Categories
folly ideological culture nannyism

The Problem of No Problem

A scientist has a problem: no problem. 

Sounds like a Zen riddle, but it’s really about the riddle of victimhood-worship. 

Emily Yoffe writes an advice column called Dear Prudence. A female reader reported a problem pertaining to workplace bias against women. Although she works in a “very masculine scientific field … I have never really suffered from sexism.” 

Hmmm. Why not? “Maybe I’m just awesome at playing the man’s game (or in denial and don’t have an eye for sexism?).” 

It is probably not denial. It is pretty easy to detect abusive treatment when you’re on the receiving end and not rationalizing it away. The bigger problem, though, is that “even quite reasonable and pleasant women” of her acquaintance get nasty when she can’t “contribute to their list of crimes committed by the patriarchy.” 

What to do? She dislikes unpleasantness, but doesn’t want to lie. 

One thing to do is recognize it’s not up to you to make unreasonable people reasonable. When no discussion is possible, take your conversation elsewhere. I also advise skipping gratuitous self-doubt.

Happily, Ms. Prudence and I are on the same wavelength. 

“My general advice,” she writes, “is that it’s best not to engage with unpleasant people.… But if you feel like it, you can also counterpunch by saying something like, ‘It’s funny, but the only people who try to bully me are women who aren’t in my profession.’ ”

Commonsensical minds think alike, I guess. Ask me for advice any time.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
folly meme

Net Neutrality Lunacy

“The very same government that couldn’t even build a functional website and leaked massive amounts of personal data while doing it just took over the entire Internet.

And people everywhere are telling me that places like Amazon (a company that can deliver almost anything to my door within 24 hours with the click of a button) are making the Internet less free.

Raving, barking lunatics.”

—Justin M. Stoddard


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netNeutralityLunaticsb

Categories
crime and punishment national politics & policies responsibility Second Amendment rights

Herd Immunity to Violence

I praised Juan Williams the other day. Let me balance that out.

On Tuesday’s The Five, a Fox news opinion chat show, in the wake of the Mall of America terrorist threat, Greg Gutfeld decried “gun-​free zones” advancing the “more guns, less crime” argument that economist John Lott has more famously made.

Mr. Williams expressed incredulity. “I don’t think that makes sense, that everybody in the mall has a gun. Let the police protect us.”

Gutfeld laughed. There was banter. Some accusatory explanation. Oh, you lefties! But then Gutfeld regrouped.

This is not an either/​or — like everybody’s armed [or] everybody’s not. The concealed [carry] permit creates a level of uncertainty on the people that are choosing an attack.”

Other things being equal, the secretly (or discreetly) gun totin’ are safer than the rest of society. The more folks who secretly carry means that those prone to violence face higher risks. 

There may be more than one reason why gun violence has plummeted over the past two decades. But one must be this: as Americans have accumulated more guns per capita than ever before, as more households possess guns than ever, the “celerity of punishment” (that old Benthamite term for swiftness of bad repercussions) has increased, nudging the marginally criminal to choose to commit fewer violent crimes.

Making society safer. 

Since Williams seemed to have some difficulty with this, let’s translate it for him: compare gun violence and peaceful gun ownership to viral infection and vaccination.

It’s herd immunity, only to violence. Just as the more vaccinated make us all safer, the more peaceful people discreetly carrying guns make us all safer. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Common Sense general freedom individual achievement judiciary U.S. Constitution

Racial Justice Advanced

I don’t know if Juan Williams is right about who qualifies as America’s most influential thinker on race. But I hope he is.

In a Friday Wall Street Journal op-​ed, Fox News’s liberal-​leaning political analyst and author of Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary (1998), argues that our country’s most important influencer of thought on race is neither some current and trendy academic writer nor our current president (or his outgoing attorney general). Instead, it is none other than Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

While more famous figures of African-​American descent have dominated the news talk shows and airwaves and popular consciousness, Justice Thomas has gone about “reshaping the law and government policy on race by virtue of the power of his opinions from the bench.” While previous African-​American racial activists and thinkers have striven to defend the rights of black people, Justice Thomas, “the second black man on the court, takes a different tack. He stands up for individual rights as a sure blanket of legal protection for everyone, including minorities.”

Opposed to “perpetual racial tinkering,” Thomas has marshaled Frederick Douglass’s words to make his case: “What I ask for the Negro is not benevolence, not pity, not sympathy, but simply justice.” And justice, in Clarence Thomas’s judgment, does not entail a constant rescue-​worker attitude towards minorities, or other disadvantaged folks. It requires nothing other than equality of rights before the law. 

And perhaps some hard work on the part of the disadvantaged.

Hats off, then, to Juan Williams for recognizing the importance of Thomas’s common sense contention that “black people deserve to be treated as independent, competent, self-​sufficient citizens.” 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
meme

The Problem With Socialism…

“The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.”

—Margaret Thatcher


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The Problem With Socialism

 

Categories
general freedom nannyism property rights responsibility too much government

Why the Tiny Domicile

The “tiny house” movement has gained momentum. More and more people — especially young people and childless people — see the virtue of very small houses. They are cheaper, can be made energy-​efficient, have an almost necessarily smaller “environmental footprint,” and are mobile.

And I can see the attraction. For one thing, a tiny house would be easier to clean than what I have. For another? Snug. Many of the efforts are very cleverly designed and built. And certainly for young singles, they make a great deal of sense.

But, wouldn’t you know it, there is a problem here. Government.

Urban housing authorities, zoning boards, and the like, have not exactly been accommodating to this new development.

Which is, in its way, typical, and typically frustrating. After all, many of the reasons folks are looking to tiny houses result from government regulation in the first place. City, metro and county governments have been so poorly accommodating to diversity in housing demands that costs have risen horribly.

This is all explained over at Reason, which draws the bureaucratic environment of the nation’s capital in relation to tiny homes: “they’re illegal, in violation of several codes in Washington D.C.‘s Zoning Ordinance. Among the many requirements in the 34 chapters and 600 pages of code are mandates defining minimum lot size, room sizes, alleyway widths, and ‘accessory dwelling units’ that prevent tiny houses from being anything more than a part-​time residence.”

This leaves Reason’s featured tiny home owner in yet another bad-​government-​induced limbo: “allowed to build the home of his dreams — he just can’t live there.”

We need tiny government. Or at least tiny-​accommodating government. Really… both.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.