Read it.

Harvard Medical School (HMS) students styling themselves the “Racial Justice Coalition” are demanding that their next Dean be “committed to social justice both inside and outside our community.”

And, of course, that has everything to do with learning to become a doctor.

Again, the intellectual fallacy here is that because Group X comprises Y percent of the population, then ipso facto they must be entitled to Y percent of the jobs in [insert your favorite field here].

Quite frankly, I don’t want anybody to be working on my health who is so stupid as to believe that .

Freeberg brings up some inconvenient truth:

Are the geeks like me keeping women out of the field? That is the idea you can see people would like to position ahead of a voice box, just before giving it some hot air so it can lunge out and achieve promotion to spoken thought. They seldom go this far because the thought wouldn’t last long. Keep women out of the field? What meeting was that? I must have missed it. And if I didn’t miss it, I sure as hell wouldn’t have voted yes. Shortening and brightening my work days, working alongside nice-looking intelligent women, like it seems ALL the other male working classes get to do…lawyers, architects, hospital workers, bureaucrats at City Hall, Hooters cooks. Nope, the software engineers just have to toil away endlessly, shoulder-to-shoulder with a bunch of other sweaty guys. Oh, we’re working hard to keep it that way, are we? Well that would be news to this one.

And that really puts it in perspective. I know plenty of women in tech, and they don’t appear to have any problems. The real ulcers here are the people who appear to believe that women are ‘underrepresented’, as if the fact that women make up X percentage of a population ipso facto means that there ought to be X percentage of women in [pick your field here].

Read it.

A few weeks ago, I took my three young children to a stage show called “Wild Kratts Live.” If you’re not already immersed in the bizarre world of children’s television, I understand if this sounds odd, but bear with me. It gets weirder.

…

Unfortunately, in its earnest quest for female empowerment, America—never quite good at moderation, and always quite good at fighting the last battle—is quietly and methodically marginalizing boys. Every day, through various media campaigns, America’s boys absorb countless messages that girls can do anything—and that they deserve our unending attention and adoration. When it comes to boys, however, the cacophony of “dream big” media encouragement falls oddly silent. The assumption, one supposes, is that the giant, sinister swath of oppressive male “privilege,” supposedly inherited by young boys, speaks for itself.

All in service of The Narrative.

The Other McCain Told You So:

Mothers of sons consider this unfortunate, but feminists like Amanda Marcotte, Jaclyn Friedman, Jessica Valenti and Alexandra Brodsky are enthusiastically in favor of marginalizing boys. Feminists despise successful men and resent male achievement, and seek to eliminate educational and career opportunities for boys.

Read it.

Here is a familiar fact pattern in large U.S. law firms.

Time 1. Partners come together and agree that diversity is part of their firm’s core values; they review the firm’s bleak statistics, particularly at the partnership level, and agree they can and will do better.

Time 2. Through significant time and expense, they successfully recruit a diverse class of incoming associates.

Time 3. A disproportionately large number of female and diverse associates leave the firm.

Time 4. The remaining associates eligible for partner are primarily white men.

Time 5. Partners come together and agree that diversity is part of their firm’s core values; they review the firm’s bleak statistics, particularly at the partnership level, and agree they can and will do better.

In other words, the firm is committed to fixing a problem that they didn’t create and that they are powerless to solve, unless they can somehow force women and minorities to stick around long enough to be considered for partner. (Can a government program be far behind?)

This is the catch-22 world that ‘diversity’ throws us into.

Steve Sailer connects the dots.

From the Los Angeles Times below is an article that makes evident how the violence against the Trump rally in Chicago was part of the ongoing Safe Spaces from microaggressions campus movement, such as the Yale freakout over Halloween costumes.

Of course, Safe Spaces has nothing to do with safety and everything to do with the territorial imperative. Young people naturally feel the urge to fight turf wars, to stake out territory and drive out enemies. Normally in America we have laws to regulate the competition for property so territorial urges don’t turn into mob rule. But over the last year minority college students have increasingly asserted that they must be above the law because racism. It’s the only way they can be safe.

What we’re seeing at UIC is the balkanized future of America in which The Diverse can only come together over fear and loathing of whites. Hating whites is the KKKrazy Glue of the coalition of the fringes.

