Mississippi libraries ordered to delete research in response to state laws
mississippitoday.org
mississippitoday.org
Maternal mortality rate in Iran in 2020: 22/100,000 live births [1]
Maternal mortality rate in Mississippi in 2018-2022: 39.1/100,000 live births [2]
Infant mortality rate in Iran in 2022: 10.35/1,000 live births [3]
Infant mortality rate in Mississippi in 2022: 9.11/1,000 live births [4]
[1] https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789240068759
[2] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/maternal-mortality/data.htm
[3] https://www.who.int/data/gho/indicator-metadata-registry/imr...
[4] https://www.cdc.gov/maternal-infant-health/infant-mortality/
Rick Steve's Iran was a great watch that everyone should check out.
So the unfortunate reality is that the government is highly repressive. It tightly controls communication and enforces a strict theocratic system that doesn’t reflect the will of much of the population.
If you're curious about what Iranian society is all about, look at the photos before the 1979 revolution. That change wasn't long ago, it was just a generation back. My parents lived through it. Many from that time believed they were rising up for democracy, not realizing what would replace the Shah was something even more authoritarian. My own father admits they were misled and now actively curses the regime and himself.. the peak being burning the US embassy because they were told it's a foreign spy command center..
What's especially tragic is that Iran today has a very young population, many of whom strongly oppose the current regime. But peaceful change feels unlikely, look up what happened anytime people took to the streets. And if the government were to collapse without a clear path forward, there's a real risk of something even worse filling the vacuum.
That said, there are reasons for hope. During the most recent uprising, the "Woman, Life, Freedom" movement, women led the charge, and the government was forced to back down somewhat after international outcry. Since then, many women have continued to defy mandatory hijab laws, walking around without head coverings despite the real risks of arrest or violence. It’s incredibly brave, and it speaks to a deep, ongoing resistance that’s hard to suppress:
I mean… it is
Mississippi is one of the worst states in the US for maternity health; the US is one of the worst countries in the developed world for the same.
The comment you're responding to implied that Mississippi was comparable to Iran, and you rebutted that... the data supports that claim.
Mississippi's laws only changed to roughly mirror Iran's in mid 2022 following the supreme court ruling.
There were always things we considered science that are no longer considered science or harmful (blood letting, lobotomy, race science, etc)
Instead there was way more care about making conclusions, a lot of nuance and conditional statements (this study says so under those conditions and another one opposes sort of thing). But, what certain people here actually hate the most are results that are fairly consistent and were reproduced to death.
They are not any less scientific than, say, physics just because they have a harder time observing and modeling things.
In theory, no. In practice, yes. One doesn't even need to make a subtle case about all the ways it's gone wrong. Just say "Reproducibility Crisis".
Some systems- human social behavior being one of them- are simply not amenable to modern science because the systems have far too many uncontrolled variables, and the ability to create hypotheses which can't be falsified (because running the experiments would be impossible, unethical, or ambiguous) is far larger.
You'll see the same thing with race science. I reject it not because I'm well versed on how it's not rigorous enough, although it may be, but I think it's on its face because incredibly harmful.
Also, given development last few years, it turned out grievance studies were pretty correct about misogyny in society and about where rather large part of conservative population wants to go. Overall, they actually diagnosed things pretty accurately.
That doesn’t sound charitable at all.
The charitable interpretation is that this isn't real science.
Also in Iran there's more female engineers than men. It's quite unlike Taliban ruled Afghanistan.
Also in Iran if you happened to be male & gay and get caught you have the choice between the death penalty and getting a forced "sex re-assignement" surgery.
This is a straight out lie and you know it. 30 years ago was 1995.
But nice try rooting for a bloody dictatorship like Iran, led by people stuck in a 7th century mindset, allegedly the paragon of "progress" according to some here...
Mississippi is one of the 14 states where homosexuality was only legalised by Lawrence v Texas in 2003.
Given enough time all can degenerate.
