Liberals also say and do stupid shit

A couple of things to say to this:

Security clearance is a ridiculous comparison. There is only one organization in the U.S. that hands them out; there are thousands of places you can get a college degree. If you lose your security clearance, it can really finish your career, even if you have a long-standing one; being forced to switch schools is not comparable. It is necessary that DoD have a much more robust appeals process.

Ruth Marcus and the Washington Post editorial board are not really distinct entities. Marcus is not a “liberal columnist”; she pretty much aims for the exact center of any given controversy.

I just can’t believe it’s that difficult to go through college without being thrown out for sexual misconduct, especially if you are mindful that that is a possible consequence of your actions. I think you are missing that making students more mindful of this possible consequence is exactly the point of the original policy change. The point isn’t to catch a bunch of rapists that otherwise go free; the point is to change minds and expectations in a way that will prevent people from entering into the kind of ambiguous situations that can have bad consequences.

I think you are particularly incensed by this issue because you regard the accusations as being so heinous, as being accused essentially of sexual assault, so it seems inappropriate that they are adjudicated purely administratively. Think of it as being more like conduct codes in the 1930’s, where even being in a compromising position with a woman or making false promises could get you thrown out of the better schools.

True, point taken. It’s one thing to taunt a team with music that makes fun of their home town or mascot, but making light of possible impending doom would be very shitty indeed. Still hoping, as are we all I’m sure, that something happens to severely lessen said impending doom and everyone emerges safe and sound.

Actually, multiple agencies give clearances, Secret Service, CIA, State, FBI and of course Defense. Evidently, some are better than other with the process.

Losing a security clearance certainly can be big deal but is necessarily the end of a career, my roommate after 5 years at Lockheed, working on Star Wars, He got in trouble by government/Lockheed security for leaving his desk unlocked, and during the month long investigation, he went out and started looking for another. They eventually cleared him and let him off with a warning, but ended up getting a better job offer. He much preferred his nondefense job, so almost losing his clearance was a good thing for him. Now I’ll admit this the exception, not the norm.

I just can’t believe it’s that difficult to go through college without being thrown out for sexual misconduct, especially if you are mindful that that is a possible consequence of your actions. I think you are missing that making students more mindful of this possible consequence is exactly the point of the original policy change. The point isn’t to catch a bunch of rapists that otherwise go free; the point is to change minds and expectations in a way that will prevent people from entering into the kind of ambiguous situations that can have bad consequences.

But a big difference between losing a security clearance and a sexual assault conduct is that there are people will accuse you being a rapist.

You clearly haven’t read many of the examples, or if you have you lack all empathy. Much of the time the guys are completely innocent of wrong doing. A UCLA professor puts it at 33%

USC suspended Boermeester in February while the school investigated what it called a “student-conduct issue.”

Mark Schamel, an attorney representing Boermeester, said Boermeester was not permitted to return to USC following the school’s investigation, in which USC alleged that Boermeester assaulted Katz. Katz has denied this, as did Boermeester, through his attorney.

In the statement, Katz said she and Boermeester have dated for more than a year. The Title IX investigation began, Steigerwalt said, after a neighbor witnessed Boermeester and Katz roughhousing. The neighbor told his roommate, who told a coach in USC’s athletic department that Boermeester was abusing Katz. The coach then reported the incident to the Title IX office.

Katz said she was summoned to a mandatory meeting with Title IX officials, where she told investigators that the two were playing around. Katz was subsequently told that she “must be afraid of Matt,” she said. She told officials she was not. Boermeester has not been arrested or charged with a crime.

“When I told the truth about Matt, in repeated interrogations, I was stereotyped and was told I must be a ‘battered’ woman, and that made me feel demeaned and absurdly profiled,” Katz said. “I understand that domestic violence is a terrible problem, but in no way does that apply to Matt and me.”

Katz said that she has “never been abused, assaulted or otherwise mistreated by Matt.”

