Glenn Reynolds (and Sarah Hoyt, and others) writes that we’re living through them. Sure looks like it.
[Update a while later]
Our vague yet imminent malaise.
[Update late morning]
Speaking of Sarah Hoyt, from late last week, strange days in America.
Category Archives: Social Commentary
Space And Religion
A brief history of their relationship. I infer that she thinks evangelicals not supporting spaceflight is a problem, because of concern that it could reduce public support for it. Apparently she doesn’t realize that public support is irrelevant to a space future that is funded not by the government, but by private interests, which is what our space future now is.
[Update a while later]
Related, sort of. Laura Seward Forczyk describes her eclipse experience.
[Update mid-afternoon]
Another account from Miri Kramer.
[Update Wednesday morning]
It’s good to be an earthling.
Tripling Down On Stupid
OK, we have a regular commenter, probably the most prolific one (note that this is not a quantity with a quality all its own), who thinks that the Republicans would like to replace Trump with Hillary.
No, don’t laugh, he apparently really thinks this:
In about a femto-second the left would choose a new primary target so we could all suddenly realize how stupid and evil that person is. It would not be Pence because a tie breaking vote is not much real power. The GOP would try to enact law to retroactively make Hillary president so they can return to their safe space where nothing positive is actually accomplished.
So I responded:
Ken, even if that were legally possible, it would be politically impossible, and very few Republicans would have any desire to do it. That’s just stupid.
If you seriously believe that any Republican wants Hillary (as opposed to Not Trump) as president, you’re insane. The only reason any Republican supported Hillary last year was because she was the only serious alternative at the time. Every Republican would be perfectly happy to replace Trump with Pence. [Emphasis added for future reference]
Now note his response:
Many said they voted for Hillary. They could have just not voted. Bush voted for Hillary (and we wonder why the country moves left regardless of elections.)
That’s it. No recognition whatsoever of my emphasized words above. He is fantasizing that because they voted for Hillary a year ago, they want her to be president now, and would prefer that to a President Pence. He offers no sane rationale for this fantasy, but there we go.
There’s a lot more nuttiness over there if you want to wade through it, but it gets really great here:
You seem to be presuming Pence would get the vote of every Republican over Hillary. This is you asserting your faith because there is no logic based on any fact that provably reaches that conclusion.
About the only related fact we have is that some Republicans did vote for Hillary when some conditions existed. Neither you nor I know if Pence being the alternative would not be such a condition for every Republican.
I am not presuming that Pence would get the vote of every Republican over Hillary, and it is not necessary for me to assume that. I am assuming, because I didn’t chow down on lead paint chips when I was kid, that there is an insufficient number of Republicans who would prefer Hillary to Pence for this to occur. I think any assumption other than that is insane.
Set aside the fact that neither he, or anyone else has responded to my challenge to name a single Republican who would prefer a President Hillary to a President Pence. He doesn’t even posit a Constitutionally plausible mechanism by which this could occur, even if it had (and again, this would be insane) majority Republican support. All he says is that “The GOP would try to enact law to retroactively make Hillary president.” It betrays an utter ignorance of how our government works. Congress has no power to simply remove a president, bypass the existing vice president, and name someone else president.
Is he saying that they’ll impeach and remove both Trump and Pence? Really? Then Orrin HatchPaul Ryan is president. Will Orrin Hatch Paul Ryan nominate Hillary to be Vice President? Really? And a majority of the House will go along with that? Really? And then he’ll resign, or they’ll impeach and remove him so they can get their precious President Hillary? Really?
No, this is just anti-anti-Trump derangement. And I wish I didn’t have to waste time responding to blithering idiocy like this in my comments section. But I guess the only way to avoid it is to either ignore it, and let it continue to clog it up, because he clearly has no more self control than his Lord and Savior Trump to stop doing it, or to ban him.
[Late Monday-night update]
Part of the purpose of this post was to ferret out other loons in my comments section. It seems to have succeeded. Also note that Ken is now saying, “Oh, I didn’t mean it, I was just joking,” after repeated defenses of his original idiocy.
Sorry, no.