Due process isn't a part of any religion afaik. And "rule of law" in Christianity and Islam is "suffer not a witch to live" and stuff like that. Not good.
> Given enough time all can degenerate.
"Degenerate" is a strange word in this context. Islam started as an imperialist death cult. Any movement towards liberalism and sanity is not something I'd call "degenerate". Christianity is hard to pin down where it started because it started small and without power. As soon as it got real power it turned evil real fast.
While after conversion to Islam the Arabs had a few centuries of great territorial expansion, when they have conquered not only their neighbors in Asia, but also the North of Africa and a part of the Iberian Peninsula, this was the standard behavior at that time for any population that was strong enough to be able to do this. It does not make the Arabs more "imperialist" than any other of their contemporaneous nations, e.g. when compared with Charlemagne.
Moreover, for many centuries, until relatively recently, most conflicts in Islamic countries, such as the Turkish Empire, were more likely to be settled by judges according to the law and without making discrimination based on religion, nationality or wealth, than in the contemporaneous European countries, where the enforcement of the laws was frequently arbitrary and biased.
The Europeans who have lived in countries occupied by Islamic Turks or Arabs have survived many centuries without losing their religion or traditions, in contrast with what happened with those that have been occupied by European empires, like the Russian Empire (or its Soviet descendant) or by the Austrian Empire (or its Austria-Hungary successor), where complete denationalization has frequently happened, due to intense discrimination.
Anti-scientific interpretations of the Islamic religion rules have prevailed only many centuries after its appearance. Only then claims like "there is no need to read any books but the Holy Book, as it contains all truth that has to be known by humans" began to have supporters and enforcers. Moreover, taking into consideration the recent history, the US citizens are the last who should be mocking this kind of ideas, because many of them appear to think in the same way.
I said "started" didn't I? I think the historical record is very clear. I meant during the time of the founder.
So you cannot single out Islam as a special religion from this point of view. At most it can be said that all monotheistic religions are structured to support imperialism, because they replace the previous multitude of gods, all of which had their specific jobs, at which they could not be supplanted by others, by a single all-powerful God who knows everything and who can do anything, and this structure of the celestial realm is supposed to be mirrored on Earth, where there must also be a single all-powerful ruler, whom everybody must obey without questioning.
In December 629, after eight years of intermittent fighting with Meccan tribes, Muhammad gathered an army of 10,000 Muslim converts and marched on the city of Mecca. The conquest went largely uncontested, and Muhammad seized the city with minimal casualties.
hardly sounds like the work of an "an imperialist death cult"
Current deportations sans due process aside, have a look at recent history in Mississippi:
‘Lynchings in Mississippi never stopped’ (2021) - https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/08/08/modern-day-...
no necessarily gays. Different societies may treat as non-humans different groups of people. US has just threw several hundreds of people into a black hole of prison in El Salvador. Considering the prison conditions even in US and how even US was openly waterboarding people multiple times (180 times for one guy), one can imagine what may be happening to the people in that prison in El Salvador (read on the El Salvador death squads, and the current regime there basically continues the same behavior). A fall from a tall building may be a mercy in that context. And i guess we'd never know how many of those guys will come out, if ever, of there alive.
CECOT prisoners do not receive visits and are never allowed outdoors. The prison does not offer workshops or educational programs to prepare them to return to society after their sentences.
The prison's dining halls, break rooms, gym and board games are for guards.
[ the human rights organization ] Cristosal reported last year that at least 261 people had died in El Salvador's prisons during the gang crackdown. The group and others have cited cases of abuse, torture and lack of medical attention.
.. the government has shown CECOT prisoners in boxer shorts marching into common areas and made to sit nearly atop each other. Cells lack enough bunks for everyone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Shepard
And the people who would do that kind of thing again are absolutely THRILLED and EMPOWERED about the current administration's policies towards gay and trans people.
