Ella Whelan: Anti-Feminism: The New Heresy

   This seems pretty much exactly right to me.
   I can't believe that people knuckle under to this stuff. And it's this outlawing of criticism, incidentally, that's helped fill contemporary feminism with such bizarre nonsense. Feminism doesn't have to be sane anymore because it doesn't have to be defensible because it doesn't have to defend itself intellectually: it's critics are simply shouted down.

Yet Another "There's No Such Thing As Political Correctness!" Piece

   So...all those speakers are "de-platforming" themselves?
   But, really...since PC is indefensible, I suppose, rhetorically speaking, their best shot really is to just insist it doesn't exist...  It's just not there at all. It's all in your head. Who you gonna believe, me or your lyin' eyes?
   Incidentally, don't read that Taub piece. It's just awful.
   (Also: the crapification/PC-ification of Vox continues apace...)

More On The Inconsistency Between Liberal Views on Incarceration and Rape

   Though this person uses the term "rape culture" apparently with a straight face, so...  

   Oh, and here's a quote:  "There is a culture of rape."  But uh...no, there really isn't.

   God, liberalism is in a tailspin. The only arguments that liberals seem willing to accept against dumb liberal positions are opposing dumb liberal arguments. It's reasonably well-known that the kinds of massive reductions in incarceration rates that the left wants can't be achieved without releasing some violent criminals. But that doesn't seem to phase the left...until somebody says "rape culture!" in response. I suppose rape is the only violent crime that counts...

Stupid Anti-Trump Arguments, Episode MCXVIII

   So liberals all over the intertubes are pooping their panties over this...
   Anybody care to try to explain to me how this counts as some monstrous outrage?

Sebastien Roblin: The U.S. Army's Tank Destroyers Were Not The Failures History Has Made Them Out To Be

This, at War is Boring, is great.

"Safe Spaces" As Terminology

   One of the many things wrong with politically correct "safe spaces" is the term. The PCs have a real knack for choosing inaccurate and annoying terminology--often because they commonly choose their jargon in order to gain illicit rhetorical advantage.
   I'm going to ignore the substance of the "safe space" dispute right now...but just think about the term for a second. Oh and: remember: these are rooms on American university campuses. These are, for example, rooms where you can go (well...maybe not you...because you may very well be a dreaded straightwhitemale...) to, for example, watch puppy videos because someone who you disagree with is speaking somewhere else on campus... Calling such places "safe" is to clearly indicate that the rest of the campus is dangerous. Which is simply false of almost every university campus in the U.S. That's bad enough without even mentioning the fact that the reason the rest of campus is being implicitly described as dangerous is that (for example) somewhere on it someone is saying something somebody might think is wrong. 
   Now...if you're really, really, really, really, really idiotically fragile, civil disagreement might be upsetting. But there is no even vaguely plausible way to describe it as dangerous.
   The "safe space" terminology is almost as extravagantly inaccurate as the "microaggression" terminology...not quite...but it's in the ballpark...

Alan Levinovitz: How Trigger Warnings Silence Religious Students

This is good.

Clinton Feints To The Body?

Tricky, if true.

Spiked: Charles Murray, "America Against Itself"

   This is pretty interesting. Here's some of it:

Collins: Do you see the culture divides and trends you identified in Coming Apart as contributing to the rise of Donald Trump? 

Murray: Yes, I do. There are two developments. First, if you look at those people who are out of the labour force – what I call the ‘new lower class’ – they are no longer participating in the major institutions of American society. To put it crudely, I think they look upon Trump as sticking it to the man in a way they find gratifying. But I think they also look upon this as entertainment. I’m exaggerating to some extent, but there’s a sentiment of ‘well, this is a really interesting reality show, look at what this guy is getting away with, with all his outrageous stuff – let’s see what happens next’
Then you have other people in the white working class who are getting married, holding jobs, playing by the rules – and they are pissed as hell. They see all of these shenanigans among the elites, the Wall Street types, for instance, with their 20,000-square-foot mansions. And most aggravating of all, they have to suffer the cognitive elite’s incredible smugness and condescension. The elites don’t even bother to hide this condescension towards the white working class. They are constantly making fun of rednecks, of evangelical Christians. And they talk about ‘flyover country’, as if nothing between the East Coast and West Coast really makes any difference. Indeed, cognitive elites are contemptuous of the working class. At the same time, working-class people, trying hard to makes ends meet, are being faced with an awful lot of competition for work from an influx of low-skilled, immigrant labour – an influx that the elites have encouraged and done nothing to stop. So, are they angry? Yeah. And is Trump a vehicle for expressing that anger? Absolutely.

And some more:

Collins: I was thinking about how, in Coming Apart, you explore how the elites seek to distance themselves from the working class. They eat so-called healthier foods, they have different child-rearing practices, and so on. Then, from afar, they preach their preferred ways to the working class, as if they know better. The elites may no longer preach traditional civic virtues, as you note in Coming Apart, but they are still preaching, in a way. Only now they’re preaching about health, parenting and other things. 

Murray: They are preaching. They are legislating. They are creating policies. The elites (on both the right and the left) do not get excited about low-skill immigration. Let’s face it, if you are members of the elite, immigration provides you with cheap nannies, cheap lawn care, and so on. There are a variety of ways in which it is a case of ‘hey, it’s no skin off my back’ to have all of these new workers. The elites are promulgating policies for which they do not pay the price. That’s true of immigration, that’s true of education. When they support the teachers’ unions in all sorts of practices that are terrible for kids, they don’t pay that price. Either they send their kids to private schools, or they send their kids to schools in affluent suburbs in which they, the parents, really do have a lot of de facto influence over how the school is run.
So they don’t pay the price for policy after policy. Perhaps the most irritating to me – and here we are talking about preaching – is how they are constantly criticising the working class for being racist, for seeking to live in neighbourhoods in which whites are the majority. The elites live in zipcodes that are overwhelmingly white, with very few blacks and Latinos. The only significant minorities in elite zipcodes are East and South Asians. And, as the American sociologist Andrew Hacker has said, Asians are ‘honorary whites’. The integration that you have in elite neighbourhoods is only for the model minority, not for other minorities. That’s a kind of hypocrisy, to call working-class whites ‘racist’ for doing exactly the same thing that the elites do. It’s terrible.

   Of course, as anyone on the left will tell you, CHARLES MURRAY IS A BIG FAT RACIST BECAUSE REASONS... But, then, as we've also been told, everyone is a big fat racist...so...Murray's no worse than any of the rest of us poor sinners born with the ineliminable super-sin of racism in our souls... Deny that you've got it, and it just means that YOU ARE A SUPER DUPER RACIST.

   Anyway, the contempt point is a really good one. I completely agree. The "elites" loathe lower-class whites, and, as Murray notes, they don't even bother to hide it. Contempt is a powerful damn thing.

You Don't Have To Stand For The National Anthem

   So, whatever on this Kaepernick fellow.
   There's no law that says you have to stand for the national anthem. He didn't do it. Whatever. I stand for the national anthem but sit resolutely for the odious Pledge of Allegiance. And people are, of course, free not to...I dunno...buy his jerseys or whatever. It's a free country, more or less.
   Maybe the question really is: how good are his reasons for not standing? But I don't know the answer because I don't care about this.

Chait: Chicago and the Anti-Anti-PC Left

Chait is on-target, as usual.

"How 'Open Borders' Became An Illiberal [Battle?] Cry"

   I think this is pretty good, though I'd have to think about it more.
   When I was younger I was extremely sympathetic to cosmopolitanism. Now I'm not so sure. I think we in the West pretty much hit the jackpot, culturally speaking. I've never been in any way anti-immigration, though I do worry about barely-checked illegal immigration, and immigration that happens so quickly that immigrants don't have time to assimilate. I also worry about overpopulation...though I'd be just as happy to fight that with lower birth rates as with lower immigration rates... Both would be good...but neither is going to happen any time soon. Not until the problem is out of control, I expect. So anyway, no reason to bring that into it.
   Like Furedi, I think that "diversity" and "multiculturalism" have good versions and bad versions, and I suspect that some elements of the far-ish left are committed to bad versions for bad reasons.  
    And I, too, noticed this:

US vice-president Joe Biden expressed this sentiment last year, when he welcomed the Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff to Washington. Hesaid that ‘those of us of European stock’ will be a minority by 2017, adding ‘that’s a good thing’. But why should a change in the ethnic or cultural composition of a society be a ‘good thing’, or a ‘bad thing’, for that matter?

    Uhhh.... Nobody would stand for a VP saying "it's good that Asians are a minority in this country," or "we should strive to keep blacks a minority." Why should we want whites to be a minority? Maybe the answer is: it's not good for any single racial group to outnumber all the others. I don't think that's crazy... But I do worry about the extreme anti-white racism of the contemporary PC left. When combined with its avowed hatred of Western civilization--not to mention its sworn enmity to (actual) liberalism... I do get concerned that "diversity" and "multiculturalism" are possibly being used as weapons.