The worst thing about Trump is arguing with morons who support him, even when I compliment him on the rare good things he does, like tonight’s speech (which obviously someone else wrote, but with his input, to make sure he had the right 3rd-grade words in it, like “horrible”).
[Monday-afternoon update]
OK, so there are still some people operating under the delusion that there exist Republicans today, who would, if they could, remove Trump and replace him with Hillary, in preference to Mike Pence.
The “logic” (such as it is, but it isn’t) seems to be:
a) Some Republicans voted for Hillary over Trump last year
b) Republicans cannot be trustedTherefore, they will replace him with her at the first opportunity.
Folks, this is what is called a “broken syllogism.” It has two premises, both of which are true, and yet the conclusion in no way follows from them. It is a leap of logic that puts Evil Knievel’s attempted jump of the Snake River Canyon to shame. It makes as much (and as little) sense as “Roses are red, violets are blue, and therefore my chicken is unable to lay eggs.”
I personally know some conservatives who voted for Hillary. For instance, I’m pretty sure that Bob Zubrin did. They were (and in some cases remain) “Never Trumpers.”
Why did they do this? Was it because they preferred her policy positions? Or her picks for the Supreme Court? Or that they didn’t believe all the stories about how corrupt she was?
No.
They did it because, as awful a president as they expected her to be, they thought that Trump would be even worse. They did it not as an affirmative vote for Hillary, but as the only effective way to vote against Trump. Ken wrote “they could have not voted.” Yes, they could. They could have also howled at the moon. But neither of those things would have done anything to reduce the chances of a Trump presidency in the way that voting for Hillary Clinton would.
Now you can disagree with their assessment, and in fact I do. I felt physically relieved that she lost, but I recognize that the last election presented us with the most awful presidential choice in our lifetime, and I’m not going criticize them for that decision at that time.
But the other thing I’m not going to do (unlike, apparently some here) is to fantasize that they’re idiotic enough to actively want Hillary to be president, either then or now (as opposed to Trump not being president). They weren’t voting for Hillary, they were voting for the only Not Trump available at the time. That was then, this is now, and the best Not Trump option is Mike Pence. The second, third, fourth, fifth…ten millionth next best option is any (actual, as opposed to Trump) Republican. This was, in fact, one of the reasons that I preferred him over her, because he was potentially removable, and she never would have been. As I’ve repeatedly said, the notion that there are any prominent Republicans, let alone a significantly large number of them that would, if they could, replace him with her today, is utterly deranged.
But my challenge stands. Name one.
Racial Purity
A great idea from Katherine Mangu-Ward: Let’s hand out DNA testing kits at the next neo-Nazi rally.
The Lancet
…has reviewed Nina Teichholz’s book
Many readers will be incensed by this book. If you think saturated fats and cholesterol are bad for you, you’ll be incensed. If you think the fat story is exaggerated, you’ll be incensed. If you trust in the objectivity of science to inform health policy, you’ll be incensed. Stories of shocking scientific corruption and culpability by government agencies are all to be found in Nina Teicholz’s bestseller The Big Fat Surprise. This is a disquieting book about scientific incompetence, evangelical ambition, and ruthless silencing of dissent that has shaped our lives for decades.
Good for her.
The Left’s Nostalgia
So why — beyond the traditional Trump bashing — are such liberal-lefties, or whatever you want to call them at CNN and elsewhere, so determined to make such an equivalency? Why do they want to magnify the existence and importance of neo-Nazis and Klan members in our society when their numbers are minuscule?
We could call this a kind of nostalgia for Nazism, the yearning for a simpler time when the source of all evil was so clearly evident and so directly confronted. Perhaps more importantly, it’s a nostalgia for when all evil was supposedly on the right, even though the Nazis, so many conveniently forget, were the National Socialist Party. At least the right could be blamed. And is.
It is also a yearning for a time when the source of evil was not so treacherous and complicated. No one knows how many Islamic radicals there are or where they are, although there are apparently a lot of them, probably vastly more than there ever were Nazis, possibly in the hundreds of millions if you add up the results of this Pew poll of eleven Muslim countries. (It may even be understated, given the reluctance to answer such incriminating questions.)