And it's happening much more often now thanks to Trump's Stochastic Terrorism, aimed at his lunatic cult of MAGA followers who are every bit as fanatical and delusional and vengeful and armed to the teeth as any religious imperialist death cult.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_terrorism
Beaten With Belts, Sticks: Transgender Man Tortured For Weeks Before Murder:
https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/beaten-with-belts-sticks-tra...
>Nordquist, originally from Minnesota, travelled to New York in September to meet his online girlfriend and was staying at Patty's Lodge motel in Canandaigua.
>New York authorities have charged five individuals for the brutal torture and killing of a 24-year-old transgender man, whose body was dumped in an empty field after going through weeks of abuse.
>Sam Nordquist was subjected to relentless physical and psychological torture, according to court documents. He was punched, kicked, beaten with sticks, dog toys, ropes, canes, belts, and even assaulted with a table leg and a broomstick for weeks before succumbing to his injuries.
>Nordquist, originally from Minnesota, travelled to New York in September to meet his online girlfriend and was staying at Patty's Lodge motel in Canandaigua, about 30 minutes from Rochester. His family raised concerns after losing contact with him.
>Police launched a missing persons investigation on February 9, and on Thursday, they uncovered a "deeply disturbing pattern of abuse" at the motel, according to New York State Police Captain Kelly Swift.
>"In my 20-year law enforcement career, this is one of the most horrific crimes I have ever investigated," Ms Swift said at a press conference.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/26/the-truth-behi...
Shepard was a meth dealer and he was in a sexual relationship with the man who killed him.
GP never said "Iranians" or "Afghans", the issues are specific to the countries themselves.
Y'all give Mississippi too much credit if you think they hold the only copy of gender studies and race relations academic research.
I can't help but feel like this is the start of a modern equivalent of what happened to the Institut für Sexualwissenschaf, now masked by procedure and law.
Banning literal words and then deleting research based on those words? If you needed a sign that you're well on your way into authotarianism, it doesn't get a lot clearer than that.
If you are for free speech only it it is for your side, you are not for free spech. In fact, I believe if you uncritically tow any party line, you gave up on critical thinking.
Oh boy, oh boy. I'm so exited to be the bearer of bad news here!!
The people who believe in free speech as a matter of principal, not as a means to another political end are saying things like "fucking called it" and "told ya so" and making memes about how the demographics who are currently pissed off about this should have listened to them in years past and not lent political will to equally ham fisted stupidity that paved the way to this.
Which is basically the same thing that A LOT of single issue communities are saying right about now.
MLC (https://www.mlc.lib.ms.us/) is a state body that helps library systems in the state with govt money. They have a tool called MAGNOLIA that gives public libraries, community colleges, and k12 schools access to scholarly databases like ebscohost. This article says that MAGNOLIA no longer provides access to those collections. Larger universities in the state don't use MAGNOLIA as they have (and pay for) their own access.
No research is being deleted. Mississippi doesn't have the power to delete research in ebscohost. They're using a feature provided by ebscohost to exclude access to those collections. This is literally 2 bit flips in a database.
https://connect.ebsco.com/s/article/Content-in-EBSCOhost-Dat...
However, if you have concerns about the material included in MAGNOLIA, you can request a review of the material on the MLC website: https://www.mlc.lib.ms.us/review/
But the harder question is whether this particular material was unfairly singled out or not. If the library is unfairly suppressing quality research then that would be a bad thing. I think what would help me understand the situation in that respect is if someone posted examples of high quality research that was deleted but arguably shouldn't have been.
The harder (rhetorical) question is, if any solid quality assessment had been made by the executive.
I also have children and I obviously worry a great deal about what the world will look like when they grow up.
Whatever is happening at the moment has been set in motion in the past 15 years in this slow tectonic movement towards a likely repetition of past history. In that context there seems to be a huge information /misinformation/propaganda/psy ops operation happen under our feet.
The wake up call for me was during the past US presidential campaign. I heard in my social circle (three separate) under 25 yr old males (all raised and living in social-democratic Central Europe) repeating tiktok/instagram talking points, about how Trump "...will be good for 'the economy' ".
