Category Archives: Social Commentary

Climate Activists

You people lost the scientific argument. Get over it:

Essex said that there seems to be a cultural shift and that scientific arguments have deteriorated. Individuals in society have moved away from “civilized dialogues in which people have a collegial attitude and work together to try to find the truth.” Essex characterized the pro-climate change philosophy as a form of sophistry, catering to popular opinion rather than being concerned with the truth.

You don’t say.

Odds Of Survival

I’ve often (only half) joked that there are billions of people alive who have never died, so why should we consider it inevitable?

Well, someone has actually worked out the ratio. Hey, 7% odds of survival beats zero.

Mortality Hourglass

[Update a couple minutes later]

Speaking of which Peter Thiel seems to finally be getting serious about longevity, not only funding non-profit research, but actually investing in companies pursuing it.

Censorship

can’t cure racism:

Many people may find this disappointing. Indeed, punishing those who engage in offensive expression is perennially popular because it gives the impression that we’re “doing something” about the problem of racism, sexism and bigotry. In France, for instance, Holocaust denial has long been illegal, and just this year the country arrested more than 70 people for praising the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack. France has put real teeth into laws that punish offensive speech.

Yet according to the Anti-Defamation League, 37% of the French harbor anti-Semitic opinions. In the U.S. — which, thanks to the First Amendment, has never banned Holocaust denial or hateful speech — that number is 9%, among the lowest in the world. While this comparison can’t capture all the differences between the two nations, it strongly suggests that punishing expression is no real cure for bigotry, and refusing to punish hateful speech does not lead inevitably to its spread.

Censorship isn’t necessary for those who are confident in the truth of their views. It’s a signal of insecurity and displays a fear that if an idea is allowed to be expressed, people will find that idea too attractive to resist. Somehow, college administrators are convinced that if they don’t officially punish racism, their students will be drawn to it like moths to a flame. But there’s simply no reason to expect that. Given the history of campus activism in our nation from the civil rights movement onward, there are myriad reasons to expect the opposite.

The solution to bad speech is more speech. And, as Instapundit notes, it’s not surprising that a Democrat doesn’t understand (or care about) the Constitution.