Category Archives: Political Commentary

Political Commentary, War Commentary

One Of The (Many) Reasons

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…that Obama is unlikely to win. Michael Weiss writes extensively about his Iraq minefield:

…there is every expectation that Obama will have his bluff called sooner or later. Adolph Reed, a prominent black leftist intellectual who teaches political science at the University of Pennsylvania, published a fascinating and undervalued essay in current issue of The Progressive magazine. It is titled “Obama No.” Professor Reed has followed the resistible rise of this young Chicago politico for quite some time, and he never liked what he saw:

Obama’s style of being all things to all people threatens to melt under the inescapable spotlight of a national campaign against a Republican. It’s like what brings on the downfall of really successful con artists: They get themselves onto a stage that’s so big that they can’t hide their contradictions anymore, and everyone finds out about the different stories they’ve told different people.

Political Commentary, Science And Society

Math Is Hard

29 Comments

…as Barbie used to say. Well, actually, it’s not that it’s hard, but that women just aren’t as into it as men are.

The tone of the article is amusing, because the author clearly knows that she is reporting politically incorrect (though obvious to most thinking, observant people) results, and seems uncomfortable with it. So kudos to her for doing it anyway. And of course the feminist establishment is extremely threatened by the notion that there is any cause of disparity between men and women that cannot be attributed to evil patriarchal social conditioning and rampant sexist discrimination. To the point at which they of course have to completely misstate the argument in order to knock down the illogical straw man:

Rosalind Chait Barnett, at the Women’s Studies Research Center at Brandeis, says that boys and girls are not, at root, different enough for such clear sorting to be seen as a matter of “choice.”

“The data is quite clear,” she says. “On anything you point to, there is so much variation within each gender that you have to get rid of this idea that ‘men are like this, women are like that.’ “

Well, the data may be clear, but the logic is severely flawed (I’ll refrain from noting that it may be because it’s coming from a woman…).

Even if there is tremendous variation among individuals within genders (which there clearly is) it doesn’t follow that there won’t be average differences in traits between genders. For instance, when it comes to math, what Larry Summers noted (and lost his job over after some of the mature, rational, scientific women present got the vapors and had to hie to their fainting couches) was that in fact men have a much greater standard deviation than women. They have both more geniuses, and more morons, when it comes to higher mathematics, whereas women have more of a tendency to stay near the mean. And there are brilliant (individual) woman mathematicians and hard scientists. But that doesn’t mean that we can therefore conclude that there are no statistical differences in these traits between men and women. And the fact that there are allows us to draw no conclusions about any particular man or woman (if I call Ms. Barnett illogical, it is because she conveys illogic, and has nothing to do with her genital configuration.) It remains perfectly reasonable, on a statistical basis, to make some broad statements about the genders (“men are like this and women are like that”) without having to infer that every man is like this and every woman is like that.

This is the general problem with discussions of gender and race differences, and why books like The Bell Curve are such anathema, and draw down such fury from the left. If one views people as individuals, then it doesn’t really matter whether or not blacks, on average, have a lower (or for that matter, higher) IQ than whites do. You still have to test each individual’s IQ and treat them as an individual.

But leftists, hating individualism, and being addicted to group and collective rights, can’t conceive that such research wouldn’t or shouldn’t be translated into some attempt at social policy making. Similarly, if women’s choices in career really are choices, and not a result of false consciousness, then they won’t be able to get as much support for implementing their social engineering nostrums.

Political Commentary

Hypocrite

1 Comment

One of the reasons that Obama has done so well is that Hillary has never really brought out the big guns against him, something that the McCain campaigns and the 527s will have no compunction about doing in the fall. His campaign (at least up to the point of the Reverend Wright controversy) was a hothouse plant, and it’s likely to wilt when put out in the wild after the convention.

And why didn’t Hillary hit him where it really hurts (as opposed to idiotic things like kindergarten essays)? Because those big guns are likely to backfire on her. Here’s an example:

In her campaign for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, Clinton has said little about her experiences in the tumultuous late 1960s and early 1970s, including her involvement with student protests and her brief internship at the law firm, Treuhaft, Walker and Burnstein. She has said she worked on a child custody case, although former partners recall her likely involvement in conscientious objector cases and a legal challenge to a university loyalty oath.

But her decision to target Obama’s radical connections has spurred criticism from some former protest movement leaders who say she has opened her own associations to scrutiny.

“The very things she’s accusing Barack of could be said of her with much greater evidence,” said Tom Hayden, a leading anti-Vietnam War activist, author and self-described friend of the Clintons.

Next thing you know, she’ll be accusing him of shady real-estate deals.

Economics, Political Commentary, Technology and Society

Doomsday Has Been Postponed, Part Whatever

32 Comments

More thoughts on “peak oil,” and what I’ll call the “peak oil constant,” which seems to be twenty or thirty years (i.e., it’s always predicted to be that far in the future).

[Update mid afternoon]

Manzi has a follow up, in response to a Georgetown professor. Bottom line:

What if we had reacted to the predictions throughout the 1970s and 80s that we would reach peak oil in about 2000? Do you think that some of these proposed changes would have slowed economic growth and prevented the world from being in the current position of paying an ever-dwindling share of total output for oil? What other difficult-to-anticipate changes might some these interventions have had? Could the idea of purposely restructuring the transportation, housing, and agricultural sectors of the U.S. economy based on a prediction for an event that we have proven to be very bad at predicting – and for which the world’s leading experts refuse to provide anything other than very broad guidance – induce a sense of humility? It does in me.