Joel Kotkin hears his bullshit detector go off.

The ongoing trial involving journalist Mark Steyn – accused of defaming climate change theorist Michael Mann – reflects an increasingly dangerous tendency among our intellectual classes to embrace homogeneity of viewpoint. Steyn, whose column has appeared for years on these pages, may be alternatingly entertaining or over-the-top obnoxious, but the slander lawsuit against him marks a milestone in what has become a dangerously authoritarian worldview being adopted in academia, the media and large sections of the government bureaucracy.

…

These are the same people who historically have identified themselves with open-mindedness and the defense of free speech, while conservatives, with some justification, were associated more often with such traits as criminalizing unpopular views – as seen in the 1950s McCarthy era – and embracing canonical bans on all sorts of personal behavior, a tendency still more evident than necessary among some socially minded conservatives.

But when it comes to authoritarian expression of “true” beliefs, it’s the progressive Left that increasingly seeks to impose orthodoxy. In this rising intellectual order, those who dissent on everything from climate change, the causes of poverty and the definition of marriage, to opposition to abortion are increasingly marginalized and, in some cases, as in the Steyn trial, legally attacked.

Read it.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

It always comes as a shock to people that when you force up the price of something people buy less of it. Markets work, even when you don’t want them to.

John Hinderaker is not happy.

One of the hallmarks of a totalitarian state is that there are so many laws and regulations that no one can possibly know what they are, let alone obey them. Thus everyone is a criminal, and only the despot’s discretion separates the solid citizen from the criminal. Unfortunately, the United States is rapidly approaching–if it has not already reached–this dystopian status.

The Other McCain pulls back the curtain.

It was Dick Gregory, I believe, who defined “integration” as the period of time between when the first black family moves into a neighborhood and the last white family moves out. The recent report that New York City’s schools are the most segregated in the country might be seen as confirmation of that cynical jest.

Are we to assume that the enlightened and sophisticated white liberals of New York are secretly more racist — “RAAAAACIST!” — than they would have us believe? Our suspicion of pharisaical hypocrisy on their part may explain why liberals are always able to hear those coded racist “dog whistles” that nobody else can hear. Perpetual outrage at the alleged racism of Republicans functions as a means by which white liberals soothe their guilty consciences and tune out the cognitive dissonance that results from the unbridgeable chasm between their professed egalitarian beliefs and their inevitably elitist lifestyles.

Read it.

A story from Yale University shows that “Social Justice” should never be confused with the real thing.

Seth Roberts turns over a rock.

I am somewhat embarrassed to remember this, but I used to say things like: “Universities are places where people can devote themselves to a life of study, investigation, and imagination. In exchange for a home like this, we provide society with ideas. And, of course, we teach.” I guess I thought that there should be a home for people who are capable and devoted to intellectual pursuits, a rather naive notion it seems.

I wanted a place where I would be judged primarily by my intellectual and creative ability. Instead I have been made keenly aware of the importance of networking, of doing favors for the right people, of who to cite, whose criticism to acknowledge and whose to ignore. I used to despise such things, now they’re second nature. The irony, that I now know far more about popularity than I did back in high school. One of the first things I learned is that it is imperative to do research that brings money and/or prestige. In other words: popular research. I didn’t know such a thing existed.

Gavin MacInnes lays down some inconvenient truth.

Modern feminism has become fascism and it’s making women miserable.

Read it.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Hotel executive and Democratic fundraiser Sant Singh Chatwal pleaded guilty on Thursday in New York to witness tampering and conspiracy to evade campaign finance laws, the Associated Press reports.

Democrats — the party of foreigners.

Read it.

Step back and note something obviously out of whack with this whole controversy.  It is said that college campuses are the prime venue of “rape culture.”  But most college campuses are run by liberals, and liberalism and its correlates—maximum individual liberation in all things sexual—is the dominant orthodoxy.  Why is this problem ostensibly most severe where liberalism reigns?  Perhaps for the same reason that poverty and social dysfunction are worst where liberalism reigns supreme (Detroit).  Hanlon notes a rising number of reported rapes at Dartmouth.  He should be embarrassed by this.  But he ought to ponder this question: is sexual assault a problem at conservative colleges like Hillsdale, Patrick Henry, Liberty University, or Regent University?  I wonder why not.  Actually I don’t.  Hillsdale and other conservative colleges actually take seriously their role as moral instructors of young adults, and extend this responsibility to enforcing the alcohol laws, basic behavior and manners, and even dress codes.  Liberal universities like Dartmouth might want to borrow a clue, but don’t hold your breath.

