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I have written about the effort to change the Canadian military's culture here although, to be clear, I am focused and expert (ish) on only one aspect of the culture change effort--changing attitudes and practices of civilian control.  Most of the conversation is about making the military more inclusive, diverse, and equitable, and the CDSN has done much in this area via our personnel research theme.  We have also discussed this much at the Battle Rhythm Podcast.  We know, thanks to Machiavelli, that any reform will face resistance from those who benefited from the old way.  And this is the case today, but there is more to it as I will explain.  The story right now is about a special issue of the Canadian Military Journal and the storm that has been generated in response.  Transforming Military Cultures is one of the nine networks currently funded by the Department of National Defence's Mobilizing Insights on Defence and Security program.  The TMC group organized a special issue of this journal to present a critical perspective on the military and what needs to change.  Yes, they used all kinds of buzz words that greatly annoy the right wing: critical race theory, decolonization, and anti-racism to name a few. * These kinds of analyses can be hard to read and process because they say: the way things have done has been harmful, and we need to change.  This calls out those who have been influential in the military (and their civilian overseers) in the past as complicit--either encouraging or condoning an environment in which those in power could act within impunity and those without power suffered quite significantly.  We know about the purge of LGBTQ2S+ from the military and intelligence services deep into the 1990s, we know about the problem of sexual misconduct from multiple reports by multiple retired supreme court justices, we have some understanding of the challenges Indigenous people have faced in and out of the CAF, and so on.  So, yeah, it calls out mostly white men because white men have generally had power when this bad stuff was happening.  It hurts the feelings of some apparently to be called out for the sins of the past.  Suck it up, snowflakes.Anyhow, this special issue got a heap of attention when a far right propaganda outlet blasted it, essentially siccing its readers on the TMC people who have now faced some significant harassment.  This is typical far right behavior, stuff that Trump does all the time (including providing Obama's address which led to a potential assassin showing up near Obama's house).  Some of the judges and prosecutors involved with Trump's various prosecutions have been swatted--that is when someone files a false report with the cops that indicates there is an emergency that requires the heavily armed special police types to go to a certain address with the caller hoping that the police end up killing the target of their animus.The ruckus this has stirred up has also led opponents of culture change to engage in a writing campaign aimed at CMJ.  Again, opponents to culture change largely but not entirely fit into one basket--those who find the ways of the past--of purged gays and lesbians, of women and men facing little recourse when sexually harassed, of senior officers abusing their authority, of historically excluded groups being relegated to inferior positions--to be the traditions they want maintained.  There is one additional complication--that the far right outlet's take on all of this was included in a Royal Canadian Navy news summary that was widely distributed.  The idea is that those in the navy should be aware of news stories, positive or negative, that are relevant to the navy.  While the far right is quite relevant and the military should be kept abreast of what it is up to, I think including such outlets in a news summary is akin to putting the press releases of Al Qaeda or the Islamic State in a news summary.  Again, the public affairs folks in the CAF should know what is being said about them, but I would not platform far right outlets in regular email summaries.And to be clear, while I want to avoid any false equivalence, I would not include press released by Greenpeace or Amnesty International or the Communist Party in a news summary either.  To be absolutely clear, we live in a time where the violence and the incitement of violence is coming from one side of the spectrum.  Far right terrorism has been far more harmful the past 20 years than far left violence.  So, we need to keep in mind where the threat is coming from, and we need to be clear that platforming the far right without context is very problematic.  I don't think there was ill intent here, but as one of my favorite bluesky follows often says, So, yes, the RCN needs to re-think what it sends around.  And I stand with TMC and others who are fighting the good fight of changing the culture of the military so that almost all Canadians would be welcome to join and to serve with pride and success--all except the far right, white supremacists that is. *A reminder that basic logic suggests that if one is anti-anti-racism, one is pro-racism.

Drawing on survey data across a ten year period, Josh Borycz, Alison Specht, and Kevin Crowston, explore how attitudes to open data and more broadly open science have shifted and identify three factors that shape uptake of open science practices. Open Science is a game changer for researchers and the research community. The UNESCO Open … Continued

