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Separating the presumably wiser adults from the relatively inexperienced younger individuals without specifying any gender identity for the purposes of this title

by 6 Comments on Separating the presumably wiser adults from the relatively inexperienced younger individuals without specifying any gender identity for the purposes of this title

Pop quiz for self-described Repub­li­cans, Lib­er­tar­i­ans, Con­ser­v­a­tives, and Clas­sic Lib­er­als.1 What is your first thought when you see this head­line from an arti­cle in today’s Wall Street Jour­nal?

Pay­Pal Can­cels Plan for Facil­i­ty in North Car­oli­na, Cit­ing Trans­gen­der Law

Choose the one option which most close­ly cor­re­sponds to your belief:

  1. Polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness has gone too far.
  2. Cor­po­ra­tions have no right to tell peo­ple how to gov­ern themselves.
  3. God­less anti-het­ero­sex­u­al hea­thens are extort­ing the good peo­ple of North Car­oli­na to pre­vent
… Read the rest
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FBI drops Apple case after cracking iPhone

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Dear FBI—

I under­stand that some­times gov­ern­ment is slow to get tech­nol­o­gy right. And I ful­ly sym­pa­thize; it’s hard to keep up with all the trends and new gad­gets and acces­sories. Every­thing changes so quick­ly these days.

But this news is dis­ap­point­ing. It’s just waste­ful. Those iPhones are expen­sive. I know; I have one. What with this being an elec­tion year, all the can­di­dates are promis­ing to cut waste. It might not be too long before you can’t even get a … Read the rest

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Support truthiness

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I hate it when politi­cians lie. I hate it when every­one else lies, too, but politi­cians are a spe­cial case. Lies usurp pow­er by chan­nel­ing peo­ple’s actions in the wrong direc­tion. Some kinds of mis­in­for­ma­tion are more dan­ger­ous than oth­ers, but none are more fright­en­ing to me than those used to manip­u­late peo­ple into giv­ing over polit­i­cal pow­er. Abus­ing pow­er to gain pow­er sim­ply can’t end well.

This is why I love the fact-check­ing web­sites. As with any oth­er sources of … Read the rest

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Second place is the first loozah

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Don­ald Trump’s Pres­i­den­tial cam­paign just ended.

Hope­ful­ly I won’t have to eat those words; it’s the risk one takes when mak­ing pre­dic­tions, and there are plen­ty of ways I could be mis­con­stru­ing the results of last night’s Iowa Cau­cus. I’m not a polit­i­cal expert, nor am I immune to the lure of think­ing some­thing to be so because I want it to be so. It would be irra­tional to count him out, but in con­sid­er­ing a can­di­date so anti-ratio­nal as Trump, … Read the rest

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North Carolina town’s idiocy, news media’s incompetence, blogosphere’s imposture

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The shock­er head­line, A US town has reject­ed a pro­pos­al for a solar farm fol­low­ing pub­lic con­cerns that solar pan­els ‘suck up all the ener­gy from the sun’ is such a good illus­tra­tion that the word fol­low­ing is a jour­nal­is­tic weasel word that it has been added to the list of ways which so-called jour­nal­ists (as well as real ones) mis­lead us here on Mono­chro­mat­ic Out­look. The head­line from the pri­ma­ry source reads, Wood­land rejects solar farm. The … Read the rest

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Oh Scalia, what did you say this time?

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Supreme Court Jus­tice Antonin Scali­a’s com­ments dur­ing oral argu­ments1 in Fish­er v Uni­ver­si­ty of Texas at Austin gen­er­at­ed con­tro­ver­sy both in news and social media. Some are sug­gest­ing that Scalia is reveal­ing him­self to be a bigot

Scalia has had these sorts of accu­sa­tions point­ed at him sev­er­al times, and I’ve found it instruc­tive to seek out the court opin­ions or argu­ments from which the com­ments come. For the most part, the accu­sa­tions have been com­plete­ly ground­less. For exam­ple, he … Read the rest

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Fox News declares war on cops, justice, liberty, and the American people

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Fox News is telling us there is a war on police.

First, it is galling that Sher­iff Lewis can sit there with a straight face and say that the peo­ple lack account­abil­i­ty. Com­ing from a uni­formed law enforce­ment pro­fes­sion­al, that’s rich. He could shoot a hand­cuffed, sleep­ing per­son in the head with a crowd of reporters watch­ing and cam­eras rolling and the worst that might hap­pen to him is los­ing his pen­sion. Unless the per­son he exe­cut­ed was also … Read the rest

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Justice matters

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It’s sad and dan­ger­ous how easy it is (for every­one) to mis­un­der­stand a slo­gan and react defen­sive­ly. When a belief is con­densed to a few words, it nec­es­sar­i­ly assumes a whole set of con­texts, con­texts a read­er of that slo­gan may mis­un­der­stand. There are exam­ples of bril­liant writ­ing where tremen­dous nuance has been con­veyed in only three words; they are exceed­ing­ly rare.

Three-word slo­gans put into hash­tags seem to clar­i­fy and encap­su­late mean­ing to their authors, and to the peo­ple who … Read the rest

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Fool me eight times, shame on me

by 1 Comment on Fool me eight times, shame on me

Today a friend post­ed a link to an arti­cle titled Stud­ies Prove With­out Doubt That Unvac­ci­nat­ed Chil­dren Are Health­i­er Than Their Vac­ci­nat­ed Peers1 to his Face­book stream. Just two days ago I said I was done lis­ten­ing to any­thing about vac­cines, but I end­ed the post with:

If you have a study or actu­al data of some kind to cite, do it. 

I should have known by the fact that the title used the plur­al stud­ies rather than study… Read the rest

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