It's hard to imagine even the most ardent Democrats supporting the literal deification of Barack Obama or erecting small shrines in his honor throughout Washington DC. By contrast, after Julius Caesar was posthumously declared a god, Augustus, as his adopted son, became known as the son of god. Along with the other gods, he received dedications at small crossroads shrines throughout Rome.
The Ronald Reagan Legacy Project was started in 1997 by Grover G. Norquist.
The Ronald Reagan Legacy Project is committed to preserving the legacy of one of America’s greatest presidents throughout the nation and abroad.
One of the ways we work to further the legacy of Reagan is by asking the governor of every state in the nation to make a proclamation declaring February 6th, "Ronald Reagan Day." An average of 30 governors a year over the last few years have made such a proclamation, choosing to honor character over partisanship.
In addition to ensuring that every February 6th is known as “Ronald Reagan Day,” we work to encourage the naming of landmarks, buildings, roads, etc. after Ronald Wilson Reagan. We continue compiling a list of Reagan dedications that remind American society of the life and legacy of President Reagan. Each one of these dedications serve as a teaching moment for those who were not yet alive during his presidency or to grant those who remember him with the opportunity to reflect on his accomplishments. Whether it be the Ronald Reagan Parkway in Indianapolis, IN or Ronald Reagan National Airport in Arlington, VA; each and every dedication will serve as a teaching moment for generations to come. Our goal is to eventually see a statue, park, or road named after Reagan in all 3,140 counties in the United States. The first project that RRLP worked to name after Ronald Reagan was National Airport, in 1998 renamed Ronald Reagan National Airport.
This study is about unwanted sexual contact, not rape.
Your reading comprehension is not as good as you think it is.
The experiences described by our respondents ranged from inadvertent alienating behavior, to unwanted verbal and physical sexual advances, to, most troublingly, sexual assault including rape.
For somebody who says that we should respect women, your language towards someone you disagree with is too snarky and disrespectful for me to want to continue this discussion.
Adults don't talk that way all the time. Honest. If someone is saying fuck all the time at work, then HR needs to get involved. This is the work place, act like professionals.
That was in a university. At that time, we had a strong principle of academic freedom, and it would have been inappropriate and a violation of their AAUP contracts for HR to say anything.
My freshman physics professor, who was a great teacher, was teaching in the U.S. for the first time in several years, because he had been blacklisted during the McCarthy days. An oceanography professor had escaped Nazi Germany. One of my art teachers was arrested in an obscenity case. So they were very defensive of free speech.
One of the leading Supreme Court cases in free speech was the one known as the "Fuck the Draft" case. So even the Supreme Court defended free speech back then.
Now, we have much less free speech. In the "Bong Hits for Jesus" case, the Supreme Court took a dive.
It's not a coincidence that several college teachers who have been fired by their administrations, over the objections of the faculty, "Not for what he said but the manner in which he said it," had criticized Israel, like Norman Finkelstein and Steve Salaita. Salaita was fired after a billionaire contributor said he wouldn't give the university any more money. Or search Google for "professor fired" to get an idea of the state of free speech in America.
The original PLOS article was about the academic profession. That's an environment in which we try to give people maximum freedom.
Either you have free speech or you don't. As Lennie Bruce said, if you can't say "Fuck", you can't say "Fuck the government." And now, sure enough, we can't say either.
It is harassment if it continues after saying "no". You don't get disciplined or fired at work for flirting one time, you get fired for keeping at it.
Yes, but in this survey, they only asked Question 32 about "inappropriate or sexual remarks" and Question 39 about "physical sexual harassment".
You can't tell from this survey whether the subject said "no", or whether the incidents happened once or repeatedly.
The survey asks them for a completely subjective response. They say in the article that they deliberately didn't give definitions. So these "inappropriate sexual remarks" might have been something as innocuous as telling an off-color joke in a bar after work. The "physical sexual harassment" might have been a co-worker putting his hand on your arm.
If you join a group of people and they have a certain style of conversation, should everybody else accommodate your standards, or should you accommodate theirs? I don't see why everybody else should be required to change their language to your standards. This is what anthropologists study. I'd like to see studies of these real issues.
Some people are very prudish. If you say "fuck", they get upset. Other people say "fuck" all the time. When I was in college, my English teachers assigned us poems by Alan Ginsberg, who used "fuck" all the time. Some people -- very few -- were upset. What were we supposed to do -- censor Alan Ginsberg's poems? Should we all change? Or should that one Freshman English student from a religious high school realize that she's being too fastidious and that this is the way adults talk?
Suppose the incidents happen repeatedly, and the subject doesn't say "no"? That's what happened in the Bora Zivkovic case. Nobody stopped coming to work. They even encouraged him. Then they suddenly started complaining that they were being harassed all along.
It's not that simple. That's why people study anthropology.
I did read the study, and the appendix S1. I just reread it, searching for "assault" and "rape."
