Some thoughts on the sad state of contemporary political discourse and freedom of expression.
Category Archives: Social Commentary
The Stupidity Of Gun Buy-Back Programs
Kathleen Cairns, a WBFF Baltimore journalist, tweeted a picture of a woman who was surrendering a 9mm. She hoped to use the money from the program to buy an even bigger gun.
Good for her.
Gun Control
A statistician changes her mind after actually looking at the data:
“A reduction in gun deaths is most likely to come from finding smaller chances for victories and expanding those solutions as much as possible,” Libresco concludes. “We save lives by focusing on a range of tactics to protect the different kinds of potential victims and reforming potential killers, not from sweeping bans focused on the guns themselves.”
Libresco says she still does not endorse gun ownership, “but I can’t endorse policies whose only selling point is that gun owners hate them.”
What a concept.
Reproduction On Mars
Nadia Drake has the latest. We continue to not have a gravity lab to study this.
[Update after reading the whole thing]
They seem to be proposing a gravity lab (still unfunded), but they want to put it in lunar orbit. I see no reason to do this, other than to give the Gateway something to do; LEO (and probably in the ISS orbit) makes a lot more sense to me.
Fifteen Foods Not To Order
I don’t think I ever eat any of these, other than getting ice from the fountain machine, for water. As I’ve noted in the past, eating out is bad for both your health and your budget.
Titania McGrath
Godfrey Elfwick (who was banned from Twitter) welcomes her back. (I suspect that the same person is behind both satire accounts.)
[Saturday update]
Reflections from Titania xirself:
Indeed, Twitter’s modus operandi appears to involve routinely silencing those who defend social justice and enabling those who spread hate. In my short time on the platform, I have regularly come across hate speech from the sort of unreconstructed bigots who believe that there are only two genders, or that Islam is not a race. It’s got to the point where if someone doesn’t have “anti-fascist” in their bio, it’s safest to assume that they’re a fascist.
The permanent suspension only lasted for a day, but the experience was traumatic and lasting. I now understand how Nelson Mandela felt. If anything, my ordeal was even more damaging. Mandela may have had to endure 27 years of incarceration, but at least his male privilege protected him from ever having to put up with mansplaining, or being subject to wolf-whistling by grubby proles on a building site.
She is a true martyr.
[Bumped]
Psychological Hibernation
I suspect that if we settle space, we’ll see a lot of this sort of thing in some of the environments.
Shame Storm
Thoughts on the viciousness of the Internet, from a thankful victim.
The Climate Wars
The first shots are being fired in western Europe:
Who pays for environmental virtue?
The gilets jaune revolt begs the issue: who pays to save the planet? The Paris accords absolved the very countries driving emission increases — China and India — from mandating emissions cuts until 2030, leaving the burden largely on the backs of the West’s own middle and working classes.
Yet many of these people need fossil fuels to get to work or operate their businesses. Tourists may gape at the high-speed trains and the Paris Metro, but the vast majority get to work in cars. More than 80 percent of the Paris metropolitan area population lives in the suburbs and exurbs, in an area nearly the size of Connecticut and Rhode Island combined.
Like the revolutionaries of 1789, people are enraged by the hypocrisy of their betters. In pre-revolutionary times, French aristocrats and top clerics preached Christian charity while indulging in gluttony, sexual adventurism and lavish spending. Today they see the well-off and well-connected buying their modern version of indulgences through carbon credits and other virtue-signaling devices. Meanwhile, as many as 30 percent of Germans and as many as half of Greeks are spending 10 percent or more of their income on energy, the definition of “energy poverty.” This is occurring while these policies prove sadly ineffective in reducing emissions while the much disdained US leads the large countries in cuts.
It’s not about saving the planet; it’s about the “elites” (who are elite in name only, not in talent or competence or intelligence) signaling their virtue to their peers, while defecating on the commoners and telling them it’s cotton candy.
[Update a while later]
It’s hard to believe that it’s been almost exactly nine years since I wrote this piece about the Precautionary Principle. And nothing has changed.
The Facebook App
Yet another reason I’ve never installed it on my phone.