Kulturkampf

[HaughtyFrank]

[Nintex]

More boring Disney dreck.

Would be cool if they did like a JOKER type dark noir take on Bambi. 

[Uncle]

bambi is a shit boring story that modern audiences would never sit through, so of course they're going to add a lot of dumb subplots and action scenes and a rapping frog voiced by Pokimane

[Polident]

I saw that headline followed by one about making a Titanic submarine movie. We don’t really talk about the upsides of the writer’s strike.

[benji]

TED guy wrote an essay on Twitter about that racist speech:

[benji]

Bambi becomes an anti-gun activist who gets elected to the Senate and gives a speech that convinces the corrupt old white cishet men fighting progress to ban guns and enact animal rights.

[benji]

Spoiler:  (click to show)(click to hide)

edit:

[Potato]

What, exactly, is be doing that's offensive? Looks like his thumbs are up his nose rather than pulling his eyes...

[HaughtyFrank]

[Eric Cartman]

TED guy wrote an essay on Twitter about that racist speech:

As with your previous post, it is difficult to comprehend why you believe these comments will improve the situation.

First, I agree that it is unfortunate you dragged Adam Grant into this. I use the active voice here, because unlike the passive "got dragged into this", the reason Grant is now implicated is because you felt it necessary to subject Coleman's talk to pseudo-scientific verification. That was your choice. By appealing to him for verification, you are implicitly suggesting Adam Grant is either an equal or more authoritative source on this topic than Coleman Hughes. That is on you, not the internet. The internet is merely responding to your appeal to authority.

On the subject of authority itself, a tweet is a difficult place for a debate about whether organizational psychology is a functioning science, and whether it has achieved the kind of institutional competence necessary to vet a race-relations talk. In brief, replication in psychology journals is generally abysmal. It was recently found to be 50% or less for several prominent journals. It is the field whose poor performance made the term "replication crisis" a household word.

If you are asking us to take the citation of a meta-analysis - an aggregation of studies in the field - seriously, my mouth is agape. Aggregating information with 50% or less verifiability means you are effectively getting noise. A psychology meta-analysis today is the scientific equivalent of a subprime mortgage-backed security from the 2008 financial crisis. You don't get accurate research by combining lots of inaccurate research. You might as well have told us you consulted a coin to see if Coleman's talk was scientifically sound, and it came up tails.

Furthermore, calling Grant's remarks a "nuanced summary of the evidence" is thoroughly confusing, unless you are referring to private remarks you have yet to publish. All I have seen from Grant thus far is a few brief comments on a meta-analysis - which is paywalled - with links to 3 other papers, all of which are paywalled. There is no discussion about why we should believe these particular papers, or these particular authors. There is no explanation of what makes these findings credible in a field already widely discredited for its lax standards, small sample sizes, poor controls, overinterpretation of results and unacceptably low replication rates. There is no enumeration from Grant of why the studies comprising the meta-analysis are likely to be accurate or trustworthy. In short, actually determining if any of these citations supports Grant's conclusion is left completely as an exercise for the reader - a reader who must then pay hundreds of dollars in journal access fees to not only buy these papers, but the papers they meta-analyze and reference.

You also spend a paragraph discussing the assertion that, "Some commenters below just don’t understand how anyone could be upset by a talk arguing for color blindness". I'm sure we can find a few commenters among the thousand that fit that characterization. You can find anything in a big enough comments thread. But read the bulk of the comments more carefully and you will find this is not their complaint. Rather, they don't understand how an institution could be more upset about a color blindness talk than a color-conscious talk, of which TED has had several. In fact, you helpfully cited one right in your post (TED 2014's “Color blind or color brave?”).

Where was the pseudo-scientific vetting then? Where was the required debate? Where were the outraged employees? Where were the internal machinations to scuttle the VOD?

Overwhelmingly, that is what the comments are actually about. Nobody would even know about this incident, let alone complain, if the only thing that had happened was that some employees watched the talk and didn't personally like it. Presumably that happens all the time, with all kinds of TED talks. That is not the gravamen here. Why pretend it is?

You then assert that the reason people might feel this way is due to "their own lack of immersion in the rich debate that has swirled on this topic in recent years". If I may hyperbolize for a moment: every news source, every social network, every political podcast in America has been having nothing but this debate for the past five years or more. Is your argument really that the people critical of TED's behavior have heard none of this? That they are unaware of what the arguments are? Is that how you are drawing the dividing line? You believe that people demanding equal treatment for Coleman Hughes simply "don't understand" the debate?

You closed with, "I see a growing number of people yearn for something better than having our conversations dominated by the angry and the judgmental. What if we tried giving each other the benefit of the doubt?" I will close with that as well: TED failed precisely this mission statement. That is why people are upset. TED's employees dominated the conversation we wanted to have with Coleman by being angry and judgmental. They in no way gave his talk the benefit of the doubt.

TED's employees tried to prevent his talk from being published. TED's "town hall" attendees took to the microphone and called him "dangerous", "irresponsible", and "racist". They implicitly accused him of supporting Plessy vs. Ferguson. You apparently had no problem with any of this. You have not apologized for TED's behavior. You didn't admonish the hostile attendees for their tone, and I imagine they are more than welcome back next year.

Nobody believes your platitude because they saw how Coleman Hughes was treated by TED and by its attendees. You're chastising the chorus for lack of harmony, but your section was the one loudly singing in discord. Your organization participated in and facilitated something deeply offensive to the tenets of open, honest intellectual exchange. Stop trying to recontextualize it. Own your mistake. Publicly apologize to Coleman Hughes, institute policies for TED to ensure this never happens again, and move on.

