Video: Why the Past Matters

Induced Learning Disabilities

Critical Theory teaches its adherents how not to understand texts, art, or speech like neurotypical human beings. Under the influence of its doctrines, people lose their God-given ability to discern key non-linguistic features of communication and consequently become learning disabled.

As I've observed in other posts, words and symbols take on meaning from the context in which they're deployed. As I wrote around this time last year:

"Words are not completely comprehensible on their own; they also take on additional - or sometimes even new - significance from the gestalt in which they sit -- much like tofu soaks up the flavors of the other ingredients in an Asian dish.

"Take a sentence like 'I love my mother.' This sentence is composed of four utterly prosaic words -- yet do we really know what it means? Don't we need to hear the inflection with which it was said? Don't we need to see the speaker's body language? Don't we need to know why/where/when/etc. it was said? If this sentence appears in a poem lauding the beauty of Mother Earth, 'mother' likely does not mean our female parent. If this sentence is uttered with a particular stress after a long sigh, most of us effortlessly intuit that it's meant to be ironic."

All of this richness gets lost, however, once the social justice bully gets to work. Suppose, for example, you decide to write a protagonist who starts off with a few unconsciously bigoted notions but eventually learns to cast such mistaken ideas aside. Sounds like great fodder for a redemption arc, no? Nope, sorry: if you attempt to publish this seemingly innocuous, morally upright story, some motivated busybody on Goodreads is going to tear you apart. Why? Because critical social justice impedes one's ability to comprehend how character development works.

Or let's consider works written in other eras. Many historical texts that tackle the subject of race - including those written by black civil rights champions! - use the dreaded n-word. Those of us who aren't ideologically-possessed realize that norms have changed over time and therefore filter such usages out to get to the central point. But the social justice bully doesn't want us to do this. The social justice bully encourages us to get distracted - and upset - by the surface features of a piece of writing without digging deep to parse what's actually being said. That's how they're able to portray pro-black works (like Huckleberry Finn or To Kill a Mockingbird) as somehow anti-black and beyond the pale.

Social justice bullies also deliberately blur the lines between characters and authors, heroes and villains, heroes and anti-heroes, etc. If the bad guy says something racist, then our would-be censors behave as if the author endorses that statement -- even though such a conclusion is patently ridiculous. Assholes say asshole-ish things. That's how writers establish that they're assholes. How else are we creators to delineate villainy?

Social justice bullies, in short, have trained themselves to deliberately misconstrue what writers and artists mean to convey. And that's why they can never be trusted to control the levers our popular culture. Their attempts to warp the things we make need to be beaten back with severity and speed.

I Refuse to Live in Fahrenheit 451

"Now let's take up the minorities in our civilization, shall we? Bigger the population, the more minorities. Don't step on the toes of the dog lovers, the cat lovers, doctors, lawyers, merchants, chiefs, Mormons, Baptists, Unitarians, second-generation Chinese, Swedes, Italians, Germans, Texans, Brooklynites, Irishmen, people from Oregon or Mexico. The people in this book, this play, this TV serial are not meant to represent any actual painters, cartographers, mechanics anywhere. The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle controversy, remember that! All the minor minor minorities with their navels to be kept clean. Authors, full of evil thoughts, lock up your typewriters. They did. Magazines became a nice blend of vanilla tapioca..."

It's becoming increasingly clear that Ray Bradbury's dystopia is the social justice bully's end game. But I have to believe that most Americans don't want this future. I have to believe that most of us don't want our entertainment sanitized to the point of absolutely uniformity. I have to believe most of us want to keep Blazing Saddles, Tropic Thunder, Gone with the Wind and other older, potentially uncomfortable products of our popular culture available and free of fussy edits.

So what do we do? Honestly, I think we might have to consider being as obnoxious as the Control Left. We need to start actively punishing these media corporations every time they bend the knee to whiners who apparently don't understand the "don't like, don't consume" principle. What should this punishment look like? I don't know. I'm not sure what will be effective. But we may need to become as unyielding and as intolerant as our censorious opponents in order to get our way.

Whatever we do, we must make these people understand that they have no right to decide for the rest of us what we're allowed to watch or read. No. Right. Adults handle things that offend them by discussing the offense and/or walking away -- not by trying to coerce everyone around them to conform to their moral sensibilities. This was true back in the 80's and 90's when it was religious fundamentalists trying to censor our crap, and it's just as true now that the other side is wielding the ban-hammer.