 So, Anita Anand is out and Bill Blair is in as Minister of National Defence.  This is bad news for my civ-mil classes as Minister Anand zoomed into my class both times I taught the class while she was Minister of National Defence.  I think it is also bad news for Canadian civil-military relations, the Department of National Defence, and, yes, the Canadian Armed Forces.  Let me listicle my way through this:the file is not an easy one, and Anand has done a heap of homework and understands the stuff pretty well by this point.  While she has not been able to deliver a defence policy update on time, she has managed the file pretty well given the constraints imposed by the Prime Minister's Office, the world (hey, how about you spend much of your time working to help Ukraine), and resistance within the CAF and maybe within DND itself.  Blair will come in and have to learn from scratch.  Will he have the same determination to read everything (as Anand said on the BattleRhythm podcast)? Speaking of which, DND and CAF aren't very transparent, but Anand did do a fair amount of outreach, including appearing on our podcast. Will Blair?Beyond reading/speaking, Anand seemed more determined than most MND's to actually impose civilian control of the military, rather than just sign off on whatever the CAF wanted.  While this might have been tough for the CAF to swallow, the military had proved that it did not handle its autonomy well at all.  Which gets back to continuity.  How long does it take it to create new institutions, rules, and norms and have them bite--shape the incentives, outlooks, and then ultimately who leads?  Not sure what the magic number is, but I am guessing it is more than two years.  What of that defence policy update?  Will it be scrapped and started again with new leadership?  Will Blair just sign off on the previous work?  🤷.I have written repeatedly about the problems of having a former military officer serve in this spot--O'Connor/Sajjan here, Mattis/Austin in the US.  What about an ex-cop?  Lovely.  Not so lovely.  If there is an agency or entity that has a worse record of civilian control than the military, it is Global Affairs the Royal Canadian Mounted Police as well as the other police forces in Canada.  As an ex-cop, Blair almost assuredly had an attitude that the cops knew better than the politicians and that they should have autonomy to avoid being politicized.  The problem, of course, is that all policing is political.  Is Blair likely to accede to whatever the military recommends, or is he going to, yes, engage in management and even micromanagement?  Gasp!  I am guessing the former.  While there are better leaders in the CAF now than a few years ago, decades of behavior and the dynamics in other countries have proven that giving militaries heaps of autonomy is not the way to go.  So, that is the substantial stuff, but there is also the symbolic.  No, I am not talking about swapping out a women of colour and putting in an old white guy (although, yeah, that might send some signals).  I am talking about removing a super-competent, engaged person and replacing them with someone who has little clout and has mismanaged his previous files.  The message this sends?  Trudeau doesn't care about defence now that it is not burning as much, so he is sending someone who should have been shuffled out of the cabinet to defence.  This is a damaging message to send to those who have been sticking it out in the CAF and DND, hoping for and fighting for change to happen.  Is Blair going to help or hurt with the personnel crisis?  Now that I think about it, that really would have been the first question I would be asking myself if I were PM.  Sure, few folks condition their votes on defence or foreign policy, but when making this decision, I would use that attitude to do what is necessary for Canada's national interests.  Given the primacy of the personnel crisis, that would shape the decision..... or not.Maybe they need a sharp, detail-oriented person at Treasury Board.  Ok,  But Blair as Minister of National Defence?   

Theme To properly implement climate change mitigation policies, it is crucial to understand the interaction between these policies and people's behaviour, both at the individual and the social levels. Doing so leads to specific recommendations that can improve policy acceptability. Summary Based on the Elcano Royal Institute's 2019 survey on the attitudes of Spanish citizens […]
La entrada Four lessons on the interaction between climate change mitigation policies and social behaviour se publicó primero en Elcano Royal Institute.

With most through to another four years of office, in
their latest meeting Bossier Parish police jurors reverted to their typical
arrogance and obtuseness. Perhaps they should pay attention to the shape of their
future: what happened at the last Bossier City Council meeting.

Recent election results guaranteed nine jurors
would return to office. The one runoff that remains will send a new member to
the Jury since District 10 four-decade veteran Jerome
Darby retired, but vying as his replacement leading into the runoff is his
brother Democrat Julius Darby. Republican challenger Keith Sutton defeated
incumbent Republican Mac Plummer in
District 12, while the GOP's Pam Glorioso beat incumbent Democrat Charles
Gray in District 9.

But over the past two years, all jurors had
engaged in questionable, if not illegal, acts. They hired, knowing
full well it was against the law, Butch Ford as parish administrator, because
he was not a registered voter in Bossier Parish. He would not become one until
ten months into his tenure, but even
now some dispute remains over whether that residence qualifies for that purpose.
They also filled completely the parish's Library
Board of Control with themselves, a move which
is of uncertain legal status and unprecedented across the state.

