The Warszawa posted:

Well, leave it to noted "race realist" Andrew Sullivan to defend Jason Richwine.


"What are liberals afraid of?" Uh, I don't know, Sully, drawing specious conclusions to justify racist policy by cloaking them in "Yeah Mr. White, yeah Science!"? See, e.g., the last 200 years or so.

joepinetree posted:

The best part of Sullivan writing on this topic is his follow up. He points to a piece by Ron Unz, where Unz strongly criticizes Richwine for completely ignoring the bulk of the research that would disprove or at least seriously damage Richwine's dissertation. Then Sullivan says that that is what should be done, instead of crying "racism." But Unz's article is perhaps the best evidence that Richwine is a racist piece of crap, but Sullivan of course ignores that much.

Autumncomet posted:

Is this the real answer?

Some rear end in a top hat posted:

It is in this respect, if only this respect, that drones are a welcome development in the history of war making. They make possible what to date has been, for all intents and purposes, a fantasy: the irruption of moral truth in a domain — the battlefield — traditionally overrun by mysticism and lies.

VideoTapir posted:

China established gun control in 1935. From 1948 to 1952, 20 million political dissidents, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated

VideoTapir posted:

SWITZERLAND ISSUES EVERY HOUSEHOLD A GUN! SWITZERLAND'S GOVERNMENT TRAINS EVERY ADULT THAT THEY ISSUE A RIFLE TO IN GUN SAFETY AND USE. SWITZERLAND HAS THE LOWEST GUN RELATED CRIME RATE OF ANY CIVILIZED COUNTRY IN THE WORLD!!!

quote:

Each such individual is required to keep his army-issued personal weapon (the 5.56x45mm Sig 550 rifle for enlisted personnel and/or the 9mm SIG-Sauer P220 semi-automatic pistol for officers, military police, medical and postal personnel) at home or (as of 2010) in the local armoury (Zeughaus). Up until October 2007, a specified personal retention quantity of government-issued personal ammunition (50 rounds 5.56 mm / 48 rounds 9mm) was issued as well, which was sealed and inspected regularly to ensure that no unauthorized use had taken place.[4] The ammunition was intended for use while traveling to the army barracks in case of invasion.

Jack Gladney posted:

I wonder how this is different from America's relationship with guns.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_politics_in_Switzerland#Army-issued_arms

Fandyien posted:

I love that they have the gall to cite Guatemala in that list. Wasn't the government in 1964 the result of a U.S. back coup against the legitimately elected progressive guy in the mid-50s?

Pope Guilty posted:

You see? Guns are needed to protect against the US government!

Fandyien posted:

Hilariously, this was also literally Che Guevara's motto in Cuba, where he supported arming people after the revolution explicitly because of what he saw of U.S. involvement in Guatemala. Next time someone makes the "I'm scared of the U.S. government I need my guns argument" I'm going to buy them a Che shirt.

Fandyien posted:

Hilariously, this was also literally Che Guevara's motto in Cuba, where he supported arming people after the revolution explicitly because of what he saw of U.S. involvement in Guatemala. Next time someone makes the "I'm scared of the U.S. government I need my guns argument" I'm going to buy them a Che shirt.

Job Truniht posted:

Why do gun owners try to correlate firearm laws with non firearm related crimes (assault, burglary, ect)?

Job Truniht posted:

Why do gun owners try to correlate firearm laws with non firearm related crimes (assault, burglary, ect)?

Fulchrum posted:

Because criminals are well known for giving a victim ample time to allow them to ready their weapon, as well as letting them move as much as they want.

Job Truniht posted:

Why do gun owners try to correlate firearm laws with non firearm related crimes (assault, burglary, ect)?

Mr. Funny Pants posted:

The frequency of defensive gun use is a hotly contested topic, but no one denies they happen in significant numbers.

VideoTapir posted:

The problem is reports of this tend to be on sites like WND or examiner.com. It would be nice to see some actual data on it.

