"...as long as..."
Bringing the Hammer
The payoff comes two minutes, twenty-eight seconds in.
That guy might have been President, these last six years.
That guy might have been President, these last six years.
"Meanwhile, in Norway..."
About 27 tonnes of caramelised brown goat cheese - a delicacy known as Brunost - caught light as it was being driven through the Brattli Tunnel at Tysfjord, northern Norway, last week.
The fire raged for five days and smouldering toxic gases were slowing the recovery operation, officials said.
The Viking Guide to an Evening Out
Legitimate advice from the Havamal is made accessible for the current generation.
Wait, What?
Via Hot Air:
The part that I want to hear more about is how the obligation to work is shared by everyone.
Really? Where is that coming from? How is this obligation grounded? What should be done to those who don't meet this obligation?
SESSIONS:The part of that statement Allahpundit is interested in is the part where people who are illegally in this country have a "right" to work.
Let me ask you this: In the workplace of America today when we have a high number of unemployed, we’ve had declining wages for many years, we have the lowest of Americans working, who has more right to a job in this country? A lawful immigrant who’s here, a green-card holder or a citizen, or a person who entered the country unlawfully?
LYNCH:
Well, Senator, I believe that the right and the obligation to work is one that’s shared by everyone in this country regardless of how they came here. And certainly, if someone here, regardless of status, I would prefer that they be participating in the workplace than not participating in the workplace…
The part that I want to hear more about is how the obligation to work is shared by everyone.
Really? Where is that coming from? How is this obligation grounded? What should be done to those who don't meet this obligation?
Interesting Analogs
How about a former US Assistant Treasury Secretary and working economist who proposes we think of Iranian nuclear issue in the model of The Lord of the Rings? Picture that in your mind for a minute.
Did it look like this?
Did it look like this?
If we use J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings as a metaphor for the West, the West is Mordor and Washington is Sauron.
It is pointless for Iran to negotiate with the West in hopes of gaining acceptance. Iran is on the same list as Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi, and Assad. The only way Iran can be accepted by the West is to consent to being an American puppet state. Suspicion about Iran’s nuclear energy program is a contrived issue. If it were not the nuclear issue, it would be some other contrived issue, such as weapons of mass destruction, use of chemical weapons, terrorism, and so forth. Iran’s leaders should understand that the real problem is Iran’s independence of Washington’s foreign and economic policies.
Now There's A Headline I Never Expected to See
"Chemists find a way to unboil eggs."
“This method … could transform industrial and research production of proteins,” the researchers write in ChemBioChem.
For example, pharmaceutical companies currently create cancer antibodies in expensive hamster ovary cells that do not often misfold proteins. The ability to quickly and cheaply re-form common proteins from yeast or E. coli bacteria could potentially streamline protein manufacturing and make cancer treatments more affordable. Industrial cheese makers, farmers and others who use recombinant proteins could also achieve more bang for their buck.
When everything you know is wrong.
The WSJ editorial board wants the President to have a Seinfeld moment:
Mr. Obama is now taking credit for 2014’s job gains that his policies inhibited, much as he is for the boom in oil and gas drilling that his Administration resisted. Thus comes the opportunity for a late-term “Seinfeld” economic epiphany. Imagine the possibilities if the President realized that everything he thought about economics is wrong.
A President Costanza would cut the tax rate on capital, not raise it; reduce the incentives to go on disability, not increase them; and reduce regulatory costs on business, not add to them. Whatever economic instincts you have, Mr. President, do the opposite.
"How We Won the War on Dungeons & Dragons"
The "we" in this sense is the folks who enjoyed playing Dungeons & Dragons back when there was a huge uproar against it. Apropos of Tex's posts about nerd culture. They may feel oppressed, but sometimes they win!
We used to play D&D when I was a teenager too, and I think it's very helpful for kids. That kind of role-playing is one way of working out who you really want to be, and what's important to you. You can't actually be a barbarian king or a wizard, but you can explore what it might be like to have the virtues of courage or knowledge, and decide where you want to focus your own efforts to develop those virtues in yourself.