When at that latest meeting
a couple of citizens questioned the reappointment
of Republican Juror Doug
Rimmer to the Board, drawing upon attorney general documents that declared
sitting jurors on library boards was dual officeholding, as well as questioning
why all five board members had to be jurors when in a parish approaching
130,000 residents surely there were more than enough non-jurors willing to
serve, the likes of Rimmer and another juror on the Board, Republican Julianna
Parks, at jury meetings and other forums have asserted the necessity of
having jurors on the Board because of alleged and nebulously specified problems
with the Board. As well, at this meeting Rimmer stated, on the advice of Parish
Attorney Patrick Jackson, that the ability for jurors to serve on the Board was
unquestioned.

The problem is, in addition to the Attorney
General's office publicly taking the opposite position, case law not addressing
this exact situation – at the meeting Jackson erroneously implied that it had
and in favor of his interpretation – and conflicting statutes that seemingly give
a parish the ability to dodge dual officeholding restrictions in this instance,
Jackson himself doesn't have a good track record when it comes to understanding
what the law means concerning appointments in parish government. In the past, he
told jurors that, absent a court
ruling otherwise which eventually happened, that Jury appointee Robert Berry
to the Cypress Black Bayou Recreation
and Water Conservation District could serve in that capacity and as the agency's
executive director without violating dual officeholding law. And Rimmer stated at
a recent Republican Parish Executive Committee meeting that Jackson also advised
jurors they could appoint Ford as parish administrator despite his voter
registration not being in Bossier while he looked to rectify that, which appears
nowhere in the law and an action Ford showed no signs of pursuing until this
space publicized his continued registration in Caddo parish ten months after
his appointment.

Worst of all, Jackson either apparently was
unaware of, tacitly approved of, or actually counseled in favor of the fact
that the Board, then comprised of Rimmer, Republican Bob
Brotherton who won reelection, and Gray illegally had made Ford interim
library director in October, 2022, in contravention of R.S. 25:215 that states
any head of a library system must have qualifications under R.S. 25:222, or a certification
by the State Board of Library Examiners. Ford would serve six months in that
job.

This unequivocally illegal action by three jurors
(probably four, as minutes of that meeting never haven been made widely available,
if they exist; the next meeting's minutes imply at that previous meeting
Republican Juror Glenn
Benton had been appointed but it's unknown whether he participated in the
vote to appoint Ford) belies the argument that jurors were necessary to "clean
up" the Board. In fact, they disgraced it and themselves by behaving illegally.

And the whole argument of juror necessity to respond
to some problem is untenable, if not a mendacious excuse to justify the juror
takeover. In fact, jurors were serving on the Board as long ago as 2016,
when the Jury expanded the Board to include Rimmer and Brotherton with five
other citizens (boards can have five to seven members). If there were alleged
difficulties, not only have these been going on a long time, but also jurors by
definition contributed to these so how can adding more jurors – and retaining the
two already there – solve for problems jurors already are creating? So what's
so great about juror service on the Board if they act illegally and supposedly
badly enough to need outside intervention?

Of course, to clarify about whether jurors can
serve on the Board, a simple request to the Attorney General's office for an opinion could be pursued. That
would take a resolution passed by the Jury, but no juror has suggested this
happen – perhaps because they know their policy might be in trouble. And the
dismissive attitude that Rimmer and other jurors showed in the meeting towards
citizen concerns on this issue illustrates their haughtiness and a belief they
are above the citizenry, if not the law, emboldened now by recent electoral
success.

If it stays that way. And it may not, if the
latest Bossier City Council meeting indicates anything. Because three years ago,
the Council was much like the Jury today. Back then five members of almost two
decades or more service on the Council, actively supported by another more
junior member, ran the show with little transparency, using their voting power
and a compliant mayor to foist an avalanche of unneeded capital spending fueled
by debt onto the backs of the citizenry.

However, the stench of that awakened enough voters
so that two of the graybeards lost their jobs and eventually were replaced by
newcomers Republicans Chris Smith and
Brian
Hammons. Since then, the pair have become increasingly vocal about use of
tax dollars going to genuine needs rather than to monuments, figurative and literal,
to long-serving councilors' egos.

While Hammons missed the last meeting, Smith more
than made up for the both of them with a display of this critical attitude over
spending. On an item
for more capital expenditures for parks and recreation, Smith pointed out that
in recent years over $20 million in tax dollars had gone for capital expenditures
at the Tinsley Park complex, yet tax-paying citizens often couldn't use these
in being crowded out instead by out-of-towners paying fees to use these.

Sparring with head of the Bossier City Department
of Parks and Recreation Clay Bohanan, who with past mayoral and current Council
graybeard support has pursued a model
that puts revenue generation ahead of citizen ability to use certain facilities,
Smith not only fought back against Bohanan's arrogance, who was joined by graybeard
Democrat Councilor Bubba Williams
implying that their exclusionary pay-to-play model was unimpeachably correct,
but he also made the heretical suggestion that in following that model it would
make more sense just to sell off the facilities to private operators.

