Gamergate in 60 Seconds

This is accurate:

Transracialism Is Inevitable: Greensboro Edition

link
If transgenerism, then transracialism.
It's pretty simple.

"American Doesn't Have A Gun Problem, It Has A White People Problem"

It's a free country, and you've got a right to write inane bullshit if you like. 

Imagine that somebody wrote this with 'black' and 'white' reversed, though. 

It'd the double standard that I refuse to acquiesce to.

Schools Safer Now Than In the '90s?

Maybe

National Debt Spikes $1,000,000,000,000 In 6 Months

Well that's just great.

Kushner Loses Access To Top-Secret Intelligence

Oh no, not that.

Portland State Snowflakes Freak Out Because There Are Sex Differences

loooooooooool

Handgun Bullets Too Slow And Stabby To Affect Someone Wielding An AR-15

facepalm
Honestly, I don't know how anyone can know so little about firearms. You'd think they'd know more just from living on Earth. Or that after they've repeatedly embarrassed themselves on the subject, they'd bother to go learn just a little bit.
   But you'd be wrong.

Freakishly Warm Weather In The Arctic

lovely

Having A Firearm Does Not Make You Easier To Kill

Both sides in the gun wars have some crazy arguments. But IMO the craziest one is the anti-gun argument that says that if you find yourself in a mass shooting situation it's worse to be armed. This argument is repeated over and over in various forms whenever the debate heats up.
   Look, I doubt that getting more people to carry is a very good solution to the problem. More guns means, even ignoring everything else, more accidental shootings. And, though CCW-holders are much less likely to commit gun crimes than the general population, that might very well change were we to encourage more people to carry. Furthermore, mass shootings (actual mass shootings, not shootings that meet the bogus definitions deployed to artificially inflate the numbers) are extremely rare in the U.S. Arming people en masse seems like an inefficient response...though I'm not exactly sure how to think about that, honestly. Finally, it seems unlikely that enough people would ever carry to make a difference.
   However, the very worst argument lives on the left, and, reduced to its essentials, it goes like this: even if you were to find yourself in the midst of a mass shooting, you are better off (as are all the other potential victims) if you are unarmed. So we're not talking about increased chances of death and injury under normal conditions. We're talking about only those people actually already caught in a mass shooting. The position entails that, should you ever find yourself about to be attacked by a mass murderer, and should you run across a gun, you should leave it be. All it will do is raise your odds of dying. Somehow. I've seen people argue that they're too small and weak--"he'd just wrestle it away from me." No, he wouldn't. He's not going to wrestle with you. He's going to shoot you. The only question is: would you rather have a chance to shoot him first/too? Or would you rather just be slaughtered? "I'd probably just shoot innocent people!" Well, you might. But he's going to. He's aiming to kill people, and, unless stopped, will do so. Him trying to kill them is more likely to kill them than you accidentally doing so. To argue that you shouldn't return fire if possible is approximately like arguing that, if you see Smith trying to kill Jones, you should try to stop him, because you might hurt Jones. Yeah, you might. Your airbag might kill you in an accident. You might have a deadly reaction to antibiotics. You might have a heart attack at the gym. The point is that you should decide on the basis of probabilities, not possibilities. Run a hundred simulations with real people and paintball guns. See whether arming the potential victims increases the death toll. And lemme know if you'd like to bet on the outcome. Because I'll bet however much you like on it.
   According to the anti-gun folks, guns have a weird magical property--they only kill the innocent. They make bad guys invincible, but are completely ineffective in the hands of the good guys. Except for agents of the state. There they become effective again...
Read more »

Confucius Institutes and China's Infiltration of American Colleges

link

Brooks on Pinker's Enlightenment Now

Mostly of interest because I didn't know Pinker had a new book. Sounds like it might be worth a read.

John Dean: Gates's Testimony May Be The End Of The Trump Presidency

Dean has seemed to me to be something of an alarmist...which is not to say that he's wrong about this.
   I'm becoming less certain of my No collusion, just obstruction position...

Feinstein Loses CA Dems' Endorsement To Someone Running Far To Her Left

Worried yet?

You Will Not Die In A Mass Shooting

link

You will not die in a tragic mass shooting. You will die of heart disease in your late 70s. Unless you keep worrying about being murdered all the time. Stress is a killer.

Even Gawker is right sometimes.

The Tragedy Of Testing Decades-Old Rape Kits

This is awful.

The Federalist Party Of America

That's so crazy it just might work.*

*Well...that's half-right, anyway...

Wesley Pegden and Ariel D. Procaccia: An "I Cut, You Choose" (Actually: Freeze) Protocol To Beat Gerrymandering

I have to admit, I was kinda proud of myself in high school for thinking up the "I divide, you choose" protocol to divide up bags of...uh...spices... But apparently everybody figures that out. Oh well.
   Anyway, here's a similar idea for preventing gerrymandering. Pretty damn clever, I say.
[h/t Statisticasaurus rex]

Max Boot: "If This Is What Conservatism Has Become, Count Me Out"

link
[h/t the Redneck Raconteur]

Which Amendment Will The Left Reject Next?

   The far left has long hated the Second Amendment. Now they've begun questioning the First Amendment. How long before we start seeing articles in Vox about how prohibitions against the quartering of soldiers are outdated and problematic?

