Something tells me I should be using my outline processor to capture this stuff, instead of my blog, since there is breadth & depth to this and both dimensions are important. That’s usually a tip-off that outlining is the way to go.

But related events are coming in fast and thick, and I’m more concerned about the breadth than the depth. I’ve done the depth already, a few times. I’ll probably be doing it here, too, before I’m done.

I’m seeing three topics of immediate concern:

One. Our modern society, as obsessed as it is with female achievement, doesn’t seem to be interested at all in providing girls with what children really need to become competent and capable adults: Challenge (H/T to Gerard again).

Are girls so totally fragile and glassine, so pathetically weak and easily crushed that gentle parenting to protect and guide them will destroy their gentle souls? Is the delight in science and industry such a guttering candle flame that it is snuffed by even the mildest breeze?

Two. Our society, apart from that, seems to be enthusiastically embracing a mindset that is immature at best, and at worst, insane: Women should be able to decide, on behalf of straight men who are attracted to women, what sexy is. Erm, no, as Captain Capitalism points out, straight men actually decide what sexy is, in a woman. Gotta let us decide something, ya know…

…the women who agree with Brenoff see themselves as diamonds in the rough, caged birds that whose songs are incredibly beautiful, but those infantile, privileged men refuse to recognize them as such. But all the other birds believe our songs are beautiful! Sorry, but singers don’t get to decide what their listeners will find pleasing to hear. A person simply cannot decide what others desire in their lives. It is puerile to demand other people prop up the delusions you have about your life.

Three. The gamma male. Ah, the poor, sniveling wretches…

The third and lowest tier of male social hierarchy. Unlike the dominant alpha or the passive beta, the gamma male’s hallmark traits are clinginess, possessiveness, and manipulation. Since he is unable to compete with men above his social tier, he is prone to isolating and manipulating girls, and failing that, throwing guilt trips to keep them on a short leash. While a gamma male is often a self-proclaimed “nice guy”, his benevolence is merely a means to an end, which is usually trying to hook up with a girl he is obsessed with. Overly emotional and prone to feelings of unwarranted entitlement, the gamma male would rather blame all of his problems on other people than take responsibility for his own behavior.

Fleshing out the “outline” a bit under the high-level “node” that is Observation #3: I see someone took notice of this little tempest-in-a-teapot between John Scalzi‘s fans, and me & severian. I spoke of insanity up above, which has been defined as the exercise of consistent behavior with the expectation of inconsistent results. That fits what we’ve lately seen out of the Gammas quite well:

You can always tell when the Gamma male, who will never openly admit that his precious little feelings have been wounded, is having trouble maintaining his delusion, because he keeps returning to the point where it has been punctured, trying to come up with some spin on the situation that he can successfully sell to others and thereby convince himself.
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Note that despite all the reassurance he’s received from the other rabbits, it’s still not enough and he’s actively seeking even more. This is because he knows that his weakness, and worse, his pride in his weakness, makes him an object of derision and disgust by men and women alike. And the knowledge of that is painful to his ego.

Not sure how I fit into the tier system. I know I’m not Alpha, Beta or Gamma. Guess I’ve always been a sort of a “War Games” sort of guy: “The only winning move is not to play.” My kind, like the Alpha and the Beta, is naturally programmed by evolution to get a rush out of sex — the having of it, and the prospect of it as well. Gammas are a different breed entirely. It seems they achieve exactly the same thrill out of female approval. Their wires are crossed. Their mothers, or female caregivers, must have done something awful to them.

severian‘s original point, or a big part of it anyway, was that there is a certain element of danger to this business of bragging about your daughter outdoing you. How could I explain it to the intransigent-Gamma; oh right, I can’t. Well, I’ll explain it to everybody else then:

If the numbers of the Scalzi-daughter-bench-press have been discussed, they haven’t found their way to me, so I’m taking it as an unknown in the equation. Scalzi can bench press X, his daughter can bench press Y, and Y > X. That is known; let us now ponder the likelihoods. It is likely — at least, I would hope — we’re talking about something upwards of 150 pounds, which is mired deeply in the mucky layer of “bro, do you even lift???.” But unless his daughter is freakish, it’s not above what an average man can lift if he’s been working at it. And no, Gammas, I do not include myself in that. Been writing a fair amount of code over the past three years, have a bit of a T-Rex thing going on at the moment. Daughter’s a teenager who can out-lift her dad. We can probably peg this contest down to within 50 pounds. And the daughter, I take it, is in good shape.

Applying a reductio ad absurdum, let’s arbitrarily subtract a decade from the daughter’s age and pretend Scalzi was bragging about his six-year-old lifting more than he can. Now, we’ve lost our ability to provide a quality estimate about the weights being discussed, or much of it. We really haven’t a clue about what’s going on. Is he dictating this “tweet” from a hospital bed, with both arms busted? Is the daughter from the planet Krypton? I dunno. You don’t either. Point is: This is an ineffective way to assess the daughter’s suitability for feats that challenge physical strength — and, may very well involve danger.

Back from the reductio ad absurdum, we have restored the precision and can guess what’s going on again, within 50 pounds or so. But, the observation remains: This is an ineffective way to assess strength. And by “ineffective,” what I really mean is idiotic. Hey sorry John, you’re probably following the trackbacks and are reading this for yourself, and for the record — believe I said this already — I really liked Redshirts. You’re just plain wrong. I don’t mean, by that, that we’re engaged in some sort of cultural clash here and trying to figure out who’s going to impose his personal tastes on whom. It is, as a matter of fact, a matter of fact. Strength. Weakness. Those two are opposites, which means they’re not the same.

Better get word to your fanboys:

So run, kid. Beat the pants off of me. I did my damndest to help you fly, and if you soar above horizons that I can never reach, well, I think that’s what every good parent was hoping for. Instead of, you know, being an insecure douche who’s secretly engineering his kids to fail so he can feel better about his life.

I guess we must be talking about liberals, right? The tell-tale sign is right there: The kid must be soaring above higher horizons, because someone else was properly pummeled downward. Person A’s weakness becomes (somehow) Person B’s strength. Dude, that’s whacked. It’s almost as far out in the tall-grass as figuring out my secret game plan to engineer my kid to fail. And to think I’ve got that beatdown coming because I said something about pulling Scalzi’s man-card; my goodness, these people know so much they don’t really know.

There is some overlap, here, with Point #1. We talk about our aspirations for our children, particularly our daughters, to become all they possibly can. But the people who generate the most noise about this, I notice, are consistently opposed to actually challenging them.

This is destructive. It’s obviously destructive when people confuse weakness for strength. Here there is destruction against human potential. There is destruction against the challenges that build up that human potential, since these poor Gammas seem to be under the delusion that it is the spectacle of victory that makes growing children into strong, capable adults. There is also destruction against those children, themselves, since it is dangerous to pretend to assess someone’s true capabilities, while in reality only going through the motions of doing so. Not that I think Scalzi’s daughter is in this danger; Scalzi, I’m sure, knows the numbers involved in his glorious defeat. But other people reading about it don’t know, and it’s obvious there is this idea churning around out there that girls are being prepared for fabulous and glorious experiences as adult, when they meet the challenge of — beating the chestless old man, who didn’t want to win anyway. It’s not exactly a stringent test.

There is also the matter of disappointment. Competition is great for building up a child’s actual strength; it sucks as a way of building up their confidence, because it works far too well. The message never quite makes it across that there is always someone better, faster, stronger. Ironically, we have dealt with that here in the Freeberg household, during this first summer in which the teenager is taller than his old man. Yeah, great, actually we’re all pretty happy about that. That might surprise some of the Gammas who have gone a little bit off the deep end, speculating about me & my relationship with my kid. But we’ve also had to have the conversation — I’m sure they won’t understand this — that effort is required in other walks of life as well, and there’s always someone out there who’s taller. Boys who win competitions need to hear that; and they do. Girls who win competitions need to hear it too. I’m not so sure anyone’s pointing it out to them.

That takes care of the Gamma/Scalzi matter. If time permits, sometime in the days or weeks ahead I’ll flesh out the other two.

It’s called a “delicious quote” and I’m inclined to agree; it’s one of those gems that seem to have been meticulously designed word by word, not out of intent to deceive, but in the spirit of stringent quality control.

