Man, they sure imploded at season end. Now I don’t have to care if the Bears win.
[Update a few minutes later]
Wow, watching the Eagles dismantle the Bears just makes the Lion’s implosion more painful.
Category Archives: Social Commentary
Peaceful Women
One of the tropes of gender feminism is that if women were in charge, there would be less war and violence. Well, ignoring the notorious cruelty of Afghan women, it turns out that women were heavily involved in the Final Solution.
The Swamp Folks
The End Of The Beginning
A brutal but accurate assessment from Bill Whittle.
Of Ducks And Gays
…and tolerance:
The advantages of classical liberal market cosmopolitanism–the idea that it’s best to set aside peaceful differences of opinion and creed and worries about different races, nationalities, and genders when deciding how we interact with the world–has a great track record of making us all richer and happier.
The idea that that people should be punished with boycott or losing their jobs over having wrong beliefs hobbles the flowering of tolerant classical liberal market cosmopolitanism.
There may have been a good reason why classical tolerance of expression was summed up in the epigram: “I disagree with what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it!”
That has a different feel than: “I disagree with what you say, I think you are evil for having said it, I think no one should associate with you and you ought to lose your livelihood, and anyone who doesn’t agree with me about all that is skating on pretty thin ice as well, but hey, I don’t think you should be arrested for it.”
It’s a “heads I win tails you lose” situation, as it often is with the Left. As I noted at Twitter yesterday:
I despise hate speech. I won't say I hate it, though, because that would be hate speech. I think. #IAmSoConfused
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) December 20, 2013
I can't stand that intolerance exists. I won't say I won't tolerate it, though, because that would be intolerant. I think. #IAmSoConfused
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) December 20, 2013
As I also noted there, declaring someone a sinner does not justify bullying or assaulting them. There will always be bullies, but their existence is not a reason to suppress freedom of expression or religion.
[Update a few minutes later]
Joel Achenbach has a pretty amusing take: The Ducksters are the Flintstones.
[Update a while later]
The show is likely to be canceled. I noted yesterday on Twitter that A&E needed Duck Dynasty a lot more than the latter needed A&E. A&E can run whatever programs it wants, but I think that they’ll realize that this was a stupid business decision.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Thoughts from Jonah: Real rednecks.
Impeachment
Looking back, fifteen years later.
That episode was the point at which the Democrats lost me permanently, as a party of shameless corruption.
Ender’s Game
Jon Goff has some gripes (with spoilers) about the movie.
I haven’t read the book in a third of a century, so I wasn’t as bothered by some of those things as he was. As he notes, in retrospect, it’s probably a mistake to read the book just before seeing the movie. If you haven’t read it, it would probably be better to watch the movie first.
Is Safety Stifling Space Development?
In which I’m interviewed by Popular Mechanics about the book. Which can be purchased on the button over to the leftright.
[Update a few minutes later]
I’d forgotten that it was on the right in the new template.
The Gun Control Movement
…and its inherent dishonesty.
Printer Hate
Lileks has bought another buck-sucking fail box:
The aforementioned cord situation is miserable – unless i turn it around, so the control panel faces away. But: it has wifi, so I think: put it in the unheated porch which is sorta-kinda my wife’s office, except A) it isn’t, because it’s unheated and bone-cold half the year, and B) she’s a kitchen-table-iPad after-hours worker now. So i could put it there and communicate with it, wirelessly.
Except you know how that goes. You know. You send a document to the printer. You hear nothing. You get up and walk over to the next room and make sure it’s on. Wifi light is blinking red, because the tech has an attention span that makes Dory from “Finding Nemo” look like the fargin’ Sphinx, and it can’t remember networks, or forgets it was connected, or gets all confused because there’s a box for the city’s wifi system down the block and it keeps saying things and making it lose its place!!!! And then you have to enter your password on a printer touchscreen, which ought to be a field-sobriety test, and then you go back and send the document again and wait for the sullen complaining sound of plastic crap feeding a piece of paper into the machine, and the sudden shocked kadunk! as the print heads swing into place, and then silence, because it jammed.
Like wi-fi, this is a really screwed-up technology.