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Gripweed posted:No. When she said that the children got the disease from men who have sex with men, that's not incautious phrasing that can be misrepresented, that's a bad sentence when represented by her own words in the form of the sentence she herself said. You are conflating an assertion about the demographic data of documented cases, a technical factual statement, out of the larger context of the press briefing with a moral assertion. She’s bad at her job. But lol no she’s not trying to scapegoat. It’s sophistry.
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Jul 30, 2022 23:03
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My theory is that she is just not a career politician, and so she isn't as adroit as a senator or representative or whatever.Gripweed posted:Either way, trying to read into Walensky's heart and soul is pointless. She said a bad homophobic thing and should've resigned or been fired. But you ARE doing this by assigning the most malicious intent to what she said and why she said it. silence_kit fucked around with this message at 23:11 on Jul 30, 2022 |
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Jul 30, 2022 23:08
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Walensky is an academic who has never had a public facing position and consequently says really stupid poo poo when she's not reading from prepared remarks -- which is why the administration has spent $25,000 on consultants to try to make her less of a mess. She's really bad at that part of her job and her entire tenure has involved gaffes like this.
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Jul 30, 2022 23:11
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Absolutely wild that Nancy Pelosi may force a conflict with Chinese sovereignty over Taiwan. I can't understand it from a political angle as anything other than an attempt to appear tough on China, but sending a military escort into territory they consider theirs seems pretty provocative.
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Jul 30, 2022 23:12
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silence_kit posted:My theory is that she is just not a career politician, and so she isn't as adroit as a senator or representative or whatever. Yeah I think it's a Peter Principle thing where she rose up the ranks until her position demanded skills she doesn't have. Great doctor, great researcher, probably at least a decent administrator, not a good communicator to the public. She got training on it but 30 or 40 hours with a media consultant isn't going to keep you from making mistakes especially when you have a lifetime of experience and training in speaking to a totally different audience. Bar Ran Dun is being silly when they say Walensky is this way because she grew up priviliged, there are tons of privileged people who know how to communicate to an audience of average people. Gripweed is being silly when they say it's a deliberate effort to frame Monkeypox as a gay disease, or even an expression of homophobia. The most intuitive explanation is that she's used to communicating to people who are already experts in medicine or public health, not reporters and certainly not average Americans. She shouldn't be fired or made to resign, just hire a spokesperson for this part of the job and let her be a research/public health administrator which is the job she's equipped to do. Civilized Fishbot fucked around with this message at 23:23 on Jul 30, 2022 |
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Jul 30, 2022 23:14
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silence_kit posted:
Is the whole point there that it doesn't matter WHY she said it like that, the problem is that she did and how it's being received and understood, for example by the AP?
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Jul 30, 2022 23:15
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DeadlyMuffin posted:Yeah, that's my point. Yes you are arguing against a position nobody here holds. Feel free to engage with the arguments people are making, which is the one I explained to you.
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Jul 30, 2022 23:18
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silence_kit posted:But you ARE doing this by assigning the most malicious intent to what she said and why she said it. You are focusing on intent, we are focusing on impact. This is a meaningful distinction when discussing harm to marginalized groups that you shouled probably pay more attention to.
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Jul 30, 2022 23:20
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some plague rats posted:Is the whole point there that it doesn't matter WHY she said it like that, the problem is that she did and how it's being received and understood, for example by the AP? If you truly and honestly believe that the most important aspect of her job is PR and making sure not to say anything which could be interpreted or misconstrued as being offensive, then I guess the position is internally consistent. I think this position is at odds with popular Goon beliefs on good governance though. Personally, I think the 'intent doesn't matter' theory of communication & ethical action is non-sensical.
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Jul 30, 2022 23:31
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I think the question of whether her intent is homophobic is very relevant to the question of whether or not her position is salvageable. If she's homophobic in intent, she needs to go because no support given to her can avert her from having that impact. If she's just loving up because she was trained to talk to doctors and researchers and not the usual American dummy, then she only needs a spokesperson who has the appropriate skillset, and she can stick to the stuff she's good at.
