Thoughts on how disconnected gender feminists and SJWs are from normal people.
Category Archives: Social Commentary
Trump Versus Clinton
Tim Carney: You don’t have to choose the lesser of two evils:
As a conservative, I weigh the candidates against each other by considering the worst-case scenarios. On that score, there’s an irony: Hillary’s time as secretary of state — especially her disastrous and illegal war in Libya — doesn’t suggest supreme competence; Trump’s rhetoric, meanwhile makes many people think of fascism. But the “fascism” threat (an overblown word, of course) is probably greater with Hillary, and the incompetence threat is far greater with Trump.
They’re both incompetent fascist wannabes.
Bill Nye
…the climate huckster guy:
Admittedly, climate science is complex. There might be perfectly reasonable scientific justifications for what’s happening on the tornado front. Although, surely, there are just as likely interesting scientific arguments that challenge The Science Guy’s chilling and reckless assertions meant only to scare you into adopting leftist economic policy, not to teach you anything. Nye’s “science” is, at the very least, arguable.
But that’s not the reason Nye is dishonest. Or, at least, not the only reason. His biggest lie—and he makes these sorts of claims all the time—is that people are increasingly suffering because of global warming, and thus by extension they are suffering because of the use of fossil fuels.
This is simply untrue. Life, by nearly any quantifiable measurement, is better today for more people than it has ever been. One of the externalities in the spike of comfort and health is that more people are emitting carbon into the air. Fewer people are suffering. On top of the huge, if inadvertent, moral benefits of oil, gas, and coal, we should add that far fewer people are dying from drastic weather events—or any weather, actually.
These charlatans shouldn’t be surprised that people don’t take them seriously.
Aging
I’ve always believed that there is no law of physics that makes it inevitable, that it’s a matter of learning how to continue doing the cellular-level repair that occurs when we’re young. But here is an article that says it is caused by thermal chaos.
Not sure I buy it (it still doesn’t take into account artificial techniques for doing error checking in transcription), but it’s an interesting read.
The Latest Book Review
Roger Launius has reviewed it over at Quest, but for subscribers only (I think it will become available when the next issue comes out). It was interesting, in that it was more of a good summary, with no value judgments, though in an email he did say it was “thought provoking.” And he had no criticism of facts or history, so that’s a good thing. It may be the first “peer reviewed” review I’ve gotten. FWIW
Against Trump
In light of comments at this post, interesting to note Ross Douthat’s conservative case against him this weekend.
Collapse Proofing Our Society
Glenn describes the dangers of the complexity of the current sociopolitical structure.
It strikes me as a dangerous situation, what Perrow has described as a tightly-coupled complex system, that is vulnerable catastrophic collapse. He was describing physical systems, such as nuclear plants, but social systems can have similar failure modes.
The Trump Story
Jonah explains how he could beat Hillary.
“Watching [MSNBC’s] Chris Matthews interview Obama,” Ace wrote, “I was struck by just how uninterested in policy questions Matthews (and his panel) were, and how almost every question seemed to be, at heart, about Obama’s emotional response to difficulties — not about policy itself, but about Obama’s Hero’s Journey in navigating the plot of President Barack Obama: The Movie.”
I think something similar has been at the root of Trump’s success. I can’t bring myself to call him a hero, but many people see him that way. Even his critics concede that he’s entertaining. I see him as being a bit like Rodney Dangerfield, constantly complaining he doesn’t get enough respect.
Regardless, Trump bulldozed his way through the primaries in part because the nomination was his MacGuffin and people wanted to see the movie play out. Many voters, and nearly the entire press corps, got caught up in the story of Trump — much the same way the press became obsessed with the “mythic” story of Obama in 2008. People just wanted to see what happened next.
What I’d like to see happen next is the appearance of a candidate who favors limited government.
[Update a few minutes later]
The case for, and against Gary Johnson, at NRO.
Related: Thoughts from Nick Gillespie.
If there was ever a year for a libertarian breakthrough, this would be it.
[Update a while later]
Wow. Mary Matalin switches political parties:
Pressed Thursday about why she switched political parties, Matalin told Bloomberg Politics that she was a Republican in the “Jeffersonian, Madisonian sense.”
“I’m not a Republican for a party or a person,” she continued. “The Libertarian Party represents those constitutional principles that I agree with.”
