Beyond Georgia Tech, I have visited many campuses over the past several years, and I was invited to talk in most instances to present an alternative perspective on climate change. One of the universities was Oberlin, which featured prominently in Shermer’s article. There is a club of young republicans and libertarians, which receives contributions from a donor to invite speakers on a range of topics to add diversity. Apparently I was sufficiently tame or insufficiently known to have instigated much of a backlash.
Apart from the social issues that are of primary concern in Shermer’s article, I am particularly concerned about all this promoting groupthink in terms of actual research in the social and natural sciences. I don’t see a near term solution, but I think that heterodox academy.org and the blogosphere are making a difference.
I’m in the air somewhere over Wyoming on the way to ORD to switch planes for a flight to DCA this afternoon. Attending a workshop on space safety tomorrow. I’ve got Internet, obviously, but what I don’t have is room to type comfortably, given the seat pitch and guy ahead of me reclining. So probably light posting.
The Tea Party movement — which you also failed to understand, and thus mostly despised — was a bourgeois, well-mannered effort (remember how Tea Party protests left the Mall cleaner than before they arrived?) to fix America. It was treated with contempt, smeared as racist, and blocked by a bipartisan coalition of business-as-usual elites. So now you have Trump, who’s not so well-mannered, and his followers, who are not so well-mannered, and you don’t like it.
If you’re ready to burn down the world, you’re part of what’s wrong with the world. There are plenty of places on this planet where “burning it down” has been tried — Syria, Somalia, the Balkans, Afghanistan, the territories of Boko Haram — and the results are never anything short of catastrophic. It’s easy to forget, but even in the toughest of times, Americans are incredibly blessed compared to those living everywhere else. Our wealth, our spirit, our untapped potential, and our capacity for renewal are mind-boggling. And yet some significant portion of the population relishes the thought of sending it all up in flames.
You dare not call yourself conservative if you belong to this arson-minded mass. Conservatives are here to preserve, create, and build, not to ignite and destroy. Insofar as the torch is an American political tradition, it’s not a conservative one — it’s the recourse of our country’s worst radicals, from the Klan to the Weather Underground to the Black Panthers to Timothy McVeigh.
Victor Davis Hanson calls what we’re witnessing “Republican nihilism,” a dangerous strain of the historical perspective that there is nothing to approve of in the current social order. It’s a self-evidently ludicrous perspective when applied to our country as it stands today.
If you think that Trump will be a conservative, in any way, you’re deluding yourself.
I share many of the New Urbanist ideas for cities, but I can’t cast my lot in with the group because they are screwball-daft when the subject of cars comes up, and will entertain any inconvenience as long as it’s anti-car. I don’t want to ride a got-damned bicycle to work. Most people don’t. Period. So you have to force them out of their cars into something else. If a neighborhood is made sufficiently inconvenient for cars, some will adapt, and some will find a home in a placewhere they can have a car. That’s your choice. If you stay, fine; glad you’re happy. If you go out into the far-flung exurbs because you want to drive, and are willing to endure a few inconveniences, then fine; that’s yhour choice. You’d think the Critics of Everyone Else’s Choices would be happy that people are living far out and taking the train in, but no, a fresh new horror has revealed itself as people continue to show the depthless roiling stinky-pitch of their hearts:
While city planners generally welcome transit hubs to their community, they are concerned that, if improperly located, the stations will actually increase sprawl by encouraging people to drive to rail stations instead of walking, biking or taking the bus.