You’re in luck.

See the right margin “categories” drop-down menu.

It has “transgenderism,” “feminism,” “politics,” “men’s issues,” “economics,” “abortion,” “animals,” “culture,” “drugs,” and so on. Quite a few on what you are looking for. And I’ve written more on these things in the last couple of years.

You can also use the search box for more specific things like “Trump” or “universal basic income.”

There’s also hardly any good “entry points” into important topics like transgender issues – like you
really have to dig if you want to find the truth (or find “more truth”). It’s a tour I took.

But anyway, that’s just my suggestion. We need guys like you in times like now.

Thanks.

(btw, I think there may have been a comment on some other post I left somewhere….I can’t find it to see your reply, otherwise I would have replied back. I didn’t realize there was a “email me new posts” option. anyways, I clicked it this time)

Sorry to reply again, Bill, but something caught my eye. I am not intending to bury you with verbiage here, but this is so emblematic of just awful reasoning, reasoning that you are clearly smarter than, that it deserves to be unpacked. Because if you can get why this was a terrible and thoughtless argument, maybe you can stop holding your irrational ideas about the sociology of race.

So you said, “Absurd given how much money is invested in diversity training. In Chicago, for instance, police have to take multiple cultural competency courses, including on religion, so if there is systemic racism in policing against black people, then 1. those courses don’t work and it is all pervasive or 2. they do work on only some police officers are racist and therefore there is no systemic racism in policing against blacks”.

The number of ways that this line of reasoning is so mangled and so full of fractal non sequiturs, I want to break it down.

Broadly, the argument is:

1) If a problem is real, a solution is present for it.
2) Diversity training is a solution to systemic racism in policing.
3) Diversity training has been implemented.
4) Diversity training has not completely eliminated systemic racism.
5) Therefore, systemic racism doesn’t exist.

As you yourself correctly note, #1 and #2 are false. A problem can be real and the proposed solutions for it fail to deal with it. One cannot reason from the failure of solutions to the non-existence of problems.

But #3 is only supported by referring to Chicago. You say “for instance”, but don’t prove that Chicago is actually representative.

You don’t support #4 with any evidence whatsoever.

So #5 doesn’t follow.

But the entire argument hinges on two utterly fallacious lines of reasoning.

First, you implicitly assume that a solution must be perfect for it to be worth implementing.

In fact, if we see that a bias training program reduces racial gaps in policing, we are perfectly justified in making the inference that there was bias. But it’s affirming the consequent to go the other way: the failure of a policy doesn’t disprove the existence of a problem, especially when that problem is documented. The fact that you had to try to reason this way to get to your argument shows that even you know that you can’t make a valid argument to the conclusion, so you need an invalid one.

Bias training could be being effective by reducing the amount of bias in action among officers, and still not perfectly solve the problem because it doesn’t totally eliminate the bias. You simply assume this problem away.

In fact, part of the reason for a broad-reaching, relatively radical route to criminal justice reform in line with “Defund the Police” rhetoric is precisely because no one solution on its own is likely to be effective and we’ve seen that piecemeal reforms get coopted or ignored. We need broad-reaching change that actually makes the institutions shift in their values and behaviors.

But the second problem is that you fractally fail to understand racism in the criminal justice system.

It’s not just implicit bias in police officers. It’s not just the same kind of implicit biases in police leadership, or prosecutors, or policymakers, or corrections officers and officials. It’s not just the presence of explicit bias among some individuals, even if it may be a minority. It’s not just the pressures toward police militarization. It’s not just a militaristic society that tends to use criminalization approaches instead of rationally-rooted ones. It’s not just the overt racism, classism and anti-leftism that birthed the drug war. It’s not just the protection of American banks that engage in money laundering for drug dealers. It’s not just the failure to properly fund social work and other alternatives to the police, motivated by a culture that values sadism and cruelty (often rooted in Christian fundamentalism). It’s not just failing to clean up lead.

It’s all of those things. So implicit bias training was never meant to single-handedly solve the problem. So this entire line of reasoning is as irrational as someone telling their auto mechanic that they clearly don’t need to change their oil because their tires blew. The entire car has issues, and if we don’t intend to just replace it, then we need to do some serious maintenance.