Of course, at some point, it's time to 'put away childish things,' and get on with the business of developing real virtue (although you can probably get back to it, as with other childish things, once you get old enough). At a certain age, when you aren't sure yet who you are or what you want, the games are helpful things.
We used to play D&D when I was a teenager too, and I think it's very helpful for kids. That kind of role-playing is one way of working out who you really want to be, and what's important to you. You can't actually be a barbarian king or a wizard, but you can explore what it might be like to have the virtues of courage or knowledge, and decide where you want to focus your own efforts to develop those virtues in yourself.
Of course, at some point, it's time to 'put away childish things,' and get on with the business of developing real virtue (although you can probably get back to it, as with other childish things, once you get old enough). At a certain age, when you aren't sure yet who you are or what you want, the games are helpful things.
PC Nonsense
Jonathan Chait tries to take on the whole internet, at least according to the weaklings at Gawker.
And as for what it means to be a man, I doubt he and I agree at all. He'll answer to God for his conscience, and I for mine, but don't think they're similar -- let alone the same.
I am white and male, a fact that is certainly worth bearing in mind. I was also a student at the University of Michigan during the Jacobsen incident, and was attacked for writing an article for the campus paper defending the exhibit. If you consider this background and demographic information the very essence of my point of view, then there’s not much point in reading any further. But this pointlessness is exactly the point: Political correctness makes debate irrelevant and frequently impossible.I doubt Chait and I have agreed about ten things in ten years. That's why PC is nonsense. These categories are just analogies. I doubt we have ten things in common, including 'being white' and 'being male.' He's a New York writer from a Jewish family -- which is fine, and I in no way mean to suggest otherwise, but it's almost totally different from my own Scots-Irish heritage in Appalachia.
And as for what it means to be a man, I doubt he and I agree at all. He'll answer to God for his conscience, and I for mine, but don't think they're similar -- let alone the same.
Good for You, Lady
I checked the history, and most mentions of Michelle Obama here at the Hall are from Tex or Cassandra (who has posting privileges she may have forgotten). I think the American tendency to pay attention to the First Lady and families of Presidents is a mistake, probably JFK's fault, that only hurts their ability to carry on with family life during a difficult few years. Best to ignore them and what they do, almost all the time, for the sake of the President's mental health and the individual good of each family member.
However, I'll break tradition this once. It's not mandatory for women from outside Saudi Arabia to go veiled, but it's good for an American not to. She may not have felt she had much choice, given the constant rumors that her husband is a secret Muslim, but all the same it's a healthy signal of independence. It's good for us, and it's good for the women of Saudi Arabia.
However, I'll break tradition this once. It's not mandatory for women from outside Saudi Arabia to go veiled, but it's good for an American not to. She may not have felt she had much choice, given the constant rumors that her husband is a secret Muslim, but all the same it's a healthy signal of independence. It's good for us, and it's good for the women of Saudi Arabia.
Fascists Have The Best Uniforms
"The Front National now has the support of a quarter of Paris’s gay voters – and only 16 per cent of the straight ones."
The Front National now offers a welcoming home to gay people who feel judged by Muslims and share wider concerns about immigration and the loss of French identity... Marine has worked hard to expand the FN’s membership beyond obvious bigots, racists and skinheads. She has publicly condemned anti-Semitism and insists that, far from being racist, her party is the only one that defends secularity and democracy against Islamisation. A key part of this strategy is using the Islamist threat to court the sort of people that the far right has traditionally persecuted. It’s working.That's not just 'working,' that's amazing. It sounds like a leading indicator.
"Control Your Thoughts."
Apropos of a story about a Christian blogress who decided to quit wearing Yoga pants in public so as to avoid tempting other men into violating the commandment against coveting another man's wife, some advice:
Meanwhile, others criticised the entry for feeding into the idea that what a women chooses to wear dictates how men behave. “How about you learn to control your thoughts?” said one commenter.That's great advice! Let's try it. Don't think of a pink elephant.