Fahrenheit 451 was a warning, not an instruction manual. We must be militant in defending the freedom of the artist from political persecution of all types. If we fail in this endeavor, we will lose everything in our art that is sincere and genuinely creative.

A Few Links of Interest

Apologies for the perfunctory posts this past week. My paternal grandmother died (peacefully and at home, fortunately) on November 9, and things have been busy since then. If you, reader, are a believer, I'd appreciate it if you would pray for the repose of the soul of Barbara Rita. Bless!

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Empathy Is Tearing Us Apart, Robert Wright, WIRED

“Polarization is not a consequence of a lack of empathy among the public, but a product of the biased ways in which we experience empathy.”

This provides an important qualification to the claim that empathy is good. Since this sort of social science has always fascinated me, I think I'll be exploring the literature further in future posts.

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Journalists Against Free Speech, John Tierney, CITY JOURNAL

"Free speech is no longer sacred among young journalists who have absorbed the campus lessons about “hate speech”—defined more and more broadly—and they’re breaking long-standing taboos as they bring “cancel culture” into professional newsrooms. They’re not yet in charge, but many of their editors are reacting like beleaguered college presidents, terrified of seeming insufficiently “woke.” Most professional journalists, young and old, still pay lip service to the First Amendment, and they certainly believe that it protects their work, but they’re increasingly eager for others to be “de-platformed” or “no-platformed,” as today’s censors like to put it—effectively silenced."

We need a complete and total shutdown of our entire education system until we can figure out what the hell is going on.

Video: Against "Hate Speech" Laws

Matt always does excellent work!

You Can't Force People to Embrace You

I've always been an oddity. I rock sometimes when I'm thinking or I'm trying to relax; I'm extremely sensitive to sound and touch; I find it difficult to mingle in a crowd; and I'm prone to developing almost single-minded obsessions with things that catch my fancy (Iron Man blogging, anyone?). Consequently, I've never been popular.

When I was in junior high, this disturbed me greatly -- the whole lack of popularity thing, I mean. So I started reading Seventeen in an attempt to crack the girl code. I begged my parents to buy me clothes that were "cool" in 1991-1992 (oh, God, don't ask!). I even got a perm and tried makeup (never again!). But none of these efforts cured the awkward sense of difference. It took high school and a small group of weirdo friends for me to finally settle into my true identity.

That's what everyone needs, I think: at least one friendship with someone who will take you as you are. It's in an intimate relationship like this that you will find the validation every human craves.

You will not find that validation in the courthouse or the halls of government no matter how much you scream for it.

What you can reasonably expect from the government is a promise to leave you be. Though my inner Christian believes certain lifestyles are questionable at best and deeply damaging to the soul at worst, my inner libertarian has no desire to legally interfere with the decisions of other grown adults because said inner libertarian believes the government is not, ultimately, an instrument of peaceful persuasion.

Indeed, any time you're tempted to petition the government to step in on a cultural or philosophical dispute, you should always ask yourself if you're willing to get what you want through violence.

Some people may scoff at this. "The government can always impose a fee. That's hardly 'violence'." Oh? And what if I neglect to pay this fee? Here come the cops with the guns.

Those cops are sometimes needed to safeguard our rights to life, liberty, and property. But we should be excruciatingly careful in distinguishing between situations in which the threat of violent enforcement is appropriate and situations in which that threat is out-of-bounds.

So let's come back to our aforementioned fundamental need for validation. There are many disturbed individuals out there who've decided they will not be happy unless the entire world is forced through government diktat to affirm their identities. I recognize - and on some level empathize with - the root lack that animates this sort of activism. That doesn't change the fact that it's evil.

It's evil to bully people into professing "your truth".

And furthermore, it's ineffective. Oh, sure: if you succeed in getting a law passed that demands that, say, aestheticians wax your balls or else, most people will swallow their discomfort and do it because most people aren't contrary enough to enjoy confrontation. But what you'll get from this are mere ritualized displays of acquiescence, not the genuine affirmation and love you seek. Beneath the surface, people will resent the hell out of you - legitimately - for your selfish imposition. No minds will actually be changed.

Put down the club and get yourself a pal -- someone who will wrap you in tender loving care. Only then will you actually feel comfortable in your own skin.

