Shakedown, Down Under
SJW Nonsense reports from Australia’s Clown Quarter, where jokes about absurdity will be punished absurdly:
On the 28th May 2013, an incident took place in a computer lab on the campus at the Queensland University of Technology. A student, Alex Wood, and two friends walked into the computer lab, hoping to use a computer. A university staff member, Cindy Prior, approached the group and asked them whether or not they were indigenous, informing them that they had entered an “indigenous space” for aboriginal students, and that they needed to find another computer room on campus. The students left the lab at her request. Later, Alex posted a comment in a student Facebook group, saying, “Just got kicked out of the unsigned indigenous computer room. QUT: stopping segregation with segregation?” Among many comments was one by another student, Jackson Powell, saying, “I wonder where the white supremacist computer lab is?”
In August 2015, over two years after the incident occurred, Alex and Jackson discovered that legal action was being taken against them for their Facebook comments. Who was so grievously harmed to be pursuing this legally, years later? None other than Cindy Prior, the woman who had initially asked Alex and his friends to leave the computer lab due to their race. Ms Prior claimed that the comments caused her to suffer “offence, embarrassment, humiliation and psychiatric injury.” Ms Prior was not mentioned by name anywhere in the comments, but she was so psychologically damaged by the posts that she had been unable to return to work due to the “trauma,” and was now seeking some $250,000 in lost wages, general damages and future economic loss.
The chronically hyperbolical Ms Prior claimed to have suffered from “sweating,” as a result of students even questioning the need for a racially segregated computer lab, and to have felt “at risk of imminent but unpredictable physical or verbal assault.” Happily, this opportunist scam ultimately failed, but only after other targets of Ms Prior’s grasping psychodrama had settled out of court.
What sort of crappy system autocloses some tags but not others?
HTML.
Um. You’re thinking of stacked brunette females in very skimpy improvised bikinis,
The chaps were quite stacked as well, as I recall, and had skimpy improvised bikinis. Oh dear, now I’m picturing a Frank Frazetta / Tom of Finland mash-up in which Conan the barbarian crash-lands on a planet of burly leather queens.
Justice Dowsett made thinly veiled criticism of the Human Rights Commission and QUT for not having notified the students of the complaint levelled against them under section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act.
The human rights body’s president, Professor Gillian Triggs, has rejected criticism of the commission’s failure to notify the students for 14 months that they were named in a formal written complaint.
In Canada we call them “kangaroo courts”. I suppose in Australia they call them “beaver courts”?
“Anti-fascist” intellectuals.
It has occurred to me that Disney owning Marvel means they presumably have some sort of rights to the character through their Savage Sword of Conan titles. Imagine the crossovers.
EDIT: Wait, the rights to Conan appear to be mired in rights hell after Marvel’s financially turbulent 00’s. Sigh.
a Frank Frazetta / Tom of Finland mash-up in which Conan the barbarian crash-lands on a planet of burly leather queens.
Laughing on train. Getting strange looks.
Getting strange looks.
Well, it would pretty much write itself. Savage sword, indeed.
Well that’s a bit of a shaggy dog story.
The short answer is probably: Some enigmatic combination of HTML, Typepad, David, the designers of your web browser, and your configured web browser settings.
This responsibility-diffusing combination is responsible for a lot of divergence in how to handle tags in general. (For example, over at Samizdata blockquotes are both italicized and indented to my view.) The official HTML spec is kind of a loose suggestion at best for how to render web pages. The early Web was full of malformed pages and crappy browsers and “catch as catch can” parsing, which set a precedent for web browsers trying as best they could to guess how pages should look when someone didn’t close their tags or otherwise screwed up. To some, forgetting to close an <i> tag is an error – pages are required to close tags! But users didn’t take kindly to the Mrs Grundy approach of displaying an error message every time there was a mistake in the tags, and the standards people didn’t exactly win all their battles of official instructions against de facto usage.
For example, the <i> tag is supposedly reserved for foreignisms like de facto, ship names, character thoughts, and a few other things that are italic-by-nature. Whereas when you want to emphasize a word, as I did just now, you’re theoretically expected to use the <em> or <strong> tags rather than italic or bold. In practice these usually work out to the same and so people use the shorter one, but then comes the complication that text-to-speech devices for the hearing impaired are sometimes built to treat them differently…
And meandering back to your question, <i> is treated as something of a “format text until I say otherwise” element in some renderings, which is why it can spill over, while <blockquote> is more of a “format this element here” thing.
