It’s not enough these days for dictionaries to record words and phrases and document as their meaning changes over time. Now, in line with Woke practice, dictionaries are actually running ahead of the pack, changing meanings and connotations to guide usage.
Or so it seems, at least to me, with the latest term: “sexual preference”, meaning either the sexes or genders with which one “prefers” to have sex, or to whom one is “oriented” sexually. And it’s the difference between “prefer” and “orient” that is the heart of this new debate. The debate, it appears, is over free will of a sort: whether one chooses to have sex with a certain gender, and you could have chosen otherwise, or whether one is constrained to have sex with members of a certain gender. To me, of course, there’s no difference here: “choose” is simply shorthand for what one does when facing…
To the profound question of “Who is a Maori”, the official definition, as far as I can make out, is “anybody who feels like a Maori”. Apart from anything else, to define something in terms of itself is a piece of logical nonsense, a fake definition and it is surely somewhat of a sobering thought that many millions of dollars of our money have been and will be dished out by a succession of governments on the basis of a fake definition. (You may laugh or cry at that — your choice!)
Only one Treaty
Some people refer to “the Maori version of the Treaty of Waitangi”. Well, no, in actual fact there is no “Maori version”, simply one Treaty of Waitangi and that is in the Ngapuhi dialect, modified of necessity by the inclusion of some important missionary-defined words owing to the…
I see that Judith Collins has taken some stick for comments she made suggesting that obesity was part due to personal choices.
Yes, genetics plays a hard but so does a diet comprising mainly junk food coupled with an aversion to proper exercise.
I admit to struggling with my weight over the years. I acknowledge I’m a bit of a Falstaffian character when it come to food and drink. I try to compensate that with a 20k daily workout on my Exercycle (listening to Concert FM).
Judith is right but, in this pc world, you’re wrong even if you’re right. It’s always someone else’s fault.
Sometimes the most important Supreme Court decisions are overlooked because of their technical nature. That is the case with the Supreme Court’s choice to hear jurisdictional claims in B.P. P.L.C., et al. v. Mayor and City Council of Baltimore.
The Court’s ruling will either allow cities to pursue superfluous nuisance claims against energy companies in state courts or limit the suits to federal courts that are less prone to accept broad liability claims.
These jurisdictional claims are significant because they set the appropriate scope of appellate review for these suits. Lawsuits predicated on federal laws and involving federal officers’ actions should be decided at the federal level. By agreeing to hear arguments in the Baltimore case, the Supreme Court is taking a crucial step…
The two most fundamental rules of logic are the Law of Noncontradiction and the Law of Transitive Properties. In fact, all of the other rules of logic stem from these two laws. Both laws are very simple and easy to understand, yet people frequently ignore or misuse them. Therefore I will attempt to explain how they actually work.
Law of Noncontradiction
This law simply states that something cannot be A and not A simultaneously. In other words, two mutually exclusive things cannot exist at the same time. So, for example, the Law of Noncontradiction tells us that it is impossible for both an immovable object and an unstoppable force to exist simultaneously, because each one cancels the other out. In other words, if there is an object that is truly immovable, then there cannot be an unstoppable force because this would contradict the properties of the immovable object. Conversely, if…
I’m a bit flummoxed by the following announcements of University-sponsored Zoom meetings emailed to us by our local Diversity and Inclusion Office.
Group Wellness Coaching for Students of Color
Monday, October 12: 6 – 8 p.m. Zoom
Join the Office of Multicultural Student Affairs (OMSA) and UChicago Student Wellness for this opportunity to work through shared wellness concerns and experiences in an open and supportive environment. Students will design wellness action plans and set goals for enhancing well-being. The session will be led by health educator Cassidy Wade. It is open to students of color in the College, graduate divisions, and professional schools.
Virtual Community for Black Women: Group Wellness Coaching Thursday, October 15: 6 – 8 p.m. Zoom Join OMSA and UChicago Student Wellness for an opportunity to work through shared wellness concerns and experiences in an open and supportive environment. Students will design wellness action plans and set goals for…
The other day Bret Stephens wrote an op-ed at the New York Times in which he bucked one of the paper’s proudest achievements: the 1619 Project, designed to be at once journalism, history, and a curriculum for secondary schools. Stephens was unsparing in his criticism, saying that the Project has “failed” and has given critics of the newspaper a “gift”. I applauded him for his bravery, and predicted his demise at the paper.
Thinking about it, though, I realize that the paper would be extremely foolish to let Stephens go, for that would cause a huge public outcry. He’s an established conservative columnist, and if he got released for doing what he should have done—criticizing a project that, although run by his employer, had become a public issue—the paper would be accused even more than it is already for being biased and one-sided. I expect Stephen will stay.
My columns on Sweden’s laissez-faire approach to the coronavirus always provoke an angry response. But it is striking that, the better Sweden does, the angrier its critics become.
Like anti-Trumpers who couldn’t hide their annoyance at the success of the U.S. economy, or British Remainers who longed for a recession so as to be able to say “I told you so” about Brexit, lockdown enthusiasts determinedly screen out the good news.
They trot out three main arguments. First, they say, “You can’t compare us to Sweden. It has a low population density.” Second, they argue that “Sweden hasn’t succeeded; it has had more deaths per capita than neighboring countries.” Third, the claim that “Sweden has taken an economic hit as well — the…
Ahead of Tuesday’sVirtual IHRParliaments, Politics and People seminar, we hear from Dr Eilish Gregory at the University of Reading. She will be responding to your questions about her research on Catholic Forfeitures during the English Revolution on Zoom between 5:15 p.m. and 6:30 p.m. on 20 October 2020. Details on how to join the discussion are available here or by contacting seminar@histparl.ac.uk.
This blog is based on Eilish’s full-length seminar paper, ‘Catholic Forfeitures during the English Revolution: Parliament and the Role of Sequestration Agents’, which is available here.
In November 1656, the Catholic delinquent William Blundell wrote to his nephew Thomas Selby, mentioning his recent dealings with the agent and lawyer Gilbert Crouch who was managing his sequestration affairs in London. Blundell’s estates in Little Crosby, Lancashire, were sequestered during the English Revolution because Blundell had fought for King Charles I against Parliament.
Thanks to Swiss Policy Research for providing perspective on the coronavirus contagion in a few charts. Their article is Covid: The Big Picture in 7 Charts, updated to October 10, 2020. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.
1) Global covid “cases” and deaths vs. all-cause deaths
Chart number one shows global covid deaths by September in blue (about 1 million) versus global all-cause deaths in purple (about 40 million). The chart also shows the cumulative number of global covid “cases” (i.e. positive PCR tests) – the so-called “casedemic” on top of the pandemic.
In contrast, the UN expects that the political reaction to the pandemic may put the livelihood of up to 1.6 billion people at immediate risk and may, by the end of 2020, push an additional 130 million people “to the brink of starvation” and an additional 150 million children into poverty.
Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
In Hume’s spirit, I will attempt to serve as an ambassador from my world of economics, and help in “finding topics of conversation fit for the entertainment of rational creatures.”
“We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error undetected will flourish and subvert”. - J Robert Oppenheimer.
Global covid deaths and…
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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