Assorted Musings

• My generally libertarian orientation is being sorely tested by Big Tech and Big Credit. Generally speaking, I think it's a bad idea for the government to step in and regulate businesses (beyond, of course, protections against obvious crimes such as fraud and intellectual property theft) -- but what else are we to do when we're faced with large corporations who have locked down almost total control of our principal communications network? As revealed by the deplatforming of Alex Jones (who's an idiot) and Sargon (who most assuredly is not), Google, Twitter, Facebook, Patreon, Paypal, et. al. now have almost unlimited power to silence dissenting voices -- and honestly, I'm pessimistic that the Rubin/Peterson crusade to find a work-around is going to come to much. It may in fact be time for politicians to step in and demand an Internet Bill of Rights that will outlaw political discrimination on social media. It's one thing to allow businesses in meat space to discriminate based on belief; it's another thing to allow owners of our digital public square to do the same. The latter threatens our norm of free speech and should be aggressively countered.
• Lately, I've also been mulling over how we can fix education, as so many things worry me about the status quo. The ideas I've brainstormed include:
• Making the college admissions process far more transparent and objective. Schools should tell students which high school courses, grades, and minimum entrance exam scores indicate solid preparation to succeed -- and if they must include essays in their applications, those essays should be academic rather than personal to keep things 100% identity-blind and avoid discrimination against the less well-off and/or extroverted.
• Urging schools with large endowments to set up academies in low-income areas to identify talented-but-disadvantaged strivers and offer them classes to bring their academic records up to the aforementioned minimum standards. It's cruel to simply admit students who don't have the grounding to succeed at elite universities because muh diversity, inclusion, and equity. Give them the right foundation before they get to campus.
• Releasing the pressure valve on the whole college thing by 1) selling alternatives like career and technical education as equally admirable and not as consolation prizes for academic failures and 2) giving students an additional chance to prove their competence by instituting an exit exam for all college graduates so that where one goes to college will matter less. I want students in high school to feel free to take more risks instead of acting like dutiful resume-building automatons.
• On a completely different topic: how do we properly introduce more diversity into our geeky properties? Don't worry, grasshopper: I have thoughts on that too.
• Number one, stop denying that good female and non-white characters have existed for a while and do have fanbases. Back in the 90's, people were skeptical about Benjamin Sisko at first -- but now he's beloved. Why? Because he's a freaking bad ass -- but also because he's a three-dimensional character with a family, a tragic past, hobbies, etc. that have nothing to do with his skin color.
• Which leads me to number two: If the only thing you know about your new diverse character is that he or she is gay/trans/non-white/female/disabled/whatever, then you don't have an idea that people will grow to love. Put some more thought into your creations, for God's sake, and don't just skate on the identity angle.
• Number three, don't force your diverse character to spend every issue/episode/story tackling the issues-du-jour that everyone associates with his or her identity group. Let these characters have thoroughly unrelated adventures so they can display their universally heroic traits.
• Number four, don't assume everyone in identity group X thinks or behaves in the exact same way. Treat characters in identity group X as individuals, not as representatives. Have you considered, for example, writing a gay monarchist? Because I happen to know one in real life, and she's definitely very interesting.
• Number five, portray other cultures honestly. I'd give my right arm for, say, a Muslim superhero who isn't wholly Westernized and progressive. Can you imagine how fascinating that would be?
• Number six, don't steal existing properties. If you're concerned that your diverse character won't get attention if he or she isn't attached to an established IP, introduce your character in said IP in a supporting role and work on developing audience demand for a solo title by heeding bullets one through five above.

And with that, I'd like to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. I shall return in 2019!

