Does it increase the abortion rate?
I don’t know, but if so, I suspect a lot of proponents will consider that a feature, not a bug.
Category Archives: Social Commentary
“Safety”
…is just another way to shut down debate on campus.
[Update a while later]
When and where did this “Ideas I disagree with make me feel ‘unsafe'” thing start?
This is a huge threat to the future of free speech nevertheless. Today’s college students are going to be tomorrow’s judges, and if they truly believe that “safety” means “never having to deal with opinions that disagree with one’s cherished beliefs,” then censorship has a good chance of gaining the upper hand over freedom of speech. After all, public safety can be a justification for suppressing speech, as with the “fighting words” doctrine.
It’s almost as if it’s all part of a plan to control speech.
[Update mid afternoon]
This seems related: An interview with Andy Levy:
It’s embarrassing now, but I have to admit that what started my change from a liberal to a libertarian (as a freshman in college) was reading “The Fountainhead.” (And I still think it’s a good book, unlike most of the rest of Ayn Rand’s stuff.) If nothing else, reading Rand got me to seek out other libertarian and libertarianish writers like Murray Rothbard, Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman to learn more about it.
I also have to give credit to the core curriculum at Columbia, particularly the philosophy class (Contemporary Civilization). That class exposed me to a lot of great stuff: classical thinkers like Plato and Aristotle, people like Rousseau, Hobbes, Locke, and Marx; and books like Robert Nozick’s “Anarchy, State and Utopia.”
And beyond that, it was a great class because being exposed to a whole range of different ideas forces you to learn how to really think, something I think is being lost at a lot of colleges these days, where they seem more concerned with keeping students “safe” from ideas they might not like.
…To me the greatest danger facing America (and Western Civilization in general) is the attacks on free speech that we’re seeing on what seems like almost a daily basis in European countries and on college campuses here at home. We’re seeing people in Europe being thrown in jail for speech that’s deemed offensive, we’re seeing a generation of college students here who are convinced that they should never have to engage ideas or thoughts or speech that they don’t like.
I’ve said on Red Eye that I believe this is a far greater existential threat to America than ISIS or al-Qaeda could ever hope to be. Along those lines, the idea that Garry Trudeau can give a speech calling “free-expression absolutists” “childish, unserious” fanatics while accepting a journalism award – and then be defended *by journalists* – is disgraceful. The idea that he can basically say “Well, of course the people at Charlie Hebdo didn’t deserve it, but man, did you see how short their skirts were” – and then be defended *by journalists* – is obscene. If you’re not “fanatical” about free-expression, you shouldn’t be a journalist.
Yes.
[Thursday-morning update]
The closing of the Millennial mind on campus:
A successful college education replaces ignorance with insight, and insularity with confidence and engagement. With the escalating price and debt loads from tuition becoming a crippling fiscal burden to young adults, delivering on those values becomes more important than ever to their economic survival.
Unfortunately, most of our universities and colleges end up promoting ignorance, insularity, fear, and infantilism. Rather than seek out heterodox opinions, the faculties and student bodies of these schools attempt to insulate themselves from opponents through speech codes, demands for “trigger warnings,” demagoguery and shouting down of alternate views. Instead of education producing open minds, these institutions end up indoctrinating young adults on how best to keep their minds closed, limited to the boundaries of groupthink rather than freed to pursue truth.
What’s worse, they borrow tens of thousands of dollars, in undischargeable debt, for the privilege. This may be the biggest scam in American history. It’s a tragedy and a travesty.
“Deniers” And Ideologues
Judith Curry’s warning to Bjorn Stevens: “In my quest to objectively evaluate the IPCC’s attribution argument and stand up for research integrity post Climategate, I was not ‘pulled’ away from the establishment community by ‘deniers’; rather I was ‘pushed’ away by scientists who were IPCC ideologues and advocates. Watch out.”
#ProTip: Use of the phrase "climate denier" makes you look like a derriere fedora.
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) April 22, 2015
Rules For Healthy Eating
I actually tend to follow most of these. I eat mostly at home, unless I’m traveling (and even then I’ll cook, if I have a kitchen), and rarely go out. I shop the outer perimeter of the grocery store (meat and produce), and tend to avoid the inner aisles.
CSI
This is terrible. More thoughts from Instapundit:
When I was in college, I interned for a criminal defense attorney who told me that although most people, including defense lawyers, assumed that the FBI lab was a gold standard, he always sent stuff to an independent lab for verification, and half the time it came back with a different result from the FBI lab. He said he didn’t understand why more lawyers didn’t do that, since a different result in itself might produce reasonable doubt.
The amount of injustice in our “justice” system is increasingly disturbing. And there are rarely any consequences for it, except to those unjustly punished.
Gary Trudeau
Cathy Young punches up at him over freedom of expression:
Trudeau’s biases reflect a common left-wing mindset that sees the world through the lens of “privilege” and “oppression” based on race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity and/or religion: non-privileged good, privileged bad (to paraphrase George Orwell). The result is a bizarre inverse caste system in which right and wrong depend almost entirely on the parties’ places in the hierarchy of oppressions — but only in the traditional Western social order.
From this perspective, because Muslims are a “non-privileged” group in the West, criticism of even the most militant forms of Islam is bigoted “hate speech.”
The Left is insane.
The SJWs Find A New Victim Class
I’m an introvert. These people are neurotic nutcases.
In Search Of The White Male Voter
Elizabeth Price Foley points out the dangerous divisive game that the Democrats are playing.
Obeying The Law
…for people to want to obey the law for reasons that go beyond avoiding punishment, several things have to be true. First, they must generally approve of the law: Maybe not of every individual provision, but they have to believe that, in general, the laws are just rather than unfair. Second, they have to feel reasonably confident that most others will obey the law, too: People like to feel like good citizens, but they don’t like to feel like suckers. Finally, they have to feel as if the people in charge also respect the law. Examples are set at the top, and if the government treats unwelcome laws as unworthy of respect, you can expect the populace to feel the same way.
Nonsense. Laws are for the little people.
California
…is so over:
…we are producing a California that is the polar opposite of Pat Brown’s creation. True, it has some virtues: greener, cleaner, and more “progressive” on social issues. But it’s also becoming increasingly feudal, defined by a super-affluent coastal class and an increasingly impoverished interior. As water prices rise, and farms and lawns are abandoned, there’s little thought about how to create a better future for the bulk of Californians. Like medieval peasants, millions of Californians have been force[d] to submit to the theology of our elected high priest and his acolytes, leaving behind any aspirations that the Golden State can work for them too.
I don’t know what it will take to break the back of this destructive aristocracy.
[Monday-morning update]
Jerry Brown’s Oedipal struggle.
[Bumped]