   And:

In a previous speech, in Morocco in December 2014, Biden said the impending minority status of Americans of European stock would make America a stronger nation. ‘The secret that people don’t know is our diversity is the reason for our incredible strength’, he said. Forget America’s democracy, Constitution, liberal ethos, creativity or entrepreneurship – apparently the real secret of America’s strength is its diversity! Of course, a society open to immigration is likely to benefit from the mixing of cultures and ideas. But when diversity is transformed into a standalone medium for change, it can become a political weapon, and be used to bypass the national will. For Juncker, weakening national borders is beneficial because it serves his project of European federalism. Diversity is the antidote to nationalism.

   I'm no fan of nationalism...though this all makes me realize that you'd think that 'nationalism' would have at least one meaning meaning basically: in favor of nation-states... Because I am in favor of nation-states... And sometimes 'nationalism' is basically used as a synonym for 'patriotism'...so I guess I am a nationalist, then, to at least some extent...

   Anyway, I have to admit, I'm a little skittish about what seems to me like a mad rush to transform the culture and the nation on the basis of not-very-well-worked-out ideas.

   Furthermore, I've been saying for quite some time that some liberals say and do a lot of things that can only be made sense of in light of a presupposition that we should have open borders (fences are bad, deportations are bad, increased border patrols are bad, sanctuary cities are good, etc. etc.) Open borders positions are fairly common on the PC left, and the PC left seems to currently have a lot of influence over liberalism... It's hard to gauge such things, but it kinda seems to me that the open-borders position is creeping rightward, toward the liberal center, becoming more of a mainstream liberal idea...I could be wrong. I'm probably wrong. I hope I'm wrong. 

   Anyway, a lot of this is just thinking out loud.

More Trouble Replicating Famous Psychology Experiments

   I typically just dismiss these kinds of nutty-sounding results out of hand unless they are confirmed by meta-studies. So this stuff doesn't actually surprise me all that much.

Justin Trudeau is a Twit

Wow that guy's an embarrassment to the Great White North.
His newest twittery: poverty is sexist!
(This is the only thing I found I could link to that wasn't insufferable lefty gushing about this nonsense. No real need to watch it all.)
Jeez, I don't even know what he's like on policy...he's just flaky as hell.

Is everybody getting stupider or does it just seem that way?
Maybe it's because both the right and the left are stupid now. I swear liberals used to not be stupid when I was a kid...uh..right? RIGHT???

Kevin Gannon: UChicago's Anti-Safe Spaces Letter Isn't About Academic Freedom. It's About Power

   Wow this is bad.
   I mean...not irrevocably-wrong-about-everything / rotten-to-the-core bad...if, y'know, that's your standard...
   But really bad.
   Or, at least: it's really bad on one read/skim. I can't even bear to read this shit anymore it's all so bad. And lemme tellya, I try to be open to the opposing viewpoints on this issue, and have tried to make their case for them in a couple of places. Even as horrifically disastrous as I think it is.
   The only thing I'm going to say in any detail about this is: it's long been a theme on the extreme left that all political issues are actually about power, and appeals to rightness / justice are mere stalking-horses. Like so many theses beloved by radicals, that one comes and goes as it's convenient. Power is all there is...all else is an illusion...except for, y'know, the "social justice" left ...they're... somehow...exempt...they only alone have escaped to tell thee... But those they disagree with are only motivated by power... Magically, the thesis that everyone is always only motivated by power actually ends up becoming everyone not on the left is always only motivated by power...
   So...trying to stop a minority of radicals from dictating what the majority can think and discuss...see...that's wrong. See? SEE??

David Harsanyi: Have Lots of Children; It's Good for the Planet

   This is a truly awful article. I mean: use-it-in-your-critical-thinking-class level awful.
   Actually, I sometimes wonder whether that's a big mistake that we make in teaching CT classes...I sometimes find myself picking really, really terrible articles for students to analyze. Do that too much, and they don't get the requisite practice trying to figure out stuff that's closer to the mean.
   Articles like this do constitute good examples, though, in that they contain such egregious errors, and those errors are typical in certain respects.

Federal Judge Says UNC Can't Enforce NC Transgender Restroom Restrictions

   I can't really evaluate this decision on its technical legal merits, but just from a layperson's perspective, I'd say that this may be the right decision. Everybody calm down, and let's return to the status quo ante until we can figure this out. I'm currently under the impression that sex-segregation of public facilities like restrooms and locker rooms has traditionally been an informal, non-legal matter. If that's true, then let's return to that while we consider the matter.
   Of course the arguments for the left's new theory of transgenederism are, logically/philosophically speaking, a complete disaster. The Department of Justice has adopted them and made them even worse, arguing, in part, that sex itself--in fact a purely biological property--is (in humans) partly constituted by "gender identity," a concept that is either incoherent or nearly so. The special pleading with respect to this topic is enough to give a rational person an aneurysm. We're told that we must adopt a nonsensical conception of sex, completely at odds with the actual concept, according to which sex is determined in the ordinary ways in all (sexual) living creatures...except for humans...in which it's determined by "gender identity." They actually seem to be arguing that it's determined by some [combination] of sex and "gender identity"...but really it's the latter that's running the show. That makes not the least bit of sense. You can, if you want, argue that there's sex and there's "gender identity," but you can't argue that "gender identity" (partially?) determines sex. For one thing, ad hominem, the people pushing this theory are deeply committed to a sex/ gender distinction--sex and gender are supposed to be very different things. But advocates simply employ and reject the distinction ad libitum. More substantively, this is like arguing that, because some overweight people identify as healthy, weight in humans is determined (or determined in part) by "health identity." (Note: yes, overweight and non-healthy aren't the same thing; that's part of the point.) You can try to push the point that "health identity" is a thing if you want...but you cannot argue that it determines weight, and you especially can't pretend that the simple, physical property of weight magically changes into something else for humans.
   And the whole thing is complicated again by the fact that we're being told that the special magical property that determines sex in humans is "gender identity," where that means whatever the PC left wants it to mean at the moment...but basically means: what you think you are. There are no properties that you have just because you think you have them (with the possible trick Cartesian exception of thinking thing.) That's not the way real properties work. You're not tall just because you think you're tall, you're not weak just because you think you're weak, you don't have malaria just because you think you have malaria, you're not the seventh son of a seventh son just because you think you're the seventh son of a seventh son. Someone might object that beliefs can influence certain kinds of properties. Someone might become a failure because they antecedently think they're a failure. But self-fulfilling prophecy cases are completely different. That's not being a failure just because you think you are; its becoming a failure through a fairly ordinary chain of actual events initiated by your belief that you're a failure. Nobody thinks that a male can become female just by believing it--or they shouldn't. A male might believe he's a female, and this belief might set in motion a chain of events that leads to surgery or whatever--but that's a very different thing.
   The whole thing is a huge goddamned mess. It's just appalling to see so many liberals--and the U.S. government--fall for such an obvious tangle of utter bullshit.
   There are much more reasonable arguments one might make, too. Here's one: part of the progress of the West has been based on progressively eliminating segregation based on biology. See: the elimination of segregation by race in the U.S. Furthermore, part of the progress of the West has been constituted by elimination of legal and cultural segregation of the sexes: at one time, men and women couldn't swim together, or, if unmarried, even be alone together. Surely when those cultural restrictions were eliminated, discomfort ensued. But ultimately it was all part of the liberal project of de-dumbifying society. Integrated restrooms is the next step in that.
   I tend to be on the other side of that disagreement--but, then, this is the kind of thing that's difficult to be objective about when you've lived your life the other way. At any rate: I'm on the other side, but I feel the force of this argument. If this were the argument being made, I'd take it very seriously.
   But the magical argument about men becoming women by wishing it were so...that's honestly just nonsense on nonsense on nonsense. It says, in effect: keep public facilities like restrooms segregated by sex--but pretend that people magically become the opposite sex in virtue of wanting to do things like use the other restroom. It's really not even a close call. That's just a terrible tangle of confusions--so far as I can tell, anyway.