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Jul 30, 2022 23:34
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Civilized Fishbot posted:I think the question of whether her intent is homophobic is very relevant to the question of whether or not her position is salvageable. If she's homophobic in intent, she needs to go because no support given to her can avert her from having that impact. That's very well put, ty.
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Jul 30, 2022 23:35
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Civilized Fishbot posted:If she's just loving up because she was trained to talk to doctors and researchers and not the usual American dummy, then she only needs a spokesperson who has the appropriate skillset, and she can stick to the stuff she's good at. I'd rephrase this, because her problem absolutely isn't that the population she's talking to is dumber. It's that she's talking about poo poo she didn't ever need to talk about. In the past, she'd have a position where everything could just be left at "at this time, this is almost entirely transmitted through MSM, we need public health interventions in that community" and there is no need to be cautious about stigmatizing language because nobody is listening who is going to hear that and think "gay disease!" She has an entirely new set of obligations now.
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Jul 30, 2022 23:43
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Civilized Fishbot posted:I think the question of whether her intent is homophobic is very relevant to the question of whether or not her position is salvageable. If she's homophobic in intent, she needs to go because no support given to her can avert her from having that impact. Absolutely the intent is relevant but the intent being good doesn't change the impact from being bad. The impact is bad if she's a homophobe, and the impact is bad if she's not a homophobe.
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Jul 30, 2022 23:44
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Civilized Fishbot posted:I think the question of whether her intent is homophobic is very relevant to the question of whether or not her position is salvageable. No, there is a theory of morality where if it is possible for someone to assign the most malicious intent to someone else's words or actions, then the action should be judged as if that were the true intent. As you can imagine, this principle is never consistently applied and only gets trotted out selectively when it benefits the user. silence_kit fucked around with this message at 23:48 on Jul 30, 2022 |
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Jul 30, 2022 23:45
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silence_kit posted:No, there is a theory of morality where if it is possible for someone to assign the most malicious intent to someone's words or actions, then the action should be judged as if that were the true intent. No this is just fragility. That's why you're focusing on intent rather than impact. Impact is concrete and has been shown in this thread. Intent is unknowable and endlessly debatable. "oh dear, I'm not racist, so I couldn't have done a racism and therefore you calling what I said racist is you just assuming the worst when I have an array of reasons I used internally to assure myself that I wasn't racist at all!"
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Jul 30, 2022 23:47
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Jaxyon posted:Absolutely the intent is relevant but the intent being good doesn't change the impact from being bad. Of course. The impact is what it is, good or bad. Good intentions are probably necessary but definitely insufficient. If we want to prevent the impact in the future, we should be figuring out the process that's producing that impact, and one input there is intention and another is competency. If the intention is the problem, the solution is we find someone with different intention. If the competency is the problem, we need someone with different competency.
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Jul 30, 2022 23:49
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Civilized Fishbot posted:Of course. The impact is what it is, good or bad. Good intentions are probably necessary but definitely insufficient. I agree, but I'm replying to a poster(s) who's focusing on only the intent aspect.