In the larger scheme of things, Smith's argument
was that instead of taxpayer dollars going to paying of the principal and
interest on debt on things of little value to the citizenry, it could be
reserved to fund employee raises, particularly for public safety personnel.
When Williams subsequently challenged (actually calling untrue) a Smith
statement that Bossier City's salaries ranked at the bottom of the region by
pointing to a study
done a couple of years back comparing Alexandria's public safety salaries to
others in the state that put Bossier City police in the middle of the pack,
Smith trumped him with his own very recent data looking at regional agencies,
almost all in Texas, which had Bossier City salaries at or near the bottom.

Such argumentation would have been unheard of
coming from the Council three years ago. But Smith and Hammons' elections in 2021 brought a breath of fresh air into Council debates that until then had been
almost always get-along-go-along with no dissension on big spending plans with
total disregard of airing out negative implications of that spending.

Hopefully, those kinds of debates will commence
and flourish now that at least one reform-minded outsider, Sutton, will join
the Jury. Glorioso was part of the cabal united with the Council graybeards
when she served as Bossier City chief administrative officer until her boss
lost reelection, so it seems unlikely that she would act differently in opening
up the Jury. Perhaps Darby's opponent Democrat Mary Giles would ally with
Sutton, while Julius Darby seems unlikely to.

But as the events surrounding Bossier City
government over the past couple of years have shown, you don't have to have a
majority to change the atmosphere. Perhaps a couple of years from now the
sunshine even one dissenter can bring will have started to show results in curbing
the Jury's penchant for lawless, sanctimonious behavior while deflating its members'
attitude of insufferably unaccountable behavior.

The Iranian LGBTQ+ community is kept invisible by the Iranian opposition, but a US LGBTQ+ award to exile Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi seems to signify changes in attitudes.

Survey data shows relatively infrequent voters are significantly more likely to support the Trump-era GOP than those who vote more often. Will this change traditional left and right-wing attitudes towards mandatory voting and other policies intended to increase turnout?

Environmentalists must drop their "capitalism equals bad" attitude and embrace business if next month's Cop28 climate summit is to stand any chance of success, a former oil industry boss who is helping host the event has said.We'd actually suggest that everything after "attitude" is superfluous there. "For far too long the climate conversation has been seen through the lens of activists equals good and capitalism equals bad. And this needs to change if business is going to be a big part of the solution."Leave aside all the Marxist wibble about class and capitalism is simply a system in which the savings of these people, here, are mobilised to fund that business over there. And, at this level of analysis, any system that does that is capitalist. The capital comes from, belongs to, those outside the business or organisation doing the whatever it is. At which point clearly and obviously capitalism is going to be a part of the solution to climate change. As any large scale mobilisation of economic resources must be. Simply because that's what it means, that mobilisation and divorce between who is providing the capital and who is doing the thing.So, yes, shrug.Except, obviously, for those whose embrace of climate change activism is the opportunity to overthrow capitalism. But as that means the end of large scale economic activity that's always going to remain a distinctly minority view, isn't it.Isn't it?

This year marks the 75th anniversary of the American National Election Studies– the definitive study of American political attitudes and behavior. The ANES has run national surveys of citizens before and after every presidential election since 1948, providing a rigorous, non-partisan basis for understanding contemporary issues as well as change over time. According to the […]
The post Reflections on the American National Election Studies: An Interview with Nicholas Valentino first appeared on Center for Political Studies (CPS) Blog.

The American National Election Studies (ANES) is the definitive study of American political attitudes and behavior. The project has surveyed American citizens before and after every presidential election since 1948. With a time series of core questions asked continuously across many elections, these surveys provide a window onto the sweep and the pivot points of historic change in American public opinion. In recent studies, new questions comprise about 30 percent of each survey, allowing users to understand contemporary issues that might be driving American political dynamics. This visual history of the ANES was written on the occasion of its 75th anniversary.
The post A Visual History of the American National Election Studies first appeared on Center for Political Studies (CPS) Blog.