My, what a surprise.

Student activists at San Diego State are the latest to publish a list of demands, and roughly half of the demands involve their insistence that they deserve free stuff and more money.

Read it.

And I regret that this turkey is in the race for the Republican nomination.

Read it.

A prominent Danish rights activist and author has been fined £2,300 for “people trafficking” after giving a Syrian refugees a lift.

Lisbeth Zornig and her husband Mikael Lindholm were handed a combined fine of 45,000 krone (£4,700) by judges in the city of Nykøbing Falster today.

Ms Zornig was prosecuted for picking up a Syrian family of four adults and two children in southern Denmark and driving them to Copenhagen on 7 September last year.

Read it.

Unions have been demanding a $15 minimum wage. But when passed, they turn around and seek an exemption for union businesses, effectively denying their members the fruits of their victory. The Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, a member of the 1,200-strong California Federation of Labor, recently did just that. It led a fight for a citywide $15 minimum wage—while vehemently opposing an exemption for non-profits and small businesses.  Immediately after the legislation was passed, however, they began lobbying for an exemption for unionized businesses.

This was too much for even the union-friendly Los Angeles Times, which captioned its editorial on the subject, “L.A. Labor Leader’s Hypocrisy on Minimum Wage.” In its defense, the Federation disclosed that its hypocrisy was not limited to Los Angeles County, that this is simply a standard exemption in minimum wage laws passed by California cities at the behest of the labor movement.

Read it.

It might be a good idea to avoid London.

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Read it.

As you inch your way through security at the airport, you’ll be relieved of your penknife and terrifying tube of Pepsodent. Your unopened can of Coke will, of course, be thrown in the trash, along with any snow globes, and off go your shoes.

When at last you’re reshod and passing the duty-free shop, you can buy a well-deserved bottle of Scotch .?.?. which you can then bring on board, crack against the cabin wall and use as you would a machete.

So why all the security kabuki from the TSA?

That’s just one of the questions posed by Tracey Brown and Michael Hanlon in their new book, “Playing by the Rules: How Our Obsession with Safety Is Putting Us All at Risk.”

Read it. And watch the video.

Bill Whittle describes well what he calls “the Progressive iron triangle of the New York media, L.A. culture machine, and Washington’s beltway corruption”.

…

To understand the elitists’ hatred of the middle class, I will recommend to you again – nay urge you to read and metabolize – Fred Siegel’s deft, definitive digging up of the roots of the elites’ scorn and their sleazy alliance with the underclass, people they would never consider their social equals, merely useful electoral fodder…

The reader will be taken aback at how old and enduring this anti-American claque really is.

Arnold Kling sums it up.

Conservative British philosopher Roger Scruton’s most recent book, Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left, critiques academics who did their scribbling in the twentieth century, creating what became known as the New Left. Most of the intellectuals profiled by Scruton are continental Europeans whose names are unfamiliar to most Americans today. Although few of us are conversant with the likes of Theodoro Adorno, Gyorgy Lukacs, and Slavoj Zizek, reading about them makes one realize how much of an imprint they have left on contemporary college campuses and even on the approach to politics taken by Barack Obama.

A major theme of Fools is that the New Left evolved a set of intellectual tactical moves against their opponents. These included creating a false left-right spectrum, delegitimizing other points of view, indicting capitalism and tradition for all wrongs while being vague about alternatives, and using Newspeak to present authoritarianism as a defense of freedom and human rights.

Read it.

Sheffield University, a public university in England, has expelled Felix Ngole, a graduate student in social work, after it found he’d posted a Bible verse condemning homosexual acts in a private Facebook discussion. A university panel said that while he had a right to his opinion, his remarks could have offended some people and would make it difficult for him to work as a social worker.

They certainly have the last part right.

The New York Post is delightfully dyspeptic today.

How will today’s college students function once they leave campus and find the world no giant “safe space” protecting them from things they don’t want to hear?

University of Pittsburgh students last week declared themselves “in danger” and “traumatized” over a provocative campus speech by righty flame-thrower Milo Yiannapoulos.

So traumatized that, at a student government hearing, they demanded to know why the school hadn’t provided on-site therapy for those who felt “invalidated” by the speech.