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Jul 30, 2022 23:51
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We're starting to get a better preview of how the midterms and 2024 are going to be a complete electoral process dumpster fire. The Trumpers who have been seeding themselves among local election officials will be acting as chaos agents; essentially just doing whatever they can to derail and sabotage the process. Considering that they're already doing this in their own Republican primaries, we can probably expect a lot more of this. And frankly if Elias is worried about it, everyone should be. https://twitter.com/marceelias/status/1553393041842622465?cxt=HHwWgsC--biv4Y4rAAAA -Blackadder- fucked around with this message at 23:57 on Jul 30, 2022 |
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Jul 30, 2022 23:52
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silence_kit posted:No, there is a theory of morality where if it is possible for someone to assign the most malicious intent to someone's words or actions, then the action should be judged as if that were the true intent. You're trying to make it a conversation about individual moral philosophy and whether she is or isn't a good person and nobody going in on her ITT gives a poo poo about that. The germane issue here is whether she's causing harm by how she's framing a potential epidemic to the public in a way that reinforces an organized campaign of reactionary violence against marginalized people. If she's got good intentions, she should not be causing harm. If she's got bad intentions, she should also not be causing harm. She's still responsible for the outcome of her actions regardless of how she feels, because the actions are what people care about It's a discussion evaluating the job performance of a government functionary, not a discussion about which person on TV would be cool to hang out with. If her intentions are really that good she should do a better job
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Jul 30, 2022 23:56
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Bar Ran Dun posted:You are conflating an assertion about the demographic data of documented cases, a technical factual statement, out of the larger context of the press briefing with a moral assertion. silence_kit posted:But you ARE doing this by assigning the most malicious intent to what she said and why she said it. Here's the clip. I'm not assigning malicious intent, it's a malicious statement. She's saying the two children, and pretty much everyone who isn't gay but got monkeypox, got it from gay men. That is inexcusable. It doesn't matter if it's in the context of explaining that gay men are most at risk, it is a horrible thing for a government official to say, and it's absurd and borderline offensive that people in this thread are excusing it. https://twitter.com/RepMTG/status/1550969674778775552?s=20&t=vnOWBdhd5d66hVGYjvipAg silence_kit posted:My theory is that she is just not a career politician, and so she isn't as adroit as a senator or representative or whatever. BRAKE FOR MOOSE posted:Walensky is an academic who has never had a public facing position and consequently says really stupid poo poo when she's not reading from prepared remarks -- which is why the administration has spent $25,000 on consultants to try to make her less of a mess. She's really bad at that part of her job and her entire tenure has involved gaffes like this. Then she should be loving fired! If she wasn't supposed to say that, then the Biden administration should've demanded her resignation immediately. She doesn't deserve this job, and she is doing harm to vulnerable communities and the credibility of the institution she stands for.
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Jul 31, 2022 00:05
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Gripweed posted:Here's the clip. I'm not assigning malicious intent, it's a malicious statement. She's saying the two children, and pretty much everyone who isn't gay but got monkeypox, got it from gay men. That is inexcusable. It doesn't matter if it's in the context of explaining that gay men are most at risk, it is a horrible thing for a government official to say, and it's absurd and borderline offensive that people in this thread are excusing it. I think if someone's good at one part of her job, and bad at another part of her job, it makes more sense to keep her around for the stuff she's good at and have someone else do the stuff she's bad at. I can't tell if you think she should be fired because she deserves to be fired morally, because you don't think she can stop loving up in this role, or because the government needs to send a message that loving up this bad will get you loving fired. If it's a moral thing, then her intention does matter, and her intention I think was just to explain the situation from a standpoint of where the disease has become endemic and where it's spreading (which is what a good public health official should do). If it's a she-will-never-stop-loving-up-in-this-way thing, I think she just needs a spokesperson to handle communicating to the public while she handles the administration of the CDC. The position is totally salvageable. If it's a we-need-to-send-a-message thing, fair enough that's not a bad message to send, but I'd rather see a government run by giving people the support they need to do a good job than by promoting them to positions for which they are unsuited and then penalizing them for it when they can't develop the new skills at a sufficiently rapid pace. Civilized Fishbot fucked around with this message at 00:15 on Jul 31, 2022 |
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Jul 31, 2022 00:10
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Civilized Fishbot posted:she can stick to the stuff she's good at. She’s bad at that stuff. Just garbage at the very thing she was appointed for. Her covid research that got her the job relating to getting people to get vaccines, garbage that didn’t work.
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Jul 31, 2022 00:16
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Gripweed posted:Here's the clip. I'm not assigning malicious intent, it's a malicious statement. She's saying the two children, and pretty much everyone who isn't gay but got monkeypox, got it from gay men. That is inexcusable. Is the statement factual correct from the data?
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Jul 31, 2022 00:20
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Gripweed posted:Then she should be loving fired! If she wasn't supposed to say that, then the Biden administration should've demanded her resignation immediately. She doesn't deserve this job, and she is doing harm to vulnerable communities and the credibility of the institution she stands for. If you truly and honestly believe that the most important aspect of her job is PR, then I guess the position is internally consistent. I think this position is at odds with popular Goon beliefs on good governance though. Also, 'causing harm' here is soo vague and is extremely debateable. For example, a case is made in the below post that the quoted statement by someone in the WHO is 'causing harm' to the gay community but there is a REALLY strong case to be made here that it is the complete opposite of that. https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?noseen=0&threadid=4005023&pagenumber=122&perpage=40#post525091583 Gripweed posted:Here's the clip. I'm not assigning malicious intent, it's a malicious statement. You are assigning malicious intent to her words by labeling it a malicious statement. I don't believe that it was a malicious statement. I think that it was a gaffe and that she isn't great at PR.
