This is a few weeks old, but I missed it at the time: a disturbing interview with Jonathan Haidt:
JONATHAN HAIDT: The big thing that really worries me – the reason why I think things are going to get much, much worse – is that one of the causal factors here is the change in child-rearing that happened in America in the 1980s. With the rise in crime, amplified by the rise of cable TV, we saw much more protective, fearful parenting. Children since the 1980s have been raised very differently–protected as fragile. The key psychological idea, which should be mentioned in everything written about this, is Nassim Taleb’s concept of anti-fragility.
JOHN LEO: What’s the theory?
JONATHAN HAIDT: That children are anti-fragile. Bone is anti-fragile. If you treat it gently, it will get brittle and break. Bone actually needs to get banged around to toughen up. And so do children. I’m not saying they need to be spanked or beaten, but they need to have a lot of unsupervised time, to get in over their heads and get themselves out. And that greatly decreased in the 1980s. Anxiety, fragility and psychological weakness have skyrocketed in the last 15-20 years. So, I think millennials come to college with much thinner skins. And therefore, until that changes, I think we’re going to keep seeing these demands to never hear anything offensive.
The latter is a great idea, but it’s going to be really hard to come up with a way to enforce single-issue that the porkers and get-along-to-go-alongers won’t find a way to circumvent.
This is all part of the Democrats’ war on science:
Looking forward to a new U.S. President next year, whether the Democrats or the Republicans are in power, I don’t expect a continuation of the status quo on climate science funding. The Democrats are moving away from science towards policy – who needs to spend all that funding on basic climate science research? Global climate modeling might be ‘saved’ if they think these climate models can support local impact assessments (in spite of widespread acknowledgement that they cannot). If the Republicans are elected, Ted Cruz has stated he will stop all funding support for the IPCC and UNFCCC initiatives. That said, he seems to like data and basic scientific research.
This article at The Space Review seems profoundly ignorant of economics and history, including the history of the Moon Treaty, because that basically seems to be what he’s proposing.
Government is just a word for things we do together, like charging city residents for toxic water that will cause permanent brain damage to their kids.
[Update a few minutes later]
Flint residents can’t sue the government. Unlike if the water company had been private like (say) General Motors. Isn’t that convenient?