Read it.

A new study published in the Lancet shows that as many as one-third of vegetative patients are misdiagnosed.

Researchers used brain-imaging techniques and found minimal consciousness in 13 of 42 patients it studied.

The study revealed that those patients with minimal consciousness have emotions and may feel pain.

Read it.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Those who hate lobbyists and their influence ought to reflect on the fact that if they hadn’t given the government all of this power over the economy then nobody would be hiring lobbyists to get the government to exercise that power in the service of special interests. Own Damned Fault, as my wife likes to say.

Sarah Hoyt turns over a rock.

One of my friends posted a result of a Facebook quiz about “your privilege.” He did it with acerbic comments – even though he’s a much nicer person than I – because he’s not stupid or a pudding head and the quiz made him almost as foamy at the mouth as I got.

…

For instance, I’m fairly sure when she (okay, might be an he, but if I had to bet. And I hate “they” as a singular pronoun. Yes, I know Elizabethans used it, but NOT for politically correct reasons) wrote the test and asked “Have you ever been derided and called names for your religion” what she was thinking of was some poor huddled Muslim female being called names by stereotypical white menTM, not an European high school student in the magnet school and the selective “advanced” form being called things because she refused to say she didn’t believe in G-d. Or, when she said “Did you ever have to hide your orientation” she probably didn’t mean at the Broad Universe tea at a convention. Or when she said “did you ever get called names because of your sexual orientation” she probably wasn’t thinking of “Breeder!” hurled from passing car as I pushed a baby carriage down the road. Nor… and this I’m absolutely sure of, did this precious flower ever think that “Did you ever have to hide who you are” could refer to my ten years of hiding my political beliefs, so I could earn a living in a liberal-dominated field.

In fact, what this very bizarre “quiz” revealed more than anything else was the quiz writers assumptions. I have no idea how someone could come by such an odd set of them, except that I think it’s a group thing – I think where she lives everyone repeats this, so, “if everyone believes it must be right.” And also, I think this person has never looked outside her position of extreme privilege, and therefore thinks that everyone’s lives must be BETTER than hers, because, surely, she can’t be privileged. I mean, she’s female. (And possibly gay or of color.)

Ross Douthat takes a look behind the curtain.

The defect, crucially, is not this culture’s bias against social conservatives, or its discomfort with stinging attacks on non-Western religions. Rather, it’s the refusal to admit — to others, and to itself — that these biases fundamentally trump the commitment to “free expression” or “diversity” affirmed in mission statements and news releases.

This refusal, this self-deception, means that we have far too many powerful communities (corporate, academic, journalistic) that are simultaneously dogmatic and dishonest about it — that promise diversity but only as the left defines it, that fill their ranks with ideologues and then claim to stand athwart bias and misinformation, that speak the language of pluralism while presiding over communities that resemble the beau ideal of Sandra Y. L. Korn.

Harvard itself is a perfect example of this pattern: As Patrick Deneen of Notre Dame pointed out when the column was making waves, Korn could only come up with one contemporary example of a Harvardian voice that ought to be silenced — “a single conservative octogenarian,” the political philosophy professor Harvey Mansfield. Her call for censorship, Deneen concluded, “is at this point almost wholly unnecessary, since there are nearly no conservatives to be found at Harvard.”

The Antiplanner discovers that his Bullshit Detector has gone off.

Those crazy planners at Smart Growth America are at it again: issuing another report all about how urban sprawl is bad and people are better off living in compact communities. Most news reports take it for granted that sprawl is evil and something ought to be done about it. But the report does devote all of three out of 51 pages to repeating claims about how sprawl makes housing unaffordable, transportation expensive, people fat, and lives shorter.

Almost all of these claims cite another report written back in 2010. Most of the claims are readily dismissed for several reasons.

