Links - 29th October 2019 (2)

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Steve Bannon full interview - "People in the United Kingdom should see this more than anything, you voted on Brexit. And what you had was a civil service that said, we're not going to do that. And it broke the back of the Tory party. Okay, it broke the back of the Tory party. That's the permanent political class that runs things. That's what's got to be addressed. And President Trump has got it in Washington, DC, just as much as you've got it in London...
You have some very attractive personalities running in the Democratic Party. What is happening every day is they're being more radicalized, they've essentially become an open borders party. They've already said the show of hands of that on the first debate was unanimous about paying unlimited health care for illegal immigrants...
Right now, there's a very disturbing trend. And I think maybe even the preliminary to a, a major confrontation started economically. Remember, war in the future will be cyber and economic, almost more than kinetic. And you're seeing China, Iran, Turkey, with North Korea, and now Russia forming I think some sort of working group, the United States is already in quasi economic war with these right now. The tariffs are essentially sanctions on China, we’ve sanctioned North Korea, we've sanctioned Iran and we’re looking to our allies to help us with secondary sanctions. We've began this kind of economic confrontation a little bit with Turkey, Turkey just bought the planes, the jets from Russia, Russia is doing joint combat exercises in the Pacific with China, you can see the control of the Eurasian landmass coming apart. And there's a working partnership... what Donald Trump has done geopolitically and this one I think he's done, he saved NATO. Remember, NATO hadn't gotten up to the 2% and this is why he was hectoring it the entire time. These threats are real threats. And that's why NATO has got to be a robust alliance. When you hear John McCain, these other people denigrate Trump on NATO, it's the exact opposite. Donald Trump's put his political capital on the rejuvenation of NATO. This budget that just went down that the conservatives are not happy about, a big part of that is about national security, to support NATO operations, support operation around the world. What Donald Trump has, I think done is put in high relief, exactly what we're facing. The next 20, 30, 40 years is about the Eurasian landmass. It is China, Iran, Turkey, Russia and North Korea… these are all totalitarian surveillance states. Okay. And I think the conflict coming in the future is against the western democracies, and those like India, and Japan and Korea, that believe in, the industrial democracies that believe in freedom and the democratic process versus these totalitarian governments. And it's very clear to me, that that's the storm clouds on the rise. And I think Donald Trump in his wisdom is putting together, that's why he's put such a focus on the South China Sea. That's why he's putting such a focus on the streets of Taiwan. That's why he's putting such a focus. That's why we have a carrier battle group up in the north Arabian Sea. And it's not to be provocative, trying to start a kinetic war. What is doing is telling our allies, particularly NATO, in Europe that depend upon the Persian Gulf, remember, we're now energy independent. We're an energy exporter. So these places in the world are not as significant as they used to be, except to our allies"

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Johnson meets Macron - "You must assume that people will take negotiating positions. One of the things that was most aggravating for me is listening to... the BBC more generally and public media more generally, treat statements from the European Union as though they’re statements of fact, rather than negotiating stances, and every single thing they say is a negotiating stance, even down to Mr. Hogan's threats of a poisoned atmosphere"

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Detroit & US 2020 elections - "We in the United States have to get back to governing. And I really think we're distracted by the wrong issues. You know, if you sit here and you watch the Mueller investigation, or you watch these other issues, this is not what the American citizens care about. The American citizens care about a Congress that works, a Congress that legislates, a Congress that thinks about what they need. And look, this is not new. This has been going on for over a decade right now. Where Washington spends more time talking about the distractions, then they talk about the real issues. This may get worse before it gets better. But at some point, the United States citizens are going to force the government to govern…
‘Should he quit it? Should he quit this talk on race?’...
‘Everyone should quit this. If everyone would wake up every morning in Washington and say, look, how can I make this country better for citizens? I think that's what everyone in Washington and by the way, that's on the right, that's on the left, and that's in the center.’"

BBC World Service - The World This Week, Kashmir Tensions - "There's overwhelming support for what he's done outside the Valley of Kashmir, they say why should Kashmir have autonomy if it's part of India? Why should Indians not be able to buy land?"

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Trump's Greenland bid - "On the 20th of September former President Obama is scheduled to speak in northern Denmark at the University of Aalborg. It's a small town, but he will get a big response and you suddenly realize Donald Trump was going, he was scheduled to visit Denmark on the second and third of September, was terrified of the contrast between the reception that former President Obama would get and that he would get. And then he began to look around for an excuse as to why he couldn't go to Denmark, Greenland became it."