Attempts by experts in the field to defend the embattled messenger inevitably fall on deaf ears. When the firestorm is over, the media’s mindset always resets to a state of comfortable ignorance, ready to be shocked all over again when the next messenger comes along.
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What scholars of mental ability know, but have never successfully gotten the media to understand, is that a scientific consensus, based on an extensive and consistent literature, has long been reached on many of the questions that still seem controversial to journalists.

For example, virtually all psychologists believe there is a general mental ability factor(referred to colloquially as “intelligence”) that explains much of an individual’s performance on cognitive tests. IQ tests approximately measure this general factor. Psychologists recognize that a person’s IQ score, which is influenced by both genetic and environmental factors, usually remains stable upon reaching adolescence. And they know that IQ scores are correlated with educational attainment, income, and many other socioeconomic outcomes.

Get with it, atmosphere! You’re holding up the show!

Reproducibility and predictability have a lot to do with saying what science is; with separating it from pseudo-science. With the climate, we have a situation in which the thing being passed off to us as “science” is clinging only just barely to the genuine, teetering on the brink of the abyss of the pseudo. And it seems to be aware of this.

The situation has deteriorated, because we’re not doing a good job of assessing what real science is, if our definition relies on the outcome of guesswork. And you know the situation is deteriorating when the so-called scientists are trying to put together a narrative, build up the anticipation, maneuver us into a “perception is reality” moment with the “atmosphere…get[ting] on board.”

…as discussed here.

It had no bearing on the outcome of anything, but still, it was an act of kindness that meant a great deal to the beneficiary of it. And that’s good to see.

Megyn Kelly…

“Perhaps the idealogues should think a bit more before trying so hard to mislead and divide us.”

From here.

Related: I don’t actually watch Fox News myself, what with it being on the teevee and all, but things like this compel me to consider changing that.

Seems everyone who comes up with reasons why I shouldn’t watch it, is put off by the idea of more people coming to find out about something they don’t want people to know. Regardless of how that turns out, this kid’s gonna go far.

During our domain & database crash this weekend, we were going through the archives of Rotten Chestnuts as well as of our own works (RC is physically hosted over here, as a sub-site of ours), and we came across this excellent post put up by severian.

John Scalzi, author of Redshirts & other fine science-fiction works, has engaged in some Internet bragging about — um — not being able to press as much as his daughter. Somehow, “revoking the Man Card” doesn’t seem adequate for this.

Let it be known that my daughter can lift more than I do. Because she’s on her school’s weightlifting team, and also because she’s awesome.

sev quotes Darth Toolpodicus, who offers…

haha good for Scalzi’s daughter…but he has no idea how bad that is. My wife and I are both competitive powerlifters, she benches a lot for a female (180lbs). Her biggest complaint: After lifting for years, the only guys she outbenches are the one who are new to the gym…virtually all the guys who are there regularly pass her up within a couple months.

All Scalzi would had to do is SHOW UP at the gym…but “bro, do you you even lift?!?”

Then closes with a common refrain:

It takes a lot of effort not to notice things like this. It takes a huge, hermetically-sealed bubble, maintained with the zealotry of an industrial clean room, not to notice some very basic problems with the liberal worldview. And yet, guys like Scalzi and his umpteen zillion blog readers / Twitter followers manage it.

Normal people with red blood, gather up the facts and go wherever those facts take them. The conclusions come afterward. Our friends the liberals, though, reach the conclusions first. The facts are stenciled out according to whether or not they’re compatible with that favorable conclusion; the ones that do, are given extra weight, and then some thin rationale is contrived against the “facts” that don’t support the desired conclusion. The liberal calls this “debunking” and can explain, in great detail, why exactly it is a debunking. In fact, just try and stop him from explaining, and re-explaining, over and over again.

But, it isn’t really a debunking. And they know it. It is a process of filtering. God only knows how much energy it takes; if we could somehow capture just a quarter of it, we could end every energy crisis that awaits us, for all time.

Actually, I was thinking about this just an hour ago, paying bills. Out of ten companies who have to receive my money because they sent me a bill, two of them failed to keep their stories straight about what was owed. One complained of a past-due amount, I went back and checked my previous month’s records and discovered there was a confirmation number there. I went ahead and paid the amount, but I guess we have to have a conversation. A third company, a credit card, failed to include a $65 charge for lunch over the weekend; I wanted to pay off the entire balance, I tried to put in what they reported plus the sixty-five, but they wouldn’t accept.

My point is — that’s thirty-percent of the information I have, being not quite so much wrong, but sufficiently pockmarked with inconsistencies to be unworkable. At least let us say, in this case, not-immediately-workable. There actually are no past-due situations here, and I started gathering up the (correct?) balances at the beginning of the month, like I always do. There shouldn’t be any wrinkles to this at all. But, there always are some like this.

It made me think of liberals, because people who manage to receive and then report a perfectly smoothed-out-and-ironed “truth,” with no residual uncertainties whatsoever, whether they realize it or not, are confessing that they don’t live in the real world. It may be an overstatement to say they’re revealing that they don’t pay bills. But not by much (and I suspect, in many cases, that may be exactly the situation).

People who are caught up in this habit of massaging truth into some alternate form, like mashing a pillow up into the right ball to support your neck at night, so that it fits their preconceptions…they shouldn’t brag about doing this. It isn’t a positive human attribute, it’s not a strength. It is a weakness, which would interfere with the capturing & reporting acumen needed to pay bills…or…any human effort that has to do with managing information and is more demanding than that. And paying bills is very, very close to the simple-side of that spectrum. Real life has redundant and inconsistent reports. It has enigmas and illusory contradictions. It’s got lots, and lots, and lots, of uncertainties. People shouldn’t brag about being “able” to do away with these in short order, because they’re not dealing with it, what they’re doing is just ignoring the parts they don’t like. It’s kind of obvious.

Just like, people shouldn’t brag about not being able to lift as much as their daughters. That doesn’t make you a better parent. In fact, it is literally weak. But, if liberals were able to identify strengths as strengths and weaknesses as weaknesses, they wouldn’t be liberals.

James Taranto, writing in Best of the Web, offers a roundup of information about the problem of peer review abuse in science:

In a July 8, 2004, email, one scientist assured another that the hypothesis they shared would prevail “even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!” Exactly 10 years later, RetractionWatch.com reported that Peter Chen, a researcher at Taiwan’s National Pingtung University of Education, had undertaken such a redefinition. “SAGE Publishers is retracting 60 articles from the Journal of Vibration and Control after an investigation revealed a ‘peer review and citation ring,’ ” noted RetractionWatch’s Ivan Oransky.

According to a statement from SAGE, “it was discovered that the author had created various aliases on SAGE Track, providing different email addresses to set up more than one account. Consequently, SAGE scrutinised further the co-authors of and reviewers selected for Peter Chen’s papers, [and] these names appeared to form part of a peer review ring. The investigation also revealed that on at least one occasion, the author Peter Chen reviewed his own paper under one of the aliases he had created.”

Corruption of the peer-review process is a widespread problem in scientific research, argues Hank Campbell of Science 2.0 in an op-ed for today’s Wall Street Journal. “Even the most rigorous peer review can be effective only if authors provide the data they used to reach their results, something that many still won’t do and that few journals require for publication,” Campbell notes. He offers this example:

In 2002 and 2010, papers published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences claimed that a pesticide called atrazine was causing sex changes in frogs. As a result the Environmental Protection Agency set up special panels to re-examine the product’s safety. Both papers had the same editor, David Wake of the University of California, Berkeley, who is a colleague of the papers’ lead author, Tyrone Hayes, also of Berkeley.

In keeping with National Academy of Sciences policy, Prof. Hayes preselected Prof. Wake as his editor. Both studies were published without a review of the data used to reach the finding. No one has been able to reproduce the results of either paper, including the EPA…As the agency investigated, it couldn’t even use those papers about atrazine’s alleged effects because the research they were based on didn’t meet the criteria for legitimate scientific work. The authors refused to hand over data that led them to their claimed results — which meant no one could run the same computer program and match their results.