A speech that no one had to attend.

Read it.

Hardee’s customers won’t have to deal with Hardee’s human employees much longer. The fast food franchise is experimenting with self-service kiosks at several of their restaurants, claiming, “The self-ordering kiosk gives the customer a fun, interactive and user-friendly way to control their order.”

This marketing blurb is obviously an exaggeration. There has never been a kiosk experience that was anything other than tolerable.

What these glorified iPads actually provide is a capital substitute for certain types of labor. Fast food restaurants are not exactly known for their sophistication in customer service and instead entice customers with speed, convenience, and consistency. Wages for fast food employees are in turn derived from the value workers add in these various capacities. The replacement of workers with kiosks signals that the value added by these services is most assuredly in decline.

Read it.

The young brownshirts of the left keep on marching.

Read it.

Rama Kunwar’s homecoming proved fatal as she returned to her family after marrying a man from a different caste.

Read it.

Just think of what it would have been like at a Hillary rally.

Read it.

One of the grave errors of the modern mind – an error found in America in the presumptions, assertions, and actions of “Progressives” from Woodrow Wilson through Barack Obama – is the belief that society must, or should, be engineered.  This principal belief naturally entails the subsidiary beliefs that the  engineering must be done by the state, and that in doing its engineering the state must ignore, or even destroy, any forces of social organization that hamper state-officials’ social-engineering efforts.

A great deal of legislation and, especially, law in a free society is inevitably inconsistent with the blueprints of social engineers.  And so, in their unreflective and unscientific presumption that society has no self-organizing forces, the social engineers are blind to the logic of the law and to the importance of legal processes.  The social engineers therefore do not see – because their blindness prevents them from seeing – the benefits that emerge over time through the operations of decentralized, spontaneous-ordering forces.  The social engineers’ designs and intrusions destroy, or at least severely weaken, these forces.  But being blind to these forces, the social engineers are blind to what they destroy.

Watch it.

I guess those super-strict Australian gun-control laws really work.

Read it.

This brief news clip is amusing, at least for those of us with a sardonic sense of humor. Under any other circumstances, the lefties of this illegal “squat” in Berlin would be out there protesting on behalf of the immigrants, proclaiming the migrants’ right to accommodation and sustenance at the expense of the German taxpayer. And maybe throwing a few paving stones and Molotov cocktails at the police whilst expressing their opinion.

But not this time. You see, the proposed asylum residence is planned for the very property where the Anarchist-Antifa types squat. That’s going too far! With the rallying cry of “Not in my backyard!” — and maybe a smoke bomb or two — they’ve been demonstrating in front of city hall against giving up their beloved abode.

Read it.

And hipsters everywhere have a massive orgasm.

Read it. And watch the video.

Is America’s welfare system destroying the incentive to work? That’s what Phil Harvey and Lisa Conyers contend in their recent book, The Human Cost of Welfare: How the System Hurts the People It’s Supposed to Help.

“The prospect of having all your benefits cut off…or a significant part of your benefits cut off makes people look on earning income as risky,” says Harvey.

The co-authors sat down with Reason TV’s Nick Gillespie to talk about what they learned from hundreds of welfare recipients they interviewed around the country.

Read it.

Indeed. Neither one has ever held a real job where he had to get a product out the door and meet a payroll.

Both were elected based on who they were rather than what they have accomplished.

Drones of a feather flock together.

Sarah Hoyt is pretty steamed at the Servants of the Crust.

I hear everywhere Americans just don’t learn other languages.  But that’s not true.  Americans aren’t TAUGHT other languages.  Not in a way anyone can learn.  After four years of watching my son hit his head against the wall of French (which NO ONE EVER in my family had trouble learning) I took his summer away to learn it the way I did it: lists of vocabulary, books of verbs, endless grammar drills, and reading the Three Musketeers in French.  By the end of summer he was fluent.  (We don’t do it much now.  Well, he doesn’t live at home.  But when we made runs to the hardware store or whatever we often spoke in French to each other, (mostly in the car) to keep in practice.)

Read it.