Grumpy Thoughts, 5th Edition

• While at Dragon Con this year, I learned of a conspiracy that has been busily dragging said con for its decision to remain apolitical. Apparently, Dragon Con is the "con of choice for Nazis"  now simply because it won't deplatform popular libertarian authors who've made the mistake of being outspoken about their beliefs. The conspirators claim, of course, that they just want to protect people from "harassers," but aside from a salty comment one of their targets made on a panel twelve years ago, they have zero evidence that said authors are genuine threats to con attendees. No: What this is really about is power. The ringleader of this conspiracy and her followers want the power to shut down anyone who might contradict the SJW worldview. Hopefully, Dragon Con continues to tell them to pound sand.
• In the world of comics, meanwhile, Peter Simeti of Alterna Comics is being relentlessly bullied for being pleasant to all of his paying customers, including those who follow the leading voices of #Comicsgate. How dare he! Clearly, we should punish the guy by buying a crap ton of Alterna titles. They're only $1.50 each, so acquiring the entire catalog wouldn't actually hurt your pocketbook all that much.
• What the two situations above have in common is this: Screaming social justice harpies have decided that anyone who is connected six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon style to critics of identity politics should be punished until they bend the knee. Well, screw that fascistic nonsense, I say. If anyone tries to shame you just because you won't unperson people who aren't radical leftists, raise two middle fingers in proud defiance and tell that individual to go straight to hell.
• Speaking of leftists trying to control us, that's the problem I have with militant trans activists and their pronoun obsession. He/him and she/her are used when you're talking about someone, not when you're talking to him or her. So basically, when a special snowflake demands to be referred to as e/eir or whatever, that person is trying to dictate how we all should converse even when he or she is not in the room. That's not okay. You have a right not to be mistreated based on how you choose to express yourself, but you do not have a right to impose your preferred mode of expression on others.
• You also don't have a right to silence researchers who are asking questions that challenge your ideology, nor do you have a right to cover up uncomfortable truths that do the same. Indeed, stopping such conversations before they even get off the ground is incredibly dangerous. People who have been denied the opportunity to discuss what they see right in front of their eyes will latch on to anyone who is willing to tell the truth. Do you want those truth tellers to be dispassionate scientists and thoughtful intellectuals? Then I suggest not pushing certain subjects out of the realm of "respectable" debate. Otherwise, people will gravitate to any crackpot who's willing to give voice to their resentments. 

Okay, so that was a bit disjointed. I may expand the above into lengthier posts at a later date once I get back into the writing groove. In the meantime, I hope you've enjoyed that little hodgepodge of things that have occupied my mind this week.

It's great to be back!

Grumpy Thoughts, 4th Edition

• I happen to think it's bad when a Republican politician assaults a reporter. I also happen to think it's bad when leftwing activists respond to the imminent speech of a controversial guest by breaking windows, lighting fires, and bashing potential attendees with bike locks. Unfortunately, there are a shockingly high number of people out there who seem incapable of holding both thoughts in their heads simultaneously. It's not okay to hit people you don't like unless they hit you first. And no, words are not violence and not grounds for a beating. Jesus H. Christ!
• Just in case I haven't made it clear before, I think the whole concept of "cultural appropriation" is bullshit. Like many leftwing enthusiasms (see my previous post), it posits a zero-sum game where one does not exist. If I use African mythology in one of my stories, that doesn't stop an African writer from doing the same. If I decide to open a Mexican restaurant, that doesn't mean a Mexican can't open his own. In neither scenario have I actually "stolen" anything; in a free market economy, the African or the Mexican are still 100% free to sell the products of their own cultures and reap the benefits even if I too am competing in that market. On the other hand, if we seal off each individual ethnicity in its own hermetic bubble, Africans and Mexicans will lose customers and, consequently, needed profits -- which will surely make things worse, not better, for those minority groups. How do I know this? Well, when was the last time you've heard of a fully segregated, supposedly "self-sufficient" community becoming wealthy and enjoying a first-world standard of living?
• The people who insist that traditional math is racist and/or sexist are making this female math teacher scream -- and aren't helping. Seriously, they aren't. Math is the language of science, and science is the reason we have airplanes, dishwashers, antibiotics, and every other modern-day convenience that has granted us more free time and longer, healthier lives. Do you really want to lock minorities and women out of STEM and the possibly lucrative careers therein? Because if you stick members of "disadvantaged" groups in mathematics courses that waste time on social justice politics, you will render them unable to study science for the rest of their lives. Want true racial and gender equality? Teach the tables, not critical theory. (Please, please, please teach the tables. I'm begging you. If you don't, only rich kids with tutors and/or extremely competitive parents will learn them.)
• Lastly, a general note to the left: Your double standards suck, and frankly, a lot of people are tired of abiding by them. If you don't police your own people and quit that shit, more and more folks on the right are going to start punching back. Trust me: I know people who are itching for an excuse to start crunching "commie skulls." Don't give it to them; you won't like the result.

Out of Patience

I was talking to my BF last night about recent events in Berkeley, and in the process, I discovered - or rediscovered, rather - my capacity for bloody-mindedness. 

