Sunday, August 11, 2019
Hope you don't own any flint knives in NY . . .
Can't let people possess any prehistoric technology, too dangerous.
Friday, March 22, 2019
Church of Marxism
You know how Scientology treats people who speak out against it? This is how the MSM and the left treat anybody who stands up for true injustice. You are a target locked onto, victimised, your character assassinated, your friends and family are 'fair game', even your children. They go after your job, those closest to you, they'll stop at nothing to push you to the very edge of sanity and, indeed, suicide. Tommy is one of their biggest victims right now. This is the Church of Marxism and we need to undermine it at every possibility.As commented by "The Internet" on Enemy of the State | Tommy Robinson Interview by Sargon of Akkad.
Labels: trends
Friday, January 12, 2018
MTA construction costs, analyzed
For years, those watching the MTA have rung the alarm on the agency’s high construction costs. I’ve written about cost concerns and the ever-increasing budgets for big-ticket MTA capital projects for years, and I’m not alone. Alon Levy has, since this post in 2011, charted the absurd costs of U.S. rail construction in detailed comparisons with international peers, and Stephen Smith, via the @MarketUrbanism twitter feed, has beaten the cost drum. When challenged, MTA officials have acknowledged that construction costs, but no one has tackled the twin issues of cost transparency and cost control. No one, that is, until last week, when The Times ran a massive front-page story charting all the reasons why NYC transit construction are so high.Unsurprisingly, it's not because NYC is special, but because NYC is especially corrupt.
Labels: local, politics, trends
Wednesday, June 07, 2017
Dickwolves
Not sure how I missed this controversy . . . which came up while reading a fascinating article on how communities online pretend to have rules and codes of conduct, but actually are dictatorships, of a sort.
Friday, February 17, 2017
Self-censorship
My friends, this started a long time ago.
This is how the muzzling starts: not with a boot on your neck, but with the fear of one that runs so deep that you muzzle yourself.I rarely speak my mind on political matters for fear of losing my job. Remember Brendan Eich?
Maybe it’s the story you decide against doing because it’s liable to provoke a press-bullying president to put the power of his office behind his attempt to destroy your reputation by falsely calling your journalism “fake.”
We no longer have to imagine it. We got a real-life example last week in San Antonio, where a PBS station sat atop the slippery slope toward censorship and then promptly started down it.
Monday, September 19, 2016
"Progress" in the geek space
And for that matter, in the grand scheme of things I don’t even have it that badly. I know really awkward, unpleasant-to-be-around people for whom, say, 4chan-type spaces online are their only social outlet. They are marginally employed and have little to no money. Many of them still live with their parents while pushing 30. They’ve set down a shitty path in life, and they have little hope of ever leaving it. These social spaces are their only treats in life.Or, what happens when reformers try to exclude people from their own social spaces.
Monday, March 07, 2016
Campus monoculture
JONATHAN HAIDT: I didn’t even know about that. The president was supposed to be the grown-up in the room. He was supposed to show some wisdom, some balance, and some strength. And so we’ve seen, basically what can really only be called Maoist moral bullying – am we saw it very clearly at Claremont McKenna. The video is really chilling–the students surrounding this nice woman who was trying to help them, and reducing her to tears. As we’ve seen more and more of this, I’ve begun calling it, “the Yale problem,” referring to the way that left-leaning institutions are now cut off from any moral vocabulary that they could use to resist the forces of illiberalism. As far as I’m concerned, “Next Yale” can go find its own “Next Alumni.” I don’t plan to give to Yale ever again, unless it reverses course.Time to stand up for reality.
Monday, August 17, 2015
Trigger warnings are anti-science
They just makes people worse psychologically. Fascinating.
But vindictive protectiveness teaches students to think in a very different way. It prepares them poorly for professional life, which often demands intellectual engagement with people and ideas one might find uncongenial or wrong. The harm may be more immediate, too. A campus culture devoted to policing speech and punishing speakers is likely to engender patterns of thought that are surprisingly similar to those long identified by cognitive behavioral therapists as causes of depression and anxiety. The new protectiveness may be teaching students to think pathologically.
Tuesday, June 30, 2015
Will you be on the side of truth or fads
In 1790, when Edmund Burke wrote his classic essay, Reflections on the Revolution in France, the reactions were not positive. He was not popular among the London elites, to say the least. As L.G. Mitchell recounts, “Burke was rejected right across the political spectrum.” Not only did radicals such as Thomas Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft “dislike the book,” but the members of his own Whig party disowned it: Charles James Fox considered the Reflections “to be in very bad taste” and the future Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger found only “rhapsodies in which there is much to admire and nothing to agree with.”Burke was right, and Reason was wrong. One suspects it will happen again.
