November 20, 2025 To: UCLA Chancellor Julio Frenk CC: Monroe Gordon, Vice Chancellor of Student Affairs Steve Lurie, Associate Vice Chancellor for Campus and Community Safety Anthony Solana, Jr., UCLA Employee and Labor Relations Subject: End Arrests at Protected Labor Actions Two rights are ironclad in California: the right of organized labor to strike when contract negotiations fail and the right of citizens to speak freely in public. This week, the University of California violated both. Four UCLA undergraduate students were arrested by university police on Tuesday while picketing in support of AFSCME 3299's protected strike. Two UCLA graduate student members of UAW 4811 were detained by university police on Wednesday at a union action about contract violations and labor cuts. We demand the University of California immediately cease and desist from arresting union members and their supporters during actions protected by the First Amendment and California labor law, and that UC leadership ensure none of the six students face criminal charges or student disciplinary proceedings. Drop all charges - legal and disciplinary. Signed, AFSCME 3299 UAW 4811 Teamsters Local 2010 UPTE CWA 9119 UCLA Faculty Association UCLA Chapter of University Council - AFT Undergraduate Students Association Office of the President Undergraduate Students Association Office of the Internal Vice President Undergraduate Students Association Office of the External Vice President Undergraduate Students Association Office of General Representative 2 Undergraduate Students Association Office of General Representative 3 Undergraduate Students Association Cultural Affairs Commission Undergraduate Students Association Office of the Transfer Student Representative UC-AFT Local 1474 UC San Diego Chapter of University Council - AFT UC Berkeley Faculty Association UC Irvine Faculty Association UC Merced Faculty Association UC Riverside Faculty Association UC San Diego Faculty Association UC San Francisco…

Four UCLA undergrads were arrested on Tuesday while exercising their right to support @afscme3299.bsky.social’s picketed strike. We demand all charges be dropped.

Not a criticism of Mamdani in particular, but as long as we allow massively funded, heavily armed right-wing paramilitaries to have veto power over every aspect of public policy, it will be impossible to enact even the most basic social democratic reforms that a lot of liberals say they want.

They lied about it. All of it. A thug cop shot an unarmed woman five times without justification, boasted about it to his colleagues, and then this administration tried cover it all up by arresting her and charging her with felonies.

#AcademicSky

Women deserve to study and work in safe places. Period.

Let's hope that men in academia start doing more to make this a reality, structurally

It's not enough to refrain from personally harassing; we need to change the norms

Be an anti-harasser, visibly, not simply a non-harasser

Really enjoyed chatting with @michaelhobbes.bsky.social for this episode! In addition to being a delight to talk to, Michael was _extremely_ committed to getting the facts right & engaged very earnestly with our feedback. A scientist's dream.

600 Americans were fired in the wake of Charlie Kirk's killing

This is easily an order of magnitude larger than the number of firings in the entire years-long 'cancel culture' panic.
www.reuters.com/investigatio...

Turning Point USA, the youth movement Kirk founded in 2012, said in a statement that it supported the right to free speech, “including that of private employers to determine when a bright line has been crossed and an employee deserves to be terminated.”

Weird how conservatives didn't mention all those years that they think it's fine to fire people for their beliefs! What an unfortunate misunderstanding we've had around this. Oh well!

Autism and Vaccines QUESTIONS AND CONCERNS PAGE 2 OF 9 | ALL PAGES J For Everyone NOV. 19, 2025 KEY POINTS • The claim "vaccines do not cause autism" is not an evidence-based claim because studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism. • Studies supporting a link have been ignored by health authorities.

HHS Research on Plausible Biologic Mechanisms between Vaccines and Autism HHS will evaluate plausible biologic mechanisms between early childhood vaccinations and autism. Mechanisms for further investigation include the impacts of aluminum adjuvants, risks for certain children with mitochondrial disorders, harms of neuroinflammation, and more. * The header "Vaccines do not cause autism" has not been removed due to an agreement with the chair of the U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee that it would remain on the CDC website.

CDC has overhauled its website to assert that “the claim ‘vaccines do not cause autism’ is not an evidence-based claim”

www.propublica.org/article/colu...

That abstract sounds right, but my anecdotal experience, including at Science, was that political scientists (who worked in American Politics) failed to predict this, not political scientists writ large. The comparativists and internationalists seemed a bit more realistic.

Material Benefits Crowd Out Moralistic Punishment - Tage S. Rai, 2022 Across four experiments with U.S.-based online participants (N = 1,495 adults), I found that paying people to engage in moralistic punishment reduces their will...

Again, would love for people read the full paper. But if you don't have time for it, you can check out our pop article in New Scientist. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Or, if you want a deep cut, you can check out my earlier paper on profitable punishment journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1...

These are all lab games and its fair to ask how these dynamics work in the real world. See our sister paper where we show people evidence of insider trading in congressmembers and how it reduces faith in the rule of law and willingness to follow it 13/
www.pnas.org/doi/full/10....

