Category Archives: Popular Culture

Business, Education, Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary

The American “Elite”

16 Comments

Are they really elite?

No:

Elitism sometimes seems predicated on being branded with the proper degrees. But when universities embrace a therapeutic curriculum and politically correct indoctrination, how can a costly university degree guarantee knowledge or inductive thinking?

Is elitism defined by an array of brilliant and proven theories?

Not really. University-sired identity politics has not led to racial and ethnic harmony.

Is there free speech or diversity of thought on campuses? Did progressive government save the inner cities? Are elites at least better-spoken and more knowledgeable than the rest of us?

Long before Trump’s monotonous repetition of “tremendous” and “great,” Barack Obama thought “corpsmen” was pronounced “corpse-men,” and that Austrians spoke “Austrian” rather than German.

Not long ago, Representative Hank Johnson (D., Ga.) warned that if Guam became too populated it might just tip over and sink.

They’re just credentialed. Elite people are actually educated, knowledgable and competent.

Education, General Science, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Science And Society, Technology and Society

Bill Nye On Tucker Carlson

22 Comments

Bill Nye the Pseudo-Psychology Guy was amazing to behold last night.

Scott Adams has a good take on it:

Tucker then asked Nye a simple question about climate science. He asked how much of the warming is caused by human activity. Nye’s entire ego depended on knowing whether human activity is contributing to climate change in a big way, a medium way, or a small way. Tucker wanted some details. How much difference do humans make? After all, Nye had said this was settled science. Tucker just wanted to know what that settled science said.

Nye didn’t know. And by not knowing that simple answer about the percentage of human contribution to warming – the only issue that really mattered to the topic – he proved in public that his opinions on science are not based on facts or knowledge. Nye tried and tried to dodge the question, but Tucker was relentless. That was the trigger. Nye could plainly see, thanks to Tucker’s simple question, that his belief in science was just a belief, because he didn’t actually know the science. When your self-image and ego get annihilated on live television, you can’t simply admit you have been ridiculous all along. Your brain can’t let you do that to yourself. So instead, it concocts weird hallucinations to force-glue your observations into some sort of semi-coherent movie in which you are not totally and thoroughly wrong. That semi-coherent movie will look like a form of insanity to observers.

Look for Nye to go totally mental in the last minute of the clip, changing the topic to political leaks for no apparent reason. That’s your tell. His brain just sort of broke right in front of you.

If I’d been debating him, when he started ranting about being able to grow grapes in England, I’d have asked, “Bill, have you ever heard of Hadrian’s wall? Because the Romans were growing grapes that far north 2000 years ago. Do you know why Greenland was called that, and why North America was called “Vinland” by the Vikings? Are you blaming their SUVs?”

[Wednesday-afternoon update]

Nine reasons you shouldn’t listen to Bill Nye about science. Or anything else. And only nine?

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture

The Enemy Of My Enemy

11 Comments

This post is related to this one. I agree with Ben Shapiro:

Unfortunately, many conservatives have embraced this sort of binary thinking: If it angers the Left, it must be virtuous. Undoubtedly, that’s a crude shorthand for political thinking. It means you never have to check the ideas of the speaker, you merely have to check how people respond to him.

That’s dangerous. It leads to supporting bad policies and bad men. The enemy of your enemy isn’t always your friend. Sometimes he’s your enemy. Sometimes he’s just a dude sitting there minding his own business.

You don’t have enough information to know.

The logic of “if he melts snowflakes, he’s one of us” actually hands power to the Left, by allowing leftists to define conservatives’ friends. It gets to choose whom we support. This isn’t speculative. It happened during the 2016 primaries, when the media attacked Trump incessantly, driving Republicans into his outstretched arms. The media’s obvious hatred for Trump was one of the chief arguments for Trump from his advocates: If, as his detractors claimed, he wasn’t conservative, then why would the leftist media hate him so much?

And yes, many of Trump’s policies are bad, and he is in many ways a bad man. I’m glad she lost, but I don’t have to be glad he won, and because I was never a supporter, I don’t have to reflexively defend everything he does, though I will in fact defend him when the attack is unfair.

Read the whole thing.

[Thursday-morning update]

How Trump could create a Republican split. Or lovefest.

BTW, I’ve never predicted that the Senate would remove Trump. Just that, unlike her, it could.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary

The Media

19 Comments

Trump is beating it at its own game.

I’m glad someone finally is, but I wish it were someone both more knowledgable and less childish. It’s possible to play that game without being him. I could certainly do it.

[Update a few minutes later]

Related: Trump haters: Do these two thought experiments. I can easily imagine the latter, and would vastly prefer it. Though I’d prefer him with policies less economically ignorant.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Science And Society, Space, Space Science, Technology and Society

To The Moon, Alice!

8 Comments

OK, actually, it’s to the moon, NASA. Bob Zimmerman has some thoughts.

In my opinion, this is a completely unrealistic goal, absent a) considering alternatives to SLS and b) being willing to risk astronauts’ lives. A seventy-ton SLS isn’t going to do that job, and that’s all they’re going to have (at best) by 2020. And putting up sending astronauts to the moon (even just around, and it’s not clear what the value of that is) on its first, or even second flight would be much sportier than Apollo 8 was, back when it was actually important.

FWIW, I also think that the reporter should have talked to someone besides Casey Dreier, The Planetary Society is hardly an unbiased source about human spaceflight.