The Parkland Shooting And The Reluctant Deputies

On the one hand, I'd expect the right to emphasize that the police (apparently) have no duty to protect citizens; so the deputies, in a sense, did nothing wrong; so this shows that individuals should take responsibility for their own defense; so they should (often, at least) arm themselves.
   On the other hand, I'd expect the left to argue that even cops won't take on an "assault rifle" if they're armed only with handguns.
   Which...uh...sure. It's suboptimal.What I'd really want under those conditions is a shotgun. But, I mean, if we're playing that game, gimme an AA-12. Or a CZ Scorpion.
   But you go with what you've got. And even if people are understandably hesitant to go into any firefight out-gunned, the point of having a handgun--rather than nothing at all--is that it's better to be outgunned than to be slaughtered like a pig. And, again: at close quarters, I don't think I'd be all that hesitant to go after a shooter armed with an MSR if I had, say, my Glock 29. Not that I wouldn't be afraid or, for all I know, even paralyzed. But be that as it may, under such conditions I'd expect to have the advantage of surprise--which is a massive advantage indeed. It's one of the biggest advantages these psycho shooters have. But if someone else had a handgun, then the advantage would be largely flipped: they'd know about the shooter, but he wouldn't know about them. They'd probably have something like a 50/50 chance of surprising him and getting off the first five or six rounds. Which, a lot of the time, is going to be enough to finish things.
   I'm sure the FBI or somebody must have run simulations of this kind, no?

The "Gender" Equality Paradox

I've mentioned this before. It's actually about sex, not gender, but whatever. In more affluent and egalitarian countries, women tend to choose more stereotypically female careers and to be less likely to to into STEM careers. The current lead hypothesis is: men and women really do tend to be interested in different things. In less-affluent countries, however, women go into STEM because they have to worry more about having a secure and lucrative career. In more affluent and egalitarian countries, women are more free to do what they actually prefer.

Trump Sucks

...but at least he isn't Justin Trudeau

Should Clarence Thomas Be Impeached?

...for lying about Anita Hill's accusations of sexual harassment?

Congo Is Sliding Back To Bloodshed

link

Did FOUR Broward County Deputies Wait Outside The Parkland School During The Shooting?

Kinda looks that way.

Transracialism Update

There aren't a lot of ways to accept transgenderism without accepting transracialism. Barring some scientific surprise, it's both or neither. Which, of course, is the view that got Rebecca Tuvel in trouble. (Though she should have modus tollensed instead of modus ponensing.)
   The inherent instability of the view that transgenderism is real but transracialism isn't is going to make it very difficult even for the PCs to maintain it for long--adept as they are at believing nonsense via the method of tenacity. Here's an indication that the instability is starting to have an effect.
   Needless to say, if one could simply choose one's sex (or gender...whatever that means now...), then one could also choose one's age, height, weight, number of limbs, species, century, the planet one lives on...anything. There's no better reason to think that one can choose one's sex (or "gender") by fiat than that one can choose any other of their real characteristics. If transgenderism, then otherkin. That slope is genuinely slippery.
   The leading error here shows up in the relativism debate as well. It's never articulated clearly because...well...that's how such errors work/survive. But it basically goes like this: x isn't real, so x is really however we think (or say) it is. That's why so many relativistic (including "social constructionist") views so often confuse themselves with skepticism/nihilism: they blur the difference between there aren't actually any x's and there are actually x's, and we made them how they are by agreement. The former is, philosophically speaking, a pretty ordinary kind of view: eliminativism about x's. The latter is a kind of pseudoscientific view that attributes magical powers to human thought, speech, and/or agreement. Note: not, perhaps, when x is something like a social institution...though things get a bit complicated there, and you've got to be more careful than I have any intention of being here. But when x is your sex, race, age, etc....not to mention dinosaurs or all of reality (all of which have been called social constructs)...well...the view that we create such things is basically the most confused idea ever conceived of by humans. (And that's why social constructionism so often tries to argue that physical characteristics (like race) are actually constituted by social roles.)
   So anyway, Dolezal was clearly right from the get-go: if you get to make up your sex, then you get to make up your race. Though, again: modus tollens is your fried there. Eventually, of course, people will stop pretending that you can make up either. But, for the time being, in the midst of ascendant moonbattery, maybe the best we can hope for is for enough people to modus ponens about enough crazy characteristics until the absurdity of it all is no longer deniable.
   Incidentally, I now "identify" as a carcharodontosaurus.*




* Also: remember when your identity was who you actually are instead of what you say you are? But that was way back when there were facts and stuff.

Missed Chances To Stop The Parkland Shooter

The local police knew he was crazy and obsessed with guns. The FBI notoriously dropped the ball despite alarming tips. The School security guard cowered outside while the murders were occurring. 

   Doesn't exactly inspire optimism.

Top Scientists Discover New Microaggressions

Aside from the familiar absurdity of this bullshit: I'm starting to worry that libraries are a hotbed of this nonsense. Our libraries declared themselves "safe spaces" a few years back, though nobody seems to know what that's supposed to mean.

Experts Rank Types Of Gun Laws By Effectiveness And Popularity

Some surprises in the chart.

Antarctic Ice Loss Accelerating?

Well that's just great.

"Crisis Actors"

Just when you think that the left has taken an insurmountable lead in the Loonylympics...the right is back, baby!

The Anti-Gun View Of Guns

In the hands of a criminal, no matter how untrained, guns are impossibly efficient killing machines. However, in the hands of ordinary people, no matter how well-trained, they are completely ineffective, and can only make the situation worse. An armed citizen will inevitably kill at least hundreds of other innocent citizens should he try to defend himself or others with a firearm. He cannot, no matter what, ever kill an attacker; but he will inevitably wreak havoc on the innocent.
   Fucking guns, how do they work?

