If the students are united against this statement, and only the administration and current faculty are for it, then the battle is already lost. Because the students of today are the faculty of tomorrow, making this statement a temporary patch that masks how bad things have gotten.
I don't think that's necessarily true. Some of the students of today are the faculty of tomorrow; in my experience the students that eventually become profs are not representative of the student body as a whole.
For example, much of the funding available in US physics is DoD funding. Many students (and grads / postdocs) have ethical issues with working on DoD projects. However, refusing DoD funding is not a good move for early-career researchers. So in my experience successful new profs tend to be more "hawkish" than grad students in general.
Did you miss [1]? The US govt. used its influence over Twitter to help sell its foreign policy (military interventions included) to the US and global audience. The only way you could not take issue with it, is if you're fine with govt. psyops/undisclosed propaganda.
I mean we allowed the alphabet agencies to cooperate with social media companies to fight "ISIS propaganda." -- what did you think would happen?
Scorpion, frog, etc.
If we had stood up to them in 2013, drew a line in the sand and said "No, a bunch of poorly edited snuff films aren't going to cause a bunch of American teens to join an Islamic revolution" these relationships wouldn't exist.
By the way, we are currently trying to ban TikTok because of similar concerns about it rotting teens brains. Before we start frothing at the mouth in rage at some problematic app let's do a thought experiment and consider the future blowback from taking such extreme action.
> It is simply a fact that ISIS did successfully radicalize and recruit western teenagers via the internet.
At no meaningful scale. If some dumbass wants to throw their life away in a foreign country we obviously should use all legal means to discourage that but part of being a liberal democracy means you do in fact have to give people enough freedom (rope) to hang themselves.
No one is talking about banning TikTok because it's rotting anyone's brain. They are talking about it because it gives the CCP direct access to data on millions of US citizens.
> I mean we allowed the alphabet agencies to cooperate with social media companies to fight "ISIS propaganda." -- what did you think would happen?
I remember thinking earlier, it's kind of odd that teenagers "running off to join ISIS" was a widespread problem. In hindsight the shills probably blew that whole thing out of proportion to justify more agency scope creep
The government has been involved with the data broker industry since well before the dotcom era. That is the underpinning of all current day surveillance capitalism. It's an intelligence resource they will never overlook.
I really don't get this response. Cops treating black people horribly is also "nothing new under the sun". Does that make it ok? Has everyone just given up on the idea of reigning in these federal agencies?
One would hope that after the patriot act, the bush jr wars, cablegate, the nsa leaks and so on just in the last 20 years people would desire to not keep the old habits, but I suppose all it took was one buffoon to take presidency and all that rolls back.
Truly a sad sight from those looking hopeful after the occupy movement and all the anti surveillance sentiment post-leaks.
All of that is still happening in the populist movement, both left (Russell Brand, Jimmy Dore, etc) and right (Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, Robert Barnes, etc.). The populist movement which has been gaining traction through new media and new organizations outside of traditional parties.
Also, the “Woke” psyop used to destroy Occupy Wall St has now destroyed corporate America with ESG and Woke media scandals. As usual, the CIA and friends are bad at managing blowback.
Small correction, we can't call them the Bush Jr. wars when they survived and thrived for 8 years under Obama. These were FULLY bipartisan fuckups of monumental proportion that proves how much both parties are in the pocket of Raytheon & Northrop Grumman.
I'm struggling to understand what punishment needs to be handed out, here. The government asked Twitter to keep some of their fake propaganda accounts online and Twitter did. What laws have been violated?
I am a strong supporter of the intelligence community when it is focused on its correct mission of nation-state hostiles, real terrorists like Bin Ladin & international/federal criminals, but I think the government overstepped the line in multiple ways that favored partisan political campaigns and certain parties. Though I believe firmly that these institutions are vital to our success as a nation, I also think they can be internally weaponized against specific groups, and that is going on currently.
It is pretty clear that these are Hatch Act violations which is about preventing your tax dollars being put to use as a part of partisan political campaigns, which is what happened.
Civilian "unempowered" agencies fall under the Less Restricted Hatch Act category, and certain Agencies like the IC, fall under a more stringent part of this, the Further Restricted category, see [1]
Some of these IC members in the Further Restricted Category were prompting BigTech censorship, or, running defense for the "Laptop from Hell" story, similar to some of the things they did back in the 60s when they were involved with unlawful activities regarding Civil Rights and Civil Liberties campaigns.
