It's too close to call over at the NYT, but "Abdul El-Sayed has won Michigan’s slugfest of a Democratic Senate primary, NBC News projects."

I'm reading "Abdul El-Sayed wins Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary, notching a Midwest victory for the left/The former public health official has defeated Rep. Haley Stevens, NBC News projects, despite facing a huge advertising disadvantage."

El-Sayed overcame a nearly $65 million onslaught of outside money and an establishment that had rallied around Stevens. Popular Gov. Gretchen Whitmer endorsed Stevens late last month — a move seen as a last-ditch effort to stop a rising El-Sayed.

Here's the NYT version of the news: "Primary Elections Live Updates: Race Too Close to Call in Democratic Primary for Michigan Senate Seat/Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, a progressive, holds a narrow lead over Representative Haley Stevens, a centrist, in a race that divided Democrats. The party sees the seat as key to its hopes of winning control of the chamber" (gift link).

"I’m a professional liberal... and even I don’t think I could tell you what liberalism’s vision is, or who its leaders are, at this moment."

"In some way, liberalism never really recovered from the Obama era — when it had this grand victory in electing America’s first Black president; when it had this thoughtful, deliberate and, frankly, quite popular liberal leader. Then it ended in Donald Trump’s being elected — not once but twice. But here’s the thing: Donald Trump is not working out. He is not making people want more of what he is...."

Writes Ezra Klein, in "The Book That Changed How I Think About Liberalism" (NYT).

Klein is reading books looking for the answer. The book referred to in the title is "The Lost History of Liberalism," and here's the interview he does with the author, Helena Rosenblatt. There's a lot of talk about the historical meaning of the word "liberal," which hasn't got much to do with the predicament of the Democratic Party in recent years. What was "this grand victory" for liberalism in electing Obama? Klein only refers to Obama's race and demeanor! 

"There is a very sly critique of liberalism in the film’s characterization of Glinda. She is obsessed with being seen as good..."

"... but she frequently passes on chances to act in ways that would better people’s lives. Bowen Yang’s character in 'Wicked' does these great 'yasss girl' ad-libs that link Glinda’s behavior to the way white liberal feminism shows up in the world, more obsessed with status than change. Being 'good' is morally vacuous, like Glinda, if you don’t do anything that matters."

Says Tressie McMillan Cottom, in "Four Opinion Writers Visit Oz and Ask: Who’s Really ‘Wicked’?" (NYT)(free-access link, because this is a long conversation with, obviously, 4 voices).

"Ms. Marshack’s self-written obituary disclosed some previously unreported details about her association with [Nelson] Rockefeller but did not mention a romance..."

"... although it ended suggestively, quoting from the 1975 musical 'A Chorus Line.' Ms. Marshack wrote that she 'won’t forget, can’t regret what I did for love.' The initial account [was]... that Mr. Rockefeller had died instantly... while he was in his office, alone with a bodyguard, 'having a wonderful time' working on an art book he was writing. The next day, The Times began deconstructing the official story.... A drip-drip of revelations ensued.... The circumstances of Mr. Rockefeller’s death remain mysterious. One account said that he was found dead wearing a suit and tie and surrounded by working papers; another said that he was nude, amid containers of Chinese food...." 

From "Megan Marshack Dies at 70; Was With Nelson Rockefeller at His Death/She was at the center of rumors about the former vice president’s last moments, but she remained silent about their association until she wrote her own obituary" (NYT)(noting that Marshack's brother said she'd signed a nondisclosure agreement).

"In interviews [for a] book, Rockefeller associates said it was an open secret that Mr. Rockefeller and Ms. Marshack were having an affair. He was married at the time to Margaretta Rockefeller, who was known as Happy...."

Who cares about Vice Presidents? The only thing interesting at this point is the irony of the nickname of the wife he cheated on. And the odd detail of the Chinese food containers. And the resurrection of the "Chorus Line" lyric...

I don't even have a tag for Nelson Rockefeller. I only started this blog in 2004, but there was a time — and I guess it was more than 20 years ago — when "Rockefeller Republican" was shorthand for... oh, who cares anymore? Kiss that day goodbye.

"'He’s convicted, so now he’s in our community,' said Rahim Buford, 53, who also has a felony conviction on his record."

