Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou
Conspiracy: Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and the Anatomy of Intrigue by Ryan Holiday
The Carnivore Diet Handbook by K. Suzanne
Goodbye, Things: The New Japanese Minimalism by Fumio Sasaki
Hollywood Dead: A Sandman Slim Novel by Richard Kadrey
A Beautiful, Terrible Thing by Jen Waite
I Heard You Paint Houses: Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran & Closing the Case on Jimmy Hoffa by Charles Brandt
Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends On It by Kamal Ravikant
Follow You Home by Mark Edwards
Vanished by Joseph Finder
Buried Secrets by Joseph Finder
Guilty Minds by Joseph Finder
Levon Cade Series V1-5 by Chuck Dixon
The Total Money Makeover: A Proven Plan for Financial Fitness by Dave Ramsey
Past Tense: A Jack Reacher Nover by Lee Child
Mind's Eye by Douglas E. Richards
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Secret Six Vol. 2: The Gauntlet by Gail Simone, Dale Eaglesham, Tom Derenick
Wolverine by Daniel Way: The Complete Collection Vol. 2, 3 & 4 by Daniel Way, Jeph Loeb, Steve Dillon, Kaare Andrews, Simone Bianchi, Jon Proctor, Marjorie Liu, Doug Braithwaite, Scot Eaton, Will Conrad, Stephen Segovia, Antonio Fuso
Captain America: Operation Rebirth by Mark Waid and Ron Garney
Wolverine: Old Man Logan Vol. 6: Days of Anger by Ed Brisson and Mike Deodato
Jungle Girl Omnibus Paperback by Frank Cho, Doug Murray, Adriano Batista
Death of Wolverine: The Complete Collection Paperback by Charles Soule, Tim Seeley, Kyle Higgins, Marguerite Bennett, Steve McNiven, Salvador Larroca, Angel Unzueta, Iban Coello
Batman: The Dark Knight: Master Race Paperback by Frank Miller, Brian Azzarello, Andy Kubert, Klaus Janson
Deadpool Vs. Old Man Logan Paperback by Declan Shalvey, Mike Henderson
Wolverine: Old Man Logan Vol. 7: Scarlet Samurai by Ed Brisson, Mike Deodato
Wolverine: Old Man Logan Vol. 8: To Kill Forby Ed Brisson, Dalibor Talajic
Deadpool by Daniel Way: The Complete Collection - Volume 1
by Daniel Way, Andy Diggle, Steve Dillon, Paco Medina, Carlo Barberi, Bong Dazo
Why Can't People Hear What Jordan Peterson Is Saying?:
"My first introduction to Jordan B. Peterson, a University of Toronto clinical psychologist, came by way of an interview that began trending on social media last week. Peterson was pressed by the British journalist Cathy Newman to explain several of his controversial views. But what struck me, far more than any position he took, was the method his interviewer employed. It was the most prominent, striking example I’ve seen yet of an unfortunate trend in modern communication.
First, a person says something. Then, another person restates what they purportedly said so as to make it seem as if their view is as offensive, hostile, or absurd.
Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and various Fox News hosts all feature and reward this rhetorical technique. And the Peterson interview has so many moments of this kind that each successive example calls attention to itself until the attentive viewer can’t help but wonder what drives the interviewer to keep inflating the nature of Peterson’s claims, instead of addressing what he actually said.
...in the interview, Newman relies on this technique to a remarkable extent, making it a useful illustration of a much broader pernicious trend. Peterson was not evasive or unwilling to be clear about his meaning. And Newman’s exaggerated restatements of his views mostly led viewers astray, not closer to the truth.
Peterson begins the interview by explaining why he tells young men to grow up and take responsibility for getting their lives together and becoming good partners. He notes he isn’t talking exclusively to men, and that he has lots of female fans.
“What’s in it for the women, though?” Newman asks.
“Well, what sort of partner do you want?” Peterson says. “Do you want an overgrown child? Or do you want someone to contend with who is going to help you?”
“So you’re saying,” Newman retorts, “that women have some sort of duty to help fix the crisis of masculinity.” But that’s not what he said. He posited a vested interest, not a duty.
“Women deeply want men who are competent and powerful,” Peterson goes on to assert. “And I don’t mean power in that they can exert tyrannical control over others. That’s not power. That’s just corruption. Power is competence. And why in the world would you not want a competent partner? Well, I know why, actually, you can’t dominate a competent partner. So if you want domination—”
The interviewer interrupts, “So you’re saying women want to dominate, is that what you’re saying?”
The next section of the interview concerns the pay gap between men and women, and whether it is rooted in gender itself or other nondiscriminatory factors:
Newman: … that 9 percent pay gap, that’s a gap between median hourly earnings between men and women. That exists.
Peterson: Yes. But there’s multiple reasons for that. One of them is gender, but that’s not the only reason. If you’re a social scientist worth your salt, you never do a univariate analysis. You say women in aggregate are paid less than men. Okay. Well then we break its down by age; we break it down by occupation; we break it down by interest; we break it down by personality.
Newman: But you’re saying, basically, it doesn’t matter if women aren’t getting to the top, because that’s what is skewing that gender pay gap, isn’t it? You’re saying that’s just a fact of life, women aren’t necessarily going to get to the top.
Peterson: No, I’m not saying it doesn’t matter, either. I’m saying there are multiple reasons for it.
Newman: Yeah, but why should women put up with those reasons?
Peterson: I’m not saying that they should put up with it! I’m saying that the claim that the wage gap between men and women is only due to sex is wrong. And it is wrong. There’s no doubt about that. The multivariate analysis have been done. So let me give you an example––
The interviewer seemed eager to impute to Peterson a belief that a large, extant wage gap between men and women is a “fact of life” that women should just “put up with,” though all those assertions are contrary to his real positions on the matter.
Throughout this next section, the interviewer repeatedly tries to oversimplify Peterson’s view, as if he believes one factor he discusses is all-important, and then she seems to assume that because Peterson believes that given factor helps to explain a pay gap between men and women, he doesn’t support any actions that would bring about a more equal outcome.
Her surprised question near the end suggests earnest confusion:
Peterson: There’s a personality trait known as agreeableness. Agreeable people are compassionate and polite. And agreeable people get paid less than disagreeable people for the same job. Women are more agreeable than men.
Newman: Again, a vast generalization. Some women are not more agreeable than men.
Peterson: That’s true. And some women get paid more than men.
Newman: So you’re saying by and large women are too agreeable to get the pay raises that they deserve.
Peterson: No, I’m saying that is one component of a multivariate equation that predicts salary. It accounts for maybe 5 percent of the variance. So you need another 18 factors, one of which is gender. And there is prejudice. There’s no doubt about that. But it accounts for a much smaller portion of the variance in the pay gap than the radical feminists claim.
Newman: Okay, so rather than denying that the pay gap exists, which is what you did at the beginning of this conversation, shouldn’t you say to women, rather than being agreeable and not asking for a pay raise, go ask for a pay raise. Make yourself disagreeable with your boss.
