Outside, unbeknownst to those of us on the panel, the individuals who left said things like, “even the women in there have been brainwashed!” and “Nazis are not welcome in civil society.”
When banal observations like “men and women are different heights” prompts the accusation that I’m both brainwashed and a Nazi, it’s clear that this was not good faith protest.
It is true that the authoritarian-left is denying biology, but the deeper truth of the situation is perhaps even more concerning. The incoherence of the protesters’ responses and the fact that the walkout was scheduled in advance suggests something darker: the protesters are “read-only,” like a computer file that cannot be altered. They will not engage ideas — they will not even hear ideas — because their minds are already made up. They have been led to believe that exposure to information is in and of itself dangerous.
Scientists, philosophers, and scholars of all sorts have effectively been accused of thoughtcrimes before it is even known what we’re going to say. The very concept of thoughtcrime, as Orwell himself well understood, is the death knell to discourse, to discovery, to democracy.
Heather Heying, “On the dangers of read-only activism”, Medium.com, 2018-03-02.
March 25, 2018
QotD: America’s “read-only” activists
March 24, 2018
How to Use a Scrub Plane | Paul Sellers
Paul Sellers
Published on 23 Mar 2018Scrub planes can be used for a variety of tasks, from stock preparation and hogging off stock in preparation for the smoothing plane to refining chamfers and texturing the surface.
For more information on these topics, see https://paulsellers.com or https://woodworkingmasterclasses.com
James May doesn’t trust Sat Navs | Q&A extras | HeadSqueeze
BBC Earth Lab
Published on 27 Sep 2013Don’t trust the Sat Nav! Speaking from experience, James thinks we shouldn’t blindly trust a machine. Get a map!
QotD: Joining “The Firm”
Personally I think Meghan Markle would be a catastrophic addition to The Firm if she does not understand why it is a terrible idea for the Royals to get political. Do that and they stop being symbols (essentially endearing living flags whose job is to wave strangely and act as a navigational datum for flypasts) and become legitimate political targets. There is no surer route to a republic and I would regret that (as I do not share Spiked’s democracy fetish) but not necessarily oppose it if the House of Windsor does indeed go full retard.
Perry de Havilland, “Samizdata quote of the day”, Samizdata, 2018-03-01.
March 23, 2018
Kaiserschlacht – German Spring Offensive 1918 I THE GREAT WAR Week 191
The Great War
Published on 22 Mar 2018It was all or nothing for the German Army under General Erich Ludendorff now: They unleashed the biggest offensive of the entire war on the Western Front trying to split the British and French Armies, drive the British off the continent and capture Paris.
The use of the euphemism “grooming”
Mark Steyn from a recent Clubland Q&A session:
If you missed our livestream Clubland Q&A on Tuesday, here’s the action replay. Simply click above for an hour of my answers to questions from Mark Steyn Club members around the planet on various aspects of identity politics, from micro-aggressions at the University of California to macro-aggressions in Telford and Rotherham – with a semantic detour into nano-aggressions and quantum-aggressions. Speaking of semantics, I saw this question after the show ended, from Steyn Club Founding Member Toby Pilling:
If with regard to language, clarity is the remedy (as Orwell would say), shouldn’t the ‘Asian Grooming Gangs’ be re-named ‘Moslem Rape Gangs’? I’ve been trying to make the case that they should at the local council I work for, but over here in the UK one can be hauled in for hate speech at the drop of a hat.
I agree with Messrs Orwell and Pilling on clarity in language, and have never liked the word “grooming”, a bit of social-worker jargonese designed to obscure that what’s going on all over England is mass serial-gang-rape sex-slavery. “Grooming” is, in that sense, a euphemism. An hour or two after yesterday’s show I chanced to stop at the Upper Valley Grill and General Store on an empty strip of road in the middle of the woods in Groton, Vermont, a small town of a thousand souls that feels, if anything, rather smaller than that. And paying at the counter I noticed that they had a can next to the cash register for donations to what the hand-written card called the “Groton Grooming Fund”.