Read it.

Why is it that cities that consider themselves most progressive also tend to have the most segregated schools and the greatest income inequality?

…

The Progressive obsession with getting people out of their cars isn’t satisfied with improving bus service, which supposedly only poor people would use. Instead, they want a transit system for the middle class, and that means trains. This makes transportation expensive, keeping the poor immobilized.

Read it.

Oh boo-hoo. I’m a victim of hate who just happens to go to one of the most exclusive universities in the world.

The assumption here is that hate is never justified; certainly the hateful will think so.

Read it.

Really, you can’t make this stuff up.

Read it.

As government expands, extending its reach to every aspect of business, every sector of the economy, private citizens and corporations require sherpas to lead them through the mountains of regulations and tax provisions, to discover exemptions and special favors and other forms of relief or favoritism to improve the bottom line. And who better to act as sherpas than the relatives of the Democrats who impose the regulations and tax provisions in the first place, who better than the lively proprietors of a family business operating in the luxurious and morally uncomplicated world of the caste of limousine liberals who dominate politics, culture, news, and finance.

Corporations give to Democratic politicians, avoiding the scrutiny of liberal attack dogs in the media and nonprofit sectors, and enjoying the ego boost that comes with being on the “right side of history.” Then those corporations hire the Podestas to get them out of the Rube Goldberg traps the Democrats have enacted into law. John’s innovation was to establish a corporate-funded think tank where the burdensome policies would be concocted, and whose staff would go on to man the regulatory agencies that put their wool-headed ideas into practice. And to whom do the corporations turn when they find themselves on the receiving end of all this uplift, all this do-goodery, all this progress, hope, and change? Why, to the man in the red Prada loafers, and to his flamboyantly patterned wife.

Charles Krauthammer really doesn’t love Big Brother.

Two months ago, a petition bearing more than 110,000 signatures was delivered to The Post, demanding a ban on any article questioning global warming. The petition arrived the day before publication of my column, which consisted of precisely that heresy.

The column ran as usual. But I was gratified by the show of intolerance because it perfectly illustrated my argument that the left is entering a new phase of ideological agitation — no longer trying to win the debate but stopping debate altogether, banishing from public discourse any and all opposition.

Read it.

Democrats, of course.

Read it.

If something is going to happen in Veneto, it won’t be an uprise of micro-nationalism: but rather, a tax revolt. You could describe Italy as a country where the North pays taxes and the South consumes taxes. This picture is painted with a wide brush, but it is not incorrect. The gap between the two parts of the country has been there for ages, and it did not narrow, in spite of the fluxes of transfers. It is only natural that economic stagnation exacerbates the problem.

Jim Goad finds that his Bullshit Detector has gone off.

The 15th annual White Privilege Conference ended on Saturday in Madison, WI. As is usually the case with the locales for such public displays of white ethnomasochism, Madison’s quotient of blacks is roughly half the national average. In contrast, presumably ignorant and “prejudiced” white Southerners—the kind of people most despised by bourgeois-yet-Marxist whites who believe in fairy tales such as “white privilege”—have for centuries lived in the blackest part of the nation. It is typically whites with the least amount of experience living alongside blacks that tend to idolize colored folks beyond all reason.

…

According to conference founder Eddie Moore, Jr., “white supremacy, white privilege, racism and other forms of oppression are designed for your destruction—designed to kill you.” If that’s the case, privileged whites are doing a piss-poor job, seeing as how the 400,000 or so Africans who were transported to the New World in slave ships have—through the noxious evils of white privilege, white technology, and living amid a predominantly white culture—blossomed into around 40 million modern American blacks. That’s an increase of 100-1 and truly the most inept genocide in world history.

Freeberg hears his Bullshit Detector go off.