Stupid Arguments Against Guns: The Instantaneous Defense Argument

So I'm neither for nor against the idea of arming teachers. But this general kind of argument rears its stupid head every time this general kind of idea is floated:

ZOMG guns in gun safes won't do any good because if a gunman bursts into the room and starts blasting away with an AR-15 there will be no time to get the gun out of the safe!!!!111

Look. If somebody leaps into the room and starts blasting away, there's basically nothing that's likely to save you. But that's not how most victims are shot in mass shootings. That happens, if at all, only to the first few victims. After that, the victims have heard him coming and have time to prepare. They'd have more than enough time to get a gun out of a safe.

   Two seconds of thought and a modicum of intellectual honesty would allow people to see this.

   Which, again, is not to endorse the idea of arming teachers.

Today's Dumbest Article Of All Time: Victoria Barrett: "Why I Will Never Carry A Gun In My Classroom"

Said, undoubtedly, in one of those breathy NPR voices:

   If this student had shown up with a weapon determined to harm us, what would my responsibility have been? Talk? De-escalate? Beg? Run? It seems clear that under any policy that arms teachers, it would be my responsibility to shoot my student dead. This creates more problems than it solves. If I miss or fail to fire, and he murders the other students, can their loved ones sue me? What if my shot ricochets and hurts or kills one of them? What if his gun turns out to be a walkie-talkie, a misidentification that happened outside my campus’s library last year, and I shoot my student dead for possession of an unusual electronic device? In these scenarios, some more outlandish than others, teachers become soldiers, and schools become liable when students aren’t protected in such circumstances as a shooting.
   But legal liability isn’t the reason I will never carry a firearm into a classroom. If it’s my responsibility to shoot someone to protect 25 others, I will have been drafted unwillingly into an ideological army to protect the rights of some civilians to own and operate military-style weapons. And I will not be conscripted.

Translation: I am such a pathetic, dogmatic orifice that I would rather see all my students killed than concede that guns are good for self-defense.

   You are a loathsome human being.

   You want to know the reason I don't carry a gun? Because it's not worth it because we live in a ridiculously safe country in an age of ridiculous safety. Carrying a handgun is a a pain in the ass. Not to mention: you'd have to deal with "progressives"bursting into tears and peeing their pants whenever they caught a glimpse of it. At any rate, it just isn't worth it. Unless you live in a high-crime area, there's insufficient reason to waste the effort. Hell, I like guns. And I damn sure don't want to need one and not have it. But, honestly, the odds of needing one just aren't high enough to justify the effort of carrying one around. But were progressives to admit that, they'd have to admit that firearms aren't really much of a threat (assuming that you're not a member of MS-13). And they damn sure don't want to to admit that.
   But damn...that thing in the Post...awful...

[But oh, God, nothing compared to the searingly stupid comments. Progressives should never try to talk about guns...]

Armed Sheriff's Deputy Stayed Outside FL School While Mass Murder Took Place

WTFF?

Marcie Bianco: "The Patriarchal Race To Colonize Mars Is Just Another Example Of Male Entitlement"

Wow this is stupid.
   And the reason I harp on such things is that, well, obviously they're not isolated. This bullshit is just a few isolated opinion pieces here and there. It's an extremely influential, wide-ranging intellectual fad. It's one of the most prominent features of the contemporary popular intellectual landscape. Not to mention great swaths of academia. And it's not merely that this fad is wrong on this or that particular point; rather the whole spirit and orientation of the thing is wrong. And not just wrong: stupid. And not just stupid: nuts.

[That link is archived, and didn't work quite right. Here's the normal link.]

Chocolate Milk = Diversity

facepalm

I'm tryin' to keep the faith... But whatever it is that currently passes for liberalism isn't making it easy.

Black Panther Packed With Diversity, But No Gays

facepalm

Warm-Ass Winter

This is one.

Kendall Marshall Back At UNC

Well now here's some good news.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Some College Title IX Hearings Unfair To The Accused

And she's right.

David French: GVROs: A Gun-Control Measure Conservatives Should Consider

One thing to like about Gun Violence Restraining Orders is that they're temporary unless evidence is presented to extend them.

Did You Realize That Donald Trump Is TEH WORST PRESIDENT OF ALL THE TIMES???

And he became the worst in just one year! Worse that the genocidal maniac Andrew Jackson! Worse than the incomparably bad Richard Nixon! Worse that Dubya, initiator of the pointless and catastrophic Gulf War Episode II: The Phantom Menace! 
   And Obama's a top-10 president? Ahead of both Clinton and Madison? I mean...I love the guy...but...c'mon. He did do his part to prevent global economic collapse...but I have no idea how much responsibility we can really attribute to him for the world economy not collapsing. I don't see that the ACA is enough to boost him into the top 10. He got OBL, and that was big and he deserves a ton of credit for that. But then there's Libya... Not to mention the domestic craziness in his Ed. department and DoJ...
   Buncha recency bias is what it is, obviously.

Blue Hat Record: Actual Statistics: Seeing Through The Partisan Gun Violence Haze

This is really good--though I'm not sure I agree with point 6.