"Mr. Buford believes that neither Democrats nor Republicans have done enough to address significant parts of America’s criminal justice system that are broken, including wrongful convictions, racial disparities and a rate of imprisonment that far outstrips that of other industrialized nations.... For Dawn Harrington, who served time on Rikers Island in New York and now directs an organization called Free Hearts for families affected by incarceration in Tennessee, watching the news coverage of Mr. Trump’s criminal conviction last week was upsetting. She heard liberals rejoice that he was now a 'convicted felon,' a term she and others have tried to persuade people not to use.... After the Trump verdict, she also heard President Biden defend the justice system as a 'cornerstone of America' that has endured for 'nearly 250 years' — back to a time, Ms. Harrington noted, when slavery was legal. The rhetoric, she thought, was 'quite frankly dehumanizing to the base that we organize with,' she said...."

From "People With Criminal Records React to Trump Verdict: ‘Now You Understand’/The New York jury’s decision stirred conflicting emotions, including surprise at the responses of many on the left" (NYT).

She heard liberals rejoice.... "liberals" is not the right word for people like this. 

"I cried when they shot Medgar Evers/Tears ran down my spine..."

This morning, I'm reading the lyrics to the 1966 Phil Ochs song "Love Me, I'm a Liberal," because I see, here in The Washington Post, that President Biden is giving the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Medgar Evers.

Evers was killed in 1963. Why did no President think of doing this before? And what does Biden hope to achieve by slotting the old fallen hero in with such characters as Mike Bloomberg, Katie Ledecky, and Phil Donahue?

In any case, study the argument in Phil Ochs's song. It has resonance today. It's the argument that convinces the student protesters to turn to violence and put their personal future on the line.

To be a mere liberal is despicable. You do all the well-behaved things and disapprove of all that is right wing, "But don't talk about revolution/That's going a little bit too far." You "vote for the Democratic Party" and "I'll send all the money" that's asked for, "but don't ask me to come on along," and for that you demand love, but you don't deserve it... in the logic of the song:

"To make 'thoughtfulness' a requirement of any universal right is to taper that right into an exclusive privilege."

"That trans kids’ access to care will in most cases be mediated by parents or legal guardians is an inescapable fact of the way our society regards children, rightly or not. For now, parents must learn to treat their kids as what they are: human beings capable of freedom. The freedom of sex does not promise happiness. Nor should it. It is good and right for advocates to fight back against the liberal fixation on the health risks of sex-changing care or the looming possibility of detransition. But it is also true that where there is freedom, there will always be regret. In fact, there cannot be regret without freedom. Regret is freedom projected into the past. So it is one thing to regret the outcome of a decision, but it is a very different thing to regret the freedom to decide, which most people would not trade for the world. If we are to recognize the rights of trans kids, we will also have to accept that, like us, they have a right to the hazards of their own free will. This does not mean shooting testosterone into every toddler who looks at a football. But if children are too young to consent to puberty blockers, then they are definitely too young to consent to puberty, which is a drastic biological upheaval in its own right...."

Writes Andrea Long Chu, in "Freedom of Sex/The moral case for letting trans kids change their bodies" (New York Magazine).

Note the suggestion that puberty is nature's sexual assault upon the child. The author doesn't quite say that, but she put the thought into my head. It would prove too much though. We wouldn't ask whether any given children can consent to take puberty blockers; we would ask whether all children should be required to take puberty blockers.

Also in this article is an acronym I'm seeing for the first time: TARL. This is a "trans-agnostic reactionary liberal":

At the bobdylan subreddit this morning, somebody asks "Why doesn't Dylan speak out more about politics?"

Here.

And somebody quotes something that I track down to this 1984 Rolling Stone interview:

Do you follow the political scene or have any sort of fix on what the politicians are talking about this election year?

I think politics is an instrument of the Devil. Just that clear. I think politics is what kills; it doesn’t bring anything alive. Politics is corrupt; I mean, anybody knows that.

"Old-school liberals can simply go on championing free-speech values. But the 'woke' or 'identitarian' left cannot go on as before."

"Having long agitated for more sweeping speech restrictions and taboos, they now confront a dilemma: They do not want 'woke' hate speech or sensitivity standards applied to Palestinian-aligned activists, and they are unwilling to police speech that unnerves many Jews in the way that they policed speech they considered upsetting to other identity groups; yet they cannot subject Jews to such a blatant double standard without alienating many Americans and losing moral standing and attendant influence.... One faction wants to resolve the double standard by treating Jews as the woke left treats Black and brown people and members of the LGBTQ community—to grant them the status of an oppressed group and to police speech on their behalf. A more farsighted faction wants everyone to get equal treatment, regardless of identity, when speaking or being spoken about. This conflict is especially hard for institutions that moved away from old-school-liberal speech attitudes toward leftist identitarianism, and created diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging bureaucracies, only to treat Jews inequitably while leaving many Jews and Palestinians alike feeling slighted and aggressed. Why conserve that?"