Anything less is not a serious response.

[Eric Cartman]

What, exactly, is be doing that's offensive? Looks like his thumbs are up his nose rather than pulling his eyes...

I thought he was trying to do the hand-glasses thing

[benji]

[Uncle]

 

[HaughtyFrank]

Spoiler:  (click to show)(click to hide)

[Nintex]

Was she forced though?

All I recall from the stories about the production is that Carrie Fisher was shall we say "rebellious" on set and Lucas had a hard time trying to make sure she and Ford took the cosplay drama seriously and weren't partying all the time (or doing coke). 

[Nintex]

[benji]

[Uncle]

https://news.yahoo.com/actor-attack-skepticism-minors-gender-080052198.html

Nonbinary actor claims 'trans-misogny' when podcaster asks about transition surgeries for minors

Advocates and lawyers of women who have detransitioned are speaking out after nonbinary Netflix "Queer Eye" star Jonathan Van Ness suggested it was "transphobic" of actor Dax Shepard to question if minors should undergo transition surgeries.

As a guest on an episode of the Shephard’s podcast, "Armchair Expert," Van Ness suggested Shepard was "parrot[ing] what he deemed "trans-misogyny" and "transphobic ideologies" for questioning if it is fair to women to oppose men in sports or to "question" if teenagers should undergo gender transitions.

"I think to say that someone can't question without threatening to take someone's rights away to explore these things … some people are very uncomfortable about teenagers transitioning, they're challenging that. How do we know that the person is not going to change their mind?" Dax asked.

"This whole notion that to be critical or to question … because to even question it makes you an enemy. I don't think that's the way forward."

Van Ness at one point responded that "there isn’t legitimate questioning" but rather an "onslaught towards queer people."

[Polident]

…sometimes you read this type of shit and think “maybe I’m a genius?” But I look at where I’m posting this and absolutely not.

Imagine not being able to imagine an apple

[HardcoreRetro]

That's called aphantasia. Apparently loads of people got that. 1 in 30 or something.

[Uncle]

yeah I feel like that's something that's only become more commonly known in recent years and a lot of people are mindblown about it

I don't know if it's the same condition but some people don't have an internal monologue, they can't talk to themselves in their head, or reproduce other sounds/voices in their head from memory

brings perspective when you think about how many people might not be stupid or uncreative, just have one of these conditions that are hard to imagine when you don't have them

[Nintex]

That is why the world is like this.

[Potato]

…sometimes you read this type of shit and think “maybe I’m a genius?” But I look at where I’m posting this and absolutely not.

Imagine not being able to imagine an apple

That's me. Nothing. Nada. Maybe a 4 at best if I try really hard to convince myself I'm seeing something.

[Nintex]

I can't imagine an apple just on its own. Even if I think about just an apple I automatically kind of render a VR space around it or the room it is in or the apple tree because it makes no sense for an apple to just be floating in mid air.

[HaughtyFrank]

New Latinos just dropped

[benji]

Hiding replies seems like such a futile thing for a company to have a worker actually sit there and do.

IDEAs are employee resource groups to help Bungie employees connect with people of similar cultural backgrounds and their supportive allies

[BIONIC]

La/Li/Lu/Le/Lo

[Polident]

yeah I feel like that's something that's only become more commonly known in recent years and a lot of people are mindblown about it

I don't know if it's the same condition but some people don't have an internal monologue, they can't talk to themselves in their head, or reproduce other sounds/voices in their head from memory brings perspective when you think about how many people might not be stupid or uncreative, just have one of these conditions that are hard to imagine when you don't have them

Joking aside, this was always interesting to me regarding sense of direction. One of my friends, who’s incredibly smart despite association, just can’t track these things.

[benji]

I can't even imagine not being able to imagine.

[benji]

The AAA and CASCA boards reached a decision to remove the session “Let’s Talk about Sex Baby: Why biological sex remains a necessary analytic category in anthropology” from the AAA/CASCA 2023 conference program. This decision was based on extensive consultation and was reached in the spirit of respect for our values, in order to ensure the safety and dignity of all of our members, as well as the scientific integrity of the program.

The first ethical principle in AAA’s Principles of Professional Responsibility is to “Do no harm.” The session was rejected because it relied on assumptions that run contrary to the settled science in our discipline, framed in ways that do harm to vulnerable members of our community. It commits one of the cardinal sins of scholarship—it assumes the truth of the proposition that it sets out to prove, namely, that sex and gender are simplistically binary, and that this is a fact with meaningful implications for the discipline.

Such efforts contradict scientific evidence, including the wealth of anthropological scholarship on gender and sex. Forensic anthropologists talk about using bones for “sex estimation,” not “sex identification,” a process that is probabilistic rather than clearly determinative, and that is easily influenced by cognitive bias on the part of the researcher. Around the world and throughout human history, there have always been people whose gender roles do not align neatly with their reproductive anatomy. There is no single biological standard by which all humans can be reliably sorted into a binary male/female sex classification. On the contrary, anthropologists and others have long shown sex and gender to be historically and geographically contextual, deeply entangled, and dynamically mutable categories.
The function of the “gender critical” scholarship advocated in this session, like the function of the “race science” of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, is to advance a “scientific” reason to question the humanity of already marginalized groups of people, in this case, those who exist outside a strict and narrow sex / gender binary.

Transgender and gender diverse identities have long existed, and we are committed to upholding the value and dignity of transgender people. We believe that a more just future is possible—one where gender diversity is welcomed and supported rather than marginalized and policed.