Category Archives: Social Commentary

Business, Culinary, Economics, Health, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Social Commentary

The Big Fat Silence

2 Comments

It’s time to end it:

…if one has been teaching that high-fat diets can lead to heart attacks for 30 years but then finds that this may not be true, or that, indeed, more fat and less carbohydrate in the diet may be beneficial to one’s health and longevity, feelings of discomfort can result. Subconscious mechanisms may then keep enduring convictions firmly in place for extended periods of time, despite evidence to the contrary.

And it’s hard to confront the fact that you may have been responsible for the poor health and lives cut short of people you’ve been advising.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

Hobby Lobby Boycotters

18 Comments

…aren’t crafty enough:

Culture warriors face two additional problems:

They tend to want to boycott places they never shopped at in the first place.
The company’s actual core demographic takes umbrage about the boycott and stages a much more effective counterboycott.

I can’t tell you how many times I have had some version of the following conversation:

Angry person on the Internet: Wal-Mart’s treatment of its workers is shameful. I am not going to give that company any of my business!

Me: How much did you spend at Wal-Mart before you realized its treatment of workers was shameful?

The modal answer to this query is sudden disappearance from the conversation. I’m not sure anyone has confessed to spending as much as $1,000 a year at the stores. Of those who claim to shop there, most seem to do so almost entirely on vacation in rural areas.

If this describes you, you are not Wal-Mart’s core demographic, and its executives don’t care whether you boycott the business; the loss in sales is less than they experience from miscalculating what sort of sunscreen to buy. They care very much about what their core demographic thinks, but those people are, by and large, not interested in these boycotts; they’re interested in paying 12 cents a can less for tomatoes.

As she notes, Chick-fil-A is a canonical example.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Social Commentary

Ignorant Appeals To Authority

38 Comments

“Just yell ‘Science!’“:

Where to begin? It doesn’t matter if Steyn has “no scientific credentials;” he’s perfectly capable of both spotting fraud when he sees it, and calling out a fraudulent huckster if he deems it necessary. And while it’s true that science, idealized, is “a matter of fact, not a matter of opinion,” this has no bearing on whether or not Michael Mann committed fraud. We’re not debating whether or not science is a fact-based enterprise; we’re debating whether or not Mann is a fraudulent scientist. Defining science simply has nothing to do with the debate at hand; it’s a definitional reductio combined with an argumentative non sequitur.

But that doesn’t really matter with these people. If they get backed into a difficult corner, they just repeat, by rote, the textbook definition of science; for some reason, this is supposed to absolve their pet favorite scientists of any wrongdoing, even if the scientists’ professional credibility is seriously in question. It just doesn’t make any sense to use such a rhetorical device in such a way, and it makes people look like idiots when they use it: “Hey, that scientist is correct; after all, science is fact-based.”

As I said, this is mostly a left-liberal phenomenon; progressives just love the empty-headed campaign to endlessly repeat “science” until their adversaries give up.

It is quite annoying, at the very least.