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Moral crusaders are especially vulnerable to confirmation bias, the tendency to be insufficiently rigorous about testing information that bolsters their preconceptions. That’s a problem in science as well, as Campbell notes:

Absent rigorous peer review, we get the paper published in June in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Titled “Female hurricanes are deadlier than male hurricanes,” it concluded that hurricanes with female names cause more deaths than male-named hurricanes–ostensibly because implicit sexism makes people take the storms with a woman’s name less seriously. The work was debunked once its methods were examined, but not before it got attention nationwide.

Among those who gave it uncritical attention was Nicholas Kristof, in his June 12 column.

The column beats up on poor kristof rather thoroughly, and closes with:

The scientific consensus is stronger than ever,” wrote a New York Times columnist this past January. You can probably guess which one.

It seems harsh to kick the guy over & over about this human flaw which we all share, whether or not we succumb to it as often. But then again…he did succumb. Then again, he has a lot of company there, too; it isn’t just a Kristof problem.

The question I’d like to pose, picking up where Taranto dropped it, is: What is the temptation? We learn this over & over again, that we are prone to the gullibility, the confirmation bias, when we strap on our shiny moral-crusade armor and vault up into the saddle of our high-horse. How come we keep putting ourselves in that position? No one likes to be embarrassed this way, least of all the people who keep doing it to themselves.

Matthew 7:1, perhaps that’s why it says what it says. People who are so quick to pass judgment on their fellow mortals, getting snookered, embarrassingly, over & over again.

And they keep right on doing it.

From here: “Have you heard the song Rude? If you haven’t than you’re one of the lucky ones.”

And, the capital-dee Dad’s response:

“Marry that girl…I’m gonna punch your face…”

Found out about this via an e-mail from my son. Language warning…

I don’t know why the heckler is looking so shocked. Her kind is everywhere. Spoiled, lazy, feeling entitled; what have we done lately to make the common young citizen any other way? Zilch. We’ve kept them from ever being bored, ever, made sure they had medication to “help them focus,” and bottled water, and cell phones, and plied them with a steady entertainment diet of movies about giant robots from other planets that turn into cars. She provides a voice for a class that fails to see any connection between personal action and personal fulfillment, because there’s never been any reason for them to see such a connection.

That is how “healthy” people’s brains work, actually. They see connections between things that circumstances have forced them to see; everything else in the universe, as far as they’re concerned, is disconnected.

That is not an endorsement for her point of view, by the way. Quite the opposite. Whenever you hear of these “what difference does it make” types, pontificating away with their “wisdom” as they “challenge” the necessity of connecting this thing with that thing…and then challenging this other connection, and that one over there, and those other ones, until they’ve manufactured a phony-baloney universe in which everything is disconnected and random, like the grains of sand on a bone-dry scorching-hot beach — it turns out that what they’re displaying is not wisdom at all, nor depth, nor eloquence, nor any sort of “nuanced” world-view. What they’re displaying is inexperience. And the barely perceptible undercurrent of rage just beneath the surface, you’re not imagining it, it’s really there (as is proven at about 23:45). It’s there because deep down, they know that’s exactly what they’re displaying. They know they’ve been robbed of important experiences, they need these experiences and don’t know how to get them.

That’s why I like this video. What’s written above is usually somewhat obscure. She, and those like her, make it rather obvious.

I’ll do an update about the boring technical details later. We had a failed database restore this weekend, which for most of yesterday “exposed” this 2012 post as the apparent most-recent-one. As a consequence of that, the two-year-old essay caught a link from Linkiest…and so, while waiting for my teenager to free up the bathroom I decided to review. It’s always an educational experience reviewing things you wrote years ago. It is one of the most critical benefits, and I do mean “critical,” of having a blog.

The dusty old piece catalogs the observations made about the Warren/Obama “You Didn’t Build That” credo. It is more about the enthusiasm among agenda-driven leftists, that react to that credo, than about the credo itself. It inspects the social phenomenon of people wildly cheering for the idea that no one anywhere actually builds anything that matters.

Yes, of course it is inconsistent, incoherent, dishonest — clearly it’s alright for Barack Obama to build big, important things — and, probably paid for. Anyway, after meandering through an assortment of run-on sentences, pointing out some things about how creative individuals work together with committees who later hog all the credit, the older post closes with:

I think the motivation is denial. This is the only viable explanation for the enthusiasm: Somebody designed the light bulb, or a part of that rocket, and that means there is an individual doing remarkable things — we are individuals, but we’re not doing remarkable things as individuals, so we don’t want anybody else doing anything remarkable either.

Not unless they are part of a big, big group. So that we can take all the human effort that goes into something noticeable, and safely anonymize it. So that no one single person can put his name next to something that is good, and receive credit for it, on an individual basis. We’re opposed to that.

Two years on, I still find this to be the most solid explanation. After all, we haven’t long to wait in our everyday lives, if we hang around the wrong crowd, to see this: Oh, there’s a gap between the objective we had at the outset, and what we have managed to accomplish since engaging the effort; so rather than upping our game, let’s re-define the goals downward.

THAT way, we don’t have to…you know, get up off this couch, or anything inconvenient like that.

Oh wait, someone else did it the other way? They said “I’m not happy with the outcome, so I’m going to change the methods” and they improved? Well SHAME on them. Let’s get all butt-hurt hatey hate on them. They didn’t build that.

Obama, along with luminaries like Him, gets a pass. He’s in a different social circle, therefore doesn’t have to function as a dangerous role model. So He accomplishes wonderful things all the time — if only someone could recall what exactly those are. Committees are anonymous, they get a pass. Government is anonymous; it gets a pass. “They” can build things. But “Bob” — he cannot build a better mousetrap, for if ever it is acknowledged that he did, then that starts a terrible conversation that frightens many: Bob did it, I wonder if I can do something like what Bob did. What would that take. What would I have to change to be more like Bob, and do some of the things Bob did.

It would seem not…Rasmussen, via Pirate’s Cove, via Linkiest:

Voters strongly believe the debate about global warming is not over yet and reject the decision by some news organizations to ban comments from those who deny that global warming is a problem.

Only 20% of Likely U.S. Voters believe the scientific debate about global warming is over, according to the latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey. Sixty-three percent (63%) disagree and say the debate about global warming is not over. Seventeen percent (17%) are not sure.

Forty-eight percent (48%) of voters think there is still significant disagreement within the scientific community over global warming, while 35% believe scientists generally agree on the subject.

The BBC has announced a new policy banning comments from those who deny global warming, a policy already practiced by the Los Angeles Times and several other media organizations. But 60% of voters oppose the decision by some news organizations to ban global warming skeptics. Only 19% favor such a ban, while slightly more (21%) are undecided.

What is really being studied here, by everyone who has the good fortune to be alive & aware in these contentious times, is not humanity’s effect on the ecology but rather humanity’s attitudes about disagreement.

We’re taught from toddlerhood to have such a curious relationship with it. Everyone loves to win, of course. You get that rush of winning something, plus you look not only wise, but persistent about your wisdom, doing your thing to make sure good prevails and evil is vanquished. It’s a triple-threat. But, you can’t win an argument if there isn’t an argument.

Paradoxically, it seems we also have this social consensus, from which some may dissent in small isolated pockets, but is never challenged much — that when we get closer to something we perceive to be truth, we know we’re getting closer because the argument subsides. Therefore, it seems some among us figure that if the arguing can be forcibly stopped then that will bring us all closer to the truth. It’s “cargo cult” learning. Ah, we certainly do love to think of ourselves as more learned than the other guy, without taking the time or effort to learn much of anything.

Back to the “science-is-settled” people. They never did have much by way of actual evidence that the science really is settled; they’ve been living in their fantasy bubble on this thing since Day One. I guess they’re drunk on the elixir of winning-the-arguments or something. Problem: Winning at just about anything requires a fastening to reality, most of the time with some actual measurements to back it up. I speak not of the measurements of earth’s temperature, but rather measurements about whether “the science is settled” or “everybody agrees.” Forget about serving the community and bringing the people good, reliable, verified information. Just think about the measurement of this victory they desire so feverishly. Their “measurements” say it simply hasn’t happened, and so great is their desire to win-win-win, that they’re pretending the measurements say something else…and they’re just playing a game of pretend and calling it good.

That isn’t just climate change alarmism; that borders on a psychosis.

And He isn’t interested in photo ops.

