Category Archives: Media Criticism

Business, Education, Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Science And Society, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

The Warlock Hunt

41 Comments

Claire Berlinski (who we almost got to have coffee with in Paris a year ago), on #MeToo and if it’s gone too far:

If you are reading this, it means I have found an outlet that has not just fired an editor for sexual harassment. This article circulated from publication to publication, like old-fashioned samizdat, and was rejected repeatedly with a sotto voce, “Don’t tell anyone. I agree with you. But no.” Friends have urged me not to publish it under my own name, vividly describing the mob that will tear me from limb to limb and leave the dingoes to pick over my flesh. It says something, doesn’t it, that I’ve been more hesitant to speak about this than I’ve been of getting on the wrong side of the mafia, al-Qaeda, or the Kremlin?

But speak I must. It now takes only one accusation to destroy a man’s life. Just one for him to be tried and sentenced in the court of public opinion, overnight costing him his livelihood and social respectability. We are on a frenzied extrajudicial warlock hunt that does not pause to parse the difference between rape and stupidity. The punishment for sexual harassment is so grave that clearly this crime—like any other serious crime—requires an unambiguous definition. We have nothing of the sort.

…In recent weeks, I’ve acquired new powers. I have cast my mind over the ways I could use them. I could now, on a whim, destroy the career of an Oxford don who at a drunken Christmas party danced with me, grabbed a handful of my bum, and slurred, “I’ve been dying to do this to Berlinski all term!” That is precisely what happened. I am telling the truth. I will be believed—as I should be.

But here is the thing. I did not freeze, nor was I terrified. I was amused and flattered and thought little of it. I knew full well he’d been dying to do that. Our tutorials—which took place one-on-one, with no chaperones—were livelier intellectually for that sublimated undercurrent. He was an Oxford don and so had power over me, sensu strictu. I was a 20-year-old undergraduate. But I also had power over him—power sufficient to cause a venerable don to make a perfect fool of himself at a Christmas party. Unsurprisingly, I loved having that power. But now I have too much power. I have the power to destroy someone whose tutorials were invaluable to me and shaped my entire intellectual life much for the better. This is a power I do not want and should not have.

Yup. Read the whole thing.

[Update a while later]

The wandering eye is just part of the human anatomy.

Yup. We can control our behavior and fidelity, but it’s really hard not to look.

Plus, the up side of office flirtation.

And so far, so good for Claire.

[Monday-morning update]

Are women really victims?

Feminists of my mother’s generation resisted furiously the claims that women were too timid, too fragile, too neurotic and too easily upset to function in the public sphere. They won this battle. Sisters began doing it for themselves. Women took their places alongside men in boardrooms and political arenas, on lecture hall podiums and in operating theatres, in courts of law and in armies.

This is currently under threat from a cultural shift within feminism which has shifted the aim from female empowerment to status-by-victimhood. It threatens to undo the progress made for women, valorise fragility, discourage resilience, weaponise victimhood and fatally undermine gender relations. It’s not good for women to be treated as fragile victims rather than competent actors in the public sphere. It’s not good for either sex for men to become afraid that talking to women, complimenting women, criticising women, flirting with women or touching women in friendly greeting could destroy their careers and reputations.

You don’t say. One of the women who tells their story is my friend Amy Alkon.

[Update a few minutes later]

Judith Curry relates her own experiences in the context of the climate debate:

If you see ‘misogyny’ everywhere (even from other females!), then perhaps you need to step back and reflect. What is being objected to is not your gender but your behavior: your attempt to gain fame and build a career based on ‘victim’ status, your unfounded attacks on serious and responsible scientists in your field, and your irrational statements and general intolerance of anyone who is not in your ‘club’. This negative reaction to your behavior is not sexual harassment (or any kind of harassment) or discrimination.
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Climate science has developed a perverse incentive structure that seems to reward this kind of unethical, bullying behavior — and I’m seeing more and more female scientists taking full advantage of this.

Unfortunately true. There are a lot of women in space and tech that I follow on Twitter, but I avoid getting into political discussions with them.

[Tuesday-afternoon update]

Sarah Hoyt: The sexual-harassment frenzy is madness, and must stop.

[Bumped]

[Wednesday-morning update]

Can we be honest about women?

[Bumped again]

History, Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Mueller Farce

4 Comments

It’s time to end it:

n a hearing before the House Judiciary Committee on Dec. 7, current FBI Director Christopher Wray consistently deflected questions regarding these types of conflicts by deferring to ongoing investigations being conducted by the Justice Department’s inspector general. He also continued to stonewall on providing information on the FBI’s use of the Steele dossier and the FISA warrant it helped generate, citing vague national security concerns.

