Category Archives: Media Criticism

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Don’t Get Mad

1 Comment

Get to work:

When a military unit gets hit by the enemy, it doesn’t stop. It doesn’t whine. It assesses the situation, it reorganizes, and it counterattacks.

Let’s assess the situation. Obamacare is constitutional, but only under one waterboarded interpretation of the taxing power. So now Obamacare is officially and forever a tax – and America’s newest liberal icon said so. People hate taxes. That’s a handy fact; let’s tuck that little hand grenade in our ammo pouch, because we’ll be using it.

What do the American people think of the decision? The polls don’t show them as particularly impressed by Roberts’s legalistic onanism. It’s always nice to know you’re going into a fight with the majority of citizens on your side – particularly old ones, who all vote and all hate Obamacare for eviscerating Medicare to give free health services to deadbeats.

Let’s talk reorganization – except it’s less reorganization than reactivation. This is “Tea Party II: The Revenge,” and for once the sequel is going to be even better than the original.

Remember the original? All the Tea Party did two years ago was take Obamacare, hang its putrid carcass around the Democrats, and send 60 of them packing off to find real jobs in the biggest Congressional housecleaning since FDR. Sure, the Dems have been telling us for almost two years that the Tea Party is disappearing, but why would we believe they can see it going away now when they couldn’t see it coming on back then?

In 2010, we were angry and disorganized, but we loved America and had the fire in our bellies. Now we’re infuriated and organized, but we still love America and now we know we are truly fighting for its life. Hey Carville, if the Tea Party was dying, John Roberts just applied the paddles.

And let’s assess our opponents. They are the usual Democrat suspects: welfare cheats handed a few bucks to carry protest signs they can barely read, government union losers still limping from the butt kicking we handed them in Wisconsin, aging law students who think we ought to chip in for their diaphragms, Hollywood stars who wonder why the rest of us don’t just eat cake, and an Administration with a track record of failure so complete they think that a 5-4 decision keeping a program Americans hate with a cold fury alive to be Topic A during the coming election is something to celebrate.

Yeah, it may be constitutional for now, but we’ll see who the bitches are in November.

Go celebrate the day, and then get back out and start fighting to take back what our Founders created 236 years ago.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Social Commentary

A Response To Paul Bain

10 Comments

From a “deniar”:

Your first paragraph amounts to an argument (or reduces to an argument) that “Everyone is doing it”. So, it is OK to use the N-Word because all your friends in the KKK use it? Is it OK to use ANY insulting degrading term “because all your friends” use it? Really?

Ignorance of where a term came from, or what it’s propaganda purpose was and is, is not an excuse. It is even a worse excuse in what is supposed to be a peer reviewed or carefully objective broad science context. Is it acceptable to just plead ignorance of, say, Einstein and Relativity in a paper on physics? Just say “Oops, didn’t know that, but I’m going to keep on ignoring it anyway.”? In ANY paper on the sociology of “Denier” one would reasonably expect the very first step to be looking at where the term originated, from whom, for what purpose and to what effect.

So here’s one free clue for you: I, like others, will now use the term “Denier” from time to time for ourselves. This is EXACTLY like blacks using the N-Word with each other to blunt the effect of it. Someone outside the group uses it, it is a red flag of bigotry. Similar to an Italian calling himself a “Wop” or any of a dozen other bad terms being used inside or outside the insulted group. So WHEN you use the term Denier, and you are not a Skeptic, you are waving a large “I Am A Bigot” flag. Got it?

Keep using it, and you are saying “I am HAPPY to be waving a large I Am A Bigot flag”…

Saying “All my friends us it” is saying “I’m Happy that all my friends are waving large I Am A Bigot flags”.

Just ask yourself “When is the N-Word” acceptable and you will have a decent guide to the proper usage and context of the term, and an accessible touchstone for the sociology of the term.

Indeed. As a reminder, here’s what I deny:

I deny that science is a compendium of knowledge to be ladled out to school children like government-approved pablum (and particularly malnutritious pablum), rather than a systematic method of attaining such knowledge.

I deny that skepticism about anthropogenic climate change is epistemologically equivalent to skepticism about evolution, and I resent the implications that if one is skeptical about the former, one must be similarly skeptical about the latter, and “anti-science.”

As someone who has done complex modeling and computer coding myself, I deny that we understand the complex and chaotic interactions of the atmosphere, oceans and solar and other inputs sufficiently to model them with any confidence into the future, and I deny that it is unreasonable and unscientific to think that those who believe they do have such understanding suffer from hubris. To paraphrase Carl Sagan, extraordinary policy prescriptions require extraordinary evidence.

I continue and am proud to be a “denier.”

[Update late morning]

You really should read the whole thing, if you haven’t. This is just a small excerpt from a massive take-down of the warm-monger crowd by an econometrist (and modeler).