They define "assault" to mean "unwanted sexual contact, up to and including rape." Apparently, they measure it by the answers to Question 39, about "physical sexual harassment," which is where they got that 26% figure from.
They don't define "unwanted sexual contact." For example, Bora Zivkovic had a habit of hugging women, some of whom didn't enjoy it. That is literally an "unwanted sexual contact." It may be creepy, unpleasant or inappropriate, and it should (and did) stop. But it's not rape.
This study doesn't distinguish between unwanted hugging and forcible rape, and it doesn't break down the 26% figure into more or less violent forms of unwanted sexual contact. It doesn't even give the number of violent rapes.
If you have an unknown number of unwanted huggings, at one end of the spectrum, and an unknown number of violent rapes, at the other end of the spectrum, then that's a big grey area.
Managers get their orders from the legal department. The legal department sets rules that will give them a safe harbor from lawsuits, and not necessarily rules that are fair, reasonable, logical, or based on evidence.
This study is oversimplified. I think they're using science to advance their political agenda. That's OK, but they need better science. I'd like to see a better-quality study.
No, what they're talking about is, according to the article:
“Have you ever personally experienced inappropriate or sexual remarks, comments about physical beauty, cognitive sex differences, or other jokes, at a field site? (If you have had more than one experience, the most notable to you).”
That's not sexual assault. I'm not even sure it rises to the level of sexual harassment.
Flirtation isn't sexual harassment. I'm sure every woman in the country must have been the subject of welcome and unwelcome flirtations.
At a recent professional meeting, a woman made suggestive sexual remarks to me about a computer program. If I had said the same thing to another woman, the second woman could have interpreted it as harassment under that definition.
There's a lot of grey areas and political correctness. If you want to look at it with publications in the scientific literature, fine. Let's use rigorous scientific methods to find out what the magnitude of sexual assault is. The first step is get your definitions right.
The following questions could be answered as “Yes,” “No,” or “I don't know:”
“Have you ever personally experienced inappropriate or sexual remarks, comments about physical beauty, cognitive sex differences, or other jokes, at a field site? (If you have had more than one experience, the most notable to you).”
In terms of good experimental design, that does seem too broad. "Comments about physical beauty" could be harassment or not. It's a leading question. What's inappropriate? They're not measuring sexual harassment, they're measuring their respondents' subjective perceptions of their colleagues' comments.
It seems as if the researchers were designing the study with the intent of coming up with the largest numbers possible, in order to make the problem seem as big as possible.
Last week a girl said to me, "that's a nice sweater," which I as a geek trying to understand social interactions interpreted as a friendly way of making small talk. If I said the same thing to a girl, these respondents could report it as sexual harassment.
This study has flaws that the peer reviewers should have identified.
I'd like to see studies of sexual harassment that meet the standards I see from rigorous scientific studies elsewhere.
I majored in physics, but at a very liberal-arts-focused school. So, I guess I've got both. I think it's served me well in the field: I've built web sites, been in tech support, run my own indie MMO, done a lot of random programming, and I'm currently a server admin.
Believe it or not, the most helpful classes may have been art history. Journalism and philosophy didn't hurt, especially Symbolic Logic, which was a philosophy class.
One of the most useful books I read in college was an art history book, Mechanization Takes Command, by Sigfried Giedion. (Here's a sample http://www.ediblegeography.com... you might be able to find the complete edition online).
He taught me about how technology changed things -- when that technology was first steam and then electricity. I learned about the Bauhaus from that. It's pretty insightful to learn about engineering from a historical perspective, starting with stone axes, the way an art historian looks at it.
I found it in the school library by picking an interesting book off the shelf of architecture and design books.
There was a story, I think on Slashdot, about cops who would go online and pretend to be sexually aggressive 13-year-old girls, luring in social misfits.
A lot of it seemed to be entrapment, that is, they trapped people into committing a crime who would never have committed a crime without the encouragement and manipulation of the cops. The entrapment defense has an unreasonable burden of proof.
That's not the kind of policing I would admire.
If Timmy said that Frank had been doing something heinous, then the cops could get a search warrant to arrest Frank and search his house and computer. They wouldn't need to trap him into exchanging child porn.
Unfortunately it's usually impossible to prosecute cops for misconduct. The only thing that has some small deterrence is throwing out the evidence (which the cop shouldn't have gotten in the first place).
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09... Challenges Seen in Prosecuting Police for Use of Deadly Force By LIZETTE ALVAREZ SEPT. 3, 2014 MIAMI — For decades, Florida has had a history of deadly, racially tinged police confrontations, many of them involving unarmed men, which have led to riots, protests and a steady undercurrent of rancor between minorities and the police. But in the past 20 years, not a single officer in Florida has been charged for using deadly force.
1) There is not a lot of evidence that most people who share this material are actually involved in harming children in any way.
18 years for trading child pornography?
I'll come out and say it, these laws are wrong. We have a higher incarceration rate than anyplace else in the world, rivaling Russia and China. Do you want to send those rates up even further?
