Category: No More Bullshit!

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Academia Nut Fruitcakes Get a Kick in the… Nuts

Jonathan Haidt, confirmed Liberal and atheist takes his colleagues to task.

Sample:

I submit to you that the under-representation of conservatives in social psychology, by a factor of several hundred, is evidence that we are a tribal moral community that actively discourages conservatives from entering. … We should take our own rhetoric about the benefits of diversity seriously and apply it to ourselves. … Just imagine if we had a true diversity of perspectives in social psychology. Imagine if conservative students felt free enough to challenge our dominant ideas, and bold enough to pull us out of our deepest ideological ruts. That is my vision for our bright post-partisan future.

There’s more at the linked article, a demonstration of an exception proving (“proving” here meaning “testing” as most of my readers would know) the rule that contemporary “liberals” are anything but. Liberal, that is. Haidt apparently is one of the few genuine liberals left in the American Academia Nut Fruitcake Bakeries laughingly called “institutions of higher learning”.

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Why, If In Days of Yore…

…God could speak to his prophet through the mouth of an ass (and a hinny-ass at that *heh* Numbers 22:22-35), why, oh, why can’t those who today claim to speak for Him at least use good grammar?

“Future Earthquake Warning” Mega-Quake of epic proportions to hit the America’s? [sic]

[Note: No, I’m not linking it. The article turns up in a Google search under that title, but I see no sense in providing it linkage.]

And not only does the blogger at “Now the End Begins” (a blog supposedly about “end times Bible prophecy”) pose the nonsensical “Mega-Quake of epic proportions to hit the America’s? [sic]” but she repeats it as a statement (“It is a warning that the America’s [sic] are in danger of suffering a mega-quake of catastrophic proportions during the next forteen [sic] days… “) in her initial paragraph.

Now, why would I feel I need to place much confidence in some gal’s interpretation of “end times prophecy” if she’s not taken the trouble to learn to write English literately? What assurance would this give me that she could actually understand those scriptures she reads and attempts to explicate? Heck, I had a grandfather who ended his formal schooling in the eighth grade to go work in the Oklahoma oil fields (since pay was so very much better than continuing to work a tenant farm in SW Missouri, and he had a mother to support), and his writing, as evidenced by the hundreds of pages of manuscripts he two-finger typed that I have read, was freer of grammatical nonsense than this gal’s.

It just makes me tired to read such things. The blogger at Now the End Begins is probably a nice enough person, and certainly as literate as most Mass MEdia Podpeople, but of course, that’s damning with faint praise, hardly a ringing endorsement. That her source for this “the sky is falling!” post is some anonymous guy wearing a tin foil hat (one of the other articles at her source trumpets, “27 Signs That The Nuclear Crisis In Japan Is Much Worse Than Either The Mainstream Media Or The Japanese Government Have Been Telling Us” *feh*) is yet another reason to look askance at this doomsday post. Add to that simple statements of wrong “facts” (labels the Japan quake as a “7.3” Richter Scale event, for example) and my inducement to read the blog further wanes even more quickly.

Still, rather than reject the content out of hand, in action that would smack of ad hominem fallacy (just because the clock’s broken doesn’t mean it can’t be right twice a day, and blind pigs do find acorns now and then), I’ll look into it a bit. After all, we could experience a tsunami here in SW Missouri, what with that New Madrid fault and all. *heh*

(Of course that was sarcasm. First of all, the geography/geology of the New Madrid fault means that likely damage even from an 8.0-scale quake wouldn’t extend to my area, and besides, where’s the ocean in SW Missouri that would lead to a tsunami? ;-))

In only peripherally-related events…

As counter to such Chicken Littles, here’s a recent (Monday) comment from Jerry Pournelle that pretty well sums up my view of the Chicken Little reporting on the Japanese nuclear plant woes:

I note that although there have been bi-hourly announcements of the impending meltdowns of the Japanese power plants, the latest headlines tell me that the Japanese are struggling to prevent disaster. When it comes to numbers, perhaps ten atomjacks (plant workers) have been hurt, no one has been killed, and fewer than 100 people off site have been exposed to some elevated level of radiation. There have been small releases of gasses.

This is not Chernobyl or even above ground nuclear weapons testing. This isn’t even a mine disaster or a school bus destroyed by a coal-carrying freight train. It’s a disaster but it’s mostly economic. A coal fired plant routinely emits annually far more radiation (there are radioactive ores in coal; not many but not zero) than will have been released when this is over. Or so it seems to me.

The disaster in Japan is caused by flood and earthquake. Concentration on the nuclear bit is political.

Indeed.