David Limbaugh (via Linkiest):

Oh? In 2004, as senator-elect, he said, “I’m so overexposed I’m making Paris Hilton look like a recluse.” His name or face appeared on half of Time magazine covers in 2008. As of the August 2009 edition, he had appeared on seven Time covers since his election in November 2008. Newsweek featured Obama on 12 of its 2008 issues. Obama marked his first 100 days in office with 300 photos — all of him. On Nov. 25, 2009, Drudge Report had a photo of him leaving the White House holding an issue of GQ magazine with his own picture on the cover. He appeared on “America’s Most Wanted” to commemorate its 1,000th episode. He’s appeared on ESPN, Leno, Letterman, “60 Minutes,” Conan, Oprah and on and on.

How about his claim that he just wants to solve a problem? As exhibits A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L and M, I offer Fast and Furious, Benghazi, the Internal Revenue Service scandal (the FBI hasn’t even interviewed the IRS employees involved), the border invasion, the Department of Veterans Affairs scandal, Obamacare, Iraq, our Marine in Mexico, the deficit, the debt, entitlements, jobs and education. I could go on. This man is not about solving problems but about creating them — unless you believe that America, as founded, is a problem.

“It’s funny how so many far-left posers get a hard-on for violence and smashing stuff.”

That’s from the comments over at the blog of David Thompson, where there is a link to Dalrymple‘s observations on crime and punishment:

Revenge, as Lord Bacon tells is, is a kind of wild justice; and the desire for it has had a very poor press over the millennia. We are enjoined not to take it, in fact to turn the other cheek to those who strike us, to return good for evil. This is easier said than done: and the question is whether it should be done. Is total forgiveness, that is to say forgiveness in all circumstances, desirable?

What is certainly true is that it is easier to forgive the evil done to others than to forgive the evil done to oneself, especially if in the first place we don’t really like those others to whom the evil is done. Then conspicuous forgiveness becomes a kind of sadism, an additional burden to bear for those to whom the evil was done: for as I know from clinical experience with my patients, the lack of proper punishment of the perpetrators of evil is itself a punishment of the victims of it, a punishment that is often long-lasting and even rather like a life sentence. This is because it removes from the victims all confidence that there is justice in the world or that anybody cares what happens to them. Their experiences and their feelings are of no account; they (the people who have them) are nothing, no more than insects under the feet of society.

A most eloquent expression of the thoughts I was having as I watched Star Trek Into Darkness. My goodness, the If You Kill Him You’ll Be Just Like Him trope has gotten tired. That’s because it doesn’t work. I go to the movies to be entertained, and Kill Bill is a much better movie, entertainment-wise, when you get right down to it.

But what kind of grown-ups do kids become after watching “don’t kill that bad guy, bring him to justice instead” movies? Non-vengeful, angelic types? Or, are they taught to de-value human life, to see it as not worth avenging, or for that matter, much of anything else. The latter, I think. For that reason, and some others, after watching the recent Star Trek installment I always come away with the same aftertaste as the closing credits roll: I don’t want to see the “don’t kill the bad guy” trope, ever again. Let’s go back to Han shooting first again. It isn’t that I entirely disagree with the point, that the desire for vengeance should be checked. The problem is that it’s bland, boring, reeks of lazy writing and that’s probably what it is. My impression is that the writers never even bothered to contemplate the other problem with vengeance, that those who crusade against it may have as many problems as those who crusade for it. They may pose just as grave a threat against what we think of as “civilization,” which, if it relies on anything at all, must rely on the idea that humans are worth something. Also, that actions have consequences.

Back to Thompson’s post. What’s interesting about it is that it has offered a connection — without meticulously explaining how the connection works — between this “lust” for not-vengeance, and the lazy condescension of the intellectuals by way of a link to Mises.

The intellectuals are a paradoxical product of the market economy, because “unlike any other type of society, capitalism inevitably and by virtue of the very logic of its civilization creates, educates and subsidizes a vested interest in social unrest.” Like Hayek, Schumpeter described intellectuals broadly as “people who wield the power of the spoken and the written word.” More narrowly, “one of the touches that distinguish them from other people who do the same is the absence of direct responsibility for practical affairs.” That is, intellectuals do not participate in the market (at least not in the areas they write about), and do not generally rely on satisfying consumers to earn a living. Add to this their naturally critical attitude—which Schumpeter argues is the product of the essential rationality of the market economy—and it is easy to see why intellectuals would be hostile to the market.

In other words, intellectuals are often out of place in entrepreneurial societies. The growth of the intellectual class is not a response to consumer demand, but to the expansion of higher education. Passing through the higher education system does not necessarily confer valuable skills, but it often does convince graduates that work in the market is beneath them:

The man who has gone through a college or university easily becomes psychically unemployable in manual occupations without necessarily acquiring employability in, say, professional work. His failure to do so may be due either to lack of natural ability—perfectly compatible with passing academic tests—or to inadequate teaching; and both cases will, absolutely and relatively, occur more frequently as ever larger numbers are drafted into higher education and as the required amount of teaching increases irrespective of how many teachers and scholars nature chooses to turn out.

If higher education takes little or no account of the supply and demand for useful skills, it will produce graduates who naturally gravitate to the intellectual class, bringing with them feelings of estrangement and dissatisfaction:

All those who are unemployed or unsatisfactorily employed or unemployable drift into the vocations in which standards are least definite or in which aptitudes and acquirements of a different order count. They swell the host of intellectuals in the strict sense of the term whose numbers hence increase disproportionately. They enter it in a thoroughly discontented frame of mind. Discontent breeds resentment. And it often rationalizes itself into that social criticism which as we have seen before is in any case the intellectual spectator’s typical attitude toward men, classes and institutions especially in a rationalist and utilitarian civilization.

A swelling intellectual class then molds public opinion, swaying it in favour of socialism.

Thompson (via Small Dead Animals) then adds:

This “conspicuous forgiveness,” a kind of vicarious tolerance, can be quite striking in its boldness and disregard for facts, with acts of savagery being met with improbable excuses and rhetorical diversions. Generally from a safe distance. In 2011, following the London riots, China Miéville, a middle-class Marxist and member of the International Socialist Organisation, claimed to be “horrified” that members of the press and public had used the word feral when describing the career predators and assorted thugs who, seeking excitement and a sense of power, had beaten passing pensioners unconscious and burned random women out of their homes. And who, on the arrival of firefighters, had dragged them from their vehicles and punched them insensible.

To use the word feral when describing such people was, Mr Miéville said, our “moral degradation far more than [theirs].” You see, by referring to such behaviour as savage and anti-social, we are the degraded ones in Mr Miéville’s eyes, the ones in need of chastisement. Our compassionate Marxist was hardly alone in his rush to invert reality and flatter the brutish, even as it became clear that an overwhelming majority of the looters, muggers and arsonists had previous convictions for similar crimes, an average of 15, and some more than fifty. Despite such bothersome details, flattery and evasion were very much the done thing as fellow leftists Nina Power, Laurie Penny and Priyamvada Gopal were happy to demonstrate. Presumably on grounds that none of the feral behaviour, the random beatings and violent predation, was being directed at them.

Tying this all together is the concept of worth. Say what you like about those who think humans are worth avenging; at least part of their mindset is “humans are worth.” Their philosophy is not, as we’ve been repeatedly told by the pop culture, opposed to justice; it’s more of a close-cousin to it, since you can’t have justice without thinking humans are worth something. The work they do, for each other, is also worth something, inconvenient as that may be to the intellectuals who consider themselves to be above it all.

Captain Capitalism has completed an interesting item of Internet research:

I had to search her name and after finding her newly hyphenated name was able to track her down.

What is she doing today?

Well….this.

I want to highlight this because there’s a couple important lessons to pull from it.

1. Look at the money raised and their pleas for money. Also look where it goes to. It goes into just basically supporting themselves. These aren’t professional activists. They’re panhandlers on the internet pursuing some sad pathetic crusade they’ve been told to by media, leftist professors, and yes, even the government.

2. Precisely what is their crusade? To take selfies on Monsanto’s signs out in the middle of nowhere as they hold up craptastic home made signs? Not only is the crusade itself pointless and ultimately mentally-egotistically self-serving, but they’re not even doing it right.

3. She is obviously with child. If they only have $160, guess who’s going to pay for her birthing expenses! That is the least of our concerns though. Any body want to place odds on the kid growing up right?