That green energy, all those renewables, is really cheaper than fossil fuels is something we've seen people say. But we've never really believed that they, themselves, believe it. For if they did then there would be no need for subsidies, laws, forcings and bans. People will naturally gravitate to the cheaper option and climate change will be solved. But here we have someone who really does seem to believe this mantra:Clean energy provides not only a key means to Britain achieving net zero within the timeline we've committed to, but also offers households a vital financial lifeline through decreasing the price of energy. Oh well. But this is not what worries us here, not at all. Markets do refute such delusions even if it might take some time. Precisely because markets work through prices, those easily visible numbers that tell us about relative costs. What strikes us as significantly dangerous is this:The UK must now double down on its commitment to achieving a clean grid by 2035 – or risk breaking its net zero by 2050 pledge. Put simply, we cannot view these timelines, informed by expertise from top climate scientists and the Climate Change Committee, as malleable to political whim. They are gradated, clear pathways that must not be tampered with at this stage of innovation and investment as we transform our economy.This is a demand that we cease to have democracy - at least upon this subject. For it is an insistence that however the next election - or next however many elections - goes this policy must be followed. But the entire point of having an election is to enable changes in policy. If we the demos decide we don't like the law then we elect someone else and we get different laws. That really is the purpose of the system, that policy change is possible without uprisings. Yes, this point does also cover other laws that have those "legally enforceable targets" and so on. They're an abomination unto democracy. The British constitution, that unwritten mishmash, has a central concept to it - no parliament may bind its successors. For the very obvious reason that the entire point of a new parliament is to change how the place is run - if that's what the demos decides it wants. Ossifying a highly contentious policy into the skeleton of the political system is inherently anti-democratic. Shame on those proposing such a thing. It's not mattocks and pruning hooks time as yet but this attitude that you'll do whatever we tell you whatever you say in an election is what does lead to such distressing episodes.

 Traditionally, more educated people were more likely to vote for conservative parties, even if you adjusted for income, but this relationship has weakened or reversed in many nations, including the United States.  The usual explanation for this change is more educated people are more conservative on economic issues, but more liberal on "social issues," so changes in voting pattern reflect changes in the relative importance of economic and social issues.   To quote David Leonhardt, "people vote based less on their income and more on their cultural attitudes."   But there's another possible explanation of the shift that hasn't gotten much attention:  maybe the relationship between education and economic opinions is changing.  I considered this possibility in a paper that I presented last week at the World Congress of Sociology using data from a large number of nations included in the World Values Survey.  I considered four questions—whether incomes should be made more equal, whether government ownership of business should be increased, whether the government should take more responsibility for caring for people, and whether competition is bad because it brings out the worst in people—and computed the difference between the opinions of university graduates and others, adjusting for income (and a few other variables).  The figure shows the association of higher education with the sum of opinions on the four questions:The horizontal red line indicates no difference:  below that line means more educated people are more conservative than less educated people, above means they are to the left of less educated people.  The relationship seems to change with per-capita GDP:  in poorer nations, university graduates are to the right of other people on these issues, but in more affluent nations, they are generally to the left.   (This relationship does not hold in the formerly socialist nations). Of course, the affluent nations differ from the poorer nations in a number of ways:  most obviously, they are generally in Western Europe or were settled by people from Western Europe.  So a cross-sectional relationship between per-capita GDP and the direction of opinion could reflect enduring cultural differences rather than affluence.  Fortunately, the WVS has included these questions since 1990, so it's possible to see if the relationship has changed over the last 30 years.  Here are the changes, adjusting for differences in the nations included in different waves.  The zero point is the differences in 1990–positive values mean more leftward (or less rightward) differences relative to 1990.For three of the four questions, the "education gap" has moved to the left--for competition, there hasn't been any clear change.  The move is pretty steady, although there seems to be some short-term variation (between the first and second waves, there was no change, or maybe even a small rightward change).  So it seems that there's something about "modernization" or economic development that leads to a change in the relationship between education and economic views.  What might that be?  One possibility is that affluence does increase the importance of "values" relative to immediate self-interest, but that economic opinions reflect mix of self-interest and values rather than immediate self-interest.  That is, educated people become more willing to help the poor even if that might increase their taxes, and less educated people become more willing to refuse a "handout" even if they would benefit.   Robert Lane proposed that freedom and equality were core principles of modern society, and although almost everyone accepts them in a general way, more educated people are more likely to apply them consistently--as a result, people in "the professional class" were more likely to be consistent egalitarians than people in the working class.  I think he may have been on to something.  

All the ignorance, fibbing, and emoting doesn't change
the facts that make Republican state Rep. Gabe Firment's
HB 463
worth enacting, if not vitally so, into law.

The bill would prohibit any procedure that physically
or hormonally changes the sexual physiology of a minor, except in the very rare
instances of disorder of sex development or dealing with the consequences of
previous attempts to change sex. Science unimpeachably
supports
the proposition behind the bill that these permanent alterations to children almost
always cause more harm than good, and out of an abundance of caution under the
watchful waiting protocol typically practiced in Europe that plays out to allow for developing physical, mental, and maturity until adulthood for those who at some
point believe they want to try to change their sex, this protects children from rash decision-making by them and others affecting their adolescent
lives.

