Welcome to Wednesday, October 8, 2025: a Hump Day (“হাম্প ডে” in Bengali) and National Pierogi Day. On my birthday in 2013 (Dec. 30), Malgorzata and Andrzej took me to a Polish restaurant (they rarely went out but this was a special occasion), and we had borscht, potato pancakes, and fried pierogi. Photos:
It’s also Alvin C. York Day, honoring the soldier’s amazing feat of heroism—he took 132 German prisoners and killed many before that— and skill on this day in 1918), International Lesbian Day, National Bring Your Teddy Bear to Work and to School Day (Toasty is in my office), National Fluffernutter Day, National Salmon Day, and World Octopus Day.
On the last topic, Ghost the Giant Pacific Octopus is still alive in the Aquarium of the Pacific, slowly starving to death as she guards a brood of infertile eggs. It’s ineffably sad, but that is how octopuses roll.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the October 8 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*Three American professors were jointly awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics for work on quantum mechanics.
John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret and John M. Martinis were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics on Tuesday in Sweden for showing that two properties of quantum mechanics, the physical laws that rule the subatomic realm, could be observed in a system large enough to see with the naked eye.
“There is no advanced technology today that does not rely on quantum mechanics,” Olle Eriksson, chairman of the Nobel Committee for Physics, said during the announcement of the award. The laureates’ discoveries, he added, paved the way for technologies like the cellphone, cameras and fiber optic cables.
It also helped lay the groundwork for current attempts to build a quantum computer, a device that could compute and process information at speeds that would not be possible with classical computers.
“This prize really demonstrates what the American system of science has done best,” said Jonathan Bagger, the chief executive officer of the American Physical Society. “It really showed the importance of the investment in research for which we do not yet have an application, because we know that sooner or later, there will be an application.”
The three laureates will share a prize of 11 million Swedish kronor, or around $1.17 million.
What did they find out? This is from the Nobel Prize Press release:
In 1984 and 1985, John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret and John M. Martinis conducted a series of experiments with an electronic circuit built of superconductors, components that can conduct a current with no electrical resistance. In the circuit, the superconducting components were separated by a thin layer of non-conductive material, a setup known as a Josephson junction. By refining and measuring all the various properties of their circuit, they were able to control and explore the phenomena that arose when they passed a current through it. Together, the charged particles moving through the superconductor comprised a system that behaved as if they were a single particle that filled the entire circuit.
This macroscopic particle-like system is initially in a state in which current flows without any voltage. The system is trapped in this state, as if behind a barrier that it cannot cross. In the experiment the system shows its quantum character by managing to escape the zero-voltage state through tunnelling. The system’s changed state is detected through the appearance of a voltage.
The laureates could also demonstrate that the system behaves in the manner predicted by quantum mechanics – it is quantised, meaning that it only absorbs or emits specific amounts of energy.
They demonstrated, on a macroscopic level, the principles of both quantum “tunneling” and the discrete levels of energy that are the “quanta” (a word grossly misused in popular parlance). This, at least, is one physics achievement that I can sort of understand on a rudimentary level. If you want more information, the press release is here, and I’ve put the announcement (in both Swedish and English) below. I don’t know if they’ve yet tracked down the Medicine or Physiology Laureate who didn’t get notified of his Prize as he was hiking “off the grid.”
*A WSJ editorial-board op-ed, “New Trump rules for radical schools,” takes the President to task for some of his attempts to force schools to obey his rules, though the editorial notes that Biden pretty much did the same thing. And the op-ed praises some aspects of the President’s “compact” while criticizing others:
. . . . And spare us the complaints that Mr. Trump is unique in breaking “norms.” The Obama and Biden Administrations used federal funds to coerce schools to follow their cultural agenda on race, gender and handling sexual harassment allegations. The latter railroaded the innocent. The main difference between the Biden and Trump efforts is that Biden officials were pushing on an open campus door with school officials who agreed with them.
Trump officials want to change a culture that is often hostile to American principles. The rub comes over how to use coercive power to drive wholesale academic reform.
And some of the criticism. I’m particularly disturbed by Trump trying to put a cap of 15% on foreign students. That’s nuts!