But by being reductive, you can point your opponents as simple-minded, stubborn, irrational bigots. You can ignore that the problem is multifaceted, including elements that aren’t even directly about race but become institutionally racist when they aggravate existing racial differences. It’s irrational, and actually demonstrates a total contempt for the needs of all Americans, but it does at least have the benefit of making one feel better, I guess.

And you even tried to slip in a genetic fallacy along with your anecdotal arguments with the claim that you know people who are on anti-racist taskforces who have racist views. As if their individual hypocrisy proves that there is widespread hypocrisy among anti-racist workers in general. Let alone as if their individual hypocrisy proves that the broad approach isn’t justified. Their imperfections has nothing to do with the argument… but it does let you decide to not talk about the racism of officers, or the failure of the criminal justice system, or the needs of communities of color, or anything of the sort. You used whataboutism as a woobie.

You may not realize this about yourself. But it’s transparent to everyone else.

So I ended up doing what I doubt you ever actually did, and simply read what West has said about Thomas. And, quelle surprise, you’re full of shit. You simply cannot honestly represent the tenor and nature of your opponent’s arguments.

https://www.google.com/books/edition/Race_Matters/p89c2eTJgJgC?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=clarence%20thomas . In Race Matters, West criticizes Thomas for mediocrity and failure: Allowing discrimination cases to “die on the vine”, being underqualified in educational terms and actual bench achievement, etc. He also upbraids him for having criticized his sister, Emma Mae, in ways that are racist mythology and deeply unfair to his sister. (You know, that racial solidarity you criticized West for not showing but never criticized Thomas for not showing, given your inability to avoid partisan bias!)

He centers all of this in the light of the cruelty shown Anita Hill and what he argues to have been a failure of black intellectual character and leadership. His criticism of Thomas was a springboard to discuss other things, broader concerns. He even notes that Souter’s mediocrity shouldn’t be used to excuse Thomas’. His point is that the black community having defended Thomas implicitly indicates that racial solidarity has to defend the mediocre, which is an internalized acquiescence to racist ideology. None of this is really about Thomas. There isn’t a vendetta here. There are measured criticisms.

And here, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/race/interviews/west.html , West says the following after Gates points out that Thomas had been depicted as a jockey and in other deeply cruel ways: “Clarence Thomas must never be demonized. He ought to be deeply criticized, ought not to be disrespected in terms of having his humanity called into question even though a person like myself may have very deep disagreements with him. It’s so easy to begin to demonize someone you think is so far removed and as the demonization begins to expand, it ends up being everybody but your friends. After a while everybody else but you. That is a slippery slope that is so easy to slide down, and that’s what is dangerous. So there ought to be a robust, uninhibited conversation in black America with different black ideological perspectives”. That’s not ignoring racial solidarity. That’s caring about it while also caring about truth and caring about the totality of your community beyond mere token members of it. And while I have some concerns about the identity politics framing that West and Gates take for granted here, I can have those concerns while also having empathy for why they are thinking that way and recognizing that perhaps they have some concerns I am not properly understanding. You know, actual empathy, actual wisdom, actual compassion.

In other words, West is very measured about his criticism. I am sure you think West is being unreasonable because you disagree with him. But this is simply not the hit piece you thought it was.

You lied to me. And I bet you didn’t even check this. I bet you inherited from conservative commentary that West was just a hater and a mediocre scholar, and didn’t read West in his own words.

Why do you not care what your word means? When you say something, why do you not care that it’s routinely not correct, not well thought-out, not reliable? Shouldn’t your word and deed matter to you?

Holy shit, Bill, now you are just screwing up super basic philosophy, and exposing yourself to be utterly inept, while going back to previous conversations, all so you can avoid talking about systemic racism. At least for once you’re talking about an issue, before you then decide to pull your dirtiest pool yet.

So! Implicit bias! Finally!

You say, “Implicit bias literature is when you want ESP without wanting ESP: it’s mindreading but without the cool occult stuff”.

And you offer precisely zero evidence for this. You cite Pinker on an unrelated broader topic.

You say, “If one has an implicit bias, there are only two ways that is possible: innate ideas (impossible according to hardcore atheist physicalist i,e. reductionists) or they are learned (ala Locke’s blank slate). Stephen Pinker wrote a whole book “How the Mind Works” which is against the blank slate theory but nonetheless, most philosophers more or less reject belief in innate ideas”.