Boermeester, who kicked the game-winning field goal for USC in the Rose Bowl, was suspended from USC, then barred from campus and from meeting with USC’s athletic trainers or members of the football team. The school also barred Boermeester from contacting Katz, she said.

A spokesman for USC, in an emailed statement to The Times, said that “the university has concluded its investigation. Student disciplinary records and proceedings regarding any matter of student conduct are confidential and protected by law. Per the registrar, he is no longer enrolled at the university.”

Katz said the Title IX office made her feel “misled, harassed, threatened and discriminated against,” and caused her to hire an attorney.

“The Title IX office’s response was dismissive and demeaning,” she said.

In the statement, Katz said she is coming forward now to clear Boermeester’s name and lobby for change in the Title IX office’s investigative procedures.

“Matt Boermeester did nothing improper against me, ever,” Katz said. “I would not stand for it. Nor will I stand for watching him be maligned and lied about.”

Now a good kicker for USC has a chance of making it to the NFL if nothing else getting a diploma from a good school.
What college is going to give a scholarship to Matt with this hanging over his head? What’s the lesson he or other guys are supposed to learn don’t wrestle with your girlfriend?

Or how about the guy who was expelled because of this crime he committed. He and his girlfriend had a fight and broke up. After they broke his girlfriend’s roommate hit on him, while he was drunk and she was sober. They had sex. The couple got back together. Terrified her roommate would blame her for having sex with her boyfriend Roomie claimed he had assaulted him.

The key piece evidence was drunken voicemail roomie left on the guy’s phone. The thing is the voicemail was from a different night than they had sex. Now, this fact came out in the civil trial, and it might have come out during the school hearing. Except in this hearing like most universities (Including at least 2 of the school’s Magnet reference). While the defendant can have an advisor, the advisor is prohibited from speaking. What’s the lesson here, never have sex with an ex’s girlfriends friends?

For those students fortunate enough to be able to afford lawyers the courts are siding with them in large numbers. However, for the rest the typically spent extra two+ years getting a degree from a less prestige school and rack up tens of dollars in additional debt and legal fees.

It’s been a while. I wonder what Joey Gibson’s peace-loving organization has been up to…

Is there data for this?

And here is the rest of the story.

Watching the video it is pretty clear who the violent group was and it wasn’t Joey folks.

If fact here is what Joey the so called Nazi said before the event.

Gibson asked participants to show up at 110 Columbia Street along the Vancouver waterfront at 2 p.m.
“We will be able to collect donations, have speeches…a small march and then we’ll march across the [Interstate] bridge," he said. According to the Facebook event page, the group plans to collect items to be donated to fire victims in Oregon and Washington.

Since the Willamette Week story said the cops didn’t end up arresting the driver. (The video of what he did is different than the description.)

But the group best able to sort which group was peaceful and which wasn’t is the cops.
There was 7 arrest for the mask wearing counter protestors and 0 for the so-called Nazi’s.

From the commentary article

2016 study from UCLA public-policy professor John Villasenor used just one of the changes—schools employing the lowest standard of proof, a preponderance of the evidence—to predict that as often as 33 percent of the time, campus Title IX tribunals would return guilty findings in cases involving innocent students. Villasenor’s study could not measure the impact of other Obama-era policy demands—such as allowing accusers to appeal not-guilty findings, discouraging cross-examination of accusers, and urging schools to adjudicate claims even when a criminal inquiry found no wrongdoing.

I haven’t looked for the study but you are welcome to.

I sure hope it’s not from this UCLA mathematician, because it has the same real world relevance as a discussion of airplanes on conveyer belts.