Yet Burke, the reform-minded statesman, decided to stand against the proclamations of the French Revolution. Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity—who would want to be against that? Burke, apparently. And he prophesied the coming Terror and the rise of Napoleon, because he refused to give in to the tyrannical dictates of eighteenth-century deified Reason.
Labels: marriage, philosophy, trends
Monday, June 15, 2015
Mark Shea and Jenner issues
To get to the point,
Steven Greydanus remarked yesterday: “The more I read and think about it, the more I realize that my difficulty with people calling Caitlyn Jenner a woman begins not with disagreement, but with honestly having no idea what they’re saying or what they mean to claim. In this context, I literally don’t understand what is meant by “woman.”
Wednesday, April 29, 2015
There's your first problem
Reading this story about a transgender suicide, I came across this:
But in addition to community, Bryk also found torment on the Internet. At one point, the abuse on 4chan, an anonymous Internet message board, became so bad that she left and started using Reddit instead.Not to be flippant, but 4chan's primary purpose on the internet is more or less to be a miserable place . . .
Labels: technology, trends
Tuesday, March 24, 2015
Having it both ways with gender
One moment I'm being lectured about the unique talents women bring to the table, that companies with more women on the board tend to perform better and how the government ought to impose quotas on the number of female MPs.I guess, women are different than men in every area of life, except those which biology would suggest. That seems like a reasonable hypothesis.
The next moment I'm being told that in the family, the number of women involves is absolutely insignificant. Women being nothing to the table. Two men can themselves up as Mr and Mr Dad and only a nasty bigot would dare suggest that something is missing from the equation.
Labels: feminism, humor, trends
Thursday, February 26, 2015
Winnie's
It's biting the dust. I am actually running out of places to go that don't suck, I think.
Reader Jack wrote in, "Two bartenders at Winnie’s Bar and Grill in Chinatown have told me that they are closing sometime in March as the landlord is renting the space to someone else (they have gone for 3 years without a lease)."
Wednesday, February 04, 2015
Snowpocalypse Roundup
Peter Woit - we're all wusses. Second Avenue Sagas - WTF Mate, why are politics driving transit decisions? And a look at the worst snowstorm in NYC history, when the trains kept running just fine for the most part.
Labels: New York, trains, trends
Tuesday, February 03, 2015
I find it reassuring that I'm not the only one that thinks our current culture is creepy
Body hair, and more specifically pubic hair, is an indicator of sexual maturity. Not all cultures remove pubic hair or see it as undesirable (see: our own culture 30 years ago). Pubic hair on a woman indicates that she is sexually mature. So what does it signify when we associate the REMOVAL of pubic hair with ‘femininity’? (1) That a fully sexually mature woman is undesirable? That to be ‘feminine’ a woman must resemble a pre-pubescent child? That a woman’s body is not acceptable the way it is naturally? (2,3) Those are certainly the messages I glean from this cultural expectation placed upon women.Basically, I agree with everything in this article.
Thursday, January 15, 2015
Does religion have a smart people problem?
No. But if you define intelligence narrowly enough, you might think so.
Tuesday, November 25, 2014
Culture Wars and the death of civil society
Moreover, the energy inspiring those clubs, associations, corporations, and movements was generated in what we today would call the “private sector”—outside of government. (If we followed Walter Williams’ suggested and used the term “government schools,” for what we call “public schools,” we could rethink the whole concept. ) What a robust civil society entailed was the existence of a great deal of free space in which people, alone or in groups, were free to act, or not to act. In the New York state of the mid-19th century, the “perfectionist” community in Oneida was tolerated for quite some time, despite its embrace of free love or “complex marriage,” as the group’s members called it, which most New Yorkers frowned upon. (By the time the larger populace found a way to shut down the experiment, it was beginning to fail on its own.)
Contrast the openness of the America of Tocqueville’s day with the story above. A couple has religious scruples about gay marriage. They cannot in good conscience allow their property to be used to label “marriage” something they view as nothing of the sort. Why is that the government’s business? Moreover, once it becomes the government’s business, it politicizes what used to be the free sphere of private action and choice.
Thursday, November 20, 2014
Free speach is only acceptable if it is the right speach
I would’ve thought that the one place in Britain where you could agree to disagree amicably would be Oxford University. But I was wrong. For instance, I’ve discovered that you’re only allowed to debate abortion there if a) you’re a woman and b) you’re all for it. Any other approach to the subject is liable to attract a mob….One hopes that at some point we stop paying for people to spend four years in an echo chamber being told how great they are.
Thursday, July 17, 2014
No more gas stations in the East Village
Monday, May 12, 2014
Missing leisure time
We're losing rest days, and we think we like it, but we are probably worse off.
But Sunday, the weekend day that even Puritans blocked off for worship and rest (a Puritan poet once pondered “over whether closing a stable door that was blowing in the wind constituted an act of work which would profane the Sabbath”), is also beginning to look more and more like just another day of the work week.Hat tip to L. for this one.