Peterson: But I didn’t deny it existed, I denied that it existed because of gender. See, because I’m very, very, very careful with my words.
Newman: So the pay gap exists. You accept that. I mean the pay gap between men and women exists—but you’re saying it’s not because of gender, it’s because women are too agreeable to ask for pay raises.
Peterson: That’s one of the reasons.
Newman: Okay, so why not get them to ask for a pay raise? Wouldn’t that be fairer?
Peterson: I’ve done that many, many, many times in my career. So one of the things you do as a clinical psychologist is assertiveness training. So you might say––often you treat people for anxiety, you treat them for depression, and maybe the next most common category after that would be assertiveness training. So I’ve had many, many women, extraordinarily competent women, in my clinical and consulting practice, and we’ve put together strategies for their career development that involved continual pushing, competing, for higher wages. And often tripled their wages within a five-year period.
Newman: And you celebrate that?
Peterson: Of course! Of course!
Another passage on gender equality proceeded thusly:
Newman: Is gender equality a myth?
Peterson: I don’t know what you mean by the question. Men and women aren’t the same. And they won’t be the same. That doesn’t mean that they can’t be treated fairly.
Newman: Is gender equality desirable?
Peterson: If it means equality of outcome then it is almost certainly undesirable. That’s already been demonstrated in Scandinavia. Men and women won’t sort themselves into the same categories if you leave them to do it of their own accord. It’s 20 to 1 female nurses to male, something like that. And approximately the same male engineers to female engineers. That’s a consequence of the free choice of men and women in the societies that have gone farther than any other societies to make gender equality the purpose of the law. Those are ineradicable differences––you can eradicate them with tremendous social pressure, and tyranny, but if you leave men and women to make their own choices you will not get equal outcomes.
Newman: So you’re saying that anyone who believes in equality, whether you call them feminists or whatever you want to call them, should basically give up because it ain’t going to happen.
Peterson: Only if they’re aiming at equality of outcome.
Newman: So you’re saying give people equality of opportunity, that’s fine.
Peterson: It’s not only fine, it’s eminently desirable for everyone, for individuals as well as societies.
Newman: But still women aren’t going to make it. That’s what you’re really saying.
That is not “what he’s really saying”!
In this next passage Peterson shows more explicit frustration than at any other time in the program with being interviewed by someone who refuses to relay his actual beliefs:
Newman: So you don’t believe in equal pay.
Peterson: No, I’m not saying that at all.
Newman: Because a lot of people listening to you will say, are we going back to the dark ages?
Peterson: That’s because you’re not listening, you’re just projecting.
Newman: I’m listening very carefully, and I’m hearing you basically saying that women need to just accept that they’re never going to make it on equal terms—equal outcomes is how you defined it.
Peterson: No, I didn’t say that.
Newman: If I was a young woman watching that, I would go, well, I might as well go play with my Cindy dolls and give up trying to go school, because I’m not going to get the top job I want, because there’s someone sitting there saying, it’s not possible, it’s going to make you miserable.
Peterson: I said that equal outcomes aren’t desirable. That’s what I said. It’s a bad social goal. I didn’t say that women shouldn’t be striving for the top, or anything like that. Because I don’t believe that for a second.
Newman: Striving for the top, but you’re going to put all those hurdles in their way, as have been in their way for centuries. And that’s fine, you’re saying. That’s fine. The patriarchal system is just fine.
Peterson: No! I really think that’s silly! I do, I think that’s silly.
He thinks it is silly because he never said that “the patriarchal system is just fine” or that he planned to put lots of hurdles in the way of women, or that women shouldn’t strive for the top, or that they might as well drop out of school, because achieving their goals or happiness is simply not going to be possible.
The interviewer put all those words in his mouth.
The conversation moves on to other topics, but the pattern continues. Peterson makes a statement. And then the interviewer interjects, “So you’re saying …” and fills in the rest with something that is less defensible, or less carefully qualified, or more extreme, or just totally unrelated to his point. I think my favorite example comes when they begin to talk about lobsters. Here’s the excerpt:
Peterson: There’s this idea that hierarchical structures are a sociological construct of the Western patriarchy. And that is so untrue that it’s almost unbelievable. I use the lobster as an example: We diverged from lobsters evolutionarily history about 350 million years ago. And lobsters exist in hierarchies. They have a nervous system attuned to the hierarchy. And that nervous system runs on serotonin just like ours. The nervous system of the lobster and the human being is so similar that anti-depressants work on lobsters. And it’s part of my attempt to demonstrate that the idea of hierarchy has absolutely nothing to do with sociocultural construction, which it doesn’t.
Newman: Let me get this straight. You’re saying that we should organize our societies along the lines of the lobsters?
Yes, he proposes that we all live on the sea floor, save some, who shall go to the seafood tanks at restaurants. It’s laughable. But Peterson tries to keep plodding along.
Peterson: I’m saying it is inevitable that there will be continuities in the way that animals and human beings organize their structures. It’s absolutely inevitable, and there is one-third of a billion years of evolutionary history behind that … It’s a long time. You have a mechanism in your brain that runs on serotonin that’s similar to the lobster mechanism that tracks your status—and the higher your status, the better your emotions are regulated. So as your serotonin levels increase you feel more positive emotion and less negative emotion.
Newman: So you’re saying like the lobsters, we’re hard-wired as men and women to do certain things, to sort of run along tram lines, and there’s nothing we can do about it.
Where did she get that extreme “and there’s nothing we can do about it”? Peterson has already said that he’s a clinical psychologist who coaches people to change how they related to institutions and to one another within the constraints of human biology. Of course he believes that there is something that can be done about it.
He brought up the lobsters only in an attempt to argue that “one thing we can’t do is say that hierarchical organization is a consequence of the capitalist patriarchy.”
At this point, we’re near the end of the interview. And given all that preceded it, Newman’s response killed me. Again, she takes an accusatory tack with her guest:
Newman: Aren’t you just whipping people up into a state of anger?
Peterson: Not at all.
Newman: Divisions between men and women. You’re stirring things up.
Actually, one of the most important things this interview illustrates—one reason it is worth noting at length—is how Newman repeatedly poses as if she is holding a controversialist accountable, when in fact, for the duration of the interview, it is she that is “stirring things up” and “whipping people into a state of anger.”
At every turn, she is the one who takes her subject’s words and makes them seem more extreme, or more hostile to women, or more shocking in their implications than Peterson’s remarks themselves support. Almost all of the most inflammatory views that were aired in the interview are ascribed by Newman to Peterson, who then disputes that she has accurately characterized his words.
There are moments when Newman seems earnestly confused, and perhaps is. And yet, if it were merely confusion, would she consistently misinterpret him in the more scandalous, less politically correct, more umbrage-stoking direction?"