Mr. Funny Pants posted:

The collection of links I have are all from mainstream news sources, either local newspapers or local TV stations. Here's a few:

http://m.spokesman.com/stories/2013/apr/03/elderly-woman-uses-handgun-detain-intruder/
http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/Robber-gunned-down-on-Pasadena-street-4415402.php
http://www.myfoxdfw.com/story/21993610/robber-shot-dead-by-would-be-victim-outside-everman-store
http://www.philly.com/philly/news/local/Elkins_Park_man_killed_after_forcing_his_way_into_apartment.html
http://www.wfmz.com/news/news-regio...k5/-/index.html
http://seattletimes.com/html/localnews/2020787643_apwahomeownershootsintruder.html
http://www.timesreporter.com/communities/x987012567/Phila-man-pulls-gun-on-intruder-to-thwart-home-invasion
http://www.azfamily.com/news/Tempe-woman-shoots-at-home-invasion-suspects-203691451.html
http://www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/2013/04/two_men_shot_including_suspect.html
http://news.yahoo.com/alleged-penn-intruder-dead-attacking-elderly-woman-club-004819256.html
http://myfox8.com/2013/04/07/police-home-intruder-shot-killed-at-charlotte-apartment/
http://www.officer.com/news/10929844/pennsylvania-music-store-owner-shoots-kills-intruder
http://kptv.m0bl.net/w/main/story/91007854/

The data, as I said, is very controversial

Fulchrum posted:

I believe you've mixed up the words controversial and anecdotal.

Job Truniht posted:

Why do gun owners try to correlate firearm laws with non firearm related crimes (assault, burglary, ect)?

quote:

I don't carry a gun because I'm angry.
I carry a gun so that I don't have to spend the rest of my life hating myself for failing to be prepared.

quote:

STANFORD, Calif. Ideas of the 1960s have now grown reactionary in our world that is vastly different from a half-century ago.
Take well-meaning subsidies for those over age 62. Why are there still senior discounts, vast expansions in Social Security and Medicare and generous public pensions?

Five decades ago all that made sense. There was no such thing as double-dipping. Seniors often were physically worn out from blue-collar jobs. They were usually poorer and frequently sicker than society in general. The aged usually died not long after they retired.
Not now. Seniors often live a quarter-century or longer after a mostly white-collar retirement, drawing subsidies from those least able to pay for them.

Seniors are not like today’s strapped youth, scrimping for a down payment on a house. Most are not struggling to find even part-time work. None are paying off crushing student loans. In a calcified economy, why would an affluent couple in their early 60s earn a “senior discount” at a movie, while the struggling young couple with three children in the same line does not?
Affirmative action and enforced “diversity” were originally designed to give a boost to those who were victims of historical bias from the supposedly oppressive white-majority society. Is that still true, a half-century after these assumptions became institutionalized?
Through greater intermarriage and immigration, America has become a multiracial nation. Skin color, general appearance, accent or the sound of one’s name cannot so easily identify either “oppressors” or “victims.”

So who exactly should receive privileges in job-hiring or college admissions — the newly arrived Pakistani immigrant, or the third-generation, upper-middle-class Mexican-American who does not speak Spanish? Both, or neither? What about someone of half-Jamaican ancestry? What about the children of Attorney General Eric Holder or self-proclaimed Native American Sen. Elizabeth Warren? What about the poor white grandson of the Oklahoma diaspora who is now a minority in California?
Even if the 21st-century state could define who is a minority, on what moral grounds does the targeted beneficiary deserve special consideration? Is his disadvantage defined by being poorer, by lingering trauma from his grandparents’ long-ago ordeals or by yesterday’s experience with routine racial prejudice?