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Jul 31, 2022 00:21
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Sometimes they announced outbreaks of particular diseases in Jewish, Amish, etc communities. Are those announcements inexcusable?
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Jul 31, 2022 00:22
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Bar Ran Dun posted:Is the statement factual correct from the data? I assume you were fine with Breitbart having a "Black Crime" section on their website, since they were simply factually reporting on cases where black men had been accused or convicted of crime. You aren't opposed to factual reporting of the data, are you?
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Jul 31, 2022 00:29
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Bar Ran Dun posted:Sometimes they announced outbreaks of particular diseases in Jewish, Amish, etc communities. Are those announcements inexcusable? Dr. Walensky wasn't really doing that--she could have answered the interviewer's question in a way to avoid bringing up that most monkeypox cases have been found in men who have sex with men or that the two children caught it from a gay man. Or she could have brought up that fact in a much more tactful way and used it as an opportunity to inform people in that community that they are most at risk. I believe that it was a gaffe, and that as someone who has spent much of her career improving HIV/AIDS screening and care that she wasn't intentionally trying to send a coded message to right-wing conspiracy theorists that monkeypox was put on Earth as punishment for homosexuality or whatever. silence_kit fucked around with this message at 00:34 on Jul 31, 2022 |
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Jul 31, 2022 00:31
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Gripweed why do you think she should be fired? Because she morally deserves to lose the job, because there's no way to prevent miscommunications like this while she holds the job, to scare similarly-positioned employees into greater caution around what they say, or some other reason?
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Jul 31, 2022 00:33
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Civilized Fishbot posted:Gripweed why do you think she should be fired? Because she morally deserves to lose the job, because there's no way to prevent miscommunications like this while she holds the job, to scare similarly-positioned employees into greater caution around what they say, or some other reason? Because she demonstrated she is not fit to hold the job.
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Jul 31, 2022 00:37
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Gripweed posted:Because she demonstrated she is not fit to hold the job. She's unfit for the part of the job where you talk to the public but I've seen nothing to suggest she's less than qualified for the rest. What needs changing is the job. Right now to succeed in the role you need to be extremely knowledgeable about public health and medicine, a competent administrator of a huge government bureaucracy, and a strong public communicator. That's a tough candidate to find, especially because a lifetime of speaking about public health with experts is going to give you bad habits in speaking to the public. The public-communicating part of the job can and should be spun off into its own position, because there's no need for the CDC director to directly interface with the public. She's not the president. Nobody's going to care if she communicates to the public through a spokesperson. The spokesperson can be someone with a decent public health background whose primary skill is saying stuff in a way that reporters can understand and shitheads can't easily spin.
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Jul 31, 2022 00:44
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Gripweed posted:Because she demonstrated she is not fit to hold the job. IDK it is a popular Goon Belief that it is unfortunate that government service is so politicized and is all about optics & PR. It is also a popular Goon belief that it is unfortunate that politicians are so good at PR that they are able to distort public opinion and trick people into supporting political policies/ideologies/beliefs etc. that are NOT truly in the public interest. silence_kit fucked around with this message at 00:52 on Jul 31, 2022 |
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Jul 31, 2022 00:44
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silence_kit posted:IDK it is a popular Goon Belief that it is unfortunate that government service is so politicized and is all about optics & PR. It is also a popular Goon belief that it is unfortunate that politicians are so good at PR that they are able to distort public opinion and trick people into supporting political policies/ideologies/beliefs etc. that are NOT truly in the public interest. Which goons are you talking about? Is it you? Because I’ve never said any of that.