It isn’t just the lefties anymore. We see it everywhere now, don’t we? A&E “fired” Phil Robertson, patriarch of Duck Dynasty — now, what was the point of that? I never did hear of anyone taking the extra time or trouble to teach or counsel Mr. Robertson into having the correct opinions about gay people, so it wasn’t about Robertson’s opinions. As always seems to be the case with actions like this, it was about influence. The rule seems to be that you can think whatever you want, but you’re not allowed to have influence unless you think the right things. If you don’t think the right things then you are to be driven out of whatever position you have. Once that’s done, you can go on thinking it, but the important goal is that we have to get our society properly arranged, with these good thoughts entirely saturating the tallest spires, and the bad thoughts entirely relegated down there in the dark alleyways, among the plebes. That is, from all I have seen and all I can figure out about it, the ultimate objective. The shrieking I hear is all about these exceptions: Someone in a position has a bad thought, let’s get him defrocked of the position so he can keep his bad thought — but, down there, not up where he is. Those people up there are all supposed to think the same, good, things.

Read it.

Burton’s trial is very worrying for anyone who holds dear freedom of speech and other basic civil liberties. One of the worrisome aspects is the conflating of “religion” with “race”. Islam is clearly not a race and Muslims belong to all races, including whites. Furthermore, the Crown Prosecution Service considers those two charges (racially- and religiously-aggravated crimes) as distinct ones.

But, despite officially paying lip service to this distinction, in Tim Burton’s case the CPS is trying to combine and confuse the two because it does not have sufficient ground to get a conviction on the “religiously aggravated” charge — which requires stronger evidence -, so decides to prosecute using the easier “racially aggravated” one.

As the CPS’s own website says, “So it will be more difficult to prosecute for inciting religious hatred as opposed to racial hatred”.

You might think this a silly question — which it is — but modern politics, and (sadly) modern law, wrestles with such silly questions all the time, with seemingly absurd results more often than most people would find comfortable.

Read it.

The fact that the story goes out of its way to avoid mentioning race suggests that the driver was white and the beaters were black. Note that the driver was characterized as ‘suburban’ and the neighborhood was an ‘east side’ neighborhood.

Read it.

That’s not Change, that’s Business As Usual.

Read it.

“Blacks,” said Mayor Barry Mahool, “should be quarantined in isolated slums in order to reduce the incidents of civil disturbance, to prevent the spread of communicable disease into the nearby White neighborhoods, and to protect property values among the White majority.”

Mahool was the mayor of Baltimore who, in 1910, signed into law a racial zoning ordinance. According to Christopher Silver’s The Racial Origins of Zoning in American Cities, he was also “a nationally recognized member of the ‘social justice’ wing of the Progressive movement.”

One of the problems with Low-Information Voters is that anything that happened before about, oh, last week, is off their radar. Democrats depend on this to sweep under the rug that their party has been the Party of Racism since the Civil War.  Judging by the voting statistics, it’s worked, too — wonder why nobody cites that when they talk about racial disparity in IQ.

Read it.

Officials with the Olathe, Kansas, school system have apologized after inviting only black students on a field trip that included visits to the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum and an exhibit on the Civil Rights movement at a local museum. Well, actually, they say it was all a “misunderstanding” and that the invitation mistakenly “suggested” the trip was open only to blacks. But the actual invitation specified that it was for “our African-American sophomores and juniors.”

Read it.

That’s it, throw the book at ‘im. (Snicker)

Perhaps an appropriate sentence would be to average the sentences that he has handed out to his birds of a feather.

Steve Sailer limns the decline of a once-great journalistic institution.

 I’m not a stickler about proper usage of the English language (mote, log, own eye, etc.), but still, the decline of the word “disinterested” represents a decline in moral as well as literary standards….

Read it.

Everything bad is good for you.

Read it.

Admiral Jeremiah Denton died yesterday at the age of 89. Admiral Denton served seven-and-a-half years as a prisoner of war in Hanoi during the Vietnam War. Denton’s is a story that should be known by all Americans. In captivity Admiral Denton gave something beyond the last full measure of devotion. His is a story of almost unbelievable endurance, courage and patriotism.

And a reminder that for about a decade we were at war with a government that paid no attention to any Geneva Convention and treated our military about the same way that the S.S. treated Jews in concentration camps — and we buy shit from that country, under that government, today. That is the saddest thing about history that has happened in our lifetime.

Read it.