Unfortunately, this area of investigation suffers from
a plague of poor research quality. Common problems of these studies feature
unrepresentative samples, lack of adequate controls, and unjustified inferential
leaps. The efforts that do the best in avoiding these pitfalls shatter common myths
circulated by advocates of making permanent physical changes to children who at
some point identify as transgender.

One myth concerning about these children is they
have an elevated desire for suicide and related indicators of harm solely
because they feel their identity mismatched with their sex. In fact, that risk
is comparable to that of other psychological conditions such as depression, anorexia,
and autism that predisposes them to suicide, and in some cases differ little significantly
from the population without these conditions.

Where elevated levels are observed in large part occur
because of the high degree of association of transgender identification with
these and other psychological disorders. (Also associated: natal sex, where
girls are significantly more likely to report a desire to change sex.) As for a
counter hypothesis that societal attitudes create a stigma driving confused
children to self-harm, quality research simply doesn't support that and this notion
runs counter to experiences in previous historical periods where even greater societal
pressures operated on children to conform to certain sex roles yet the child
suicide rate was much lower.

The best, most recent research reveals that transgendered-identified
youth respond well to traditional psychotherapy in alleviating psychological
distress, whereas long-run studies of those who underwent medical transition show
this doesn't reduce and perhaps even exacerbates distress. Other research
indicates that social contagion or psychological difficulties with
parents encourages adopting identification differing from sex as a response
to these stimuli.

Another myth is that the rate of suicide and other
contemplated harmful behavior decreases with physical alterations. Collectively,
quality research suggests a "honeymoon" period in the short run, but the sparse
long-term research available paints a disturbing picture where harmful thinking
returns, with those who underwent surgery or medication having a significantly higher
rate of suicide attempts, pointing to the underlying mental health causes
associated with a desire to change sex.

Finally, there is the myth that those who do undergo
physical transition overwhelmingly are satisfied. Again, when reviewing the
best research, there is no evidence of this, and there is plenty of anecdotal
evidence demonstrating a significant number of those altered surgically or
medicinally having regrets. Further, any observed childhood dysphoria if left
untreated physically typically turns
into desisting from a desire to change sex and by adulthood those who had it
most likely will adopt homosexuality.

In other words, given the state of quality
research, claims that preference must be given to the wishes of children at a
given moment that they should undergo physical and endocrinological mutilation
are reckless and irresponsible, built upon myth and ideological opportunism,
and that medical professionals complicit in this shamefully either are ignorant
about the area in which they assert to have expertise or they are driven by
motives unrecognizable from those associated with the Hippocratic Oath.
Regrettably, several such individuals appeared to testify against the bill.

(Also deserving of opprobrium is a study,
requested by a resolution Firment had pass last year, by the Department of
Health utilizing Medicaid data which it largely contracted out that did provide
some useful data but completely botched an assessment of outcomes, due to search
criteria that ignored research quality and limited substantially the number evaluated
while including studies with the problems listed above. This stood in stark
contrast to a much more comprehensive and careful study
compiled for the Florida Agency for Healthcare Administration last year that
didn't largely waste taxpayer dollars.)

The emoting part was left to a parade of allegedly
potentially aggrieved adults over these restrictions. They represent the
children of intellectual trends that have invaded the academy and public square
that place primacy on people's feelings and perceptions rather than evidence-based
data and critical thinking in the making of policy, a mindset that increasingly
marks the thinking of the political left.

Even so, some leftist allies didn't buy it. This
week, the House
Health and Welfare Committee passed
the bill by substitute with only a couple of Democrats, state Reps. Jason Hughes
and Larry
Selders, and the most roguish Republican in the chamber, state Rep. Joe Stagni,
opposing the other 14 members (including recent new Democrat Roy Daryl Adams).
This poses a big political problem for Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards,
who two years ago said he
would veto that kind of bill and others restricting a transgender agenda.

That's because last
year with Democrats aiding Republicans, he capitulated on a bill he vetoed the
year before that prevented biological males from competing in athletic events restricted
to biological females and also had
a veto overturned, demonstrating if the numbers are enough he can't stop
bills from becoming law. The committee vote's overwhelming nature compels the
bill's moving forward until it becomes law, and rightly so. Children's welfare
and lives depend upon it.