Some rules are common sense. The memo specifies that universities in the compact must end the use of race or gender preferences in hiring or admission on campus. This is the law. Also sensible is embracing so-called institutional neutrality so schools don’t take sides in social and political issues unrelated to the university. Professors can opine in their private capacity, but the history department can’t dictate a certain view of the Arab-Israel conflict.
The memo encourages a “vibrant marketplace of ideas,” and that can’t be said often enough. Many schools are making good efforts to address progressive monoculture, including left-leaning faculty rosters. Kudos to schools like the University of Texas, which has created a school of Civic Leadership, and others like Vanderbilt that have hosted events to emphasize a return to free-speech principles. The Trump compact seems to have backed off attempts to dictate faculty hiring, a welcome development.
Where the compact goes too far is with its demand that schools freeze tuition for five years and cap the enrollment of international students at 15%. Mitch Daniels proved at Purdue that tuition can be frozen over several years, but this should be up to the schools themselves.
And where does the 15% cap on foreign students come from—a dartboard? International students are a source of full-freight tuition for many schools. Students from overseas were 26% of the University of Southern California student body in 2025. Limiting tuition and international students at the same time could leave schools with a budget shortfall.
More understandable is the demand that the schools “promptly and fully disclose” funding from foreign institutions or individuals. This is no doubt aimed at Middle Eastern and Chinese donors who want to dictate what certain departments can teach.
Well-intentioned but hard to implement is the compact’s effort to combat grade inflation. . .
Universities have invited this Trump political blowback by becoming so far removed from the values of Americans who pay for their ivied prosperity. But higher education remains a net asset to American society if schools can return to being arenas for open inquiry, research and debate. America needs schools of excellence again, and dropping the compact’s most coercive standards might yield more enduring change.
What I object to in this compact is the threat of withholding money from people who aren’t part of the problem, like many scientists. But then we come up against the question, “But without the pressure, would there be any impetus for American colleges to reform themselves?” Clearly, many people think the answer is “no,” but for those on the Left, it’s forbidden to admit that Trump has ever done anything good. I don’t take that stand, though some of the good things he’s done (right now, confecting a good framework for ending the war in Gaza) may be motivated by things like the desire for a Nobel Prize than to do the right thing.” But if the right thing is done, I don’t much care what the motives were.
*ICE has apparently already arrived in Chicago, and yesterday there was a confrontation between their agents and protestors, which was apparently violent. One of our faculty (see tweet at bottom) was arrested on four charges, including two felonies. But in a press conference yesterday, including our Mayor, our Governor, and a Congressman, the Democrats vowed to fight back. Illinois, like California and Oregon, has filed or will file a lawsuit:
Just two jurisdictions — Louisville and the state of Nevada — have agreed to drop key policies that had restricted police and sheriffs from assisting U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers in making arrests. And Trump has faced a string of losses in court. A federal judge on Sunday blocked the president’s plan to send troops to Portland, and leaders in Illinois filed a similar lawsuit Monday to block Trump’s attempt to deploy soldiers to Chicago.
“We will not tolerate ICE agents violating our residents’ constitutional rights, nor will we allow the federal government to disregard our local authority,” Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson (D) said Monday. He announced an executive order barring ICE from using city property after reports the agency had used a school parking lot as a staging area.
Leaders of sanctuary jurisdictions said the lawsuits in Chicago and Portland show Democratic leaders are overwhelmingly deciding to fight back. Trump and his allies, meanwhile, accuse sanctuary city leaders of harboring violent criminals and refusing to cooperate in removing them from the country. And despite the pushback, the administration is still ramping up pressure through unilateral actions like launching ICE operations and deploying surge teams in sanctuary cities.
“We’re seeing that the litigation aspect is, on its own, largely not successful,” said Spencer Reynolds, a national security analyst at the Brennan Center for Justice. “Overall, I’m sure the government would like to win, but its big picture goal is to get cities and states to go along with immigration requests, and they are taking a broader, more whack-a-mole approach. These actions, taken together, can have an impact through intimidation.”
. . . . . “The Trump administration is trying to use its enforcement authority in ways they know are not legal or constitutional to get their way, and we’ve been forced to defend our rights,” [San Francisco city attorney David] Chiu said in an interview. “The vast majority of cities and counties have not changed their policies.”