Welcome.
[Update a while later]
Megan McArdle analyzes the disaster. I largely agree with her, and it was obvious to me from the beginning that Trump’s primary appeal was his celebrity, bringing out a lot of people, Republican and otherwise, who normally don’t get involved in primary elections.
I also agree that history will record that this was the fault of Bush and his donors, and the narcissism of Christie and Kasich.
[Mid-afternoon update]
It’s not too late for the Republicans to stop Trump:
Republicans would also do well to remember that democracy is not the only important value. Principles such as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, are far more fundamental. Trump’s platform of mass deportations (including of innocent children born in the US), massacring innocent civilians, large-scale discrimination on the basis of religion, and undermining freedom of speech is a grave threat to those values. So too is the possibility that a victory for Trump might turn the GOP into a US version of neo-Fascist European parties, such as France’s National Front. This horrendous agenda – combined with the dangerous prospect of giving such an unstable person control over the military and its nuclear arsenal – makes Trump a far greater menace than a merely ordinary flawed candidate would be.
Trump cannot be trusted with the other powers of the presidency either. As Larry Summers asks, “[w]hat will a demagogue with a platform like Trump’s… do with control over the NSA, FBI and IRS?” We should not take even a small risk of letting Trump win the presidency. Extraordinary evils sometimes demand extraordinary remedies. And Trump’s nomination easily qualifies as such. Given the nature of his agenda and temperament, the fact that Trump won some 40% of the GOP primary vote (a historically low number for a GOP nominee), is not sufficient reason to give in to him.
The Founding Fathers viewed unconstrained democracy with great suspicion, and sought to establish a constitutional system that would keep it in check. They understood that the fact that large numbers of people support a great evil does not make it right. They knew that voters are often influenced by ignorance and illogic, which are among the major causes of support for Trump. Even if blocking Trump really would be undemocratic, sometimes being undemocratic is the right thing to do. The Republican Party is a private organization, and does not have to follow a popular vote process in choosing its nominee. Indeed, such was not the process throughout most of of American history, up to the McGovern-Fraser reforms of the 1970s.
Yup.
[Update a while later]
If nothing changes, this will be the choice presented to Americans in November. An ignorant, unstable conspiracy theorist with no core principles versus an inveterate liar dedicated to ever-expanding government. Clinton and Trump are the least popular major-party candidates in the history of polling. Hillary Clinton is viewed “very unfavorably” by 37 percent of Americans; Trump is viewed “very unfavorably” by a staggering 53 percent.
I honestly don’t know which would be more likely to elect Hillary (assuming she’s the nominee): To let Trump have the nomination, or to replace him with a Republican.
[Update a few minutes later]
The election is not an A/B test:
Donald Trump is unfit for the office.
He is unfit for any office, morally and intellectually.
A man who could suggest, simply because it is convenient, that his opponent’s father had something to do with the assassination of President Kennedy is unfit for any position of public responsibility.
His long litany of lies — which include fabrications about everything from his wealth to self-funding his campaign — is disqualifying.
His low character is disqualifying.
His personal history is disqualifying.
His complete, utter, total, and lifelong lack of honor is disqualifying.
The fact that he is going to have to take time out of the convention to appear in court to hear a pretty convincing fraud case against him is disqualifying.
His time on Jeffrey Epstein’s Pedophile Island, after which he boasted about sharing a taste with Epstein for women “on the younger side,” is disqualifying.
The fact that he knows less about our constitutional order than does a not-especially-bright Rappahannock River oyster is disqualifying.
There isn’t anything one can say about Mrs. Clinton, monster though she is, that changes any of that.
Donald Trump is not fit to serve as president. He is not fit to serve on the Meade County board of commissioners. He is not fit to be the mayor of Muleshoe, Texas.
If he indeed is the Republican nominee, Donald Trump almost certainly will face Hillary Rodham Clinton in the general election. That fact, sobering though it is, does not suddenly make him fit to serve as president, because — to repeat — the problem with Trump isn’t that he is less fit to serve in comparison to Mrs. Clinton, but that he is unfit to serve, period.
But other than that, he’s great.
Mizzou
The SJWs have done severe damage to the university, but the administration had it coming. Patricia has a lot of family members who live there, and have attended.
Obama North
Thoughts on the dim-witted pretty boy currently leading Canada.