I think I have touched on that in the most recent post about Yuja Wang and if folks want to take the conversation there, please feel free to copy paste any comments from here that you want to use as a springboard.
2 weeks ago
Putting this up, in hope that Grok might watch it and pass it on to Charles.
https://youtu.be/nWu44AqF0iI?si=le7FLj87qVUlVihK
2 weeks ago
From Charles' Grok summary about prisons
Disciplinary outcomes differ sharply. Women receive misconduct tickets at higher rates—often 39–155% more—for “defiance” categories (disrespect, disobedience, hygiene, tone).
If they just wouldn't act like boys, they wouldn't get punished!
2 weeks ago
nous, I really appreciate your comment, it is always hard to talk about this stuff. This isn't to keep the conversation going and draw you out, but I would make an additional observation. You wrote: I’d posit that, yes, all of the men involved were feeling sexual desire, but that the attraction in that case was to be doing something secret about which the woman had no knowledge and over which the woman had no say. The men were demonstrating to each other their power and control over a woman who had been “shared” with them by the man to whom she belonged, and that sharing was a secret that was withheld from any of the women in their lives. That makes it a moment of homosocial bonding in which they violate a societal taboo, and there is a type of in-group status that comes with that sort of secret violation, as many fraternity brothers might whisper to each other when in private.
I'd also add that sexual desire is often less about the specific object and more about the internal meaning we project onto it. Your suggestion that the breaking of a societal taboo may be the focus seems likely, and because there is a shame factor involved with sex, it's easy to see how breaking those taboos can be become intertwined with sexual desire.
3 weeks ago
Grok clearly doesn't search out all the sources
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2438589/
Research suggests that rates of sexual victimization in prison may be as high as 41% or as low as less than 1%.12 A recent meta-analysis estimates a conservative “average” prevalence estimate of prison sexual assault at 1.9%. While the estimated rate of victimization varies significantly across studies, the characteristics of the victims reported in these studies are more similar. First, rates of sexual coercion are higher than rates of sexual assault or rape, independent of gender. More specifically, unwanted and sexually suggestive touching of breasts, genitals, or buttocks is more typical inside prison than the act of rape itself. Second, in the vast majority of studies, male facilities have been found to have higher rates of sexual assault compared to female facilities. Yet the perpetrators of sexual assaults against female inmates, compared to male inmates, are less likely to involve staff. Third, younger inmates are at greater risk of sexual victimization, particularly if they are new arrivals to a facility and are serving their first convictions. This may explain in part why rates of sexual victimizations vary across facilities within the same prison system. Facilities with a younger population would be expected to have higher rates of victimization than those facilities with a more mature and acculturated prison population. Fourth, inmate-on-inmate sexual victimization has an interracial bias, with victims most likely being White and sexual aggressors most likely being Black. This interracial pattern of victimization has been attributed to revenge for historical oppression and the reversal of racial dominance inside prison.
I also looked at your Grok summary and your takeaway seems to be remarkably narrowly focussed. I'll leave it to others to point out how your takeaway points are misleading.
3 weeks ago
when wonkie posted, I was tempted to post, but I realized that what I was writing was just me happy to, as they say in the commons, 'attach myself to the statements'. I was born in 61, so the 70's and 80's were my cultural memories, so discussions, like the famous bear example, seem a bit overblown. I do think that there were mechanisms to protect women, but those mechanisms were also to keep women in line and there was an implicit bargain that if you don't rock the boat, you won't get thrown to the sharks. What underlies that is power relationships, and I think you can't erase those relationships or declare them out of existence, you can only be truthful about their existence and make sure that they aren't being exploited to do something they aren't supposed it.
As an example, in my FB feed, I've recently had a bunch of people talking about the French figure skater Suraly Bonaly, who was the first person to do a backflip in competition and she did it in 1998. The only problem was that it was an illegal move and she was penalized. However, in these Olympics, it was allowed in 2024 and included in the programs this time. So, just going by the fb posts, this was a female skater (who was also black) being mistreated while the two male skaters were allowed to do it.
None of these posts told the story of Bonaly doing the backflip in the warmups, inches from Midori Ito's head, in 1992, during her warmup just before the short program. This apparently got into Ito's head, because she subsequently missed her triple lutz in the short program and was only able to get the silver by making a comeback in the last program.
It seems indicative of something that it ended up with a black skater trying to throw an Asian skater off her game. In the Rodney King riots, it was Korean stores that took the brunt of protester's rage, and the whole 'Natural Conservative' push (Reagan said something like 'Latinos are Republicans, they just don't know it yet') tells me that the pressure is going to be exhibited more in the groups oppressed. Hurt people hurt people.
