Could he take on Hillary? Probably. THe question is whether he’d win, or if it would open up the field. Not that the Dems have much of a bench.
Category Archives: Political Commentary
We’re In The Midst Of A College Revolution
…and the “liberals” are leading it:
At this point I have to ask: Where has Schlosser been the past year? He talks about the erosion of professors’ abilities to teach their students topics that may challenge their worldview. But how has he missed that liberal politicians have already adopted the position that an accusation is all the evidence one needs?
California passed “yes means yes” last year, a law that makes it far easier to accuse someone of sexual assault and provides no due process rights to those accused. States across the country have introduced similar bills. U.S. Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand and Claire McCaskill are pushing for a national law that also erodes due process rights.
And the same people pushing for trigger warnings and safe spaces are pushing the “terrifying” policy that accusations equal guilt.
It’s great that Schlosser and others have finally realized the problems on college campuses, but they still have a lot to learn.
Yes, they don’t realize that they created this monster.
[Update a few minutes later]
The lowest-paid and least secure in the system are adjuncts.
[Update a few minutes later]
Jonathan Chait: The liberal backlash against campus PC is in full swing.
Josh Marshall is unimpressed, too:
In other words, Kipnis wrote a sharp-tongued, one-dimensional caricature of university sexual assault and trigger warning activists at Northwestern. And they turned around and proved her one-dimensional caricature 100% right.
Yup.
The Power Of Instapundit
His link to the Kickstarter today (plus his generous contribution) put me almost a third of the way to the goal.
OK, well, not sure that Jeff Garzik’s $1000 contribution was a result of that link, but thanks! I’ll try to give money’s worth.
[Friday-morning update]
Got my first $500 contributors overnight, and almost halfway to the goal.
[Afternoon update]
Past the halfway mark, with eleven days to go.
To Mars
This effort would require four launches of NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) megarocket, which is currently in development and is scheduled to make its maiden flight in 2018.
The purpose of my Kickstarter is to show how it could be done, faster, cheaper, with more people.
“Skeptics”
Why they hate climate skeptics:
As described above there were a number of factors and incidents that brought the skeptics movement to where it is today. Under different circumstance skeptical heroes might have included Freeman Dyson, Michael Crichton, Matt Ridley, Bjorn Lomborg, and Michael Fumento instead of Carl Sagan, Michael Mann, Bill Nye, and Neil DeGrasse Tyson.
The forces for group cohesion can be powerful. Within the skeptic community voices that dissented in any way (or even just said “I don’t know”) tended to become more and more marginalized. Those who might dissent now have for the most part left, shut up or deferred to “science” and their places have been taken by those who believe. I once asked on a skeptical forum, why the group responded so harshly to any statements challenging climate fears, but no one ever commented or challenged any statements no matter how ridiculous exaggerating climate fears. I was told that false statements against the climate understandings represented real threats, but little harm could come from overstatements of climatic risk. No one on that forum took issue with that position and that’s when I figured I could not learn much more there. This is a group on a mission that is not accepting of distractions.
I subscribed to the Skeptical Inquirer back in the eighties, but I quit when Schermer took over, it started to veer left, and to a dogmatic atheism.
Treating The “Transgendered”
Are they different than LGBs? It does seem like a different situation, in that there is no “treatment” required for LGBs. And the treatment seems to be extreme, and in the long run, perhaps not helpful, or it makes things worse.
And no, it’s not “bigoted” or “phobic” to ask the question.
[Thursday-morning update]
[Bumped]
Thoughts On “Punching Down”
There are no innocent depictions of Muhammad. The concept itself is out of bounds. That is fine for Muslims. But non-Muslims are under no obligation to acquiesce. McDonald is right that one ought not needlessly belittle or be wantonly cruel. But this notion of fair play, when coupled with knowledge of the consequences should one violate it, easily becomes a justification for an exaggerated cautiousness and wariness. It metamorphoses into a conviction that it is better to be safe than sorry, that even if offense isn’t intended one must refrain from saying something lest offense be taken, and those offended react badly.
That is, they may try to kill you because the very act of speaking on the subject is insulting. Not the content or substance of the speech, nor its tenor, but the existence of the words themselves. “[N]obody worries about upsetting a droid.” And quite rightly. But what about all the Wookiees out there?
The dread that “Here be Wookiees” underpins the Argument from Provocation. It is palpable in three of the most egregious responses to the attack on the Geller event, all of which essentially hold her responsible for the assassins’ failed gambit to kill her.
It’s long, but worth the read.
Executive Amnesty
Terrific–so the President can take executive action that not only transforms individuals whom our law classifies as “deportable” into “not deportable,” he can simultaneously confer upon them multiple benefits, including work permits and now, tax refunds, which will be funded by law-abiding individuals who are present in the country legally.
Fundamentally transforming America!
The NASA Budget Bill
…passes the House.
Unsurprisingly, Marcia Smith has the story. Probably more thoughts after I read it myself. But this concluding statement is evergreen: “A long and difficult appropriations seasons seems inevitable.”
A Liberal College Professor
The current student-teacher dynamic has been shaped by a large confluence of factors, and perhaps the most important of these is the manner in which cultural studies and social justice writers have comported themselves in popular media. I have a great deal of respect for both of these fields, but their manifestations online, their desire to democratize complex fields of study by making them as digestible as a TGIF sitcom, has led to adoption of a totalizing, simplistic, unworkable, and ultimately stifling conception of social justice. The simplicity and absolutism of this conception has combined with the precarity of academic jobs to create higher ed’s current climate of fear, a heavily policed discourse of semantic sensitivity in which safety and comfort have become the ends and the means of the college experience.
Does anyone really imagine that such an environment is conducive to actual education?
[Update a few minutes later]
Campus justice: punished until proven innocent:
But I’ll let Leiter argue with Weinberg about the case itself, because I want to take issue with this passage: “As I noted earlier, the Title IX investigation yielded no finding of retaliation against Kipnis. One can only imagine how disappointed she will be with this. It turns out that the process she had been demonizing—which of course may have its flaws—pretty much worked, from her point of view.”
I think this is deeply wrong, and for all that, it is not an uncommon sentiment. You often hear this sort of argument when people complain about the byzantine procedures that colleges use to adjudicate charges of a racial or sexual nature, or when they argue that we should always presumptively believe any rape accusation: “Well, if they didn’t do that, the system will figure it out eventually, so what’s the big deal?”
This ignores the fact that the process itself can become the punishment. Sexual assault, racial harassment and similar crimes are serious charges, that should be treated seriously. This makes being charged with such an offense a very big deal for the accused. The judicial process is time consuming, often confusing, and scary. The accused may need to pay for legal advice, even though they often aren’t allowed to take counsel into the system with them. Then there’s the worry of knowing that however crazy the charge sounds to you, the campus judicial process may have very different ideas.
It’s becoming Kafkaesqe.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Another campus-rape case falls apart. At this point, it’s appropriate to ask if there are any of these high-profile cases that aren’t false accusations and fraud.