Writes Conor Friedersdorf, in "How October 7 Changed America’s Free-Speech Culture/The identitarian left cannot go on as it did before the attacks" (The Atlantic).

"Western civilization is what gave the world pretty much every goddamn liberal precept that liberals are supposed to adore."

"Please, somebody stop us before we enlighten again."

"The partitioning of the region wasn't decided by Jews but by a vote of the United Nations in 1947 with everyone from Russia to Haiti voting for it. But apparently, they don't teach this at Drag Queen Story Hour anymore."

"Despite his best efforts, Jake has recently hit a wall in his career and personal life. He feels stuck..."

"... and unfulfilled, and has begun to question whether the path he has chosen is really the right one for him. Jake is intelligent and resourceful, but he can also be impulsive and reckless. He has a tendency to act without fully thinking things through, which has gotten him into trouble in the past. Jake is good-looking and charming, but he has never been able to settle down in a committed relationship. He has had many casual flings and short-term relationships, but has never found someone who truly understands him. Overall, Jake is a complex and multifaceted character who is struggling with a deep sense of uncertainty and disillusionment. He is at a turning point in his life, and the events of the story will force him to confront his fears and doubts, and to ultimately make some difficult decisions about his future."

That's A.I., responding to a fiction-writer's request for a good fictional character, quoted in "Could an A.I. Chatbot Rewrite My Novel? As a young fiction writer, I dreamed of a technology that would tell me how to get my characters from point A to point B. Could ChatGPT be it?" by Jay Caspian Kang (The New Yorker).

It's terrible — isn't it? — or do I just need it to be terrible because I don't want any machine-written fiction? But am I clinging to a desire to love real, human fiction-writers? Maybe A.I.'s idea of a good fictional character is bad, and it's actually as good as what the humans do? If so, my desire to hate any machine-written fiction could lead me to hate the human fiction writer.

Here's what the real human writer — who needs us to continue to want him (and perhaps has never found someone who truly understands him) — has to say:

"[I]n the last couple of chapters of The End of History and the Last Man... I said that there is this side of the human personality that the Greeks called thymos. It’s the pridefulness..."

"... and the desire for respect that sometimes conflicts with your rational pursuit of self-interest. One of the problems in a liberal society is that it doesn’t give you a source of striving for higher ends if you simply have peace and prosperity. And I think that you can see this both on the left and the right today, where, in the United States we're having a lot of disputes over mask wearing and vaccination mandates. And protesters are wearing stars of David, saying that their requirement to get vaccinated and to wear masks is like Hitler's treatment of the Jews. And I think that's a perfect example of complacency. You're living in a liberal society. The government is not asking very much of you, but even the slightest imposition on your individual freedom, you compare it to the worst tyrannies of previous ages. You can only do that in a society that's really forgotten what real tyranny is like. And I think that one of the things that has happened with Putin's invasion of Ukraine is to remind people what real tyranny looks like...."

From "Francis Fukuyama on Ukraine, liberalism and identity politics/‘Vladimir Putin is going to be remembered as one of the fathers of the Ukrainian nation’" (Spectator). Fukuyama is promoting his new book "Liberalism and Its Discontents."

Fukuyama also says this about Ukraine, declaring that "Vladimir Putin is going to be remembered as one of the fathers of the Ukrainian nation when this is all over with":

"There is little or no liberal space in this revolutionary movement for genuine, respectful disagreement, regardless of one’s identity, or even open-minded exploration."

