"HOW POLITICAL IDEALISM LEADS US ASTRAY"

"Gaus shows that your theory of the ideal social system, whatever it may be, is almost certainly wrong. And even if it isn’t, it probably can’t work as a useful guide to political decision-making — especially not in a diverse liberal society, like ours, rife with disagreement about ideals.

Ditching our utopias for an appreciation of what Gaus, following Karl Popper, calls an "Open Society" of liberal pluralism, mutual accommodation, and incremental democratic reform brings clarity and gravity to this election season’s big choice...

As long as we can reliably identify injustice, we can focus on fixing injustices that enough of us agree to be urgent and obvious, and simply make things progressively better. That's all we need.

If you're climbing a mountain, you don't need to know what the peak looks like to know what to do next. All you have to do is make sure your next step is up. Similarly, by rectifying injustices, one after another, we can just keep gaining in moral altitude. When there's nothing left to be done, we've made it. We don't need a picture of the top to get there...

The "just go up" rule risks stranding us at a "local optimum" of justice, lacking in moral ambition. But morality demands that we don’t stop short. We’re duty-bound to shoot for the best possible social order — the "global optimum."...

In order for my ideal to play this orienting function, I needed to think that it was both possible and awesome. So I did. And that meant pretending to have good answers to hard questions I really didn’t really have evidence to back up."

https://niskanencenter.org/blog/political-idealism-leads-us-astray/

I think I'm an incrementalist, not and idealist, on justice - because this really spoke to me. 

Or maybe it's a failure of imagination, a product of having grown up in this society with all of its ingrained unjust stati quo, so that I don't know what "ideal" would look like - I just know that this isn't it, and I can concretely identify some of the reasons why. So all I can do is try to solve those until I can identify more.

FB: "there's no satisfactory way to decide among several equally compelling but incompatible ideals of justice"

"Hormone replacement makes sense for some menopausal women"

"Hormone replacement therapy toppled off the table for many menopausal women and their doctors in 2002. That’s when a women’s health study, stopped early after a data review, published results linking a common hormone therapy to an increased risk of breast cancer, heart disease, stroke and blood clots. The trial, part of a multifaceted project called the Women’s Health Initiative, or WHI, was meant to examine hormone therapy’s effectiveness in lowering the risk of heart disease and other conditions in women ages 50 to 79. It wasn’t a study of hormone therapy for treating menopausal symptoms.

But that nuance got lost in the coverage of the study’s results, described at the time as a “bombshell,” a call to get off of hormone therapy right away. Women and doctors in the United States heeded the call. A 2012 study in Obstetrics & Gynecology showed that use plummeted: Oral hormone therapy, taken by an estimated 22 percent of U.S. women 40 and older in 1999–2000, was taken by fewer than 12 percent of women in 2003–2004. Six years later, the number of women using oral hormone therapy had sunk below 5 percent... 

 the WHI hormone therapy trials were largely studies of older women — in their 60s and 70s. Only around one-third of participants started the trial between ages 50 and 59, the age group more likely to be in need of symptom relief. Hormone therapy “was always primarily a product to use in women entering menopause,” says Howard Hodis, a physician scientist who focuses on preventive medicine at the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine in Los Angeles. “The observational studies were based on these women.”

Also lost in the coverage of the 2002 study results was the absolute risk, the actual difference in the number of cases of disease between two groups. The group on combined hormone therapy had eight more cases of breast cancer per 10,000 women per year than the group taking a placebo. Hodis notes that that absolute risk translates to less than one extra case for every 1,000 women, which is classified as a rare risk by the Council for International Organizations of Medical Sciences, a World Health Organization group. There was also less than one additional case for every 1,000 women per year for heart disease and for stroke in the hormone-treated women compared with those on placebo."

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/hormone-replacement-therapy-menopause

FB: "Research in the last five years, including a long-term follow-up of women in the WHI, has clarified the risks, benefits and ideal ages for hormone therapy."

"When sickness interrupts science"

" Researchers who are chronically but not terminally ill might also fear bias and stigma (see ‘Know your rights’ for a summary of protections available under the law) if they leave work early or ask for extra help. This is particularly true if they have an illness that’s ‘invisible’ to others, such as arthritis or diabetes... 

The experience of balancing an academic career with a chronic health condition has been under-studied and its effects under-estimated, says Kate Sang, a sociologist at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, UK, who has been working on a study on illness and disability in academia.

Sang, who has degenerative nerve damage in her arm, was told that she would have trouble finding even 10 or 15 subjects, but since launching the study, she has communicated with more than 70 researchers... 

Many subjects thanked Sang for listening to them. “I found that quite upsetting, to think that this is a very articulate, very privileged group of people — academics, people with PhDs — who still felt they didn’t have a voice in academia,” Sang says."

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-00112-7?utm_source=fbk&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=naturenews&sf178912898=1

"Anatomy of a Surrogacy"

"A central purpose of Canada’s 2004 law, the Assisted Human Reproduction Act, was to protect people such as Gil. Lawmakers feared exploitation of surrogates. But they fixated on one type of exploitation over all others—coercion through money—and they failed to fully anticipate the many other perils faced by people like Gil and the commissioning family in what is inevitably a delicate arrangement.

The law’s architects were primarily concerned that if wombs and gametes were allowed to be traded openly in the marketplace, vulnerable people would be enticed to monetize them. As a result, lawmakers decided that only individuals offering these things for free, out of the goodness of their hearts, could be trusted to be doing it without coercion.