I agree that child sexual exploitation is wrong. I think child pornography should be used as evidence for prosecuting the underlying crime. I can accept a reasonable criminal punishment for distributing child pornography, if that's the only way to send a message that our society strongly condemns child sexual exploitation. It seems that prosecuting people for having child pornography on their computers does more harm than good overall. I'm not convinced that prosecuting people at six degrees of separation from the underlying crime should be a crime itself. And I'm also not convinced that possessing child pornography created outside the U.S. should be a crime within the U.S. (Our bombs blow children to pieces in our many wars, which I think is a greater harm than their being sexually abused.) We don't prosecute web sites like bestgore.com that show beheadings and rapes.
But 18 years for trading child pornography is way out of bounds. That's the sentence we should give to somebody who originally abused the children to create the pornography, not someone at several steps removed who winds up with the images of it.
I think child pornography prosecutions are like traffic tickets. It's a lot easier for a cop to sit on his ass eating donuts in front of a computer monitor than it is to go out and prosecute actual sex crimes. And it would take a large shift in budget from uneducated cowboy cops to social workers, criminologists and social scientists who actually understand child sexual abuse and how to stop it.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/re... Child abuse rises with income inequality February 11, 2014 Summary: As the Great Recession deepened and income inequality became more pronounced, county-by-county rates of child maltreatment -- from sexual, physical and emotional abuse to traumatic brain injuries and death -- worsened, according to a nationwide study.
I picked one thing at random (Obama's support of Cesar Chavez) and looked it up and it checks out.
Why are you insinuating that it's unreliable, without explicitly calling it so?
This is a good example of the kind of guilt by association that the OPM engaged in.
The Keywiki.org web says that Obama supported the creation of a holiday celebrating Cesar Chavez. A Communist group also supported the creation of a holiday celebrating Cesar Chavez.
So what?
The Hunt brothers support cancer research. I support cancer research. Does that mean the Hunt brothers support me? Or that I support the Hunt brothers? No.
I will assume that keywiki's facts are correct. The problem is the logic. He put together some quotes from an anonymous, undated pamphlet from the New Movement in Solidarity With Puerto Rican Independence, none of which quite advocate illegal violence. Since he wants to prove that they're a violent group, he interprets the quotes to mean that they advocate the violent overthrow of the government. A more objective scholar might not be convinced.
Back in the days of HUAC and Joe McCarthy, the anti-Communists used to use sources and logic like that to associate people with Communism. That's why we call it McCarthyism.
Gross was a saboteur, trying to overthrow the Cuban government. His wife finally admitted as much, as I wrote above.
He was getting money under the Helms-Burton Act. The purpose of the Helms-Burton act was to overthrow the Cuban government. They were paying him to try the unworkable idea of setting up an alternate Internet, to help the Cuban Jews overthrow the Castro government. The Cuban Jews actually got along very well with Raul Castro.
The Cubans want to exchange Gross for 3 Cuban intelligence agents who are in prison right now. They came to the U.S. as undercover agents to monitor the Miami Cubans who were committing acts of terrorism against Cuba, such as blowing up a Cuban plane, and bombing tourist spots.
The U.S. has refused the exchange. The anti-Cuban hard-liners would rather leave Gross in prison than improve relations.
whenever a US President tries to reduce tensions, they do something to ratchet them back up. For example, Obama was inaugurated in Jan of '09, announces easing the embargo by allowing families in the US to visit and send money more easily in April, and by December some poor schmuck (Alan Gross) is rotting in a Cuban jail for bringing computer equipment in for Jewish groups.
why would we trade with a country that is holding one of our guys in prison for the crime of helping people access the internet?
It would cost them literally nothing to let this guy go, but they insist on keeping him in prison
The article on Gross in Wikipedia is pretty good http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A... and the linked article in The Forward is pretty good too. Gross worked for Development Alternatives, a contractor for the USAID and other government agencies, possibly including the CIA, which was involved in some development projects in places like Afghanistan and Iraq where they were an arm of the U.S. military. The Venezuelan government accused them of giving support to the rebels trying to overthrow the Chavez government. Gross' projects in Cuba were funded under the Helms-Burton bill, the purpose of which was to overthrow the Cuban government, by methods including telecommunications, as Gross was doing. If a foreigner tried to do the same thing in the U.S., we would (and have) sentence them to long jail terms too. They convicted Gross of something like treason. At first he denied it, but later when his wife became dissatisfied with the U.S. government's efforts to get him out, she basically admitted it.
(According to The Forward, the Jewish community in Cuba was on good terms with Raul Castro, and Gross would have put the Jewish community at risk if they cooperated with him. They may have turned him in. They're patriotic Cubans.)