"In fact, there is an increasingly ferocious campaign to quell dissent, to chill debate, to purge those who ask questions, and to ruin people for their refusal to swallow this reductionist ideology whole. The orthodoxy goes further than suppressing contrary arguments and shaming any human being who makes them. It insists, in fact, that anything counter to this view is itself a form of violence against the oppressed. The reason some New York Times staffers defenestrated op-ed page editor James Bennet was that he was, they claimed, endangering the lives of black staffers by running a piece by Senator Tom Cotton, who called for federal troops to end looting, violence, and chaos, if the local authorities could not. This framing equated words on a page with a threat to physical life — the precise argument many students at elite colleges have been using to protect themselves from views that might upset them.... In this manic, Manichean world you’re not even given the space to say nothing. 'White Silence = Violence' is a slogan chanted and displayed in every one of these marches. It’s very reminiscent of totalitarian states where you have to compete to broadcast your fealty to the cause. In these past two weeks, if you didn’t put up on Instagram or Facebook some kind of slogan or symbol displaying your wokeness, you were instantly suspect. The cultishness of this can be seen in the way people are actually cutting off contact with their own families if they don’t awaken and see the truth and repeat its formulae.... If you argue that you believe that much of this ideology is postmodern gobbledygook, you are guilty of 'white fragility.' If you say you are not fragile, and merely disagree, this is proof you are fragile. It is the same circular argument that was once used to burn witches. And it has the same religious undertones...."

From "Is There Still Room for Debate?" by Andrew Sullivan (New York Magazine).

"I didn't roast Hollywood for being a bunch of liberals. I myself am a liberal. Nothing wrong with that. I roasted them for wearing their liberalism like a medal."

"I'm such a snowflake, liberal, I can't even really hate them for it. But my job is to take the piss. I did that."

Tweeted Ricky Gervais (after some people criticized his comic performance as host of the Golden Globes).

On Fox News ("The Five"), Greg Gutfeld analyzed the politics and guessed at the structure of Gervais's emotions:

"He's [Gervais] is upset because he's so confident in his liberal ideas that the refusal to listen to other ideas, which is happening right now on the regressive left, enrages him.;.. It's a pathetic sign of weakness...and I think that's what's fueling his fire and why he's so disgusted and angry -- but do not mistake that for him becoming a conservative."

I don't know if that explains Gervais, but I understand the dynamic. What Gutfeld said would work as a key to explaining what I've been doing on this blog these past 16 years. Suddenly, I think Gutfeld is talking about himself. I read Gutfeld's Wikipedia page, which links to this 2009 interview in Reason, where he says:

As a teenager, I was a liberal. It helped me in school.... I started to re-examine myself when I went to Berkeley. It was a really bad idea. It was just walking around with a target on your back.

I became a conservative by being around liberals and I became a libertarian by being around conservatives. You realize that there's something distinctly in common between the two groups, the left and the right; the worst part of each of them is the moralizing. On the left, you have people who want to dictate your behavior under the guise of tolerance. Unless you disagree with them. Then the tolerance goes out the window. Which kind of negates the whole idea of tolerance. That's the politically correct moralizing. Then when you become a conservative, the other kind of moralizing comes from religion....

"When I was a kid — and my parents are hippies — we lived in San Francisco... and so I always thought of liberals as being people who were... open-minded... not wanting to silence people, letting people speak."

"They're all about just letting people be who they are, not trying to enforce, like, rigid patterns of behavior and thought on people. But that's not the case anymore..."



The part I'm quoting begins around 2:00, but I've left the beginning on, with some funny stuff about the similarity between Boris Johnson and Trump.

What say we respond?

What say we respond to the #WhatTriggersLiberals hashtag with some lists of #WhatTriggersConservatives.

- Women
- Nonwhites
- LGBTQ+ people
- Non-Christian religions
- Pronouns in Twitter bios
- Questioning Dear Leader
- "Happy Holidays"
- The very existence of @AOC

Any others?

— There Is No Try, Only Zuul (@tonygoldmark) November 7, 2019

"White liberals dumb themselves down when they speak to black people, a new study contends."

WaPo reports on a new study by Cydney Dupree, an assistant professor of organizational behavior at the Yale School of Management, and Susan Fiske, a professor of psychology and public affairs at Princeton:

You have recently joined a book club.

Before each meeting, one member of the literary collective sends an email to the club secretary offering a few thoughts on the assigned text. This month, it’s your turn to compose the brief review.

A new study suggests that the words you use may depend on whether the club secretary’s name is Emily (“a stereotypically White name,” as the study says) or Lakisha (“a stereotypically Black name”). If you’re a white liberal writing to Emily, you might use words like “melancholy” or “euphoric” to describe the mood of the book, whereas you might trade these terms out for the simpler “sad” or “happy” if you’re corresponding with Lakisha.

But if you’re a white conservative, your diction won’t depend on the presumed race of your interlocutor....

The social psychologists call what liberals do a "competence downshift."

“White liberals may unwittingly draw on negative stereotypes, dumbing themselves down in a likely well-meaning, ‘folksy,’ but ultimately patronizing, attempt to connect with the outgroup,” argues the paper, titled “Self-Presentation in Interracial Settings: The Competence Downshift by White Liberals.”...