If Latinos are underrepresented at the University of California, Berkeley, is it because of the stubborn institutional prejudices that also somehow have been trumped by Asian-Americans enrolling at three times their numbers in the state’s general population? Are women so oppressed by men that they graduate from college in higher numbers than their chauvinist male counterparts?
Consider also the calcified assumptions about college education. The expanding 1960s campus was touted as the future gateway to a smarter, fairer, richer and more ethical America. Is that dream still valid?

Today, the college-educated owe a collective $1 trillion in unpaid student loans. Millions of recent graduates cannot find jobs that offer much chance of paying off their crushing student debts.

College itself has become a sort of five- to six-year lifestyle choice. Debt, joblessness or occasional part-time employment and coursework eat up a youth’s 20s — in a way that military service or vocational training does not.
In reaction, private diploma mills are springing up everywhere. But there are no “diversity czars” at DeVry University. There is no time or money for the luxury of classes such as “Gender Oppression” at Phoenix University. Students do not have rock-climbing walls or have Michael Moore address them at Heald College.

The private-sector campus makes other assumptions. One is that the hallowed liberal arts general-education requirement has been corrupted and no longer ensures an employer that his college-graduate hire is any more broadly educated or liberally minded than those who paid far less tuition for job-training courses at for-profit alternative campuses.

Scan the government grandees caught up in the current administration’s ballooning IRS, Associated Press and Benghazi scandals. In each case, a blue-chip Ivy League degree was no guarantee that our best and brightest technocrats would prove transparent or act honorably. What difference did it make that White House Press Secretary Jay Carney, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Attorney General Holder, President Barack Obama and U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice had degrees from prestigious universities when they misled the American people or Congress?
The now-aging idealists of the 1960s long ago promised us that a uniformly degreed citizenry — shepherded by Ivy League-branded technocrats — would make America better by sorting us out by differences in age, gender, education and race.
It is now past time to end that ossified dream before it becomes our collective nightmare.

Contact Victor Davis Hanson at

quote:

What difference did it make that White House Press Secretary Jay Carney, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Attorney General Holder, President Barack Obama and U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice had degrees from prestigious universities when they misled the American people or Congress?

Agents are GO! posted:

Why'd you cut that last line off? It would've been useful. For science.

KATHERINE KERSTEN posted:

Minnesota plays pretend with marriage
The Right Side of History surely can’t be found on the Wrong Side of Reality.

One of the clearest things about Minnesota’s new gay-marriage law is that it requires Minnesotans to “play pretend” — to embrace obvious fictions as reality.

For example, the law states that citizens must view the union of two people of the same sex — who can’t produce a child — as identical to that of a man and woman, whose sexual complementarity is the only thing that can. The law also declares that, henceforth, “when necessary to implement the rights and responsibilities of spouses or parents in a civil marriage between persons of the same sex,” words like “mother” and “father” “must be construed in a neutral manner to refer to a person of either gender” under Minnesota law. But a woman can’t be a father, and a man can’t be a mother. It’s a biological fact Minnesota lawmakers can’t repeal, no matter how much they wish to.

Our lawmakers seem utterly untroubled by their vote to impose a regime of “let’s pretend.” What explains this?

The legislators and their supporters who celebrated the bill’s passage on the State Capitol lawn made clear that what they crave is to be in the vanguard of a brave new world. “By your political courage you join that pantheon of exceptional leaders who did something extraordinary,” Gov. Mark Dayton proclaimed as he signed the law. “You changed the course of history for our state and our nation.” President Obama received similar accolades when he announced his support for gay marriage. Apparently, for some folks, there’s nothing headier than to be on the Right Side of History.

But here’s a dirty little secret. No one has the remotest idea where our state officials’ decision to turn our fundamental social institution upside down will take our society in coming decades. We know the experiment is starting out badly, because it’s based on pretending that demonstrable falsehoods are true. We have no idea what ripple effects it will have, how its redefinition of parenthood will affect children, or whether we’ll next see a push for marriage as the union of three or more loving people: the logical next step.