Having just been on the air yakking about Telford, I was momentarily startled. It is, in fact, not a whip-round to enable the gang-rapists to buy more petrol to douse the girls in, but a contribution toward the volunteer group that maintains the local ski and snowmobile trails – ie, they “groom” the snow. Happy the town in which grooming is left to the snowmobile club rather than the Muslim rape gangs. The slogan that greets you on the edge of the village is “Welcome to Groton – Where a Small Town Feels Like a Large Family”, which I always find faintly dispiriting. But it’s better than Telford, where a large town feels like a small prison.
The Grand Tour James May Running
The Grand Tour Fans
Published on 16 Mar 2018Do you think James May never ran on TV and during the episode of The Grand Tour where Jeremy Clarkson drove the Ford GT was the first time ever?
Well you’re wrong. In the third season of James May Man Lab he ran on public TV. Check out this video and see James Running (twice !!)
Who’s gaslighting who?
Nick Gillespie on the gaslighting of America:
The election of Donald Trump hasn’t just brought a poorly mannered reality TV star into the Oval Office and our newsfeeds. It has also popularized the concept of gaslighting, or tricking rational people into thinking they’re insane. The phrase is a reference to a 1944 movie in which Charles Boyer tries to convince his young bride, played by Ingrid Bergman, that she’s nuts so he can cover up a murder and search for jewels hidden in the house they share (the house’s gas lamps flicker due to Boyer’s late-night searches, hence the title).
Go Google “Donald Trump is gaslighting America” and you’ll find a constantly growing list of stories from outlets ranging from CNN to Teen Vogue to Vanity Fair to Refinery 29. The common thread is some variation on the theme that Trump’s brazen lies, misstatements, and rhetorical sleights of hand are designed to drive us all batshit crazy by contradicting what we plainly see happening to the United States of America. At rock bottom, Trump’s detractors believe there is simply no way that he could have legitimately won the 2016 election, especially against Hillary Clinton, of whom President Obama said, “I don’t think that there’s ever been someone so qualified to hold this office.”
Yet it’s not Donald Trump who is gaslighting us, but Hillary Clinton, whose complete and utter refusal to take responsibility for her loss is at the heart of what’s so weird about contemporary America. You read it here first: Trump is the effect and not the cause of the ongoing mudslide that is the daily news. Ever since about 11 p.m. ET on November 8, 2016, Clinton and her allies in the media have worked overtime to provide increasingly fanciful explanations for her failure to beat the least-credible candidate ever in American history. Sometimes the apologias are conscious, sometimes not, but nobody really wants to accept what happened (in fact, even Trump himself couldn’t believe it for a while, which helps explain why his transition was so incompetent). The result is a non-stop barrage of stories, some more credible than others, that Trump’s win was the result of some sort of sinister machination that has undermined our democracy. Following from this interpretation every aspect of his behavior, from his bro-ing out with Vladimir Putin to his indifferent spelling and capitalization while tweeting, is just one more sign that we are living in a world gone stark, raving mad.
To be fair, Trump trades in delusion, such as his insistence that violent crime is at or near all-time highs, that massive voter fraud was the only reason he lost the popular vote, and that his inauguration was the most-viewed ever. These sorts of patently false statements do indeed constitute attempts at gaslighting. So, too, do his unconvincing denials about a sexual relationship with the porn star known as Stormy Daniels, his doctor’s statement that he only weighs 239 lbs. (giving rise to the “Girther” movement), and his fanciful stories about how Japanese car makers use bowling balls in quality-assurance tests. Against such a backdrop, even the president’s so-far-not-contradicted denial that his campaign colluded with Russia seems like a form of gaslighting. In fact, everything he says seems like it’s intended to drive us insane or at least seriously question basic reality.
Tank Chats #25 Mark VIII | The Tank Museum
The Tank Museum
Published on 12 Aug 2016In the 25th Tank Chat David Fletcher explores the First World War Mark VIII tank. The Mark VIII tank, also known as The International was a joint project between the British and American forces, following their entry into the war. Once the designs had been refined massive orders were placed in 1918 and then swiftly cancelled with the end of the war. In the end six Mark VIII tanks were built for Britain of which The Tank Museum’s is the sole surviving example.
http://tankmuseum.org/museum-online/vehicles/object-e1949-363
QotD: Canadian English
… everyone knows what Canadians are supposed to sound like: they are a people who pronounce “about” as “aboot” and add “eh” to the ends of sentences.