So I'd argue that the 'there are no women in the Epstein files' is reflection of a collection of power, not of some unavoidable darkness in the souls of all men. Next to the substack GftNC posts, I'd suggest reading Amelia Gentleman's Guardian piece Sex and snacks, but no seat at the table: the role of women in Epstein’s sordid men’s club. Setting aside the irony of the writer's last name, she points out that Epstein's whole enterprise was on the backs of women who booked tickets, organized plans, etc etc. Wonkie's mention of Mad Men is interesting, because while the series revolves around the men being assholes, another important thread is how the women, in the background but vital to keep the machinery running, slowly begin to assert their own power.
While the apparent absence of asian and black victims in the case of Epstein can probably be traced to his own bent, which then gets passed thru his whole enterprise, I also wonder if the absence of asian or black men in the Epstein files might also suggest that minorities are more attuned to the transactional nature of ALL things, and therefore avoided being drawn into it.
3 weeks ago
In this regard, Coed Revolution: The Female Student in the Japanese New Left
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv1fcf87c
is an interesting read, pointing out how women were often relegated to support roles in these movements while simultaneously being demonized by the media.
About jailbait in pop, you also have to take into account the whole structure of the industry, where bands do concerts and groupies flock backstage. My backstage adventures have been with classical music, a bit more sedate, but I remember that I had a 1st year student who was a huge fan of some relatively famous heavy metal band and she missed classes to attend multiple concerts on their Japan tour and she had been befriended by one of the guys in the band and was getting backstage. When she came back from the last concert, she had pictures of her, dressed like a demure Japanese uni student and the musician. Given that this was Japan, there were no drugs, but I didn't really ask what she actually did backstage, though she was clearly smitten. Multiply that by multiple groups and multiple concerts, mix in drugs, and it's probably a feature for a lot of groups.
3 weeks ago
Looking up those links revealed a few more and this one was particularly interesting
https://scienceandrevolution.org/blog/2019/3/30/my-response-to-chomskys-extraordinary-accusations-by-chris-knight
The most interesting section to me is the discussion of Chomsky working at MITRE, and the funding was a machine translation system that would allow "the possibility of translation of Russian language materials, particularly in scientific fields, into English by machine."
which is incredibly ironic, given chomsky's opinion on the development of LLMs
3 weeks ago
Nous, thanks for the full article. While the Cassandra envy is one reading, I see it as Chomsky being constitutional incapable of admitting he is/was in error. I'm most familiar with this pattern in linguistics and Geoff Pullum notes that it is not just that Chomsky is wrong, but that he creates a system (both with his rhetoric and his theory) that is immune to being proven wrong, even when core assumptions are proven wrong.
This is a recent article about this
https://www.jbe-platform.com/content/journals/10.1075/hl.00186.pul
Pullum also had this more accessible article in the National Review about it
https://www.nationalreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/xml_20220307_Pullum_BookReview-1.html
With the first splash he made, reviewing Skinner's Verbal Behavior, he had these traits, making me wonder if he ever changed.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2223153/
3 weeks ago
Some random thoughts. I don't know all of the gory details about the French cases mentioned here, but we have had all kinds of revelations about various groups who one would imagine would be more introspective to behave badly/act immorally. Those two phrases highlight the problem, either you assign behavior to an immature lapse in judgement or you make a claim about how it is going against all societal values. And given that Foucault was always identifying flaws in societal thinking, one can see how this can seem like society pushing back, which then engenders its own pushback, etc etc.
One thing that I think is operative in the issues in France is that academia and the elite are siloed there to a great extent, maybe much more than in other countries, and it creates structures that make misbehavior more likely. I'm thinking of the issues that have recently arisen in philosophy with McGinn, Searle and others, the issues in classics (we discussed this article about Peralta who has since moved from Princeton to ASU) as well as in other areas. I tend to think that these problems are often defined as sexism or racism, but the underlying issue is the ability to rationalize. The fact that Chomsky appears to be friends with Epstein (and his quote "I’ve met [all] sorts of people, including major war criminals. I don’t regret having met any of them.") seems like instantiations of that urge to rationalization.
3 weeks ago
The title reference was to Crown Imperial, thought I'm happy to make the connection to nous' link.
A lot of interesting points. I had to check Foucault's dates, he died in 1984, and I wonder if one problem/challenge is that we often live in an eternal present, and we can pull people into that even though they have been long gone. There is the famous letter of Machiavelli where he says:
"When evening comes, I return home and go into my study. On the threshold, I strip off my muddy, sweaty, everyday clothes, and put on the robes of court and palace, and in this graver dress I enter the antique courts of the ancients and am welcomed by them... there I am not ashamed to speak with them and ask them the reason for their actions; and they, in their humanity, reply to me."
When we can time travel like this, it is easier to subject everyone, living and dead, to our own moral codes.