I could go on, but the larger point is this is ultimately where crusaderism leads. A dead end wasted life of delusion and no real practical or meaningful achievements.

In the last post I had made reference to nihilism, singling out for special criticism the “don’t discuss politics” types and the “I’m a (phony) moderate” types and the “conservatives and liberals there’s no difference between the two” types:

Nihilism — the belief that life lacks meaning or intrinsic value. It’s really a “Captain Obvious” thing when you think about it: The belief that ideas and actions are pointless, leads to the belief that life itself is pointless.

That is our culture clash. This is why we see all the arguing. “First Black President” has nothing to do with it, nothing whatsoever, it provides no motivation at all on either side. We’re having a national shouting-match about all the rest of us, and our worth. A certain Secretary of State summed it up very well, as she was being grilled in the Senate about her most glaring failures: “What difference…does it make?” Waitaminnit, did I say “very well”? I meant “perfectly.” That is the epicenter of disagreement.

Ultimately, if you are dedicated to a consumer-economy in which we rely on helping each other, lots of things matter that otherwise wouldn’t. In fact, whether you realize it or not, just about everything matters. But if you’re above-it-all, then none of it does. So then you can join some crusade that doesn’t really have any meaning, or value, material or otherwise. Get yourself knocked up with no means of support, no food in the cupboards, no cupboards, just panhandling on the Internet? Burn randomly-selected women out of their houses? Beat up old people? Get beaten up yourself? What difference does it make?

Let’s concentrate instead on banning words like “feral” and “bossy,” because words mean more than people. Yes, that does start some arguments. I should certainly hope so.

Hawkins at Townhall:

1) No matter what they fail at, it’s always someone else’s fault. George Bush did it, the Republicans are mean, the dog ate Obama’s homework. It’s not his fault that he’s flunking every class!
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5) They demand to be treated like adults, but the moment they get an adult responsibility — like being President — they quit doing it the right way five minutes in because it’s “boring” and wander off to find something more “fun” to do (like golfing or campaigning).
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11) When they don’t like something, they throw a tantrum and demand that other people change their behavior to work around their attitude problem.
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15) They torment, bully, and provoke other people at every opportunity until someone hits them back, at which point they start crying and demanding sympathy.

In all these examples — just like with the bratty kids — the common situation is that the object of study makes reliable errors, out of a sense of conviction that their feelings are somehow important.

Me, in the e-mails, on the subject of people who insist “all ideas/ideologies are equally valid,” and then somehow end up (or always wanted to be?) voting straight-lefty-dem:

I have concluded that this is the natural sentiment people end up having, when they don’t see linkage between actions they exercise, and results produced. When they build nothing, or think they’re building nothing. I’ve found people who disavow that notion, have made a lifestyle of some kind out of producing favorable consequences. It doesn’t have to be software engineering…It can be 4H. It can be gardening. But when your most impactful effort in this world is something like “I’m going to keep drawing a paycheck for no work, and my boss is never going to get rid of me,” it produces nihilism.

Nihilism — the belief that life lacks meaning or intrinsic value. It’s really a “Captain Obvious” thing when you think about it: The belief that ideas and actions are pointless, leads to the belief that life itself is pointless. And if all these things are pointless, then the only thing that has a point to it is being happy, right? Therefore, the only thing anybody can do that’s wrong, is raining on your parade. Crowding your buzz. Ruining your little party.

Being a square.

I can’t imagine living any kind of life as some sort of “adult,” that somehow permits me to maintain the same world-view I might have had in middle school. I have a great deal of trouble envisioning how that’s possible. I don’t envy it, but there must be a sort of bliss in it. Especially when the person at the center of it, has become accustomed to feeling his or her way through every little problem that comes along, and ignoring all consequences.

All the way to the eighteenth hole.

Betsy’s Page:

It really has been amusing to hear all these nice liberals bemoaning the use of the Religious Freedom Reformation Act when it was a law passed with near unanimity and signed into law with great self congratulation by Hillary Clinton’s husband. Suddenly, liberals no longer like the idea of finding a balance between the reach of the federal government and people’s individual religious beliefs if it interferes with their desired policy goals.

And all this for the goal of forcing employers to provide employees free contraceptives. It has always struck me as rather strange that that is the one prescription that the administration wants to insist should be provided at no cast to insured employees. Think of all the possible medicines that they could have chosen to be provided for free – prescriptions for heart problems, cancer, diabetes, asthma, HIV, or psychiatric treatments. But none of those were considered worthy of mandating that they be provided free of cost. Only contraceptives. Not covered with a deductible or for a certain percentage. Nope, absolutely free. I would love to have a reporter ask Obama why didn’t they have similar mandates for other medical needs? I think it was all done deliberately so that they could take advantage of the opposition that they knew would arise in order to gin up their phony cries about a war on women.

Obviously, they don’t really care about health. What’s really going on here? Three explanations:
1. Liberals have far more ability to “troll” conservatives, than the other way around, and they’re making the most of their battle-superiority here.

2. Heavy overlap with explanation #1, arguably inseparable from it: Liberals, like any political force arguing for an entitlement, defeat their own purpose of existence if they ever enjoy complete success and so they’re waging a battle on vanishing ground. Their most potent battle-weapon has been a “reproductive freedom” that isn’t actually listed in the Constitution, they’ve won this fight, so now they’re arguing to make it freer and freer and freer and freer…

3. Who cares about politics? Liberals are opposed to the human race.

From watching their actions as they form positions on existing and new issues, and arguing those positions, I find a persuasive strength in all three of these.

They are vastly more talented at trolling their opposition, by the way. And it’s good for them; “moderate” after “moderate” after “moderate” watches this go on, and yells something like “Eek, those rotten conservative men are going to force me or some poor woman to carry a pregnancy!” and starts voting straight-dem. But there’s some give-and-take involved in this. A parallel argument emerges about whether or not abortions are being used for “casual” birth control; this gets “settled” in the sense that everybody’s socially stigmatized from offering any opinion that they may be; but, as liberals continue their arguing and advocating and lobbying to keep abortifacient drugs “accessible,” meaning free for their constituents while others are forced to pay for them, there certainly is an appearance that they’re arguing to maintain unhealthy and unproductive lifestyles.

Now they’re trying to move the ideological line in our society so that it becomes an extremist and intolerably right-wing position to say people should pay for what they use. That part of it is not good for their cause; they’re weakening themselves by pushing for this. At least, I hope so.

curi.us, hat tip to Rhymes With Cars and Girls:

Declaring a debate already over is a common irrational approach that blocks off any further learning. About the debate already being over, he wrote: “Within physics and chemistry and climatology, the people who think anthropogenic climate change exists and is a serious problem have won the argument — but the news of their intellectual victory hasn’t yet spread…” Then true to the idea of the debate being finished, as you’ll see below, he didn’t want to address criticisms of his position.

He replied to me to assert he was open to debate while subtly blowing me off, then didn’t respond to some questions I sent him in reply. I think he’s more interested in convincing himself that he’s rational – which required dealing with a [direct] question about his openness to debate – than he is interested in actually discussing the issues.

After some questions, I concluded my reply, “If you don’t wish to answer all of these questions, could you tell me where to get answers to my satisfaction which would persuade me about the climate consensus and related issues? (If there is nowhere, what do you suggest?)”

He didn’t answer that either. When people don’t answer something like that, isn’t it disturbing? He says climate change is a settled debate, but he won’t answer questions about it, and he won’t even refer people to anywhere they can get their doubts answered. (Presumably because there actually isn’t anywhere, which means the debate isn’t actually settled in a reasonable way. Which is an important enough problem with his side’s “victory” on the issue that he ought to have some comment.)

This is a common problem where people are more interested in the social role of a rational intellectual than truth-seeking discussion. They’re more interested in feeling smart than being smart. They’re more interested in self-image than action. They care about popular opinion and socialized legitimized status, and only feel much need to address arguments with some kind of (social) authority behind them. They look at the source of ideas and then wonder whether, socially, they can get away with ignoring the ideas (ignoring arguments is something they seem to treat as desirable and try to maximize).

It’s not about, “Have I already written an answer to this argument? Has someone else written an answer to it that I can endorse? If yes, I’ll give a link/cite. If no, maybe I or someone else better write something.” That’d be rational but few people think that way.