"Charitably, let’s say her misunderstanding of Jordan’s positions is willful and deliberate, although I rather think not. My experience with most feminists is that they think critical thought is the same as arguing in a high school debate class, where techniques like derailing and turning constitute a ‘win’, which feminists then misconstrue as ‘understanding’. The winning condition for a feminist is never to understand. It is to feel. Angry, avenged, justified, vindicated, outrageous, virtuous – whatever the feeling, that’s how feminists argue. This particular feminist seems oblivious to how patiently Peterson lets her hang herself. At one point she is so flummoxed, she doesn’t know what to feel, and is therefore speechless. “You’ve got me,” she says, almost giddy in Peterson’s power."
"...you cannot control what happens inside someone’s head. You cannot stop them from thinking a thought. All you can do is make them too afraid to speak that thought aloud. You can find proof of this in the fact that, in a recent survey, under the cover of anonymity, 12% of Saudis declared themselves to be atheists and in the fact that the Arabic version of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion has been downloaded 10 million times. Even in the world’s most repressive country, in which unbelief is punishable by death and people are not free to utter the mildest skepticism aloud, in their minds, some of them are free. Fear and threats are poor persuaders. Arguments must be refuted with arguments; speech can only, in the long run, be effectively countered with speech..
When you take away someone’s right to speak, you also infringe on the
rights of others to hear them. You prevent those students from learning
how to confront, challenge, sift, weigh and evaluate the ideas of
others. These are vital skills.
I learned far more discussing things
with my fellow students than I ever did in lectures. We must learn to
counter speech with speech, to have the tools to respond with arguments,
rather than violence. And we must also understand that being mistaken
in a theory or wrongheaded about an idea is not, in itself, prove of
iniquity. I strongly disagree with Peterson on a number of issues, but I
feel able to refute his arguments because I have read his work and
heard him speak.
Watching students harass and threaten him and hearing
about the death threats and kidnapping threats he and his wife and
children have received, on the other hand, makes me feel pity for him as
a person. Ideas should be critiqued, but human beings deserve our
respect and protection.
When we make decisions about who to allow to speak and who to silence,
we often make very poor decisions. Even in the West. That’s why reformer
Ayaan Hirsi Ali met with death threats from some members of the Muslim
community in Australia where she wanted to speak out against practices
like child marriage and FGM, while the group’s imam gives talks on such
subjects as why and how a good Muslim should beat his wife with
impunity.
When we don’t allow ideas to be fully discussed, when we don’t encourage
people to read and listen to the actual work of scholars and writers
before passing judgement upon them, we get quote mining, witch hunts,
careers and reputations ruined and families faced with death threats —
often on the basis of partial, twisted or even completely fictional
misrepresentations of their ideas. In all fairness, we must always allow
controversial figures to put their own case. We must retain a principle
of innocent until proven guilty.
I often hear the argument that if speakers are allowed to make certain
bigoted generalisations about specific minority groups or utter racist,
sexist or homophobic slurs, this will create a hostile atmosphere which
will effectively silence members of minorities. While I believe we
should all strive to be as polite, kind and considerate of people’s
feelings as possible, I don’t think we should allow specific words to
become taboo, as it gives those terms a disproportionate power over us
and can even increase prejudice since it may seem that the thing itself
is so horrific that we shy away from even naming it.
Queer was the
Voldemort word of my own generation. Usually uttered in a sotto voce
hiss, it was an accusation which could make the victim’s blood run cold.
Now, it is one of the most politically correct of terms and its power
to hurt has been completely neutralised. Likewise, we cannot base our
morality on our fear of confronting the possibility of certain ideas.
Our psyches must become resilient enough to not be cowed by a collection
of syllables. And our ethical instincts must be robust enough to
explore, investigate, face up to truth and still be able to decide on a
course of action which will maximise human happiness...
This doesn’t mean bad ideas should go unchallenged. On the contrary,
we can only effectively challenge bad ideas if we actually know what
they are. So I want to know what someone like Richard Spencer is telling
his followers. I don’t want it shrouded in mystery. I don’t want him
made into some kind of a martyr. I don’t think punching him convinced
anyone to oppose him. I want to know what he is saying because I want
his racist, white supremacist ideology exposed, derided, ridiculed and
debunked. Give him the rope. Let him hang himself..
The New York Times article falls into one further fallacy which is the
result of a deep blindness to the author’s own privilege. I call this
the Pastor Niemoeller Fallacy. The writer believes that he will always
be one of those in charge of deciding who is allowed to speak and who
must be silenced and that his own free speech rights will therefore
always remain protected, even as those of others are infringed. This is
selfish. But also, I think, naive.
And not just because, on a worldwide scale, those silenced are
overwhelmingly atheists, liberals, dissidents and freethinkers.
We are
living in the age of Trump. It’s surely not that far-fetched to imagine
an America under right-wing rule where you are forbidden to teach
evolution, where sex education is a taboo topic, where your career could
end if you didn’t pay lip service to Christianity. There are already
plenty of pockets of repressive anti free-speech authoritarianism on the
right, too. Just look at Liberty University, where staff have to agree
to teach their students the ludicrous fiction that the world is only
6,000 years old.
We have to make a clear distinction between speech and violence.
When we
use hyperbolic language, such as claiming that not using someone’s
preferred pronouns is an act of assault or that criticizing Black Lives
Matter is an erasure of African Americans, we are equating speech and
violence. That’s something we should never do: even when we find the
speech in question despicable, disgusting, deeply offensive or vile.
Because if just saying something is considered an act of violence, that
means it’s OK to counter it with actual violence. That will convince no
one. And simply perpetuate a cycle of hate.
We also should never assume that the fact that people are outraged by
something someone has said or allegedly said means that the speaker
deserves to be punished. They placed Galileo under house arrest; they
burnt Giordano Bruno at the stake; they terrorized Salman Rushdie. And,
most recently, a mob of hundreds of his fellow students beat promising
young intellectual Mashal Khan to death, on campus, in broad daylight.
Don’t silence anyone. Answer speech with speech. Always."
So what exactly is a microaggression? First coined in the 1970s but rejuvenated in 2007 in a paper in the American Psychologist by Derald Wing Sue and colleagues, it originally referred only to racism but has expanded to a range of commonplace slights or hostility towards an oppressed group. The definition includes microinvalidations, such as being told that a negative interaction couldn’t have been due to racist motives, and microinsults, such as a teacher avoiding calling on you in class due to your gender, as well as a third class of microassaults...
It’s not just that the edges of microaggression are poorly defined: ambiguity is baked into the entire concept. Advocates see this as a key feature, and claim that more ambiguous acts of prejudice are the most damaging, because they are the hardest to deal with...
(Sue again: “The invisibility of racial microaggressions may be more harmful to people of color than hate crimes or the covert and deliberate acts of White supremacists such as the Klan and Skinheads.”)
Ambiguity can have its uses but the risk is that the concept becomes overly subjective.
For example, it could be that the experience of microaggressions is at least partially explained by a propensity to see fault or attack in statements. It could also be that the apparent impact of microaggressions on health or wellbeing is because people prone to negative emotionality (they score high on the trait of neuroticism) are more likely both to perceive microaggressions and to experience poorer health...