The Arizona Supreme Court last week declined to hear the appeal of the teacher’s union to rule the Arizona Empowerment Scholarship Account Program (ESA) as unconstitutional. The appeals court’s ruling now stands, paving the way for more children to enroll in the program.

The ESA currently allows families of disabled students to attend the school of their choosing. They are allotted 90 percent of the funding that would have been spent for their education at a public school.

…

The state’s unions have opposed the ESA since it was introduced three years ago. The Arizona Federation of Teachers  (AFT) claims the program guts funding from public schools and diverts taxpayer funds to private schools. They called the program a “boondoggle” and said it is “unconscionable” that legislators would approve of it.

Look for … the Union label….

The Other McCain turns over a rock.

The problem with trying to keep up with feminist insanity is, while you’re distracted by one deranged nutjob — say, Amanda Marcotte, or that fat chick with paranoid rape fears — another one is likely to go off her meds and completely melt down while you’re not looking.

Read it.

… most of the state’s minions don’t think of themselves as criminals. That’s because (a) they don’t think deeply, they just do what they’re paid to do, and (b) they’ve been brain-washed into believing that the state (as long as it’s their state) can do no wrong. (Well, it can do no wrong today, though its past wrongs are sometimes perceived through the lens of hindsight.) If the “criminal” label applies to anyone, it applies to the politicians whose wishes are their minions’ commands. Criminality is a manifestation of psychopathy: a common trait among leftist politicians and the pundits and academicians whose facile rationalizations for statism give aid and comfort to leftist causes.

Read it.

Yet another good reason not to fly.

Read it.

Williamson observes: “It is a perversion of the English language that our so-called liberals are the least liberal faction in our polity. American liberalism is the creed that you are entitled to think as you like and entitled to do as you are commanded.”

But liberals want to control our thoughts too. They seek to stigmatize heterodox thought as bigoted or criminal or otherwise beyond the pale. They seek to destroy those with whom they disagree.

Read it. And watch the video.

I guess we’re all Trayvon Martin now — except for white people, of course.

Read it.

We’ve talked about ransomware in the past, the process by which criminals pose as either rights holders or law enforcement to convince people that they must pay large sums of money for transgressions in order to avoid serious jail time.

The ugliest face of this particular problem isn’t even addressed in the article, which is: Would these threats have any effect if it weren’t for the fact that people are aware of what sort of Orwellian power that the current morass of government law/regulation affords those who know how to work the system? We even have a word for it — ‘lawfare’. We increasingly live in a world where one can impose financially crippling costs on someone merely by taking them to court, especially if one is a public official (ponder how ‘plea bargains’ work) or a business enterprise with deeper pockets than most ordinary individuals possess. News reports are full of instances where some poor guys gets a letter from a lawyer (or sounding as if it came from a lawyer) indulging in what is fairly obvious extortion.

Read it.

Totalitarianism advances in America.

Yesterday, after nearly a year of searching, the Mozilla Foundation announced the hiring of longtime CTO Brendan Eich as its new CEO. The internal hire looks like Mozilla opted for a technological leader to head up the front office as opposed to a business school expert, though at this point, Eich’s coding chops (inventing JavaScript, co-founding Mozilla) have possibly been outpaced by his past nine years of Mozilla leadership work.

But much of the public reaction to his promotion skipped past that “can a coder run a company” question, focusing squarely on another financial issue. In 2008, Eich donated $1,000 in support of California’s Proposition 8, the ballot initiative that sought to ban gay marriage in the state. So shortly after the announcement of Eich’s hiring, the reaction came swiftly. In particular, developers came forward with a mix of boycotts and reluctant acceptance.

App developer Rarebit ignited the conversation by announcing that it pulled its apps from the Firefox Marketplace. In a statement, Rarebit CEO Hampton Catlin recalled the story of his own gay marriage experience in California, which allowed him to marry Rarebit co-founder Michael Catlin. Catlin called Eich out for both his Prop 8 donation and his choice not to apologize.

“We morally cannot support a foundation that would not only leave someone with hateful views in power but will give them a promotion and put them in charge of the entire organization,” he wrote.