No, J.J. Redick Did NOT Say 'Chink'

Jesus Christ this nonsense has gotten just about all the way out of control.
   You have to basically be enthusiastically malicious to misunderstand what happened in that video. It's as obvious as it could be that he got tongue-tied. The alleged racial slur isn't even a word. It's half 'Chinese' and half some other word he tries to switch to at the last second.
   Things have gotten pretty bad if I'm defending J.J... 

Slavoj Zizek: A Reply To My Critics Concerning An Engagement With Jordan Peterson

Professor Z makes a couple of decent points in here.
   That's the thing about that guy. He can say a bunch of completely incoherent shit...and then make a pretty good point or two...keeps you off-balance...
   I'm not buying that "PC is actually liberalism" point, obvs...though there did seem to be some conflict between Bernie and the PCs, as Z notes...
   I'm not so sure Peterson's really up to debating the very slippery Z...but I'm not sure he isn't, either.
   At any rate, if Z is telling the truth about getting de facto banned from places like the NYT because of his dangerous right-wing tendencies, then he'll go up in my estimation.

A Bunch Of Gun-Friendly Links

Via Reddit, this comment. I've only checked out a couple, and quickly, so I can't vouch for them:

As taken from another user but I forgot his username, if anyone knows please comment so they get the credit they deserve.
Here are a few links in regards to mass public shootings and firearms across countries. Links are provided along with sources within those links. Guns are not the problem.
• The US has the more firearms than any country but nowhere near the most firearm homicides
https://crimeresearch.org/2014/03/comparing-murder-rates-across-countries/• Comparing mass public shootings US and EU. The EU has more mass public shootings per capita than the United States
https://crimeresearch.org/2015/06/comparing-death-rates-from-mass-public-shootings-in-the-us-and-europe/• US becoming safer compared to Europe in both fatalities and frequency of Mass Public Shootings
https://crimeresearch.org/2016/01/compared-to-europe-the-us-falls-in-rank-for-fatalities-and-frequency-of-mass-public-shootings-now-ranks-11th-in-fatalities-and-12th-in-frequency/• All but one of the 20 worst mass public shootings, 45 of the worst 50, occurred outside the United States
https://crimeresearch.org/2017/01/with-39-killed-in-tunisia-attack-the-top-three-mass-public-shootings-are-outside-the-united-states/• France had more casualties from mass public shootings in 2015 than the US suffered during Obama’s entire presidency (532 to 527)
https://crimeresearch.org/2017/02/france-suffered-more-casualties-murders-and-injuries-from-mass-public-shootings-in-2015-than-the-us-has-suffered-during-obamas-entire-presidency-508-to-424-2/Let's look at the UK. How's gun control going there?
• Gun crime in London up 42%
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-39578500• Gun crime in England and Wales up 27%
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-41822965Also you're more likely to die falling out of bed than in a mass public shooting. Here's the reason the US has so many firearm homicides.
• "Criminal gangs commit as much as 80 percent of the crime in many communities, according to law enforcement officials throughout the nation. Typical gang-related crimes include alien smuggling, armed robbery, assault, auto theft, drug trafficking, extortion, fraud, home invasions, identity theft, murder, and weapons trafficking."
https://www.fbi.gov/file-repository/stats-services-publications-national-gang-threat-assessment-2009-pdf• Gangs behind 80% US crime
http://abcnews.go.com/TheLaw/FedCrimes/story?id=6773423https://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/2009-01-29-ms13_N.htm• 75% homicide victims have prior criminal convictions in Boston
https://www.jstor.org/stable/1192213?origin=crossref&seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents• Gangs figure in many homicides in New York as well, but recent polls by The New York Times suggest that the gang problem may be worse in Chicago...In Chicago, gang disputes are clearly a big part of homicides, said John Hagedorn, a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago who studies Chicago gangs https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/05/18/us/chicago-murder-problem.html• 54% US counties had zero murders while 2% of US counties accounted for 51% of homicides
https://crimeresearch.org/2017/04/number-murders-county-54-us-counties-2014-zero-murders-69-1-murder/• When gun sales go up crime goes down
https://www.forbes.com/sites/larrybell/2013/05/14/disarming-realities-as-gun-sales-soar-gun-crimes-plummet/?c=0&s=trending#41289a0e3f7c• No, states with high gun ownership don't have more gun homicides
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/no-states-with-higher-gun-ownership-dont-have-more-gun-murders/article/2573353• Crime rates before and after gun bans
https://crimeresearch.org/2013/12/murder-and-homicide-rates-before-and-after-gun-bans/• The racist roots of gun control
https://firearmsandliberty.com/cramer.racism.html• 80% police officers think armed civilians help fight crime
https://www.gunowners.org/news01212015.htm• Flaws with Kellerman (guy behind the study saying you're 40 times more likely to die by your own firearm in your home than use it in self defense)
https://www.firearmsandliberty.com/kellerman-schaffer.html• Deconstructing Kellerman http://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/2011/01/william-c-montgomery/editorial-deconstructing-kellermann/• The CDC's anti-gun past
https://www.forbes.com/sites/larrybell/2013/02/12/why-the-centers-for-disease-control-should-not-receive-gun-research-funding/#5f8b011d282dFinally, Obama's own CDC study (you probably never heard about in the media) found this:
• Armed citizens are less likely to be injured by an attacker
• Gun buyback/turn-in programs are “ineffective” in reducing crime
• Mass shootings and accidental firearm deaths account for a small fraction of gun-related deaths, and both are declining
• Defensive uses of guns are common stating: “defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals"
• Stolen guns and retail/gun show purchases account for very little crime
http://www.gunsandammo.com/politics/cdc-gun-research-backfires-on-obama/