“It’s somewhat counterintuitive,” said Dupree, who is the lead author and whose research was supported by the National Science Foundation as well as by Princeton’s Joint Degree Program in Social Policy. “The idea that people who are most well-intentioned toward racial minorities, the people actually showing up and wanting to forge these connections, they’re the ones who seem to be drawing on stereotypes to do so.”

Was there a scientific study done that determined that liberals are more "well-intentioned" than conservatives? I mean, it wouldn't be "counterintuitive" if you abandoned the prejudgment about who means well and who does not. And what does it really mean to say people have good intentions? When you show up to help, you're displaying the belief that help is needed. When you stand back, it might not be because you don't care. It could be that you think other people are able to handle their own life.

[W]hite liberals are “concerned about appearing racist”... Dupree said. In their role as “impression managers,” white liberals may even take on the negative stereotypes they harbor toward people of other races, in an effort, as the paper puts it, to “get on their level.”

Their conservative counterparts, meanwhile, appear not to employ these stereotypes in the same way, as Dupree said, because, “We know empirically that white conservatives are less likely to be interested in getting along with racial minorities.”...

We know empirically.... I know "empirically" — or is it intuitively? — not to trust studies by social psychologists, but I must say that when the results make liberals look bad, I'm more likely to believe that the social psychologists are onto something and to suspect that they are framing the results as well as they can to make liberals look better than conservatives: Liberals are racists because they care and they're trying so hard to make a connection and surely if conservatives weren't so awful they'd be just as racist.

"The younger militants tend to have been influenced by the cultural Marxism that is now the lingua franca in the elite academy. Group identity is what matters."

"Society is a clash of oppressed and oppressor groups. People who are successful usually got that way through some form of group privilege and a legacy of oppression. The big generational clashes generally occur over definitions of professional excellence. The older liberals generally believe that the open exchange of ideas is an intrinsic good. Older liberal journalists generally believe that objectivity is an important ideal. But for many of the militants, these restraints are merely masks for the preservation of the existing power structures. They offer legitimacy to people and structures that are illegitimate. When the generations clash, the older generation generally retreats. Nobody wants to be hated and declared a moral pariah by his or her employees. Nobody wants to seem outdated. If the war is between the left and Trumpian white nationalism, nobody wants to be seen siding with Trump.... Liberal educated boomers have hogged the spotlight since Woodstock. But now events are driven by the oldsters who fuel Trump and the young wokesters who drive the left...."

Writes David Brooks in "Liberal Parents, Radical Children/The generation gap returns" (NYT).

That caught my eye because of the term "cultural Marxism." Earlier this month, I blogged a NYT column titled by Yale history-and-lawprof Samuel Moyn titled "The Alt-Right’s Favorite Meme Is 100 Years Old/'Cultural Marxism' might sound postmodern but it’s got a long, toxic history." I guess that "long, toxic history" bit didn't scare Brooks off using the term. Interesting! From the Moyn piece:

According to their delirious foes, “cultural Marxists” are an unholy alliance of abortionists, feminists, globalists, homosexuals, intellectuals and socialists who have translated the far left’s old campaign to take away people’s privileges from “class struggle” into “identity politics” and multiculturalism....

The defense of the West in the name of “order” and against “chaos,” which really seems to mean unjustifiable privilege against new claimants, is an old affair posing as new insight. It led to grievous harm in the last century.... “[C]ultural Marxism” is not only a sad diversion from framing legitimate grievances but also a dangerous lure in an increasingly unhinged moment.

"How Brain Science Could Determine the Midterms/Ever wonder why liberals and conservatives vote the way they do? It turns out they might literally be wired differently."

A Politico headline that misuses either the word "science" or the word "determine." The subheadline is worse: "Ever wonder why liberals and conservatives vote the way they do? It turns out they might literally be wired differently." Literally wired? Come on!

Anyway. Let's consider the notion that there's something scientists have discovered about the brain that might help us understand why an individual leans to the political left or right. The author — who probably didn't write the headline — is a professor and psychiatrist, Daniel Z. Lieberman:

The brain divides our thought life into two activities: appreciating what we have and desiring what we need.... The brain uses... chemicals like oxytocin, which encourages us focus on intimate relationships, and endorphins, which provide feelings of fulfillment and satisfaction. By contrast, desiring what we don’t have is the domain of a single chemical in the brain: dopamine. It gives us the drive to pursue new things....

