Category Archives: Political Commentary
The Hobby Lobby Decision
No, it’s not based on a “scientific mistake.”
And yes, the morning-after pill is an abortafacient.
The Stupidity Of BMI
This woman is an excellent example of it.
The Hobby Lobby Case
…the only reason this conflict arose was a New Deal-era tax loophole that gave birth to our peculiar employer-based health care system. The main lesson of Hobby Lobby is that this system has to go.
Yes. Of course, ObamaCare should never have happened, either, for the same reason.
Hobby Lobby Boycotters
Culture warriors face two additional problems:
They tend to want to boycott places they never shopped at in the first place.
The company’s actual core demographic takes umbrage about the boycott and stages a much more effective counterboycott.I can’t tell you how many times I have had some version of the following conversation:
Angry person on the Internet: Wal-Mart’s treatment of its workers is shameful. I am not going to give that company any of my business!
Me: How much did you spend at Wal-Mart before you realized its treatment of workers was shameful?
The modal answer to this query is sudden disappearance from the conversation. I’m not sure anyone has confessed to spending as much as $1,000 a year at the stores. Of those who claim to shop there, most seem to do so almost entirely on vacation in rural areas.
If this describes you, you are not Wal-Mart’s core demographic, and its executives don’t care whether you boycott the business; the loss in sales is less than they experience from miscalculating what sort of sunscreen to buy. They care very much about what their core demographic thinks, but those people are, by and large, not interested in these boycotts; they’re interested in paying 12 cents a can less for tomatoes.
As she notes, Chick-fil-A is a canonical example.
Apollo 45th Anniversary
Buzz Aldrin is starting a social media campaign to commemorate it.
I’m working on a piece that I hope gets good placement, on how it’s time to let go of Apollo.
Leaving California
Adrian Moore explains why he can’t take it any more.
Killing Bald Eagles
Ignorant Appeals To Authority
Where to begin? It doesn’t matter if Steyn has “no scientific credentials;” he’s perfectly capable of both spotting fraud when he sees it, and calling out a fraudulent huckster if he deems it necessary. And while it’s true that science, idealized, is “a matter of fact, not a matter of opinion,” this has no bearing on whether or not Michael Mann committed fraud. We’re not debating whether or not science is a fact-based enterprise; we’re debating whether or not Mann is a fraudulent scientist. Defining science simply has nothing to do with the debate at hand; it’s a definitional reductio combined with an argumentative non sequitur.
But that doesn’t really matter with these people. If they get backed into a difficult corner, they just repeat, by rote, the textbook definition of science; for some reason, this is supposed to absolve their pet favorite scientists of any wrongdoing, even if the scientists’ professional credibility is seriously in question. It just doesn’t make any sense to use such a rhetorical device in such a way, and it makes people look like idiots when they use it: “Hey, that scientist is correct; after all, science is fact-based.”
As I said, this is mostly a left-liberal phenomenon; progressives just love the empty-headed campaign to endlessly repeat “science” until their adversaries give up.
It is quite annoying, at the very least.
Regenerative Life Support
This is the kind of research that NASA should be doing, and would be if we were serious about space settlement. Instead, we waste billions on unneeded giant rockets. At least China is taking it more seriously.