There’s nothing wrong with getting drunk at Applebee’s. Actually chain restaurants frequently have the best price-to-alcohol-content ratio around.

Police are typically trained to deal with people with mental illness, but unfortunately in many cases of mental illness there is no way to handle it.

Whether you defend or oppose behaviorism I think it’s pretty widely accepted (even among any remaining behaviorists) that as a purely historical matter behaviorism’s popularity waned drastically during the cognitive revolution of the 60’s-80’s. Any book on the history of psychology in the US will tell you that. Even…

Most of what you said is true, though technically public universities do operate as full governmental agencies — the distinction made in what you wrote is not whether they’re governmental or not, but rather what can a governmental agency punish.

Right, and in this case she is being fired by a governmental entity.

Yep, I’m a lawyer too so I tried to word what I said carefully, which is why I prefaced it with an “[i]f they’re punishing her for protected speech.” It might be entirely possible that under Garcetti v. Ceballo it isn’t protected speech.

That’s not how it works; firing her is punishing her. If they’re punishing her for protected speech, they are violating her first amendment rights. The government doesn’t get to do anything they want to punish speech just because they fall short of imprisoning someone.

Freedom of speech absolutely applies to avoiding consequences for that speech; otherwise it’s meaningless.

But in this case her employer IS the government.

Protecting free speech is a conservative tactic?! Damn, now I have to become a conservative, because I take it pretty seriously.

Well I meant metaphorically. And I might be using a bit of hyperbole, but in 2012 the Republican candidates seemed to be courting his endorsement and taking him seriously. When he endorsed Romney it was at a Romney event, and most of the candidates actually reached out to him.

Slavery was pretty downplayed in my history books, too. In New York City. In schools with a significant black population.

It’s unconscious class and cultural bias. Seriously.

Nothing against him! He’s a perfectly competent actor, I just tend to lump him in with those actors who all of the sudden become a thing because apparently a few people in Hollywood have decided that he is going to be, no matter what the rest of us want. That’s the dynamic I just find fascinating — the idea that a few…

I am thinking of the school of psychology dominant through the first half of the 20th century, promoted by people like Hull and Skinner, which eventually became eclipsed because the stimulus-response paradigm was just stretched past its breaking point (most notably in Skinner’s book Verbal Behavior). Ignoring internal…

I didn’t know there were still behaviorists around...

Bless you.

Eh. I don’t see the big deal with him. He’s not bad, just not amazing or anything; he certainly doesn’t seem to have that much range.

I think he got those nominations after Hollywood decided to cast him in everything, not before.

I was just going to say he reminds me of Shia LaBeouf! That way Hollywood collectively decided to tell us he’s A Thing. John C. Reilly was like that, too.