Category: ideological culture

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ideological culture media and media people moral hazard

Sexism and Isn’tism

CERN, sexism, man, male, feminism, scandal

Is physics sexist against women?

Professor Alessandro Strumia, of Pisa University, argues to the contrary. At a presentation in Geneva, in front of mainly female physicists, Strumia offered evidence that showed, if anything, that it is men who are being discriminated against. 

Specifically, he compared male and female hirings to male and female scientific citations. Being cited for one’s work is the academic gold standard, the main test scientists have for quality of work. Strumia found a pattern of women being hired over men who had higher citations rates.

Now, Alessandro Strumia is not a social scientist, and this explanation — like any scientific work — is open to criticism.

But was scientific debate the notable reaction to his presentation?

No. He was “suspended with immediate effect” from his job at CERN, Europe’s premiere nuclear science research facility.

Some folks were obviously offended — perhaps most with his characterization of physics as having been “invented and built by men.” That is true but not directly relevant to the issue. His higher-ups at CERN called his statements “unacceptable,” and insisted, perhaps with a slight tone of panic, that the nuclear science research center “always strives to carry out its scientific mission in a peaceful and inclusive environment.” 

The outfit’s official statement did not mention Strumia’s name, but instead referred to “the scientist” and cited his talk for its “attacks on individuals.”

Really? Or merely an attack on an explanation that some individuals found . . . heretical?

Strumia himself offers the perfect characterization of the mini-scandal: “the truth does not matter, because it is part of a political battle coming from outside.”

Merely by suspending him and undertaking an “investigation,” has not CERN proved his point?  

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

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Illustration: The Large Hadron Collider/ATLAS at CERN

 

Categories
government transparency ideological culture national politics & policies

Last Week’s Least Credible Answer

Diane Feinstein, Kavenaugh, Supreme Court

So, who was lying, last week, at America’s big show trial — er, Senate Judiciary Committee hearing?

Professor Christine Blasey Ford or Judge Brett Kavanaugh?

Many Americans took sides. I cannot. Both said believable as well as scarcely believable things, but I’m with that minority who admits not to know what to believe.

Except for one thing: I am pretty sure I know who told the biggest whopper.

Senator Dianne Feinstein.

Democratic senators, especially Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), repeatedly pressured Kavanaugh to himself demand an FBI investigation to clear his name. It all seemed Orwellian: to make the accused insist on an investigation into allegations he had denied. It was also odd, considering, as Kavanaugh reminded his inquisitors, that he had repeatedly accepted any investigation the committee desired.

They just wanted him to demand it.

All of which is nuts, since the Committee possesses subpeona power, and can do an investigation itself.

But the weirdest aspect? The FBI had already checked Kavanaugh’s background, had performed an official investigation. But since Senator Feinstein had not tipped the agency off to Professor Ford’s confidential accusation — had effectively sat on the letter — the FBI hadn’t covered that precise avenue of inquiry.

And then, after the hearings were nearly over . . . the leak. And the bouhaha.

When asked whether she leaked Ford’s epistle, Feinstein said No. When asked if her staff did, she said she . . . hadn’t asked them.

Oh, come on.

Not as believable as either Ford or Kavanaugh.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

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Categories
ideological culture

The Opposite Party Is Partisan!

When departing Senator Jeff Flake indicated, the other day, that he would vote to place President Trump’s nominee Brett Kavanaugh onto the Supreme Court — despite the ugly accusations of Kavanaugh’s youthful sexual misconduct — much re-tweeted actress Alyssa Milano called him a “coward.”

We understand what she means. Because Flake “caved” to pressure from his party* — the GOP — he proved himself “spineless,” in another Twitterer’s terminology.

But the thing is, calling your opponent a coward because he does not do what you want is at least a bit odd. One does not approach a knight defending his castle and call him a coward for not surrendering.

Weird world, eh? Where our enemies are cowards for opposing us!