Personality having a hand in microaggression experience would also explain why some people from minority groups report no microaggressions when canvassed. The (limited) evidence that more ambiguous slights lead to more negative outcomes could also reflect the established psychological fact that in “weak” situations with no clear guidelines for action, people’s personality – in this case, their negative emotionality – tends to assert itself to fill in the interpretive gaps.
Lilienfeld raises a lot of other issues we simply don’t have space for here: political assumptions, no measurement of base rates of everyday slights, inclusion criteria that limits participants to those who already buy into the concept to begin with, and the need to address whether people who commit microaggressions show other signs of a prejudicial mindset (something that research into the Implicit Affect test has also struggled to demonstrate).
But he stresses that while he is not here to praise research into microaggression, nor is he here to bury it. He emphasises that many of these issues could be addressed by joining the microaggression field more closely with other more established areas of psychological research, and he offers a number of steps researchers could take to strengthen their research base.
Lilienfeld also suggests we all consider putting aside the word microaggression in favour of “perceived racial slight” – because we don’t yet understand the role of interpretation due to personality, and because it simply isn’t clear that those using microaggressions are showing aggression as we usually understand the word. Putting aside the charged term, together with the “victim and perpetrator” parlance used by advocates and researchers, would allow us to affirm that these ambiguous events have a reality of their own, while recognising that the nature of that reality needs further investigation to be understood."
Drupal Developer Larry Garfield Ostracized Over Involvement in Sci-Fi Based Kink Community - Hit & Run : Reason.com: "Here's another good example of the limits of liberal "tolerance": in the name of equality and diversity, tech leaders have turned against a long-respected member of their community over his private and consensual sex practices. Sure, the scandal has revealed that Drupal developer and spokesman Larry Garfield has a penchant for BDSM broadly and also for a specific sub-genre of the kink centered on the fictional land of Gor, in which a subset of women serve as men's sex slaves. But more importantly, the situation has exposed strange taboos in the liberal-leaning Drupal community and how hypocritical their talk of tolerance can be.
Taking the brunt of the hypocrisy criticism is Drupal trademark owner Dries Buytaert. Buytaert's main gig now is chief technology officer for Acquia, a company he co-founded in 2007. But he's better known as the the creator and original project lead for the open-source content management software Drupal, which has attracted a huge and devoted community since its 2001 launch. Drupal is "supported and maintained" by the nonprofit Drupal Association, which also organizes Drupal conferences.
...a Drupal Community Working Group investigation into Garfield found that he had not violated anything in the Drupal community's Code of Conduct, which probably should have been the end of things. No one has offered any evidence that Garfield discriminated against women in his professional life—in fact, many women whom Garfield has worked or associated with have rushed to his defense—let alone committed any more severe offenses or violence against them. Garfield himself says he believes women are every bit as intelligent as men and that his desire for female submission extends only to his own personal romantic/sexual partnerships. "The [dominant/submissive, or] D/s and Gorean community in general places a heavy emphasis on explicit, active, informed consent and constant communication," he notes, adding that he personally has "never, ever advocated for treating women, as a class, with anything other than dignity and respect." But even if Garfield did hold sincerely sexist views in private, it hardly seems grounds for community expulsion in the absence of publicly articulated views or actions.
The idea that women should be submissive to their husbands is a prominent feature of many religious faiths, and a value that plenty of Christians, Jews, Muslims, and others still hold dear—typically with way less add-on feminism than you'll find in BDSM relationships. Would the Drupal Association feel as comfortable ousting a devout supporter of Islam or evangelical Christianity if it came out that their wives practiced voluntary submission? If—as Buytaert says—the association is commited to treating people equally regardless of "their heritage or culture, their sexual orientation, their gender identity, and more," they seem to doing a pretty terrible job.
People's preferences toward certain types of sex or particular fantasies can be no less innate than a sexual orientation toward same- or opposite-sex partners (and no more reason for alarm). And it's hard to imagine a woman receiving the same treatment and derision if it came out that she once worked as a dominatrix or wrote 50 Shades of Grey fanfic. Meanwhile, Garfield was disinvited from the upcoming DrupalCon Baltimore, had his status as a conference track coordinator revoked, and (in a February phone call that both agree on at least the basics of) was asked by Buytaert to stop contributing to the Drupal community. (The request might not seem like a big deal to those outside the tech world, but "open-source communities/projects are crucially important to many people's careers and professional lives," explains John Evans at TechCrunch, "so who they allow and deny membership to, and how their codes of conduct are constructed and followed, is highly consequential.") "
...It's equally unclear what sort of other behavior of which Garfield is being accused. Garfield says he does not know, and has publicly asked Buytaert and the Drupal Association to enlighten him; they have stayed mum, not even revealing the basic nature of the alleged info. As John Evans writes at TechCrunch, "Dries & co. could surely have told the community substantially more (indeed, anything) about Garfield's problematic behavior, if any, without revealing sensitive information. For instance, they could have said they'd received reports of threats, harassment, or coercion by Garfield, if any such reports existed. They have said nothing of the sort." But "just trust us is not enough," Evans continues. "Especially since it also seems possible that the CTO and co-founder of a heavily funded pre-IPO company has participated in expelling a man from what has been his professional community for the last twelve years, ignoring that community's own Code of Conduct and Conflict Resolution Policy, because it was decided he was guilty of, essentially, thoughtcrime; that no real accusations have been made, and no allegations of problematic behavior have been cited, because none such exist.""
"Throughout all this, Buytaert and others opposing Garfield insist that it isn't about "sexual practices and kinks" and what Garfield does in his own time is fine—it's the fact that he "flaunted" it online which made a difference, or it's the "underlying" belief system behind his sexual kinks. Their statements sound a lot like some of my older relatives talking about gays and lesbians a decade or so back—if a man wants to have sex with another man in his own bedroom, that's fine, just don't go holding hands in public, or calling another man your boyfriend in front of the children! Buytaert et al. seem to suggest that sexual practices and kinks are relegated to things that happen in the flesh, in the bedroom, and entirely on the physical level. But for many BDSM practitioners, part of the fun lies in rituals and rules that extend beyond the bedroom, and role playing often (or exclusively) happens in online forums. Saying you're cool with someone's sexuality unless they ever talk about it or allude to it in public doesn't really hold water. "In the past, Dries might've kicked Larry out because 'BDSM is a threat to family values'," notes Nadia Eghba at Medium. "Today, leaders like Dries kick Larry out because 'BDSM is a threat to gender equality;. Unfortunately, the end result is the same....If diversity is our dogma, call me 'spiritual, not religious'. I still pray for the same things as you, but I won't be at the witch trials."