Instead it’s about, “If I don’t answer this, will other people think it was a serious argument I should have answered? Am I expected to answer it? Do I have to answer it to protect my social status? Do I have any excuses for not engaging with the argument that most people (weighted by their status/authority) will accept?”

I’ve noticed there is a recent mental feebleness in the air, an epidemic of a Learning Disability if you will, of flibbertigibbets prattling on and on, over & over, about things that ought to be obviously and emphatically true. On and on they go, until a situation arises in which their refusal or inability to allow this obvious & emphatic truth to stand on its own merits, is the strongest case to be presented for doubts. Then, they do it a few more times.

In an attempt to convince themselves; it very often cannot be proven, but all the signs are there, that if their beliefs were more earnest things would be much, much quieter. There’d be a great deal less endless re-litigating of the same ol’ stuff.

They often are heard to claim, like the litigant described above, that some disagreement is already over. Problem is, these are the flibbertigibbets who never allowed it to begin: “If you want to win a debate, you have to first allow it to happen.”

But they don’t want to win. They want to feel like they won; they want to look like they won. Really winning the debate? That’s something you want to do when your position in the debate is, “this bridge is capable of supporting my weight,” and you’re about to walk on it. Therein, I think, lies the problem — we have too many people arguing about bridges, and not enough people planning to walk on them. Therefore, as more people in our society become insulated from the work and the danger associated with it, this society is losing its connection to truth. Through lack of interest. Fewer and fewer people are invested in any of that truth, save for the truth of their own social standing.

Psychology Today: When Ignorance Begets Confidence: The Classic Dunning-Kruger:

The Dunning-Kruger effect describes a cognitive bias in which people perform poorly on a task, but lack the meta-cognitive capacity to properly evaluate their performance. As a result, such people remain unaware of their incompetence and accordingly fail to take any self-improvement measures that might rid them of their incompetence.

Peggy Noonan behind a pay-wall, via Stuart Schneiderman, via The News Junkie at Maggie’s Farm:

I don’t know if we sufficiently understand how weird and strange, how historically unparalleled, this presidency has become. We’ve got a sitting president who was just judged in a major poll to be the worst since World War II. The worst president in 70 years! Quinnipiac University’s respondents also said, by 54% to 44%, that the Obama administration is not competent to run the government.
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But I’m not sure people are noticing the sheer strangeness of how the president is responding to the lack of success around him. He once seemed a serious man. He wrote books, lectured on the Constitution. Now he seems unserious, frivolous, shallow. He hangs with celebrities, plays golf. His references to Congress are merely sarcastic: “So sue me.”
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This is a president with 2½ years to go who shows every sign of running out the clock. Normally in a game you run out the clock when you’re winning. He’s running it out when he’s losing…The president shows no sign — none — of being overwhelmingly concerned and anxious at his predicaments or challenges. Every president before him would have been…
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Barack Obama doesn’t seem to care about his unpopularity, or the decisions he’s made that have not turned out well. He doesn’t seem concerned. A guess at the reason: He thinks he is right about his essential policies. He is steering the world toward not relying on America. He is steering America toward greater dependence on and allegiance to government. He is creating a more federally controlled, Washington-centric nation that is run and organized by progressives. He thinks he’s done his work, set America on a leftward course, and though his poll numbers are down now, history will look back on him and see him as heroic, realistic, using his phone and pen each day in spite of unprecedented resistance. He is Lincoln, scorned in his time but loved by history.

He thinks he is in line with the arc of history, that America, for all its stops and starts, for all the recent Supreme Court rulings, has embarked in the long term on governmental and cultural progressivism. Thus in time history will have the wisdom to look back and see him for what he really was: the great one who took every sling and arrow, who endured rising unpopularity, the first black president and the only one made to suffer like this.

That’s what he’s doing by running out the clock: He’s waiting for history to get its act together and see his true size.

He’s like someone who’s constantly running the movie “Lincoln” in his head. It made a great impression on him, that movie. He told Time magazine, and Mr. Remnick, how much it struck him. President Lincoln of course had been badly abused in his time. Now his greatness is universally acknowledged. But if Mr. Obama read more of Lincoln, he might notice Lincoln’s modesty, his plain ways, his willingness every day to work and negotiate with all who opposed him, from radical abolitionists who thought him too slow to supporters of a negotiated peace who thought him too martial. Lincoln showed respect for others. Those who loved him and worked for him thought he showed too much. He was witty and comical but not frivolous and never shallow. He didn’t say, “So sue me.”

Back to the Psychology Today article…

Fremdscham (the noun) describes the almost-horror you feel when you notice that somebody is oblivious to how embarrassing they truly are. Fremdscham occurs when someone who should feel embarrassed for themselves simply is not, and you start feeling embarrassment in their place.

Five-and-a-half down, two-and-a-half to go.

Oh, my. There’s a durable argument for you.

Hat tip to Chicks on the Right.

Update: You realize, if you can show there is a consensus among our modern lefty movement that this incongruity is right and proper, and should be maintained — which I expect would not be difficult — what that would prove, is exactly what I was saying here:

This sub-surface alternative economic system is for people who do not like money. Here’s the deal: You want something and decide your want is actually a need. So, since you need it, your employer buys it for you, because he’s compelled to do so by force of law. Forget about how much it has to do with the contract between you & him, that doesn’t matter because you need it.

And because you need it, you get to dictate the parameters of this thing you need so, so badly — but somehow, can’t quite get around to opening your billfold to pay for it.

The fact that this sub-surface alternative economic system for people who do not like money, works for “health care” but not for guns, proves that this has nothing to do with basic human rights at all. Our throat-clearing wussie guy here “puts it into a different category,” but there are sure to be some people who do not look at it that way. Where, then, is the protest to force employers to provide ammunition?

Captain Obvious points out: It is a culture conflict. The abortifacient protesters are aligned with the advocates for this sub-surface economic system — “It’s an economic system built on wrath instead of on greed,” as I said. Gun nuts like me are none too fond of this slimy slithering other-economic-system, this “Fluke-onomy” system, in which such extraordinary lengths are undertaken merely to avoid opening a purse or billfold. And the feeling is mutual. They love their abortions. And hate guns. As much as they hate money; that is, having money. The wrong people having money.

What is the connection?

Current operating theory: It’s all about faith in one’s fellow man. Trust. Should ordinary, run-of-the-mill people be trusted with guns; money; babies; the planet. One side of the conflict says no, no, no and no. People aren’t good enough. They’re icky. And they didn’t build that…

The other side says, not quite so much yes-yes-yes-and-yes, but rather: Why would anyone ask me? The decision has been made already, by a power higher than ourselves. We have the guns, we have the money, we can have the babies and we have the planet. It’s not our place to decide whether that should be so, what’s on us is to make the result of these gifts and trusts, as positive as we possibly can.

These two sides are absolutely irreconcilable. The beliefs, ultimately, are about life and death. It’s not too likely you’ll ever see an adherent to one side, re-think things and cross over to the other. Well…I could be wrong. I’d like to be. But I’ve not yet seen any evidence of that.

Ask John Wayne why he loved America? He had a million reasons why.

Me? Not sure I have a million reasons, but I have one that I like more than most of the others: It’s a nation started on a tax revolt.

America is a debate that needed to happen. Yeah sure, if we pool our resources together in a big pot, we can accomplish some amazing things…but maybe, just maybe, we can accomplish more amazing things with the loot that stays with us. Is that really so selfish? Some may say so; but the word for which they’re grasping, whether they realize it or not, is not “greedy” or “selfish” but responsible. Can you impose your will over a finite value of assets, and leverage them to produce something glorious. To even entertain the question is to embrace a responsibility; not just any responsibility, but one that many of our fellow world citizens will never know.

Turns out, when you put your individual creativity and resourcefulness in competition with a bureaucracy in a contest along those lines, it’s not so hard to come out on top. Bureaucracy has an effect on such efforts, and the effect it has is not beneficial.

Celebrating our nation’s birthday, in the final analysis, is really all about celebrating individuality. Not diversity or tolerance or immigrants or, for that matter, Arizona rains or sunsets or white people. It’s a celebration of human capability reaching its pinnacle, when & where people are closest to the work that has to be done. In other countries, it’s the bureaucrats who are thought to be the smartest. In still others, it’s the hereditary sovereigns. In others, its is the clergy. And that’s fine. They can keep that.