Structural oppression
Grim linked to two very interesting articles on the subject of the War Between Nerds and Feminists. In the first, Scot Alexander expounds on a number of topics, such as how useless it is to define human relations in terms of relative oppression, so that every identification of unjust behavior becomes a competition to determine which of us has it the worst: "You couldn't go to college? Well, I had to be subject to the draft! Top that!" He calls it the "one-dimensional model of privilege." Then he really grabs me with this:
Alexander continues explaining how little help oppression-talk can be:
Then there's this spot-on summary of the social atmosphere in a STEM-dominated office:
The more I read about this, the more it seems like a war between people on opposite ends of the autism spectrum.
And this is why it’s distressing to see the same things people have always said about Jews get applied to nerds. They’re this weird separate group with their own culture who don’t join in the reindeer games of normal society. They dress weird and talk weird. They’re conventionally unattractive and have too much facial hair. But worst of all, they have the chutzpah to do all that and also be successful. Having been excluded from all of the popular jobs, they end up in the unpopular but lucrative jobs, for which they get called greedy parasites in the Jews’ case, and “the most useless and deficient individuals in society” in the case of the feminist article on nerds I referenced earlier.
. . .
I am saying that whatever structural oppression means, it should be about structure. And the structure society uses to marginalize and belittle nerds is very similar to a multi-purpose structure society has used to belittle weird groups in the past with catastrophic results.Of course it's also true that, for instance, a group of guys with some terrible habits about treating women as sex dolls might simultaneously be the target of crippling society hatred and the beneficiaries of lavish societal rewards of a different sort. It's even true that their distressing sex-doll mentality might be rooted in an oppressive social gender structure, even though they continue to suffer from some gender-based social structures and to benefit from others. It's not always about who's getting the short end of the stick in every possible walk of life. Sometimes it's just about treating people as individual human beings rather than as either objects or rigid categories. I'd really just as soon never read another article explaining that the "real" oppression is the plight of guys who would like to have sex with someone who doesn't happen to agree with the program, and therefore it follows as the night the day that all talk of oppression in the form of treating women as something less than human is illegitimate. I'm also all done listening to how a particular behavior couldn't possible be unjust or reprehensible, because the perpetrator also feels genuine pain about his life. That's just suffering one-up-man-ship, and it's not shedding light on how we can treat each other decently.
Alexander continues explaining how little help oppression-talk can be:
If we’ve learned anything from the Star Wars prequels, it’s that Anakin Skywalker is unbearably annoying. But if we’ve learned two things from the Star Wars prequels, it’s that the easiest way to marginalize the legitimate concerns of anyone who stands in your way is to declare them oppressors loud enough to scare everyone who listens.
And if the people in the Star Wars universe had seen the Star Wars movies, I have no doubt whatsoever that Chancellor Palpatine would have discredited his opponents by saying they were the Empire.
(seriously, you wanted to throw the gauntlet down to lonely male nerds, and the turf you chose was Star Wars metaphors? HOW COULD THAT POSSIBLY SEEM LIKE A GOOD IDEA?)He really dismantles theories of how Silicon Valley cleverly excludes women from lucrative STEM jobs while allowing women so to swamp the medical field these days that people are starting to worry who'll see all the patients when they start taking pregnancy leave.