Progressivism, the pursuit of progress, is, by definition, the pursuit of change, of new things. So, we might expect to see progressive ideology in people with more active dopamine circuits. And that’s just what we do find. Researchers from the University of California discovered that people who inherit particularly active dopamine receptor genes are more likely to subscribe to a liberal ideology. (They also tend to get bored easily and seek novelty, and can be impulsive, exploratory, excitable, quick-tempered and extravagant.)...

Why don't they like Trump? He's new, impulsive, exploratory, excitable, quick-tempered, and extravagant. Maybe it's that these dopamine folks want other people to stay put why they pursue newness and indulge their impulsive, exploratory, excitable, quick-tempered, and extravagant selves.

[P]eople with lower levels of dopamine and higher levels of the “Here & Now” brain chemicals are more likely to take their enjoyment from the appreciation of things they already have. They value tradition... A study of 1,771 students in Singapore found that conservative attitudes were more common among those who had a receptor gene that was less reactive to dopamine....

This sounds incredibly simplistic.

[C]onservative brains, chemically inclined toward preserving the here and now, are more sensitive to threats that might undermine their current way of life. When a group of volunteers were divided by political affiliation, researchers found that, compared to liberals, conservatives had a stronger physiological reaction to frightening images, such as a spider crawling on a man’s face.

Then why do lefties get so emotive in reaction to the sight of Trump's face and blurt feelings of disgust at his body, his hair, and his color?

This neuroscience suggests that the current confrontational political climate may be helping the conservative cause. News articles that describe public harassment by activists, for example, trigger threat circuits in the brain and can turn the ordinarily complacent conservative into an enthusiastic partisan.... In response, liberal leaders might reduce conservatives’ motivation to vote by playing down confrontation, and instead emphasizing the commonality all Americans share.

So the people you just described as "impulsive, exploratory, excitable, quick-tempered, and extravagant" are now the calm, quiet ones who keep everything in balance? I'm sure there's some brain science in there, but this article seems to have been processed into the usual pap for progressives. Why they continue to consume this stuff is a mystery, considering their vaunted love of newness and creativity.

"Sulkowicz wants to change behavior, too, but thinks that punishment is more efficacious than tweaks to campus life."

"When Columbia settled the lawsuit filed by the man Sulkowicz accused of rape, it put out a statement, noting that his 'remaining time at Columbia became very difficult for him and not what Columbia would want any of its students to experience.' But Sulkowicz believes that what he went through had a salutary effect. 'He’s been scared shitless,' they said.*... 'It’s about finding a way to make your institution, and the people who run it, more human.'"

From "Is There a Smarter Way to Think About Sexual Assault on Campus?/A team of researchers at Columbia believes that small changes to college life could make campuses safer" by Jia Tolentino in The New Yorker.

I'm interested in the enthusiasm for harsh punishment and for deterring bad behavior by scaring people shitless. That's the common stereotype of a right-wing mindset. Most of that New Yorker article is about understanding the behavior of college students and tracking them away from bad sex, that is, looking for root causes, which is the classic mindset of the liberal. Torentino asked Sulkowicz about that approach (which led to a program at Columbia called "SHIFT"):

Sulkowicz had not heard about SHIFT before, and was politely resistant to the idea: “My view in this whole thing is that, the more that Columbia can retreat behind ‘Here’s a program, here’s a study, here’s a process,’ the less that any human that finds themselves in this machine will ever be incentivized to act based on their moral compass.”

What if, I asked, the idea behind the study was tinkering with the machine, figuring out how to reorient that moral compass?

“That makes me think of asking someone to wash the dishes, and they tell you, ‘I’ll try,’” Sulkowicz said. “I think that’s the difference between spending two million dollars to try to understand the conditions that create a community that’s conducive to sexual assault versus just doing the right thing—expelling people who sexually assault other students.”

 That's an attitude I've always heard called right-wing.**
_________________

* I was confused at "they said," even though I'd read, earlier in the article (and had not forgotten) that Sulkowicz "identifies as non-binary, and uses the gender-neutral pronouns 'they' and 'them,'" and I had already struggled with confusion when I read "in the midst of sex, the student anally penetrated and choked them while they struggled and told him to stop" and "carrying a fifty-pound, twin XL mattress around campus... was a performance project: they would stop carrying it, they said, when the student who had raped them was expelled."

** The new thing is to care passionately and be right-wing.