Pournelle continued to talk sense on Tuesday. Dutch Boy. Dike. *sigh*

Of course, at least some of the Mass MEdia Podpeople Hivemind have a clue. From The Register (UK):

Fukushima is a triumph for nuke power: Build more reactors now!

Quake + tsunami = 1 minor radiation dose so far

Now, if only ABCCBSNBCCNFOXMSNBC, The New York Slimes (et al), politicians like Joe !@#$%^& Lieberman, etc., would all just STFU (or die or whatever would be best), perhaps voices of reason could prevail.

I’m not holding my breath.

BTW, I’m well aware of the tongue-in-cheek “grammar fallacy of argument” which, roughly, states that any post or comment that criticizes the grammar, spelling, word usage, etc., of another post or comment will likely contain multiple egregious errors of grammar, spelling, word usage, etc.”

*heh*

Still, just to “prove” (as in “test”–“The exception that proves [tests] the rule”) that rule, I submitted the text above to three separate grammar checkers and the only “errors” found were either genuine errors in the text I quoted from the blogger I (too gently) excoriated and errors that… weren’t errors in my text. The non-errors in my text that were found by two of the grammar checkers were:

  • the use of contractions (not preferred in formal writing, which this blog is not)
  • word usages which were what I actually intended to say (such as “course” in “of course” which one grammar checker suggested I might want to replace with “coarse”–an obvious error by the grammar checker)

All that illustrates is the dangers of folks trusting spelling and grammar checkers. It’s better to be able to rely on knowing how to spell, and how to write and speak good English. 🙂

I will note that, somewhere in the text above, I missed placing a comma where one rightly belongs to offset an appositive, and I added two commas that some orthographists would disagree with. Brownie points to those who find those. And a big, “Shame on you for wasting time doing that!” sign to them as well. *heh*

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Understanding “Presidents Day”

(Thanks to a commenter, Becky Sorensen, on FB for the kickoff to this post.)

A lady was eating lunch with her daughter and 10 year old grandson
last week when his mom asked him “What is tomorrow?”

He said “It’s President’s Day”

She asked “Do you know what that means?”.

He said “President’s Day is when Obama steps out of the White House
and if he sees his shadow we have 2 more years of unemployment and
stupidity.”

From the mouths of babes… But I’d almost prefer Presidents Day be viewed as a whack-a-mole game than as Groundhog Day, though… (I mean, after all, it honors the First Great American Tyrant as part of its purpose, as well as honoring the Father of Our Country. *heh* Playing whack-a-mole with the current occupant of the White House seems appropriate.)

😉

More?

The Makers vs. The Takers

Take away?

“The recent Bureau of Labor Statistics report citing systemic high
unemployment for the past two years shows that of the approximately
300 million Americans, only 47% of adults have full-time jobs. It’s a
mind-boggling statistic: 53%– or a majority — of American adults do
not work. The repercussions for our country are dire, despite the
White House proclaiming the recent Labor report as good news.”

Now, there are several classes among that 53%, and not all of them are
“takers” as the writer of the article posits (for but one example,
stay-at-home moms with a supportive and supportING husbands), but enough of them are that the divide is stark.

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It’s No Longer Simply Ironic

With the open display of antipathy toward democracy in recent days–so-called “Democrats” using various tactics to avoid the outcomes of democratically-decided elections, beginning with the “Democratic” State senators of Wisconsin fleeing the state to avoid providing a quorum–isn’t it time the party was formally renamed the Anti-Democratic Party?

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A Few Questions

I think there were originally 33 from some unknown asker, but my archive of an archive of an archive only lists 14.

1. Were the American Indians really environmentalists?
2. Is the U.S. government too stingy with foreign aid – or not stingy enough?
3. Was the U.S. Constitution meant to be a “living, breathing” document that changes with the times?
4. What really happened in the Whiskey Rebellion, and why will neither your textbook nor George Washington tell you?
5. What made American wages rise? (Hint: it wasn’t unions or the government.)
6. Did the Iroquois Indians influence the United States Constitution?
7. Did school desegregation narrow the black-white achievement gap?
8. Did the Founding Fathers support immigration? If so, what forms of immigration did they support?
9. What was “the biggest unknown scandal of the Clinton years”?
10. The three constitutional clauses that have caused the most mischief – what are they, and what did the Founders and Framers say they were supposed to mean?
11. Did capitalism cause the Great Depression? If not, what did?
12. Does the Constitution really contain an “elastic clause”?
13. Did the Founding Fathers believe in jury nullification – that juries could refuse to enforce unjust laws?
14. Was George Washington Carver (who supposedly developed 300 products out of the peanut) really one of America’s greatest scientific geniuses, as Henry Ford claimed?