Unfortunately, that’s wrong. Like, linguistically incorrect. Canadians do not say “aboot.” What they do say is actually much weirder.
Canadian English, despite the gigantic size of the country, is nowhere near as diverse as American English; think of the vast differences between the accents of a Los Angeleno, a Bostonian, a Chicagoan, a Houstonian, and a New Yorker. In Canada, there are some weird pockets: Newfoundland and Labrador speak a sort of Irish-cockney-sounding dialect, and there are some unique characteristics in English-speaking Quebec. But otherwise, linguistically, the country is fairly consistent.
There are a few isolated quirks in Canadian English, like keeping the Britishism “zed” for the last letter of the alphabet, and keeping a hard “agh” sound where Americans would usually say “ah.” (In Canada, “pasta” rhymes with “Mt. Shasta”.) But aside from those quirks, there are two major defining trends in Canadian English: Canadian Raising and the Canadian Shift. The latter is known stateside as the California Shift, and it’s what makes Blink-182 singer Tom DeLonge sound so insane: a systematic migration of vowel sounds resulting in “kit” sounding like “ket,” “dress” sounding like “drass,” and “trap” sounding like “trop.” The SoCal accent, basically, is being replicated almost entirely in Canada.
But the Canadian Shift is minor compared to Canadian Raising, a phenomenon describing the altered sounds of two notable vowel sounds, that has much bigger consequences for the country’s identity, at least in the U.S. That’s where we get all that “aboot” stuff.
Dan Nosowitz, “What’s Going On with the Way Canadians Say ‘About’? It’s not pronounced how you think it is”, Atlas Obscura, 2016-06-01.
March 22, 2018
Unaccountable federal agency refuses to answer to the senator who wanted it to be unaccountable in the first place
Perhaps this is a teaching moment for Senator Elizabeth Warren, says A. Barton Hinkle:
If Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren had taken a page out of Virginia Delegate Nick Freitas’ book, she might not be in the pickle she is today.
Warren is spitting mad at Mick Mulvaney, the Office of Management and Budget director who does double duty heading up an agency whose creation Warren championed: the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). The CFPB’s previous director was an ideological ally of Warren. Since Mulvaney took over, Warren has ripped the agency’s decisions. Warren said Mulvaney is giving “the middle finger” to consumers, and she railed at Mulvaney’s indifferent response to the 10 (!) letters she has sent him demanding answers to more than 100 questions.
The other day she tweeted that she is giving Mulvaney “one last chance.” Yet as The Wall Street Journal points out, she has only herself to blame for her apparent impotence.
Time and again during debate over the CFPB, conservatives and libertarians warned that its powers were too great and that its accountability to the other branches of government was too limited. But that was just the way Warren and other supporters wanted things. Neither Congress nor other political forces could influence an unaccountable regulatory agency. Now Warren finds herself thwarted by the very lack of oversight she championed.
Be careful what you wish for.
[…]
Philosopher John Rawls famously invented a mechanism for doing just that: the “veil of ignorance”: If you are designing the rules for a society, you should assume that you know nothing about your place in that society. If your race, age, physical abilities, mental prowess, and so forth are all a complete mystery, then you are likely to design a political-economic system that is fair to all. Just in case you wind up at the bottom of the social pile.
Having a president who makes policy through signing statements, his “pen and phone,” and other forms of executive action, for example, seems brilliant when the opposing party controls Congress. It seems less so when the opposing party controls the White House.
Should intelligence agencies keep tabs on Islamists who might pose a threat of domestic terrorism? Then don’t be surprised if a different administration turns the focus to right-wing militias.
Libertarian Dad Jokes
ReasonTV
Published on 21 Mar 2018In homage to Dad Joke videos everywhere, Reason‘s Andrew Heaton and Austin Bragg try their hand at one-liners, cornball punchlines, and “comedy.”
Written and produced by Austin Bragg, Meredith Bragg, and Andrew Heaton. Shot and edited by Bragg and Bragg. Starring Andrew Heaton and Austin Bragg.
Music: “Quirky Dog” by Kevin MacLeod
Feature History – Spanish Civil War
Feature History
Published on 12 Mar 2017Hello and welcome to Feature History, featuring The Spanish Civil War, zero mic etiquette, and a super subtle political lesson.