Here, we celebrate human potential. Human strength, human wisdom, human L.I.C.O.R.I.C.E.: Leadership, Initiative, Creativity, Ownership of one’s own problems, Resourcefulness, Ingenuity, Courage & conviction and Energy. We celebrate the fact that when an individual sees a problem, and resources that can be used to address it, he doesn’t need to wait for a committee to be gaveled to order. We celebrate resolve, determination, decision-making, and good, old-fashioned grit.

From Have Some Fun With Progressives This Independence Day:

Their view of our Founding Fathers is split into two camps: 1) Those exemplified by a line in the great movie Dazed and Confused, when a teacher says “OK guys, one more thing: This summer when you’re being inundated with all this American bicentennial Fourth Of July brouhaha, don’t forget what you’re celebrating, and that’s the fact that a bunch of slave-owning, aristocratic, white males didn’t want to pay their taxes.” And 2) Those who claim the Founding Fathers were progressives and loyalists were conservatives.

Both claims express an elementary school-level understanding of history, if that. But we’re dealing with progressives here, so I repeat myself.

Dealing with either claim is fruitless. They’ve made it this far in life repelling reality. Your best efforts, no matter how well reasoned, won’t make a dent in their ignorance armor. But much like a firecracker becomes fun once you light the wick, a progressive is a carnival ride when you bring up the Founding Fathers. Light the fuse, step back a safe distance and enjoy the show. There are few things more fun than inciting progressives to expose themselves in front of smart but otherwise unengaged people. The faces of others will be priceless. Then you will all be called racists and the progressive will storm away.

So wait…the proggies are saying they share a kinship with the slave-owning white guys who didn’t want to pay their taxes? I still don’t have this straight.

I don’t think anyone does.

A compendium of examples of The Left, in that never-ending crusade for ++giggle++ greater equality, losing their shit over the Hobby Lobby decision.

Via Instapundit: “Fuck you, Hobby Lobby.” And, “Scalia law is a lot like Sharia law.”

The most partisan Supreme Court Justice of all: Sam Alito.

Hobby Lobby Makes Them Dotty.

What better place to start than with ScotusBlog, the news site described to Twitchy.com as “a fantastic resource for learning about all-things related to the U.S. Supreme Court.” Angry birds on Twitter mistook Scotusblog for the high court itself and began tweeting their objections to the ruling. “SCOTUSblog retweeted many [indicated below by ‘RT’ or ‘MT’] and provided a funny running commentary about the cluelessness.”
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Yeah, we know, it’s Twitter. But the quality of argumentation on offer from serious news organizations often wasn’t much better. The Washington Post commissioned an op-ed by Sandra Fluke, described as a “a social justice attorney” and a California state Senate candidate. She calls the decision “an attack on women,” as if religious liberty were an exclusively male domain. Carrying “data-driven journalism” to a pointless extreme, a post on the Post’s Wonkblog is headlined “The 49-Page Supreme Court Hobby Lobby Ruling Mentioned Women Just 13 Times.”

“The anti-choice movement wants to limit not just affordable access, but all access to abortion and birth control,” Fluke claims in the op-ed. “It is an attack at all levels, and today’s decision is just another success in these efforts.” Even if true, that is irrelevant to the legal merits of the case.

“Hooray! The War on Women is back!”

Here’s White House press secretary Josh Earnest : “President Obama believes that women should make personal health-care decisions for themselves rather than their bosses deciding for them…The constitutional lawyer in the Oval Office disagrees with that conclusion.” This appeal to diploma is weird, because Hobby Lobby turned on the straightforward application of a federal statute. The First Amendment’s free-exercise clause wasn’t reached.

There’s another ex-lawyer who should also know better, given that her husband signed the relevant law “to protect perhaps the most precious of all American liberties,” as Bill Clinton put it in 1993. The Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) sailed through the House unanimously and the Senate 97-3.

Yet today Hillary Clinton thinks the Clinton family’s RFRA legacy is nearly Iranian. Its protections belong to “a disturbing trend that you see in a lot of societies that are very unstable, anti-democratic and frankly prone to extremism,” which is “women and girls being deprived of their rights,” including “control over their bodies,” she said this week.

America’s mullahs are also after Democratic Party chairman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who warned on MSNBC that “Republicans want to do everything they can to have the long hand of government, and now the long hand of business, reach into a woman’s body and make health-care decisions for her.” Democrats made Hobby Lobby-based fundraising pitches over the weekend, before the decision was even handed down.

Well you know — they’re just treating women like they treat any other target “oppressed” class. Hit the lecture circuit, hit the campaign trail, give speeches, write fund-raising letters, let the oppressed know how poorly they’re being treated — get those votes, get that money. If it had anything at all to do with making people equal, the crusade would be about making it easier to instigate large, important financial transactions while you’re in the process of changing your last name. Fact is, in our society, the difficulty involved in doing that has a lot more to do with making women second-class citizens than anything medical.

But, it also has something to do with being married, and that’s a little bit too much “womens’ choice” for our lefty friends to allow.

No, what’s really remarkable about Hobby Lobby, and the risible aftermath, has nothing to do with women at all. It’s about this sub-surface alternative economic system. Here we have a little-noticed connection to another favorite lefty issue “income inequality.” My exchanges with lefties about this all go pretty much the same way: I make the quite logical point that as long as there is economic freedom, and inequality among people about how to treat money, there will be income inequality because some people do not like to have or spend money. That earns me a sneer, along with any one of a number of other cues that I have toppled over the brink and excluded myself from the reasonable. B-u-u-u-t, it’s really true.

This sub-surface alternative economic system is for people who do not like money. Here’s the deal: You want something and decide your want is actually a need. So, since you need it, your employer buys it for you, because he’s compelled to do so by force of law. Forget about how much it has to do with the contract between you & him, that doesn’t matter because you need it.

And because you need it, you get to dictate the parameters of this thing you need so, so badly — but somehow, can’t quite get around to opening your billfold to pay for it. It is to be provided to suit your preferences, just as if you were the person spending the money. Which is stupid, silly, idiotic…but, it’s gotta be that way. Otherwise, everybody goes completely apeshit, because that’s how they make sure this alternative economic system continues to service them, by going completely apeshit. It’s an economic system built on wrath instead of on greed. And that’s what is happening with this “Hobby Lobby case.” They’re having their pandemic, highly organized temper tantrum, so that consumers in the secondary economic system can enjoy as much choice as consumers in the primary economic system.

Given that, none of this is surprising. Except for the lengths to which these secondary-economic-system advocates will go, to keep on pushing it. It is truly…exhausting. It’s just like the teenager dreaming up endlessly twisting & contorting “legal” arguments about why it isn’t his turn to take out the garbage, when it would be so much less work to just take out the garbage. Why not just earn money for the things they want & need, put it in the bank for awhile, and then spend it? It’s truly baffling. Sandra Fluke, to the best of my knowledge, has yet to answer the question.

By the way, Happy Independence Day!!

Update: “It’s an economic system built on wrath instead of on greed.” That’s quite good, isn’t it? I should expound on that someday.

At The Chive: “The Force is strong with these girls.”

Funniest tweets from low-information voters you will ever see.

From here.

Pallas cats were not discovered until a team of researchers were looking for snow leopards in Nepal and accidentally stumbled across an animal that looked half house cat, half snow leopard.

The majestic, shy, solitary Pallas cats were recorded in the wild for the first time by camera traps placed in an extreme climate 14,000 feet above sea level.

One camera trap caused a Pallas cat to experience an earth-shattering moment, when it realized there was something strange outside its rock den. The fluffy animal still mustered up enough courage to investigate.

Gates of Vienna, via Dyspepsia Generation.

Ah. Still carefully stripped of any sex appeal at all, I see.

Because the sex appeal was in the franchise once, for awhile — feminists don’t like TR. This proves they aren’t about elevating the status of women in society, but instead elevating a gender-neutral culture that has absolutely nothing to do with acknowledging that women have anything special to offer. Women, like men, are just people. They don’t have big breasts, they don’t birth no babies, they don’t even have a particularly distinguishable way of running or jumping; everything they do, a man can do just as capably. That’s the vision.