Anyone with the grasp of American history and civics my eighth grade American History teacher expected of us would be able to discuss all but two of these, supporting all discussion with clear and unequivocal historical facts, and the two that we would not have been expected to be able to discuss meaningfully at the time depend on history that’s occurred since that time.

Once again, may I commend to your attention the ISI’s Civics Literacy Quiz? The link’s to one of the “Findings” pages on the site, but the quiz itself, as well as a wealth of other information, is available from there. The quiz doesn’t require as muc or as detailed an American History knowledge base as the 14 questions above, but is, IMO, a fairly decent gauge of someone’s basic civics literacy.

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For The Zero

…and his ilk. From Sir Walter Scott’s “The Lay of the Last Minstrel”

Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land!
Whose heart hath ne’er within him burn’d,
As home his footsteps he hath turn’d,
From wandering on a foreign strand!
If such there breathe, go, mark him well;
For him no Minstrel raptures swell;
High though his titles, proud his name,
Boundless his wealth as wish can claim;
Despite those titles, power, and pelf,
The wretch, concentred all in self,
Living, shall forfeit fair renown,
And, doubly dying, shall go down
To the vile dust, from whence he sprung,
Unwept, unhonor’d, and unsung.

Amen.

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Understanding “Capitalism”

“Capitalism” as used by the Mass MEdia Podpeople Hivemind, nearly ALL politicians *spit*, Academia Nut Fruitcakes, Wall Street moneychangers and the common (“mass man”) man in the street today really refers to a system of spoils, wherein government licenses fiefdoms to businesses and then taxes and regulates them into inefficient, wasteful systems of producing wealth for those who are “connected” to political and bureaucratic power bases by family (or other associations) or money.

Classic capitalism is something the U.S. hasn’t seen for a long, long time.

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Useful Distinctions

One of the things I decry about society today is what technologically-driven democratization of the language we use has done to both the communication of and the formation of ideas. As subliterate Mass MEdia Podpeople Hivemind “newsertainment” has influenced our discourse into channels of the lowest common denominator, thinking itself is being dumbed down by the subliterate use of words.

Let me use an example that’s one of the least offensive: the conflation into one dumbed down, flat, colorless meaning of three separate words that once (and still for some, slightly more literate users of English) had usefully distinct meanings: vulgarity, profanity, obscenity.

Now, all seem to be very inappropriately subsumed under “profanity”. But distinct meanings can yield clarity in communication, contra the argument made in another forum that,

“Insistence on precise meaning can work both for and against clarity.”

Please, someone, explain to me in words that make sense *heh* how that statement can make sense. Certainly precision in word usage can work for clarity in thought, expression and transmission of ideas, but how does imprecision in word usage lead to clarity in any of those activities? (And that comment was from one who claims “advanced training” –*heh* not “education”–in semantics and linguistics; go figure.)

So, what have we lost when different classes of “cuss words” (and I have a predictable problem with that term as well ;-)) are all gathered together under one class, ignoring any distinctions between classes? Let’s see.

A vulgarity is simply a “low speech” variant of a “high speech” word. “Shit” for “feces” is a common example. Both have the same primary meaning. “Shit”* is more useful for conveying disgust with something or for relaying the value of a commodity in earthy, pithy, no-nonsense tone. It’s vulgar, although some neo-victorian bowdlerizers have crammed it into the “profanity” class and now perhaps most people–very, very wrongly–think of it as a profanity.

And what of obscenities? Titilating, stirring up passions with lewd, indecent, debasing expressions or images of a sexual nature can also be vulgar, but rarely profane. Why? Well, that depends on what profanity is, doesn’t it?

Rightly, profanity is that which debases, insults, degrades or slanders that which is holy, belonging to or set apart (for his use) by God. By conflating that which is merely vulgar or even that which is obscene with profanity, one degrades, debases, obscures real profanity, making it easier for those who would do so to actually profane that which is holy and point the finger at the vulgar and obscene and say, “No, what I’m doing isn’t profane; that is.”

But beside all that is the fact that blurring meaningful distinctions in language to the point of erasure is simply lazy thinking… and encourages even lazier thinking. That’s how politicians who advance anarchy and tyranny with complete disregard for what citizens want can call themselves “Democrats”. Useful and meaningful distinctions in word usage would have long since renamed them to reflect their real nature.

*BTW, I sometimes despair of folks who are offended by the use of the word “shit”. As one dear old saint in my church told me, she grew up on a farm and every time they turned around they were stepping in some sort of shit. It’s just a part of life. Besides, think of my former neighbors who were named after an ancestor who had good bowel movements. That’s right; their name was “Shatwell”–a past tense of “to shit”.