EDIT: Yup, that’s the one. I’ll save you some time and present his “data” :

https://oup.silverchair-cdn.com/oup/backfile/Content_public/Journal/lpr/15/4/10.1093_lpr_mgw006/2/mgw006f1p.png?Expires=1505254592&Signature=AKvbPEne5RRBaVrO~vlJNWkCZTdPEXVp0h~9z8SwGyZ1-DbDj8Y2YYDX9OKUlAbyKqwNs05pKbMg6JtD9FCb7ANeK9KXXtfU5w0BKy8nwrbi2mvFtV-nP64tfRMJfnT5tsMVWPJDBtJQrychcCqvZNvfGIvZoVug~YTfpBGVpgW0mPvMMpNoXtamHbTalOG03uLnKxr-y5LcP4LK9IE1empNAOkG5F-4SykYyvbUjEbBZ9W4r3wZL8V5lJpRvOr~ARc-rrTZxeA0LiHcoch0sPt1O9fm6IU48vGZdfYmCxCJGcPsEOAHIzz59JdJAfDrRvlSSBVlWmO--14jNW4Yfg__&Key-Pair-Id=APKAIUCZBIA4LVPAVW3Q

And his conclusion:

Inevitably, there will be many defendants who would be declared innocent if the evidence is evaluated using a beyond a reasonable doubt standard but found guilty if that same evidence is evaluated using a preponderance of the evidence standard.

This is the kind of obvious conclusion that gets mathematicians ridiculed.

Thanks!

Yes, but that does not mean that 33% of guilty findings are in error. This is basically the prosecutor’s fallacy.

Note also that the reasoning in that paper can be generalized to all decisions made on preponderance of evidence, which means not only every other university offense, but our entire system of civil litigation. So if it were really true that 33% of sexual offense expulsions were unjust, then you would also conclude that 33% of all expulsions and all lawsuits are decided unfairly.

Neither is the case, because the author isn’t actually talking about the real world.

So let me get this straight we should categorically reject mathematical models of juries outcome, but anybody who questions says the mathematical model of what the climate will be like in 50 or 100 years is an idiot.

My this could be a topic for liberal stupidity.

The American justice system is designed so that it is better than 10 guilty people go free than one innocent person is found guilty. We have an elaborate system (e.g. double jeopardy) in place to reach that goal, and for capital cases, we exceed it modestly (4% false convictions)

Once we start reducing the safeguards that prevent false convictions, obviously the number is going to go up. The interesting question is by how much? I’m not going to check the professor’s math work but it certainly seems plausible that we go from 10-1 ratio in the criminal justice system to a 2-1 ratio in the University kangaroo court system

The paper you is purely mathematical. It start with an abstract world in which sexual assault does not exist and everyone charged with it is innocent. It then proceeds to explore the possible outcomes, and concludes that in such a world, there would be an error rate of 33%.

The exact same analysis could be used for other systems with the exact same standard of evidence. For instance, if negligent driving did not actually exist, then 33% of lawsuits over driving negligence would be decided unjustly. If nobody ever made a defective product, then 33% of all product liability cases would be decided unjustly. If no doctor actually committed malpractice, then 33% of all malpractice cases would be decided unjustly. And so on.

We all know that sexual assault, bad drivers, medical malpractice, and defective products really do exist. So there is only one thing we can conclude from the article: at least 67% of these cases are decided correctly. It’s quite possible that 100% of them are decided correctly. The truth probably lies in between.

For a mathematician, the analysis stops here. For a scientist, this is where it starts. A scientist must build a model using actual actual data, and cannot simply assume things like “no product is defective”. In your paper, there is no attempt to bridge that gap to the real world. But models of climate change are based on literally millions of data points, which are used to continually test and refine the model. Because for a scientist, the analysis never stops.

The American criminal justice system is designed to put people in jail.

Civil disputes between drivers, civil disputes between doctors and patients, and civil disputes between students will never lead to jail time. The only possible outcomes are financial damages. This is why they all weigh both sides equally, and this is why preponderance of evidence is the proper standard in each situation.

If that makes it a kangaroo court, then so is every single civil lawsuit.