You would expect our legislators to wrestle with weighty questions like these before deciding to end marriage as we — and all other people on Earth — have always known it. They did not. That’s because they (at least the true believers among them) were motivated by a quasi-religious faith that “marriage equality” will inevitably lead our state to the secular equivalent of the Promised Land.

Gay marriage is a crusade, and the driving force behind it is the secular religion of progressivism. This faith’s adherents put their hope, not in salvation after death, but in a hazy and glorious future here on Earth.

The journalist Christopher Caldwell has put it succinctly: “The argument for gay marriage is always made in the name of history — not the history we have lived, but the history we are yet to live.” Will that future turn out as planned? Progressive dogma leaves no doubt that it must. Those who dare to question this — like gubernatorial candidate Tom Emmer or Chick-fil-A president Dan Cathy — are branded heretics, and figuratively burned at the stake by the media, Hollywood and fervent wavers of the Rainbow Flag.

Social commentator George Weigel sees the roots of the progressive faith in an “intense revival” of an ancient religious movement called Gnosticism. This movement has taken many forms throughout history. But it is always an elite phenomenon, and always holds that the key to human flourishing is possession of a special knowledge that allows man to transcend the material world, so he can build paradise for himself on his own terms.

Modern man — at least many intellectuals — chafes under the constraints of reality. He longs to be “as a god,” to pretend that there are no givens, that “everything in the human condition is plastic and malleable.” In short, says Weigel, he craves to believe that “everything can … be bent to human willfulness, which is to say, human desire.”

Today, Gnosticism is most “powerfully embodied” in the Sexual Revolution and its ideology of gender, writes Weigel. That ideology holds that maleness and femaleness — two elements of the human condition that have always been understood as the essence of “givenness” — are now to be viewed as mere cultural constructs.

Weigel points to Spain’s Zapatero government, which passed a law in 2007 permitting men to change themselves into women, and vice versa, by a declaration at a government office — absent any surgery — after which a new national identity card, with the new gender, is issued. “It is hard to imagine a more explicit expression of personal willfulness overpowering natural givenness,” he concludes.

The gay marriage crusade is just the latest manifestation of the secular religion of America’s intellectual elites. Who knows what new game of “let’s pretend” our chattering classes will impose on us next?



Katherine Kersten is a senior fellow at the Center of the American Experiment. The views expressed here are her own. She is at kakersten@gmail.com.

Mo_Steel posted:

I opened up today's Opinion section of the Star Tribune, and find a trove of the greatest sort of treasure (emphasis mine):


"No one knows what will happen now that gays can marry. We might've destroyed all children for generations! Polygamous marriages forced on everyone! Dogs and cats, living together, mass hysteria! And for what? To support this secular religion of progressivism () that is actually a backdoor to Gnosticism! Dear readers, you probably have no loving clue what I'm talking about, because how many people have even loving heard of Gnosticism except in relation to the term agnostic (which is one of them scary atheist sorts in disguise), but just look at the word. Gnosticism. That looks like a devil word to me. People might try to better the conditions in this world and improve themselves and strive to do better than the past, and then where will we be? Pretending men are women and dogs are cats and that four men marrying a TI-86 graphing calculator is acceptable, that's where!"



The most amazing treasure trove of conservative tears.

Steve Tobak posted:

Inspector Clouseau: Does your dog bite?
Hotel Clerk: No.
Inspector Clouseau: [bowing down to pet the dog] Nice doggie.
[Dog barks and bites Clouseau in the hand]
Inspector Clouseau: I thought you said your dog did not bite!
Hotel Clerk: That is not my dog.

As kids, we all learned the old adage, “when you assume you make an rear end out of u and me.” Did any of us listen? Apparently not.

I don’t care if you’re a CEO, a Nobel Prize winning physicist, or the president of a sovereign nation, I guarantee you’ve made terrible decisions – some of them life-changing or even disastrous – based on misinformation, flawed assumptions, and faulty logic.