<blockquote>
</blockquote>
But blockquote dies with its ‘element’ (such as a comment) while italic can continue as long as there’s text.
Hm. Practically an ephemeron, this.
text-to-speech devices for the hearing impaired
Cruel, cruel world.
Sorry, my OCD. Though I’m still smarting myself over my reference weeks ago to “Hammer and cycle” that no one called me out on.
my reference weeks ago to “Hammer and cycle” that no one called me out on.
Oh, we noticed, all of us. We were just too polite to draw your attention to it. But we won’t forget.
Um, what? If you mean the lack of hyphen in “hearing impaired”, I think it’s acceptable when the phrase is used in a manner that’s noun-y rather than adjective-y. Dunno what the technical terms are, but compare:
Bob, who is out of work, turns fifty.
Out-of-work Bob turns fifty.
“Anti-fascist” intellectuals.
I realize its sometimes difficult to determine on Twitter whether someone is serious or not, but I did raise an eyebrow at this tweet. The Holodomor was an aberrant, one-off event regrettably outside of human agency–sort of like a really big tornado or asteroid strike. Query, how fucked in the head does one have to be to become an apologist for 30 million political murders?
Query, how fucked in the head does one have to be to become an apologist for 30 million political murders?
On the upside, Twitter is making it possible for a large audience to see the psychology of the people attracted to such things. I’ve often thought that a good way to develop a sane aversion to Marxoid ideology is simply to spend half an hour in a room full of communists sharing their coercive fantasies. The sight of, and sounds of, so many vain and needy poseurs is quite educational and tells you much of what you need to know. I mean, to borrow from your question, what kind of people find it either necessary or entertaining to photograph themselves giving the finger to that particular monument, a reminder of the boneyards to which certain vanities lead?
Put another way, you could spend weeks poking dutifully through Marx’s Capital and the Communist Manifesto, and the deranged and sadistic correspondence of Marx and Engels, or Paul Johnson’s excellent account of Marx’s personal vanities and dishonesties, and you’ll find plenty of warning signs that these were not good people intent on spreading joy. But you’ll find much the same narcissism and delinquent spite, which have informed the ideology from Marx onwards, summed up rather neatly in the tweeted photo.
[ Edited. ]
Not sure which is correct but I feel for Bob. It’s a tough world out there for an out-of-work fifty year-old.
This is essentially a scene in Hail Caesar! wherein George Clooney’s dimwitted character, not much of a stretch to be sure, is taken in by a roomful of commies. The audience on the other side of the fourth wall can see what a bunch of losers they really are which adds to the humor of Clooney’s characater falling for their spiel hook, line, and sinker.
The Holomodor was not an aberrant one-off event regrettably outside of human agency. I could – barely – accept that it was an aberrant one-off event if I didn’t know of the 50 millions who died in the Great Leap Forward, or the million killed by the Khmer Rouge. How many dies in the Holomodor? Well, 2.5 million died, 1.5m were not born (the expected births in the period were 1.5 million more than those who were actually born. And over half a million deported. From the Max Planck Institute. And this was NOT an act outside human agency. The borders of Ukraine were sealed to stop Ukrainians fleeing in search of food. The Soviet authorities knew they were taking grain that was needed for food and seed grain, but they took it anyway. There was nothing, repeat nothing like this in Britain of Belgium or France or Germany in the transition to industrialisation. My copy of Black Book of Communism – hint, I loathe Communism and regard modern Communists as equivalent to modern Nazis – has 100 millions murdered by Communism. What kind of person must you be to be a modern Communist knowing that?
This is essentially a scene in Hail Caesar!
I started watching that a few weeks ago, but the pacing was dire and after about 20 minutes I lost the will to carry on.