I must confess: When I saw people actually fighting back against those black-masked wannabe revolutionaries, I was initially pleased. I understand on an intellectual level that egging on a series of ever-escalating street battles will probably not end well for our society as a whole. But I also can't help thinking that Moldylocks and her ilk absolutely deserved to get the crap kicked out of them -- that such a humiliating defeat couldn't have happened to a nicer bunch of folks. 

I want to be thoughtful. I want to listen. I want to be civil. But there are certain ideological stances I refuse to countenance because they violate bedrock principles of our liberal constitutional system. To put it frankly, there is a line in the sand that you cannot cross without arousing my desire to utterly destroy you -- and these Antifa thugs definitely crossed that line some time ago.

I want them punished -- and upon reflection, I think there are nonviolent ways to do that. 

I think, for example, that every non-converged legislature needs to draft bills that demand that all educational institutions receiving public funding institute codes of conduct that fully restore First Amendment rights for students and faculty and establish expulsion procedures to handle malefactors who try to shut down speech through violence and intimidation. You don't have a right to a college education if you refuse to appreciate its purpose.

I also believe Congress should withdraw federal aid from any municipality that fails to arrest and criminally charge rioters. Peaceful demonstrations are one thing, but if you are setting fire to public property, breaking windows, throwing bricks, or lighting M80's, your ass belongs in jail -- and if we have to use what essentially amounts to blackmail to get you there, then so be it.

Lastly, each school's alumni should pressure administrators to put on their big-girl panties and stop giving in to their campus cry-bullies or else risk losing their jobs. If you can't stand up to the few who are throwing tantrums and defend the many, many other students and instructors at your school who are genuinely interested in the truth, then you don't deserve your position as president, dean, etc.

My BF remarked that the usual suspects would probably pitch fits if a program like the above were successfully enacted, but I say let them scream. They've already proven their incompetence; there's no reason we need to take them seriously now.

Another Intellectual Crush

Camille Paglia: a feminist I respect. You can buy her newest book here.

An Intellectual Crush

Since I discovered him, I've been mainlining a lot of Jordan Peterson. I know I've mentioned him twice before in recent days, but I just can't help sharing more of his oeuvre because I think he's saying things that desperately need to be said.


Here, for example, Peterson questions the radical left's gender ideology, citing its utter lack of objectivity. If the scientific evidence is presented to me, I can accept that a very small number of people have disorders of gender identity that are best treated through medical transition. But trans activists aren't interested in evidence or in careful diagnosis; they just want to force other people to turn off their skepticism and grant self-declared trans folks unearned power and moral standing. Like Peterson, I'm not down with that.


Here, Peterson avers that unfettered free speech is vital because free speech is how we think. I understand and appreciate this argument on a gut level because I grew up with a father who regularly encouraged me to say whatever was on my mind so that he could play devil's advocate and tear me down. At the time, it drove me crazy -- but as an adult, I now recognize how brilliant a teacher Dad actually was. We reason better when we're not endlessly affirmed in our beliefs; we have to butt up against people with whom we disagree or else we'll lose the ability to articulate, defend, and - when necessary - correct our worldviews. Plus, as Peterson points out, driving certain speech underground because it is "hateful" or whatever doesn't actually cure bigotry. No: Suppression of "hate speech" enhances its allure. If suppression of "hate speech" actually worked, Trump would not be president. Alas, "build a wall" is now a motto of the new punk.


This video is longer, but it's also worth a listen. I actually cheer when Peterson declares that flying flags emblazoned with the hammer and sickle is tantamount to waving flags emblazoned with the swastika. Because yeah: Compared to the communists, Hitler was just a piker.

Oh, and if you're interested in academic psychology at all, I also highly recommend visiting Peterson's personal YouTube channel, which is loaded with free lectures on the science of personality and ideological formation. Go and watch!

LOL: #FreeKekistan Hacks Buzzfeed

REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!

Rauch on Liberal Science and Free Speech

An oldie but a goodie.

Links of Interest: Economic Mobility, Unreliable Social Science, and More

How Utah Keeps the American Dream Alive, Megan McArdle

None of the findings in this article surprise me. My mother's family is originally from Salt Lake City, and I have some first-hand experience with their "peculiar" society. Yes, the cultural homogeneity does help -- but as McArdle suggests, there are still many things here that are replicable if we could just rediscover our intestinal fortitude and start promoting a generally bourgeois life script.