Federal Judge Says UNC Can't Enforce NC Transgender Restroom Restrictions

   I can't really evaluate this decision on its technical legal merits, but just from a layperson's perspective, I'd say that this may be the right decision. Everybody calm down, and let's return to the status quo ante until we can figure this out. I'm currently under the impression that sex-segregation of public facilities like restrooms and locker rooms have traditionally been an informal, non-legal matter. If that's true, then let's return to that while we consider the matter.
   Of course the arguments for the left's new theory of transgenederism are, logically/philosophically speaking, a complete disaster. The Department of Justice has adopted them and made them even worse, arguing, in part, that sex--in fact a purely biological property--is (in humans) partly constituted by "gender identity," a concept that is either incoherent or nearly so. The special pleading with respect to this topic is enough to give a rational person an aneurysm. We're told that we must adopt a nonsensical conception of sex, completely at odds with the actual concept, according to which sex is determined in the ordinary ways in all (sexual) living creatures...except for humans...in which it's determined by "gender identity." They actually seem to be arguing that it's determined by some function of sex and "gender identity"...but really it's the latter that's running the show. That makes not the least bit of sense. You can, if you want, argue that there's sex and there's "gender identity," but you can't argue that "gender identity" (partially?) determines sex. For one thing, ad hominem, the people pushing this theory are deeply committed to a sex/ gender distinction--sex and gender are supposed to be very different things. But advocates simply employ and reject the distinction ad libitum. More substantively, this is like arguing that, because some overweight people identify as healthy, weight in humans is determined (or determined in part) by "health identity." (Note: yes, overweight and non-healthy aren't the same thing; that's part of the point.) You can try to push the point that "health identity" is a thing if you want...but you cannot argue that it determines weight, and you especially can't pretend that the simple, physical property of weight magically changes into something else for humans.
   And the whole thing is complicated again by the fact that we're being told that the special magical property that determines sex in humans is "gender identity," where that means whatever the PC left wants it to mean at the moment...but basically means: what you think you are. There are no properties that you have because you think you have them (with the possible trick Cartesian exception of thinking thing.) That's not the way real properties work. You're not tall just because you think you're tall, you're not weak just because you think you're weak, you don't have malaria just because you think you have malaria, you're not the seventh son of a seventh son just because you think you're the seventh son of a seventh son. Someone might object that beliefs can influence certain kinds of properties. Someone might become a failure because they antecedently think they're a failure. But self-fulfilling prophecy cases are completely different. That's not being a failure just because you think you are; its becoming a failure through a fairly ordinary chain of actual events initiated by your belief that you're a failure. Nobody thinks that a male can become female just by believing it--or they shouldn't. A male might believe he's a female, and this belief might set in motion a chain of events that leads to surgery or whatever--but that's a very different thing.
   The whole thing is a huge goddamned mess. It's just appalling to see so many liberals--and the U.S. government--fall for such an obvious tangle of utter bullshit.
   There are much more reasonable arguments one might make, too. Here's one: part of the progress of the West has been based on progressively eliminating segregation based on biology. See: the elimination of Jim Crow in the U.S. Furthermore, part of the progress of the West has been constituted by elimination of enforced legal segregation of the sexes: at one time, men and women could swim together, or, if unmarried, even be alone together. Surely when those cultural restrictions were eliminated, discomfort ensued. But ultimately it was all part of the liberal project. Integrated restrooms is the next step in that.
   I tend to be on the other side of that disagreement--but, then, this is the kind of thing that's difficult to be objective about when you've lived your life the other way. At any rate: I'm on the other side, but I feel the force of this argument. If this were the argument being made, I'd take it very seriously.
   But the magical argument about men becoming women by wishing it were so...that's honestly just nonsense on nonsense on nonsense. It's really not even a close call. It's just a terrible tangle of confusions.

Drum On Chicago and "Safe Spaces"

Reasonable, as usual.

PC Doublethink, Chicago, and the Ugly Death of The New Republic

ugh.
   Sad and stupid all the way around.
   RIP TNR...we miss ya. Doubly sad that this lefty braindead zombie simulacrum of you is shuffling around with your name on it fighting for the Dark Side.
 
   Ok, calming down a bit. As I've argued, I think "trigger warnings"--preferably stripped of the PC terminology--aren't necessarily bad if used and thought of correctly. As with some other PC stuff, the core idea wouldn't be so bad if it were represented as a permission or suggestion rather than an obligation. It's largely a matter of degree--or so I currently think. The more upsetting and outlandish the material is, the more reasonable it is to give people a heads-up that they're going to be exposed to it. The problem with the PC / SJ nonsense is that, as is so often the case, they take that basically sane idea and say a bunch of crazy things about it.
   If Smith is in my class, and I know that Smith's whole family was horrifically eaten by bears right in front of him at the age of five...then it's a good idea to tell Smith that we'll be watching The Edge in class.  (I really like that movie, incidentally, despite it's mamettishness. Also, I kind of don't approve of showing movies in class. That's butt-ass lazy right there. Anyway.) But the PCs demand "trigger warnings" about any topic about which they can make up a story about how someone somewhere might be in some way upset by...uh...it? That sentence is not even close to being grammatical.  Is there any quality control around this shithole blog at all? Jesus.
   Similarly with "safe spaces." The terminology is tainted irrevocably by PC nuttiness--e.g. their insistence that universities must have rooms showing puppy videos if someone, anyone, on campus is saying something, anything that might upset PC-approved sensibilities... But there are distant cousins of the idea that aren't insane. They're too distant to constitute defenses of the idea itself...but critics of "safe spaces" shouldn't make the mistake of trying to reject all versions of the idea in toto. That's a tactical error.
   Anyway, what about what's-his-name's claim that Chicago's anti-"trigger-warning" stance is an attack on academic freedom? I call bullshit. It's not a ban--it's not a decree about what professors can or can't or must do. It's a statement of principle, in effect saying that the institution will not mandate such things. Things might become complicated when it comes to "safe spaces" if some professors want to ban certain types of discussion in their classes...but I suppose we'll have to see how that plays out. Anyway, I'm not currently feeling very charitable, so I'm going to say that what's-his-name is basically arguing that it's a violation of academic freedom for a university to stand up for the idea of the university. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, what's-yer-name. To paraphrase the immortal Mark Twain: what's-his-name has some responses he could make here, but never mind what he might say--I'm not arguing his case.

The University of Chicago Stands Up For The Idea Of the University

   In a letter to incoming freshmen, Chicago expresses its commitment to freedom of inquiry and expression, and explicitly rejects "safe spaces," "trigger warnings," and "deplatforming."
   I had to make hard decisions about where to go to grad school. One of the schools I turned down was Chicago--not something a kid from a farm in the Ozarks who went to a (basically) open-admission land-grant college with two directions in its name does lightly. Though I've always been happy with my decision about where to go, I also think fondly about the places that were willing to give me a chance, even though I couldn't accept the offers.  Anyway, there's no point to this. I'm weirdly fond of all sorts of universities for weird reasons. I just like universities, basically. But I'm feeling particularly warm and fuzzy about Chicago right now, as they seem to be taking point in this battle.
   So good on, Chicago. I think I'm gonna send 'em some money.

What Is The Alt-Right?

   The left throws around the 'racist' epithet so indiscriminately that I tend to ignore it anymore. But Michelle Goldberg is reasonable, and basically nothing here sounds good. I've not read Milo saying such things, and he's the only guy I know of who I think would be categorized as "alt-right"...but anyway...not good.
   OTOH, I suspect a certain amount of liberal hyperbole and misrepresentation. I think it should be expected that people will react against irrational liberal pieties...that's what always happens with irrational pieties... When everything is racist and racism is the worst possible sin, a sin of inestimable magnitude...people are going to start pushing back. Or poking back, anyway. And that's usually going to take the form of humor and insolence. Hell, I think leftier liberals and the PC left are hilarious / disgusting, and that their attitudes about racism are commonly over the top and, consequently, ripe for ridicule. That's not constitutive of racism. The fault for such ridicule lies with those who have elevated racism to the status of Super Sin. It's worse than murder! Worse than genocide! Worse than...everything! My evil father is a racist POS. I grew up hating racism with every fiber of my being. But the contemporary clown show is too much even for me. Between the desperate virtue signalling and the actually sincere beliefs that even the tiniest infelicities with respect to race are moral crimes of incaculable magnitude...it's just not possible to resist the urge to farble the lefties. And I'm sure that's the sort of thing that's up with many on the "alt-right."
   But, as Goldberg shows, that's not all that's up with them, unfortunately.

Coulter contra Trump

   So apparently Anne Coulter has just published a book titled In Trump We Trust, if you can believe that. And like two days later he changed his tune on illegal immigration (or "immigration" as its known on the left). Much bitterness ensued.
   It's petty to comment on nonsense like this.
   Yup.
   Definitely petty.

"Stop White People" RA Training At SUNY-Binghamton

   It's not completely clear what's up with this...but it's the kind of thing that pisses me--and a lot of other people--off. 

   Needless to say, this is an inconsequential bit of racism compared to what a lot of people of other races have had to put up with. But it's not the real effects of this that anger me. Rather, it's the fact that such racism is officially sanctioned. Racism against a lot of non-white groups is, apparently, still a significant problem. But the weight of our official theories and institutions is against it. Basically, it's pretty common now to think that--other than a rapist or a child-abuser--the worst thing you can be is a racist. Except, of course, if you're racist against whites. Then--at least at universities--that's ok. (In fact, of course, the PC / SJ crew has tried to do a bit of their usual terminological futzing around, trying to argue that it is a conceptual impossibility for non-whites to be racist... Of course that's patently false.)

   It's especially galling that at universities--where you can be classified as evil if even one person can find even one interpretation of even one thing you said even once that is "racist"--outright anti-white racism is not only tolerated, but officially promoted. I'm not for being a whiner about such things.

   I'm not for being a whiner about such things...but it's the fact that the shit is officially sanctioned by professors and administrators that I think we can reasonably get ticked off about.