Ohio Court Takes "Transgendered" Teen Away From Parents Who Refused To Let Her Take Hormones

Basically, they refuse to pretend that their daughter is a crypto-male. So the court took her away and placed her with her grandparents. (CNN, of course, refers to her as 'he', and says that "he" "identifies as male," but never mentions the obvious fact that she is actually female). 
   There's no sense, really, in repeating the arguments against this insanity. The left has been gripped by madness, and they very rapidly began using the coercive power of government to enforce their currently-preferred fairy tale. If parents refuse to pretend that patently false things are true, the government will take their children. (Presumably, children's decisions to "identify as" different races will be next, as the tide seems to be turning on that front as well.)
   I'm not even going to go into all this again, except to say: this (among many other things) gives the lie to claims like "we just want you to call us what we want to be called; why make such a big deal about mere words?" No, it isn't what they "just" want at all. They want people to use the words differently so that the meanings change...partially. And they want to use the new incoherent meanings to effect practical policy change. They start with "oh, it's just words and it's just polite...you just have to say these false things because our feelings are so delicate...God knows what we might do if you don't..." But then they pretend that the falsehoods they're demanding we say out of politeness are actually true.. And then they want practical policy changes. Like men in women's locker rooms...and taking away your children.
   Extraordinarily consequential changes are being pushed onto society, and rational discussion of these changes is being suppressed by shrieking down anyone who is inclined to point out the absurdity of it all.
   Honestly, I've seen American society do some crazy shit in my lifetime--I still remember when people got hassled and even beaten up for being gay. And I remember the Satanic Panic. But this...I believe that this is the craziest shit of all the crazy shit I've ever seen.

God, Subjectivism And Transgendered Kansans

If I have to choose between "God did it with his magical God powers," and "we did it with our magical mind powers"...well...I don't have to is what I'm really saying. Though at least the God story is distant enough to not be conclusively refutable--unlike the stories about the magical power of human belief.
   But anyway: the answer is none of the above.

Jamie Palmer: "Fundamentalists vs. The New York Times"

This is good.

  What we have here is a failure to communicate, and it is willful. In the populist lexicon, the term ‘neocon’ does not denote a set of political positions with which Greenwald or the Times’s left-wing critics are prepared to disagree in good faith; it is simply an instrument of stigmatisation. Identifying political opponents as such is reason enough to expel them from the realm of legitimate discussion. And as the Left continues to divide against itself in the Trump era, heterodox opinions on a whole range of complex questions are being re-described as heresies so that the sphere of reasonable disagreement diminishes while the list of non-negotiable orthodoxies lengthens.
   Invited to discuss the vilification of political scientist Charles Murray at Middlebury on Charlie Rose last year, the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt described the incident in explicitly religious terms. “The best way to understand what happened,” Haidt argued, “is an auto-da-fé – a religious rite.” That is why the protesters were so adamant that the event be moved off-campus, he explained: “The campus is like a church and you cannot have blasphemy on campus.” It wasn’t enough simply to express disagreement or disapproval. Murray’s mere presence was somehow so disruptive to moral order, it threatened to pollute the sanctity of the territory itself. This secular fanaticism is what lies behind the attempt to drive Bari Weiss and Bret Stephens from the masthead of the New York Times. That they are both immigration doves and ardent Trump opponents counts for nothing until and unless they are prepared to endorse every dot and comma of progressive dogma.
   As Haidt has noted elsewhere, political purification and polarisation are the products of longstanding political trends. But they seem to be accelerating with alarming rapidity in response to our present moment. Liberals have responded to Trump, Brexit, and the transnational rise of the populist far-Right by worrying that the pragmatic centre is in danger of collapse and that now, more than ever, it is vital to defend democratic institutions, free speech, free assembly, and the rule of law. Leftists, meanwhile, see liberalism as a spineless doctrine of compromise and accommodation, and that the only useful response to right-wing populism is a radical left-wing alternative that is comparably trenchant, intolerant, illiberal, and doctrinaire.
   A rallying cry published in the Guardian on February 6 of last year made this explicit. Bylined by six activists, one of whom is a convicted Palestinian terrorist and another of whom is an unrepentant Stalinist, the article called for a new global anti-capitalist feminist movement that would be “anti-racist, anti-imperialist, anti-heterosexist and anti-neoliberal.” Its authors announced that “it is not enough to oppose Trump and his aggressively misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic and racist policies. We also need to target the ongoing neoliberal attack on social provision and labor rights” as well as 30 years of “financialization and corporate globalization” and something called “corporate feminism.” With every subsequent line of the article, the circle of the indicted widens and the circle of available allies shrinks. On which subjects will reasonable people of goodwill still be permitted to disagree?

Michael Barone: What's Oozing Out Of Campuses Is Polluting Society

A couple of years back one of the lame defenses of political correctness (right up there with "it doesn't exist") was: it's isolated to universities. Indeed, people did make that argument. As if universities didn't matter. And didn't have an enormous amount of influence on the rest of society. I'm not sure whether the defenders of PC really believed what they were saying...but I think they did. Those people are nothing if not convicted.
   At any rate, it was an obviously stupid argument at the time. And it's now undeniable that PC has leaked out into society at large.
   Here's Michael Barone on the topic.

Carolina 93 - Louisville 76

Good game Cards, good game Heels.