In light of past interesting discussion in HN, I ask the question:
How can we as citizens contribute to counter this? And how can governance / intelligence counter act something that now appears unstoppable and entrenched?
"The economy" in the US does not mean "jobs" or "the general public" or "the middle class" or "workers" or "people who live in your town/city/region" or "the general public's savings/ standard-of-living". It means "the stock holdings and assets of the top ~20(-40)% richest".
The top 10% of Americans held 93% * of all stocks, while the bottom 50% only 1%, as of 1/2024. (* It was only 70% back in 2019 [2]. That's a huge 5-year change.)
(In 3Q/2024, the bottom 50% of households held $4.8T real estate assets + just $0.3T stocks. The top 1%, by comparison, held over $16T stocks + $6T real estate assets.)
[0]: Scott Galloway (Prof G) keeps talking about this distribution of wealth and why it's structurally dangerous to the US.
[1]: "The Richest 1 Percent Own a Greater Share of the Stock Market Than Ever Before" (1/2024) https://inequality.org/article/stock-ownership-concentration...
[2]: Here's an older USAFacts on 2019 Fed data: https://usafacts.org/articles/what-percentage-of-americans-o...
Seems like a non trivial task to divvy up the beneficial ownership of equities. Plus, I would expect older people to have more savings, so there would need to be a normalization for age, presumably.
Edit: Looks like the source is here:
https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/index...
> The DFAs integrate two data products produced by the Federal Reserve Board: the Financial Accounts of the United States, which provide quarterly data on aggregate balance sheets of major sectors of the U.S. economy, and the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF), which provides comprehensive triennial microdata on the assets and liabilities of a representative sample of U.S. households.
Diving more into this data seems time intensive, so I guess I’ll just take the Fed’s word for it.
(Defined Benefit pensions are pretty rare in the US; in March 2023, only 15% of private industry workers had access to a defined benefit pension plan, and only 11% participated in such plans; mostly govt and local workers. Hence, the Fed data averages are deceptive; ~85% of people have no DB, 15% or fewer. So if they graphed those two separate subpopulations, we'd see more representative numbers for people who spent most of their working lives working for govt + everyone else.)
(Why would you expect US Fed data on US residents to have anything to do with Norway’s sovereign fund? There are comparatively few Norwegians in the US and even fewer retirees living in the US who spent most of their life working in Norway; approximate as zero.)
Yes, obviously older people have more savings, things compound. Also their retirement plans may have historically had more generous provisions/matches. And they got to invest in previous boom cycles. And historically real-estate tended to go up not down, most of the time.
It is unclear if 93% of all stocks owned by Americans are owned by the richest 10% of Americans, or if 93% of all stocks traded in the US are owned by the richest 10% of Americans.
The defined benefit plan beneficial ownership is actually more so all taxpayers (since most are government employees), since they are on the hook for the benefits of the equity investments don’t live up to the expected returns. This would impact everyone via higher taxes, although exactly who and how much is up to politics.
I guess my point is the whole of society kind of has its eggs in the public equities basket.
On a less immediate note, issues of greed are likely countered by generosity, so volunteering is good. Read what every religion has to say about that.
I wonder how they're taking the current economic news...
I don't know whether the reporting or the news itself is more disappointing.
Criticism does not.
This wasn’t just a marketing term nor just criticism.
Both have the outcome of muzzling speech that one doesn’t like.
Neither are okay.
But three that comes to mind are Brendan Eich: Mozilla is far poorer for what happened.
Peter Vlaming is another https://adfmedialegalfiles.blob.core.windows.net/files/Vlami...
Finally, Katie Herzog https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/02/style/what-is-cancel-cult...
I for one can see similarities between the canceling and the censoring mob.
If you’re seriously not aware how close to gleefully indulging in book-burning business certain US states have been and still are, K have some news for you.