Not only that, a significant percentage of the left evinces sympathy for Islamic radicals, identifying with them and justifying their cause, despite the obvious misogyny and homophobia, through such latter-day crypto-fascist inventions as “intersectionality.” The Antifa movement, in the forefront of that nauseating sympathy for Islamism, is far more prevalent and dangerous in U.S. society than those few pathetic remaining losers in the KKK and similar neo-Nazi groups. The Antifa thugs are seemingly everywhere, smashing windows and making life Hell for weak-willed university administrators across the country.
I've been making this point all week. Stalin fought Nazis, too. Opposing Nazis is a necessary, but not sufficient condition to be good guys. https://t.co/tGaAZcRkxp
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) August 18, 2017
[Update a couple minutes later]
Let’s not talk about Islam:
They discussed the popularity of La Rambla as a tourist destination, and went into some detail about the nationalities of vacationers currently thronging the city. They noted that La Rambla is Barcelona’s chief tourist street, essentially its counterpart to the Champs-Elysées in Paris, the Kufürstendamm in Berlin, Fifth Avenue in New York – and, perhaps most significantly, La Promenade des Anglais in Nice, France, where, in July of last year, eighty-six people were killed in a similar jihadist atrocity.
They pondered the apparent lack of sophistication of this particular crime, the biographical background of the truck driver, the timeline of the atrocity, the apparent speed and weight of the truck itself, and so on. They talked about the wounded, about the degree to which they had been wounded, about how many had been sent to hospitals.
But they didn’t talk about Islam. They didn’t talk about jihad.
They used words like assassin, murderer, criminal. Even terrorist. But I didn’t hear the word jihadist. If they said it, I missed it. And except when they were forced to mention that, for example, the Islamic State had claimed responsibility for the attack, I didn’t hear the word Islam.
They’d rather talk about Nazis.
[Noon update]
A point I’ve been making all week (e.g., the above tweet). Jonah Goldberg: No, Antifa, fighting Nazis doesn’t make you the good guys:
There’s a natural tendency to think that when people, or movements, hate each other, it must be because they’re opposites. This assumption overlooks the fact that many — indeed, most — of the great conflicts and hatreds in human history are derived from what Sigmund Freud called the “narcissism of minor differences.”
Most tribal hatreds are between very similar groups. The European wars of religion were between peoples who often shared the same language and culture but differed on the correct way to practice the Christian faith. The Sunni-Shia split in the Muslim world is the source of great animosity between very similar peoples.
The young Communists and fascists fighting for power in the streets of 1920s Germany had far more in common with each other than they had with decent liberals or conservatives, as we understand those terms today.
Stalinists, and defenders of communism in general, like to play up the trivial differences with the Nazis, while ignoring the much greater similarities.
And then there’s this:
This history is relevant today because of the depressingly idiotic argument about whether it’s OK to equate “antifa” — left-wing radicals — with the neo-Nazi and white supremacist rabble that recently descended on Charlottesville, Va. The president claims there were “very fine people” on both sides of the protest and that the “anti-fascist” radicals are equally blameworthy. He borrowed from Fox News’ Sean Hannity the bogus term “alt-left” to describe the antifa radicals.
The term is bogus because, unlike the alt-right, nobody calls themselves “the alt-left.” That’s too bad. One of the only nice things about the alt-right is that its leaders are honest about the fact that they want nothing to do with traditional American conservatism. Like the original Nazis, they seek to replace the traditional right with their racial hogwash.
Sean Hannity is an idiot, and so is Donald Trump for paying any attention to him.
Johnny Has “The Talk”
Postmodernism
It’s the cause of the mess in academia, and it’s starting to collide with its own internal contradictions.
Google’s CEO
Given that the full text of the memo is public, that it is the subject of a national debate on an important subject, that many educated people disagree with one another about what claims it made, and that clarity can only help Google employees adhere to the company’s rules going forward, would you be willing to highlight the memo using green to indicate the “much” that you identified as “fair to debate” and red to flag the “portions” that you deemed Code-of-Conduct violations?