John De Goes, organizer of the programming conference LamdaConf, expressed similar sentiments in an Inc interview. "In this new world order, it's not sufficient to conduct yourself with the highest standards of professionalism, as Larry Garfield has reportedly done," said De Goes. "Instead, you must have the right private beliefs and values, and you must restrict your private consensual sexual behavior to the list of approved behaviors. Everything you say and do must be examined with a microscope to judge whether you are morally worthy of inclusion into the community." Inc points out that "the deeper question about how much tolerance should be afforded to controversial views is one that has popped up multiple times in open-source communities" in recent years, from Brendan Eich's removal as CEO of Mozilla over his opinion on same-sex marriage to the drama surrounding LambdaConf's inclusion of programmer Curtis Yarvin (who runs a neoreactionary blog in his non-professional life)."
8values "...is, in essence, a political quiz that attempts to assign percentages for eight different political values...
What are the eight values?
There are four indendent axes - Economic, Diplomatic, State, and Society - and each has two opposing values assigned to them.
They are:
Equality (Economic)
Those with higher Equality scores believe the economy should distribute value evenly among the populace. They tend to support progressive tax codes, social programs, and at high values, socialism.
Wealth (Economic)
Those with higher Wealth scores believe the economy should be focused on rapid growth. They tend to support lower taxes, privatization, deregulation, and at high values, laissez-faire capitalism.
Might (Diplomatic)
Those with higher Might scores believe in an aggressive, or hawkish, foreign policy. They tend to support high military spending, nationalism, rivalry with other countries, and at high values, rapid military expansion.
Peace (Diplomatic)
Those with higher Peace scores believe in an peaceful, or dovish, foreign policy. They tend to support low military spending, international aid, cooperation with other countries, and at high values, pacifism.
Liberty (State)
Those with higher Liberty scores believe in strong civil liberties. They tend to support democracy and oppose state intervention in personal lives. Note that this refers to civil liberties, not economic liberties.
Authority (State)
Those with higher Authority scores believe in strong state power. They tend to support state intervention in personal lives, government surveillance, and at high values, censorship or autocracy.
Tradition (Society)
Those with higher Tradition scores believe in traditional values and strict adherence to a moral code. Though not always, they are usually religious, and support the status quo or the status quo ante.
Progress (Society)
Those with higher Progress scores believe in social change and rationality. Though not always, they are usually secular or atheist, and support environmental action and scientific or technological research.
What's the "Closest Match" mean at the bottom of the results?
In addition to matching you to the eight values, the quiz also attempts to match you to a political ideology. This is a work in progress and is much less accurate than the values and axes, so don't take it too seriously. "
I, too, side with the gay immigrant of Jewish descent who dates black guys. Instead of anti-free speech violence & thuggery. And Gay Jewish immigrant who dates black dudes is the weirdest definition of Nazi White Nationalist ever. The mental gymnastics required to even make the claim is mind boggling.
UC-Berkeley Protesters Set Campus on Fire, Shut Down Milo Yiannopoulos Event - Hit & Run : Reason.com
Berkeley and Hitler | Scott Adams' Blog: "Speaking of Hitler, I’m ending my support of UC Berkeley, where I got my MBA years ago. I have been a big supporter lately, with both my time and money, but that ends today. I wish them well, but I wouldn’t feel safe or welcome on the campus. A Berkeley professor made that clear to me recently. He seems smart, so I’ll take his word for it.
I’ve decided to side with the Jewish gay immigrant who has an African-American boyfriend, not the hypnotized zombie-boys in black masks who were clubbing people who hold different points of view. I feel that’s reasonable, but I know many will disagree, and possibly try to club me to death if I walk on campus.
Yesterday I asked my most liberal, Trump-hating friend if he ever figured out why Republicans have most of the Governorships, a majority in Congress, the White House, and soon the Supreme Court. He said, “There are no easy answers.”
I submit that there are easy answers. But for many Americans, cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias hide those easy answers behind Hitler hallucinations."
Thugs Indulge Their Weimar Dreams and Become the Totalitarians They Claim to Hate - Reason.com: "Well, that's how they imagine it in their fever dreams, anyway. In reality, the Nazis didn't show up and the protesters themselves were the only totalitarians in sight. The Black Bloc thugs—"about 150 masked agitators who came onto campus and interrupted an otherwise non-violent protest," says UC-Berkeley—seem to imagine themselves as stars of a Weimar Germany reenactment. In their minds, they march through the streets as the phalanx of the center-left Eiserne Front (or, more likely, the communist Rotfrontkämpferbund), battling their deadly enemies in the Nazi SA between sessions at the beer hall. But the anti-fascists couldn't find any Nazis at Berkeley.
So instead "[t]hey shattered the glass of our Amazon Pickup Center, one of the few places Berkeley students can receive packages without fear of them getting stolen. They created a bonfire of trash in the center of the chaos, picked up barricades to drive through the building's glass walls, set off fireworks, and left a trail of rage-filled destruction in their wake as they stormed the very streets we call home," in the words of a student who saw a peaceful anti-Trump protest hijacked by visitors from 1930. Oh, and they sold a whole lot of books for Milo, who is less a Nazi than a professional troll and self-promoter who has tied his personal brand to that of Donald Trump. Brownshirts also missed the date at Gavin McInnes's speech at New York University. Anti-fascist crusaders had to settle for pepper-spraying McInnes himself before he'd even opened his mouth, and cursing out cops for not beating up McInnes and his supporters. And they got themselves arrested for disorderly conduct, resisting arrest, and criminal mischief. McInnes, by the way isn't a Nazi either. The co-founder of Vice and serial hipster's major "offense" seems to be that he's a Trump supporter; he's also a self-described "Western chauvinist," seemingly a male chauvinist, and no fan of Islam.
Arguably, a Nazi did show up for the very first act of anti-Nazi direct action of the Trump era, when avowed racist Richard Spencer was violently attacked the day after the new president took office. Ironically, he was giving a TV interview at the time, during which he denied being a neo-Nazi—he's just awful in so many other ways. But that's close enough for the incident to have sparked a Nazi-punching craze, with allegedly serious articles in major publications pondering the ethics of committing battery against people for their political views.
Curiously, each major target of violent anti-fascist ire has actually been further and further from an actual Nazi, from Spencer, to Yiannopoulos, to McInnes. This suggests that the threshold allegedly justifying physical assault is movable, making anybody at the outer edge of the shifting acceptable realm for speech eligible for a punch. If it's Nazis all the way down, ultimately, only two black-clad douchebags will be left standing in a basement somewhere, fists clenched, glaring at each other with each wondering about the other's anti-Nazi bona fides. Which is a big part of why it's not OK to punch Nazis..."
One thing that bugs me in the wake of the violence was the "denunciation" by some on the left of how the Black Bloc protesters invaded the march and weren't emblematic of the movement as a whole. The weren't "real" Democrats or Leftist or whatever. They were *anarchists*! [See also, No True Scotsman fallacy.] Maybe. But this is from the sidebar of UC Berkeley News after the riot:
No mention of the students and other people who were pepper sprayed and beaten for having different political opinions...