From a New York Times article about Clinton campaign fundraisers in London organized by Anna Wintour:

The designers Alber Elbaz, Christopher Bailey of Burberry and Tom Ford were among the couple of hundred guests paying $500 each for the gallery event ($1,000 including a photo with Chelsea Clinton) or $2,700 for the dinner. Mr. Elbaz, who cannot vote as he is not an American citizen, said he went to support his partner, Alex Koo, who is. Mr. Bailey, who is British, is a friend of Chelsea Clinton.

From the Federal Election Commission website: “Foreign nationals are prohibited from making any contributions or expenditures in connection with any election in the U.S. Please note, however, that “green card” holders (i.e., individuals lawfully admitted for permanent residence in the U.S.) are not considered foreign nationals and, as a result, may contribute.”

I guess laws are just for the Little People.

Read it.

How do I know the kid is black?

1. His race is not mentioned.
2. He’s living with his mother and grandmother – no mention of a father, or even a grandfather.
3. He has a 12-year-old sister and a nephew, the son of his elder sister. No husband mentioned for her, either.

More here.

Read it.

If all you want to do is protest, why are you wasting time and money on college?

Uh, because it’s their time but somebody else’s money? Either Mommy & Daddy or the Gummint.

More bogus racism charges.

The allegation set social media ablaze, sowing shock and outrage as it went: Three black students at the University at Albany had been attacked on a city bus by a group of white men who used racial slurs as other passengers and the driver sat silently by.

The Jan. 30 episode, reported to the police, would draw hundreds of people to a campus rally against racism; an emotional response from the university’s president; and even the attention of Hillary Clinton, who condemned the attack on Twitter.

…

But only a few weeks later, what seemed to be the latest iteration of a now-familiar debate about race on campus — the protests, the anguished soul-searching, the calls for greater faculty diversity and administrative changes — has metastasized into a controversy of an even more scorching kind: the allegation, the authorities said, was a lie.

Oops.

Surveillance videos did not support the accounts of the young women, Ms. Burwell, Alexis Briggs and Ariel Agudio. Neither did the statements of multiple fellow passengers. Rather than being victims of a hate crime, the authorities said, the women had been “the aggressors,” hitting a 19-year-old white woman on the bus.

All three pleaded not guilty on Monday to misdemeanor assault charges; Ms. Burwell and Ms. Agudio, who publicized the episode through Twitter, also pleaded not guilty to charges of making a false report. The judge who oversaw the arraignment called the charges, if proved, “shameful.”

Hey, #BlackLiesMatter.

“People were forced to think about things that they didn’t think about, maybe, before,” said Amberly Carter, a coordinator at the university’s Multicultural Resource Center who helped organize the rally. “So do we now stop defending black women because of what happened?”

Well, these black women, anyway; that seems clear enough.

But whatever solidarity emerged has fractured over the charges against the young women, putting their supporters on the defensive. Behind the rush to declare the matter a hoax, they say, is an ingrained prejudice against taking the concerns of minority women seriously.

Given their modern penchant for lying about incidents, I’d say that’s a good thing.

“I walked away saying, ‘I can’t tell you what happened in that video; you haven’t shown me anything to confirm what these young women are saying, and I can’t deny it either, because it’s just not clear to me,’” said Alice Green, a social justice activist and the director of the Center for Law and Justice, based in Albany.

After all, who are you going to believe, us or your lying ears?

She was one of several community and university leaders whom the district attorney invited to review the evidence before charges were brought. “But once you lodge charges against someone,” she added, “in the minds of most people, that’s guilt.”

Although they seemed perfectly comfortable with it when the shoe was on the other foot.

To Ms. Agudio’s lawyer, Mark Mishler, public opinion had outstripped the available evidence.

As it did with the original complaint. But nobody gets to Notice that.

Sami Schalk, an assistant professor in the university’s English department, who has devoted class time since the bus episode to talking through the implications with her students, said she was concerned that the women’s detractors had failed to consider the prejudice and “racialized language” the young women may have encountered on campus or before the bus ride that could have played a role in provoking the fight.

In other words, they did it, but Society was to blame. The broken record makes another turn.

Joel Kotkin raises the alarm.