He can’t do that, because a) he doesn’t know himself and b) maintaining uncertainty is a key element of totalitarian thought control.
[Update a couple minutes later]
The Google Archipelago: A nice round up of links from Ed Driscoll.
[Updatea a while later]
This whole thing is so rife with irony. Google may regret being a California company:
Dan Eaton, an employment lawyer, in San Diego wrote on CNBC: “Federal labour law bars even non-union employers like Google from punishing an employee for communicating with fellow employees about improving working conditions … California law prohibits employers from threatening to fire employees to get them to adopt or refrain from adopting a particular political course of action.”
He also said” “It is unlawful for an employer to discipline an employee for challenging conduct that the employee reasonably believed to be discriminatory, even when a court later determines the conduct was not actually prohibited by the discrimination laws.”
Oh, what a tangled web we weave…
[Monday-morning update]
Cathy Young has an interview with Damore, in which he provides his influencers. I’m probably going to write up something on this myself at some point. There are so many issues to unpack.
[Update early afternoon]
Yes, Pichai should go, but that’s not enough:
When you use Facebook or Google (or Twitter, or Amazon, or Netflix) you’re sharing a lot of data with a company that you have to trust won’t abuse that. It’s much harder to trust a company that has decided to aggressively pursue thoughtcrime. And it doesn’t matter where you are on the political spectrum – Damore describes himself as a centrist. But it only takes one politically incorrect utterance, as so many in academia have learned, to achieve Enemy Of The People status. And then, apparently, you’re fair game.
Can you trust a self-driving car from Google, if some new company policy might reprogram it to avoid events Google doesn’t approve? Can you trust Google to prevent its (apparently many) “social-justice warrior” employees from trawling through your personal data looking for dirt, and then leaking it?
As Robert Tracinski writes, this is the big danger for Google: “The most dangerous part is that they are now beginning to be seen by the public (or revealed, depending on how you look at it) as politicized entities. Politicized entities to whom we are giving enormous amounts of data on our lives, thoughts and interests.”
There should, at a minimum, be Congressional hearings.
From College Indoctrination
It is no surprise, then, that corporations are increasingly populated with young adults who do not know how to handle political views or scientific claims they have been taught are out of bounds of public discussion. When Google’s diversity officer replied to James Damore’s email, it was an incoherent affirmation of the company’s diversity policy, coupled with an accusation of sexism. It didn’t even attempt to cite reasons why the science Damore mentioned was wrong, or why his political views about diversity policy were misguided. It just asserted they were, and then used that assertion the next day as a pretext to fire him. This is what we get when university professors abuse their power and attempt to turn students into pawns in their political game, rather than autonomous agents with the capacity (but not yet ability) to think for themselves.
Combined with the problems of journalism, which are also discussed, this is a societal disaster.
[Update a while later]
Straight talk about sex differences in the workplace.
[Update mid-morning]
No one expects the Google Inquisition.
[Late-morning update]
By firing the memo author, Google validated his thesis.
[Update a few minutes later]
I don’t often agree with David Brooks, but yes, the Google CEO should resign.
[Update early afternoon]
Google is run like a religious cult:
“Conform and carry out the rituals, and you’ll be rewarded and praised; ask any uncomfortable questions or offend the wrong people, and the threats and public shaming will be swift and ruthless. The religion in this case is a kind of intersectional feminism, its central tenets are Diversity and Inclusion, its demonic enemy is Bias, and its purifying rituals include humiliating forms of ‘training’ that resemble Maoist struggle sessions.”
“This might sound crazy to a lot of your readers, but college students should understand, since it’s a similar culture.”
This is just awful.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Apparently, Damore wasn’t sufficiently afraid. He didn’t see that this was the unacknowledged rule. Google is a safe space, muffling the fear. That in itself is something to be afraid of. When sparing everyone fear is the order of the day, you need to fear you will be deemed the embodiment of the fear that others must be spared. Then you’re completely unsafe. And gone. No man, no fear.
And as Stalin would have said, “No problem.”
[Update a while later]