Like @ezraklein I was born and raised in OC and educated at a UC. He is right to point to some of CA's problems. But they aren't a sign "progressivism cannot work here". It's a sign corporate/right-wing power hasn't been sufficiently broken.

Oh are we talking about Sheryl Sandberg again? Well, your reminder that disabled feminists, LGBQT feminists, and feminists of color criticised her ‘lean in’ deal from day one. Don’t let anyone retcon that out of existence.

Like, a pretty narrow slice of feminists actually endorse and support corporate feminism, they’re just white, nondisabled, straight, cis, and noisy so their voices have a bigger reach.

So if your impression is that ‘feminism’ gave her a ‘free pass’ maybe you should question your overall impression of feminism rather than continuing to centre a handful of people as ‘thought leaders’ or whatever.

Critics within feminism have been doing this work for a long time and have been getting shat on it for about as long and I'm tired of seeing them erased. But what do I know — I am, after all, not a feminist.

But I WILL say, from my not-a-feminist perspective, that people who aren’t feminists who are criticising feminism should maybe understand the movement more deeply beyond a handful of high profile celebrity feminists.

Academic staff at universities can't be open about the complaints against them - and most complaints of transphobia from students seem to be directed at staff. I'm just a final year PhD student, under no contractual requirement to be confidential, so I can share.

The original complaint against me was typical of the sort of thing directed at many female professional academics (and some male too). The strategies employed by my complainants are commonly used.

One of these is to perform vulnerability while behaving aggressively. Performing vulnerability is essential in order to trigger the university's awareness of its duties under the Equality Act, and establish an oppressor/victim dynamic to the case from the outset.

My complainants did this effectively. The complaint was initiated by a fellow PhD student, who joined forces with the SU. A student from the SU wrote the actual complaint. This is how it begins:

In all my dealings with @HuddersfieldUni I accepted that sometimes anonymous complaints were necessary - and that, sometimes, victimisation could be a concern. However, I have never victimised anyone. Nobody has ever argued that I have.

1/14 How do e-cigarettes (ECs) affect cigarette smoking among youth? My new paper with @FloeFoxon simulates each scenario and finds out which one best matches actual trends... https://t.co/dBB7kcnTls @jgitchell @mikepesko @SwitchFinder @jkelovuori @TobPolicy @Clive_Bates

2/14 First, let's talk about why this question is so difficult to answer: COUNTERFACTUALS. We can't know the alternate-reality answers, like which smokers would have never started in a world without ECs, and which nonsmokers would now be smoking without ECs as an option.

3/14 So, the best we can do is use fancy/sophisticated methodologies to estimate what would have happened to youth smoking rates in the absence of ECs. In our case, simulation modeling

4/14 First, we look at the declining smoking trends *that were already happening* before ECs came (~2010), and project them into the present. This is our BASE-CASE SCENARIO about what smoking trends would be if ECs were never invented. Actual trends were LOWER than this base-case

5/14 Side note about terminology: We use the term “catalyst” instead of “gateway,” because “catalyst” is more precise about the claim we are modeling (that ECs are used first, and then causally lead to smoking). Whereas "gateway" can include other mechanisms like renormalization.

The reason that so many conservative evangelicals these days appear to be moral relativists is that they *are* moral relativists.

They would deny this, of course. But that doesn’t make it any less true. Here's why.

They’ve bought into the premise that all statements are either fact or opinion: facts are objective and verifiable; and everything else is opinion—subjective and unverifiable. In other words, they've bought into full-fledged modernism.

From there, the secular path to moral relativism places all moral statements in the “opinion” category. On this view, morality is subjective—dependent on cultural context, historical background and the like.

Conservative evangelicals recoil from this approach, as they should.

So instead, they place morality in the “fact” category, claiming that moral truth is objective and empirically verifiable.

And how is moral truth empirically verified? The Bible, of course. Problem solved.

This is tempting, for two reasons. First, Scripture is entirely true; and much of that truth pertains to morality.

Second, apart from special revelation, it’s difficult to imagine where we might go to find empirical verification of moral truth—you can't *see* moral properties.

Capitalism demolishes society and, with it, itself.

A thread.

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Prior to capitalism, there were plenty of elite-centric, exploitive systems in place. European and Japanese feudalism. Roman mass slavery. The corvee labor of the ancient hydraulic state. Etc.

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But as exploitive and repressive as these systems were, they still retained some sense of mutual obligation among classes. Elites depend on the masses to survive and thrive. You can only exploit them up to a certain point, beyond which you threaten your own labor supply.

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Consider this quote from Kenneth Jupp on European feudalism. Feudalism entailed *mutual obligations* between rich and poor.

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These obligations were not equal, uniform, or always universally respected. But they were at least *there.* In return for labor and agricultural surplus, a feudal lord was obligated to protect his villeins, provide them justice, and respect their usufruct land rights.

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