Note: this article was a part of another, larger article composed in December of 2015. I honestly don’t even know where to begin on the data I’ve looked at over the last week or so. There are so many conversations about homicide, suicide, and guns you could have that any number of different arguments are…
Category: Politics
Do You Really Oppose Violence?
Merely to note for posterity the proximate catalyst for this post, this past weekend, a guy was allegedly attacked during a demonstration by a group of a left-wing organization known as antifa (fun fact, nobody knows how this name is supposed to be pronounced). The details that made it to me are obscure. Initial police,…
Andrew Johnson, America’s Most Hated POTUS
In honor of President’s Day: Andrew Johnson, the 17th POTUS, is way more interesting than he will ever be given credit for because of our tendency to filter history through a lens referred to as the Whig historiography, or in more modern parlance, the “progressive view of history”. I.e. there’s a steady line of improvement…
My Personal Feelings on the Johnson/Weld CNN Town Hall
Journalist and writer Liana Kerzner has been kind enough to shoot the shit with me on Twitter from time to time. You should check her stuff out (she has a website and YouTube channel–at the very least, check out her “Gamer’s Guide to Feminism” videos). I endorse her as a competent writer and thinker. Anyway,…
How Chocolate Milk Epitomizes Corruption in Academia
Academia is absolutely rife with corruption, and it’s a dirty, disgusting secret I’d love to let you in on. Somewhere along the lines, a maternal authority figure should have advised you against crying over spilled milk. It’s a great little aphorism of stoicism, but in the case of an incident at the University of Maryland,…
He Who Cannot Be Stumped
In the halcyon days of last autumn, I thought that the Trump campaign was just wasting everyone’s time before an inevitable Icarian plummet to Earth. I was completely wrong. I prefer to think of it as optimism, not naivité, but frankly I can’t mount much of a defense against my ignorance. I underestimated any number…
Democracy Versus Republic
A reoccurring meme posted by conservatives and constitutionalist types will look something like this: “In a democracy, as long as a majority decides they want something, they can take it from you. But in a republic, you have inherent rights to your property that cannot be taken away. America is a Republic, not a democracy.”…
Scientific Literacy & Optimism on the Political Spectrum
The U.S. General Social Survey is fairly substantial data trawl that looks for a variety of demographic and opinion data from US residents. Science literacy and political views–or at least proxies for these–are among the pieces of information sought out. There is a general stereotype that liberals tend to be more scientifically literate and more…
The Judge is Dead. Long Live the Judge
US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died yesterday. The news travels quickly, these days. Wikipedia was the first to break the story to me. “…Scalia was described as the intellectual anchor for the originalist and textualist position in the Court’s conservative wing” was the sitting terminus to his introductory paragraph. “Then he died”, appended a…
Most Kids Are Too Busy to Destroy Society
The Kids These Days TM are making demands on their colleges. They use a lot of hashtags, so it ends up circulating through to the media. From there, we go on to judge the opinions of 18-22 year olds and come up shocked when not all of them seem to be completely well thought out….