The Cuban government wants to release Gross in exchange for the Cuban Five, now down to three. They were five Cuban intelligence agents who went to Miami as refugees and infiltrated the anti-Castro groups. They had good reason to infiltrate those groups, because the Miami Cubans were committing terrorist acts in Cuba. The most notorious was Luis Posada, who engineered the bombing of a Cuban airliner, which killed all aboard. Posada was living in the U.S., which refused to prosecute him, even though he bragged about it publicly. Other terrorist acts included setting off bombs (with a few fatalities) at tourist spots, in order to discourage tourism and hard currency.
So that's the situation. The Cubans want to exchange Gross for the Cuban three, and the U.S. wants them to free Gross without anything in return. I'd like the Cubans to release Gross for humanitarian reasons (even though he's guilty of trying to overthrow the Cuban government, which is what Helms-Burton money is for). I'd also like the U.S. to free the Cuban three (even though they're guilty of traveling to the U.S. disguised as refugees, to monitor the Miami groups to stop terrorism). It's not reasonable to expect one without the other.
I would hardly agree that the U.S. was trying to reduce tensions, if they were sending people like Gross to set up a communications network to help the Jewish community overthrow the Cuban government. Don't forget, Helms-Burton only disburses money for projects to overthrow the Cuban government. If Gross was getting Helms-Burton money, then he was trying to overthrow the Cuban government.
It seems that the ones who are holding up the deal are people like Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and the other anti-Cuban hard-liners. It seems that they don't want a trade, because it would improve relations with Cuba. They only want to overthrow the Cuban government. They'd rather let Gross stay in jail than improve relations. I suggest you address your concerns about Gross to them. I suspect, though, that you'll have to wait until they're dead before we establish normal relations with Cuba again.
Then it turns out, she was a member of the New Movement In Solidarity with Puerto Rican Independence, who specifically stated as goals and objectives support for paramilitary organizations and groups active in the US, in their plans to attack military and government installations as a way of combating the imperialism of the US government.
Yes, that's what you learned from a web site that claims Barak Obama is affiliated with the Communist Party. http://keywiki.org/Barack_Obam...
I bet those lunatics at the OPM do their security reviews the same way, by clicking on the first Google hit.
You just fabricated an interview. Nobody knows for sure what the agent said and what she answered, because he destroyed the notes after he wrote his report.
And he didn't make an audio recording, which would have cleared up all the disagreements. Why don't they record interviews? Because this way they can "remember" anything they want.
She admits to having corresponded to a known terrorist. That may not be the letter of the law in regards to having been an member, but don't you think that she should have mentioned that particular fact, knowing that she was applying for government position that actually required more than a cursory background check?
No. If she's going on an interview for a background check, she has an obligation to answer any question they ask her, to the best of her ability.
She doesn't have an obligation to provide all information that any right-winger could possibly want to know about her background. This is not a Chinese self-criticism session or a Scientology audit.
They're saying, "You didn't answer the questions that we didn't ask."
An accountant once told me how to act at an IRS audit: Answer all their questions, but don't volunteer information.
"more than a cursory background check"? For what? She was working at the NIH on an education project to draw more women into computing. She's not working on nuclear weapons.
If you look at the other documents that you find on the Internet about the Women's Committee Against Genocide, you'll see that many of them are involved in filmmaking.
This flyer is for a film series. The film series is jointly sponsored by the Moncada Library. So we don't know whether this is written by the Women's Committee or the Moncada Library.
The problem here is guilt by association. There's nothing to actually show that they or Barr were advocating violence. I bet the OPM is doing similar Google searches and drawing similar unsupported associations. At least you know your limits.
Filmmakers who run film series don't necessarily agree with the politics of the films they show. I ran a film series once and I showed Birth of a Nation, Triumph of the Will, and Potemkin. So would you conclude that I'm a KKK member, a Nazi, and a Communist? If I were applying for a job at the National Institutes of Health, and they asked me whether I had ever belonged to an organization that advocated overthrowing the government by violence, am I supposed to say, "No, but I showed Potemkin in my college film series"?
It appears to me that the two groups that she was in were sub-groups (not just "affiliates") of the May 19 Communist Organization (M19CO). Thus she was part of the May 19 Communist Organization (M19CO).
Well, I don't see anything in that interview about the New Movement in Solidarity with Puerto Rican Independence at all, and I don't see anything that indicates that the Women’s Committee Against Genocide was a "sub-group" of M19CO. The only one who claims that they're sub-groups is the OPM.
How is Barr supposed to know that the OPM believes that the two movements that she was once involved in were sub-groups of a third group?
Nobody on this list can even find a source on the Internet to support that claim.
Slashdot Mirror
It's hard to imagine even the most ardent Democrats supporting the literal deification of Barack Obama or erecting small shrines in his honor throughout Washington DC. By contrast, after Julius Caesar was posthumously declared a god, Augustus, as his adopted son, became known as the son of god. Along with the other gods, he received dedications at small crossroads shrines throughout Rome.
What about Ronald Reagan? He was a God, right?
http://www.ronaldreaganlegacyp...
The Ronald Reagan Legacy Project was started in 1997 by Grover G. Norquist.
The Ronald Reagan Legacy Project is committed to preserving the legacy of one of America’s greatest presidents throughout the nation and abroad.
