A number of Trump appointees have tried to burrow into long-term public service jobs. Biden is firing them, which right wing commentators are trying paint as politicization. The reality is that this is correcting a Trump-era pattern of deprofessionalization. 1/

Lets step back to general principles here: political appointees selected on the basis of ideology are expected to resign when a new President comes into power. Career officials stay. For some positions its a little more complex but that is the basic governing logic. 2/
Trump blurred these basic differences between appointees and career staff. He ran out of time in his effort to turn potentially hundreds of thousands of career officials into appointees, and Biden reversed that policy. A good step to protect competence. 3/ https://t.co/mVLPHCmz97
Thats the big picture stuff, so lets focus on the specific case. The U.S. Agency for Global Media funds International broadcasters. The most famous is Radio Free Europe. Seven months ago a Trump appointee Michael Pack took over. 4/
https://t.co/WCwUJq4xG4
Pack engaged in extreme politicization of the agency. He hired people without relevant qualifications, stacked advisory boards with ideologues & conspiracy theorists, called reporters "deep state" & interfered in programming and political reporting to push a pro-Trump slant. 5/
Trump loses the election. Still, Pack and his pet board decide they want to keep control of USAGM. So they design contracts that say appointees can only be removed for cause, giving protections akin to a career official despite acting like appointees. 6/ https://t.co/ifzPJ3PCWQ
Coates is a political consultant and Trump appointee who needs a job after the election defeat. She was hired to lead Middle Eastern Broadcasting network, part of AGM, despite no real media background and limited Middle East expertise. Started Dec 22. 7/
Biden appoints a journalist with overseas experience - imagine that! - to lead AGM, with instructions to restore integrity. She fires Coates. Coates and supporters are *pointing to the contracts that Pack created to burrow in his ideological picks* to say she can't be fired. 8/
There will be a debate about the legality contracts, but to sum up:
1) Trump appointees engage in unprecedented ideological attack on mission of agency
2) Create contracts to give themselves quasi-career protections
3) Cry foul when they are treated as political appointees 8/
In other words, this is the ultimate "Biden says he wants unity" gag.
"Biden says he wants unity, but he refuses to keep in place a team of unqualified Trump appointees that oppose him and the core mission of their organization."
Follow David Folkenflik if you are interested in this topic. As he implies here, the ideal is to avoid AGM becoming a partisan mouthpiece, which means having leaders with bipartisan confidence. Trump broke that model and Biden has to fix it. https://t.co/lOuid5WsRR

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This is a pretty valiant attempt to defend the "Feminist Glaciology" article, which says conventional wisdom is wrong, and this is a solid piece of scholarship. I'll beg to differ, because I think Jeffery, here, is confusing scholarship with "saying things that seem right".


The article is, at heart, deeply weird, even essentialist. Here, for example, is the claim that proposing climate engineering is a "man" thing. Also a "man" thing: attempting to get distance from a topic, approaching it in a disinterested fashion.


Also a "man" thing—physical courage. (I guess, not quite: physical courage "co-constitutes" masculinist glaciology along with nationalism and colonialism.)


There's criticism of a New York Times article that talks about glaciology adventures, which makes a similar point.


At the heart of this chunk is the claim that glaciology excludes women because of a narrative of scientific objectivity and physical adventure. This is a strong claim! It's not enough to say, hey, sure, sounds good. Is it true?
THREAD: 12 Things Everyone Should Know About IQ

1. IQ is one of the most heritable psychological traits – that is, individual differences in IQ are strongly associated with individual differences in genes (at least in fairly typical modern environments). https://t.co/3XxzW9bxLE


2. The heritability of IQ *increases* from childhood to adulthood. Meanwhile, the effect of the shared environment largely fades away. In other words, when it comes to IQ, nature becomes more important as we get older, nurture less.
https://t.co/UqtS1lpw3n


3. IQ scores have been increasing for the last century or so, a phenomenon known as the Flynn effect. https://t.co/sCZvCst3hw (N ≈ 4 million)

(Note that the Flynn effect shows that IQ isn't 100% genetic; it doesn't show that it's 100% environmental.)


4. IQ predicts many important real world outcomes.

For example, though far from perfect, IQ is the single-best predictor of job performance we have – much better than Emotional Intelligence, the Big Five, Grit, etc. https://t.co/rKUgKDAAVx https://t.co/DWbVI8QSU3


5. Higher IQ is associated with a lower risk of death from most causes, including cardiovascular disease, respiratory disease, most forms of cancer, homicide, suicide, and accident. https://t.co/PJjGNyeQRA (N = 728,160)