Sergei Sivokho, Ukrainian peace activist, succumbed to chronic asthma and passed away on October 17. His name was not well known outside Ukraine, perhaps because, in these angry times, he sought to reconcile Ukrainians rather than drive them apart. One wonders if, in the end, this big bear of a man died of a broken heart.Sivokho rose to political prominence thanks to his close personal friendship with Volodymyr Zelensky. He was the creative producer of the comedy show Kvartal 95 and after Zelensky's unexpected victory, the newly minted president tried to get him to run for public office. Sivokho, originally a native of Donbass, asked instead to be appointed advisor to the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine with the remit of advising on humanitarian policies toward his native region. Very quickly, however, he came to the conclusion that peace in Ukraine had to be approached from a radically different perspective, namely by putting an end to what he termed "the war inside our own heads." According to Sivokho: "More terrible than the coronavirus is the virus of hatred. It is important to change not only the attitude of the state to its citizens, but the attitude of people to each other . . . What my team is doing is trying to incline people to mutual understanding . . . because the peace that we are all seeking begins in the hearts and minds of every Ukrainian "At first Sivokho's optimism was echoed by Zelensky himself. At the 2020 Munich Security Conference, and later at the Forum on Unity in Mariupol, Zelensky called for "a massive national dialogue," where people could discuss their common future face-to-face. To this end, he endorsed Sivokho's pet project — a National Platform for Reconciliation and Unity — which was formally presented to the public on March 12, 2020. That presentation, however, lasted just 20 minutes, because a gang of some 70 young people from the National Corps (the civilian wing of the Azov Battalion) stormed into the hall, and with shouts of "traitor," pushed Sivokho until he fell to the ground. Sivokho was fired from his advisory government position two weeks later.It may seem odd that even before Russia's invasion, merely mentioning reconciliation and dialogue could arouse so much anger, until one realizes that what Sivokho was actually asking for was a fundamental shift in Ukrainian political thinking. In his mind, Ukrainians had to recognize that they all bear some measure of responsibility for the conflict in Donbass, and specifically for dehumanizing the Other Ukrainians, those who do not think or talk the way they do. Such policies, he argued, began well before 2014. His words aroused intense anger among Ukrainian nationalists, who were further outraged by his assertion that, "the time has come to correct mistakes, to forgive and to ask for forgiveness . . . to talk to the people living in the uncontrolled territories." After being fired, and despite threats on his life, Sivokho persisted in his peace efforts until the very end. Over time, he became increasingly critical of government policy, though never of his longtime friend, Zelensky. He called for changes to the Ukrainian language laws that severely restrict the public use of Russian. He said that the government's refusal to implement the Minsk Accords had led Ukraine into a dark and isolated corner.He even revealed publicly that the rebels had made a formal proposal to return nationalized companies to their Ukrainian owners, and to have the contentious "special status" for Donbass end in 2050, and he rebuked the Ukrainian government for refusing to even talk to the rebels. Rather than prohibiting contacts between local officials across the contact line, Sivokho urged them to talk to each other. "Imagine," he says, "how they would rejoice and sorrow together. If they were only allowed to return there, they would restore their villages on their own, from both sides. What a fantastic example that would be!"His last public battle was to prevent passage of the draconian law "On the Basics of State Policy in the Transition Period," sponsored by then Minister for Reintegration of the Occupied Territories (later Minister of Defense), Oleksiy Reznikov. Sivokho complained bitterly that the Reznikov Plan, which was approved by the Cabinet of Ministers in August 2021, treated the Ukrainians in Donbass and Crimea as a conquered people.Rather than allowing animosities to subside, he said, this would ensure that they are passed on to future generations. The rebels themselves would be long gone, but like Banquo's Ghost, their spirit would still haunt Ukraine's future, an impertinent reminder of the Other, Russophone Ukraine, that Ukrainian nationalists would still be busily trying to erase.Some Ukrainian nationalists will rejoice at the demise of this inconvenient Ukrainian patriot who fought tirelessly to overcome the country's divisions by preaching mutual forgiveness. His personal quest for peace may now be over, but we should all hope, for Ukraine's sake, that his mission is taken up by others.