One of the ways we work to further the legacy of Reagan is by asking the governor of every state in the nation to make a proclamation declaring February 6th, "Ronald Reagan Day." An average of 30 governors a year over the last few years have made such a proclamation, choosing to honor character over partisanship.
In addition to ensuring that every February 6th is known as “Ronald Reagan Day,” we work to encourage the naming of landmarks, buildings, roads, etc. after Ronald Wilson Reagan. We continue compiling a list of Reagan dedications that remind American society of the life and legacy of President Reagan. Each one of these dedications serve as a teaching moment for those who were not yet alive during his presidency or to grant those who remember him with the opportunity to reflect on his accomplishments. Whether it be the Ronald Reagan Parkway in Indianapolis, IN or Ronald Reagan National Airport in Arlington, VA; each and every dedication will serve as a teaching moment for generations to come. Our goal is to eventually see a statue, park, or road named after Reagan in all 3,140 counties in the United States. The first project that RRLP worked to name after Ronald Reagan was National Airport, in 1998 renamed Ronald Reagan National Airport.
This study is about unwanted sexual contact, not rape.
Your reading comprehension is not as good as you think it is.
The experiences described by our respondents ranged from inadvertent alienating behavior, to unwanted verbal and physical sexual advances, to, most troublingly, sexual assault including rape.
For somebody who says that we should respect women, your language towards someone you disagree with is too snarky and disrespectful for me to want to continue this discussion.
Adults don't talk that way all the time. Honest. If someone is saying fuck all the time at work, then HR needs to get involved. This is the work place, act like professionals.
That was in a university. At that time, we had a strong principle of academic freedom, and it would have been inappropriate and a violation of their AAUP contracts for HR to say anything.
My freshman physics professor, who was a great teacher, was teaching in the U.S. for the first time in several years, because he had been blacklisted during the McCarthy days. An oceanography professor had escaped Nazi Germany. One of my art teachers was arrested in an obscenity case. So they were very defensive of free speech.
One of the leading Supreme Court cases in free speech was the one known as the "Fuck the Draft" case. So even the Supreme Court defended free speech back then.
Now, we have much less free speech. In the "Bong Hits for Jesus" case, the Supreme Court took a dive.
It's not a coincidence that several college teachers who have been fired by their administrations, over the objections of the faculty, "Not for what he said but the manner in which he said it," had criticized Israel, like Norman Finkelstein and Steve Salaita. Salaita was fired after a billionaire contributor said he wouldn't give the university any more money. Or search Google for "professor fired" to get an idea of the state of free speech in America.
The original PLOS article was about the academic profession. That's an environment in which we try to give people maximum freedom.
Either you have free speech or you don't. As Lennie Bruce said, if you can't say "Fuck", you can't say "Fuck the government." And now, sure enough, we can't say either.
It is harassment if it continues after saying "no". You don't get disciplined or fired at work for flirting one time, you get fired for keeping at it.
Yes, but in this survey, they only asked Question 32 about "inappropriate or sexual remarks" and Question 39 about "physical sexual harassment".
You can't tell from this survey whether the subject said "no", or whether the incidents happened once or repeatedly.
The survey asks them for a completely subjective response. They say in the article that they deliberately didn't give definitions. So these "inappropriate sexual remarks" might have been something as innocuous as telling an off-color joke in a bar after work. The "physical sexual harassment" might have been a co-worker putting his hand on your arm.
If you join a group of people and they have a certain style of conversation, should everybody else accommodate your standards, or should you accommodate theirs? I don't see why everybody else should be required to change their language to your standards. This is what anthropologists study. I'd like to see studies of these real issues.
Some people are very prudish. If you say "fuck", they get upset. Other people say "fuck" all the time. When I was in college, my English teachers assigned us poems by Alan Ginsberg, who used "fuck" all the time. Some people -- very few -- were upset. What were we supposed to do -- censor Alan Ginsberg's poems? Should we all change? Or should that one Freshman English student from a religious high school realize that she's being too fastidious and that this is the way adults talk?
Suppose the incidents happen repeatedly, and the subject doesn't say "no"? That's what happened in the Bora Zivkovic case. Nobody stopped coming to work. They even encouraged him. Then they suddenly started complaining that they were being harassed all along.
It's not that simple. That's why people study anthropology.
I did read the study, and the appendix S1. I just reread it, searching for "assault" and "rape."
They define "assault" to mean "unwanted sexual contact, up to and including rape." Apparently, they measure it by the answers to Question 39, about "physical sexual harassment," which is where they got that 26% figure from.
They don't define "unwanted sexual contact." For example, Bora Zivkovic had a habit of hugging women, some of whom didn't enjoy it. That is literally an "unwanted sexual contact." It may be creepy, unpleasant or inappropriate, and it should (and did) stop. But it's not rape.
