Notices by Karl Fogel (kfogel@kfogel.org)

So, dental floss -- what happened to it?

Has anyone else noticed that floss (major brands, anyway) changed recently? Instead of being made of whatever kind of braided fibers it used to be made of, it's now a single smooth plastic string, and it sucks.

Is anyone aware of a brand that didn't make the switch?

Also, is this a sign that all the apparently different dental floss brands are really controlled by one shadowy owner? Is the New Floss ultimately due to some private equity deal?

Anyone? Pro Publica? Bueller?

Even good organizations make mistakes sometimes. The OSI should do exactly what this petition says and release the original full results of its 2025 election. The petition explains why very clearly; I've signed it, and I urge you to do the same.

I support the OSI's mission wholeheartedly. I served a three-year term on its Board of Directors, about a decade ago -- that was the Board that transformed the OSI into a membership organization that holds member-driven elections, so I take deviations from that very seriously. (More recently -- full disclosure -- my company has done research consulting for OSI.)

The reason the OSI should publish the unaltered election results is that is the only way such elections should ever be run is with full transparency. That's what voters and candidates both expect and deserve. There can be no qualifiers, conditionals, or hedging when it comes to how an election is done: you either do it right or, in the rare cases where there are truly exceptional circumstances, you disclose them and explain precisely why they required a change in procedure. In this case, there were no circumstances that really required a change in procedure, and the OSI then changed the procedure post facto anyway without explaining why.

One may agree or disagree with the particular platform of two of the disqualified candidates, but that platform is not the issue here. The issue is that the OSI held an election and then neither honored nor published the actual results.

The OSI is clearly aware of this: their updated blog post about the results makes some reference to those in-flight procedural changes. You can read it yourself and compare it with the factual allegations in the petition. I do believe you should take the latter as firm findings of fact: I've known candidate @bkuhn for many years and I cannot imagine him ever knowingly misrepresenting or misreporting a particular sequence of events that he was a witness to (and note that the OSI's post does not contradict the petition -- it merely presents things in a different light).

As I said at the start, even good organizations make mistakes sometimes. This was such a mistake, and I hope they'll quickly fix it in the most direct way possible.

I believe it is still the case that these elections are technically only advisory anyway. Under the bylaws, the Board ultimately decides who serves. Thus what's been happening in OSI elections all along is the Board has simply chosen to rubber-stamp, and thus officialize, the results of the member-driven elections. This is a fine arrangement; if the Board wants to decline to rubber-stamp a particular election result, it should announce that decision and explain why. But by refusing to acknowledge that that's what they're doing, and by not publishing the actual results, they're just temporarily silencing a signal that is unlikely to go away.

My opinion is that it would be much better for them to let the results stand, get those candidates onto the Board (if they indeed won), and have a healthy debate over the proposed reforms and all the other matters that that signal was signaling so loudly about. But that's just my opinion; if the Board feels that the presence of those candidates would be bad for the organization, then they don't have to seat them. But they should own that decision publicly and not hide behind false proceduralism.

@evan I don't know if that impression is accurate or not (though for what it's worth I haven't noticed anything like it -- but maybe Chicago is unusual, or my environment is unusual in some way). Assuming it were true, the first question to ask is always the base rate question: what is the proportion of Palestinians in the general population in the place you're considering? That will have a big effect on how many are even available to be leaders of protests.

In any case, it still isn't specifically a question about Jews participating in leadership roles or not.

@evan Thanks for asking. I can say what jumped out for me: the implicit assumption that a Jewish person necessarily has any connection to Israel or to Israeli policy at all -- i.e., that a Jewish person participating in such a protest is more worthy of inquiry than any other non-Palestinian participating would be.

If the concern is just that the protests should feature Palestinian people more prominently, then that would argue against any non-Palestinian taking a leadership role -- not just against Jews doing so. (There is a complex question of what is meant by a "Palestinian" in this context, but for our purposes here I just mean someone with a personal, familial or other heritage-based connection to Palestinian territory and thus to the experience of oppression by Israel.) But your question wasn't "Should non-Palestinians have leading roles in anti-Gaza-war protests?", it was "Should Jewish people have leading roles in anti-Gaza-war protests?"

This is also different from the dynamic, which you offered as an example, of white people taking leadership roles at a Black Lives Matter protest. In that case, the dichotomy is inherent and unseverable from the political situation: at the very least, every white person in the U.S. has benefitted economically from years of pro-white-because-anti-black policies, and thus every white person truly is implicated, even if not by their own choice.

But a Jew outside Israel is not inherently implicated in Israeli policies, does not benefit from U.S. subsidy of Israeli military action, etc. They're just a person, who is Jewish, living in a country that is not Israel, as indeed most Jews have done for the past couple of millennia. Most importantly for this discussion, they have no way to further separate themselves from the connection that many people seem to assume they have with Israel and its government's policies. They're already doing all the same things everyone else is doing to achieve that! Like, you know, not living in Israel, not being a citizen of Israel, not voting in Israeli elections, etc. The unfortunate implication is that the one remaining thing they could do is not be Jewish.

That's why I asked "Why is this a question?"

@marymessall in reply mentioned that "Non-Jews don't need to be telling Jewish people what their roles are", and I want to be clear that that's not what I'm saying here. My reaction to your question would be the same whether you are Jewish or not (indeed I don't know whether you are), and my feeling about whether someone should be asked to stay out of a leadership role because of being a Jew would be unaffected by whether those doing the asking were Jewish or not as well.

@soaproot Heh! I thought about including some things like that from math, but I didn't feel I had enough expertise to be sure about what was and wasn't settled these days. Unlike other fields, math has gone through some cycles of taking care of deferred maintenance -- you know, things like re-establishing calculus on more rigorous basis than its originators had ever bothered with, and the adoption of ZF[C] as a foundational framework. Maybe there are other examples too (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_mathematics#Foundational_crisis for those keeping score at home).

Math is special, quite unlike other fields in its hypertrophied attention to definitional rigor. To provide an example in mathematics, I would have had to get a Ph.D. first, and, you know, it was just one Fediverse post, so was it really worth half a decade in graduate school? Some might answer "yes" to that question, and, indeed, I'm not sure that the answer is "no", but... it was late and I just wanted to hit Submit.

Sitting here trying to make a satire transposing Andreesen’s dumbassery into a nontechnica realm, and this is the best I’ve managed:

“A world in which trees are all destroyed by squirrels, who then themselves die out — logically, necessarily — is a world in which nut production goes through the roof, absent the squirrels to eat them. Because zero divided by zero is infinity, we then live in an infinite forest, beyond all imagining.”