Category Archives: Social Commentary

Health, Science And Society, Social Commentary, Technology and Society, Weird

Nerve Stimulation

13 Comments

…may help with female sexual dysfunction.

Isn’t sex itself nerve stimulation?

[Friday-evening update]

This seems sort of related: Custom sex dolls.

This seems to me like the ultimate expression of free-market capitalism. I found the kicker interesting:

“You have to find beauty in imperfection,” Krivicke says as he takes the mannequin head back from me.

I’ve noticed over the years that, when I get to know someone, and I come to like them, they grow increasingly interesting and physically attractive, even if I didn’t find them so initially.

Business, Economics, History, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

Airworthiness For Spacecraft

10 Comments

I missed this earlier in the week, but Mike Snead has a long essay on passenger safety over at The Space Review. It’s a useful history, that touches on many of the themes of my book, but I believe that it’s technologically premature to apply the principles to human spaceflight. Spaceflight participants (not passengers) must be aware of the risks of the varied methods of building spaceships, and accept them accordingly. No one should, at this point in history, get aboard one with the same expection of getting safely off that one does with an airliner, particularly because different people have different risk tolerances and goals. There will come a time when trips to space will be considered common carrier, on certified vehicles, but we are years from that time.

Business, Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

SJWs

9 Comments

…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]