I'd argue in favor of:
(1) Strengthening the Hatch Act
(2) Handling Constitutional violations by the IC under the Hatch Act
(3) Prosecutions of the Hatch Act under existing Law
(4) Clearance revocations
(5) Removal of Section 230 protections for BigTech when acting as an agent of govt censorship
(6) Budget cuts / Budget reformations for some select Federal Agencies, FBI being foremost
(7) Forced retirement / exit from federal service of those involved in these behaviors.
(8) Debarring of contractors involved in some of these heinious activities
(9) Strengthening Federal Acquisition Regulation
(10) Diffusion of Federal Agencies HQs throughout the United States to prevent centralization in overly partisan areas
(11) Applying Diversity & Inclusion to political parties and other important characteristics of job seekers
(12) Adding restrictions or longer "Cooling Off Periods" for the revolving doors between IC, Congress, BigTech, Lobbyists, and the Consultant Class.
We are discussing whether the event is notable, not if it is legal. And as someone not from the US, I care more about making people aware that Twitter collaborates with the US to help spread their govt. propaganda (in the same way I would want them to know if the doctor they're discussing smoking with is employed by the tobacco industry), than whether Twitter complies with laws written by that same government.
I.e. claiming no laws were violated (hypothetically) is as much a defense of Twitter as claiming TikTok hasn't broken Chinese law.
>Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
It's since been expanded through court cases to extend from congress to every government entity including local ones.
The government is constitutionally forbidden from meddling with the press, even through private entities via the 14th amendment. The FBI and CIA meddled with twitter. The particulars aren't relevant. They're expressly forbidden from doing what they did.
Government “requests” are usually treated as directives, since it’s well understood that they have many seemingly unrelated ways to make life difficult for a company and its officers.
> Overall, Twitter withheld or otherwise removed some or all of the reported content in response to 51% of global legal demands, down 5% from the previous reporting period.
This isn't true asking for your post to be removed doesn't violate your rights. It would if requests were accompanied by legal threats. Twitter is the one removing content and with every right to do so.
I don't follow. The post is long on his odd upbringing, clumsy propaganda campaigns on 4chan, the unlikeliness of some conspiracy theories, and amateur psychoanalysis casting an unkind light on various factions.
So.. what? How does that affect whether his ethnicity has a right to exist as a cohesive group, whether its members are better off as part of such a group vs. alone, whether they are better off sharing their countries with other ethnicities with strong group identities, and whether the documented relative demographic decline of his group in many countries [1] is something that group should welcome?
It is so hyperfocused on the people involved, it entirely ignores the underlying facts.
I don't know - is it interesting that the US govt. used its influence to conceal Twitter influence campaigns that served to justify and whitewash the kind of military operations whose ugliness Manning revealed [1]?
What happens in US military expeditions is 10/10, but how they are sold to the US and global audience is 2/10?
> ...When Stanford could not remove a student organization for bad behavior, they found other justifications. One such case was the end of Outdoor House, an innocuous haven on the far side of campus for students who liked hiking. The official explanation from Stanford for eliminating the house was that the Outdoor theme “fell short of diversity, equity and inclusion expectations.” ...
> Next year, Outdoor House will be reinstated, but only because house members promised to refocus their theme on “racial and environmental justice in the outdoors.” Upholding diversity, equity, and inclusion is the first of four “ResX principles” that now govern undergraduate housing. Stanford reserves the right to unhouse any organization that does not, in their opinion, uphold these principles.
I wonder what portion of that 1971 'White British' were actually Irish, Huguenots French, German Jewish or one of the other myriad dispossessed groups that have been coming to London for centuries.
Like clockwork. When it comes to claiming Europe has always been diverse and its countries have no identity, and demographics trends must be obfuscated, different European ethnicities are looked at separately, as if they have nothing in common. But when it's time to blame white people or claim some profession isn't diverse enough, they're lumped into a single group.
> Women wait around ten years in America for a diagnosis of endometriosis, a painful but historically little studied gynaecological condition. [..] Might such delays and biases reflect skews in academic research?
That's a nice anecdote. Let's see what happens when we expand the sample size:
"Struggled" meaning tried to hide until the secret got out internally. In completely unrelated news that didn't make the cut for the NYT or Washington Post or most other wikipedia "reliable sources":
> There were a record 44.8 million immigrants living in the U.S. in 2018, making up 13.7% of the nation’s population. This represents a more than fourfold increase since 1960, when 9.7 million immigrants lived in the U.S., accounting for 5.4% of the total U.S. population. - https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2020/08/20/facts-on-u-s...
Given that immigration to the US has been high for decades, and 1st generation immigrants as a % of the population are at the highest levels since 1910, if immigration was the solution, wouldn't the problem* be solved already?
*Instead of calling it a "labor shortage", why not a "job surplus"?