Psychology's Favorite Tool for Measuring Racism Isn't Up to the Job, Jesse Singal

"A pile of scholarly work, some of it published in top psychology journals and most of it ignored by the media, suggests that the IAT falls far short of the quality-control standards normally expected of psychological instruments. The IAT, this research suggests, is a noisy, unreliable measure that correlates far too weakly with any real-world outcomes to be used to predict individuals’ behavior — even the test’s creators have now admitted as such." This article is pretty technical but still worth a read if you care at all about the problems in social science.

Mortality and Morbidity in the 21st Century, Anne Case & Angus Deaton

This is a preliminary paper discussing an increase in mortality and morbidity in the white working class. Like the widening gaps between men and women when it comes to educational attainment, these are more findings that complicate the regressive left's narrative, which pits the so-called "privileged white male" against everyone else. As it turns out, that "privileged white male" has his own social problems to deal with -- especially if he doesn't have a college degree.

Screeching Harpies Claim Another Scalp, The Liberty Zone

Here, Nicki - in her inimitable style - excoriates feminist Naval Academy alumni for successfully forcing Jim Webb to decline an honor he was supposed to receive because once, back in 1979, he questioned whether women should be allowed to serve in combat. My mother was a member of the "first class" of 1980 and did in fact face resistance from her fellow midshipmen due to attitudes reflected in the essay at issue -- and yet I still find the screaming ridiculous. Even if Webb was utterly wrong and a total sexist at the time - and I'm not convinced that's the case - the fact remains that he eventually changed his mind. Are people just not allowed to be imperfect anymore?

Spare Me the Strong Female Character, Dawn Witzke

This blog post has generated a lot of discussion in my circles, so I think it's worth sharing here. As for my own personal feelings on the matter: SFC's are okay in my book as long as they are still recognizable as women and as people and are not promoted at the expense of strong men. Major Kira Nerys - my girl-crush since middle school - is a good example of an SFC done right. Yes, she does kick a lot of ass -- but she was trained from childhood to be that way and, athletic prowess aside, often succeeds through means other than pure physical strength (like, for instance, being so damned crazy that the enemy declines to call her bluff). Moreover, she's messed up; the consequences of being a child soldier leave her just on this side of being functional, which means she sometimes makes decisions that are frankly irrational and even dangerous. In other words, she's not always right, and she doesn't always win -- and I think that's the real key.

More Grumpy Thoughts

• So the net now informs me that finding clothes that fit is a "cis privilege." As a cis-female, that certainly comes as news to me. For years, I have had trouble finding pants that fit correctly -- and the less said about shoes, the better.
• Saying that finding clothes that fit is a "cis privilege" is like saying white people are privileged because "nude" hosiery and Band-aids "match their skin tone." Neither statement is true. I defy you to find any "nude" products that match this:
  
  
  
   
• If you recognize that a fetus is a human being with rights, there is no contradiction between being pro-life and advocating for small government. Sorry, Tomi Lahren.
• If this is a society in which fakers like Rachel Dolezal can appropriate a minority racial identity and, for a time, profit from it, this is not a "white supremacist" society. Is it a society in which certain lingering inequalities cut across racial lines? Yes -- but WHY? I think the answer to that question is far more complicated than race-obsessed ideologues care to admit -- and involves the "well-meaning" government to a substantial degree.
• "Sensitivity readers" are hucksters. I believe in doing the research and being as accurate as possible, but who gave these self-appointed gatekeepers the authority to speak for their entire gender/ethnicity/orientation? Once again, the publishing establishment is allowing a small group of militant activists to vitiate the individuality and agency of millions of other people -- and as a disabled woman, I won't stand for it.
• And since I've been watching some Star Trek lately: Data didn't need an emotion chip. The early seasons of TNG make it perfectly clear that he was human enough from the start. He was capable of missing crew-mates and appreciating friendships. He showed great compassion for others -- to the point of violating the letter of the Prime Directive in at least one instance. And his insatiable curiosity is, on its own, a profoundly human trait. The only thing the emotion chip did, in my opinion, was allow Brent Spiner to mug for the camera. It didn't add anything vital to the character.

And I think I'll leave it there for tonight. ;)

Heh: "Punch a Nazi"

A new song from the "Social Justice: The Musical" soundtrack.