*In the NYT, columnist Bret Stephens offers some “Lessons from a Long War“. He gives 11 lessons, I’ll show five:
“Believe people when they tell you who they are.”
Maya Angelou’s classic warning should have been believed in 1988, when Hamas declared in its founding covenant its intention to slaughter Jews. Instead, Israel continued to tolerate Hamas out of a combination of ideological convenience — it suited Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, to have a divided Palestinian polity — and international reluctance to topple the group. That was until Oct. 7, 2023, too late for the 1,200 people slaughtered that day.
Israelis are better than their government.
Nobody typifies this better than Noam Tibon, a retired general in his 60s who, with his wife, Gali, drove to the rescue of his son Amir and his son’s family in Kibbutz Nahal Oz, which had been overrun by Hamas. “We understood that if we will not go and get them, nobody will,” the elder Tibon told The Times the next day. Noam fought his way into the kibbutz, rescuing his family, while Gali ferried wounded Israelis to safety. There are scores of similar stories. The Talmudic injunction “All of Israel are responsible, one for the other” — that is, communal responsibility — is what saved the Jewish state on Oct. 7.
Antisemitism suffuses anti-Zionism, and anti-Zionism tends to produce antisemitism.
After a British man named Jihad al-Shamie rammed his car into a Manchester synagogue in an attack that killed two people on Yom Kippur last week, the police said they were “working to understand the motivation behind the attack.” Really. The attack illustrates how, outside of academic seminars and left-wing journals, the distinction between “Jew” and “Zionist” is either invisible or pretextual to those who mean one or the other harm.
This point bears on the previous one: Even if Israel’s defenders were to accomplish a miracle of persuasion by shifting attitudes toward the country — or if Israel had fought a much more limited war in Gaza — it would still face a chorus of ill-disguised bigotry, which would seek to accuse it of the worst crimes on the slimmest bases.
Palestinian suffering is undeniable. Hamas is its principal author.
For those who spent the past two years chanting “cease-fire now” at anti-Israel rallies, they neglect to mention (as Hillary Clinton pointed out) that there was a cease-fire before Oct. 7, 2023, which Hamas violated in the most grotesque way possible.
As for those who rightly decry the suffering of Palestinian civilians, they must equally rue the fact that Hamas continually and deliberately put ordinary Gazans in harm’s way by waging war beneath, behind and between them. This war could have been ended at any time in the past two years by Hamas laying down its arms, which even now it is reluctant to do. Why did so many so-called peace protesters, who made incessant demands of Israel, never make any demands of Hamas?
Those who want to help Palestinians would render the most effective “humanitarian aid” by getting rid ofHamas.
And the most telling one to me, which is really a no-brainer:
There will be no Palestinian state if Hamas or other militant groups survive as a military or political force.
Feckless diplomatic gestures, such as the recent recognition of a Palestinian state by France, Britain and other countries of diminishing relevance, will do nothing to pressure or persuade Israelis that they should replicate their Gaza experience — withdrawal followed by endless war — on the vastly greater scale of the West Bank.
The only viable path to a sustainable Palestinian state is a cultural revolution among Palestinians that ends, once and for all, the fantasy of Israel’s destruction. That’s as much the work of educators and imams as it is of Palestinian politicians and foreign diplomats. And it requires an end to Hamas or to any armed group prepared to enforce a militant orthodoxy over other Palestinians. What, one might ask, are Britain and France prepared to do for that?
My answer to the last question is “apparently nothing.” The damning of Israel by touting an impossible two-state solution is never accompanied by any statements about Hamas’s “genocide” or its numerous and real war crimes.
*A shortie from the AP: it looks as if the Supreme Court is against states banning “conversion therapy”. I made a mistake originally, thinking that the bans being challenged were “affirmative therapy” urging kids to change gender, but they appear to be religion-based bans on therapy that tries to talk kids out of changing gender or becoming gay. The article makes it appear as if the Supremes consider both kinds of bans as bans on free speech.
A majority of Supreme Court justices on Tuesday seemed likely to side with a Christian counselor challenging bans on LGBTQ+ “conversion therapy” for kids as a violation of her First Amendment rights.
