When he’s right, he’s right: Yes, the Left is just as, if not more anti-science as “the right.”
Of course, the biggest way in which it is anti-science is in its denial of human nature, and belief in the blank slate.
Category Archives: Media Criticism
The Left
Is it closing in on the kill for America?
I’m sure it hopes so. It’s always hated the very idea of it.
Charles Koch
…and the Republic of Science.
There are few people in public life so misunderstood and/or mischaracterized as the brothers Koch.
[Update a few minutes later
Check out this amusing bit of projection:
“We really see higher education as the first cog in their political machine,” said Kalin Jordan, a co-founder of UnKochMyCampus. “They see themselves as creating the next generation [of libertarian thinkers] and in creating a next generation, they’re really pushing out any other thought on campus. They’re not interested in creating diversity of thoughts.”
Translation: “They’re fighting back against our successful decades-long fight to push out any thoughts on campus that aren’t leftist.”
Hillary On Trump
It’s scary because it’s true: She’s right about his foreign “policy” “positions.”
She’s also right that he’s a con man and a charlatan who took advantage of people who couldn’t afford his scams with regard to Trump U. And no, I’m not going to vote for her under any circumstances.
When A University Asked An Alumnus For A Donation
I hope a lot more respond like this. What a scam higher ed has become.
Guns, Gorillas, And Moon Missions
Thoughts on the futile attempts to make us perfectly safe.
Gee, someone should write a book about that.
The Disappointing Libertarian Ticket
I agree with Tim Carney; they seem to be running against conservatives more than in favor of liberty:
Weld and Johnson held their first post-nomination joint interview on Tuesday, on liberal network MSNBC. “We’ve never bought into this anti-choice, anti-gay…sense of the Republican Party,” Weld said, as his first comment to the national television audience.
The message was clear: We don’t need those backward Christian Right bozos as much we need as you MSNBCers.
Johnson has sent similar signals, suggesting that his love of liberty is second to his revulsion to religion. In January, for instance, Johnson said he would make it a federal crime for women to wear the Burqa, the full-body covering worn by women in certain strains of Islam. Johnson recanted a day later, while continuing his warnings about the threat of Sharia — Islamic law — in the U.S.
This spring, Johnson pushed aside freedom of conscience. When asked in an Oregon about laws and lawsuits requiring caterers to participate in gay weddings, Johnson took the big-government side — for coerced baking in the name of gay rights. When later asked about this anti-liberty view, Johnson made the standard liberal conflation between selling off-the-shelf cupcakes to a gay customer (which is straight-up discrimination against a person) and refusal to participate in a ceremony (which is a freedom of conscience issue, a freedom of association issue, and often a free speech issue).
The dress-code libertarianism and bake-me-a-cake libertarianism Johnson has embraced isn’t libertarianism at all — it’s left-wing social engineering enforced at gunpoint. Coming from Johnson and Weld, it reeks of raw identity politics. The only consistent theme is that religious people are bad.
Yes. It’s disgusting. This sort of thing is why I’ve never been a Libertarian, despite the fact that I’m generally libertarian.
Political Correctness
It’s the main issue driving support for Trump:
when “respectable” people won’t talk about things that a lot of voters care about, the less-respectable will eventually rise to meet the need. That’s what Trump’s doing. And a lot of people are cheering him on not so much because they’re fans of Trump personally as because they’re happy to see someone finally stand up to the PC bullies.
I agree. His willingness to ignore the faux political pieties that have protected corrupt Democrats (most of all, the Clintons) from criticism is pretty much the only thing I like about him. He’s a bloviating vain, lying asshat and con man, and will probably be a terrible president, but at least he’s forcing the media to finally do their job.
[Update a while]
Trump states the obvious about the leftist (not “liberal”) media.
Hillary’s Emails
So many warnings, so many lies.
As Austin Bay says, anyone who has ever handled classified material knows that they be doing years in Club Fed for a fraction of what she’s done.
Will we ultimately see a Torricelli solution to this?
The Era Of The Expert
When it comes to putting them in charge of our lives, it’s the era of the expert failure:
The additional power that is being granted to experts under the Obama administration is indeed striking. The administration has appointed “czars” to bring expertise to bear outside of the traditional cabinet positions. Congress has enacted sweeping legislation in health care and finance, and Democratic leaders have equally ambitious agendas that envision placing greater trust in experts to manage energy and the environment, education and human capital, and transportation and communications infrastructure.
However, equally striking is the failure of such experts. They failed to prevent the financial crisis, they failed to stimulate the economy to create jobs, they have failed in Massachusetts to hold down the cost of health care, and sometimes they have failed to prevent terrorist attacks that instead had to be thwarted by ordinary civilians.
Ironically, whenever government experts fail, their instinctive reaction is to ask for more power and more resources. Instead, we need to step back and recognize that what we are seeing is not the vindication of Keynes, but the vindication of Hayek. That is, decentralized knowledge is becoming increasingly important, and that in turn makes centralized power increasingly anomalous.
Insufficient opportunities for graft in that.