How it’s really a war on the world’s poor.
Category Archives: Science And Society
SJWs
…are ruining engineering school.
No surprise, they ruin everything they come near. They have the reverse Midas’ touch.
[Late-afternoon update]
There may be a scientific reason that SJWs are so whiny.
[Update a while later]
The fences are closing in:
Born as free Americans, you are being treated as sheep.
Raised as proud Americans, you are learning the lessons of shame.
Schooled as thinking Americans, now you’re told to abandon open debate, objective truth, even the scientific method and mathematics. They are somehow “racist.” They’re the products of “privilege.”
What do the brilliant minds behind Tim Kaine’s Democrat Party want to replace them with? A set of stern, angry dogmas that have taken over our colleges and our corporate human resource departments. And dogmas like “intersectionalism,” which demonize whole groups of people such as Christians and conservatives. They want to say that their voices shouldn’t be heard and they shouldn’t be protected from hate and discrimination. You should be able to spew hate about them for years, as tech reporter Sarah Jeong did and then still get hired for the editorial page of the New York Times. Andrew Sullivan, a liberal gay writer, warned us in New York magazine that the Democrats have been hijacked by a new, puritanical cult, and it’s already running witch hunts. So Sarah Jeong called him a racist and tried to get him fired. If that can happen to famous, liberal, gay writers, what do you think they’re planning for your pastor? For conservatives who teach school? For you and your children?
The witch hunters can’t afford to let you question them because their excuses will fall apart. So they impose them instead by legal action, by harassment, by collusion and blacklisting. Unable to defend their new creed with reason, these ideologues instead forbid our questions. They isolate, target, and try to destroy dissenters. They spray them with social and professional plutonium as “an example to the others.” That tactic is straight from the playbook of totalitarian movements. We have seen all this before.
Yes. And the irony, of course, is that they call us fascists.
[Monday-morning update]
The story about SJWs ruining engineering is no joke.
[Bumped from a week ago]
Property Rights On Mars
I don’t know if it will be webcast, but I’m going to be giving a talk tomorrow morning in Pasadena, as part of the final plenary of the Mars Society meeting.
[Update Sunday afternoon]
I think the talk went OK. The crowd was smaller than I expected; I think that the Mars conference in DC has pulled a lot of the audience that Bob used to get for his Mars Society meetings. I called people in the audience “mutant weirdos,” and made a lawyer joke.
[Bumped]
Trouble With The Concept
There is a Greek myth, which may or not be true, that @n@l sex is called “Greek” because the ancient Greeks used it for birth control. Well, a clueless couple in China failed to get pregnant for four years because they were doing it wrong. At least for that purpose. Hopefully they were at least having a good time.
Lunar Water Ice
An interview with Phil Metzger, including the most recent findings, on how to utilize it.
Deep-Fried Fair Food
A lot of nutrition mythology in this.
No, you won’t get a coronary from eating fried food, or if you do, it’s not because it’s fried, or has saturated fat. Probably the least unhealthy of these is the fried cheesecake, because at least it has additional sat fat in it, along with protein. The others are basically fried sugar and flour. And at least adding the fat mediates to some degree. Also, counting calories is stupid.
That Dress, Twenty Years On
On the anniversary, my fellow defendant Mark Steyn remembers the last time a president was (entirely justifiably) impeached.
And as I typed this, I just realized that I forgot to commemorate the sixth anniversary of that infamous Blog Post which resulted in the never-ending lawsuit against me, CEI, National Review, and Mark (though he is now eager to go to trial having made a lot of money selling a book against the plaintiff). And it’s been over two years since our request for an en banc appeal, with no ruling from the DC Circuit.
Eat More Carbs?
I wish it were true, because I love bread and pasta but I’m pretty skeptical of the results of this study. I’m guessing it’s more junk nutrition epidemeology, with self reporting.
Liking Men
I’d put it a different way; if you don’t like men, you’re going to be a terrible mother to a boy.
Gender Is A Social Construct
A foundational tenet of academic feminism holds that alleged differences between males and females are socially constructed. This credo usually maximizes the opportunities for charging sexism, yet it will be discarded in an instant if acknowledging the innate biological and psychological differences between men and women yields an additional trove of feminist complaint. The current issue of the Yale Alumni Magazine shows how the game is played.
For years, medical research neglected “sex and gender differences” in health, according to the magazine. “Historically, the narrative of medicine has been driven by data derived from white men around the age of 40,” the associate dean for curriculum at the Yale Medical School told the magazine’s reporter. Clinical trials only occasionally included females and when they did, the results were rarely analyzed by sex. It’s mysterious why this alleged neglect should matter, if sex differences are “socially constructed.” If males and females are the same psychologically and physically before the patriarchy starts assigning sex roles, then medical research need not distinguish between males and females, either.
It turns out, however, that males and females differentially respond to stress, environmental risk factors, drugs, and disease, as an initiative called Women’s Health Research at Yale devotes itself to documenting. . . .
Such discoveries should be the death knell for social constructivism. Along with many others like them, they buttress the possibility that uneven sex ratios in various fields are in part the result of males and females’ different average dispositions toward competition, risk, and abstract rather than people-centered work (an observation that got computer engineer James Damore fired from Google).
And yet, feminist social-justice warriors are perfectly capable of proceeding on several contradictory fronts simultaneously.
It’s almost as though they select these whacko theories only in order to serve an agenda.
[Update a few minutes later]
Related: No, the professional engineering exam is not gender biased.