   I have so say, I also worry that this sort of thing might have real effects that are bad. Ideas matter. IMO American blacks are heroes in many ways, and one of those ways is: they've never seemed to generally be as angry at whites as one might expect them to be. The PC / SJ left seems to be intent on changing that. Not in the service of actual justice, and not in the service of improving the lot of blacks in America. But, rather, merely for the goal of fanning the flames of racism and anger against a group that they despise.

de Boer: The Contradiction Between Progressive Attitudes To (a) Sex Crimes and (b) All Other Crimes

   Insomnia's bad, so brain no worky...but this seems really, really good on a first read. I'm amazed and annoyed that I didn't think of this. Especially since it's very clear to me that (a) the left is too soft on violent crime in general and (b) it is too hard--hard to the point of insanity--on accusations of sexual assault and domestic abuse. They're obviously wrong about both things...but it's hard to even make the case that they're wrong about something without an outright inconsistency. "Progressives", it seems to me, generally won't admit to any error other than not being progressive enough... But what de Boer's argument shows is that they've gone too far to the left on at least one of the two issues. In fact, of course, they've gone too far to the left on both.
   I've noted before from time to time that "progressives"* are largely delusional about "the carceral state." There's no way to get the prison population down to levels that will make progressives happy without releasing a whole lot of violent criminals. Just releasing non-violent drug offenders will not do the trick. Progressives speak as if having a lot of people in prison is clearly, all things considered, an evil thing. It isn't. It depends on how many violent criminals you have in your society. It's bad to have a lot of violent criminals, of course...but given that you have  lot of violent criminals, it's better to have them locked up than not. Having lots of people in prison may show that you should be doing things differently--doing them in a way that helps bring down rates of violent crime (to the extent that that can be done with public policy). But it may be basically a good thing given your real and relevant current options.
   And, of course, the left is utterly crazy about sexual assault right now, as the way its being treated on campuses makes clear. The "listen and believe" madness really is off the loony scale. And this can't be blamed merely on the fringiest fringe of the academic left--the DoJ is enforcing something akin to that view as law on all public universities.
   How the contradiction escaped me is beyond me.
   At any rate, I just want to point out: since both views are crazy, we can't resolve the contradiction by adopting one of them and adjusting the other accordingly. Neither will work. The view that it's better to have violent criminals victimizing the innocent than it is to have high incarcerations rates is daft. And so is the trendy view of sexual assault according to which all accusations should be believed, burdens of proof on accusations should be radically lightened, and "victims" can decide months or hears after the fact that sex was non-consensual.
   Both views have to go.

* I've just decided to go ahead and use "progressive" to mean, roughly, bad liberal. Or rather, to mean something like: bad very lefty liberal or member of the rightward edge of the PC/identity politics left or liberal too weenieish to defend the term 'liberal' after it became a term of abuse.

Jessim, "Truth In Stereotypes"

link

"Report Debunks 'Born That Way' Narrative And 'Transgender' Label For Kids

   I haven't read the full paper yet, but the summary at The Federalist sounds pretty reasonable to me.
   Of course I'm merely a reasonably-well-informed layperson with respect to the medical stuff. But on the philosophical side, there's really no doubt that the left's theory of transgenderism simply doesn't work.
   The report mentions something I've noticed before, which is that institutions have begun, in effect, encouraging children to believe that they're transgendered. That will be denied. The response will be: we've merely made it easy for kids to report what they actually are. But this isn't so. For one thing (and it sounds like this is one of McHugh and Mayer's points), kids really aren't one way or another with respect to sex, gender and so-called "gender identity" (I'm a broken record, but: that's a largely incoherent quasi-concept) at very young ages. Kids are simply indeterminate in many respects. (We're all indeterminate in some respects...but kids are much more so, and especially in these respects.) And there's a blurry line between mere acceptance and encouragement. In effect, the left is putting institutions and subcultures in place that say to kids:  "Are you transgendered? Are you? It's ok. It makes you special. There's nothing wrong with it. It could explain some of the uncertainty and anxiety you feel about these adult things you don't understand (sex and gender). Do you think you might be this special kind of person?"
   First, note that the official line on the left is that all of this is "socially constructed." That quasi-concept is a disaster of confusions...but, ignoring that fact and just aiming to cut the knot: if that's right, then social encouragement is tantamount to making children transgendered. Add to that another component of the left's theory: that being transgendered is a living hell...and you've got institutions that should be expected to have the effect of destroying kids' lives.
   Second, imagine that the far right were doing this with...I dunno...demonic possession or something. Or the ability to speak in tongues. No one would stand for that. Yet here we have the left taking an incoherent, barely-understood, entirely outlandish, unscientific, unproven theory...and building it in to schools and government.
   Third, at the borderline of illness, society can basically create such conditions. Somebody (Ian Hacking? Nicholas Rescher? Somebody?) used to write about this "disease" that suddenly gripped Europe in, like, the 19th century, where people would spontaneously walk extremely long distances--to other towns, to other countries. Just out of the blue, and with no explanation, with the trappings of illness (I don't know what happened...I never intended to do that...etc.) It was, in effect, a psychological illness fad. That's very probably what transgenderism is. There's little doubt that the trendiness of the thing is influencing some teenagers to claim transgenderism--"transtrenders" is the online term for them. And if we establish institutions that encourage it, we'll get more of it. That's not a complicated point.
   One important thing that undergirds all this is the real point that all this nonsense is ignoring: the old-school feminist point that the link between sex and gender is a lot more arbitrary than we used to think. It should be no surprise that there are feminine men and masculine women. And there really is nothing wrong with either of those things. What the left's theory of transgenderism gets wrong is: it gets the point almost exactly backwards. Instead of preaching acceptance for feminine men and masculine women, it preaches, in effect, that a feminine man is a woman and a masculine woman is a man. And that's batshit crazy. That would have been considered the bigoted view five years ago. In fact it is a bigoted view. And that's probably why the left's theory adds in the "gender identity" stuff--the relativistic/subjectivistic heart of the theory, inconsistent with all other parts, that says that you are whatever you think you are. That component allows it to avoid the uncomfortable and bigoted implication that all effeminate men are women. The theory leaves it all up to the individual...but then reifies the individual's subjective preferences and impressions, blowing them radically out of proportion and attributing to them consequences that they cannot have.
   This report will be rejected by the left because its conclusions are politically incorrect, and because it's by McHugh, who the left demonizes. And, hell, I haven't read it and don't know the medical and psychological stuff. So it might be bad. But--and here's the part that should worry everyone--there is no doubt that it will be attacked and rejected because there is a strong bias in favor of the left's theory of transgenderism that will lead to the rejection of any politically incorrect conclusion on this subject. Politics really does strongly infect psychology, especially its less-scientific quarters. And everybody should be worried about that.
   But, anyway, this, together with Rebecca Riley-Cooper's recent "Gender Is Not A Spectrum" gives me hope that maybe--just maybe--the resistance might manage to defeat the PC effort to suppress discussion of these issues. That's the big meta-problem here, as I keep repeating: serious discussion is verboten. To question any facet of the left's theory of transgenderism is to be "transphobic," which is a new kind of bigotry and the new worst thing you can be. It's kind of the left's version of Christianity's you are evil and will suffer eternal damnation if you don't believe. But that's been turbocharged to you are evil if you have any doubts at all. The former is a particularly fallacious ad baculum. We don't even have a name for the newer fallacy...but we really do need one...

Missouri: Clinton, Trump Virtually Tied?

Wow

Did Welfare Reform Work?

Either yes or no.

Texas Judge Temporarily Blocks Obama's Transgender Bathroom Directive

This is probably the right decision.  The position makes no sense, the arguments of the DoJ are a disaster, and this is exactly the kind of important social change that needs to be thought about carefully over a relatively long period of time rather than being rammed through.

Eli Stokols: What If Trump Won't Accept Defeat?

   One thing I disagree with in here is the claim that no candidate or party has ever questioned the legitimacy of the outcome of a national election. I'd say that's exactly what the GOP was doing in 2000. The Democrats' central argument was: We should count every vote and cheerfully abide by the outcome because such an attitude is central to the very idea of American democracy. The Republicans' central argument was: Give us the Presidency. Now.
   The GOP made it very clear that there were not going to give up, and that they did not give a rat's ass who had actually won, nor who had the most reasonable case. They got their supporters fired, up, they put together astroturf riots, they intimidate ballot-counters, they intimated that worse violence might be in the offing. Turns out they mostly won anyway...but what's really telling is what they were gearing up to do before that became clear. After Florida 2000, the GOP should not be considered a serious party with an actual commitment to democracy. And yet here we are...
   At any rate: it's basically happened before.
   I've dismissed worries about Trump "refusing to accept defeat" (as if he's going to have a choice...) up until now. But I started reflecting on Florida 2000 this morning, and now I'm all agitated and concerned. Not that I think they can do anything about the outcome...but because I think they can yet again weak our political institutions by casting doubt on them. In the past they've been perfectly willing to undermine American democracy and the faith and good will that sustains it in order to achieve narrow political goals. That's what Rush Limbaugh's career is built on. They'll be willing to do it again this time. They're tantrum could be epic...but it won't be contentless; it'll aim to convince people that our democracy is rotten.
   And that's the heart and soul of irrationality: giving up on the general because it doesn't yield a result you like in the particular. In this case: we won't get the (maniacal, idiot) president we want...so fuck the whole institution of American democracy. This is one way you know you're dealing with extremist lunatics: they refuse to be bound by universalization principles. They want to think what they want and do what they want in each particular case...and consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds... Any attempt to bring order to the chaos of their thoughts is just another sign that You Don't Get It.
   Well, now I'm all pissed off about something that hasn't happened and may not do so.