This is not new. Remember George W. Bush calling the terrorists of 9/11 “faceless cowards”? Bill Maher lost his comedy newschat show at the time because he made the obvious point that people who give their lives to a cause, even if terrible, are anything but cowards.

Human beings are a mixed bag — of virtues and vices. This should be treated as a given . . . for folks on all sides.

In one sense, however, Ms. Milano and many others in the Twitter brigades are not wrong. In politics, today, our biggest challenge is often resisting the besetting sins of our respective tribes.

But the fact that she and her friends “call out” the Senator for his partisan moral failings while rigorously maintaining their partisan ranks does not exactly indicate a moral heroism transcending partisanship.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* Some Republicans likely regard Flake as “caving” to pressure from the left, by calling for an FBI investigation before a Senate floor vote on the Kavanaugh nomination. Flake did this after a confrontation with two women who were victims of sexual assault.

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First Amendment rights ideological culture media and media people Regulating Protest

James Woods, Parody, and a Pillow

James Woods, Twitter, censorship, free speech, ban, parody, satire

The beginning of the end of actor James Woods’s time on Twitter likely occurred on July 20, 2018.

Only recently discovering a tweet that he posted then, Twitter has locked Woods out of a forum where his right-leaning messages have been followed by 1,730,000 people.

His delinquent tweet forwarded an image of giddily grinning guys promising to abstain from voting so that a woman’s vote would be “worth more.” Woods tweeted: “Pretty scary that there is a distinct possibility this could be real. Not likely, but in this day and age of absolute liberal insanity, it is at least possible.”

Twitter told the actor that if he agreed to the deletion of this fake-news tweet — simple enough — it would let him tweet once again.

Woods refuses.

“Free speech is free speech — it’s not [Twitter CEO] Jack Dorsey’s version of free speech,” Woods says. “The irony is, Twitter accused me of affecting the political process, when in fact their banning of me is the truly egregious interference. . . . If you want to kill my free speech, man up and slit my throat with a knife, don’t smother me with a pillow.”

There’s lots more where that came from, but you get the idea. I don’t, um, strictly agree with everything Woods says here. But I can only applaud the spirit of his refusal to submit to Twitter’s arbitrary standards of acceptable speech.

Oh, and one other thing: somebody tell Twitter that parodies are inherently fake.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

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First Amendment rights general freedom ideological culture media and media people moral hazard privacy

Google Goes Bad

Google, don't be evil, China, censorship, free speech

Good Google’s evil twin, Bad Google, is at it again.

In addition to doing bad things to advance its political agenda, Google is willing to work with bad governments do bad things. 

For example, the authoritarian Chinese government.

Google is working on a mobile version of its search engine, code-named Dragonfly, which would censor search results the way the Chinese government wants. The company is doing so even though it shut down its Chinese-mainland search engine back in 2010 because it “could no longer continue censoring our results” in China. At the time, I praised Google for moving in the right direction.

Now it’s regressing.

And more than regressing. The Intercept reports that Dragonfly goes beyond censorship. How? By linking a user’s search results to his phone number. Critics note that this would abet human rights violations, since users could easily be detained and even jailed for searching for the “wrong” terms.

At least five Google employees have resigned in protest. One, Jack Poulson, a research scientist, says that he regards “our intent to capitulate to censorship and surveillance demands in exchange for access to the Chinese market as a forfeiture of our values and governmental negotiating position across the globe.”

Google no longer promotes what used to be its motto and guide: “Don’t be evil.” 

To be sure, that motto did not put a very positive spin on the company’s moral stance. “Always be good” might be better. But I agree with both. 

Be good, not evil.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

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Categories
crime and punishment ideological culture insider corruption media and media people

Socialist Saboteurs Infiltrate

Stuart Karaffa, socialism, DSA, Democratic Socialist,Project Veritas, James O’Keefe

Once upon a time, people who worried about communists infiltrating the government were often dismissed as paranoid. 

“Sure, commies under every bed! Right!”