And I’d be willing to bet that’s the reason behind more financial bubbles, corporate disasters, personal tragedies, and dumb legislation than any other factor. It’s certainly behind all manner of dysfunctional leadership behavior, the dot-com bubble, and maybe even a war or two.

Not only that but the Web and social media have made the problem a thousand times worse. Now, information propagates all over the planet at Internet speed. From some unshaven moron at home in his pajamas to a billion people in milliseconds. And folks make all sorts of business and personal decisions based on it.

The only problem is that probably 99% of it is complete BS. It’s what we in the business like to call “content.”

Truth be told, this isn’t all about the Web. Flawed assumptions and faulty logic have always been the Achilles Heel of even the brightest human minds. Here are three quick examples I’m sure you’ll recognize:
The physicist. Albert Einstein, who famously said, “God doesn’t play dice with the world.” Oh yes he does, Albert. Even he admitted he was wrong, albeit after decades of denial and debate in the scientific community over quantum mechanics, which is now accepted by every physicist on Earth.
The president. George W. Bush took America to war with Iraq over Weapons of Mass Destruction that, to my knowledge, were never found. I’m not taking a position on whether that was right or wrong. I’m just saying it was a pretty big decision based on an assumption from limited data that apparently turned out to be erroneous.

The CEO. WorldCom CEO Bernie Ebbers, now serving 25 years in federal prison, promoted a best-case assumption for the continuous growth of the Internet as gospel. The so-called “big lie” was adopted by the telecom industry and Wall Street, fueling the dot-com bubble and costing investors trillions when it burst.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Here are some more recent examples of how the Internet and social media have compounded the problem and turned us all into propagators of flawed assumptions, misinformation, and faulty logic that affects each and every one of us:
Remember when Toyota recalled millions of vehicles and nearly suffered a brand meltdown over allegations that “sudden acceleration” caused dozens of accidents? None of that turned out to be true.
A U.S. Department of Transportation investigation showed that drivers were mistakenly flooring the accelerator instead of jamming on the breaks. But media hype and grandstanding politicians – always ready to capitalize on a crisis – propagated the erroneous assumption that the crashes were caused by automotive malfunction.

The Obama administration and congressional Democrats teamed up to sell the American public on the idea that ObamaCare would reduce skyrocketing healthcare costs. That little bit of misinformation, propagated all over the airwaves and Internet, was apparently based on some ridiculous assumptions that had no chance of being true. And yet, it worked. The bill passed. And now, we’re all stuck with it.

Perhaps the most devastating affect of the Internet Age is that it routinely propagates bad science. In case you didn’t know, the scientific method is how civilization has advanced the state of science and technology for centuries by making assumptions and either disproving or upholding them over numerous experimental trials.

Without the scientific method and its rigid adherence to logic and deductive reasoning, we would all still be living in the Dark Ages. Well, guess what? That’s the direction we’re now heading in. Every day I come across supposedly factual articles in reputable publications that propagate bad science.
I was just reading an about research suggesting that effective leaders had similar activity in certain regions of the brain. It goes on to suggest that neurofeedback could be used to train people to be better leaders. Funny thing is, it’s just as likely that the cause and effect are reversed: that the brain activity is the result, not the cause, of leadership activities. In which case the conclusions are bogus.

A couple of years ago, Time Warner’s Health.com published an article listing 10 careers that are “more depression-prone than others.” The article, which quoted all sorts of mental health professionals discussing how jobs contribute to depression, went viral and was picked up by many major news outlets.
But here’s the thing. The article was based on the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, a questionnaire that, in addition to dozens of questions about drug and alcohol use, asked people if they’d had instances of depression in the past year and what they did for a living. There’s simply no scientific or causal link between the two. And it’s probably more likely that depressed people self-medicated and ended up in crappy jobs than that the jobs caused depression.

The coupe de grace in this category is of course global warming, manmade climate change, or whatever Al Gore is calling it these days. In this case, all the civilized nations of the world got together and legislated how billions of people will live from now on based entirely on an unproven assumption.
I get emails like this one all the time: “So you think that 97% of climate scientists who believe that climate change is real and that we are the reason are wrong?”

