Monday Pensées
TODAY… a collection of short thoughts, with bolded words to indicate the topic of each number.
On Saturday I saw several groups of college students walking to (I presume, based on their dress) the rescheduled East Lansing Pride festivities. Watching them, I had the sense that for many of them, it wasn’t particularly ideological. They just wanted a chance to dress up in funny clothes and party. (It was Halloween but with an enhanced sexual component, someone commented on Twitter.) Now that’s not to say there isn’t a moral component, but they aren’t thinking about it. Just like they don’t think about it when they get smashed drunk or have sex with a random hookup. It’s a harmless chance to have some fun, they imagine. (And the devil is probably perfectly happy to pull them into the movement via that false impression.)
It looks like Canon Press flew a “Christ is Lord” banner over the San Diego Pride parade. That’s a genius move in a sense - we’ve seen incidents of streetside evangelists being detained for “disrupting a public event”, but good luck telling that to a pilot a thousand feet up. Maybe we’ll have to get tactically smarter like that. But it made me think, this is the sort of thing conservatives have traditionally not done, because we don’t like to cause conflict. We don’t show up at someone else’s event to tell them how wrong they are. Should we be doing that more? I don’t know.
I called this trend early (if I may so humbly say), but electric bicycles are everywhere now. Last week a mother passed me on one of those monster e-bikes with a container on the front for two children… and her two sons were in it! (This wasn’t the exact model, but something like that.) Everyone seemed to be having a good time.
GLAAD wants you to stop using the term “homosexual”. Good words help good thinking, and good thinking also takes time to do. One of the reasons they want to keep changing the words you’re “supposed” to use for a thing is to prevent your brain from settling into clarity about that thing.
Kamala Harris says the Biden admin is going to take strong action against the problem of domestic aircraft not having accessible restrooms. It made me think though that, this is basically the view of US history we tend to teach kids in K-12. “Things were bad in this way, and then the State passed some laws and things got better. And then things were bad in this new way, but then the State passed some laws and things got better. And then…” Subject students to that, and then are we surprised they become statist technocrats as young adults? We’ve spent twelve years telling them the state is their savior. (And even good schools could so easily fall into this. A few ways to do education well, a million ways to do it poorly.)
I’m not sure I’ve ever seen the “typical weather is reported as human-caused climate change DOOM” problem as bad as it is right now. Many reasons for that, but two of our struggles are that humans respond better to anecdotes than statistics, and no one can be an expert on the whole planet. An acquaintance on Twitter mentioned that when he lived in Florida, every time there was serious rainfall a certain street would turn into a river. But now when the same thing happens he sees videos of the flooding go viral as “look at what climate change is doing”. No, it’s just local engineering + weather. But nobody sharing the viral video knows that.
Tracy Hoeg and others have a new study out reporting that the CDC’s MMWR journal published a ton of bad papers on masks, which routinely made causal claims unwarranted from their data, virtually never cited conflicting evidence, and so on. One of the issues in science today is that trash studies that promote a preferred narrative are fast-tracked to easy publication, whereas excellent studies that contradict a preferred narrative are nitpicked on every little thing, ideally until they are killed.
The Left has come out so strongly against Moms for Liberty because they know the power of identity-based appeals. (Really, if you’re so inclined, go marvel at how dishonest and propagandistic the Moms for Liberty Wikipedia page is now.) There is a real danger many otherwise not-paying-much-attention mothers will learn about the group, be attracted to it and want to know more. Whatever else you might say about them, Left-wing tactics tend to be highly effective, and when you see the Left adopt an "all hands on deck" push-back / smear campaign it's usually because the Right has, probably accidentally because the Right is pretty dumb about these things, started using a usual Left-wing tactic, and it worries them.
Joe Biden’s FTC pressured Ernst and Young, the big accounting firm, to produce a negative report about Twitter after Musk took over and decided to stop censoring posts critical of Leftism. The federal government needs to be shrunk in size by about 80%. A real problem with a “regulations for everything” society is that if the state wants to punish a dissenter, they’ll find some excuse to do it. There’s a rule out there somewhere to harass you with. “Give me a man and the paragraph will be found”, someone told me.
THE END
Re 3.: Electric bicycles are all over the place here in Germany. We use them all the time to get around in our small (but rather hilly) town. They are particularly popular among older people (who are now spending much more time outdoors, getting some exercise - the benefits are definitively outweighing the costs of rising numbers of bike accidents).
But look at the prices, particularly of those container e-bikes! You can get a decent used car for that money (yeah, for how long, you might ask). And I'll always prefer a standard e-bike plus trailer for flexibility.
Excellent!