I understand it a pure math model and its relevance to the real world is pretty limited.
But likewise the 67% percent correctly make assumptions that all the relevant evidence is collected and presented in a fair process. That seems to be a false assumption in the case of university proceedings.

There is no question that in our civil court system there are miscarriages of justice. In general, the side with the deeper pockets i.e. institutions or rich people prevail. Which is why it so surprising the universities are losing so many cases. (Sadly, we don’t know about the ones that are settled, it would be interesting if somebody did a FOIA request to see how much money was spent on settling Title IX cases).

Still, the civil court process has protection, including things like cross examinations, discovery, the right to be represented by counsel, that time has found to be the best way of getting at the truth.

I’m not the one calling the university proceeding Kangaroo courts, federal judges are.

In 36 of the due-process lawsuits, courts have permitted the university to maintain its guilty finding. (In four other cases, the university settled despite prevailing at a preliminary stage.) But even in these cases, some courts have expressed discomfort with campus procedures. One federal judge was “greatly troubled” that Georgia Tech veered “very far from an ideal representation of due process” when its investigator “did not pursue any line of investigation that may have cast doubt on [the accuser’s] account of the incident.” Another went out of his way to say that he considered it plausible that a former Case Western Reserve University student was actually “innocent of the charges levied against him.” And one state appellate judge opened oral argument by bluntly informing the University of California’s lawyer, “When I . . . finished reading all the briefs in this case, my comment was, ‘Where’s the kangaroo?’”

And note that’s when the judges ruled in favor of the universities.

Besides our normal arguing with each other, are you really defending the Universities handling of this Title IX sex cases?

In part 3 of Emily Yofee series, she looks at race.

I find it surprising that the office of civil rights doesn’t keep racial statistics on the sexual assault cases. Emily provides strong, albeit anecdotal evidence that black men and foreign students on campus are expelled at very high rates. She believes they lack the financial and network resource to contest the charges.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2017/09/14/former-cia-directors-shun-harvard-after-the-school-invites-chelsea-manning-to-campus/?hpid=hp_no-name_hp-in-the-news%3Apage%2Fin-the-news&utm_term=.bce19f0004d1

I’ll toss this in here, even though it got corrected.

Then again I consider most Manning-related things to probably go here.

Plus isn’t that Clay’s old boss? I saw it going around, but he never Tweeted about it or even anything adjacent to it so it threw me when I read the name at a later date.

While I am pretty anti-Chelsea because of what she did, I have no problem with having her speak. She has valid experiences due to her mistreatment in the military.

She shouldn’t have been rewarded with a visiting fellow.

Inviting her to speak at Harvard is fine. Giving her any type of honor isn’t, I’m pleased Harvard did the right thing quickly.

I don’t know if this is liberal stupidity or corporate stupidity, but it’s dumb regardless.

Seattle is outlawing disposable plastic drinking straws. That’s fine. There is a ton of waste associated with disposable plastic utensils.

Here’s what’s dumb: Instead of phasing out straws immediately, Starbucks is starting to hand out “reusable straws” with their drinks. It’s the same kind of straw that would come with a cooler/tumbler. It’s still plastic, just much thicker and nicer. But no one is keeping the straws. They’re just throwing them away. What are you supposed to do? Put a wet straw in your pocket for later?

I assume that when the ban actually starts, Seattle stores won’t hand any straws out and people will just have to sip out of the opening in the lids. In the meanwhile, these hard plastic green straws are just going in the trash.

Yeah, I’m sure they mean well, but I doubt anyone but the more motivated environmentally conscious customers will be making the effort to re-use the straws.

I think putting up signs and notifying customers over the next few weeks that straws will be going away at a certain would be the better approach.

There are also waxed paper straws, similar to Dixie cups in material, which…mostly work.

I’ve also seen what claim to be biodegradable corn plastic cups and straws, but I’m pretty sure thats just marketing.