Category Archives: Social Commentary

Business, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary

Like Parents, Like Children

5 Comments

An interesting article on the degree to which your parents’ professions influence your own. These two were sort of outliers, though, in the sense that there is much less demand for the “services” than there is “talent” for it:

Some fields are particularly dynastic, like Hollywood acting or politics.

You don’t say. I’d go beyond “dynastic,” and say nepotistic.

I have a theory that one of the reasons that Hollywood types tend to be “liberal” is guilt over the knowledge that, though there can be a lot of perseverance involved, their success was largely due to dumb luck, or choosing the right parents, and that there are many other people who were just as, or more capable and/or attractive than them. On the politics side, I hope we’ve finally broken the Kennedy, Bush and Clinton dynasties, but the threat of George P. and Chelsea are still out there.

[Early-afternoon update]

Sorry about the missing link; I had a long dentist appointment this morning right after I posted that. Fixed now.

Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, War Commentary

Being “Caring”

41 Comments

…is a license to be nasty:

There has always been a malicious, vengeful streak in sections of the compassionate new left. Consider how they have always boasted about ‘hating the Tories’, as if hatred is an emotion to be proud of. The far left always talk of ‘smashing’ or ‘fighting’ things, whether it be capitalism, racism or the system. The rhetoric of caring and combat paradoxically go hand-in-hand. As Albert Camus observed in his attack on Sartre in his 1951 L’Homme révolté, the more someone professes to care about humanity, the more they tend to dislike people as human beings.

It’s not even the “new” Left. It’s the way the Left has always been. Including their purloining of the word “liberal” to attempt to fool people into thinking they actually are. And I don’t “hate” Leftists, because I’ve never found hate to be a productive emotion. I simply oppose them and their works with every fiber of my being.

If I ever get around to writing my book about the projection of the Left, this would be a chapter in it.

History, Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

Linda Tripp

1 Comment

Her thoughts on the reassessing of Bill Clinton by the Democrats. She was the only person in that whole sorry episode who told the truth.

But the Democrats still refuse to admit that it wasn’t about the sex, or sexual harassment, or sexual assault. It was about the corruption, and obstruction of justice to prevent an innocent woman he’d sexually harassed from getting a fair trial.

Business, Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

Net Neutrality

3 Comments

Those protesting the decision are going after the wrong targets:

Fifteen years ago, when I started blogging, it was common to hear that “the internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” You don’t hear that so often anymore, because it’s not true. China has proven very effective at censoring the internet, and as market power has consolidated in the tech industry, so have private firms.

Meanwhile, our experience of the internet is increasingly controlled by a handful of firms, most especially Google and Facebook. The argument for regulating these companies as public utilities is arguably at least as strong as the argument for thus regulating ISPs, and very possibly much stronger; while cable monopolies may have local dominance, none of them has the ability that Google and Facebook have to unilaterally shape what Americans see, hear, and read.

In other words, we already live in the walled garden that activists worry about, and the walls are getting higher every day. Is this a problem? I think it is.

Yes, it is.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

Rand Paul

7 Comments

Reminder what terrible people many in the media are:

The only “dispute” existed solely in the attacker’s troubled mind, until, on a beautiful autumn day, he ran down the hill on our property and slammed his body into Rand’s lower back as he stood facing away, wearing noise canceling headphones to protect his ears from the lawnmower.

This was not a “scuffle,” a “fight” or an “altercation,” as many in the media falsely describe it. It was a deliberate, blindside attack. The impact left Rand with six broken ribs, three displaced, pleural effusion and now pneumonia. This has been a terrible experience; made worse by the media’s gleeful attempts to blame Rand for it, ridiculing him for everything from mowing his own lawn to composting.

This Thanksgiving weekend, instead of playing golf with his sons or enjoying our annual touch football game with family and neighbors, Rand will be in pain. But we will still be grateful for the love of our large and supportive family, and for the encouragement and prayers of hundreds of kind and thoughtful people during these last weeks.

And no one remembers the name of the Bernie supporter who tried to murder the Republican congressmen on that baseball field.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

When People Are Questioning Your Sacred Cows

28 Comments

Listen up:

…as I attempted to explain why this story looks weak to a lot of journalists (I was not the only one who noticed the thin sourcing), I began to understand why I’d triggered such outrage. Because several people asked me some version of the same question: “Why would you even question this story?” In their minds, it was clear that there could be only one reason: because I was trying to somehow salvage Moore’s candidacy.

I get asked this question a lot these days. Why would you even argue about rape statistics, when we know that rape is a problem? Why would you give even a moment’s consideration to those who theorize that global warming could be moderate rather than catastrophic? Why would you raise questions about that terrible gang rape at UVA?

My interlocutors have a point: We all make choices about which assertions we interrogate, and which we accept on easy faith. And because we are biased, we tend to interrogate most ruthlessly the inconvenient claims that stand in the way of something we’d very much like to believe. When someone casts doubt on a politically charged story, it’s not crazy to infer an ulterior ideological motive (even though in this particular case involving my qualms about that Roy Moore mall story, this inference was dead wrong).

But if we are committed to believing only things that are likely to be true, then how much does the motive of a questioner really matter? I’d argue “not much.” Knowing someone’s political commitments tells you that they are likely to accept evidence for some propositions more easily than for others. But it does not tell you that their analysis is wrong.

This is reminiscent of the other day when, in having the temerity to point out, horrible a human being as Roy Moore is, that there was no available evidence that he was an actual pedophile, I was accused of “defending” him, or being a pedophile myself.

Business, Education, Media Criticism, Philosophy, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

Millennials’ “Education”

48 Comments

The hard lifting of undoing it:

One of the falsehoods that has been stuffed into your brain and pounded into place is that moral knowledge progresses inevitably, such that later generations are morally and intellectually superior to earlier generations, and that the older the source the more morally suspect that source is. There is a term for that. It is called chronological snobbery. Or, to use a term that you might understand more easily, “ageism.”

Second, you have been taught to resort to two moral values above all others, diversity and equality. These are important values if properly understood. But the way most of you have been taught to understand them makes you irrational, unreasoning. For you have been taught that we must have as much diversity as possible and that equality means that everyone must be made equal. But equal simply means the same. To say that 2+2 equals 4 is to say that 2+2 is numerically the same as four. And diversity simply means difference. So when you say that we should have diversity and equality you are saying we should have difference and sameness. That is incoherent, by itself. Two things cannot be different and the same at the same time in the same way.

Furthermore, diversity and equality are not the most important values. In fact, neither diversity nor equality is valuable at all in its own right. Some diversity is bad. For example, if slavery is inherently wrong, as I suspect we all think it is, then a diversity of views about the morality of slavery is worse than complete agreement that slavery is wrong.

Similarly, equality is not to be desired for its own sake. Nobody is equal in all respects. We are all different, which is to say that we are all not the same, which is to say that we are unequal in many ways. And that is generally a good thing. But it is not always a good thing (see the previous remarks about diversity).

Related to this: You do you not know what the word “fair” means. It does not just mean equality. Nor does it mean something you do not like. For now, you will have to take my word for this. But we will examine fairness from time to time throughout this semester.

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