RIP Women's Sports In The Age Of Transgender Ideology: Hoops Edition

Look, lemme say again: if we think we might want to eliminate separate restrooms, locker rooms, sports, scholarships, etc. for men and women, then let's have the public discussion and make a decision. But men cannot become women (at our current level of technology), and women cannot become men. Those are the hard facts we have to deal with. This shaming-enforced game of make-believe is downright insane. This gigantic obviously male person is obviously male. Obviously. If you're so weak-minded or easily bullied as to say otherwise, you need to step back and think hard about your life. This ridiculousness is only sustainable at all because so few people do it. If men pushed, say, 10% of women out of women's sports, people would start putting their feet down. Which is, of course, what it would take. Merely pointing out that PC transgenderism theory is false won't have any effect at all. Only arguments that it harms members of groups favored by the left will carry any weight with them.

[link fixed]

Meru

I don't do technical climbing--nothing beyond hard scrambles--but I read a lot of climbing books an watch some climbing movies. I thought this one was pretty damn good:

Mueller Charges 13 Rooskies With Interfering In The 2016 Election

If anybody knows WTH this means, then, by all means, fill me the hell in.

Fallows: The Empty Rituals Of An American Massacre

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FBI Failed To Act On Tip In FL School Shooting

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Public Confrontations Prompted Pruitt To Switch To First-Class Travel, EPA Says

This doesn't surprise me at all. Given the shrieky self-righteousness on the contemporary left, the love of drama, and the "resistance" tale they love so much, this was actually predictable. (Remember this Sean Spicer thing? And she recorded it! She was proud of it!)

[Drum doesn't buy it. I find it pretty plausible, and I don't think Drum's snarky comment ("Nothing says “public servant” like spending thousands of dollars a year to provide a buffer against the public, amirite?") carries any weight. Pruitt may be lying. But it's not a crazy reason.]

There Have Not Been 18 School Shootings In 2018

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Jacob Sullum: An "Assault Weapon" Ban Won't Stop Mass Shootings

At Reason

Stealth Destroyers Being Turned Into Ship-Killers

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Bari Weiss on #MeToo on Bill Maher

Not bad.
Maybe there are still some liberals out there? Even at the NYT?

Mass Shootings, The Second Amendment, And The Implacable Left

Mass shootings inevitably make me feel a bit more sympathetic to restrictions on firearms. I'm not religiously committed to the easy availability of 30-round magazines. I used to be more favorably-disposed toward what are sometimes called "common-sense" restrictions on firearms than I am currently. 

   So what's changed? Well, one relatively recent change is that I have come to believe that the left is implacable and inherently...what? Radical? Expansionist? It's never satisfied. Even when its goals aren't crazy (as some aren't, obviously), it just keeps pushing leftward. So that even the non-crazy goals eventually evolve/mutate into crazy ones. I've long ridiculed the intractability of the right...but I've become a bit more sympathetic. It no longer seems all that crazy to me to think that you just have to draw a line and fight the left basically every step of the way. Which is not to say that's always the approach I favor; rather: it just doesn't seem that crazy to me anymore. Does anyone really think that the anti-gun lobby would be satisfied with banning high-capacity magazines? Giving in on that issue would just mean that they have that much less territory they have to win; but they'll never stop until there's a total ban. No concession will ever be enough. Or, well, so I'm at least somewhat inclined to suspect these days.

   I'm not sure how we got here. This wasn't Obama's attitude. It wasn't Bill Clinton's attitude. It didn't seem to be Hillary's attitude...did it? 

   Though, OTOH, it's not like the NRA has been a paragon of compromise, either. To say the very least.

Florida School Shooter Belonged To A White Supremacist Group [Or Not...]

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[But see Anon's comment below]

High School Bans "Outdated And Racially Insensitive" National Anthem From Rallies

The Committee to Re-elect Trump thanks you.

   Though...as much as I detest the plague that is political correctness...there does seem to be some controversy about the correct interpretation of the stanza in question. It might very well be worth thinking about. But I'm probably too annoyed by all this nonsense to be objective about close calls.

Slavoj Zizek on Jordan Peterson

Zizek almost never makes a damn bit of sense.
Every now and then he'll say something that's not total shit. But it's pretty rare.
Peterson is his intellectual superior in basically every way.
Why do people find Jordan Peterson so convincing? Because--with respect to transgender madness, anyway--he's almost entirely right. Zizek is right that the left is full of shit on this stuff...but that's of secondary importance.

Marwa Eltagouri: What 'Anglo-American' Means In Legal Contexts

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I haven't forgotten that the right is nutty. But daggum, the left is just SO batshit right now.

Here's a simple rule of thumb that would help them out a lot if they could just get it through their Starbucks-and-IPA-soaked crania: Not everything is racist.

Alex Epstein: "97% Of Climate Scientists Is 100% Wrong"

Anybody know how much of this is true?

Aaron Blake: 'Anglo-American' and the Liberal Trump Outrage Machine

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Sessions, Sheriffs, and 'Anglo-American'

facepalm:

I am not making this up:

Do you know anyone who says “Anglo-American heritage” in a sentence? What could possibly be the purpose of saying that other than to pit Americans against each other? For the chief law enforcement officer to use a dog whistle like that is appalling.