Anti-Trump Violence In Minnesota

Not showing up anywhere in the "MSM"

Website Issues Apology After "Triggering" Readers With Positive *Sausage Party* Review

At Heat Street
Make sure to skim through the tearful apology itself. (Archived, so no hits)
It's actually somewhat difficult to believe that these people are being serious...but they certainly seem to be. One of the things they are apologizing for seems to be that a white person wrote the review, but one of the characters in the movie is an animated "Latinx" lesbian taco.
So...as you can see...there's...I dunno...all sorts of privilege or...uh...I'm going to go with...uh...rape culture? Or...something?
Anyway, though they're apparently serious, they also seem to be unaware that they are parodies of themselves. Reading stuff written by these people is like reading something written by Scientologists. They're living in a fantasy world, obsessed with the details about the interactions of non-existent things and categories.

Big in Japan

Ahhh...ignoring politics currently.
This is better.

New Political Science Initiative Calls For Evaluating Research Before Knowing The Results

This is very, very exciting.
(h/t Statisticasaurus rex)

Is Trump's Charlotte Speech Trouble?

   There were several parts of that speech that would have grabbed me pretty hard if given by a sane candidate. I'm concerned that there may be an actual "pivot,", and that it could be trouble. There were also the standard crazy parts, though. Maybe instead of gaining saner people he'll just lose crazier ones. But his support seems pretty inelastic...
   At any rate, I'm less sanguine about this race than I was a day ago.

Not Ransom

   My guess is that the cash sent to Iran isn't ransom. Apparently there were two different streams of negotiation that didn't cross--which is even less like ransom than I'd guessed. I'd guessed that there was one big negotiation with lots of parts, and no 1-to-1 correspondence between any two parts on different sides. My not-very-well-thought-out view was that the best question to ask was: is this an established, accepted way to negotiate? Have such deals historically been categorized as ransom payments? This is the kind of case Republicans love to scream about. They're well-known for holding Obama to a different standard, and complaining about things he does even though they happily tolerate them in Republican administrations.
   But if the two different streams of negotiation story is true, then the cash is even less like ransom than I'd thought. In fact, if the streams of negotiation really were fully distinct, it simply isn't ransom at all.
   And withholding a payment negotiated for other reasons until hostages are released is not paying ransom.
   This is all pretty clear as far as I can tell. Of course I'm assuming that the administration's account is true--but that's a different issue.
   Republicans won't believe it, but their ODS is basically terminal at this point. I doubt most people will believe it, either. But that's a political/rhetorical matter that doesn't go to the truth of the administration's account, obviously. They're already more angry about this non-ransom payment than they've ever been about Reagan's actual ransom payments.

Some French Towns Ban "Burkini"

I sorta understand the rationale...but damn, Jack, ya can't micromanage how people look. Of course the religion is micromanaging how women look...but their participation is voluntary. It's up to them. I might try to talk them out of it, but legislating against it seems kinda nutty.

Might Trump Simply Have Peaked At The Right Time For the Primary?

   The GOP primary race seemed to be one peaking candidate after another...could it have been that Trump was just the one who peaked at the right time? Maybe he isn't really a window into the soul of the Republican base... Maybe he just happened to be in the right place at the right time.
   Though his peak did seem to last longer...though the guy peaking at the right time would probably have a longer peak...
   Just thinking out loud.

Tom Nichols: How The P.C. [Thought?] Police Propelled Donald Trump

   Not sure how much of a factor this was...but I do suspect that it was a factor. I mean, P.C. (or "social justice"-ism, or whatever) is very, very bad. And it drips (or shrieks) with disdain for all who disagree with it. Trump is the only candidate speaking out against this. Liberals are largely either on board with P.C., indifferent or ambivalent to it, or silent about it out of groupthink and/or fear of "shaming." Obama has spoken out against it, but, honestly, not a lot. I thought what he said was very pointed and right on the mark...but, though a word to the wise may be sufficient, a word to the loons is not.
   As I've said, I suspect that Trump will make the P.C. problem worse--it's firmly ensconced in the cultural salients controlled by liberals, and anything Trump likes will be anathema to most liberals for a long, long time. Nevertheless, he's basically right--perhaps accidentally so, perhaps not--about the PC problem. I say "basically" because I'm not sure he's really right about anything other than  PC: bad I'm not even sure he knows what it is. He indiscriminately labels anything left of conservatism as PC, which isn't even close to being right. And that's another way in which he's helping them out--he's reinforcing the myth that PC is just ordinary liberalism. (Contrast this with Obama's very pointed remarks against the very heart of PC-dom).

Transgender Bathroom Access In All Federal Buildings Based on Incoherent Rationale: Will Unisex Restrooms Become Mandatory?

   I'm not sure what to think about the actual policy, but the rationale is based on a blatant blurring of the sex/gender distinction. This is basically what the gender studies left has been doing for years now: insisting on the sex/gender distinction when it helps lead to the conclusion they want, and ignoring it when it doesn't.
   The point is that no law against discrimination on account of sex entails anything about gender (except insofar as there is some middling-strong correlation of gender with sex). However, the most salient point here is that, if this stands, it seems extremely unlikely that we can legally maintain sex-segregated restrooms and locker rooms. Which means that a liberal/leftist activist DoJ (and DoE) obsessed with a tiny minority of people, deploying a false--and, in fact, incoherent--theory of transgenderism is using patently invalid reasoning to achieve a pre-determined, ideologically-driven conclusion that, if applied consistently, will force us to give up an institution that is based in important biological realities, that is not obviously discriminatory, and that most of us will be very uncomfortable to see the end of.
   I do think that there are cogent arguments against sex-segregated public restrooms. I suspect that they are weaker than the opposing arguments--but they're non-trivial. What's so infuriating about all of this to me, however, is that most of the arguments being used to extend the arguments in the transgender direction don't work at all, and commit us to crazy versions of relativism / social constructionism. If applied consistently, that is. Though another thing that's afoot here is a certain ad hoc approach to these matters. Certain conclusions are deemed correct prior to evaluation of the reasoning, then arguments are accepted ad hoc in order to persuade people that the conclusions are rational. Of course accepting an incoherent metaphysics with respect to practical matters does give at lest some kind of rhetorical boost to those metaphysical positions. And courts may not be as willing to accept inconsistency once the first step has been taken...so if these propositions about sex-segregation get accepted, there's a decent chance that courts will order us to take them to their logical (in the narrow sense) conclusions. That is: public facilities fully integrated by sex. We might avoid that by pleading harm to women--which is a reasonable point. Needless to say, mere considerations of irrationality, or bad philosophy, or harm to men are unlikely to do the trick...
   As a sidebar: even if I'm wrong about all of this, the liberal tendency to support virtually any claim made by virtually any group that represents itself as a sexual (where that includes preferences) minority will go wrong at some point. I'm not sure that liberals are as irrational as conservatives on this issue--but this stuff is putting them in the ballpark.
   RIP reality-based community...

Oregon State To Force "Social Justice" Training On Freshmen

The left certainly does love brainwashing kids.

Trump Is Probably Screwed

Down 14 points in the OD.
And:

...experts who have studied presidential campaigns for decades have concluded that no candidate in Trump’s polling position at this stage of the race has gone on to win the popular vote in modern times...

Is Violence In The Milwaukee Riots Specifically Targeted At Whites?

NYT story: no mention of violence specifically targeting whites.

Heat Street: at least some violence specifically targeting whites.

This seems like an important aspect of things, if true. 

But I have no idea which is more accurate.

The Koch Brothers: Not Really Evil?

   A libertarian friend of mine was telling me about having taken a grant from the Koch brothers to support some research he was doing--and how some of his colleagues freaked out at him for it.  (Note: no one would have said a word if the money had come from, say, Soros...) Anyway, he was also arguing to me that, so far as he could tell, the Kochs were not actually evil. In fact, according to him, not evil at all, but genuinely libertarian. They do, he said, have some positions he disagrees with, and some of their large grants are distributed in a way such that some of the money ends up in the hands of people who might raise eyebrows (AGW skeptics, in case that kind of thing bothers you. It doesn't bother me...but it might bother you.  I say: fund 'em. See what they turn up.)...  But his conclusion: they aren't evil.
   And I'd add: so what if they're evil? Their money's just as green as everybody else's. If you're doing honest research, why care who's funding it? In fact, better to take money from evil organizations than good ones--you take money away from evil projects, use it for good, and leave the money from the good organization available for someone else...  Of course...even speaking like this is shady, as it suggests politicization of scholarship...
   Anyway, since I'm always finding out that I'm wrong about...well, it's starting to look like everything...I thought I'd try to keep an open mind about the Kochs.  Liberals are, so far as I can tell, just about as bad as conservatives about demonizing their enemies. (Not Presidents, though. Conservatives are untouchable there.) So what about the Kochs? What's the straight dope? Well, here's "Eleven Things No One Ever Takes The Time To Point Out About The Kochs."
   This the first thing I've really read on them with an open mind. Later I'll start looking for actual evidence of badness.