Funny thing is, science isn’t about “belief” -- at least it didn’t used to be. If it were, we’d all be living like the Flintstones. And that 97, 98, or 99 percent number you see quoted all over the Internet is simply false. According to my research, scientists seem to be split about 50-50 on the question.

And yet, we’re all supposed to buy electric cars that we have to plug in.
Look, f the leaders of the world think everyone should change their lives based on an assumption, then they’re just trying to make an rear end out of u and me. And if scientists no longer use the scientific method, then Dark Ages, here we come. And that conclusion is based on good, solid logic. Yaba-daba-doo.

Steve Tobak is a Silicon Valley-based strategy consultant and former senior executive of the technology industry.

El Anansi posted:

Came here to post this one as well. For someone who's been writing the exact same editorial every month for ten years, I'm delighted to see that Kersten is branching out, having been apparently utterly unhinged by the marriage equality law.

quote:

Our society's growing acceptance of cohabitation as a substitute for marriage is deeply troubling. For despite recent developments, marriage remains the most stable of all family forms. Over millennia, it has proven to be the best vehicle for the transmission of norms and culture from one generation to the next.

The institutionalization of cohabitation will inevitably weaken marriage, because it will prompt young people to view wedlock as just one of many equally acceptable lifestyle choices. The truth is quite different, as we are beginning to discover.

quote:

For months, journalists and politicians have been claiming that the FBI bungled opportunities to prevent the 9/11 attacks. Why, if not because of ineptitude, would they have refused a warrant to search the effects of Zacarias Moussaoui? Why would they have rejected an agent's plea for permission to help track down Khalid Almihdhar, who later piloted a plane into the Pentagon?

Here's why. For almost 30 years, Congress, the courts and federal bureaucrats -- at the urging of civil liberties groups -- have erected barriers that undermined the FBI's ability to gather intelligence and use it swiftly and effectively.

quote:

As of April 30, however, a company that tries this may be hauled up for violating Jim's rights under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), and face hefty legal damages. For employees like Jim now have a federally protected right to be dirty and rude at work, so long as their obnoxious behavior may be linked to a psychiatric or emotional illness. According to guidelines just released by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, companies that expect warehouse workers like Jim to observe "dress code and coworker courtesy rules" are violating the ADA. The agency has declared that such rules are discriminatory, since no "business necessity" can justify them.

quote:

In the first joint nationwide investigation under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), Humphrey et al. had caught Wendy's International -- that notorious scofflaw -- violating the law redhanded. The offense? (Drum roll:) According to Humphrey, "The task force found most Wendy's restaurants had customer lines that were too narrow for wheelchairs."

Now, Wendy's had certainly tried to comply with the ADA. According to news reports, its corporate-owned restaurants had typically bent over backwards to accommodate disabled customers, allowing them to cut to the front of the line in special wheelchair lanes. But this failed to satisfy the access police. According to Janet Reno, shunting people in wheelchairs around the line merely reinforces stereotypes about the disabled.

quote:

The debate at Southwest is not about civil rights. It's about whether to allow sexually provocative clothing--until recently unmistakable streetwalker garb --in classrooms where kids are supposed to be studying geometry and history.

quote:

In the darkness of the human condition, hope often seems illogical. But Tolkien believed that man, by nature, turns toward the hope and joy of God. In "The Return of the King," the character Faramir expresses the vision this way: "The reason of my waking mind tells me that great evil has befallen and we stand at the end of days. But my heart says nay; and all my limbs are light, and a hope and joy are come to me that no reason can deny. In this hour I do not believe that any darkness will endure!"

Mo_Steel posted:

JohnClark posted:

Fox business is always good for a laugh, especially when discussing global warming!


He's soooo close to getting the point, and then at the very end he drives right off a cliff.