This study doesn't distinguish between unwanted hugging and forcible rape, and it doesn't break down the 26% figure into more or less violent forms of unwanted sexual contact. It doesn't even give the number of violent rapes.
If you have an unknown number of unwanted huggings, at one end of the spectrum, and an unknown number of violent rapes, at the other end of the spectrum, then that's a big grey area.
Managers get their orders from the legal department. The legal department sets rules that will give them a safe harbor from lawsuits, and not necessarily rules that are fair, reasonable, logical, or based on evidence.
This study is oversimplified. I think they're using science to advance their political agenda. That's OK, but they need better science. I'd like to see a better-quality study.
No, what they're talking about is, according to the article:
“Have you ever personally experienced inappropriate or sexual remarks, comments about physical beauty, cognitive sex differences, or other jokes, at a field site? (If you have had more than one experience, the most notable to you).”
That's not sexual assault. I'm not even sure it rises to the level of sexual harassment.
Flirtation isn't sexual harassment. I'm sure every woman in the country must have been the subject of welcome and unwelcome flirtations.
At a recent professional meeting, a woman made suggestive sexual remarks to me about a computer program. If I had said the same thing to another woman, the second woman could have interpreted it as harassment under that definition.
There's a lot of grey areas and political correctness. If you want to look at it with publications in the scientific literature, fine. Let's use rigorous scientific methods to find out what the magnitude of sexual assault is. The first step is get your definitions right.
Here's one of the questions:
The following questions could be answered as “Yes,” “No,” or “I don't know:”
“Have you ever personally experienced inappropriate or sexual remarks, comments about physical beauty, cognitive sex differences, or other jokes, at a field site? (If you have had more than one experience, the most notable to you).”
In terms of good experimental design, that does seem too broad. "Comments about physical beauty" could be harassment or not. It's a leading question. What's inappropriate? They're not measuring sexual harassment, they're measuring their respondents' subjective perceptions of their colleagues' comments.
It seems as if the researchers were designing the study with the intent of coming up with the largest numbers possible, in order to make the problem seem as big as possible.
Last week a girl said to me, "that's a nice sweater," which I as a geek trying to understand social interactions interpreted as a friendly way of making small talk. If I said the same thing to a girl, these respondents could report it as sexual harassment.
This study has flaws that the peer reviewers should have identified.
I'd like to see studies of sexual harassment that meet the standards I see from rigorous scientific studies elsewhere.
I majored in physics, but at a very liberal-arts-focused school.
You didn't go to Antioch, by any chance? That's where Nobel laureate Mario Capecci https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... graduated.
I majored in physics, but at a very liberal-arts-focused school. So, I guess I've got both. I think it's served me well in the field: I've built web sites, been in tech support, run my own indie MMO, done a lot of random programming, and I'm currently a server admin.
Believe it or not, the most helpful classes may have been art history. Journalism and philosophy didn't hurt, especially Symbolic Logic, which was a philosophy class.
One of the most useful books I read in college was an art history book, Mechanization Takes Command, by Sigfried Giedion. (Here's a sample http://www.ediblegeography.com... you might be able to find the complete edition online).
He taught me about how technology changed things -- when that technology was first steam and then electricity. I learned about the Bauhaus from that. It's pretty insightful to learn about engineering from a historical perspective, starting with stone axes, the way an art historian looks at it.
I found it in the school library by picking an interesting book off the shelf of architecture and design books.
There was a story, I think on Slashdot, about cops who would go online and pretend to be sexually aggressive 13-year-old girls, luring in social misfits.
A lot of it seemed to be entrapment, that is, they trapped people into committing a crime who would never have committed a crime without the encouragement and manipulation of the cops. The entrapment defense has an unreasonable burden of proof.
That's not the kind of policing I would admire.
If Timmy said that Frank had been doing something heinous, then the cops could get a search warrant to arrest Frank and search his house and computer. They wouldn't need to trap him into exchanging child porn.
Unfortunately it's usually impossible to prosecute cops for misconduct. The only thing that has some small deterrence is throwing out the evidence (which the cop shouldn't have gotten in the first place).
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09...
Challenges Seen in Prosecuting Police for Use of Deadly Force
By LIZETTE ALVAREZ
SEPT. 3, 2014
MIAMI — For decades, Florida has had a history of deadly, racially tinged police confrontations, many of them involving unarmed men, which have led to riots, protests and a steady undercurrent of rancor between minorities and the police. But in the past 20 years, not a single officer in Florida has been charged for using deadly force.
1) There is not a lot of evidence that most people who share this material are actually involved in harming children in any way.
18 years for trading child pornography?
I'll come out and say it, these laws are wrong. We have a higher incarceration rate than anyplace else in the world, rivaling Russia and China. Do you want to send those rates up even further?