Theoretically, findings raise Qs about whether punishment evolved to support cooperation. Punishment may be more about exploitation/domination. Policy-wise, they help to explain not only why punitive policies don’t work, but also why non-criminalized communities think they work. 12/

Much more in paper, but results help show that punishment only works if it communicates moral intentions and norms. If those signals are degraded by selfish/biased motives, punishment stops working. Nothing to worry about unless you find yourself in society w/rising corruption and polarization 10/

We find this is b/c observers think paying punishers increases cooperation. They trust punishers, think targets of punishment are selfish, and focus on catching cheaters. Targets of punishment don’t trust punishers, care about fair treatment, and worry about punishment of those who do cooperate 9/

If punishment doesn’t work, then why do we punish? We let observers who would benefit from more cooperation choose what experimental conditions they would be assigned to. They overwhelmingly choose conditions where punishers are paid to severely punish, and they lose money as a result. 8/

This effect holds regardless of punishment rates. In this study, people are punished every time they act selfish and they’re never punished if they act fair. Optimal conditions for learning to share. Even then, what we find is that while sharing increases, its always lower if punishers are paid 7/

We're interested in what happens when people can punish (next 4 rds). When punishers are unpaid (classic version), punishment stabilizes sharing rates (blue line), as theory predicts. But when punishers are paid, cooperation collapses (red line), classic effects disappear as people stop sharing 6/

To test this idea in the lab, we add a twist to classic punishment games. We pay people a bonus to punish. You can think of this like cops getting bonuses for meeting quotas, asset seizure, or other profit motives. Here’s what we find- when there’s no punishment, (first 4 rds), sharing goes down 5/

Meta-analyses show severe criminal justice policies don't reduce crime. We think this is b/c in real world, punishers have selfish/biased motives and can’t be trusted. We see that at macrolevel, here’s a graph from Balliet/Van Lange, showing punishment is more effective in high-trust societies 4/

Some see third-party punishment as the key to how cooperation evolves. Its also fundamental to criminal justice policies that assume actors are rational, so if you increase costs of crime through punishment, then crime should go down. One problem- punishment may not work in the real world 3/

Background- Why do people share/behave fairly instead of cheat/act selfish? A classic answer is people's willingness to punish. Here’s a famous graph from fehr/gachter showing that pre-punishment (rds 1-10) contributions steadily go down, then post-punishment (rds 11-20) contributions go back up 2/

A thread on our recent paper (w/Raihan Alam @raihanalam) in PNAS on why punishment often fails and what it means for crime, cooperation, democracy, and the rule of law. I’m super excited for it, it’s the lab’s most extensive experimental work to date. Check it out! 1/
www.pnas.org/doi/full/10....

I have been feeling depressed and discouraged that this man has the power and influence he does at my school and in my profession

And I am a tenured professor at Harvard! How much more protected can I be?

Imagine how STUDENTS feel. Junior faculty. This quote nails it

'We love the immigrants': Nebraska grandparents protest McCook ICE facility A group called "Pissed Off Grandmas" gathered outside of the governor's mansion to sing in protest on Monday.

Well done elder white women in Nebraska using their social status for good: “We love the immigrants“ www.klkntv.com/we-love-the-...

#PissedOffGrandmas
#NoICEDetentionCenters

Oxford University Has Failed Women Over Harassment Concerns, Staff Say The university has repeatedly been slow to act against male academics accused of sexual misconduct and inappropriate behavior, a Bloomberg investigation found.

This—on my former university, department, and advisor—is harrowing but required reading for all social psychologists. www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...

your movement has to be like 8 levels removed from reality to think that some of the starving kids in gaza also having serious medical conditions makes Israel look better. it's completely insane. they just think because it's an additional fact it's somehow exonerating.

See how Donald Trump is creating his own police force Immigration agents are operating in cities with few legal constraints

With @arynbraun.bsky.social, this week we ran this big look at what ICE/CBP has become under Donald Trump and how the agencies increasingly resemble a sort of national police force he can send to whatever city he likes to intimidate people:
www.economist.com/interactive/...

I encourage you to read her full comments, not because they exculpatory — they absolutely are not — but because they're dangerously close to self awareness about the trap that hasbarists find themselves in.

⭕️ JUST IN | Gaza’s Government Media Office says Israel has carried out 393 ceasefire violations since the agreement came into effect, stressing that the pattern is deliberate, systematic, and in breach of international humanitarian law. As of the evening of November 18, 2025, the office reports 279 Palestinians killed – including children, women, and the elderly – 652 injured, and 35 people arrested during raids. According to the statement, Israeli forces have carried out: ▪️113 shooting incidents targeting civilians, residential areas, and tents for displaced families. ▪️17 incursions by military vehicles into residential and agricultural zones, crossing the temporary demarcation line. ▪️174 bombardments by air, land, or artillery. ▪️85 demolitions of homes and civilian infrastructure. The office says these actions amount to collective punishment and constitute a grave breach of the Geneva Conventions. It highlights three more points: 1.Israel’s continued attacks on civilians and infrastructure violate all legal and moral obligations.

It highlights three more points: 1.Israel’s continued attacks on civilians and infrastructure violate all legal and moral obligations. 2.Israel is fully responsible for the humanitarian and security consequences of its actions, which threaten to collapse the ceasefire. 3.The statement appeals to President Donald Trump, mediating states, and the UN Security Council to intervene immediately to halt the attacks and enforce strict adherence to the ceasefire and its humanitarian protocol. The release concludes that Israel’s ongoing violations endanger any prospects for stability in Gaza and demonstrate that only sustained international pressure can force compliance with international law.

⭕️ JUST IN | Gaza’s Government Media Office says Israel has carried out 393 ceasefire violations since the agreement came into effect, stressing that the pattern is deliberate, systematic, and in breach of international humanitarian law. As of the evening of November 18, 2025, the office reports...