Why Good Teaching Evaluations May Reward Bad Teaching: On Grade Inflation and Other Unintended Consequences of Student Evaluations. - "I address the paradox that university grade point averages have increased for decades, whereas the time students invest in their studies has decreased. I argue that one major contributor to this paradox is grading leniency, encouraged by the practice of university administrators to base important personnel decisions on student evaluations of teaching. Grading leniency creates strong incentives for instructors to teach in ways that would result in good student evaluations. Because many instructors believe that the average student prefers courses that are entertaining, require little work, and result in high grades, they feel under pressure to conform to those expectations. Evidence is presented that the positive association between student grades and their evaluation of teaching reflects a bias rather than teaching effectiveness. If good teaching evaluations reflected improved student learning due to effective teaching, they should be positively related to the grades received in subsequent courses that build on knowledge gained in the previous course. Findings that teaching evaluations of concurrent courses, though positively correlated with concurrent grades, are negatively related to student performance in subsequent courses are more consistent with the assumption that concurrent evaluations are the result of lenient grading rather than effective teaching"
Market mechanisms don't always improve outcomes

I Was a Female Incel - "this bullying was perpetuated almost exclusively by women. For all the talk of a shadowy cis-hetero-patriarchal conspiracy whereby men get power by pitting innocent women against each other, men never bullied me or taunted me for being awkward or different. Mostly they either ignored me or appreciated my strength, intellect, and humor. It was girls who bullied me, and bullied me relentlessly, even though I clearly posed no threat whatsoever to their various sexual pursuits. They did it to tell me that they viewed me as inferior, even though the very men they pursued seemed to prefer the company of girls like me to girls like them, who they tended to view as unoriginal and desperate for attention. (I will admit that I harbored some resentment that the boys romantically pursued these other girls instead of me.) Ultimately, this appeared to me not to be an issue of boys pitting girls against each other, but rather of socially powerful girls using their social power—and their sex appeal, in particular—to oppress both women and men they deemed unworthy, knowing damn well that the other girls were too timid, and the boys not socially permitted, to fight back... I was introduced to radical feminism. As I scrolled through blog after blog of ignorant, hateful misandrist drivel, I felt a righteous anger stirring inside me. Here were the same pretty, popular girls that used their social power to degrade me talking about how oppressed they were. They spoke proudly about degrading their bodies through cheap, meaningless sex. They bragged about destroying the sexual and social confidence of men and then called it ’empowerment.’ They saw the entire world as a perpetual struggle between the female collective and an oppressive patriarchal system, and their purpose in life was smashing that system. They laughed off the idea that they, too, might be oppressive... Most women will never understand just how terrifying girls—especially pretty girls—are to men (or, in this case, gay women)."

The Problem with 'White Fragility' Theory - "it appears that DiAngelo and her disciples have become so focused on white ‘illiteracy’ in the conversation about race that they are prepared to sacrifice the scientific method on the altar of fighting ‘institutional racism.’... in many cases, progressive activism is inspired by ideas that lack sufficient support from social science research... I have lamented how progressives such as Claudia Rankine have turned the Emmy-award-winning show Breaking Bad into a paradigm of ‘whiteness’ by misinterpreting the motives that drove Walter White to become a modern Macbeth (failing, I might add, to see the irony that Walter White’s final act is the murder of white supremacists). I have questioned whether micro-aggressions really are a thing, drawing attention to a devastating critique of the micro-aggression research paradigm (MRP) written by eminent Emory University psychologist Scott O. Lilienfeld in his review of the psychological literature... I have come across serious critiques of the Implicit Association Test (IAT)... I have been asked, explicitly or implicitly: why are you so uptight? Why do you have a problem with the pursuit of social justice? Why do you get defensive about white privilege? I am then directed to the work of Dr. Robin DiAngelo on ‘white fragility.’ As a career economist with an undergraduate degree in philosophy, I have found myself distraught by this unwillingness to engage in debate about the merits of progressive ideas and the social science research that underlies them... The notion of ‘white fragility’ is an unambiguous example of the slippery slope that can ensue. Invoking ‘white fragility’ when presented with serious critiques of the conceptual and methodological underpinnings of the IAT, the micro-aggression research paradigm, white privilege, and other progressive ideas, is like hearing someone blithely dismiss a rigorous critique of communism as ‘bourgeois.’ One does not have to invoke communism’s worst abuses to appreciate the hostility to scientific inquiry of those who wave away objections by attributing them to a white ‘racialized’ perspective (to use DiAngelo’s word). Socialization and acculturation are powerful forces in the development of one’s capacity to think critically about social, political, and economic issues, but they do not make it impossible. To believe otherwise is to replace the scientific method (ironically enough) with a reactionary reflexive need to categorize any objections—reasonable or otherwise—as manifestations of ‘white fragility.’ In other words, ‘white fragility’ becomes an Orwellian device to dismiss objections from white people in the same way that ‘bourgeois’ was a semantic weapon to dismiss the objections of ‘capitalists’ to communist doctrine... DiAngelo remains determined to demonstrate to “red-faced” white people that they have been socialized into a “racialized” worldview. In her stubborn persistence, invoking ‘white fragility’ elevates a banal observation about universal defense mechanisms into an old Marxist storyline about ‘false consciousness’ as a central force in the perpetuation of systemic exploitation.As I have argued elsewhere, the specter of Marxism haunts the contemporary social justice movement... This kind of thinking has a tendency to transform education into indoctrination. When the scientific method is subordinated to the eradication of ‘racialized’ perspectives, we cease to learn about the hows and whys of social and economic disparities across racial groups and instead become immersed in the propagation of ideas that lack support from social science research. At which point it becomes difficult to dismiss concerns that progressive activism is not about social justice at all, but about ideological intolerance and conformity, driven by agendas reminiscent of Marxist thought and activism"
If a non-white person disputes liberal doctrine, just accuse them of internalised whiteness or internalised white supremacy - or even better, of being a white supremacist