The fallacy of a false dilemma. Ideas can be both innate and learned, with complex influences from both biology and environment, and “biology” and “environment” are themselves intertwined inextricably and cyclically. And you are now trying to take a position that both are false, even when you’re trying to
argue for this false binary. Are you even trying to pay attention? Of course, you end up clearly siding with learned behavior, so… implicit bias is learned so I win!

In fact, Bill, the modern scientific and philosophical consensus (and this is so fucking basic I shouldn’t need to cite this for you, but I will: https://canvas.highline.edu/courses/1240222/pages/false-dichotomy-nature-vs-nurture?module_item_id=16078526#:~:text=The%20very%20nature%20of%20the,options%2C%20whereas%20others%20are%20available ) is that it’s both. We have some built-in ideas (and how the fuck is this against physicalism? our ideas are a physical consequence of brain configuration under physicalism), or more accurately some built-in ways that we approach the world and engage with it. The entire field of cognitive psychology demonstrates a host of biases. We also learn stuff. You need to stop reading mass market books like Pinker’s that support your delusions and start actually talking to experts in the fields in question. If you talk to almost anyone working anywhere in sociology, they will all tell you that it’s always both biological and social.

And so implicit biases (and, again, you clearly believe in implicit biases, you keep alleging people are biased and don’t have the audacity to claim it’s all overt consciously-held hatred) are a combination of these. We live in a racist society, but people have natural tendencies toward in-group and out-group identification. Those tendencies are complex and can lead to homophilic in-group valorizing or heterophilic out-group valorizing effects, etc. but they do always lead to stereotypes and biases. Like, are you going to try to argue that people don’t have stereotypical thoughts?

So let’s actually cite some research!

https://bmcmedethics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12910-017-0179-8 , for example, is a systematic analysis that confirms that IAT tests have impacts on real behavior. All of the hash that some make about test-retest stability (you know, that thing we should accept would change given that the test itself can expose the underlying biases in the person to that person) and other complaints miss that the overwhelming bulk of the literature can link implicit bias results to demonstrable impacts in the world. It’s measuring something, but there is reasonable debate about what and what impact it’s having. I bet you think IQ is a valid measure even though it’s nowhere near as useful and is infinitely more ideologically and scientifically fraught!

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0956797619844270 actually supports you a little, Bill, but it also supports me. They find that biases seem to emerge from being immersed in a culture but that individual biases can evaporate in different cultures. Which explains why bias training can work.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1364661321002047 this also indicates that it comes from structural inequality. Some, like https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/2372732217746190 , argue that conventional bias training puts too much focus on the individual, and I agree, but the very existence of the bias training raises consciousness of these biases.

And this one, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31192631/ , finds that you can use a ton of measures to try to change the results and you still get implicit measures that can vary slightly but still have the same level of correlation with observed behavior and explicit bias.

Oh, and when it comes to his ideas about the blank slate and evo psych, Pinker is a hack. https://freethoughtblogs.com/reprobate/2018/02/25/three-feminist-myths/ demonstrates how Pinker is both internally inconsistent and ideologically biased in how he surveys evidence. And Richard’s own analysis of evopsych, on which Pinker heavily depends, is also useful: https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/9141 . Pinker just straight up lies both about activist and movement feminism and about all his ideological opponents, implying that everyone who rejects his radical biotruths and his extreme beliefs in modularity (and the ascension of free markets and everything else) are all just people who believe in a blank slate, when no one does. It’s a massive strawman, and you apparently don’t know that. Which means you have done no research on the sources you cite. Super telling.

There are valid criticisms of IAT measures and approaches. You’re not making them.

You say, :” Which means that if implicit biases are in fact learned, but one is unaware of their existence. Where did they learn these biases? In police training courses? Absurd given how much money is invested in diversity training. In Chicago, for instance, police have to take multiple cultural competency courses, including on religion, so if there is systemic racism in policing against black people, then 1. those courses don’t work and it is all pervasive or 2. they do work on only some police officers are racist and therefore there is no systemic racism in policing against blacks”.

Because people wake up and turn on as complete blank slates the day they walk into police training. And all cops live in Chicago.