The audience on the other side of the fourth wall can see what a bunch of losers they really are
Somewhat related, this gathering of esteemed and not-at-all-narcissistic communist thinkers who bang on, at great length, about how “serious” and “radical” and “dangerous” they are, and how they’re “an insurgent movement” that will “break the government” and initiate a “revolutionary transformation of society.” Note that the word “humility” is used, albeit unconvincingly, at least six or seven times. And note that at its conclusion the event is hailed as “a very good discussion,” albeit one made up entirely of lengthy, unchallenged, somewhat rambling assertions, and in which no-one actually discusses anything.
The Holomodor was not an aberrant one-off event regrettably outside of human agency.
I fear you may believe that I was asserting same, as opposed to pointing out how ludicrous the linked tweet was. (Memo to self: Use < sarc > tags where applicable.)
It’s for the best. Disney would probably make him gay with severe daddy issues being the reason he treats women the way he does. I mean he is so unabashedly straight and white that even Rudyard Kipling would tsk a bit.
Frank Frazetta / Tom of Finland mash-up in which Conan the barbarian crash-lands on a planet of burly leather queens.
Better than the last Conan film.
Paul Johnson’s excellent account
Apparently, not all of his readers appreciated his poking holes in inflated legacies:
i presume that johnson does no[sic] associate himself with dreadful people like intellectuals,so what gives him any authority to write about them.
tolkien,
What kind of person must you be to be a modern Communist knowing that?
One who would exclaim, “Look at the tremendous progress these countries made! They never achieved, and never would have achieved, such things under capitalist exploitation!
In other words, “100 million eggs made one hell of an omelet. Look at the size of it, would ya!”
David,
Can I commend this to your blog readers, “Comedian Bridget Christie gives a very personal take on the state of modern feminism”,
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04xrwhh
in short no I can’t, unless you’re a sadist.
It has occurred to me that Disney owning Marvel means . . . . Imagine the crossovers.
Um, what? If you mean …
Well, I was thinking that converting text to speech really wouldn’t help people who can’t hear sound. But then after posting it, I thought that that was stupid itself because the deaf could have been the ones typing the text for the benefit of those who can hear…but that would benefit the dumb not the deaf per se but as most deaf are also rather dumb, but not dumb like not smart but dumb like Helen Keller but not blind like Helen Keller, but either way would not be cruel to the deaf because they would not know what they were not hearing anyway, but then kinda cruel to whoever developed text-to-speech but not really because it has a purpose just not for the deaf…unless they are also dumb.
In my defense, I didn’t have my coffee yet, the sun was in my eyes, I had a better post but the dog ate it, and I had to go because my mother was calling.
Oh, we noticed, all of us. We were just too polite to draw your attention to it. But we won’t forget.
You are ever so kind…wait a minute…
The scholarly 20th Century Democide. Bookmarkable.
a Frank Frazetta / Tom of Finland mash-up in which Conan the barbarian crash-lands on a planet of burly leather queens.
Be careful what you wish for. I’ve seen pictures of the Folsom Street Fair.
I’ve often thought that a good way to develop a sane aversion to Marxoid ideology is simply to spend half an hour in a room full of communists sharing their coercive fantasies.
It assumes that the person involved is a person who values individuals over the mass. This does not hold true for lots of people, lots of the time.
Many Russians genuinely believe that if it took millions of deaths to make Russia powerful, then that is acceptable. For some of them the reflected glory of the power of Russia is important. They still let Putin behave despicably to them and others because they think that having a powerful Russia is more important than individuals living safe and well.
It doesn’t help that many still believe that the Marxists advanced Russia from serfdom to great power. They aren’t aware that 1914 Russia was not particularly backward (in many ways it was one of the more advanced countries) and that under Communism it consistently lost ground on the West.
New Zealand managed to industrialise and electrify the country without any massacres at all, at the far end of the earth, and with precious few natural resources. Yet the electrification of Russia under Stalin is taken as some amazing achievement.
How did she ever find their FB posts In the first place?
Cindy is the worse actor in all of this. The Australian human rights commission investigated the incident for 2 years without questioning the defendants at any time, so it was a total ambush. Then it became a financial shakedown with a number of defendants paying cindy hush money for it to go away in the 5 figure range. I believe they didn’t finish their studies as a result as well.