We are left with an appearance of an unacceptable degree of political prejudice and a troubling series of unanswered questions. It is dangerous to subject the office of the president to a gravely biased investigation undertaken with a reckless spirit. Should further evidence of untoward bias emerge, Americans may conclude that the justice system itself is illegitimate, with all that entails.

The most prudent move would be to suspend the special counsel investigation until the Justice Department inspector general’s office and other watchdogs can conclude their investigations into possible illegitimate or illegal actions taken by members of Mueller’s team. Then Congress must be given time to review the conclusions of the internal investigations as well as conclude their own ongoing inquiries. The stakes are too high to allow a clique of politicized government agents to destroy the integrity of the investigative apparatus, and damage the office of the presidency.

I wish this were something new, but I think this kind of corruption goes back a quarter of a century, when the Clinton gang came into national power.

Business, Education, Media Criticism, Philosophy, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

Meaningless Words

9 Comments

Thoughts from Sarah Hoyt on the ideological incoherence (and, as always, psychological projection) of the left:

All I was doing was pointing out he had no proof of his statement and in fact, there was plenty of proof to the contrary. Where it got interesting was his tactic in the argument. He started by calling me a snowflake and saying I was obviously hurt by what he said. I told him I wasn’t in the least hurt, just amused at his lack of reasoning, and furnished him with another half dozen names of great/rich writers. He tried to call me snowflake again, and then told me to go copulate with myself but in more common words. When that failed, he said he was deleting the thread because he’d obviously hurt people. Note that in none of this had he hurt me, not even with the profanity, nor had I or any of the people who agreed with me on that thread implied we were hurt. Somewhere between amused and appalled is not hurt.

I was discussing this argument with a friend later, and he said I was making the mistake of interpreting the words as words. Or of thinking any kind of thought was behind first calling me snowflake, and then saying he’d hurt people’s feelings.

He said that the whole thing was more a reaction on the level of “when I’m called snowflake it hurts me, so I’ll call her snowflake and that will hurt her” and when we didn’t cave to his argument, he couldn’t figure out how to get out of it other than apologizing for hurting our feelings.

He – he’s an academic – pointed out this is the whole point of post-modern analysis, be it of literature or society: words have no meaning and can be assigned arbitrary meanings according to the emotions they elicit.

He says that’s why the left is more and more resorting to shouting random slogans and words until it gets them the reaction they want. Not because they don’t know the meanings of words, but because they reject the idea that words have inherent meanings.

Like “pedophilia.” Or “liberal.”

Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Strzok

9 Comments

It occurs to me that the texts/emails likely reveal something much more serious than a simple love of Clinton or hatred of Trump. Perhaps they actually provide evidence of a conspiracy to help the former and hurt the latter. e.g., “Yeah, they fu**ed up, but I’ll make sure that none of Clinton’s people have any problems with this email thing.” Or “Don’t worry, we’ll come up with something impeachable on Trump.”

Either or both of these would both destroy the prevailing media narratives. The former would require the investigation into her server be reopened, and the latter would so taint the investigation that it would not be possible for it to be used against Trump. In fact, it would help him, bolstering his own claims of bias and double standards.

[Update early afternoon]

Kim Strassell writes that Mueller and the FBI are obstructing justice. And more from Byron York on the dossier.

And Kurt Schlichter writes that “liberals” (and by “liberals,” he means leftists) have turned the FBI into a disgrace.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

The Mars Race

16 Comments

This is hilarious. Muilenburg thinks (or at least claims to think) that Boeing is going to beat SpaceX to Mars. With SLS.

[Update a while later]

Eric Berger’s take:

Boeing also isn’t going to land a rocket on Mars without near total funding from NASA, which has already paid more than $10 billion for development of the SLS and has no actual funding to implement a humans-to-Mars exploration plan. SpaceX will also need some government funding if it is to develop its “Big Falcon Rocket” to reach Mars, but Musk has laid out plans for commercial applications of his launch system that could offset some of its cost. (The SLS rocket has no known customers aside from NASA).

What is particularly puzzling to us is why Boeing and SpaceX are arguing about Mars. These two companies, who compete directly for NASA and other government contracts, are in a far more immediate and real race to reach the launch pad in the commercial crew competition. NASA has had to rely on Russia to get its astronauts to the International Space Station since the space shuttle’s retirement in 2011. Both Boeing and SpaceX are building capsules that will launch crews from Florida.

The companies have both seen slips in their schedules for the first crewed flights. They have launch dates now set for 2018, but there is a general expectation that further delays are likely—both due to development problems and changing requirements from NASA. Regardless, the company that eventually breaks NASA’s Russian dependence will win a public relations boon beyond compare for an aerospace company.

“Do it,” we say to Dennis and Elon.

Indeed.