I agree that child sexual exploitation is wrong. I think child pornography should be used as evidence for prosecuting the underlying crime. I can accept a reasonable criminal punishment for distributing child pornography, if that's the only way to send a message that our society strongly condemns child sexual exploitation. It seems that prosecuting people for having child pornography on their computers does more harm than good overall. I'm not convinced that prosecuting people at six degrees of separation from the underlying crime should be a crime itself. And I'm also not convinced that possessing child pornography created outside the U.S. should be a crime within the U.S. (Our bombs blow children to pieces in our many wars, which I think is a greater harm than their being sexually abused.) We don't prosecute web sites like bestgore.com that show beheadings and rapes.
But 18 years for trading child pornography is way out of bounds. That's the sentence we should give to somebody who originally abused the children to create the pornography, not someone at several steps removed who winds up with the images of it.
I think child pornography prosecutions are like traffic tickets. It's a lot easier for a cop to sit on his ass eating donuts in front of a computer monitor than it is to go out and prosecute actual sex crimes. And it would take a large shift in budget from uneducated cowboy cops to social workers, criminologists and social scientists who actually understand child sexual abuse and how to stop it.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/re...
Child abuse rises with income inequality
February 11, 2014
Summary: As the Great Recession deepened and income inequality became more pronounced, county-by-county rates of child maltreatment -- from sexual, physical and emotional abuse to traumatic brain injuries and death -- worsened, according to a nationwide study.
http://www.bmj.com/content/347...
Research: Preventing sexual abusers of children from reoffending: systematic review of medical and psychological interventions
BMJ 2013; 347 doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmj.... (Published 9 August 2013)
http://www.miamiherald.com/201...
Florida spurns $50 million for child-abuse prevention
If we don't get it, the terrorists will get it first.
Grow a big moustache.
Are you drunk?
Right-wing wacko. Ignore. Put name on bozo list.
Looks well researched and has citations.
I picked one thing at random (Obama's support of Cesar Chavez) and looked it up and it checks out.
Why are you insinuating that it's unreliable, without explicitly calling it so?
This is a good example of the kind of guilt by association that the OPM engaged in.
The Keywiki.org web says that Obama supported the creation of a holiday celebrating Cesar Chavez. A Communist group also supported the creation of a holiday celebrating Cesar Chavez.
So what?
The Hunt brothers support cancer research. I support cancer research. Does that mean the Hunt brothers support me? Or that I support the Hunt brothers? No.
I will assume that keywiki's facts are correct. The problem is the logic. He put together some quotes from an anonymous, undated pamphlet from the New Movement in Solidarity With Puerto Rican Independence, none of which quite advocate illegal violence. Since he wants to prove that they're a violent group, he interprets the quotes to mean that they advocate the violent overthrow of the government. A more objective scholar might not be convinced.
Back in the days of HUAC and Joe McCarthy, the anti-Communists used to use sources and logic like that to associate people with Communism. That's why we call it McCarthyism.
Gross was a saboteur, trying to overthrow the Cuban government. His wife finally admitted as much, as I wrote above.
He was getting money under the Helms-Burton Act. The purpose of the Helms-Burton act was to overthrow the Cuban government. They were paying him to try the unworkable idea of setting up an alternate Internet, to help the Cuban Jews overthrow the Castro government. The Cuban Jews actually got along very well with Raul Castro.
The Cubans want to exchange Gross for 3 Cuban intelligence agents who are in prison right now. They came to the U.S. as undercover agents to monitor the Miami Cubans who were committing acts of terrorism against Cuba, such as blowing up a Cuban plane, and bombing tourist spots.
The U.S. has refused the exchange. The anti-Cuban hard-liners would rather leave Gross in prison than improve relations.
whenever a US President tries to reduce tensions, they do something to ratchet them back up. For example, Obama was inaugurated in Jan of '09, announces easing the embargo by allowing families in the US to visit and send money more easily in April, and by December some poor schmuck (Alan Gross) is rotting in a Cuban jail for bringing computer equipment in for Jewish groups.
why would we trade with a country that is holding one of our guys in prison for the crime of helping people access the internet?
It would cost them literally nothing to let this guy go, but they insist on keeping him in prison
The article on Gross in Wikipedia is pretty good http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A... and the linked article in The Forward is pretty good too. Gross worked for Development Alternatives, a contractor for the USAID and other government agencies, possibly including the CIA, which was involved in some development projects in places like Afghanistan and Iraq where they were an arm of the U.S. military. The Venezuelan government accused them of giving support to the rebels trying to overthrow the Chavez government. Gross' projects in Cuba were funded under the Helms-Burton bill, the purpose of which was to overthrow the Cuban government, by methods including telecommunications, as Gross was doing. If a foreigner tried to do the same thing in the U.S., we would (and have) sentence them to long jail terms too. They convicted Gross of something like treason. At first he denied it, but later when his wife became dissatisfied with the U.S. government's efforts to get him out, she basically admitted it.
(According to The Forward, the Jewish community in Cuba was on good terms with Raul Castro, and Gross would have put the Jewish community at risk if they cooperated with him. They may have turned him in. They're patriotic Cubans.)