The next culture war will not be about issues like gay marriage or abortion, but about something more fundamental: how Americans choose to live. In the crosshairs now will not be just recalcitrant Christians or crazed billionaire racists, but the vast majority of Americans who either live in suburban-style housing or aspire to do so in the future. Roughly four in five home buyers prefer a single-family home, but much of the political class increasingly wants them to live differently.

Theoretically, the suburbs should be the dominant politically force in America. Some 44 million Americans live in the core cities of America’s 51 major metropolitan areas, while nearly 122 million Americans live in the suburbs. In other words, nearly three-quarters of metropolitan Americans live in suburbs.

Yet it has been decided, mostly by self-described progressives, that suburban living is too unecological, not mention too uncool, and even too white for their future America. Density is their new holy grail, for both the world and the U.S. Across the country efforts are now being mounted—through HUD, the EPA, and scores of local agencies—to impede suburban home-building, or to raise its cost. Notably in coastal California, but other places, too, suburban housing is increasingly relegated to the affluent.

Read it.

Approximately thirty faculty, staff, and members of the Intercultural Center (IC) at Swarthmore College met last week to discuss new course requirements dedicated to, get this — gender, race, class, and sexuality.

That’s right — requirements. Who would have guessed, eh?

Read it.

“As smoking gives us something to do with our hands when we aren’t using them, Time gives us something to do with our minds when we aren’t thinking,” Dwight Macdonald wrote in 1957. With smartphones, the issue never arises. Hands and mind are continuously occupied texting, e-mailing, liking, tweeting, watching YouTube videos, and playing Candy Crush.

Read it.

But of course Obama’s background check can figure out that he’s actually a wacko.

He is, after all, the Magic Negro.

Read it.

ThoughtCrime is always punished, even in the Brave New World.

Read it.

Political irony is the best irony: while many millennials are flocking to vote for Bernie Sanders, a man who brashly argues in favor of raising taxes, the same constituency seems to fear tax-season.

USA Today reports “a survey of 1,600 U.S. adults found that 80% of taxpayers’ ages 18-34 (the millennial generation) who filed taxes last year and plan to file this year say they’re fearful about some aspect of preparing their taxes. That’s the highest of all the age groups.

Perhaps it’s because millennials have never learned basic If-This-Then-That in school.

There are some serious reasons why millennials fear tax-season, as the USA Today continues: “Almost a quarter (22%) of those nervous Millennials say their biggest worry is making a mistake on their returns.” As they should, one mistake on your tax forms and you could be audited, jailed, or labeled as a good-for-nothing-tax-dodging-cheat who should be burned at the stake in one of Sanders’ next stump speeches. Who can handle that type of pressure?

Well, I can, but then I’m an MBA.

Steve Sailer explains the truth that dare not say its name.

When Nosek et al. did an initial experiment with white respondents, asking them to judge whether students are worthy of inclusion in a (hypothetical) honor society based on GPA, test scores, and photos:

…we unexpectedly observed a social judgment bias favoring blacks over whites. In 5 subsequent studies, we established that this effect is robust, replicable, and appears to occur partly outside of awareness and control.

The latter part of Nosek’s findings—“outside of awareness and control”—is important within the academic world because in recent years a party line has developed that white racism works on autopilot outside the conscious willpower. Since few whites will admit these days to believing that blacks and whites tend to behave differently on average, the rationalization has emerged that white racism is such a powerful mind-warping force that it works its evil whiles outside of human control. The academic mainstream assumes that white racism operates much like the CIA mind-control beams that crazy people pick up via their dental fillings.

But Nosek’s original study and his five follow-up studies found the opposite. White people of all political persuasions tend to bestow honors upon blacks even when they are less deserving than whites. In a half-dozen studies, with a total sample size of 4,359 white people, whites consistently rewarded blacks for meeting lower standards.

Read it.

It sounds like an old argument for the allegedly uplifting effects of imperialism, though in this case she’s calling not for colonizing territory but for colonizing time. In Clinton’s worldview, what the disadvantaged need is to have “structure” imposed on them, and the way to impose that structure is to compel them to spend more time in institutions. (Notice that she isn’t arguing here for, say, offering after-school or summer programs for families who want them. To “expand the school day and the school year” is to expand the hours and days that kids are coerced to be in school.)