"How We Became A Country Where Campaign Signs And Bad Hair Days Cause "Trauma"

   This is ok.

 A second explanation can be found in my work on “concept creep.” In recent decades, several psychological concepts have undergone semantic inflation. The definitions of abuse, addiction, bullying, mental disorder and prejudice have all expanded to include a broad range of phenomena. This reflects a growing sensitivity to harm in Western societies. By broadening the reach of these concepts — recognizing emotional manipulation as abuse, the spreading of rumors as bullying and increasingly mild conditions as psychiatric problems — we identify more people as victims of harm. We express a well-intentioned unwillingness to accept things that were previously tolerated, but we also risk over-sensitivity: defining relatively innocuous phenomena as serious problems that require outside intervention. The expansion of the concept of trauma runs the same risk.

   I think liberals have to take the blame for a lot of this. Liberals tend to try to make us more sensitive and empathetic, but American liberalism seems to not understand that this can go too far. Or, if it does understand that it can go too far, it's wrong about the point at which it does go too far... In very many ways, the left long ago flipped from empathy to coddling. Conservatives tend to err in the other direction, of course. But erring either way is erring.

Haidt and Abrams: 10 Reasons American Politics Are Broken

link

The Mystic: Explaining Trump

I largely agree, though I think it's important not to lose sight of the other factors in play as well.

What's Really Wrong With Calling Obama and Clinton "The Founders of ISIS"?

   I've been puzzling over this.
   It does seem to me to be in the ballpark by the standards of American political rhetoric. OTOH, maybe it can be compared to Kerry's "regime change at home" comment, which he was pressured into apologizing for. OTOOH, I thought that comment was just fine and pretty clever...
   My current thinking is something like:
A. The comment itself would be so patently absurd if taken literally that no one can take it that way
B. So it's got to be taken as...what? Metaphorical? Hyperbolic? What is it exactly?
So far so good.
C. What's weird is Trump's denial that he meant it non-literally.
I mean...that was just weird. I don't know why it was weird, but it was weird. It's like Trump isn't satisfied with his metaphor (or whatever the hell it is...that's making me crazy. I should have paid attention in at least one English class at some point...). He's got to push the vitriol up another notch. And he keeps doing it. Obama and Clinton are the founders of ISIS. Of course I don't mean that literally. But I kinda do...
   It sorta seems to be the latest evidence that Trump doesn't have a very robust grip on reality. He seems to mentally inhabit some twilit superposition of states of reality and a  make-believe world of his own creation. And this ambivalence is reflected in his ambivalence about whether his ISIS claim is intended literally or not.
   Anyway, everybody on the Dem side of things is sitting around grimly shaking their heads about Trump's claim, pointing out that, in fact, it is straightforwardly false. It got four Pinocchios. Etc.  I don't think this is a bad strategy given how bizarre the claim is and how difficult it is to get a fix on. A pretty good response, actually. But it seems to me that it doesn't quite get to the heart of the matter, which, again, is that the claim has to be taken non-literally in order to be non-insane...but Trump won't quite admit that he meant it non-literally. That indicates some problem with Trump first and foremost, not so much some problem about the assertion.
   Also there's: Trump's commitment to the now-standard nudge-nudge-wink-wink at the proposition that Obama is a Muslim. Against that background, Trump's claim does seem rather more sinister. But I haven't thought about that much.
   Some pure speculation:
I'm starting to think Trump might really be delusional. Maybe it's that being rich your whole life knocks too many sharp corners off of the world. Maybe you end up lacking a sufficiently acute sense of reality. You have so much power that saying so or wanting so...often can sort of make something so. Maybe it's a little like having magical powers within a certain domain. Add to this that another check on wishful and magical thinking, pushback from other people, is probably also dampened down, too. People don't want to lose their jobs by disagreeing when disagreement is unwelcome. Maybe Trump really just doesn't quite know what it's like to live in the real world where facts are hard things and you can't always make people believe you just by saying something. And this is just politics!  Imagine if the guy were trying to become a farmer or an engineer... Of course I guess you do get certain pushback from the world and other people as a businessman...so this is probably just bullshit.

GOP Panic? Clinton Landslide?? Extinction of the Party????

Maybe

Everything Is Offensive: Volleyball clothes Edition

Damned if you do, damned if you don't

Trump Campaigns in Connecticut

Ok this may be the craziest thing yet.
It's getting harder and harder to avoid overconfidence about this election. This guy has absolutely no idea what he's doing.

If Trump Doesn't Release His Tax Returns, Then Don't Vote For Him

   Here's the way this dialog goes every time it comes up:

A: Trump should release his tax returns
B: He can't because he's being audited!

But the next move is:

A: Well then, no one should vote for him. Every candidate releases their tax returns. Nobody should vote for a candidate who doesn't release their tax returns. Trump won't/can't release his tax returns. So no one should vote for him. It's not illegal not to release them. But we shouldn't vote for anyone who won't/can't. Trump's I'm being audited! response isn't a reason for exempting him from releasing his returns--it's a reason for not voting for him--for eliminating him as a serious candidate.

   Of course it's all bullshit anyway. There's never been any plausible explanation of why the audit is relevant. The IRS has the information. They're not going to get any new information just because we all get the same information they have.
   Just more bullshit from the world's most prominent bullshitter.

Peter Weber: Donald Trump Is Losing The War On Political Correctness

   Here's what Weber is right about: Trump is winning the battle for the pro-PC side. When a lunatic attacks a view, it tends to make people more sympathetic to that view.
   Here's what Weber is wrong about: he conflates PC with politeness, thus committing the same straw man that pro-PC folks make virtually every time they pretend to defend the position. If you're so clueless as to think that PC is mere politeness, you have no business speaking up in this debate.

Julian Assange and Roger Stone Plot Anti-Clinton October Surprise

Wow. The cabal of kooks arrayed against Clinton should be almost enough to convince reasonable people to vote for her on those grounds alone.

The "Political Correctness Is Just Politeness" Ploy: Alyssa Rosenberg Edition

Well, here it is again.
   How can anyone who's motivated to write about this issue misunderstand it so badly? And how did that thing about the parents get in there? This simply isn't any kind of PC issue I've ever heard about--and I follow the debate pretty closely.
   How it is that someone can purport to defend PC without mentioning campus speech codes, "safe spaces," "bias response teams," "microaggressions," "deplatforming," goofy euphemisms, brainwashing in freshman orientation, "rape culture," Title IX madness or any of that stuff...is utterly baffling.

President of Ripon College Urges All Ripon Professors To Criticize Trump In Class

   I was watching CNN last night. One of Trump's "surrogates" was on. He was utterly incoherent. When challenged, he just dumped a load of incoherent verbiage that had nothing going for it beyond that fact that about 80% of it was grammatical, and some of the words were relevant. 

   Wow, I thought. This would actually make great fodder for critical thinking class...

   Thing is, it's obviously extremely important not to slant classes politically. (This seems to be contrary to the prevailing wisdom...) And, bad as the Clinton people can be, they're simply not as nuts as the Trump people. Their job is much easier. They're only about as full of shit as average politicos. Trump is off the scale, his people are paid to defend him, so their bullshit is off the scale. Even Kayleigh McEnany, for whom I have a soft spot--she really is damn sharp--descended into madness trying to defend this "founder of ISIS" business.

   So what to do. Here's good, relevant, interesting fodder for discussion. But it's hard to try to balance it out. Furthermore, pretending that there's equivalence where there is none is a massive and massively harmful error. College students are already very susceptible to the fallacy of false equivalence. Anything that has the cache of intellectual sophistication calls to them irresistibly.

   So: I understand approximately where Messitte is coming from.

   However.

   If I might articulate arguments on the other side. Academia should not aim at immediate political goals. And academic objectivity is more important even than this very important election. There are a million good examples of things to discuss in classes. Discuss general principles. Equip students to reason. Arm them with information. Let current events play out as they will. 

   What Messitte is talking about is not exactly indoctrination, but it's not exactly not indoctrination. And the fact that he's written what he's written is a sign of the decline and decay of the university in America: short-term--and always leftward--political ends have taken center stage, elbowing the real ends of education out of the way. 

   Can anyone imagine anything that the left might do to elicit this kind of reaction from academia? Is there any lefty lunacy so loony that there would be this kind of call to mobilize against it?

   Well...OTOH...it's just one guy, I suppose... But my guess is that his attitude is not all that unrepresentative... But what's such a guess worth?

