- "War on __" doesn't imply an irrational war on __
- I'm not sure I buy that. I think the reputation of soldiers varies greatly with the public perception of the wars they fought. Soldiers are highly regarded when they're seen to be fighting some great evil, but at other times soldiers are considered to be fools or even among the lowest strata of society (particularly before the modern era.)
WW2 veterans receive near universal praise, but in the Vietnam era there were widespread (probably heavily exaggerated if not fabricated) reports of soldiers being spat on because a whole lot of people didn't think America's military adventurism was really in defense of America. Of course those who felt that the war was necessary in the fight against communism to defend the American way of life had a more positive view of the same soldiers. In more recent wars with all volunteer soldiers I think the reputation of soldiers is just as polarized although usually the negative side doesn't go further than cool sniffs and sneers; the spitting was probably all apocryphal in the first place. Certainly you won't see me going around thanking Iraq vets for their service; they signed up for a stupid war and I'm not going to thank them for making that mistake. I won't look down on a soldier who got drafted, but those soldiers who signed up for the travel, job experience, college education, etc are essentially mercenaries anyway.
- We need to have severe penalties for negligent DMCA takedowns, not just willfully malicious ones. Including disbarment and possibly imprisonment for any lawyers involved. Taking down pages about NASA rocketry because they shared a name with a social media model was probably an accident, but it's an inexcusable accident that never should have happened. These kind of accidents wouldn't happen so often if the people issuing takedowns were forced to have skin in the game.
- It's well respected in the sense that when you're at a dinner party and tell people that you're a school teacher everybody says "Oh how nice! that's such an important job. You must love working with the kids, right? So rewarding to be able to make a difference"
Contrast when you tell somebody you're a lawyer or lobbyist, some people will be impressed but other people will get a bit uncomfortable and try to change the subject or start telling "lawyer jokes".
What did the lawyer name his daughter? Sue!
- The fact that nobody was injured in the previous incident is fortunate for anybody who might have been injured then, but doesn't diminish the importance of addressing whatever flaw caused the explosion. Considering that we're talking about a lot of liquid helium being improperly vented, the next time something goes wrong it could end up asphyxiating a hundred people.
Just because nobody was in the danger zone the first time it exploded doesn't mean you should count on nobody being in the danger zone the second or third time it might explode. This is the reason work site safety officers yell at people to report all near-miss incidents, not only the accidents that get people hurt. If something went wrong and nobody got hurt by chance coincidence, it might happen again when people are actually near it. Therefore a near miss incident needs to be addressed with the same seriousness as an accident that actually caused injury.
- > Tell us how you really feel. :)
Anybody who says that deserves a prompt smack. I told you how I feel you smarmy parasitic prick.
- You nose detects it and your brain reacts to it; it's odor. Just because you don't consciously perceive it doesn't mean it isn't odor. If it isn't odor then there isn't any other good word for it.
- You've rightly hedged with "sometimes", the article on the other hand is very whiggish and seems to incline that any perception of decline at any time in any place is a cognitive bias and not representative of reality. What about in the UK during and in the years after WW2, when rationing continued and in some cases got even worse even after the war ended and average body weights were dropping? Where people who perceived a decline there and then operating under delusions and believing things which weren't true? Do their experiences at the time not count because a generation later things started to recover? Or maybe their experiences don't count because the decline of the British empire was actually a good thing from certain points of view and anybody who saw it as a decline had an invalid opinion?
Or maybe because technology seems to march inexorably onward, decline in other aspects of life are wholly negated and therefore anybody who perceives any decline is wrong. If rent and groceries now account for a larger portion of an average worker's spending but ipads got twice as fast, does that mean that people who perceive a decline are objectively wrong?
- > In any case, I don't think anyone is qualified to credit or discredit a claim in a medical or psychologically diagnostic sense without a clinical interview (something that few psychiatrists are qualified to perform by the way). That's not what I'm doing here. What I'm pointing out is the unreliability of recovered memory.
