Monthly Archives: February 2014

The Minimum Wage, Part 1

February 27, 2014 – 1:30 pm

There’s been a lot of argument lately about whether to raise the minimum wage, and I haven’t had much to say about it in these pages. But a comment in a recent thread got me digging into the topic more deeply than I had before, and so it’s time for a post about it, I […]

By Malcolm | Posted in The Economy | Comments (4)

Forward!

February 27, 2014 – 12:16 pm

In a Takimag article called Useless Mouths, John Derbyshire looks at the road ahead, as technology displaces more and more workers. I recall that this sort of gloomy forecast was common when I was a boy, but I think this time round it’s more on the mark. (Barring a Butlerian Jihad, that is.) Things have […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Technology | Comments (0)

Service Notice

February 25, 2014 – 12:56 am

We’ll probably be offline for a few days. Meanwhile, here’s something interesting to read. Update: this is a good one too: with a hat tip to Bill K., a fine rant from VDH.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (4)

The Idols Of The Tribe

February 22, 2014 – 2:01 pm

Our previous post touched once again on how liberal orthodoxy habituates its adherents to deny reality and suppress the expression of truth. One such truth is the near-total hegemony of liberal orthodoxy itself in the social sciences, and of course our leading liberal commenter has wasted no time in denying it. (As I said in […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Science, HBD | Comments (67)

Battle Lines

February 21, 2014 – 10:49 pm

Last year I wrote this about liberal orthodoxy’s unavoidable antagonism to truth: A sine qua non for the modern liberal ideologue is a flair for living comfortably in a state of cognitive dissonance. This is made necessary by the internal contradictions of his worldview, and by its frequent, and calamitous, collisions with the social, political, […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Science, Religion, HBD | Comments (16)

Where Yinz From?

February 19, 2014 – 8:23 pm

I’m working late, so all I have for you tonight is this little quiz. Give it a go.

By Malcolm | Posted in Language | Comments (17)

On Reaction

February 19, 2014 – 12:49 am

Julius Evola, from the opening pages of Men Among The Ruins: Recently, various forces have attempted to set up a defense and a resistance in the sociopolitical domain against the extreme forms in which the disorder of our age manifests itself. It is necessary to realize that this is a useless effort, even for the […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Reaction | Comments (29)

Uh-Oh!

February 17, 2014 – 11:05 pm

From Australia’s News.com.au: New forms of discrimination, known as “neoracism”, are taking hold in scientific research, spreading the belief that races exist and are different in terms of biology, behaviour and culture, according to anthropologists who spoke at the annual American Association for the Advancement of Science conference in Chicago. This would be bad enough […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Science | Comments (0)

Links

February 15, 2014 – 3:33 pm

Yep, they’ve been piling up again. (Just like the snow is supposed to do, again, here in the Outer Cape tonight.) — Life, and love, in Russia. — The GDP of American states and foreign nations. — Theodore Dalrymple on the suppression of dissent. — See above. — More from Russia. — The most beautiful […]

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (4)

The Dark Enlightenment Exposed

February 13, 2014 – 10:11 pm

In which blogger Mark Shea is shamelessly pwned by a spectacularly imaginative troll. Here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Reaction | Comments (3)

Recoil

February 13, 2014 – 10:01 pm

Some heartening news on the Second Amendment front: First, the good people of Connecticut are defying that state’s new registration laws with some old-fashioned civil disobedience. This is what you get when you pass bad laws: people will not respect them, and will not obey them. Second, the Ninth Circuit (!) has tossed out, as […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Guns | Comments (3)

Caudillo

February 11, 2014 – 8:11 pm

Got two items in the mail today from Barack Obama’s Ministry of Truth, shortly after learning that He had decided, on a whim, to change an explicitly articulated (and politically damaging) proviso of the healthcare law until after the upcoming elections. Make sure you read the letter from ‘Cathi’, which I’ve pasted in below the […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Rubbish | Comments (5)

The Employer Mandate

February 11, 2014 – 12:17 pm

   

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (0)

Plug

February 10, 2014 – 11:47 pm

If any of you happen to be baseball fans, my son Nick has just launched a new website: Pitcher GIFS. Go have a look. .

By Malcolm | Posted in Sport | Comments (10)

Cheer Up!

February 10, 2014 – 11:18 pm

Here’s your antidote for those Monday blues: two stories to warm your heart. First you’ll be glad to see that New York State residents can own an AR-15 after all, and at the same time show just how foolish these hysterical “assault-rifle” bans — which prohibit, on the basis of superficial appearance, weapons that are […]

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (3)

How Can This Be?

February 10, 2014 – 1:28 am

The CBS program 60 Minutes reported tonight, to everyone’s astonishment and dismay, on a recent, and heretofore completely unsuspected, scientific discovery. The context was specific — differences in the effect of the sleeping pill Ambien on men and women — but it appears, shockingly, that the scope of the problem might be far more general, […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Science, Religion, Reaction, Darwin and Biology | Comments (21)

Food For Thought

February 8, 2014 – 12:06 am

A while back, the comment-thread of a post about the government shutdown turned into a discussion about the obesity of the American poor. A commenter remarked: The reason why many poor people are obese, of course, is that the cheapest foods tend to be high in carbs and low in nutrients, which often leads to […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture | Comments (13)

Selected Shorts

February 6, 2014 – 5:41 pm

Some good reads from the Web today: Matt Ridley on inequality. Kevin Williamson on feminism. From the Statistics Lab at Cambridge University, a look at some climate-alarmist buncombe.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (7)

Little By Little

February 3, 2014 – 11:23 pm

The Second Amendment notwithstanding, it appears that some pretty serious infringement is under consideration in Massachusetts, right-to-bear-arms-wise. Boston.com reports (my emphasis): More than a year after the school shootings in Newtown, Conn., a panel of academic experts today released a long-awaited report recommending that Massachusetts tighten its gun laws, which are already considered among the […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Guns | Comments (2)

Daniel Dennett on Sam Harris on Free Will

February 2, 2014 – 11:43 pm
This entry is part 14 of 15 in the series Free Will

I used to spill a lot of ink here about the question of free will. In the most recent of a series of thirteen related posts on the topic, I mentioned a disagreement on this topic between two writers whose names are often linked: the philosopher Daniel Dennett and the neuroscientist Sam Harris. Both are, […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Mind and Brain, Reason and Philosophy | Comments (9)

Paving The Road To Hell

February 1, 2014 – 10:59 pm

Over the years readers have mentioned to me that too much of the discussion here takes place in the comment-threads, which are often far longer than the posts themselves. The days go by, the posts roll away down the screen, and exchanges that happen days after the original post are, effectively, hidden. I’ve been trying […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture | Comments (27)