Kaley Chiles, with support from President Donald Trump’s administration, argues the laws passed in Colorado and about half of U.S. states wrongly bar her from offering voluntary, faith-based therapy for kids.
Colorado, on the other hand, says its measure simply regulates licensed therapists by barring a practice that’s been scientifically discredited and linked to serious harm.
But the court’s conservative majority didn’t seem convinced that states can restrict talk therapy aimed at changing feelings or behavior while allowing counseling that affirms kids identifying as gay or transgender. Justice Samuel Alito said the law “looks like blatant viewpoint discrimination.”
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Andrzej are now into gender:
Hili: How many genders do angels have?
Me: Just a dozen.
In Polish:
Hili: Ile płci mają anioły?
Ja: Tylko tuzin.
*******************
From the English Language Police:
From Animal Antics:
From Now That’s Wild:
Masih is quiet, but so is JKR. Fortunately, Rowling is tweeting things that could have come from Masih, like this:
A woman from Afghanistan: Education is our right. Don’t take it away from us.💔 pic.twitter.com/DaD55xTyq3
— WDI.Afghanistan (@WDIAfghanistan1) October 5, 2025
From Luana. These students are not only thoughtless, marking the beginning of the war via the Hamas genocide on Jews in southern Israel, but also selfish. They want cheaper parking and things like cheaper housing to benefit THEM!
“We want cheaper parking.” https://t.co/tclDNpzxAj
— Steve McGuire (@sfmcguire79) October 7, 2025
From Malcolm. I intended to post the second one but you’ll get the first one, too (what are those creatures?). The rock/paper/scissors twist is funny.
The Chinese men have re-invented Rock-Paper-Scissors. 😂 pic.twitter.com/n53eMGe79F
— Global Index (@TheGlobal_Index) September 7, 2025
Two from my feed. I second the first one!
This is what I came to the internet for pic.twitter.com/rQ32RlDXyC
— Nature is Amazing ☘️ (@AMAZlNGNATURE) October 7, 2025
Man, these cats really don’t like each other!
These cats were put in separate cages because they kept fightingpic.twitter.com/r1KslZ054W
— Interesting things (@awkwardgoogle) October 5, 2025
One that I reposted from the Auschwitz Memorial:
A Dutch Jewish girl, four years old, was probably gassed to death with her mother as soon as they arrived in Auschwitz. The father perished later. Sara would be 88 today had she lived.
— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-10-08T10:33:03.569Z
Two posts from Professor Cobb. I have asked my friends in Idaho to find the Laureate and tell him the good news!
Fwd: Fwd: “I hope this email finds you well”
— Oded Rechavi (@odedrechavi.bsky.social) 2025-10-07T08:37:18.973Z
Colossal would call this bird a dodo because it LOOKS like a dodo. So why not put the bucks into saving this species instead of tweaking a pigeon genome? As Wikipedia says, “Surveys suggest numbers are critical and that 70 to 380 individuals survive in the wild, and there is currently no captive population.”
Hey Colossal – spend some of your money on saving this real bird!
— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2025-10-07T06:35:31.770Z
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
We must learn to honor excellence in every socially accepted human activity, however humble the activity, and to scorn shoddiness, however exalted the activity. An excellent plumber is infinitely more admirable than an incompetent philosopher. The society that scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water. -John W. Gardner, author and leader (8 Oct 1912-2002)
Love it!
Also attributed to Mr Gardner:
We are faced with unexpected opportunities cleverly disguised as insoluble problems.
The critters in the sand are mole crabs, aka sand crabs.
Thanks Mark. I was trying to figure it out, but didn’t get far. I like their Latin name: Cancer emeritus (now E. emeritus). 🙂
Does the switch from Cancer emeritus to Emerita emeritus mean that they are in some way not “true crabs”?
I am not versed in the Crustacea, but a brief look online says that they are in the Anomura clade, so they are true crabs.
Digging them up out of the beach here in Malibu in front of tourists REALLY freaks them out. It’s incredible how many live just under the surface and you’d never know it. Once I did it and the family packed up and left. I don’t do it anymore, unless I’m feeling naughty.