Who hasn't used 'Anglo-American' in a sentence at some point or other? You're really going to try to pretend that it's some outlandish term? You really can't think of any reason somebody might use the term...other than trying to start a civil war or whatever the hell it is that you're suggesting? Like...maybe just to, y'know, talk about something in the Anglo-American tradition?
   I mean...the left thinks everything is a "dog-whistle." It's like "institutional racism." Both are terms to deploy when you can't find anything specific / concrete to complain about, but you're irrevocably dedicated to bitching about something... So I've come to expect that progressives will plead "dog-whistle" pretty frequently But...if your reflexive whingeing requires you to claim that 'Anglo-American' is some kind of freakish, sinister term, then...uh...well...you're really damn stretching...that's what.
   You've also gotta love the I can't find anything wrong with this but Sessions said it and lots of people think Sessions is a racist so what he said is probably undetectably racist argument.
   Jesus. The left really has lost its marbles.

Carolina 83 - Irish 66

ND hung tough--still playing without Bonzie--until the end when the Heels hit the afterburners.
Our 3-point D was uncharacteristically good in the second half.
Also we got a little of that good home cookin'.
Good game, Irish, Good game Heels.
That's wins over d00k, State and Notre Dame in five days. Not too shabby.

Saletan: GOP Excuses For Trump's Alleged Attempt To Fire Mueller Show How Dangerous The Party's Become

Saletan's a pretty sane and smart dude, IMO.

"Trump Takes 'Shackles' Off ICE, Which Is Slapping Them On Immigrants Who Thought They Were Safe"

This is actually worth a read...though the Post avoids explicitly saying that the "immigrants" in question are illegal about as long as it could possibly do so. About halfway through the story, however, it becomes pretty balanced and interesting. There really are a lot of difficult cases out there. And just a lot of cases, of course.
   One interesting point is that, though Trump is, as we know, literally Hitler, fewer illegals are actually being deported now than at the beginning of the Obama administration. Which I guess makes Obama literally Hitlerer than Trump even.
   I've long wondered whether it would be worth basically saying something like: Ok, we've been so slack about immigration in the past that it's rather unfair to suddenly tell people who have been here for 30 years that they have to get out. But from now on, we're serious. From this day forward, if you come here illegally, you need to understand that we'll kick you out if we catch you, regardless of how long you've been here.
   Dunno. Tough problem, for sure.

Reminder That CNN Was More Hostile To An American Citizen Who Made A Wrestling GIF...

...Than to a representative of the most evil government on Earth.

   I'd actually almost forgotten about GIFgate... Man, CNN sure did flip its shit over that one. Remember how the GIF was supposed to be an actual threat of violence against journalists? It was the popomo method of free-form pseudo-interpretation in action.
   If someone wanted to become a serious journalist (or a serious anything else, for that matter), he'd be well-advised to avoid all popomo humanities and social sciences classes like the plague.

Transgenderism and Privacy Arguments

I didn't think much of this, from The Federalist. But it's an occasion to mention something I mentioned quite awhile ago, which is that I think that the "transgendered" would be better off making privacy arguments roughly of the form: I shouldn't have to disclose my sex; it's private. (Which is not to say that I endorse the crackpot arguments according to which it's ok to trick people into sex by deceiving them about your sex. That's psycho.) 

   And I don't accept that the government has to lie on your driver's licence by putting the wrong sex on it. At most, people should have the option of leaving their sex off of their license. The ACLU might argue that to do so would be, basically, to admit that you aren't the sex you are trying to appear to be. But plenty of progressives would leave it off precisely to insure that this wasn't the case. Furthermore, though the government may be obligated not to disclose your sex, I doubt that it's obligated to help you conceal it.

   OTOH, the government does have a legitimate interest in putting your sex on your license. That's one of the main ways we categorize and identify people. We're very good at identifying people's sex--even when they're trying to fool us about it. And if we can demand that the government not identify us by sex, can't we also demand that they can't identify us by height, weight, eye color, etc.? OTOH...how diligent are they about making sure you tell them the right height, weight, etc.? If someone colors his or her hair, do they insist on knowing the person's actual hair color? I have no idea...

   A lot of the ACLU's argument depends on conflating sex and gender--but that's par for the course on the left these days. What used to be mandatory is now forbidden; mucking up sex and gender is now the centerpiece of most lefty arguments about transgenderism. Putting your sex on your license says nothing at all about your gender. And your gender is disclosed as soon as you open your mouth, anyway; we're all very good at distinguishing masculinity from femininity. So, no, none of this has anything at all to do with gender (a virtually meaningless term as its now used on the left), nor "gender identity," which has never really meant anything at all. God, that ACLU argument really is a mess. I'm not going to sort through the details...because either the ACLU doesn't understand the sex/gender distinction at all, or they're intentionally mucking it up right good.

   And, as for the ACLU itself / overall...well, it's not in good shape. Taking a principled stand on the rights of the Klan et al. in the Charlottesville case may have been the last gasp of the old, liberal ACLU. There was apparently a kind of revolt after that, and now many of its employees are apparently demanding that it abandon liberalism in favor of identity politics causes (like transgenderism). Which suggests to me that Conquest's Second Law maybe ought to be: Any organization not explicitly right-wing inevitably drifts farther and farther leftward...

Andrew Sullivan: We All Live On Campus Now

Years ago I ended up in several web-arguments with progressives making every excuse they could think of for campus PC madness. One of their most idiotic arguments was: it's just on campuses, so there's no reason to worry about it. As if the rights of students and faculty didn't matter. As if what starts on campuses doesn't spread to the rest of the world.
   Well, here's Sullivan, right on the money as usual. The PC cult has now spread from campus to the rest of the cultural superstructure, and the country is--obviously--much worse for it.