Reason.com: "Despite some promising open data initiatives, the executive branch under Obama was, on the whole, more secretive than ever. Since 2009, press access to the White House has been notably restricted, whistleblower prosecutions have spiked, and Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuits against the federal government have reached an all-time high.
In 2013, the Committee to Protect Journalists published a scathing report, written by former Washington Post editor Leonard Downie Jr., on the Obama administration's obsession with controlling media coverage and burnishing its image, drawing comparisons to the pathological tendencies of one of the White House's previous occupants.
"The Obama administration's aggressive war on leaks, and its determined efforts to control information that the news media needs to hold the government accountable for its actions, are without equal since the Nixon administration and in direct conflict with President Obama's often-stated goal of making his administration the most transparent in American history," Downie said when the document was released. "Parenthetically, I'm old enough that I was one of the editors on the Watergate story, so I make that comparison with knowledge," he continued.
But unlike Tricky Dick, who provided future presidents with a cautionary tale about how dirty tricks can come back to bite them, Obama leaves a blueprint on how to suppress information and get away with it."
CBLDF Joins Amicus Brief in Support of “The Band Who Must Not Be Named” | Comic Book Legal Defense Fund: "CBLDF has joined a basket of deplorable people and organizations on a Cato Institute-led amicus brief to the Supreme Court in Lee v. Tam, asking, “Should the government get to decide what’s a slur?” Among the deplorables who joined CBLDF on the brief are satirist P.J. O’Rourke; former ACLU president Nadine Strossen, Flying Dog Brewery (which once sued the state of Michigan over its attempt to stymie the sale of the brewery’s Raging Bitch IPA), and illustrator Ralph Steadman (who drew the label for Raging Bitch).
When an activist Asian-American rock band decided to choose a name that both affirms their racial identity and reclaims a racist term as a way to challenge stereotypes — The Slants — they likely didn’t expect to end up in front of the Supreme Court. They anticipated some blowback, sure, but then the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) denied their trademark application.
The PTO determined that The Slants were in violation of portions of the Lanham Act, which denies registration to trademarks “which may disparage … persons, living or dead, institutions, beliefs, or national symbols.” Band leader Simon Tam took the PTO to court, arguing that the band’s First Amendment rights were violated. A three-judge panel of the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit disagreed, but the full court reversed the earlier ruling in a 9-3 decision that struck down the disparagement clause in the Lanham Act as unconstitutional.
The PTO appealed to the Supreme Court.
Cato filed a brief in support of Tam, entitled “Brief of the Cato Institute and a Basket of Deplorable People and Organizations,” which David Post of The Washington Post called “an instant classic [that] is well worth reading — a nice illustration, among other things, that legal briefs can have serious doctrinal content while also being a hoot to read.”
Cato contends that a government entity should not determine what constitutes a racial slur. Further, the brief illustrates the ways in which the disparagement clause suppresses political speech, prevents the reclamation of terms from their pejorative use, and is so unconstitutionally vague that any trademark could be denied on the grounds that it offends some group or another."
Offensive Trademarks Are Free Speech - Reason.com: "In 2004 the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office agreed to register Heeb as the name of a magazine covering Jewish culture. Four years later, the PTO refused to register Heeb as the name of a clothing line conceived by the magazine's publishers, because the term is "a highly disparaging reference to the Jewish people."
Such puzzling inconsistency is par for the course at the PTO, which since 1946 has been charged with blocking registration of trademarks that "may disparage...persons, living or dead, institutions, beliefs, or national symbols, or bring them into contempt, or disrepute." A case the Supreme Court will hear today could put an end to that vain, vague, and highly subjective enterprise, which sacrifices freedom of speech on the altar of political correctness. The case involves an Asian-American dance rock band called The Slants, a name that self-consciously repurposes a racial slur. In 2011 the band's founder, Simon Tam, tried to register the name but was rejected by a PTO examiner who deemed it disparaging to "persons of Asian descent." An administrative appeals board affirmed that decision, even while conceding that the band's name was "an attempt not to disparage, but rather to wrest 'ownership' of the term from those who might use it with the intent to disparage." The board said "the fact that applicant has good intentions underlying the use of the term does not obviate the fact that a substantial composite of the referenced group find the term objectionable."
Hit & Run : Reason.com: "Tierney correctly observes lots of leftwing partisans forget that science is applied skepticism and instead treat "science" as a collection of dogmas. What dogmas? "The Left's zeal to find new reasons to regulate has led to pseudoscientific scaremongering about "Frankenfoods," transfats, BPA in plastic, mobile phones, electronic cigarettes, power lines, fracking, and nuclear energy," summarizes Tierney. And let's not forget Rachel Carson's thoroughly debunked claim that exposure to trace amounts of synthetic chemicals is a major cause of cancer or the assertion the current average consumption of salt is a major cause of cardiovascular disease."
The Real War on Science | City Journal: "I’ve read the Left’s indictments, including Chris Mooney’s bestseller, The Republican War on Science. I finished it with the same question about this war that I had at the outset: Where are the casualties? Where are the scientists who lost their jobs or their funding? What vital research has been corrupted or suppressed? What scientific debate has been silenced? Yes, the book reveals that Republican creationists exist, but they don’t affect the biologists or anthropologists studying evolution. Yes, George W. Bush refused federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research, but that hardly put a stop to it (and not much changed after Barack Obama reversed the policy). Mooney rails at scientists and politicians who oppose government policies favored by progressives like himself, but if you’re looking for serious damage to the enterprise of science, he offers only three examples. All three are in his first chapter, during Mooney’s brief acknowledgment that leftists “here and there” have been guilty of “science abuse.” First, there’s the Left’s opposition to genetically modified foods, which stifled research into what could have been a second Green Revolution to feed Africa. Second, there’s the campaign by animal-rights activists against medical researchers, whose work has already been hampered and would be devastated if the activists succeeded in banning animal experimentation. Third, there’s the resistance in academia to studying the genetic underpinnings of human behavior, which has cut off many social scientists from the recent revolutions in genetics and neuroscience. Each of these abuses is far more significant than anything done by conservatives, and there are plenty of others. The only successful war on science is the one waged by the Left."
...two huge threats to science are peculiar to the Left—and they’re getting worse. The first threat is confirmation bias, the well-documented tendency of people to seek out and accept information that confirms their beliefs and prejudices. In a classic study of peer review, 75 psychologists were asked to referee a paper about the mental health of left-wing student activists. Some referees saw a version of the paper showing that the student activists’ mental health was above normal; others saw different data, showing it to be below normal. Sure enough, the more liberal referees were more likely to recommend publishing the paper favorable to the left-wing activists. When the conclusion went the other way, they quickly found problems with its methodology. Scientists try to avoid confirmation bias by exposing their work to peer review by critics with different views, but it’s increasingly difficult for liberals to find such critics. Academics have traditionally leaned left politically, and many fields have essentially become monocultures, especially in the social sciences, where Democrats now outnumber Republicans by at least 8 to 1. (In sociology, where the ratio is 44 to 1, a student is much likelier to be taught by a Marxist than by a Republican.) The lopsided ratio has led to another well-documented phenomenon: people’s beliefs become more extreme when they’re surrounded by like-minded colleagues. They come to assume that their opinions are not only the norm but also the truth. Groupthink has become so routine that many scientists aren’t even aware of it. Social psychologists, who have extensively studied conscious and unconscious biases against out-groups, are quick to blame these biases for the underrepresentation of women or minorities in the business world and other institutions. But they’ve been mostly oblivious to their own diversity problem, which is vastly larger. Democrats outnumber Republicans at least 12 to 1 (perhaps 40 to 1) in social psychology, creating what Jonathan Haidt calls a “tribal-moral community” with its own “sacred values” about what’s worth studying and what’s taboo...