Dude, we live in a society where people have biases and stereotypes. You know this. You’ve acknowledged it yourself in these threads. You were previously so terrified of this fact that you wanted us to not talk about racism so it would go away. Now you seem to be baffled, BAFFLED!, at the idea that racism exists everywhere.

Why is it so bizarre to imagine that people who have been exposed to even explicit racist messaging (you know, like the neo-Nazis spewing trash on the Internet or everyone’s proverbial racist uncles), let alone broader cultural ideas about race that came from a racist society, might absorb that implicitly at a level before they have even considered it? You just make a baseless argument from incredulity against this.

You don’t cite any evidence about the efficacy of the Chicago police program, which would be a pretty important thing to suggest. I haven’t found any, but I did find that HR professionals note how important it is ( https://www.builtinchicago.org/2020/11/09/chicago-unconscious-bias-in-the-workplace ) and that bias training can work ( https://hbr.org/2021/09/unconscious-bias-training-that-works#:~:text=UB%20training%20seeks%20to%20raise,interactions%20with%20customers%20and%20colleagues. ). The problem has been programs that have just assumed that mere consciousness alone, rather than broader institutional support and changing actual behavior and habits, is sufficient. This is why the bias training programs that demonstrably work are ones where people actually train to see their bias in action and change their behavior and habits. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/businessreview/2021/03/24/is-unconscious-bias-training-still-worthwhile/ is a very good article that argues that IAT training needs to continue, just with a broader, more thoroughgoing support.

What a surprise. An ideologically motivated conservative denies the evidence, doesn’t have any on offer, cherry-picks anecdotes, and then makes his worldview from that, all to justify not improving flawed but well-meaning policies so they are even more effective. Nothing at all emblematic about that (/s)!

You say, “Every “anti-racist” I’ve ever met was far more racist than they average Joe Sixpack on the street. It’s “anti-racists” who want separate student unions, graduation ceremonies, hell, even racially segregated yoga studios. Even a great mind like the great late Thích Nhất Hạnh supported this bullshit towards the end of his life, proving that even Buddhist masters can become morally corrupted by woke ideology”.

So you have anecdotal data. And anecdotal data based on a bad comparison: Anti-racists, since they are dedicated activists, should be compared to neo-Nazis and alt-righters who are their ideologically motivated opposition, rather than random members of the population. I wonder why you did that. Maybe because an actually fair comparison would prove how much of a fucking partisan hack you are being?

You cite no polls, of course, and you know damn well I can cite you poll after poll that shows that the average American will say some incredibly racist, offensive, vile horseshit. They will be biased against Muslims, against Arabs, against atheists. So your anecdotal data doesn’t fucking cut it, Bill.

Of course, your immense bias on this topic has already been exposed. I have not shown a single indication that I’m more racist than everyone who voted for Donald Trump, Bill. You just stopped trying to have that argument. I bet you’ve pigeonholed me into the racist anti-racist category: you already accused me of being effectively a self-hating white, no matter the original tenor of my response to you, and of having incredible anti-conservative hatred, no matter how much I am clearly capable of returning to calm policy analysis. Your judgment fucking sucks, Bill. I don’t trust you to identify a racist because you demonstrably do it poorly.

I’m a Buddhist. It scares me that you think Buddhism supports your thoughts. Buddhism should tell you that your mental illusions can mislead you and active thought and mindfulness are necessary to improve compassion, because compassionate, enlightened behavior is not default. Why didn’t you assume this from Buddhism, Bill? Why did you ignore your apparent beliefs? Is it because your biases are stronger than your practice?

You say, “Even if we did have innate ideas, there is no scientific reason to think racism is one of those”.
What a wonderful bit of assuming your beliefs to be true in your premises. IAT studies, the thing we were discussing, say that racism is implicit, though not innate.

And, yeah, actually, Bill, there’s some pretty good research that indicates that humans are predisposed to use some visual signifiers to identify tribe. That’s not an overwhelming signal, it can be overcome, and it’s based off of the society’s existing racial and ethnic understanding. We don’t talk about Scythians anymore. We’re not worried about the Peril of the Hun. But the fact that societies do tend to keep developing racist ideologies does point to something about us. Chomsky has argued that it’s more parsimonious to argue that people use ex post facto rationalizations to justify the shitty things they’re already doing, and that’s fair as an explanation for systemic racism and colonialist ideology.