3 weeks ago
A good time to watch Stewart Lee on Prince Andrew
https://youtu.be/MDUeO4lRhu4?si=N3cb873hkKF98w7-
I think I have touched on that in the most recent post about Yuja Wang and if folks want to take the conversation there, please feel free to copy paste any comments from here that you want to use as a springboard.
Putting this up, in hope that Grok might watch it and pass it on to Charles.
https://youtu.be/nWu44AqF0iI?si=le7FLj87qVUlVihK
From Charles' Grok summary about prisons
Disciplinary outcomes differ sharply. Women receive misconduct tickets at higher rates—often 39–155% more—for “defiance” categories (disrespect, disobedience, hygiene, tone).
If they just wouldn't act like boys, they wouldn't get punished!
nous, I really appreciate your comment, it is always hard to talk about this stuff. This isn't to keep the conversation going and draw you out, but I would make an additional observation. You wrote:
I’d posit that, yes, all of the men involved were feeling sexual desire, but that the attraction in that case was to be doing something secret about which the woman had no knowledge and over which the woman had no say. The men were demonstrating to each other their power and control over a woman who had been “shared” with them by the man to whom she belonged, and that sharing was a secret that was withheld from any of the women in their lives.
That makes it a moment of homosocial bonding in which they violate a societal taboo, and there is a type of in-group status that comes with that sort of secret violation, as many fraternity brothers might whisper to each other when in private.
I'd also add that sexual desire is often less about the specific object and more about the internal meaning we project onto it. Your suggestion that the breaking of a societal taboo may be the focus seems likely, and because there is a shame factor involved with sex, it's easy to see how breaking those taboos can be become intertwined with sexual desire.
Grok clearly doesn't search out all the sources
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2438589/
Research suggests that rates of sexual victimization in prison may be as high as 41% or as low as less than 1%.12 A recent meta-analysis estimates a conservative “average” prevalence estimate of prison sexual assault at 1.9%. While the estimated rate of victimization varies significantly across studies, the characteristics of the victims reported in these studies are more similar. First, rates of sexual coercion are higher than rates of sexual assault or rape, independent of gender. More specifically, unwanted and sexually suggestive touching of breasts, genitals, or buttocks is more typical inside prison than the act of rape itself. Second, in the vast majority of studies, male facilities have been found to have higher rates of sexual assault compared to female facilities. Yet the perpetrators of sexual assaults against female inmates, compared to male inmates, are less likely to involve staff. Third, younger inmates are at greater risk of sexual victimization, particularly if they are new arrivals to a facility and are serving their first convictions. This may explain in part why rates of sexual victimizations vary across facilities within the same prison system. Facilities with a younger population would be expected to have higher rates of victimization than those facilities with a more mature and acculturated prison population. Fourth, inmate-on-inmate sexual victimization has an interracial bias, with victims most likely being White and sexual aggressors most likely being Black. This interracial pattern of victimization has been attributed to revenge for historical oppression and the reversal of racial dominance inside prison.
I also looked at your Grok summary and your takeaway seems to be remarkably narrowly focussed. I'll leave it to others to point out how your takeaway points are misleading.
when wonkie posted, I was tempted to post, but I realized that what I was writing was just me happy to, as they say in the commons, 'attach myself to the statements'. I was born in 61, so the 70's and 80's were my cultural memories, so discussions, like the famous bear example, seem a bit overblown. I do think that there were mechanisms to protect women, but those mechanisms were also to keep women in line and there was an implicit bargain that if you don't rock the boat, you won't get thrown to the sharks. What underlies that is power relationships, and I think you can't erase those relationships or declare them out of existence, you can only be truthful about their existence and make sure that they aren't being exploited to do something they aren't supposed it.
As an example, in my FB feed, I've recently had a bunch of people talking about the French figure skater Suraly Bonaly, who was the first person to do a backflip in competition and she did it in 1998. The only problem was that it was an illegal move and she was penalized. However, in these Olympics, it was allowed in 2024 and included in the programs this time. So, just going by the fb posts, this was a female skater (who was also black) being mistreated while the two male skaters were allowed to do it.
None of these posts told the story of Bonaly doing the backflip in the warmups, inches from Midori Ito's head, in 1992, during her warmup just before the short program. This apparently got into Ito's head, because she subsequently missed her triple lutz in the short program and was only able to get the silver by making a comeback in the last program.
It seems indicative of something that it ended up with a black skater trying to throw an Asian skater off her game. In the Rodney King riots, it was Korean stores that took the brunt of protester's rage, and the whole 'Natural Conservative' push (Reagan said something like 'Latinos are Republicans, they just don't know it yet') tells me that the pressure is going to be exhibited more in the groups oppressed. Hurt people hurt people.