   I think we're in crisis because of such attitudes... I report, you decide...  I mean, consider:

Understanding Trump and his supporters means having a deep knowledge of words like “empathy,” “tolerance,” “power” and “narcissism.”

   This tells you something about contemporary academia, I think. First: understanding Trump "means having a deep knowledge of" certain words??? Jesus, there's the downfall of the freaking humanities in a nutshell. It's not that knowledge of language is unimportant...it's that it's been so radically overblown...by people who deal only with words. But maybe it's just infelicitous expression of the idea. Look at the words, though. These are the obsessions of the contemporary humanities and social sciences, brought to you by very bad French literary theory and Continental philosophy. These are some of the all-purpose obsessions of the academic left, applied to Trump. Maybe not 'narcissism.' That's not such a standard component of the list. But whatever.
   Bah. 

   I'm done.

   I've got no ending here.

   tl;dr: everybody pisses me off

Presidential Candidates Leading In The Polls In Early August...

...almost always win.

Greenland Sharks May Live Around 400 Years

...making them the longest-lived vertebrates.

Vox: Jokes Are Never Jokes

   I'm sad that Vox is going in a bad direction.
   I had a few e-conversations with Ezra Klein back in the early days of political blogging, and I really liked the guy. And I hoped for the best with respect to Vox. But it seems to be turning into just another batch of left-of-liberal clickbait. Maybe it's just me.
   This piece starts with an obviously false, PC-friendly theory of humor by some random English Ph.D. which--predictably, given the political climate in English--argues that jokes about "socially unacceptable" things are never just jokes, but always "serve the social function" of "normalizing the unacceptable thing." Seriously, without reading the dissertation, you could predict this conclusion with fair certainty if you know anything about the political orientation of English departments.
   Is the point plausible?
   It is not.
   Most of my jokes have the approximate form "so's your butt." There's no reason to think that things change suddenly and inevitably when the topic is something "socially unacceptable." In fact, as lefty academicians have themselves noted, sometimes people do things specifically in order to be "transgressive." If I tell an edgy joke, I am not thinking about changing the borderline of the socially acceptable, I'm thinking about crossing it. Furthermore, jokes often seek to do basically the opposite of what the Vox piece says--they seek to point out that something considered unacceptable ought to be unacceptable. But mostly humor--even about socially unacceptable topics--is indifferent to social change. Here's a joke:
Q: How many dead prostitutes does it take to change a light bulb?
A: Not six, because my basement is still dark.
Is this joke an outrage on the grounds that it seeks to make murdering prostitutes "socially acceptable"? No. Does it seek to make murdering prostitutes "socially acceptable"? No.
   The left tends to like to control what people say. One aspect of this is that it likes to exercise tight social control on humor. (Think about why this joke is funny: How many feminists does it take to change a light bulb? That's not funny.) This Vox thing is just part of that general project, employed ad hoc against Trump.
   IMO the better theory of all of this is that Trump was sort of joking. It was one of those jokes that seek to establish the joker as a member of a certain group--"Second Amendment people" in this case. Maybe it was more kidding on the square. I dunno. But whatever it was, it's stupid to grab onto this dumb theory simply in order to use it ad hoc against one thing Trump said. There are better ways to explain what was wrong with it.

Sassy Trump...

...talks military communication

Trump: Obama Is Literally The Founder Of ISIS

   So...I was going to complain about making a big deal out of Trump's (bullshit) line that Obama is the "founder of ISIS." Meh, I was going to say, cut it out you liberals. It's just a stupid slogan. It's not meant literally. Yes, it's idiotic. But...
   But the thing is, Hugh Hewitt tried to make this point, but Trump shut him down and seemed to insist that he actually, literally means that Obama is the founder of ISIS...
   Of course our innate propensity to employ a principle of interpretive charity makes it almost impossible to accept this...my brain still wants to read the claim non-literally...but Trump does seem to be insisting that he means it literally...
   That guy...he's a goddamned idiot. He's starting to seem completely divorced from reality. Or maybe he just doesn't believe that words have meanings. I really can't tell. Maybe he is insane. I really can't rule that out at this point.

Anti-Trump Bias / Blindness / Hysteria / Dishonesty

   Trump is still a national humiliation and potential catastrophe, and he's spewing out evidence of that at a genuinely alarming rate.
   However, liberals and the (let's face it, liberal) media are still treating him unfairly with some frequency, e.g. by interpreting things he says and does in the worst available way.
   Consider the baby incident--just one example, but one I never got around to complaining about. It was clear that Trump was kidding around, and yet the usual suspects freaked out, spewing nonsense about Trump kicking babies out of his rallies. By now, this pattern is well-established: liberals and the (face it: liberal) media say a significant number of false things about many things Trump says and does with the effect of making these acts and utterances seem worse than they actually are.
   I don't say that these liberals are lying because mostly what they do is on the borderline--they kind of believe it, they're kind of spinning...they're somewhere in that epistemic twilight zone where these things happen. They've got to realize that they're not being completely honest/objective much of the time, but they're not clearly and unequivocally lying. Typical political quasi-bullshitting. Much like what Trump himself does.
   Is this what is going on with interpreting Trump's "Second Amendment" comment as an assassination threat against Clinton? Anybody? Me, I'm not sure. It was such an outrageous, indefensible, bone-headed, tone-deaf, dumb-ass thing to say that it was kind of difficult to know what to think about it. I think I kind of thought that's what he was saying at first...though I think I pretty quickly concluded that it wasn't a threat, but rather...something else. I mean, it was, I thought, a non-trivial matter to figure out what was going on there. So we might say that it was an honest mistake. OTOH, I'm pretty sure that liberals would have pretty quickly figured that out had Mrs. Clinton made a similar error (difficult as that is to imagine--and, no, the Kennedy comment doesn't count.)
   Yeah, Trump is dangerous. Very, very dangerous. FiveThirtyEight still has him at like a 15% chance of winning. That's about like finding out that there's a 15% chance of a giant asteroid hitting the Earth. It's not a source of comfort. This is a very, very alarming situation.
   So, some will argue that cheating/dishonesty is warranted in a case like this, and that epistemic punctiliousness is out of place.
   Well, I'm really just pointing out that dishonesty is afoot on the left. I'm not suggesting anything about what ought to be done about it.
   But, uh, while we're on the subject, it ought to stop.
   This is the point at which people traditionally make prudential arguments about how being honest will also achieve good outcomes.
   That could be true...but it sounds a little panglossian to me. Maybe honesty will help bring down Trump, maybe it won't. I'm not saying I'd opt for scrupulousness if I new that a single white lie was the difference between Trump winning and not winning. But we can play consequentialist would you rather until the evening return of the bovines.
   Here's the standard advice: we have an obligation to be honest. We don't know that dishonesty will help, so just close off that option right now.
   Furthermore, for people who just have to have the prudential argument: liberal media dishonesty about Trump part of what helps Trump. More importantly: it's part of what Trump supporters are right about. Liberals and the liberal media are often dishonest about conservatives, and often dishonest about Trump. Conservatives and Trump supporters are right about this. Most liberals seem incapable of believing such things, and have no inclination to try. But the things are true. And this kind of cheating is part of what's driving this madness.
   Furtherfurthermore: there's no need to do it. Trump is awful enough that there is absolutely no excuse whatsoever for making shit up. He provides us with way more than enough legitimate ammunition.
   I'm not saying conservatives are any better. That's a different question for a different time.
   Anyway, I guess I'm making the standard panglossian argument that virtue and good outcomes converge: honesty is the best policy in both respects. Or, rather: we ought to be honest, and we have no reason to believe that this will be any less effective than dishonesty. And we shouldn't even be doing such calculations anyway.
   tl;dr: damn liberals, be honest.

Cage The Elephant: Mess Around

Cleanse your palate

Dick Cheney: I Have No Problem Torturing Innocent People So Long As It Helps Us Achieve Our Objective

The Mystic just told me about this.
How did I no know it?
Did I forget?
Dick Cheney, you are an evil sonofabitch.
You ever imagine saying that to maybe George Washington or Thomas Jefferson? Well, maybe you ought to. "Good afternoon, Mr. Madison...here's a little theory I've been working on about torturing innocent people...what do you think?"
You know, conservatives, I'm done defending your sorry asses after this week.

Goddamn everything.

Donald Trump, Liar

Under oath even.

Friedman on Winking At Extremists And The Rabin Assassination

This is exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about, though I didn't have the Rabin case in mind.
Keep falsely arguing that your political opponents are traitors, then you are responsible when someone finally believes you.
You can't argue "oh, gosh, I didn't think anyone would kill Smith merely because I relentlessly argued that he's a traitor...and...uh...we all know what traitors deserve..."

Trump / "Second Amendment People": Not a Threat. But Maybe It's Worse.

