easily be used to refute that point:
…[W]hat jumps out at you when you read Fleegler’s article is that the decrease in fatalities that he documents relates almost exclusively to suicides. What his study really shows is that strict gun laws have little or no impact on gun homicides…
If you do the math, the ten “top” states, i.e., those with the most controls on guns, averaged 3.2 gun homicides per 100,000 population, while the ten “bottom” states averaged 3.5 gun homicides per 100,000. So the rate was slightly higher in the least regulated states. But that is only because Louisiana is an outlier”“it has the highest homicide rate of any state, while it also has relatively few gun statutes…You can see what an anomaly Louisiana is. If you take Louisiana out of the equation, the remaining nine lowest-regulation states have an average gun homicide rate of 2.8 per 100,000, which is 12.5% less than the average of the ten states with the strictest gun control laws…
But there is more: note that Fleegler’s study covers all 50 states, but leaves out the District of Columbia. Why do you suppose he chose to do that? Because the District has 1) some of the nation’s most draconian gun laws, and 2) the highest murder rate in the country, higher even than Louisiana’s.
Back when I was in graduate school, even though I was in a clinical master’s program and not an experimental one, we were required to take statistics at the graduate level, which is significantly more difficult than the statistics course at the undergrad level through which I’d already plowed. What’s more, we had to learn how to design our own research and to closely read and critique that of others. These studies were, of course, in social science fields; we weren’t critiquing physics (nor were we equipped to). But I developed the ability to skim a social science study—in psychology or sociology, primarily, or even medicine, which has some of the same characteristics—and the flaws would rather quickly jump out at me.
Those flaws were always present, and they were not trivial. Sometimes I would suspect that the author[s] had succumbed through bias, and sometimes merely through the inherent difficulty of designing such studies for human subjects, with all their built-in limitations in terms of controls and confounding variables that were either inadequately dealt with or not taken into consideration at all. I learned that one has to be very, very wary, and that such scholarship can be used to almost any purpose.
But used, it will be. Despite the work Hinderaker has done to expose the flaws in this one, that message will not get to nearly as many people as will the message the CNN headline gives the study.
I don’t usually just offer a list of links, but I every now and then there are a lot of stories and not enough time to write all I’d like about them. So here you go:
Lots here about Rand Paul’s old-fashioned filibuster, which I support—although John McCain and Lindsay Graham do not (an example of my frustrations with both men, who continually try to position themselves as noble, above-the-fray voices of reason, but who end up being used by the left). See this for more.
The South today, racism, and SCOTUS.
Victor Davis Hanson on the state (in both senses of the word) of California (hat tip: “Don Carlos”).
That book of Conly’s is the gift that keeps on giving, isn’t it? Much fascinating discussion in yesterday’s thread, which is not even the first time we’ve discussed it (see also this and this).
I especially recommend your wading through commenter “kolnai’s” effort; he’s far more erudite than I on the subject.
Discussions about autonomy and government are essential in trying to understand the differences between liberals (especially the left) and conservatives, and where libertarians fit into the mix. Not a whole lot of this was apparent to me when I was younger, prior to my change experience. For one thing, I was not especially political, and I followed the news in a much more surface way.
For another, the trend regarding government regulation of health “for your own good” was easier to ignore. For example, in the New York of my youth, I can’t imagine a mayor trying to ban large soft drinks. He’d have gotten tossed out on his ear for his pains. In fact, in the New York in which I grew up—and in the US as a whole at the time—smoking was everywhere, and no one thought much of it.
And we ate huge gobs of butter, too, if we could afford to do so.
Sigh.
I have no doubt, however, that the left had this agenda long ago, which seems obvious in retrospect by looking at the eugenics movement, which sacrificed liberty for what was seen—using what was though of as scientific evidence—as the public good (see this and this).
Taking on a somewhat different aspect of the topic, I’d like to respond to this comment by Jim Nicholas, :
Do we want the government, whether federal, state, or local, to help us make good decisions in taking care of ourselves? For example, do we want a government to examine and license physicians or do we want the government to get out of the way and let us evaluate whoever claims to be a physician.
If we think that the government should limit our freedom of choice in even a limited way about how we care for ourselves – such as limiting who can take care of us in a hospital – then, it seems to me, it is not always easy to decide what should be within or beyond a reasonable limit.
I am not allying myself with Conly, only saying that a polar opposite stand is also not a wise course.
I think Jim Nicholas’ example is a case where it’s relatively easy to draw the line. We are not stopped from going to a quack. The only thing the law stops us from is being deceived by a quack holding him/herself out to have training he/she doesn’t have, hanging out a shingle fraudulently claiming he/she is an MD or telling that to a clinic in order to be hired (see a this typical example of the way the law against practicing medicine without a license reads).
Licensing doctors does not protect us from ourselves. It protects us (supposedly, anyway) from going to an untrained doctor holding him/herself out to be a trained one. It is meant to establish minimum professional standards for treating other people, not oneself.
The same goes for rules of the road, and vehicle driver licensing.
A much better analogy is mandatory seat-belt wearing laws for adults. Those protect us against ourselves, and as such are much more suspect. The argument for them—an addition to arguments such as Conly’s—is that we all incur health care costs when people become injured, and that society suffers. Those arguments are too broad, IMHO, and can be used to justify nearly any restriction that affects health in any way—which is just about anything (this ties into the eugenics movement, to which I linked earlier).
Jim Nicholas uses the inclusive phrase “the government, whether federal, state, or local.” But those entities are allowed very different degrees of freedom to curtail our freedom. Local governments are allowed to do a lot that the federal government (at least, so far) is forbidden to do. Seat belt laws are passed on a state-by-state basis, and you can see there’s a lot of variation among states. So theoretically you can move to another state if the one you reside in isn’t libertarian enough for you. I wonder how long that will be the case.