It stands to reason that the first positions to be eliminated are wife, and mother. Those are the two things women can do that men can’t do. Looking genuinely hot while excavating treasure and beating up bad guys, in skimpy outfits, would be yet another thing so that also has to go. And after the Tomb Raider looks like a titless fifteen-year-old boy in skinny-jeans — the feminists still aren’t happy, which is something I find pretty darn interesting.

PJ Tatler:

The owners of this particular corporation are a family. They have rights. They do not surrender those rights because they formed a business. Anyone who thinks that they did surrender those rights when they formed their family business is a moron.

The Greens — they own Hobby Lobby — were literally minding their own business when the Obama administration slammed them with a mandate forcing them to use their property to pay for something that violates their religious beliefs. The Greens acted on their beliefs and took the mandate to court. They won. That’s how it works in this country.
:
We are a nation that has enshrined respect for religious beliefs into our Constitution. That’s not some feel-good thing. It’s the bedrock of our system. The Supreme Court found that the Obamacare mandate puts an undue burden on religious people.

If libs were honest — well, they wouldn’t be libs. But if they were honest libs, they’d just come out and say how they want these reconciliations to work between popular will and the Constitution: No consistent principles involved, none whatsoever, just the popular will prevailing over the Constitution when it’s further left than the Constitution, and the Constitution defeating popular will when the Constitution, interpreted as recklessly far-left as it can possibly be interpreted, is to the left of popular will. Whatever makes it so that lefties win, that’s what should determine everything.

That’s what they’d say if they were honest about it. But they aren’t. At this point, I don’t know who they think they’re fooling. The Supreme Court just ruled that they should lose, and so, predictable as a sunrise, they’re plotting some new ways to get around that. They don’t care about anything but more-and-more-liberalism.

I’m tempted to get philosophical and monotonous about this…I have before already. And how could I not? It’s the plague of our times, this mental insanity that you can make things true just by doing a really, really, really enthusiastic job of wishing for them. Grown-ups doing their “thinking” like five-year-olds.

But, people don’t really read or listen to that stuff. Sometimes you need a comedian to make the point.

And, a buffoon. Two people funny, only one trying to be.

Via Newsbusters.

ODDEE, by way of Linkiest:

Geek gals are always looking for cool apparel, especially when it comes to comfortable swimwear. So, here’s some good news: Now, there’s an Evil Dead-inspired Necronomicon bikini that’s supposedly “super comfortable,” according to its makers.

The made-to-order Brazilian-cut silicone bikini, available through Etsy by Bloodlust Productions, is styled after the human flesh-bound Book Of The Dead, the Necronomicon Ex-Mortis from Sam Raimi’s original Evil Dead movies. (Source)

That’s about the most normal one out of the lot, of: #FreeTheNipple, Bubble Wrap, 3D-Printed, Evil Devil, et al. Some images not suitable for a general audience or work environment.

There’s been a recent upsurge in the drive to recruit men to feminism, and it doesn’t seem to be related in any way to the Hobby Lobby nonsense (video auto-plays). Oftentimes when there’s a sudden increase in the fevered pitch of something it’s difficult to figure out — as we see in the case of soccer — if that’s an increase in supply or in demand. Or neither of those. Or both. In this case I’m inclined to think it’s a combination of supply and demand, but leaning toward demand; the feminists are trying harder to recruit men to their movement. But then again, it’s likely that they’re trying harder all of a sudden, because they’re finding it easier to do all of a sudden. That would mean supply.

As you can see from that first link up there, it seems a lot of male feminism has to do with figuring out what the female feminists are saying, and emphatically agreeing with it without thinking about it.

Avoid playing the Devil’s Advocate. It’s a really good way to get into arguments, but not a good way to start productive discussions. Read the commenting policy on blogs and websites you want to comment on. Most of them are in place to create a safe, troll free space where blog participants can express ideas and opinions freely without being attacked. There are plenty of other spaces where you can play Devil’s advocate all you like so you can leave these ones alone.

After reading that, you don’t need to know a lot about feminism to figure out this is no place for a man. You just have to know something about being a man. “Productive discussions” come from an echo chamber? Laughable. No really, it is, I’ve seen feminists try to do this. After the “Hooray, we all agree with each other” moment, it looks like the dog catching the car. They don’t know what to do next. They don’t know what they have here — a good idea, or a really super-duper cool idea? How to gauge, how to assess? You can’t. Best you can do is vote on it, and everyone agrees on it, so that gets you nowhere. It’s a sad, sad sight to see.

It is the exact opposite of the process by which a week timid little boy becomes a tower of masculine strength as a man. The echo chamber provides “a safe, troll free space where blog participants can express ideas and opinions freely without being attacked.” It is a shelter from disagreement, be it reasonable or other. The ideas that emerge from the echo chamber, like Pajama Boy, show all sorts of signs of having never been challenged. Among my favorites: Skimpy clothes on good looking women. It shouldn’t happen, ever, because it “objectifies” and “exploits” women, unless it’s a school or some other setting that will piss off the conservatives, and then the rallying cry is that there shouldn’t be any “slut shaming.” In other words, feminists really have no idea how to react to this. Every now and then in the echo chamber, one of the un-attacked will meekly offer up the question “How do we feel about that?” Which, I think, cuts straight to the heart of the matter: Feminism is not about covering up good-looking women, or letting schoolgirls prance around in denim-diapers, or women voting or having private conversations with their doctors or chasing careers or enjoying any sort of “choice” about anything at all. It is about collective thinking.

That, too, is antithetical to being a man. To being a strong man, or a desirable man as Captain Capitalism points out:

This is why, when a woman asks you what color to choose for the carpeting or the furniture, she gets honked off when you reply with “Whatever.” It comes from evolution and instinct. It’s got to do with what the two sexes bring. Women bring the oven, men bring the recipe. So what’s the recipe? How is it different from another recipe? That’s the true male contribution: His signature. Goes for everything. Medicine cabinet in the bathroom, carpet color, how the family computer is configured, what’s in the kitchen junk-drawer, what kind of coffee gets brewed in the morning. If living with a man is like living with any other man, that would mean the woman is expecting something from the relationship she is not going to be getting. It means the dude isn’t bringing anything. For her, it’s frustrating, boring and a turn-off. She’s instinctively wired to avoid this, and in the earlier years when a suitor is facing the instinctive screening process, the truth of it is that’s what’s being screened. Genetic weakness, physical weakness, mental weakness, but those are distant seconds to: The ordinary. Women are wired to avoid the generic. That’s what’s really going on. They don’t crave disagreement, they crave identity.

It’s burned into our culture, and other cultures all around the world. Kids get the Dad’s last name. There’s a reason for that, and it isn’t just because men want it that way.

This thing about “Agree with her about everything,” like much of liberalism, simply doesn’t work. It is a cause, as well as a symptom, of dysfunction (hat tip again to Gerard).

Seriously — have you seen many of these self-proclaimed male feminists? When I see all these sullen dorks standing like political prisoners holding their “I NEED FEMINISM BECAUSE…” signs, I wish that one of them could be honest and say they need feminism because they’re not naturally attractive to women.

I therefore posit that in at least some cases, male feminism is a mating strategy for men who aren’t getting laid on the virtues of being men alone. So they switch gears and attempt to get laid on the merits of proclaiming to be feminist “allies.” The “allies” thing is all lies. It is a sneaky way of trying to appeal to women by loudly proclaiming that you hate the type of guy who normally appeals to women. I believe the most reasonable explanation for the very existence of the modern “male feminist” is rooted in evolutionary biology: Calling oneself a male feminist is a deceptive and despicable little shame-dance, a pathetic self-puffing mating ritual that beta male lizards do to garner even a scrap of female attention.

It’s like going to some pro-marijuana rally because you know someone there is going to have weed. If you hang around enough girl feminists long enough and claim to be a feminist, sooner or later one of them will fuck you…maybe…right?

As is the case in many other walks of life: Receiving greater approval by way of disguising your distinguishing features, is a loser’s game. It would be futile even if it worked, which it usually doesn’t. The thing to ask about it is, what if it did work? Noodle on that one a little bit; you “earn” approval by pretending to be something you really aren’t? Where’s that get you, exactly? Same thing it got you in Grades K through 5, right? A bunch of friends who aren’t really your friends. See, this is supposed to be the benefit of public school. You were supposed to figure out that this isn’t a winning plan.