You say, “Back to Cornel West, West opposed Thomas due to party lines because that is what is expected of him.”

[citation needed]

You don’t cite a single piece of West’s actual arguments against Thomas. You just assert, baldly, that he’s as biased as you are. Why? Why can’t you ever bother making actual facts? These two links you cite here, in order to engage in some dirty fucking pool on an incredibly tangential point so that you can make a fallacious argument that doesn’t prove West was right about Thomas.

Maybe Cornel West is an asshole, dude. That doesn’t make him wrong about Thomas. Your argument from hypocrisy and genetic fallacy doesn’t fucking cut it. Why did you do this? I keep on pointing out how you keep making arguments about people rather than ideas, and you keep being unable to help yourself.

You say, “This is the same guy who shared a stage with a suspected murderer named Radhanath Swami. So West has an issue with a so called “Uncle Tom” like Justice Thomas but can’t be bothered to read the countless articles and several books that outright accuse his Swami friend of being a murderous cult member and yet I am accused of not doing my research on these people?”

Oh, cool, so guilt by association is totally valid! Every Republican who ever bitches about child pornography, like they did with Jackson, are all massive hypocrites because of Dennis Hastert! They’re all rapists because they love Trump, the self-admitted rapist, and Kavanaugh, the accused rapist and known liar! You seem to know your spiritual communities: is everyone who has ever even considered new spirituality after the 60s all guilty of terrorism because of fucking Rajneesh? You hated that we were treating the Covington kids by virtue of looking at them being ant-abortion right-wing extremists, so apparently that’s actually valid and we can just assume Sandmann is an asshole just because of his asshole friends and his asshole school! I can go on and on. It is trivial to find people on every issue you’ve talked about on this thread who hang out with jerks, who platform jerks, etc. People are flawed. But that never bothers you when it’s your pet issues.

It couldn’t be that West disagrees with you and finds the accusations implausible, or thinks that the arguments from the guy are interesting and he actually believes in platforming controversial figures. It couldn’t be that he had thought maybe he should debate him because Swami might be dangerous and a possible murderer, and found the right place to do that, the way that Dillahunty did huge damage to Peterson is a “conversation” just by basic logic. Nope. He’s a hypocrite. Even though you don’t cite any of his reasoning for why he did it. Even though you didn’t ask him. You bitch about intellectual charity and then only once cite your opposition, when you did it with Tim, and you cited a different article than the one that was shown to you then lied about what it said.

Hey, Bill, remember when you said that common law was the way you described harm? Swami is suspected of murder. Not convicted. You fucking mendacious clown. I’m sorry, but you deserve to be upbraided for that bullshit you just pulled. You have contradicted, just now, countless things you have said earlier.

When it came to the harm from racism, that has to be done in law. But when it comes to a guy you don’t like and think may be a murderer, fuck that it’s all allegations, not only should we not listen to him, but West is a bad person for platforming him!

When it came to Kavanaugh, it was totally acceptable for him to shriek about a persecution complex because he was being accused. But Swami can’t do the same because accusations against him are clearly matters of indisputable public record, despite the lack of any actual prosecution and the fact that everyone has to say “alleged” about all these murders because no one ever fucking made a case despite it supposedly being so ironclad!

Intellectual charity? Not for West! He’s a hypocrite because he likes an alleged murderer but not an alleged grabass and proven bad judge, even though those aren’t even the same thing!

What an incredibly fucking asshole move you just pulled, Bill. When it comes to people you don’t like, allegations on blogs and Quora fucking cut it. Rumors cut it. What incredible mendacity.

Looking up the accusations against Swami, there’s Quora articles that insist that he ordered the hit on Prabhu, some blog posts, etc. Nothing like evidence, or a police report, or anything. It sounds like the standard bullshit accusations that happen in cults. Might Swami be a murderer? Hell yeah! Rajneesh sure did that anthrax stuff! It astonishes me how much you act like a partisan. Like, I think Bill Clinton is a likely rapist, dude. You can criticize Cornel West all you like. No gods, no masters, no idols. Maybe you need to start doing the same.