So I'd argue that the 'there are no women in the Epstein files' is reflection of a collection of power, not of some unavoidable darkness in the souls of all men. Next to the substack GftNC posts, I'd suggest reading Amelia Gentleman's Guardian piece Sex and snacks, but no seat at the table: the role of women in Epstein’s sordid men’s club. Setting aside the irony of the writer's last name, she points out that Epstein's whole enterprise was on the backs of women who booked tickets, organized plans, etc etc. Wonkie's mention of Mad Men is interesting, because while the series revolves around the men being assholes, another important thread is how the women, in the background but vital to keep the machinery running, slowly begin to assert their own power.
While the apparent absence of asian and black victims in the case of Epstein can probably be traced to his own bent, which then gets passed thru his whole enterprise, I also wonder if the absence of asian or black men in the Epstein files might also suggest that minorities are more attuned to the transactional nature of ALL things, and therefore avoided being drawn into it.
In this regard,
Coed Revolution: The Female Student in the Japanese New Left
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv1fcf87c
is an interesting read, pointing out how women were often relegated to support roles in these movements while simultaneously being demonized by the media.
About jailbait in pop, you also have to take into account the whole structure of the industry, where bands do concerts and groupies flock backstage. My backstage adventures have been with classical music, a bit more sedate, but I remember that I had a 1st year student who was a huge fan of some relatively famous heavy metal band and she missed classes to attend multiple concerts on their Japan tour and she had been befriended by one of the guys in the band and was getting backstage. When she came back from the last concert, she had pictures of her, dressed like a demure Japanese uni student and the musician. Given that this was Japan, there were no drugs, but I didn't really ask what she actually did backstage, though she was clearly smitten. Multiply that by multiple groups and multiple concerts, mix in drugs, and it's probably a feature for a lot of groups.
Looking up those links revealed a few more and this one was particularly interesting
https://scienceandrevolution.org/blog/2019/3/30/my-response-to-chomskys-extraordinary-accusations-by-chris-knight
The most interesting section to me is the discussion of Chomsky working at MITRE, and the funding was a machine translation system that would allow "the possibility of translation of Russian language materials, particularly in scientific fields, into English by machine."
which is incredibly ironic, given chomsky's opinion on the development of LLMs
Nous, thanks for the full article. While the Cassandra envy is one reading, I see it as Chomsky being constitutional incapable of admitting he is/was in error. I'm most familiar with this pattern in linguistics and Geoff Pullum notes that it is not just that Chomsky is wrong, but that he creates a system (both with his rhetoric and his theory) that is immune to being proven wrong, even when core assumptions are proven wrong.
This is a recent article about this
https://www.jbe-platform.com/content/journals/10.1075/hl.00186.pul
Pullum also had this more accessible article in the National Review about it
https://www.nationalreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/xml_20220307_Pullum_BookReview-1.html
With the first splash he made, reviewing Skinner's Verbal Behavior, he had these traits, making me wonder if he ever changed.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2223153/
Some random thoughts. I don't know all of the gory details about the French cases mentioned here, but we have had all kinds of revelations about various groups who one would imagine would be more introspective to behave badly/act immorally. Those two phrases highlight the problem, either you assign behavior to an immature lapse in judgement or you make a claim about how it is going against all societal values. And given that Foucault was always identifying flaws in societal thinking, one can see how this can seem like society pushing back, which then engenders its own pushback, etc etc.
One thing that I think is operative in the issues in France is that academia and the elite are siloed there to a great extent, maybe much more than in other countries, and it creates structures that make misbehavior more likely. I'm thinking of the issues that have recently arisen in philosophy with McGinn, Searle and others, the issues in classics (we discussed this article about Peralta who has since moved from Princeton to ASU) as well as in other areas. I tend to think that these problems are often defined as sexism or racism, but the underlying issue is the ability to rationalize. The fact that Chomsky appears to be friends with Epstein (and his quote "I’ve met [all] sorts of people, including major war criminals. I don’t regret having met any of them.") seems like instantiations of that urge to rationalization.
The title reference was to Crown Imperial, thought I'm happy to make the connection to nous' link.
A lot of interesting points. I had to check Foucault's dates, he died in 1984, and I wonder if one problem/challenge is that we often live in an eternal present, and we can pull people into that even though they have been long gone. There is the famous letter of Machiavelli where he says:
"When evening comes, I return home and go into my study. On the threshold, I strip off my muddy, sweaty, everyday clothes, and put on the robes of court and palace, and in this graver dress I enter the antique courts of the ancients and am welcomed by them... there I am not ashamed to speak with them and ask them the reason for their actions; and they, in their humanity, reply to me."
When we can time travel like this, it is easier to subject everyone, living and dead, to our own moral codes.
A good time to watch Stewart Lee on Prince Andrew
https://youtu.be/MDUeO4lRhu4?si=N3cb873hkKF98w7-