Communists in the State Department or wherever generally weren’t caught on tape boasting that they were Soviet agents and part of the Resist Truman or Resist Eisenhower movement. Allen Funt did not expose Alger Hiss. But now we have this social-media thing happening. And we have members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) caught on tape touting their illicit exploits as federal employees.

Project Veritas is a conservative group* that conducts hidden-camera interviews with lefty activists. In one of Veritas’s recent exposes, several DSA members confess to abusing their government positions in order to impede Trump Administration policies, including any even slightly pro-market policies. The goal is to “f*ck sh*t up,” as one rebel summarizes.

Several of the Resisters boast that “we can’t really get fired.” That’s probably almost true; they’re federal bureaucrats. But DOJ paralegal Allison Hrabar and others may find that their license to chill is about to expire. 

Hrabar was in the news a few months back for helping chase Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen from a restaurant. Now she has admitted using government resources to dredge up the home address of a DC lobbyist she wanted to target. Address in hand, she and several DSA comrades swooped down on the residence to hold a harassing protest. 

Not quite how taxpayer dollars are supposed to be deployed.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe, whom I know and like, has done enormous good with his undercover stings of ACORN and others. Last year’s failed effort against the Washington Post is the exception. Had Project Veritas succeeded in slipping this false accusation into the newspaper, the result would have been to publicize a harmful lie, not show the truth (per his group’s name.

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Categories
First Amendment rights ideological culture too much government

Censorship for Unity

British Labour MP Lucy Powell, censorship, UK

“Social media has given extremists a new tool with which to recruit and radicalise,” writes British Labour MP Lucy Powell in The Guardian. 

And just where are people “being exposed to extremist material”?

On Facebook!

“Instead of small meetings in pubs or obscure websites in the darkest corners of the internet,” she explains, “our favourite social media site is increasingly where hate is cultivated.”

Sharing ideas that she opposes is dangerous because they quickly spread. But her main ire is directed against private “Facebook groups,” an environment she argues “normalises these hateful views” because “critics are removed from the groups.”

Apparently, the problem with Facebook is that it is open — and that it is closed. Facebook is something new and dangerous because everybody uses it. Yet, because it allows closed groups, it is something very much like . . . “small meetings in pubs.”

Ms. Powell has, naturally enough, proposed a bill. “The responsibility to regulate these social media platforms falls on the government,” she asserts. “I believe we can force those who run these echo chambers to stamp out the evil that is currently so prominent.”

Like any politician, she talks up unity, of course. She demands the government prevent social media from “being hijacked by those who instead wish to divide.” 

But remember, she is a member of a political party that opposes other parties. She is trying to suppress divisions that exist. The implication of her agenda is a one-party state, where opposition is suppressed.*

By censorship.

A word she somehow neglects to use.

Online extremism, she writes, “is something we are frighteningly unequipped to deal with.”

I’d say she is frighteningly equipped.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* Social media critic Dave Cullen notices that MP Lucy Powell admits that there is a huge personal element here: she is a politician who doesn’t like criticism.

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Illustration by JG

 

Categories
general freedom ideological culture moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies too much government

An Evil Ism

socialism, Antifa, means, ends, refutation, fascism, intentions

With “democratic socialism” again on the rise, a refresher course in history seems apt: socialism has demonstrated the strong tendency to end up in totalitarian tyranny, poverty, and genocide.

As I mentioned on Monday, Reason’s Nick Gillespie suspects that this response is not very convincing to people tempted by socialism. But really, why not? What about a history of horror could be appealing?

Which is why the question “Do Socialists Mean Well?” as answered by Grant Babcock, might help. Babcock answers in the negative.* “Socialism is not ultimately an end but a means. And as a means, socialism is evil.”

With an evil means, one’s chosen end is irrelevant, because of other results. “If I told you I wanted to end homelessness, you might say I had good intentions,” Babcock explains. But if he confessed to seek that end “by conscripting the homeless into the army . . . [n]ot only should you say I have bad intentions, you shouldn’t give me any moral credit for saying I want to end homelessness.”