They had in mind, where surrogacy was concerned, mostly sisters or cousins or nieces offering help within their own families. The idea of a stranger being contracted to carry a baby seemed to arouse a certain discomfort, not unlike what people often feel about paid sex work. A pregnancy was too intimate—too sacred—to sell. They couldn’t fathom that a sane woman would grow a child in her uterus only to relinquish it, let alone take money for doing so... 

The Assisted Human Reproduction Act has been a spectacular failure."

https://hazlitt.net/longreads/anatomy-surrogacy

"What Self-Awareness Really Is (and How to Cultivate It)"

"We’ve found that even though most people believe they are self-aware, self-awareness is a truly rare quality: We estimate that only 10%–15% of the people we studied actually fit the criteria. Three findings in particular stood out, and are helping us develop practical guidance for how leaders can learn to see themselves more clearly... 

Across the studies we examined, two broad categories of self-awareness kept emerging. The first, which we dubbed internal self-awareness, represents how clearly we see our own values, passions, aspirations, fit with our environment, reactions (including thoughts, feelings, behaviors, strengths, and weaknesses), and impact on others... 

The second category, external self-awareness, means understanding how other people view us, in terms of those same factors listed above. Our research shows that people who know how others see them are more skilled at showing empathy and taking others’ perspectives...

As it turns out, “why” is a surprisingly ineffective self-awareness question. Research has shown that we simply do not have access to many of the unconscious thoughts, feelings, and motives we’re searching for. And because so much is trapped outside of our conscious awareness, we tend to invent answers that feel true but are often wrong... 

Therefore, to increase productive self-insight and decrease unproductive rumination, we should ask what, not why. “What” questions help us stay objective, future-focused, and empowered to act on our new insights."

https://hbr.org/2018/01/what-self-awareness-really-is-and-how-to-cultivate-it

Related:no one is looking at you 

FB: "we found that people who improved their external self-awareness did so by seeking out feedback from loving critics — that is, people who have their best interests in mind andare willing to tell them the truth. To ensure they don’t overreact or overcorrect based on one person’s opinion, they also gut-check difficult or surprising feedback with others."

"The Caucasian Panthers: Meet the Rednecks Armed, Ready and ’Bout That Anti-Racist Life"

"It turns out that Henson is a redneck. It also turns out that Henson is a UC Berkeley-educated economist and scholar with a Ph.D. in environmental science, policy and management and heads the Cooperative New School for Urban Studies and Environmental Justice. Henson doesn’t consider the term “redneck” a pejorative, and defines a redneck simply as “a white working-class Southerner.” He has been working for years to separate redneck culture from its neo-Confederate, racist past and redefine it according to its working-class roots.

“The only culture that white people and upper-middle-class white people have is whiteness,”Henson explains. “To fit in that class, you must strip yourself of everything else. What I would like to do is show white working-class whites that the neo-Confederate bullshit is a broken ideology. ... A lot of the activism in anti-racism is all about white people giving up their privilege in regards to white supremacy. I believe that will never work with working-class whites. You have to find a way to show working folks that anti-racism is within the self-interests of working-class white people. And you have to do that with a culture.”"

https://www.theroot.com/the-caucasian-panthers-meet-the-rednecks-armed-ready-1821943540?utm_medium=sharefromsite&utm_source=The_Root_facebook

Related: other anti-racist redneck post

FB: "Henson, Thurman and the YPO chapters across the country are using their history with the Panthers to fight racism, class warfare and oppression on all fronts, and they are rounding up unafraid rednecks willing to fight the power structure in any way possible."

"HOW A DORM ROOM MINECRAFT SCAM BROUGHT DOWN THE INTERNET"

"In France last September, the telecom provider OVH was hit by a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack a hundred times larger than most of its kind. Then, on a Friday afternoon in October 2016, the internet slowed or stopped for nearly the entire eastern United States, as the tech company Dyn, a key part of the internet’s backbone, came under a crippling assault... 

The truth, as made clear in that Alaskan courtroom Friday—and unsealed by the Justice Department on Wednesday—was even stranger: The brains behind Mirai were a 21-year-old Rutgers college student from suburban New Jersey and his two college-age friends from outside Pittsburgh and New Orleans. All three—Paras Jha, Josiah White, and Dalton Norman, respectively—admitted their role in creating and launching Mirai into the world.

Originally, prosecutors say, the defendants hadn’t intended to bring down the internet—they had been trying to gain an advantage in the computer game Minecraft... 

VDOS was an advanced botnet: a network of malware-infected, zombie devices that its masters could commandeer to execute DDoS attacks at will. And the teens were using it to run a lucrative version of a then-common scheme in the online gaming world—a so-called booter service, geared toward helping individual gamers attack an opponent while fighting head-to-head, knocking them offline to defeat them. Its tens of thousands of customers could pay small amounts, like $5 to $50, to rent small-scale denial-of-service attacks via an easy-to-use web interface... 

The new malware scanned the internet for dozens of different IoT devices that still used the manufacturers’ default security setting. Since most users rarely change default usernames or passwords, it quickly grew into a powerful assembly of weaponized electronics, almost all of which had been hijacked without their owners’ knowledge."

https://www.wired.com/story/mirai-botnet-minecraft-scam-brought-down-the-internet/

(tbh, this is long, I got bored pretty quickly - but it was interesting before I got bored!) 

FB: "At its peak, the self-replicating computer worm had enslaved some 600,000 devices around the world—which, combined with today’s high-speed broadband connections, allowed it to harness an unprecedented flood of network-clogging traffic against target websites. It proved particularly tough for companies to fight against and remediate, too, as the botnet used a variety of different nefarious traffic to overwhelm its target, attacking both servers and applications that ran on the servers, as well as even older techniques almost forgotten in modern DDoS attacks."