[And, incidentally: if you want even more proof of how bad and widespread the problem has become, look at the train wreck that is the comments under the Sullivan piece.]

Carolina 96 - State 89

WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

That was a really good game. And winning is more fun than losing.
They went on a 19-0 run in the first half, and shot 55% in the second half...but we got within two at halftime...and shot 77% in the second half if you can believe that. Hard to beat a team that's shooting like that.
Also: Luke Maye.
Also: Go to hell, State.

The Big One

Go to hell, State.

Go git 'em, boys.

CA Lawmaker Behind #MeToo Push Accused Of Groping Male Staffer

#HimToo

Whelp, you know the drill: listen and believe.

Theo's Dunk

Not as good as it would have been if he hadn't lost the handle when he was dunking on Bagley...but still pretty satisfying:

Carolina 82 - Duke 78

Good game dookies.
GDTBATH

Republicans Love Deficits...Again

'Cause remember: Reagan proved the deficits don't matter or whatever.

Saletan: The Obstruction Case Is Getting Solid

I still think that this, and not collusion, is a/the real problem.

Joseph Heath: The Problem With Critical Studies

Via the Ph*l*s*phy M*t*F*r*m, and basically right, IMO.

How Not To Not Look Like A Tin-Pot Dictator In Case That's Something You Care About Not Looking Like

I know you know what this is an excuse for:

Not Clapping = Treason

I can't even think of anything to say about this idiocy.

James Madison University Railroads Student In Title IX Investigation; Court Awards Him $850k

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Description of the case in question.
Heads should roll over this at the university in question.

Katie Roiphe: The Other Whisper Network

Her long-awaited article on the so-called "Shitty Media Men" list:

   No one would talk to me for this piece. Or rather, more than twenty women talked to me, sometimes for hours at a time, but only after I promised to leave out their names, and give them what I began to call deep anonymity. This was strange, because what they were saying did not always seem that extreme. Yet here in my living room, at coffee shops, in my inbox and on my voicemail, were otherwise outspoken female novelists, editors, writers, real estate agents, professors, and journalists of various ages so afraid of appearing politically insensitive that they wouldn’t put their names to their thoughts, and I couldn’t blame them.
   Of course, the prepublication frenzy of Twitter fantasy and fury about this essay, which exploded in early January, is Exhibit A for why nobody wants to speak openly. Before the piece was even finished, let alone published, people were calling me “pro-rape,” “human scum,” a “harridan,” a “monster out of Stephen King’s ‘IT,’?” a “ghoul,” a “bitch,” and a “garbage person”—all because of a rumor that I was planning to name the creator of the so-called Shitty Media Men list. The Twitter feminist Jessica Valenti called this prospect “profoundly shitty” and “incredibly dangerous” without having read a single word of my piece. Other tweets were more direct: “man if katie roiphe actually publishes that article she can consider her career over.” “Katie Roiphe can suck my dick.” With this level of thought policing, who in their right mind would try to say anything even mildly provocative or original?

   The core of this isn't new. Feminism has been getting progressively more insane for, what, forty years? And the insanity of feminism is just one prominent, representative species of the insanity of the left generally--which is largely driven by hatred of straight white men, and the desire to punish them. Justly or unjustly...such details don't matter.

Progressives Continue To Eat Their Own: Bill Nye / SOTU Edition

So Bill Nye got props for the incoherent babble about gender on his t.v. show. Pretending that leftist sexual politics was science was something progressives were very much down with.
   But now he's gone too far by attending Trump's State of the Union Address.
   Which obviously means that he is totally anti-science.
   Here's an embarrassingly stupid, resolutely anti-scientific letter from 500 women scientists claiming...well...a bunch o idiotic things. Most notably that science can't/shouldn't be separated from left-wing politics. Neo-Lysenkoism in a fairly pure form.
   Despite propaganda to the contrary, the left has become way more anti-scientific than the right. It's also alarming to see how utterly clueless many scientists are about what makes science science.
   Honestly, I had to stop reading it. It's just an embarrassment.

WereThe Mizzou Football Protests Based On Hate-Crime Hoaxes?

Maybe

DoJ: Mueller Probe Lawful

Obstruction of obstruction of justice!

Sully: The Gay Rights Movement Is Undoing Its Best Work

I'm inclined to agree.

Academic Ethics: Hidden Hiring Criteria

Props to Leiter for this.
   I was on a hiring committee once, at a certain time in a certain place, that was instructed to only consider female candidates. This BS does, in fact, happen. I raised hell, but eventually gave in when the dean threatened our then-precariously-positioned department with loss of the position. The then-chairperson, for whom I had great respect, convinced me with a version of the "Forget It, Jake, It's Chinatown" argument. But I'd certainly never let such a thing happen again. I was young and stupid and dealing with some personal crap, and I eventually just gave in. But the fact that I did bugs me to this day.

Good Tomoe Nage Video (I Think)

This seems like a good tomoe nage video...but I don't really know because nobody's ever taught me to do tomoe nagi right. We all loved trying it back in my first Judo class in highschool...but I'm pretty sure our instructor didn't even know how to do it right. I still remember him yelling at me from the sidelines during randori: "[Smith]! Stop tryin' to do that [daggum] tomoe nagi!" I'm not sure it ever worked, actually.
   Anyway, watching this video, I'm not surprised that our lame attempts never worked.