True. But Babcock has to engage in his extended argument about means because, for purposes of his essay, anyway, he began with the premise that while fascists are evil because they seek directly to harm some people, socialists do not.

Uh, really? Most socialists make much of taking from “the rich,” however they define the rich — as “the one percent” or “the privileged,” etc.

Call it expropriation; call it theft: that’s a lot of anger and ill will directed to one group of people.

In that way, the appeal of socialism is too much like the appeal of fascism.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* Babcock, by the way, denies the label “socialist” to social democrats who call themselves “democratic socialists” — by definition. On this matter, see “Bernie’s Slippery Definition of Democratic Socialism” and “Is Denmark Socialist?” on this site.

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Categories
ideological culture Popular too much government

The Irony Law of Socialism

Under capitalism, said the old socialists, “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.” Today’s socialists admit this hoary “immiseration thesis” is old hat.

“The socialist argument against capitalism isn’t that it makes us poor,” explains City University of New York Professor Corey Robin in the New York Times. “It’s that it makes us unfree.”

Unfree?

Nick Gillespie at Reason tries to make sense of that breathtaking inversion of the usual anti-socialist argument, which Gillespie characterizes as the invocation of “Stalin, the Great Leap Forward, or even Hugo Chavez.”*

But is there really anything new here? 

“When my well-being depends upon your whim, when the basic needs of life compel submission to the market and subjugation at work, we live not in freedom but in domination,” writes the tax-funded socialist professor. He wants “to establish freedom from rule by the boss, from the need to smile for the sake of a sale,” which is so very not new. It’s reminiscent of Oscar Wilde’s “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” which imagined rescue “from that sordid necessity of living for others.”

How real-world socialism “frees” us, though, is palpably oppressive: by burdening business and labor and trade with taxes, prohibitions, regulations.

And constant bullying. 

The ironies abound, too. Gillespie notes that “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez may rail against the gig economy, but just like Bernie and Warren she uses Uber every chance she gets.” Jim Carrey praises “free” medicine in Canada, acknowledging no costs.

The cost of “free stuff” is actual freedom. And the cost of actual freedom is paying for what you get, and not getting what you won’t pay for.

That’s the Irony Law of Socialism.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* Gillespie also says it is unpersuasive. Well, unpersuasive to whom? As always, many arguments for the truth are necessary.

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free trade & free markets general freedom ideological culture too much government

The Ambit of an Ambition

“The geopolitical situation makes this Europe’s hour: the time for European sovereignty has come,” said European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker this week, staking a big claim for the future in this year’s State of the Union Address.

Juncker wants the EU to be a shiny new “global player,” but shies from the word that comes immediately to mind: “We have to be super,” Juncker clarifies, “but not a superpower.”

The big question is how Juncker’s ramped-up globalism would serve European citizens. Juncker itches to build a “More United, Stronger and More Democratic Union,” but his biggest problem may be that the people seem increasingly iffy on this whole unity thing. 

Brexit is only the most spectacular popular rebellion.

“The Visegrad nations of Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic,” the Washington Times noted yesterday, have balked at EU migration policies, and “all face EU legal sanctions.” Meanwhile, “Populist governments have been elected in Italy and Austria, where voters are sick and tired of the constant intrusions into their lives by Brussels.” 

And on Wednesday the EU enacted Article 13, an intrusive copyright law that Net activists have dubbed a “meme killer” capable of destroying “the Internet as we know it.”

While Juncker talks about Europe taking “destiny into its own hands,” Europeans seem more interested in taking their government into their own hands.

After all, it is not as if Europeans cannot prosper in a world economy without confederation — much less something much more, a stronger central bureaucratic authority. 

European states could, for instance, adopt free trade. It would make them richer and the world safer.

And they could, in addition, junk Juncker.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

 

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