RIP.
I saw him at a Reason event in LA a couple years ago. He will be missed.
[Saturday-morning update]
Nick Gillespie told me on Twitter that there will be a service in Santa Barbara in a couple months. I’ll post an update when I have more info.
Category Archives: Social Commentary
The Problems On Campus
Judith Curry’s thoughts on Michael Shermer’s thoughts:
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.
It’s an ongoing battle for freedom.
Elizabethan English
I’d love to hear some Shakespeare in the original language. I think I’ve linked this before, but here’s an example.
I suspect that the “arrr” pronunciation of “r” after a vowel, is related to the pirate “arrr.” Many of them were from southwest England and Cornwall.
A Feminist Picnic
…falls apart when no one is willing to make samwiches.
Maybe they’ve just realized that people should go paleo.
OK, probably not.
Heading To DC
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.
Trump Was Created By The Likes Of David Brooks
They denigrated the Tea Party, and now they have to deal with raucus working-class Trumpsters. They deserve whatever they get.
David Brooks
A shorter @Instapundit: “Eff you“:
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.
They brought this on themselves.
[Saturday update]
The Key To #NeverTrump
I’m Angry
“So I’m voting for Donald Trump.”
That really is the quality of logic going on here.
“Burn It All Down”
Why this isn’t something a conservative would, or should say:
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.