Conservatives have been variously pathologized as unethical, antisocial, and irrational simply because they don’t share beliefs that seem self-evident to liberals. For instance, one study explored ethical decision making by asking people whether they would formally support a female colleague’s complaint of sexual harassment. There was no way to know if the complaint was justified, but anyone who didn’t automatically side with the woman was put in the unethical category. Another study asked people whether they believed that “in the long run, hard work usually brings a better life”—and then classified a yes answer as a “rationalization of inequality.” Another study asked people if they agreed that “the Earth has plenty of natural resources if we just learn how to develop them”—a view held by many experts in resource economics, but the psychologists pathologized it as a “denial of environmental realities.”
...The Blank Slate dogma has perpetuated a liberal version of creationism: the belief that there has been no evolution in modern humans since they left their ancestral homeland in Africa some 50,000 years ago. Except for a few genetic changes in skin color and other superficial qualities, humans everywhere are supposedly alike because there hasn’t been enough time for significant differences to evolve in their brains and innate behavior. This belief was plausible when biologists assumed that evolution was a slow process, but the decoding of the human genome has disproved it, as Nicholas Wade (a former colleague of mine at the New York Times) reported in his 2015 book, A Troublesome Inheritance. “Human evolution has been recent, copious and regional,” writes Wade, noting that at least 8 percent of the human genome has changed since the departure from Africa. The new analysis has revealed five distinguishable races that evolved in response to regional conditions: Africans, East Asians, Caucasians, the natives of the Americas, and the peoples of Australia and Papua New Guinea. Yet social scientists go on denying the very existence of races.
The American Anthropological Association declares race to be “a human invention” that is “about culture, not biology.” The American Sociological Association calls race a “social construct.” Even biologists and geneticists are afraid of the R-word. More than 100 of them sent a letter to the New York Times denouncing Wade’s book as inaccurate, yet they refused to provide any examples of his mistakes. They apparently hadn’t bothered to read the book because they accused Wade of linking racial variations to IQ scores—a link that his book specifically rejected. Some genetic differences are politically acceptable on the left, such as the biological basis for homosexuality, which was deemed plausible by 70 percent of sociologists in a recent survey. But that same survey found that only 43 percent accepted a biological explanation for male-female differences in spatial skills and communication. How could the rest of the sociologists deny the role of biology? It was no coincidence that these doubters espoused the most extreme left-wing political views and the strongest commitment to a feminist perspective. To dedicated leftists and feminists, it doesn’t matter how much evidence of sexual differences is produced by developmental psychologists, primatologists, neuroscientists, and other researchers. Any disparity between the sexes—or, at least, any disparity unfavorable to women—must be blamed on discrimination and other cultural factors...
Over and over, scientists yielded to the temptation to exaggerate their expertise and moral authority, sometimes for horrendous purposes. Drawing on research into genetics and animal breeding from scientists at Harvard, Yale, Johns Hopkins, and other leading universities, the eugenics movement of the 1920s made plans for improving the human population. Professors taught eugenics to their students and worked with Croly and other progressives eager to breed a smarter society, including Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Margaret Sanger. Eventually, other scientists—notably, in England—exposed the shoddy research and assumptions of the eugenicists, but not before the involuntary sterilization or castration of more than 35,000 Americans. Even after Hitler used eugenics to justify killing millions, the Left didn’t lose its interest in controlling human breeding. Eugenicist thinking was revived by scientists convinced that the human species had exceeded the “carrying capacity” of its ecosystem. The most prominent was Paul Ehrlich, whose scientific specialty was the study of butterflies. Undeterred by his ignorance of agriculture and economics, he published confident predictions of imminent global famine in The Population Bomb (1968). Agricultural economists dismissed his ideas, but the press reverently quoted Ehrlich and other academics who claimed to have scientifically determined that the Earth was “overpopulated.” In the journal Science, ecologist Garrett Hardin argued that “freedom to breed will bring ruin to all.” Ehrlich, who, at one point, advocated supplying American helicopters and doctors to a proposed program of compulsory sterilization in India, joined with physicist John Holdren in arguing that the U.S. Constitution would permit population control, including limits on family size and forced abortions. Ehrlich and Holdren calmly analyzed the merits of various technologies, such as adding sterilants to public drinking water, and called for a “planetary regime” to control population and natural resources around the world...
Their ideas went nowhere in the United States, but they inspired one of the worst human rights violations of the twentieth century, in China: the one-child policy, resulting in coerced abortion and female infanticide. China struggles today with a dangerously small number of workers to support its aging population. The intellectual godfathers of this atrocity, had they been conservatives, surely would have been ostracized. But even after his predictions turned out to be wildly wrong, Ehrlich went on collecting honors...
For his part, Holdren has served for the past eight years as the science advisor to President Obama, a position from which he laments that Americans don’t take his warnings on climate change seriously. He doesn’t seem to realize that public skepticism has a lot to do with the dismal track record of himself and his fellow environmentalists. There’s always an apocalypse requiring the expansion of state power. The visions of global famine were followed by more failed predictions, such as an “age of scarcity” due to vanishing supplies of energy and natural resources and epidemics of cancer and infertility caused by synthetic chemicals. In a 1976 book, The Genesis Strategy, the climatologist Stephen Schneider advocated a new fourth branch of the federal government (with experts like himself serving 20-year terms) to deal with the imminent crisis of global cooling. He later switched to become a leader in the global-warming debate...