Read it.

On a couple of occasions during this election season, I’ve written in detail about Hillary Clinton and the Whitewater/Castle Grande scandal. Although the events in question took place 25 years (or so) ago, they are relevant today because at the heart of that scandal, insofar as Hillary is concerned, was the theft and/or wrongful destruction of documents. Such conduct is also a central issue in Hillary’s current email scandal, although this matter also raises concerns that she compromised national security.

Now, the invaluable Judicial Watch has obtained and published an April 1998 memo by the Office of Independent Counsel, called “HRC Order of Proof.” It includes the names of 121 witnesses and a discussion of the evidence to be used at trial against the Whitewater/Castle Grande conspirators. The memo thus constitutes a road map to the Independent Counsel’s criminal case.

Ken Starr, the Independent Counsel, decided not to proceed against Hillary Clinton. He did so, it is said, because he believed his team could not win the complicated, largely circumstantial case against such a high-profile figure. It’s quite possible that, in addition, political calculation came into play.

Read it.

Thank God for Rahm Emmanuel and those strict gun control laws, or the place might have wound up like Texas.

Read it.

In a New York magazine excerpt of her upcoming book, All the Single Ladies, Traister writes that the rise of the single-lady demographic represents “a radical upheaval, a national reckoning with massive social and political implications. Across classes, and races, we are seeing a wholesale revision of what female life might entail. We are living through the invention of independent female adulthood as a norm, not an aberration, and the creation of an entirely new population: adult women who are no longer economically, socially, sexually, or reproductively dependent on or defined by the men they marry.”

With results as you see them.

What do all these single women want? Well, according to Traister, it is most certainly not a “hubby state,” the term some conservatives have used to insinuate that women still desire dependency, just on Uncle Sam instead of a family patriarch. “The notion that what the powerful, growing population of unmarried American women needs from the government is a husband…  is of course problematic,” she writes. “It reduces all relationships women have to marital, sexual, hetero ones and suggests that they are, by nature, dependent beings.”

Traister is right to point out that when men rely on government social programs or tax incentives, we don’t say they’re seeking a “wifey state.” Also that men, especially married men, long benefited from government policies designed to sustain their dominance, be they direct (laws limiting the hours that women could work) or indirect (policies that propped up the mid-century nuclear family). But the problem comes when Traister tries to define what single women do want from government: laws ensuring “pay equity, paid family leave, a higher minimum wage, universal pre-K, lowered college costs, more affordable health care, and broadly accessible reproductive rights.”

With the exception of the last point, those are all either direct requests for state support or requests for state-mandated support from private actors. Sure, these policies aren’t designed solely to benefit women (unless you think of things like parenting as purely female), but there’s no mistaking this agenda for anything other than a call for More! and Bigger! government.

Read it.

A school in Guernsey has provoked outrage after asking pupils to write a letter pretending they are converting to Islam.

Pupils aged 12 and 13 at Les Beauchamps High School were asked to pen the creative writing exercise as part of a religious education lesson. They were asked to write a letter to their parents explaining that they had converted to Islam and hope that their family would respect their decision.

The homework briefing stated: “Complete the letter you started or started planning in class to your family on how you are converting to Islam. Include: How you’re feeling, how becoming a Muslim has changed your life, how much you love your family and hope they can accept your choice.

More to the point would be having them pretend to be a Muslim converting to some other religion and then have them describe how they would avoid being beheaded. That would be challenging.

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Read it.

Oh, if it were only that easy….

Read it.

Geez, you’d think it was Detroit.

Read it.

It’s exhausting work, being offended all the time. But is activism actually ruining college kids’ mental health? A report on the emotional state of Brown University student-protesters—who suffer from suicidal thoughts, sleeplessness, panic attacks, and failing grades as a result of their advocacy—paints a weirdly alarming picture.

Self-inflicted problem. Think of it as evolution in action. If all of these yahoos were to spend the rest of their lives unemployed and financially crippled by student debt — well, I wouldn’t clap, but I wouldn’t weep, either. (Unfortunately, far too many of them will get government jobs and inflict themselves on us for the next half-century.)

Read it.