They resemble the little terrestrial crustaceans we used to call “pill bugs” (aka woodlice, roly polies.)
They make excellent bait btw…
Read “Freud: The Making of an Illusion” by Frederick Crews after seeing it here. It was an excellent book! I was not all that familiar with Freud and psychoanalysis, and the book shows just how unscientific it is. The primary source is letters written by Freud to his fiance and others. Many of these were only made public recently, so some of this was not known until now. Most of psychoanalysis was made up by Freud and not based on observation of multiple patients.
I have “Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age” on the way. It looks interesting. I found this interview with the author here:
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/inventing-the-renaissance-ada-palmer
Freud is afforded a stature equal to that of Aristotle, Joan of Arc, and Beethoven…
… in the movie Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure….
… the thing is, when I saw it I figured sure!
To be fair, intellectual standards were different in his day. There was a lot more tolerance for airy pronouncements on the workings of the world based on philosophical speculation.
Thank you for the interview link! And now I know about Kathleen Belew.
Fight back against law enforcement.
Yes, the GOP is using all the tools the Dems have created for overriding local autonomy. This is one of the two major failings of the GOP. The other is their own commitment to big spending. If Trump doesn’t want to fund some schools, he should fund none.
The piece that describes the awarded physics on the Nobel Prize website is superb.
Indeed, I almost feel like “hey, that sounds cool! I want to try that too!” 😁
Very clear, very compelling.
In an era where everyone zealously guards their rights—or grasps for new ones—raising the question of “obligations” can seem retrograde, an affront to one’s autonomy. But amidst the clamor provoked by Trump’s assault on the American university, I think cooler heads should be revisiting whether academic freedom, tax-free endowments, lavish federal funding, and general autonomy in conducting their affairs obligates universities—both private and public—to the taxpayers who subsidize university life and are losing trust in the institution. What might those obligations be—from both the public and the universities?
One attempt to answer that question, and to provide some historical context, comes from the newly-appointed provost at the University of Texas-Austin. Be forewarned: he is one of those exotic creatures, an outed conservative in the academic wilds. He does go off on a brief China tangent that made little sense to me until I learned he had once worked on the National Security Council. That aside, I recommend the article below to reasoned consideration.
https://nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/restoring-academic-social-contract
Thanks for pointing out Inboden’s article, Doug. Very thought provoking stuff on some fundamental issues.
And I might add, perhaps it sounds trivial in the midst of the heady academic discussions, that no modern university in the US should entertain the existence of scholarship athletics or any type of payment to athletes who compete under the name of the university. The business of college sports can be cleanly severed and athletics can be returned to what has often been termed the club level as an extra-curricula activity for students who desire to participate. When I queried our good Professor Cobb some time ago on whether the U.K. unis had athletic scholarships, he gave an excellent answer of, as I recall: “No. In the U.K., college sports are recreational, not reputational”. As should all of our university sports which have grown into a tail wagging dog monstrosity….errr IMHO of course.
Interesting. York went from ‘Don’t want to fight’ to ‘God wants me to fight’. God was on his side all the way, from Church of Christ in Christian Union to Just War. Good thing York fought. Too bad God was not able to flog Church of Christ in Christian Union on the Germans.
Banning “conversion therapy” for TQ+ is actually pushing “conversion therapy” for LGs. It’s homophobic.
Many parents, especially religious extremists, would rather have a trans child than a gay child. Many children who would happily grow up to be gay adults are being pushed to transition before they even understand their own sexuality. Many US christians have done this.
It is already happening on a big scale in Iran, where gay people are being forced to transition or face the death penalty because the country disapproves of homosexuality. They perform a huge number of sex ‘changes’ there.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-29832690
A therapist MUST be allowed to explore ALL aspects of their client’s life. Many children, especially girls, who are victims of sexual abuse as children blame themselves and their sex, and then grow to hate their bodies and try to escape it by denying their womanhood. These girls need to be allowed to explore the cause of their distress and not just be affirmed as trans.
There are many, many detransitioners who have ruined their bodies because they did not have proper therapy and were allowed to assume that they were in the ‘wrong body’. People like Sinead Watson and Ritchie Tullip have waived their anonymity to go public about the dangers of affirming children. Neither of them was actually ‘trans’ but both have had sexual surgery, and after effects, that have changed their lives.