Then there's this spot-on summary of the social atmosphere in a STEM-dominated office:
Any space with a four-to-one male:female ratio is going to end up with some pretty desperate people and a whole lot of unwanted attention. Add into this mix the fact that nerds usually have poor social skills (explaining exactly why would take a literature review to put that last one to shame, but hopefully everyone can agree this is true), and you get people who are pretty sure they are supposed to do something but have no idea what. Err to one side and you get the overly-chivalrous people saying m’lady because it pattern matches to the most courtly and least sexual way of presenting themselves they can think of. Err to the other, and you get people hollowly imitating the behavior they see in famous seducers and playboys, which when done without the very finely-tuned social graces and body-language-reading-ability of famous seducers and playboys is pretty much just “being extremely creepy”.The second article grabs me just as hard with a nerd woman's paean to perseveration:
What I’ve got, and what I wish the rest of the “women in tech” community who rage against the misogyny they see everywhere they look could also have, is a blazingly single-minded focus on whatever topic I happen to be perseverating on at the moment. It has kept me awake for days puzzling out novel algorithms and it has thwarted a wannabe PUA at a conference completely by accident. It is also apparently the most crashingly successful defense against attempts to make me feel inferior that has ever been devised. When I’m someplace that says on the label that it’s all about the tech, so am I. I may have come by it naturally, but it is a teachable skill. Not only that, it’s a skill that transforms the places where it’s exercised.
The fact that Shanley Kane dismisses experiences like mine as “denial,” and regards them as “colluding in my own oppression,” both saddens and baffles me.The author is perfectly describing the dreadful "Uncle Tom" or "Oreo Cookie" criticism. She's found a home in the STEM world, she knows why it works for her, and she's not interested in apologizing because it doesn't work for people not like her, whether anyone thinks the necessary qualities sort themselves out along gender lines or not.
The more I read about this, the more it seems like a war between people on opposite ends of the autism spectrum.
When privileges collide
Who's more aggrieved, feminists or nerds?
“I was terrified that one of my female classmates would somehow find out that I sexually desired her, and that the instant she did, I would be scorned, laughed at, called a creep and a weirdo, maybe even expelled from school or sent to prison,” Aaronson said.
....
The feminist response was swift and harsh, with controversial blogger Amanda Marcotte calling Aaronson’s mini-memoir “a yalp of entitlement combined with an aggressive unwillingness to accept that women are human beings just like men.” His essay boils down to a belief that women are “a robot army put here for sexual service and housework,” she said.I assume the article omitted the intervening comments that formed some kind of rational bridge between the nerd's cri de coeur and the feminist backlash. These two groups don't seem to be communicating well. I've always been fond of nerds, myself, especially since I are one.
Speaking of the 1st Amendment
Sometimes when a seemingly disgraceful story hits the right-wing news outlets, I like to check to see whether any mainstream sources have picked it up. For one thing, if the news needs to be spread, experience suggests that the message can be heard more widely and without so much static if it comes in a more soothing wrapper than the Fox News banner. Also, the rightosphere has been known occasionally to push a story for political purposes, shocking as that may be. (I understand the leftosphere and the MSM occasionally err in this fashion as well.)
Anyway, when I heard that Bowe Bergdahl is to be charged with desertion but the White House is trying furiously to bury the story, my first reaction was to un-bury it as vigorously as one puny individual can. My second was to see whether I might get some confirmation. Naturally, confirmation in a case like this is tricky; if the White House really is squelching the news, can I trust the New York Times to carry it? The question answers itself.
The upshot is that I'm getting hits on all kinds of sites like the Daily Mail, with The Washington Times perhaps being the closest to a traditional news outlet, but nothing in any sources like Reuters or the AP. Duffleblog is on the job, though:
Anyway, when I heard that Bowe Bergdahl is to be charged with desertion but the White House is trying furiously to bury the story, my first reaction was to un-bury it as vigorously as one puny individual can. My second was to see whether I might get some confirmation. Naturally, confirmation in a case like this is tricky; if the White House really is squelching the news, can I trust the New York Times to carry it? The question answers itself.
The upshot is that I'm getting hits on all kinds of sites like the Daily Mail, with The Washington Times perhaps being the closest to a traditional news outlet, but nothing in any sources like Reuters or the AP. Duffleblog is on the job, though:
For his own personal safety Bergdahl has gone into hiding in Idaho, a rugged mountainous area far from civilization, where he is being guarded by several of the local hill tribes.
The Taliban have asked the U.S. to immediately extradite Bergdahl back to Afghanistan to face criminal charges. The U.S. Department of Justice has vowed to work overtime to fulfill their request.
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