I hope a lot more respond like this. What a scam higher ed has become.
Category Archives: Media Criticism
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.
British Diabetics
…rebel against junk-science dietary recommendations from the National Health Service, improve health.
It would sure be nice if government dietary advice was actually based on science.
A New Review Of The Book
Chris Petty has thoughts about it on his website.
“Violent Extremists”
They’re not “on the run” as the president says; they’re on the march:
“Today we worry about more than just terrorist cells — we worry about full-fledged terrorist armies as they capture territory and enlist thousands to join their ranks.”
In Syria and Iraq, McCaul said the world is witnessing “the largest global convergence of Islamist terrorists” in modern history.
Note: In “modern” history. This really has been going back for centuries. They just have better weapons now, and weaker-willed foes.
Hiroshima
I agree with Glenn:
All this talk about the Hiroshima bombing being a war crime is just virtue-signaling, mostly by people who would regretfully acknowledge the unfortunate necessity of obliterating, say, Texas…
Know what would have been more evil than dropping the bomb? Not dropping the bomb. #Moron #MoralMidget https://t.co/gHEFztfsVI
— Apostle To Morons (@Rand_Simberg) May 27, 2016
[Update a while later]
No, Brian Williams, we did not use atomic bombs against Japan “in anger.”
As I said, second-guessing historically ignorant moral midgets.
[Update Saturday morning]
Hiroshima as gun control:
It is instructive to consider that if president Obama had been transported to 1945 nobody in the audience would have understood what he was talking about. By the same token Harry Truman would be scarcely comprehended if sent into the 2016 future to address the modern Democratic electorate. That is because these men, separated by 70 years, saw the arrow of causality as working in a manner opposite to the other.
To the World War 2 generation threats to mankind came from ideologies which once allowed to spread would automatically find the things necessary to effect destruction. The Atomic Bomb was incidental. An ideology on the loose in the 21st century would invent something else far more deadly. To that way of thinking a creed which vowed to destroy “the American way of life” would be seen as a menace with the same fervor that moderns would regard it as harmless. The ideas would be central, the things secondary.
Who is right time will tell. Truman’s record now speaks for itself. His legacy, the Pax Americana also known as the Long Peace, has prevented a general war for three generations, the length of living human memory. Some will say his achievement was accidental. By contrast the record of the man who now promises a world without nuclear weapons — his synonym for peace — has only just embarked on his plan.
It has been far from auspicious; according to a former secretary of defense the world is today closer to a nuclear conflict than at any time since the height of the Cold War. From the South China Sea to Ukraine, to the Middle East, the shadow of war is everywhere one looks. Perhaps one should give it time, as socialism and other sure-fire schemes should be given time, and we will not be disappointed.
It is ironic to consider that today’s generation perhaps has more blind faith than the men who 70 years ago defeated Hitler and Tojo. Moderns know what’s going to happen much more than people in the past. They read it in a book. They saw it on social media. They know it will be specified in talking points memos. We forget sometimes that by contrast the World War 2 generation had no certitude of triumph. They did not even know the Atomic Bomb was going to work or that they would perfect it before Hitler did. They could not have seen it as evil with the same retrospective certainty that Obama can. At each step of the way these young men won victory — can the word still be used without embarrassment? — with none of the certainty which today’s generation possess in such abundance.
RTWT.
But it’s worth noting (as he does not) that traditional Islam (and sharia) is a creed which vows to destroy the American Way of Life. You may not be interested in ideology, but ideology is very much interested in you.