The Cuban government wants to release Gross in exchange for the Cuban Five, now down to three. They were five Cuban intelligence agents who went to Miami as refugees and infiltrated the anti-Castro groups. They had good reason to infiltrate those groups, because the Miami Cubans were committing terrorist acts in Cuba. The most notorious was Luis Posada, who engineered the bombing of a Cuban airliner, which killed all aboard. Posada was living in the U.S., which refused to prosecute him, even though he bragged about it publicly. Other terrorist acts included setting off bombs (with a few fatalities) at tourist spots, in order to discourage tourism and hard currency.
So that's the situation. The Cubans want to exchange Gross for the Cuban three, and the U.S. wants them to free Gross without anything in return. I'd like the Cubans to release Gross for humanitarian reasons (even though he's guilty of trying to overthrow the Cuban government, which is what Helms-Burton money is for). I'd also like the U.S. to free the Cuban three (even though they're guilty of traveling to the U.S. disguised as refugees, to monitor the Miami groups to stop terrorism). It's not reasonable to expect one without the other.
I would hardly agree that the U.S. was trying to reduce tensions, if they were sending people like Gross to set up a communications network to help the Jewish community overthrow the Cuban government. Don't forget, Helms-Burton only disburses money for projects to overthrow the Cuban government. If Gross was getting Helms-Burton money, then he was trying to overthrow the Cuban government.
It seems that the ones who are holding up the deal are people like Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and the other anti-Cuban hard-liners. It seems that they don't want a trade, because it would improve relations with Cuba. They only want to overthrow the Cuban government. They'd rather let Gross stay in jail than improve relations. I suggest you address your concerns about Gross to them. I suspect, though, that you'll have to wait until they're dead before we establish normal relations with Cuba again.
A little info about New Movement in Solidarity With Puerto Rican Independence
Really, did it ever occur to you to wonder whether some anonymous web site is accurate?
This same site also has an article linking Barak Obama to the Communist Party. http://keywiki.org/Barack_Obam...
Then it turns out, she was a member of the New Movement In Solidarity with Puerto Rican Independence, who specifically stated as goals and objectives support for paramilitary organizations and groups active in the US, in their plans to attack military and government installations as a way of combating the imperialism of the US government.
Yes, that's what you learned from a web site that claims Barak Obama is affiliated with the Communist Party. http://keywiki.org/Barack_Obam...
I bet those lunatics at the OPM do their security reviews the same way, by clicking on the first Google hit.
You just fabricated an interview. Nobody knows for sure what the agent said and what she answered, because he destroyed the notes after he wrote his report.
And he didn't make an audio recording, which would have cleared up all the disagreements. Why don't they record interviews? Because this way they can "remember" anything they want.
She admits to having corresponded to a known terrorist. That may not be the letter of the law in regards to having been an member, but don't you think that she should have mentioned that particular fact, knowing that she was applying for government position that actually required more than a cursory background check?
No. If she's going on an interview for a background check, she has an obligation to answer any question they ask her, to the best of her ability.
She doesn't have an obligation to provide all information that any right-winger could possibly want to know about her background. This is not a Chinese self-criticism session or a Scientology audit.
They're saying, "You didn't answer the questions that we didn't ask."
An accountant once told me how to act at an IRS audit: Answer all their questions, but don't volunteer information.
"more than a cursory background check"? For what? She was working at the NIH on an education project to draw more women into computing. She's not working on nuclear weapons.
Well I read the pages you linked to, and I think jrumney has it exactly right.
If you look at the other documents that you find on the Internet about the Women's Committee Against Genocide, you'll see that many of them are involved in filmmaking.
This flyer is for a film series. The film series is jointly sponsored by the Moncada Library. So we don't know whether this is written by the Women's Committee or the Moncada Library.
The problem here is guilt by association. There's nothing to actually show that they or Barr were advocating violence. I bet the OPM is doing similar Google searches and drawing similar unsupported associations. At least you know your limits.
Filmmakers who run film series don't necessarily agree with the politics of the films they show. I ran a film series once and I showed Birth of a Nation, Triumph of the Will, and Potemkin. So would you conclude that I'm a KKK member, a Nazi, and a Communist? If I were applying for a job at the National Institutes of Health, and they asked me whether I had ever belonged to an organization that advocated overthrowing the government by violence, am I supposed to say, "No, but I showed Potemkin in my college film series"?
It appears to me that the two groups that she was in were sub-groups (not just "affiliates") of the May 19 Communist Organization (M19CO). Thus she was part of the May 19 Communist Organization (M19CO).
http://actuporalhistory.org/beta/interviews/images/banzhaf.pdf
Well, I don't see anything in that interview about the New Movement in Solidarity with Puerto Rican Independence at all, and I don't see anything that indicates that the Women’s Committee Against Genocide was a "sub-group" of M19CO. The only one who claims that they're sub-groups is the OPM.
How is Barr supposed to know that the OPM believes that the two movements that she was once involved in were sub-groups of a third group?
Nobody on this list can even find a source on the Internet to support that claim.