A Colorado park stays closed because too many people are taking selfies with bears.
I think we should just let evolution take its course, myself.
Category Archives: Social Commentary
Social Psychology
A new paper on the lack of political diversity in the field, and its consequences.
The War On College Men
A Democrat representative from Colorado steps it up a couple notches:
The main result of adopting Polis’s approach would be to create — since we all know this policy is aimed at male students, and almost exclusively enforced against them by a university “diversity” bureaucracy in which men are wildly underrepresented — a hostile educational environment for male students. As the Pope Center for Higher Education, which conducted a study of gender representation among “gender equity enforcers,” found, “Considering that the overwhelming preponderance of sexual harassment allegations are directed by women at men, the disproportion of women to men in the positions charged with interpreting and enforcing the sexual harassment rules is a legitimate concern. Are male students who are accused of sexual harassment likely to receive fair-minded treatment in these offices?”
If even a false accusation of sexual assault is grounds for expulsion, the result is to burden student sex lives with fear. That’s doubly so when the enforcers are so heavily non-male. Men who fear that they may be so targeted — and remember, you don’t even have to have dated a woman to be falsely accused — cannot possibly enjoy college in a normal fashion.
These people are insane totalitarians. If you wanted to destroy academia, it would be hard to do a better job.
College Graduates
…don’t know much about the Constitution.
What a mess. This is shameful. They should be learning those sorts of things in high school. But instead, they’re propagandized about how we’re destroying the planet and how the US is the worst country in the history of humanity.
[Update a while later]
Related: Six questions you should ask about your children’s school:
If you want your child to grow up to be an independent thinker and a leader, take a look at the curriculum with this question in mind: Is your child being taught to learn in an objective fashion, or play political ball in a bureaucratic system?
If it’s a public school, it’s most likely the latter.
Carly
…responds to Trump.
I think she’s going to mop him up in the debate. And she’d beat Hillary like a rented mule.
Negative Cognitive Therapy
A case study in “micro-aggressions.”
These people are not going to survive well in the real world.
[Update a while later]
Popehat: A market solution to academic snowflakes.
The Case Against The GOP Establishment
Yes, this. I’ve been having a lot of this false-choice and other fallacious arguments with a lot of idiots on Twitter.
The Rise Of Cultural Libertarians
I meant to link this a couple weeks ago, but neglected to. Being cultural authoritarians is just one of the many ways that Social Justice Warriors are not liberal.
Why We Can’t Go To Mars
Yet…
Stephen Fleming gave a talk on that subject at Dragoncon this weekend (I should go some time). I haven’t looked at them yet, but his slides are on line, and I suspect there’s some good input to the Kickstarter there.
[Update a few minutes later]
Still haven’t been through slides, but I’m amused to see that he stole my graphical book-cover them in the very first one.
[Reading through]
I’d note that in his slides on the “Martian Defense Grid,” someone on the Mars panel at the AIAA meeting last week called Mars our “Jamestown.” High casualties to initial pioneers.
[Update a few more minutes later]
I wish we could show those charts of the unknown shape of the health/gravity curves to Congress. It makes a powerful case for a gravity lab, but only to people who actually give a damn about Mars. Actually, someone should show them to Elon.
Thoughts On The Donald
I haven’t had time to write much about it, but fortunately, I agree pretty much with everything Jonah writes:
Yes, I know Trump has declared himself pro-life. Good for him — and congratulations to the pro-life movement for making that the price of admission. But I’m at a total loss to understand why serious pro-lifers take him at his word. He’s been all over the place on Planned Parenthood, and when asked who he’d like to put on the Supreme Court, he named his pro-choice-extremist sister.
Ann Coulter wrote of Newt in 2011: “If all you want is to lob rhetorical bombs at Obama and then lose, Newt Gingrich — like recent favorite Donald Trump — is your candidate. But if you want to save the country, Newt’s not your guy.” Now Ann leads a chorus of people claiming that Trump is our only savior. Has Trump changed, or have Ann and her followers? Is there a serious argument behind the new thinking, or is it “because he fights!”?
It is entirely possible that conservatives sweat the details of tax policy too much. Once in office, a president must deal with political realities that render the fine print of a campaign pamphlet as useful as a battle plan after the enemy is met. But in the last month, Trump has contemplated a flat tax, the fair tax, maintaining the current progressive tax system, a carried-interest tax, a wealth tax, and doing nothing. His fans respond, “That shows he’s a pragmatist!”
No. It shows that he has absolutely no ideological guardrails whatsoever. Ronald Reagan once said, “Government is like a baby. An alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other.” Trump is close to the reverse. He’s a mouth at the wrong end of an alimentary canal spewing crap with no sense of responsibility.
In his embarrassing interview with Hugh Hewitt last night, Trump revealed he knows less than most halfway-decent D.C. interns about foreign policy. Twitter lit up with responses about how it doesn’t matter and how it was a gotcha interview. They think that Trump’s claim that he’ll just go find a Douglas MacArthur to fix the problem is brilliant. Well, I’m all in favor of finding a Douglas MacArthur, but if you don’t know anything about foreign policy, the interview process will be a complete disaster. Yes, Reagan delegated. But he knew enough to know to whom to delegate.
I am as mystified by otherwise-intelligent people supporting Trump as I was by the Perot phenomenon.