Uh huh... and in another comment in this discussion you've gone on to speculate that she has BPD, with the implication that her accusations shouldn't be believed for that reason.
- So let me get this straight, your training as a psychoanalyst qualifies you to discredit a woman's testimony, despite you never having met with her? How wonderful.
By the way, have you read this?
> Today, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) reiterates its continued and unwavering commitment to the ethical principle known as "The Goldwater Rule." We at the APA call for an end to psychiatrists providing professional opinions in the media about public figures whom they have not examined, whether it be on cable news appearances, books, or in social media. Armchair psychiatry or the use of psychiatry as a political tool is the misuse of psychiatry and is unacceptable and unethical.
https://www.psychiatry.org/newsroom/news-releases/apa-calls-...
- When chemicals float through the air into your nose or mouth and get detected by your brain, that's odor. Conscious perception or unconscious emotional reaction makes no difference, both are odor. If there are no chemicals being emitted or they have no reaction to your nose and your nose doesn't change the signals it's sending to your brain, then you can fairly say it has no odor.
To say that odors aren't odors unless they are consciously perceived is like saying UV isn't light because you don't consciously perceive it. Except it's the same physical phenomena, electromagnetic radiation or chemicals floating through the air, your sensory organs are detecting it (mostly being destroyed by it in the case of UV, but probably not in the case of tear odor...) and your brain is reacting to it even though you don't consciously realize it.
- If tears are being detected by the brain, it's through chemicals from the tears traveling through the air and landing on sensors in your nose (or mouth); that is odor. If there is some mechanism other than odor by which humans might distinguish tears them from saline solution after sniffing them, please tell me.
Odors also being detected with your tongue is irrelevant trivia which doesn't alter my conclusion. Sound can be heard through your chest but that's irrelevant trivia when somebody says "if there's no air to transmit pressure waves to your ears then there's no sound." Sound is transmitted through pressure waves in the air, and odors are transmitted through chemicals in the air. If you're hearing them with your ears or chest or smelling them with your nose or mouth makes no difference, the fact that any detection is evidently taking place shows that there is sound or odor involved. Furthermore, the researchers obviously suspect that the mechanism of detection is odor because they asked their subjects to sniff it. You don't ask subjects to sniff a thing unless you suspect odor of being involved. If researchers were studying the perception of magnetic fields, they wouldn't ask people to sniff the fields.
Again, if there is any other plausible mechanism for detection, then tell me. Otherwise, stop wasting my time.
- If they think it's being absorbed through the lungs then they should plug the subjects noses and have them inhale instead of sniffing it. But that's a far fetched assumption. Assuming the effect is real at all, it's almost certainly chemical detection through the nose. That's odor. That's why they had the subjects sniff it, because they obviously suspect that it's based on odor.
> She is accused of plagiarism in her dissertation and at least two of her 11 journal articles. Two sentences from the acknowledgement section of her dissertation even seem to have been copied from another work.
Presuming the allegations are true, I find it interesting that it went unaddressed for so long. The matter was seemingly systematically ignored for almost 30 years until she pissed off the wrong people by allowing students to protest against Israel. Then people went digging for something to use against her and found this plagarism. From the NYTimes:
> After weeks of tumult at Harvard over the university’s response to the Israel-Hamas war and the leadership of its president, Claudine Gay, there was no shortage of interest in a faculty forum with Dr. Gay this week.
> In a town hall held over Zoom on Tuesday with several hundred members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Dr. Gay focused on how to bridge the deep divides that had emerged on campus as a result of the war, according to two people who attended and asked for confidentiality because of the sensitivity of the situation.
> Faculty members who spoke up in the meeting were largely positive, and there were no questions about Dr. Gay’s academic record after public allegations of plagiarism. The matter wasn’t even raised, one professor said.
> But by Thursday, new questions surrounding Dr. Gay’s scholarship had shifted to the forefront, after the university said late Wednesday that it had identified two more instances of what it called “duplicative language without appropriate attribution,” from her 1997 doctoral dissertation.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/21/us/harvard-claudine-gay-p...