And this borderline libelous accusation was, let’s remember, to: 1) Discredit Swami so that 2) You can discredit West by guilt by association so that 3) You can argue that West had no valid reason to dislike Thomas and was being ideologically motivated so that 4) What again, exactly? That liberal blacks can disagree with conservative blacks, thus disproving your entire bullshit about identity politics and how liberals behave? What’s your fucking point? How badly have you lost the plot? If I were to make an argument like this, Bill, relying on sheer fucking hearsay and rumor, I would have done it for something central to the argument. Not some tangential nonsense. You really don’t give a fuck about racism.
Inside baseball about Hare Krishnas and other new spirituality movements? THAT you know about and have citations for! How fucking telling!

Be more mindful, Bill. You of all people have no excuse for this bullshit. You are applying such a grotesquely obvious double standard that it is clearly coming from not having thought about your beliefs for five seconds. Think about why you are so charged on this topic. Take some accountability for yourself.

Hey, Bill. If you’re constantly hearing from people that you are demonstrably a lay person and don’t understand what you’re talking about, you should take some personal responsibility and listen to that, and start either doing some research and consulting experts or not running your mouth about things you don’t know about.

If I heard in the 90s, when I was 13, that a judge would want to hear from a biologist to know what a woman was, I would accept that there’s probably some nuances that are important or at least that there could be. Apparently even as a teenager I was more honest than you ever have been.

Yeah, so… Richard’s comment obviously demonstrates the point here. Seriously, this isn’t up for any debate. We’re not just concerned about Thomas’ own opinions, though you saying that spouses can disagree about a topic doesn’t mean that they are and doesn’t deny that they are much more likely to agree on a topic than the average person they don’t like, especially when there’s independent evidence that they are likely to agree (namely, Thomas’ existing partisan bias matching his wife). We are actually perfectly justified in worrying that Thomas has opinions that he cannot overcome, but hopefully as a judge he could.

The problem is that he has a vested interest in the case that has nothing to do with his own convictions or sense of the law. His family could be affected depending on his ruling. And that not only gives him a perverse incentive to rule dishonestly, but very reasonably could cloud his judgment and make him delusionally reason toward his desired conclusion.

You can say that you would think the same about Kagan with BLM, but, well, I don’t believe you, Bill. You have shown yourself to be perfectly willing to allege bias from all sorts of parties. You’ve said it about the mainstream media. You even argued, straight-up illogically, that Sandmann must have had bias against him to win the lawsuits, even though the fact of the lawsuits going his way actually proves that the system worked for him – the proof of systemic bias would have been if he had had justice denied. The way that Blasey-Ford did.

This isn’t just a matter of ignorance, Bill. You’ve proven both that you care about bias and try to detect it when it’s against your tribe. You not seeing a problem here, and continuing to try to debate minutiae instead of systemic racism, just keeps showing the point.

Why can’t you talk about systemic racism, Bill?

Implicit bias literature is when you want ESP without wanting ESP: it’s mindreading but without the cool occult stuff. If one has an implicit bias, there are only two ways that is possible: innate ideas (impossible according to hardcore atheist physicalist i,e. reductionists) or they are learned (ala Locke’s blank slate). Stephen Pinker wrote a whole book “How the Mind Works” which is against the blank slate theory but nonetheless, most philosophers more or less reject belief in innate ideas. Which means that if implicit biases are in fact learned, but one is unaware of their existence. Where did they learn these biases? In police training courses? Absurd given how much money is invested in diversity training. In Chicago, for instance, police have to take multiple cultural competency courses, including on religion, so if there is systemic racism in policing against black people, then 1. those courses don’t work and it is all pervasive or 2. they do work on only some police officers are racist and therefore there is no systemic racism in policing against blacks. Which is it? I know people on anti-racism task forces who are openly against WASPS marrying non-WASPS, what to speak of legit interracial marriage. Every “anti-racist” I’ve ever met was far more racist than they average Joe Sixpack on the street. It’s “anti-racists” who want separate student unions, graduation ceremonies, hell, even racially segregated yoga studios. Even a great mind like the great late Thích Nhất Hạnh supported this bullshit towards the end of his life, proving that even Buddhist masters can become morally corrupted by woke ideology.

