Monthly Archives: April 2012

Twitter: Where Dissent is Punished.

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The Progressive celebration of free speech continues.

As our late-night-owl readers know, after Twitter reinstated conservative activist Chris Loesch’s account in the wee hours of Sunday night/Monday morning, the progressive flag-spam lynch mob — a vicious group of free speech-squelching Twitter users who trigger automatic suspensions by falsely “mass reporting” conservatives as “spammers” — took him down again and again.

Other McCain offers the Marcusian rationale for silencing people in the name of tolerance. At Protein Wisdom, Darleen Click notes the “hit list”.

But don’t call them fascists. It hurts their iddle feewings.

Let's go liberate stuff from being different from us!

 

Joe Nocera: You’re Too Stupid to Handle Your Money

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At least, I think that’s the stealth argument he’s making: (h/t: Memeorandum)

That data starkly backs up Ghilarducci’s contention. According to the Employee Benefit Research Institute, for instance, only 22 percent of workers 55 or older have more than $250,000 put away for retirement. Stunningly, 60 percent of workers in that same age bracket have less than $100,000 in a retirement account. Ghilarducci told me that the average savings for someone near retirement in America right now is $100,000. Even buttressed by Social Security, that’s not going to last very long.

So give your money to Big Daddy White Boss and let him dole out such crumbs as he thinks you deserve?

Yeah, no thanks.

Lileks on the Horror of Instagram

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I don’t normally comment on clearly not-long-for-this-world aesthetic fads, because that would require me to care about them, and I have very little room for Caring About Things after I’m done damning the Proggies and congratulating my own cleverness. But the Internet’s reigning King of Nostalgia is able to marshal sound and solid arguments against the lameness:

This isn’t even about using the filters that crappify the image; I’ve used 70s filters, but only when I take a picture of something that looks like it’s straight out of the 70s.

Otherwise: no. 1) It’s anchronistic. It takes something contemporary and makes it look as if it’s old, which it cannot possibly be. That computer, that dog, that iPod, these things did not exist then, so a faded picture of the items makes no sense. 2) the faded look is not a result of an aesthetic choice. It’s just the product of time and decay. The only reason it sums up some vague sense of nostalgia is because you’ve been told that’s what old photos looked like. They didn’t look like that at first. In fact they were quite colorful, and didn’t look as if they’d been dipped in urine for a week. 3) It puts distance between the viewer and the image. A good black-and-white photos from the early 60s, say, connects immediately, and if you’re aware of the passage of time, it’s because of the clothing or the setting. A faded picture makes you aware of the passage of time because of the condition of the image, not its content.

Nostalgia may be experienced legitimately. It should never be manufactured.

Equal Pay for Equal Work

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It turns out, that’s what’s happening (h/t Instapundit):

The Labor Department defines full-time as 35 hours a week or more, and the “or more” is far more likely to refer to male workers than to female ones. According to the department, almost 55% of workers logging more than 35 hours a week are men. In 2007, 25% of men working full-time jobs had workweeks of 41 or more hours, compared with 14% of female full-time workers. In other words, the famous gender-wage gap is to a considerable degree a gender-hours gap.

And we all knowwhy that’s happening, the rug-rats. And it’s not because guys won’t help out:

But even if we could put a magic potion in the nation’s water supply and turn 50% of men into Mr. Mom, that still leaves the growing number of women with no father in the house. Over 40% of American children are now born to unmarried women. A significant number—though not a majority—are living with their child’s father at birth. But in the next few years when those couples break up, which is what studies show they tend to do, guess who will be left minding the kids

If this kind of talk keeps up, people will start talking about the consequences of pre-marital sexual activity. Stacy McCain, call your office.

Oh, and making it work more family-friendly? That’ll help, but it won’t help 23 percent worth:

Which brings us to the second proposed solution for the hours gap: generous family-leave and child-care policies. Sweden and Iceland are frequently held up as models in this regard, and they do have some of the most extensive paternity and maternity leave and publicly funded child care in the world.

Yet even they also have a persistent hours and wage gap. In both countries, mothers still take more time off than fathers after the baby arrives. When they do go back to work, they’re on the job for fewer hours. Iceland’s income gap is a yawning 38%—that is, the average women earns only 62 cents to a man’s dollar. Even Sweden’s 15% gap—though lower than our 23% one—is far from full parity.

Women just seem to prioritize differently than men do once the wee ones come into the world. Just in time for National Offend a Feminist Week (or am I late for that?)

Poem in a Pocket Day

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My cliche choice:

THE SECOND COMING

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Yeats rules.

Justice for Trayvon

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George Zimmermann may or may not be guilty of murder. I suspect not, as the evidence indicates that Trayvon attacked him and was beating him senseless when Zimmerman fired. But that’s what you have trials for.

Man Beaten By Mob, In Critical Condition

What Parker says happened next could make the fallout from the brutal beating even worse. As the attackers walked away, leaving Owen bleeding on the ground, Parker says one of them said “Now thats justice for Trayvon.”

So justice for someone who was killed while beating another man is to take the first honky who steps into your cross-hairs and beat him bloody.

Man Beaten By Mob, In Critical Condition | WKRG

STACY MCCAIN CHIMES IN: And points out that the victim is hardly a model citizen. We shouldn’t have any problem admitting that, as it makes not the slightest bit of difference.