(0)

Leah Libresco asks: Is "Kindness-Adjacent" a Useful Category?, riffing off their previous post Avoiding Rape-Adjacent Sex. The latter (which came first):

I do believe them that there's plenty of sex happening now, that isn't experienced as rape by either partner, that doesn't meet the affirmative consent standards proposed. That could include sex where both partners kind of just leapt into the act, not checking in with each other, but not hitting any snags. Sex where one or both partners was somewhere past tipsy and within sight of "too impaired to consent" but no one pulled out a breathalyzer and both parties felt ok in the morning (aside from the headache). Sex with coercion/pressure, where one partner didn't back down after an initial "No" or "I'd rather not" but the reluctant party felt more like someone who's been guilted into going to a boring party they would have preferred to skip, rather than someone who was violated...

The goal of the Yes-Means-Yes law in California is to kibosh a lot of this gray area, rape-adjacent sex.

Rape-adjacent sex means that one partner can think ze is behaving appropriately, having sex as they've done it before, while zer partner experiences it as rape.

Rape-adjacent sex gives cover to serial predators, who are believed to be the main driver of sexual assaults on campus, since the kind of sex they're trying to have doesn't look very different from the sex everyone else is already having.

The proposed law is one way to engineer a retreat from the

(a)

Open borders? No, that's a ... proposal ... which says essentially there is no United States...

It would make everybody in America poorer -- you're doing away with the concept of a nation state, and I don't think there's any country in the world that believes in that. If you believe in a nation state or in a country called the United States or UK or Denmark or any other country, you have an obligation in my view to do everything we can to help [our] poor people. What some people in this country would love is an open-border policy. Bring in all kinds of people, work for $2 or $3 an hour, that would be great for them. I don't believe in that. I think we have to raise wages in this country, I think we have to do everything we can to create millions of jobs...

I think from a moral responsibility we've got to work with the rest of the industrialized world to address the problems of international poverty, but you don't do that by making people in this country even poorer.

(b)

"I want people taken care of in the country, okay? You can call it anything you want, but I want -- including people that don’t have anything," he told radio host John Fredericks in an interview Wednesday. "We gotta do that."

(1)

Now: of (A) and (B), which was said by Donald Trump, and which was said by Bernie Sanders?

Well, if you pattern-matched "liberal" to "nice guy" and "conservative" to "evil", you were wrong (as I'm sure you found out when

(0)

Walking through the Yard yesterday, I commented to a friend that if I met myself of three years ago, I wouldn't know where to begin to explain how the past three years have gone, except to say one thing: "Ross, you'll make the most wonderful friends you've ever known."

But today, as I've been reminded a few times via Facebook, is another important anniversary of a time my life took an unforeseen turn for the better, which deserves a few words, I guess. I really don't know what I'd say to myself of eight years ago, but here's something of an attempt.

(1)

Eight years ago today, my parents drove me to Carlisle, Pennsylvania to drop me off for three weeks at the Center for Talented Youth summer program. It was the first time that I'd be sleeping away from family for more than a few days, and I didn't know it then, but it would change my life. I'd spend a total of four summers at CTY, learning things that -- in the long run -- weren't that important, and making friendships which would prove utterly crucial to the person I became.

I had a few friends in middle school, but not many, and not any that were actually at my school. I wasn't picked on, but I was an outcast. It probably would have hurt, if I'd noticed. But mostly I kept to myself, and was okay with the fact that I kept to myself.

And then, one summer Sunday, my parents dropped me off at CTY, at Dickinson College, ostensibly to learn Latin for three weeks. And I made friends. It was

On the shore dimly seen through the mists of the deep (where the foe's haughty host in dread silence reposes), what is that which the breeze, o'er the towering steep -- as it fitfully blows -- half conceals, half discloses?

Now it catches the gleam of the morning's first beam; in full glory reflected now shines in the stream: ’tis the star-spangled banner, O! long may it wave o'er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

As a friend reminded me recently, the better-remembered verse is a question, which is almost always left unanswered.

But today, what is our answer to the question "O! say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave?"

Our nation was founded on a bedrock principle that we are all created equal. The project of each generation is to bridge the meaning of those founding words with the realities of changing times -- a never-ending quest to ensure those words ring true for every single American.

Progress on this journey often comes in small increments. Sometimes two steps forward, one step back, compelled by the persistent effort of dedicated citizens. And then sometimes there are days like this, when that slow, steady effort is rewarded with justice that arrives like a thunderbolt.

This decision will end the patchwork system we currently have. It will end the uncertainty hundreds of thousands of same-sex couples face from not knowing whether their marriage, legitimate in the eyes of one state, will remain if they decide to move or even visit another.

This ruling will strengthen all of our communities by offering to all loving same-sex couples the dignity of marriage across this great land.

We are people who believe every child is entitled to life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness. There is so much more work to be done to extend the full promise of America to every American. But today, we can say in no uncertain terms that we’ve made our union a little more perfect. (...)

The right to marry whoever one wishes is an elementary human right compared to which "the right to attend an integrated school, the right to sit where one pleases on a bus, the right to go into any hotel or recreation area or place of amusement, regardless of one’s skin or color or race" are minor indeed. Even

(1)

I love the place I'm working this summer. (A smallish proprietary trading firm in lower Manhattan.) It has one of the most vibrantly intellectual atmospheres I've seen anywhere, and the problems that we're working on really are interesting, often novel, and eminently practical. For a place that aims to compete in international financial markets by hiring the best mathematical talent that (1) cool math problems and (2) money can buy, it's...just about exactly what you might expect.

In particular, I'm in love with my current research project, which is easily the coolest thing I've been asked to do yet. (I also interned for all of last summer there.) What exactly it is is proprietary (sorry), but it has me mixing machine-learning and stochastic calculus in some really cool ways that have me alternating between coding furiously and filling up whiteboard upon whiteboard with math. Also, I recently got yelled at for taking up too much computing power on the shared intern server, so I got upgraded to supercomputing-cluster access.

The day I got my project (and after I had spent the entire morning figuring out just what it was), I was pretty insufferable. Most of the interns had just gotten our projects, but I was ready to explain mine to anyone who would listen, and would consistently get animated and excited about just how darn cool it was.

On my way out of the office, I ran into one of my mentors from last summer, who asked me what I was working on now, and I launched right into---

---nothing, as the elevator stopped on another floor, someone else got in, and my ready explanation of this tremendously

(1)

Today (a few days ago) from the NYT's Upshot column: When Family-Friendly Policies Backfire.

In Chile, a law requires employers to provide working mothers with child care. One result? Women are paid less.

In Spain, a policy to give parents of young children the right to work part-time has led to a decline in full-time, stable jobs available to all women -- even those who are not mothers.

Elsewhere in Europe, generous maternity leaves have meant that women are much less likely than men to become managers or achieve other high-powered positions at work.

Family-friendly policies can help parents balance jobs and responsibilities at home, and go a long way toward making it possible for women with children to remain in the work force. But these policies often have unintended consequences.

They can end up discouraging employers from hiring women in the first place, because they fear women will leave for long periods or use expensive benefits. "For employers, it becomes much easier to justify discrimination," said Sarah Jane Glynn, director of women's economic policy at the Center for American Progress.

It goes on to rattle off some supporting statistics: In the wake of strong maternity-leave protections, women are more likely to remain employed after having a child, but less likely to be hired or promoted (even if not planning on having