 In Kathi Weeks' The Problem with Work she makes an argument about the way in which work produces and reproduces gender. As Weeks writes:"To say that work is organized by gender is to observe that it is a site where, at a minimum, we can find gender enforced, performed, and recreated. Workplaces are often structured in relation to gendered norms and expectations. Waged work and unwaged work alike continue to be structured by the productivity of gender-differentiated labor, including the gender division of both household roles and waged occupations...Gender is put to work when, for example, workers draw upon gendered codes and scripts as a way to negotiate relationships with bosses and co-workers, to personalize impersonal interactions, or to communicate courtesy, care, professionalism, or authority to clients, students, patients or customers."Lately I have been thinking about the way in which we could also think about the way in which work is also organized by, and organizing of, other social hierarchies including race. How is work organized by race, or how are racialized codes and scripts put to work in the workplace?This is to some extent the question of racial capitalism. It is possible to say, following Weeks, that there is an emerging awareness that capitalism was not just about the creation of the working class, a creation of a class of people with nothing but their labor to sell, but also the creation of the housewife, of unwaged labor in the home, and all of this was made possible in part by slavery, by the unwaged labor of people who were themselves commodities. Capital was born in the bloody intersections of gender, race, and class. Understanding these overlapping intersections is a matter not just of understanding the past, but of understanding the present This question is also in some sense the central question of Sylvie Laurent's Capital et Race: Histoire d'une Hydre Moderne.One way to think about the intersection of race and wage worker is to argue that the former affects the latter only in and through the racist ideas and conceptions of employers. In this conception, which is developed by Lordon, the general tendency of dependency on the wage relation is the general condition through which the specific hierarchies of race are lived. In other words, it is because one needs to sell their labor power that one is then subject to the various racist attitudes of employers. Such a dual systems account of race and capital makes the former individual, even psychological, and the latter structural. Part of the merit of Laurent's book is that she focuses on the structures of racial capitalism, seeing it not as the attitudes of individuals but as something materialized in practices and institutions. Her book is am investigation of the hydra of race and capitalism considered according to its "heads," the institutions (plantation, academy, multinational, colonial contract), stories (most notably Robinson Crusoe, but also the story of progress through the development of commercial society told by Adam Smith), and practices (primitive accumulation, colonialism, neoliberalism) that intertwine capitalism with racism. Race is not an idea, not just an idea that would reside in the heads of individuals, it is also institutionalized in different practices, or, more to the point, it is the intersection of practices and ideas. There is a lot to think comment about in Laurent's book, but I am less interested in thinking about the role that race played in the formation of capitalism. I know that a great deal has been written, and continues to be written about the intersection of slavery and the formation of modern capitalism. In a similar way there has been a lot written about the continuation of racial logics of division and hierarchy in and through the age of Jim Crow. The challenge it seems to me is to continue to think about the intersection of race and capital into the age of Charles Mills calls "de facto racism" (as opposed to de jure racism) without lapsing into seeing it as a purely individual attitude or prejudice. The contrast with gender is useful. Even after the destruction of the housewife as the personification and naturalization of unwaged work, gendered scripts continued to exist in the commodification of care work, emotional labor, and sexualized work, in the school teacher, waitress, and sex-worker. The gendered division of labor continues even within generalized wage labor. One could make an analogy of sorts with race on this point. There is a racial division of labor that we see everyday in restaurants, with a predominantly white waitstaff and largely latino and black staff bussing tables, and other industries from hotels to hospitals, in which the hierarchy of jobs often overlaps with a racial hierarchy. However, this is just an analogy, an anecdotal one at that; it is hard to say that these jobs are performing racialized scripts even if they are sometimes perceived that way for the people who consume it. I have been thinking a lot one what one could call the "mediated immediacy" of race, as a hierarchy produced and sustained by a long history that includes slavery, Jim Crow, and redlining, is perceived as a natural way of the world by a person who passes through a hotel or restaurant. One does not see the history of this production, just the hierarchy and exclusion it has made possible, and since that hierarchy corresponds with the physical appearance of race that appearance is taken as its cause and condition. Laurent draws on Moishe Postone, Hylton White, and Harry Chang, to draw a connection not between race and the everyday experience but between race and the structural conditions of capitalism. These structural conditions are the two defining abstractions, that of capital, of surplus value, and of its opposite and condition, that of the laboring body. As Laurent writes:"The black body is thus the perfect projection of an organism without capitalist labor, what Fanon rightly identified when speaking of the fetish of blackness as the embodiment of "the untamed biological."If the Jew of antisemitism is the human body of money, the Black of anti-black racism is the human representative of brute biological bodilyness. The Negro represents essentialized biological and chaotic power, demanding its domestication. Its incapacity to discipline itself by labor condemns it to be an energy without object. Objectified, it is itself reduced to exchange value, incorporated into the commodity to become one with it, just as the Jew becomes one with capital." Laurent connects race not with the apparent hierarchies of capitalism, the racial division of labor in workplaces, but with its mysteries and metaphysics, the abstraction of value and the potential of labor. Or, more to the point, race, the race that structures contemporary racism, is always both immediately apparent, and unnervingly hidden, and it is formed at the intersection of these two aspects.