The rise of Germany and the threat that Germany’s ever-expanding navy posed to Britain set the scene for the Thucydides Trap of the First World War. The nature of the danger was spelled out in 1907 in a note by a British Foreign Office official called Eyre Crowe. “Germany would clearly build as powerful a navy as she can afford,” Crowe wrote, and that navy would pose a fatal challenge to the British Empire whatever Germany’s protestations to the contrary. As Crowe noted, dry as sandpaper, “Ambitious designs…are not as a rule openly proclaimed, and even the profession of unlimited and universal political benevolence [is] not conclusive evidence” against “unpublished intentions.” Seven years later these two brotherly powers were duly fighting to the death.

The growth in tensions between the US and China has been uncannily similar. In Seattle, Mr Xi pooh-poohed the dead Greek but in the years before that speech, China had converted thousands of merchant ships for military use, developed a “carrier killer” missile specifically designed to sink American aircraft carriers, tested hypersonic glide vehicles said to be capable of striking the US with nuclear warheads, and stealthy submarines armed with ballistic missiles. In 2015, despite the general slowdown of the economy, China increased its military budget by 10 per cent, and one Chinese general warned that once the build-up was complete, “No enemy will dare to bully us.”

Read it.

When Barack Obama meets this week with Xi Jinping during the Chinese president’s first state visit to America, one item probably won’t be on their agenda: the possibility that the United States and China could find themselves at war in the next decade. In policy circles, this appears as unlikely as it would be unwise.

And yet 100 years on, World War I offers a sobering reminder of man’s capacity for folly. When we say that war is “inconceivable,” is this a statement about what is possible in the world—or only about what our limited minds can conceive? In 1914, few could imagine slaughter on a scale that demanded a new category: world war. When war ended four years later, Europe lay in ruins: the kaiser gone, the Austro-Hungarian Empire dissolved, the Russian tsar overthrown by the Bolsheviks, France bled for a generation, and England shorn of its youth and treasure. A millennium in which Europe had been the political center of the world came to a crashing halt.

The defining question about global order for this generation is whether China and the United States can escape Thucydides’s Trap. The Greek historian’s metaphor reminds us of the attendant dangers when a rising power rivals a ruling power—as Athens challenged Sparta in ancient Greece, or as Germany did Britain a century ago. Most such contests have ended badly, often for both nations, a team of mine at the Harvard Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs has concluded after analyzing the historical record. In 12 of 16 cases over the past 500 years, the result was war. When the parties avoided war, it required huge, painful adjustments in attitudes and actions on the part not just of the challenger but also the challenged.

Read it.

Twitter is a private company, of course, and if it wants to outlaw strong language, it can. In fact, it’s well within its rights to have one set of rules for Robert Stacy McCain, and another set of rules for everyone else. It’s allowed to ban McCain for no reason other than its bosses don’t like him. If Twitter wants to take a side in the online culture war, it can. It can confiscate Milo Yiannopoulos’s blue checkmark. This is not about the First Amendment.

But if that’s what Twitter is doing, it’s certainly not being honest about it—and its many, many customers who value the ethos of free speech would certainly object. In constructing its Trust and Safety Council, the social media platform explicitly claimed it was trying to strike a balance between allowing free speech and prohibiting harassment and abuse. But its selections for this committee were entirely one-sided—there’s not a single uncompromising anti-censorship figure or group on the list. It looks like Twitter gave control of its harassment policy to a bunch of ideologues, and now their enemies are being excluded from the platform.

Banning McCain wasn’t even Twitter’s only questionable activity last night. It seems that Twitter also suppressed the pro-McCain hashtag subsequently created by his supporters, #FreeStacy. After it started trending, Twitter made it so that the hashtag wouldn’t autocomplete when people typed it. “The #FreeStacy tag would be in the US top 10 now, but Twitter has scrubbed it,” wrote Popehat’s Patrick on Twitter.

…

If Twitter wants to go full-on Ministry of Truth, it can. But its user have the right to raise hell about it—to call out the platform for punishing dissident alt-right figures while empowering their adversaries. I’m not convinced that’s what’s happening, but the exclusion of Robert Stacy McCain—a mere 10 days after the Trust and Safety council came into existence—is cause for concern.