Even if we did have innate ideas, there is no scientific reason to think racism is one of those. Back to Cornel West, West opposed Thomas due to party lines because that is what is expected of him. This is the same guy who shared a stage with a suspected murderer named Radhanath Swami. So West has an issue with a so called “Uncle Tom” like Justice Thomas but can’t be bothered to read the countless articles and several books that outright accuse his Swami friend of being a murderous cult member and yet I am accused of not doing my research on these people?

https://iskconnews.org/radhanath-swami-and-dr-cornel-west-bond-in-conversation-on-faith/

http://www.harekrsna.org/gbc/black/radanath.htm

My 90s self would be totally on board with that. Because I had just read the entirety of Roe v Wade and knew even then that’s exactly the sort of thing the judiciary is for.

That gender didn’t mean the same thing as sex was already well established by then (a formal scientific discovery of it goes at least as far back as the 1950s; it became mainstream in academic discourse by the 1970s).

Though I would later discover this wasn’t new. Ancient authors exhibit awareness of the distinction even as far back as the Roman Empire, which should be less surprising as they employed fully gendered languages and thus were well aware gender had nothing to do with sex, as if ships and abstractions like “virtue” had genitals. I also discovered in the late 90s, from taking courses in anthropology at the time, that many cultures have long made the distinction explicit, even identifying more than two genders, such as in certain Native American and West Asian cultures.

Jackson is well aware the science on this is now immense and complex and she isn’t an expert in it. As a judge, she must adhere to what actual experts testify to in proceedings within the boundaries of the Federal Rules of Evidence. And she has taken no cases like that yet, so couldn’t comment. Just as she explained to the disingenuous ignoramuses questioning her in Congress. And we should want judges to act exactly like this. It’s precisely what they are for: to maintain neutrality in disputes until formal proceedings are presented to them properly weighing the pertinent facts and law.

Bill, two things:

Technicals:

Because the comments thread by indenting, there is a functional limit on how many subthreads can be presented in a browser frame. Once you hit that limit, you simply have to go back up the thread stages and start over. There is no actual fix for this. Other than using a commenting plugin that doesn’t indent threaded comments, which would eliminate the utility of threading. (I actually do want a better comments plugin, but the difficulty of installing and debugging such things is too extreme to justify spending days trying to set it up, so I haven’t yet.)

Subject of discussion:

On the legal question, that isn’t how the law works. It is precisely because of proximity to power and influence that recusal is required. The mere appearance of undo influence is always sufficient legal grounds. At no point does anyone have to prove any actual influence occurred. All the law requires is that a judge’s “impartiality might reasonably be questioned.” Period. It tends to be the case that people are influenced by or biased toward the positions of their spouses. So Thomas’s impartiality can be reasonably questioned. No one needs to prove that it “is” questionable. There is reasonable grounds to suspect it. And the law says that’s that.

Look over the various examples of disqualifying grounds under that law: they are even more vague than “my spouse tried to secretly overthrow the government.” So if they count, that certainly does. And lo, it is explicitly listed in par. 5: “He or his spouse, or a person within the third degree of relationship to either of them, or the spouse of such a person: … Is known by the judge to have an interest that could be substantially affected by the outcome of the proceeding.”

As for example, her communications on the matter of insurrection being surrendered to the investigating committee—yet he voted against that, without admitting his section 28 grounds for recusal (we only found out later that he had something to hide by that vote). That’s judicial corruption under the law. Maybe not enough to impeach him for it though (as he was outvoted it’s a consequentially minor offense), but if he continues to violate section 28, he very well can be legally impeached and removed from the bench for corrupt practice (and yes, the law is explicit on this point, too).

The important takeaway here though is methodological: you should have been able to determine this yourself with just five minutes of Googling. That you didn’t discredits everything you say as likely not reliably fact-checked or even knowledgeable. The more we catch you failing at basic epistemic responsibilities, the less trustable anything you say becomes.

You need to engage routinely in reliable fact-checking and self-informing on issues you weigh in on before anyone has any reason to believe you ever do that. And only if they believe you reliably do that can they trust anything you say. You need to start becoming a more epistemically reliable person. This is literally the most important quality in anyone who would ever expect to engage a discussion of any matter of fact, ever. And you should take this seriously.