Dysphoria can also be a symptom of many other things, eg clinical depression. Therapists must be allowed to treat the cause, not just the symptoms.
Allowing a victim of sexual abuse to have their genitals mutilated is the same thing as allowing a person with anorexia to starve themselves.
Joolz, I appreciate you recognizing that “banning” conversion therapy is really an attempt to force conversion therapy. “Cut away the gay” gets support in the more liberal jurisdictions because it plays on the fears of the older form of “pray away the gay.” We clearly share concerns over the trans movement where it involves vulnerable children and the rights of women.
But I am curious whether you can source your claim that “Many US Christians have done this.” I could understand a craze for transitioning in the mainline Protestant denominations because these groups in the US have mostly declined in numbers and morphed into variants of progressives at prayer. I could also accept Catholics transitioning at numbers that match the nonreligious public, principally because that’s what happens when religious affiliation is “assigned at birth” as it is for so many cradle and nominal Catholics—their social stances often differ little from the irreligious. But when I think of religious clout in American political circles, I think of evangelicals: the Southern Baptists; or the Methodists who split off from those congregations that were absorbed by the LGBTQ movement; or the Black congregations that, whatever their voting patterns, are socially very much like their white conservative counterparts. I would be stunned to see transitioning being embraced in these circles, so it would interest me if you have data.
Your list are all ‘christians’, regardless of their particular brand. When I see a parent abusing their child, I don’t ask them for details of their beliefs.
No parent would answer a survey with ‘yes, I forced my gay child to become trans’, so you will never have statistics on it, but there are videos on tiktok etc of religious people (usually the ‘mother’) showing off their ‘trans’ child and you can see that elsewhere on their feed, they are damning gay people. They seem to believe ‘better a trans child than a gay child’.
Exulansic has covered a few, and other friends have shared links with the gender critical community.
It’s really arrogant of those parents to decide that their special infallible ‘god’ made a mistake when s/he made their child. It’s pure hypocrisy.
It’s happening with muslims too, some christians are just the same.
“I’m particularly disturbed by Trump trying to put a cap of 15% on foreign students.”
Canadian universities have been rocked by the drop in international student enrolments since 2023. [Long story, basically our government came to its senses and realized mass immigration was driving up housing costs, creating medical shortages, and driving down per capita GDP. So they slashed visas for international students.] My university fired staff and scrambled to find other sources of income.
But in my Faculty of Science <<15% of our students are non-Canadian. Same goes for five other Faculties. And we operate just fine. Only two Faculties (I’ll be discreet) have a problem with dependence on those sweet sweet international student fees, and need them to prop up their financial model that includes far too many professors.
One way to think about Trump’s ridiculous experiment is that it could be a way to stress-test American universities’ vulnerability to the same experience Canada is having: what happens when families in India and China no longer send their kids to your universities?
I can’t access the article, but the extracts you shared from Bret Stephens’ piece clearly come from a wise man. The last two points should be self evident, but it doesn’t seem to have dawned on Palestinian flag wavers that Hamas is the problem.
I try not to comment on that conflict as I don’t think Israel has been spotless, but I believe that Israel could move forward into peace if Palestinians reject Hamas, but I just don’t see that happening without strong international intervention.
Joolz, you can read Stephens’ column here:
https://archive.ph/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/07/opinion/lessons-from-a-long-war.html
First you have to get the URL of the NYT article. If you don’t have the article’s title, a simple Google search for “Bret Stephens New York Times” will get you his New York Times page that lists all his recent columns. There you can get the URL of the article that interests you. The head over to archive.today or the site of the Wayback Machine …
Thank you. I forgot that paywalled articles may still be on the wayback machine. Thanks for the link and the reminder.
If you insist on spotlessness in your allies, you won’t have any. Just sayin’.
Your would-be allies might be able to get along without you, if they must, but can you get along without them? Remember, countries have interests, not values or morals.
Where did I say my allies need to be spotless? I don’t believe that at all. I expressed that so many times when the gender critical movement started to split over Palestine that I made the following meme to remind people that your allies DON’T have to be spotless.