Other defendants fought the case with 6 figure legal cost which is apparently the norm in the west these days. They eventually won but we all lost when her complaint wasn’t rejected immediately on complete hypocritical and bullshit groz NSA that any sane person would see.
The same HRC actively sourced complaints about a cartoonist after some controversial racial cartoons. He died suddenly this year and I have no doubt that the stress caused by the legal action taking was at least partly contributing. These people are monsters and fooling themselves as being heroes.
These people are monsters and fooling themselves as being heroes.
Themselves and others. That’s been the theme of almost every post here on the campus “social justice” phenomenon – the mismatch between the protestations of piety and the actual behaviour, which ranges from merely spiteful to outright sociopathic. What’s strange, to me, are the contortions some people will perform to avoid acknowledging this dissonance.
What’s strange, to me, are the contortions some people will perform to avoid acknowledging this dissonance.
When your six-figure faculty or administration salary is contingent on fueling the dissonance, such contortions become second nature.
Look what happened to that husband-wife team at Yale who gently urged students to not let Halloween costumes bother them so much. Ridden out of town on a rail.
When your six-figure faculty or administration salary is contingent on fueling the dissonance, such contortions become second nature.
Quite so. It’s not that they fail to realize the contradictions, but that they use same for personal gain. Their business is disingenuity.
Which begs the question of why those who don’t profit cannot see the contradictions. The fact is, some people are intellectually incapable of recognizing mutually exclusive philosophical positions. They’re like that one person who, during congregational singing in church, fails to recognize that none of their notes bears any resemblance to what’s in the hymnal. They’re the shit-contestants on talent shows who nonetheless think they’re the next teen idol being used to get ratings for the producers.
hold on. ….back up a bit!
wouldn’t that be cultural appropriation by the indigenous?
OT: There’s an excellent (but lengthy) article up at https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/03/29/reflections-on-mark-steyns-a-disgrace-to-the-profession-about-dr-michael-mann/ by Rick Wallace.
“The apparent consequence of all this is that when there are enough people like these who have worked their way into a particular field of science, then you have a quorum that can effectively further “the cause”.
Ok, the reason for my March 28, 2017 at 17:01 post was to show that it’s possible for government to be diminished in the area of poverty assistance and for a private institution (this time a church) to pick up the slack, and possible for that private program to actually lift people out of poverty instead of trapping them for multiple generations.
Later it occurred to me that it might have looked like a random bit of proselytism.
Wasn’t. I got the link to The Atlantic article from Insty, and my Twitter feed had just been masticating the whole TRUMP WANTS TO ELIMINATE MEALS ON WHEELS which always includes WHY ARE YOU CONSERVATIVES SO MEAN TO THE POOR EVEN THOUGH JESUS SAID!
Political point; not religious.
Sorry for any confusion.
Sorry for any confusion.
Well, I for one was not confused. It’s no secret that private efforts surpass government intervention in both timeliness and efficacy. See, e.g. Hurricane Katrina and Joplin, MO tornado. Private parties were rolling before the government could get its head out of its ass, and, in the case of the former, politicians felt compelled to intervene to require licenses, permits and such for private parties to help–all while the MSM is broadcasting false reports of cannibalism, rapine and pillage. See also, the number of citations issued to people trying to feed the homeless ostensibly because of “food safety” concerns.
All within the state and nothing outside the state, baby!
A major factor here is ego-defense,
As it turns out, scientific disciplines are plagued regularly by “mean girls” behavior when one researcher comes up with a Beautiful Theory about something, that theory gains followers and acolytes, and woe betide the scientist who discovers evidence to the contrary — s/he can expect a firehose of resistance to the evidence, as the Beautiful Theory is defended tooth and nail, to the point of denying grant money, denying publication, and denying conference presentations.
It often requires that the acolytes of the Beautiful Theory retire or die off before the new evidence gains a foothold.
I just finished reading 1491, the book about the Americas before Columbus. (A fascinating read, BTW.)
Amid the amazing history of the American civilizations, you also read about fights about which is the oldest discovered settlement, or what were the migratory patterns from the Bering Strait, or whether this population was related to that — all had Beautiful Theories be established that were Doubled Down On when new evidence came to light, and nasty little shenanigans ensued to discredit the researchers whose evidence put the Beautiful Theory in doubt.