Watched it again.
I still think it's very clear that it's not a threat.
It may not exactly be a joke, though. It's more like a kind of joshing...one of those bits of kidding around to try to kind of establish some connection with a group ("the Second Amendment people"...not exactly a way of referring to them that shows great familiarity with them...)
Something like:  Well even at that point the gun-rights crowd might still have some recourse nudge nudge ha ha amirite?
That's not a threat.
It's something...but I'm not sure what. An allusion to the use of political violence? More than that? Encouragement possibly. Encouragement at worst, I'd say. But Trump isn't threatening...he's not even talking about his own actions. Nor is he suggesting that he has the power to direct the group in question. He's just saying something jokey about what that group might do. He's not disapproving of it...but it isn't a threat.
It's completely impermissible and nuts...
But I still say that it's not accurate to call it a threat--and not out of any punctiliousness, really.  I just don't think it's a threat.
It's threatening... But I'd say: more in the way that a crazy person walking around near me is threatening. He may not mean to be...he may not have me in his sights...but he's a threat.
What Trump said is a threat in the sense that it's threatening--he's crazy, saying that was one of the strong indicators that a crazy person is near the levers of power...any sane person needs to recognize the threat... But Trump wasn't threatening to kill Clinton, nor to have her killed.
In fact, I had completely failed to notice the other obvious--and, perhaps, better--interpretation: that he's saying that gun-owners might rise up in rebellion. I'm not saying that's better...I'm saying it's a better interpretation...

The real threat to my mind is what comes before the infamous claim: he asserts that Clinton is trying to eliminate/destroy the Second Amendment. This is in line with a general kind of GOP argument through the Obama administration: the Democrat is trying to destroy the country. This is dangerous obviously because it's false...but also because if Clinton were trying to illicitly destroy the Second Amendment, then rebellion would be justified. The GOP has made many arguments over the last eight-or-so years which, if sound, would justify violent action against the government and/or the President. This is, perhaps, the most dangerous thing a political party could do. I'm frankly rather amazed that it hasn't born fruit. They've argued that Obama is intentionally destroying the country. But if a President were intentionally destroying the country, then violent action would be warranted. I guess we can all thank their constituencies' inability to put two and two together...
Anyway, though I continue to think it wasn't a threat, now writing this has made me come to think that it was edging toward something worse: he was coming very close to making an argument for violent revolution. And, of course: an argument based on radically false premises. He's not threatening to kill Clinton, he's arguing that people ought to rise up against the government...when Clinton starts "appointing her judges."  One might argue that there's an implicit conditionalization in there: if they aim to illicitly destroy the Second Amendment...  But that's too much charity by ten times or more...
As others have noted, no matter how charitable we are about this, it shows that Trump can't be allowed anywhere near the Presidency: a lot of hard parsing is required to find some way to interpret his words as not either advocating violent revolution or winking at assassination.
This is a dangerously stupid, dangerously irresponsible, dangerously puerile sonofabitch.
A 15% chance of this person winning the election should send a chill down everyone's spine.

228 Years To Close The Black-White Wealth Gap

Well that's just great.

Only Elizabeth Warren Can Make Trump Sound Reasonable By Comparison

facepalm

Wikileaks Fanning Conspiracy Theory That Hillary Murdered DNC Staffer

link
I wondered why they were offering a reward.
Wow. Those guys are batshit crazy, and they sure do hate Clinton.
Roger Stone's got his oar stuck in, too.
Crazy on crazy on crazy.

Second Amendment People For Hillary

   Y'know, upon reflection, this Trump psychopathy about "Second Amendment people" maybe oughtta kinda piss off gun owners.
   Don't drag me into your (as the lefties like to say) eliminationist fantasies, Trumpo.
   Cripes what a lunatic.

Trump's Hillary / Second Amendment Joke: Bullshit On Both SIdes

   No, it was not an assassination threat, as some on the left are asserting.
   No, it was not about gun owners organizing to use the power of the vote to keep HRC out of office, as the usual Trump "surrogates" = paid liars are asserting. That's utter nonsense.
   The Trump camp seems to be made up of liars all the way down, so there's no reason to even pretend that they're worth talking to/about. Anti-Trump liberals, IMO, really ought to know better though. No matter how bad Trump is, he's never bad enough for some of these folks. They've always got to make up another layer of badness. In addition to being bad in itself, this make it easier for Trump to worm out of this stuff by pretending that everybody's always being uncharitable to him.
   Trump made a joke about something no one--especially not a presidential candidate--should ever joke about. Attempts to spin that are bullshit.

Trump Makes a Joke About Shooting Clinton

   First, it was a joke...well...mostly a joke...more kidding on the square? I can't believe that even from Trump in this case. It was almost entirely a joke.
   Second: this is something that we do not joke about.
   He may be even stupider than I thought he was, which, a priori, I would have thought impossible.

60 Women Have Now Accused Bill Cosby Of Rape

Jesus Christ.

Drum: Calling Someone Crazy Is Not An Insult To The Mentally Ill

I've been hoping that Drum would kinda start calling BS on PC BS...

  To be honest, though, I'm not completely sure I agree with him with respect to the details. I think there's some unclarity with respect to 'x is an insult.' If I call Smith crazy, and Jones has a mental illness, I'm not insulting Jones in the sense of launching an intentional insult at him. OTOH, I may be saying something which objectively insulting to Jones. That is: it's not merely that Jones takes offense, but, rather, that...what? Most reasonable people in Jones's position would take offense? I.e. find my utterance insulting? Anyway, though I think I agree with Drum, I'm not completely certain that calling a nutty person crazy isn't objectively offensive (whatever that means) to people with mental illnesses. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't.
   Thing is, I'm inclined to think: even in a case of objective offensiveness (whatever that means) in which a reasonable person is likely to take offense, often you just need to get the hell over it. The quick and dirty version of the thought here is something like...there are two possible positions:
1. A lot of the stuff the PCs deem offensive is not actually/objectively offensive
2. Some of the things the PCs deem offensive actually are offensive. But that doesn't mean it's a big deal to say them. Small offenses are no big deal, and we're all obligated to not be fucking babies about every little hurt feeling.
   Drum wants to go the first way with 'crazy'-talk. I'm inclined toward a combination of the two thoughts. We have something like an imperfect duty not to needlessly hurt people's feelings with such things. That means, roughly: we all ought to try not to be assholes who have no regard for the feelings of others...but this means roughly reducing the number of cases in which we're saying things likely to hurt feelings. It does NOT mean that we have a perfect duty to avoid hurt feelings in every case. It does not mean that each individual hurting of feelings is some big-ass deal. Also: we all have a complementary duty not to be fucking babies all the time.
   The PCs go wrong with respect to this stuff largely by pretending that every case in which there is anything even possibly sub-optimal about your utterance is a case of incalculable moral guilt. Use last week's euphemism, you are literally Hitler. That's the kind of thing that's made liberalism stupid.
   Ah, that's all a mess.
   Whatever.

FiveThirtyEight Polls-Only: HRC 87.5% Chance of Winning; Trumpo The Clown 12.4%

   No sense linking I guess (oh, WTH), as it changes all the time and there's no permalink to the current estimate.
   Still enough of a chance of a Trump victory to make me weep for my country...but it's hard to complain.

Clinton E-mail Did Not Lead To Iranian Scientist's Death

Just Trumpo making more balloon animals.

The War On Stupid People

I...don't know what to make of this.

Trump Is Testing The Norms Of Objectivity In Journalism

Well...as an objective matter of fact, Trump's an unqualified lunatic... I do think that the press was unfair to him at times early on...but at this point, when he's made his lunacy so manifest, I don't see how we can blame journalists for basically passing that information along to us. I really don't have a lot of complaints about coverage right now.

50 Former GOP National Security Officials Sign Open Letter Against Trump

Holy crap.
   This is getting downright embarrassing.
   I'm almost starting to feel bad for the guy. At this point just about everybody who knows anything about anything has come out and publicly declared that he's a fucking moron who doesn't know anything about the things they know about.
   If Trump had an ounce of self-awareness or intellectual integrity, he'd have bugged out for a long stint at a Tibetan monastery by now in the hope that everybody would have stopped laughing at him in ten or twenty years.

Clinton's Post-Convention Bounce Shows No Sign of Fading

link

Evan McMullin: The Latest Anti-Trump Republican Candidate

Godspeed, Mr. McMullin...

How Paul Krugman Made Donald Trump Possible

I think this is worth a read.
   I often complain about the fact that Republicans now seem to think that no Democrat can ever be a legitimate President. And I complain about liberals constantly painting Republicans as evil racists. But I somehow hadn't recognized the similarity. If every Republican is loathsome and unacceptable--and, of course, racist and misogynist! (I take it that goes without saying...) Then why is Trump different?  Sure, you can plead degrees of badness...but why should degrees matter when every candidate is so far beneath the threshold of acceptability? There's an answer to that but I'm on a roll.
   Anyway, you know what was really dumb? Making a huge deal out of that "binders full of women" comment. What nonsense. Liberalism has become stupid largely because of this obsession with latching onto the worst possible interpretation of any utterance having to do with race or sex.
   Maybe I'm just complaining about this because I now look back fondly on Mittens...