“You don’t have to agree with someone on every topic before you campaign with them on topics where you agree. A socialist and a Tory can campaign together against child abuse, whilst also opposing each other on every other topic. It’s called being an adult. If you only ever stand with those who agree with you on everything then you will stand alone.”
Thanks for the correction on the conversion therapy case at the Supreme Court. I predict the Colorado law restricting what therapists can say to patients will not stand.
When Canada’s Liberal Government was preparing to ram its ban on CT through Parliament, it published a Charter analysis in which it laid out likely objections that critics would make, claiming violation of Charter rights to freedom of expression, and how the Government would defend its legislation. Central to the Government’s argument was that our Charter of Rights and Freedoms contains a “reasonable limits” clause that makes all our rights effective only as far as the Courts want to take them. No individual freedom against the state shall take precedence over the Government’s desire to promote a just, equitable, and diverse progressive society that treats people differently in order to right past wrongs and enforce “group” rights. (I’m not making this up.)
The Government argued that its ban on even promoting talk-type CT would pass the “reasonable limits” test — were it ever to be challenged — even though it does admittedly infringe on freedom of expression. Laws against hate speech do so explicitly and our Supreme Court has upheld convictions as reasonable limits. The ban on CT is not just to protect individuals, says the Government, but to protect an entire “community” from hate. (And all this without the Government even having to invoke that piece of Canadian arcana, the notwithstanding clause.)
This Canadian view is profoundly unAmerican. Since the Bill of Rights to the U.S. Constitution contains no such convenient Canadian escape hatch for the Courts to help the government restrict speech (or any other right therein) when it really really wants to, I can’t see an American Supreme Court upholding Colorado’s law.
I don’t know what penalty Colorado imposes for violating its CT law. I have to admire the courage of the therapist’s convictions, even if they are religious. In Canada you go to jail for two years and would lose whatever professional licence you hold. No one has dared to risk saying anything that could be construed by a trouble-seeking patient or X-scanning activist as conversion therapy.
I don’t pretend to understand the law in Canada regarding conversion therapy, but since you brought up individual rights, what about an individual’s right not to have religion-based nonsense masquerading as therapy shoved down one’s throat? There should be some protection from that.
There is. Easy. Find another therapist more to your liking who tells you what you want to hear. Or if you’re happy as you are, don’t see a therapist at all.
Anyway, I was just predicting how your Supreme Court will rule, not making an argument whether CT is inherently good or bad. Our CT law survives on the “reasonable limits” clause which the U.S. Constitution doesn’t have. Ergo, SCOTUS must strike down Colorado’s law.
There is another angle, for which I credit a legal scholar on a private Discord whom I can’t name. Since CT almost certainly doesn’t ever work, at least not for converting homosexuals, it could be fraud to take money for providing it on the claim that it will produce the desired result. Fraudulent claims are of course not 1A protected. I don’t know if Colorado is making this argument.
Re: ““This prize really demonstrates what the American system of science has done best,” said Jonathan Bagger, the chief executive officer of the American Physical Society. “It really showed the importance of the investment in research . . . .”
May one reasonably expect additional self-congratulatory, coattails-riding statements from the heads of other American scientific societies? No doubt that the American system is impressive and admirable. However enabling, expediting and facilitating the system (and its funding), it is individuals (frequently collaborating with other individuals) who make the discoveries. Every Nobel season sampling American media to see if they identify the nationalities of recipients evokes “pulling teeth” and “getting blood from a turnip.”
Per a (British) poster’s response to the NY Times article about the physics prize:
“This bizarrely fails to state that Clarke is British, not just studying at Cambridge, and Devoret is French. They may have taken US citizenship as well but they are also British and French even if they are ‘at American Universities’. To deny other nations’ participation in achievements is nationalist and Trumpist and a sign of the politics of the moment appearing in a context like this.”
I don’t know where the 15% comes from regarding foreign students, but I do have a concern about foreign students coming to the U.S. to study physics, engineering, computer science, etc., and then taking that knowledge back to their homelands and using it to compete against us. Maybe foreign students from some countries should have to stay in the U.S. to work for five years after receiving their degrees. The U.S. would benefit and the newly minted scientist might come to love the U.S. and make it home.