Category Archives: Political Commentary

Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

Too Young To Vote

30 Comments

Instapundit says that what’s happening at Yale and in Columbia shows that we need to raise the voting age.

[Monday-morning update]

Glenn has changed his mind. It’s not the under-25s that are the problem. It’s the over-25s.

[Bumped]

Business, Economics, Mathematics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Technology and Society

A Vegan, Liberal Environmentalist

2 Comments

How he went from climate promoter to climate skeptic.

It’s amazing how pathetic the warm mongers’ “arguments” are. It’s one of the ways you can tell it’s not science; it’s ideology and religion.

[Update a while later]

Bjorn Lomborg on the trivial effects of current climate proposals. But the economic impacts would be far from trivial.

History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, War Commentary

Paris

33 Comments

My immediate hot take:

In general, it’s wise to say “We don’t know who did this or why and we shouldn’t speculate until we get all the facts.” In this case we know exactly who did it, and why. The French won’t be talking nonsense about “violent extremism.”

The (obviously) racist French have closed the borders. They are going to (GASP!) profile, to determine who can leave the country. For example, white (and probably many black) Americans will be allowed to leave. Adult male Algerians and Moroccans (and Syrians, to the degree that they’ve been invading recently) not so much.

This was an act of war, and I expect France to treat it as such. Unfortunately, with the apparent collapse of Westphalia, it won’t be obvious who to punish for it, but if ISIS takes “credit” for it, expect them to get a pounding in Syria and Iraq, Russians or no. And unlike us or Israel, the French know they will be immune from charges of “war crimes.”[Update a few minutes later]

#ProTip The French declaration of a state of emergency effectively suspends civil liberties.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Call me nuts, but I’m guessing that France, and Europe in general, is going to be tightening its Syrian-refugee policy as a result of this.

[Saturday-morning update]

Great timing, Barack: “We have contained [ISIS].” An asshat extraordinaire.

Also, oopsie, more bad timing: Al Gore in Paris this weekend for a summit on the “greatest challenge facing us,” too much plant food in the atmosphere.

Roger Simon: Why Paris happened. Yes, there don’t appear to be any world leaders today, least of all Barack Obama.

Mark Steyn: “The barbarians are inside, and there are no gates.”

And from Richard Fernandez: A Europe with no borders has taken a body blow:

It’s significant that the attacks occurred during a period of heightened alert associated with big soccer matches. French president Hollande himself was watching a game when he had to be unceremoniously shuttled to the safety of a government building. That suggests that French security forces and intelligence were genuinely surprised by the attack and therefore there exist terror networks they don’t know about capable of large-scale operations. Scotland Yard and MI5 must realize this and will inevitably be burning the midnight oil tonight.

DHS should be doing the same thing.

[Afternoon update]

Claire Berlinski checks in from Paris.

Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

The Mess On Campus

32 Comments

Are we creating a generation of mentally-ill, credentialed, physically mature children?

These people will never survive in the real world.

[Update a couple minutes later]

What the Yale shame should teach us.

I spent a lot of time in Columbia over the past couple weeks.

Somehow, this seems like cheap theatrics. I suspect that if they’d had a chance at a bowl, they wouldn’t have made this threat. Amusingly, I heard this morning that the basketball team (which I’d imagine has a black player or two) wants nothing to do with it. But they still have hopes for a successful season.

[Tuesday-morning update]

The “collective guilt of white people in Missouri“:

The goal is not to establish responsibility and identify actual perpetrators. The actual goal is power: the power to make demands that will be obeyed—the power to turn the tables and reverse the power differential, putting the protesters in charge of what Allan Bloom called the “dancing bears” in the university faculty and/or administration. A central demand of protesters such as those at Missouri is almost always a university-wide process of mind-control and intimidation, with the mandatory requirement that administrators offer and faculty and students attend classes and/or workshops that describe exactly what is now required in terms of speech, thought, and behavior that the protesters deem acceptable.

In other words, the protesters want to become the official campus propagandists. Perhaps they already have done so.

Yes. And in addition to the re-education camps, they won’t be satisfied with these two scalps.

Oopsie, that was racist, I guess.

[Update a while later]

Remember this is one of the top “journalism” schools in the country:

“You need to back up if you’re with the media!” a voice in the background yelled to the journalists trying to document the protest. “You need to respect the students! Back up!”

“I am a student,” Tim Tai, a student photographer trying to cover the protest, responded.

After Tai protested that the crowd was trying to push him, several people in the crowd laughed, tried to cover the camera with their hands, and responded, “Okay, then we’ll just block you.”

“You don’t have a right to take our photos,” one of the protesters asserted, apparently unaware that he was on taxpayer-funded public property that is by law open to the press.

Later in the video, the crowd aggressively started pushing the reporter around in an attempt to get him to stop covering their behavior.

As noted, I suspect they don’t think that police has such a right to “privacy” from being photographed. Freedom for me, not for thee.

[Afternoon update]

This is a little good news. The J-School faculty is voting to withdraw the courtesy appointment of the little fascist.