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Jul 31, 2022 00:58
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Gripweed posted:Which goons are you talking about? Is it you? Because I’ve never said any of that. I'm just suspecting that you don't consistently believe that people like the director of the CDC's most important job role is PR, because it is at odds with EXTREMELY popular political beliefs on this forum. If you really don't believe that it is a shame that government service is so politicized and/or that politicians are able to trick the general public because they are TOO good at PR, then OK, I'll take you at your word.
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Jul 31, 2022 01:03
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silence_kit posted:I'm just suspecting that you don't consistently believe that people like the director of the CDC's most important job role is PR, because it is at odds with EXTREMELY popular political beliefs on this forum. If you really don't believe that it is a shame that government service is so politicized and/or that politicians are able to trick the general public because they are TOO GOOD at PR, then OK, I'll take you at your word. If you think I’m being disingenuous because other people on this forum have stated positions that conflict with my stated positions, I’m really not sure how to respond to that.
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Jul 31, 2022 01:05
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-Blackadder- posted:We're starting to get a better preview of how the midterms and 2024 are going to be a complete electoral process dumpster fire. Refusing to certify the election is not really a "one weird trick" to steal the election. When some random partisan dipshit refuses to perform their ministerial role, the courts can and will force them to comply, and have in this article. I'm more concerned about legal forms of election fuckery where election officials make it more difficult for Democrats to vote on a legal, ostensibly neutral, but completely bullshit pretext.
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Jul 31, 2022 01:14
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-Blackadder- posted:We're starting to get a better preview of how the midterms and 2024 are going to be a complete electoral process dumpster fire. Ah, it's time for another episode of my favourite TV show, Experts: Please pay attention to and do something to help stop this bad thing. US Public: No. Experts:  US Public: HOLY gently caress HOW DID THIS BAD THING HAPPEN?! hope it's a good one! 
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Jul 31, 2022 01:17
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Gripweed posted:I assume you were fine with Breitbart having a "Black Crime" section on their website, since they were simply factually reporting on cases where black men had been accused or convicted of crime. You aren't opposed to factual reporting of the data, are you? You are again conflating very different things. A far right propaganda news outlet and a CDC presser are not equivalent. Breitbart is an intentional distortion to push an agenda. It’s analogous to your argument actually silence_kit posted:
She’s not good at her job and should know better. Gripweed posted:Because she demonstrated she is not fit to hold the job. She’s did that during the vaccine roll out. She’s not an immoral bigot though, she’s just very bad at being the head of the CDC.
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Jul 31, 2022 01:21
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Gripweed posted:I assume you were fine with Breitbart having a "Black Crime" section on their website, since they were simply factually reporting on cases where black men had been accused or convicted of crime. You aren't opposed to factual reporting of the data, are you? This is another example of why people who say things like 'intent doesn't matter' don't actually mean what they say and that the purported principle is non-sensical. You don't really believe that 'intent doesn't matter' here--your bone to pick in this (maybe hypothetical?) example is the malicious intent behind exclusively highlighting black crime in the news.
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Jul 31, 2022 01:34
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Here's a question: do you think there's any way she or anyone else could report relevant facts to the public in such a way that people motivated to interpret those facts in bad faith could not use them as justification for hateful bullshit? I absolutely agree that the impact of her words is terrible and probably irresponsible, but I don't believe there's any way she could have avoided that short of purposefully withholding information. If the COVID response has shown anything, it's essentially that the public at large should not have access to statistics or data or scholarly research, because they will do insane, stupid and hateful things with it. That's one way to go, but it has its own drawbacks in a free and democratic society.
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Jul 31, 2022 01:37
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PT6A posted:Here's a question: do you think there's any way she or anyone else could report relevant facts to the public in such a way that people motivated to interpret those facts in bad faith could not use them as justification for hateful bullshit? No there isn't a way for health organizations to talk about and effectively address monkeypox without doing that and there isn't a way to avoid 'causing harm' and mental distress in certain people who believe in ludicrously warped forms of egalitarianism. We had people in this thread suggesting that the experts at the CDC and WHO need to study up on confirmation bias, and that it is theoretically impossible for disease to be concentrated in certain demographics, lol
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Jul 31, 2022 01:56
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