Grumpy Thoughts for the Evening

• If you believe free speech should be forcibly curtailed for certain people you don't like, then you must believe you have a total monopoly on the truth -- which means you're an arrogant putz.
• Look beneath the surface numbers. Just because a certain racial group performs less well on a teacher certification test does not automatically mean the test is racist and should be scrapped. It may mean public education in certain areas is utter shit for a host of complicated reasons that have very little to do with race.
• If you want gay characters in your movies, write your own stories. Don't try to colonize stories that already exist. I'm looking at you, Disney.
• Speaking of gay representation: Putting LGBT characters into everything ever is not actually representative of reality. Same-sex-attracted individuals represent 3.5% of the US population according to census data -- and "gender-nonconforming" folks represent an even smaller percentage. Ironically, by artificially inflating LGBT representation in popular media, you are making people MORE afraid of the "gay agenda" and its possible impact on the family. Back off.
• We're tired of the left's screeching about Russia, Trump's fascism, etc. Reality does not conform to your hysteria; if it did, many of you would already be in jail. Critique actual policy, not your fever dreams.
• Stop talking about "white privilege." It is 100% nonconstructive. No average American is going to accept that notion when the evidence before our lying eyes reveals that many working class whites are also disadvantaged by the system. Speak instead about the barriers that poor people face regardless of race. This will help everyone instead of just a few favored groups.

Anything else I should address? I'm in a bad mood and on a roll.

Quick Thoughts

So "cultural appropriation" is in the news again...

... thanks to literary fiction writer Lionel Shriver, who caused a ruckus over a speech she recently delivered at the Brisbane Writers Festival that politely - but firmly - criticized the rhetoric of the regressive left. I for one applaud Shriver for her audacity and agree 100% with her remarks. "Cultural appropriation" - like many concepts born of "social justice" zealotry - takes a tiny germ of truth and then seeks to push its applications to the very edges of absurdity. It obviously behooves us to treat other cultures - including subcultures within our own society - with respect. But "respect" means we should work hard to be accurate and fair; it does not mean we should wall these cultures off from all outside curiosity. Indeed, to attempt to accomplish the latter is outrageously counter-productive. First, in suggesting that these cultures cannot withstand the outsider's explorations, SJZ's are implicitly suggesting that these cultures are inferior to ours. After all, nobody is seriously arguing that, say, Lin-Manuel Miranda has damaged white American culture by embracing Alexander Hamilton and transforming him into a hip-hop icon (and, in my view, a deserving Broadway sensation). So let's think about this: Do we really believe that white American culture is uniquely robust while every other culture is exquisitely fragile? Secondly, Americans of European extraction are still the majority demographic in the United States; how, then, will minority cultures ever become visible and clothed in dignity if white folks aren't permitted to enjoy aspects of those cultures in their own pursuits? Racial harmony and human solidarity come from empathy, and empathy comes from stepping into the shoes of the Other -- and from no other source.

Meanwhile, regarding the presidential campaign...

... Hillary Clinton has been having a rough week. Personally, as a person with a debilitating autoimmune disease who still manages to nail her job, I think it's a little weird that we're obsessing over Clinton's health and not over her manifest corruption in other matters. Clinton is - despite all tongue-and-cheek speculations to the contrary - a human being, and human beings get sick. On the other hand, the Clinton campaign royally deserves mockery for the cagey way in which it's handled the whole health question. Just be honest, okay? For Christ's sake, it's not like the US president has to be able to drop everything and run a marathon!

It was also not a smart move to claim that a significant chunk of Trump's supporters belongs in a "basket of deplorables". I'm no Trump fan, but I still think this characterization of the Trump camp is slanderously inaccurate. Sure: Trump does attract alt-right provocateurs, and some of those are objectively racist white nationalists. But I think Trump has also attracted frustrated working-class whites who are looking for someone - anyone - to pay attention to their problems and give them a voice -- not to mention a lot of vocally reluctant supporters who just fear Clinton more. I encourage everyone - but especially out-of-touch urban elites - to sit in fly-over America for a spell and actually listen to the people who live there before throwing out careless judgments. Oh, and also? First cast the beam out of thine own eye, Ms. Clinton. The left has its own problems with "deplorables"; clear out your own house and we will clear out ours.

Star Trek: The Libertarian Edition

I'm libertarian-leaning at best, but some bits in here still strike me as 100% on point.