The Trouble with Physics addresses this phenomenon in the field of String Theory, when String Theory was so big and so HOT and so sexy that any physicist who WASN’T doing String Theory was a pariah: no hiring, no papers published, no invites to the conferences, no grant money. It wasn’t even a particularly malicious phenomenon as much as Everyone Chasing The Shiny Thing and what’s the matter with YOU, ya square?
Spoiler Alert: String theory is no longer a thing. Too many variables make it impossible to test.
The difference between these squabbles and the AGW thing is that they didn’t have policy implications, so the public never heard about them, and so the phenomenon of Bad Science gaining hegemony in a field—suppressing all reasonable opposition—is unfamiliar to most people.
And so nobody can imagine that Top People In A Discipline would be pushing a dubious theory at best and an outright lie at worst.
Trouble is, the perps of the AGW scam will never suffer for their bad behavior. The issue will be eclipsed by the Next Doomsday Scenario and the current OVERWHELMING EVIDENCE will disappear down the memory hole.
@dicentra
Though I must say, Utah’s liquor laws are fairly Byzantine in their complexity. I love the state, mind you. Beautiful place. The national park “Grand Circle” is is killer, and Moab is in on the retirement relocation short list, but Mormon beer sucks in spades.
The difference between these squabbles and the AGW thing is that they didn’t have policy implications, so the public never heard about them, and so the phenomenon of Bad Science gaining hegemony in a field—suppressing all reasonable opposition—is unfamiliar to most people.
But increasingly unfamiliar.
Popular confidence in any “discovery” in the field of nutrition is now at a point where no-one really believes anything you see reported. It’s clear to everyone that there is far more bad science than good.
Economics has never left that zone, but not everyone considers Economics a science.
Increasingly familiar, sorry.
One of the first critiques of Kuhn’s “paradigm shift” model of scientific revolutions was that paradigm shifts didn’t actually happen – what happened was the proponents of the old theory just died out or retired and were replaced by a younger cohort of scientists who had always been proponents of the new paradigm.
Economics has never left that zone, but not everyone considers Economics a science.
They change the exam questions every year, but not the answers.
Hate to disagree about string theory Dicentra, it may no longer be the be-all end-all denying others their time in the sun (was it ever ? not that I recall but never mind); but the field remains the only extant mathematically reasonable place to seek a TOE. Tying Gravity in with the three other forces does require a framework, and despite numerous claims for progress only the string theorists still have (for now, by no means do I imply that it is the only way, just the best yet found) a possible way forward.
All of this was enabled by a stupid law here in Australia referred to in the short hand as “18C”.
—
http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/rda1975202/s18c.html
RACIAL DISCRIMINATION ACT 1975 – SECT 18C
Offensive behaviour because of race, colour or national or ethnic origin
(1) It is unlawful for a person to do an act, otherwise than in private, if:
(a) the act is reasonably likely, in all the circumstances, to OFFEND, insult, humiliate or intimidate another person or a group of people; and…
—
You read it right, it is currently officially unlawful to even offend someone when talking about race in Australia.
Plenty of stuff about this online, just google “australia 18c”
only the string theorists still have … a possible way forward.
Maybe when they build an abacus large enough to calculate the 1^500 variable combinations they will finally figure out what the hell gravity even IS.
1^500 or 1! Either way, we’re gonna need a bigger computer 🙂
On social pressures entrenching theories, all y’all may be interested in Paul Romer’s paper on the trouble with macroeconomics.
Like many I’ve been soberingly ‘numbed’ in recent years to the sort of peerlessly deplorable, satire-proof ‘fuckwittery’ propagated by the looniest elements of the loony Left, yet just occasionally an incident of such exceptional mind-warping audacity still has the power to elicit unbridled rage.
And this one of those occasions.
I genuinely struggled to fully read the linked article as I found myself getting increasingly angrier and of which proved profoundly detrimental to of my general mood as a consequence. I masochistically persevered however and am considerably angrier for it.
To hell with the supposed moral high ground, I’ll cast aside my customary abhorrence to both violence and the advocation of violence inflicted upon others when I happily declare that Cindy Prior is in terminal need a thorough kicking. Nothing more nothing less.