Environmental science has become so politicized that its myths endure even after they’ve been disproved. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring set off decades of chemophobia with its scary anecdotes and bad science, like her baseless claim that DDT was causing cancer in humans and her vision of a mass avian die-off (the bird population was actually increasing as she wrote). Yet Silent Spring is taught in high school and college courses as a model of science writing, with no mention of the increased death tolls from malaria in countries that restricted DDT, or of other problems—like the spread of dengue and the Zika virus—exacerbated by needless fears of insecticides. Similarly, the Left’s zeal to find new reasons to regulate has led to pseudoscientific scaremongering about “Frankenfoods,” transfats, BPA in plastic, mobile phones, electronic cigarettes, power lines, fracking, and nuclear energy. The health establishment spent decades advocating a low-salt diet for everyone (and pressuring the food industry to reduce salt) without any proof that it prolonged lives. When researchers finally got around to doing small clinical trials, they found that the low-salt diet did not prolong lives. If anything, it was associated with higher mortality. The worst debacle in health science involved dietary fat, which became an official public enemy in the 1970s, thanks to a few self-promoting scientists and politically savvy activists who allied with Democrats in Congress led by George McGovern and Henry Waxman. The supposed link between high-fat diets and heart disease was based on cherry-picked epidemiology, but the federal government endorsed it by publishing formal “dietary goals for the United States” and creating the now-infamous food pyramid that encouraged Americans to replace fat in their diets with carbohydrates. The public-health establishment devoted its efforts and funding to demonstrating the benefits of low-fat diets. But the low-fat diet repeatedly flunked clinical trials, and the government’s encouragement of carbohydrates probably contributed to rising rates of obesity and diabetes, as journalists Gary Taubes and Nina Teicholz have chronicled in their books...
The dietary-fat debate is a case study in scientific groupthink—and in the Left’s techniques for enforcing political orthodoxy. From the start, prominent nutrition researchers disputed fat’s link to heart disease and criticized Washington for running a dietary experiment on the entire population. But they were dismissed as outliers who’d been corrupted by corporate money. At one hearing, Senator McGovern rebutted the skeptics by citing a survey showing that low-fat diet recommendations were endorsed by 92 percent of “the world’s leading doctors.” Federal bureaucrats and activists smeared skeptics by leaking information to the press about their consulting work with the food industry. One skeptic, Robert Olson of Washington University, protested that during his career, he had received $250,000 from the food industry versus more than $10 million from federal agencies, including ones promoting low-fat diets. If he could be bought, he said, it would be more accurate to call him “a tool of government.” As usual, though, the liberal press focused only on corporate money. These same sneer-and-smear techniques predominate in the debate over climate change...
Pesident Obama promotes his green agenda by announcing that “the debate is settled,” and he denounces “climate deniers” by claiming that 97 percent of scientists believe that global warming is dangerous. His statements are false. While the greenhouse effect is undeniably real, and while most scientists agree that there has been a rise in global temperatures caused in some part by human emissions of carbon dioxide, no one knows how much more warming will occur this century or whether it will be dangerous. How could the science be settled when there have been dozens of computer models of how carbon dioxide affects the climate? And when most of the models overestimated how much warming should have occurred by now?
These failed predictions, as well as recent research into the effects of water vapor on temperatures, have caused many scientists to lower their projections of future warming. Some “luke-warmists” suggest that future temperature increases will be relatively modest and prove to be a net benefit, at least in the short term. The long-term risks are certainly worth studying, but no matter whose predictions you trust, climate science provides no justification for Obama’s green agenda—or anyone else’s agenda. Even if it were somehow proved that high-end estimates for future global warming are accurate, that wouldn’t imply that Greens have the right practical solution for reducing carbon emissions—or that we even need to reduce those emissions. Policies for dealing with global warming vary according to political beliefs, economic assumptions, social priorities, and moral principles. Would regulating carbon dioxide stifle economic growth and give too much power to the state? Is it moral to impose sacrifices on poor people to keep temperatures a little cooler for their descendants, who will presumably be many times richer? Are there more important problems to address first? These aren’t questions with scientifically correct answers. Yet many climate researchers are passing off their political opinions as science, just as Obama does, and they’re even using that absurdly unscientific term “denier” as if they were priests guarding some eternal truth.
Science advances by continually challenging and testing hypotheses, but the modern Left has become obsessed with silencing heretics. In a letter to Attorney General Loretta Lynch last year, 20 climate scientists urged her to use federal racketeering laws to prosecute corporations and think tanks that have “deceived the American people about the risks of climate change.” Similar assaults on free speech are endorsed in the Democratic Party’s 2016 platform, which calls for prosecution of companies that make “misleading” statements about “the scientific reality of climate change.” A group of Democratic state attorneys general coordinated an assault on climate skeptics by subpoenaing records from fossil-fuel companies and free-market think tanks, supposedly as part of investigations to prosecute corporate fraud. Such prosecutions may go nowhere in court—they’re blatant violations of the First Amendment—but that’s not their purpose. By demanding a decade’s worth of e-mail and other records, the Democratic inquisitors and their scientist allies want to harass climate dissidents and intimidate their donors. Just as in the debate over dietary fat, these dissidents get smeared in the press as corporate shills—but once again, the money flows almost entirely the other way. "
"I believe you can joke about anything." - George Carlin.
George Carlin – Rape Can Be Funny | Genius: "Lots of groups in this country want to tell you how to talk. Tell you what you can't talk about. Well, sometimes they'll say, well you can talk about something but you can't joke about it. Say you can't joke about something because it's not funny. Comedians run into that shit all the time. Like rape. They'll say, "You can't joke about rape. Rape's not funny." I say, "Fuck you, I think it's hilarious. How do you like that?" I can prove to you that rape is funny. Picture Porky Pig raping Elmer Fudd. See? Hey, why do you think they call him "Porky," eh? I know what you're going to say. "Elmer was asking for it. Elmer was coming on to Porky. Porky couldn't help himself, he got a hard-on, he got horny, he lost control, he went out of his mind. A lot of men talk like that. A lot of men think that way. They think it's the woman's fault. They like to blame the rape on the woman. Say, "She had it coming, she was wearing a short skirt." These guys think women ought to go to prison for being cock teasers: don't seem fair to me. Don't seem right, but you can joke about it. I believe you can joke about anything. It all depends on how you construct the joke..."
If You Need a Trigger Warning, You Need P.T.S.D. Treatment - NYTimes.com: "Proponents of trigger warnings point out that many students have suffered trauma, exemplified by alarming rates of sexual assault on campus. Accordingly, they urge professors to warn students about potentially upsetting course materials and to exempt distressed students from classes covering topics likely to trigger post-traumatic stress disorder, or P.T.S.D., symptoms, such as flashbacks, nightmares and intrusive thoughts about one’s personal trauma.
Proponents of trigger warnings are deeply concerned about the emotional well-being of students, especially those with trauma histories.
Yet lost in the debate are two key points: Trauma is common, but P.T.S.D. is rare.
Epidemiological studies show that many people are exposed to trauma in their lives, and most have had transient stress symptoms. But only a minority fails to recover, thereby developing P.T.S.D. Students with P.T.S.D. are those most likely to have adverse emotional reactions to curricular material, not those with trauma histories whose acute stress responses have dissipated.
However, trigger warnings are countertherapeutic because they encourage avoidance of reminders of trauma, and avoidance maintains P.T.S.D. Severe emotional reactions triggered by course material are a signal that students need to prioritize their mental health and obtain evidence-based, cognitive-behavioral therapies that will help them overcome P.T.S.D. These therapies involve gradual, systematic exposure to traumatic memories until their capacity to trigger distress diminishes.
Rather than issuing trigger warnings, universities can best serve students by facilitating access to effective and proven treatments for P.T.S.D. and other mental health problems."