It is certainly (in a properly-ordered world) the right of anyone to refuse to use a product for whatever reason they think best, but this tendency of the supposed proponents of tolerance to characterize legitimate differences of opinion as ‘hateful views’ is the sort of thing that, in the modern era of Identity Politics, eventually gets turned into legislation, regulations, and prosecutions.

Read it.

Imperial traditionalists have expressed dismay that allotments will henceforth be measured in metres, thereby ending a 600-year-old system of staking out municipal veg patches in poles.

According to the Daily Mail, shocked gardeners have received rent renewal notices from their town halls reclassifying the standard “10 pole” allotment as 253 square metres.

The swine.

However, the powers that be further up the administrative food chain denied they had mandated the metric allotment. A spokesman for the Department for Communities and Local Government insisted: “There is no central government requirement for town halls to measure up the size of their allotments. This sounds like the work of over-zealous municipal officials.”

Oh, we know all about over-zealous municipal officials.

Read it.

Silicon Valley has become one of the most ageist places in America. Tech luminaries who otherwise pride themselves on their dedication to meritocracy don’t think twice about deriding the not-actually-old. “Young people are just smarter,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told an audience at Stanford back in 2007. As I write, the website of ServiceNow, a large Santa Clara–based I.T. services company, features the following advisory in large letters atop its “careers” page: “We Want People Who Have Their Best Work Ahead of Them, Not Behind Them.”

And that’s just what gets said in public. An engineer in his forties recently told me about meeting a tech CEO who was trying to acquire his company. “You must be the token graybeard,” said the CEO, who was in his late twenties or early thirties. “I looked at him and said, ‘No, I’m the token grown-up.’ ”

Apparently this is great news for the cosmetic surgery field.

Freeberg sounds the alarm.

We have a culture that is friendly to the little laws; it comes easy to us to complain that such-and-such is happening, unregulated and we need yet-another-little-law. Maybe an actual regulation, maybe just a new soft, cultural hand-slapping. No, we don’t have Hooters because a blogger complained. We have Hooters because of the people who wanted to keep Hooters out, or rather, because of the tension that built up around their mindset. It’s a case of the pressure building up under the blockage.

Half of us relieve our daily tensions by finding some refuge where we can get away from the little-laws. The other half of us, unfortunately, seem to escape similar tensions by passing those little-laws. Mencken said puritanism was the nagging fear that someone, somewhere is having a good time? What we’ve got is the widespread nagging fear that someone is able to do something they want to do. Not so much a desire to control others, as a phobia against liberty. Subtly different.

Read it.

Guess that’s why everybody’s moving to Texas….

Read it.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Read it.

The attacks of anti-technology left-wingers in San Francisco are kicking into high gear with multiple, rowdy protests, bouts of property damage, and graffiti all across the city calling for the death of those “techies” who work for Google, Microsoft, and Apple. Even Twitter has become a hate-filled battleground.

The hate is being perpetrated against high-tech companies like Apple, Microsoft, and Google because the billions these companies bring into the economy in the Bay Area are driving up property values, helping local small businesses thrive, and supposedly driving poorer residents out of the neighborhoods.

The Left has been the mother lode of hate for time out of mind — I guess they’ve decided to drop the usual masquerade of ‘tolerance’.

Read it.

Hint: No.

Opposition to biotech crops, and the subsequent failure to adopt safe, healthy genetically modified crop variants, is causing mass human suffering all over the world.

The most obvious example of this is Golden Rice, which has been available since the early part of the last decade, but is not in regular use in any country. Golden Rice is a genetically altered rice strain built to address Vitamin A deficiency, which affects about 10 percent of the 3 billion people for whom rice is a staple food. That deficiency causes blindness in between 250,000 and 500,000 children each year, half of whom die within 12 months, according to the World Health Organization.

Read it.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Read it.

On February 23rd 17-year-old Byron White allegedly killed a Seattle man for his cell phone then complained that the cell phone “was not a nicer model.”

Here’s  Byron White:

I guess we’re all Trayvon Martin now — except for white people, of course.

Read it.

Well guess what? Growing pot is very carbon-intensive.  Says Mother Jones:

You thought your pot came from environmentally conscious hippies? Think again. The way marijuana is grown in America, it turns out, is anything but sustainable and organic. . .

Bummer, man.