Category Archives: Media Criticism

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

The Second Amendment

Of course it secures the right to carry a gun. It’s astounding that anyone would argue otherwise.

[Update a few minutes later]

Eugene Volokh analyzes the ruling:

I think the Ninth Circuit majority’s analysis is correct on this, and the dissent’s is mistaken. The dissent keeps stressing that the case should be about whether the California ban on concealed carry is constitutional, and that Heller says that the concealed carry ban is indeed constitutional. But the California ban on concealed carry is part of a general scheme that bans the great bulk of all carrying in public for self-defense (unless one has a permit that the police may choose not to grant). It is this general scheme that violates the Second Amendment, even if a ban on concealed carry that left people free to carry openly would not do so.

The California ban was just an attempt to get around the Second Amendment, and even the Ninth Circuit recognized that.

Business, Economics, Health, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Arbitrary Health-Care Mandate

79 Comments

“My whim is my command“:

…the sudden demand that businesses stop adjusting for regulatory policy is nearly the height of hypocrisy for this administration, which has repeatedly offered short-term gimmicky tax credits for business decisions that boost its policies, including an ill-considered credit for hiring that ended up costing taxpayers millions for hiring decisions that would have been made anyway. Suddenly, the Obama administration has to take action outside of the law because employers respond to regulatory signals more predictably than one-off credits.

In other words, it’s a demonstration of arbitrary power, of precisely the kind predicted by Hayek. And it’s no longer just opponents of the ACA noticing.

At National Journal, Major Garrett blasted the latest unilateral changes in enforcing statutory law by noting, “The Affordable Care Act means what it says and says what it means. Until it doesn’t. … [T]he arbitrary is the norm.”

The editorial board at The Washington Post blasted Obama for his “increasingly cavalier approach to picking and choosing how to enforce this law. “ Garrett’s colleague Ron Fournier and the Daily Beast’s Kirsten Powers both declared their patience at an end to the arbitrary changes and continuing incompetence from the Obama administration – and all of these people support the law in principle.

The attempt to create a command economy in the health-insurance market has failed, in the same manner that Hayek predicted, and resulted in the same arbitrary use of power to attempt to compensate for those failures. The demand for businesses to “self-attest” that they aren’t following standard business principles foreshadows the later stages of unreality that will take from F. A. Hayek to George Orwell on a long enough continuum.

This is what tyranny looks like.

[Update a while later]

“Obama is legislating without the legislative branch. This is corrosive of self-government, counter to our constitutional system and contemptuous of the rule of law.”

Nothing new for him.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

My Twitter Battle With Anil Dash

1 Comment

I had one of the dumbest back and forths of my life last night, in response to this post.

I simply pointed out that he was being sexist, which quickly devolved into non sequiturs and straw men, and ultimately resulted in my being accused of lying and being “threatened and insecure.” It was pretty funny, actually.

[Update a while later]

This seems related somehow: thoughts on the sexism (and other “isms”) of Robert Heinlein and Orson Scott Card:

With Resnick and Malzberg the backlash was faster and louder and even a lot of their number thought (privately) that they were off their rocker. With Card, I think only the choir thinks he’s “a fascist.”

And with Larry… There is no word for this. It’s like a Chihuahua trying to hold onto a car by the back bumper. They have not only bit off more than they can chew, they’ve bit off more than they can… bite. In tactical terms it’s getting involved in a landwar in Asia or going up against a Sicilian when death is on the line.

But wait, there’s more. The other reason they’re getting crazier and crazier and trying to enforce group conformity more and more is that they are no longer in possession of the bully pulpit. It used to be due to quirks of distribution and culture in NYC that got get bought and properly distributed you had to be a darling with a “not Baen” house. Oh, Baen had bestsellers, but they were more a midlist house.

So advances with other houses were bigger, and prestige was immeasurably higher.

Well… The times they are achanging. The collapse of the chains; amazon; the internet where people can find out about books that were publishing put paid to the cozy gentleman’s arrangement of yore. Even when these people are getting published, their advances are smaller, and they have to compete with all the great unwashed for sales. They no longer feel their own specialness.

Yup.

Culinary, Health, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

Whole Milk

10 Comments

Helps you lose weight.

The notion that you should drink reduced-fat milk is based on two theories that have zero scientific basis — that calories per se make you fat, and that saturated fat is bad for your heart. They’re both nonsense.

[Update a couple minutes later]

The author still gets that part wrong:

Whole-milk dairy products are relatively high in saturated fat. And eating too much saturated fat can increase the risk of heart disease. So many experts would agree that adults with high cholesterol should continue to limit dairy fat.

I repeat, there is zero empirical evidence that saturated fat increases the risk of coronary disease. It is based on the flawed theory that high cholesterol causes heart disease and that eating cholesterol increases your cholesterol. Again, neither is true.

Business, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

National Review

3 Comments

No, it is not doomed:

By the likes of The Week, Salon, and Politico in quick succession, we are said to be in “deep trouble,” likely “doomed,” facing a “wipe out.”

This is in part a tale of lazy reporting and even headline cribbing.

None of the writers of these articles ever called National Review. They didn’t ask what our chances in court were, or even bother to get basic facts about the case right. Damon Linker of The Week, the one who got this meme rolling, made rudimentary mistakes without trying to check them, and then lectured us about journalistic standards.

You’d think people who write about media and the law would know, instinctively, to consider this factor: libel insurance.

You’d think that, until you realize that they’re leftist hacks, and idiots.

Business, Economics, Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Should Americans Be Poorer?

3 Comments

Kevin Williamson takes on an idiot academic:

Labor is a resource, and American labor a particularly valuable one. Sensible people want Americans to work for the same reason that we want to make use of our natural gas and to irrigate California farmland: We want the country to be richer rather than poorer.

This sort of thing is utterly lost on Professor Hunnicutt, who produces from his pocket a particularly stale chestnut regarding Henry Ford, that he believed that paying higher wages was essential to “assuring adequate consumer demand.” I have often heard it said that Henry Ford was a genius for “paying his workers enough to afford his cars.” I very much doubt that Henry Ford believed any such thing, but perhaps he did; he believed a lot of crazy things. The actual history of Ford very strongly suggests that the firm paid market wages, higher than those paid by some similar firms largely because the company had difficulty keeping employees, who were quickly burnt out on its assembly lines. (Ford would sometimes see personnel turnover equivalent to the company’s entire work force in the course of a few months.) “Paid them enough to buy his cars” is a timeless, deathless myth, but it is economically illiterate on its face: Why doesn’t Ferrari pay its workers enough to buy Ferraris? Rolls-Royce? The belief that one can create a functioning consumer market for one’s own goods by overpaying for labor or any other input is magical thinking. But our academics have a weakness for magical thinking.

The newly organized anti-work faction for the most part is little more than the flashing of partisan gang signs: Obamacare apologists are abject, and there simply is no failing in the program that they will not attempt to defend. That is to be expected.

The real problem is that there are people who apparently actually believe this stuff. They have made an elementary conceptual error: National economies are not household economies. There are times in individuals’ lives when leisure becomes more valuable than the return from an additional hour’s work. We take vacations and retire for a reason. But you cannot put a national economy on vacation, much less retire it. To argue that Americans as a whole should work less is to argue that Americans should be poorer.

Yup. But it’s not like these people have even the most basic understanding of economics. They are stuck in the childishness of Marxism in their attitudes, even if they’ve never read a word of his works.