Utopia, you are standing in it!

If you had any doubts about Ilhan Omar’s Islamist and anti-Israel agenda in Congress, have a look at her latest attempt at legislation: House Resolution 496 (see pdf here).

The two screenshots below, which link to the articles, are from the Al-Monitor and the Forward, respectively.

From the Forward:

The bill was prepared by Omar, her fellow Muslim Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, and Democrat John Lewis of Georgia, an African-American with a long history of civil rights activism. (This underscores the sad fact that the black community is becoming increasingly dismissive of Israel’s right to exist. The Black Muslims became explicit anti-Semites a long time ago.)

If you read the resolution, you’ll see that it’s clever, not mentioning BDS but instead describing boycotts that were harder to criticize; and also affirming Americans’ civil rights to boycott nations or companies—which doesn’t need affirming. But it also criticizes recent legislation created…

by Noah Smith

Noahpinion (September 03 2012)

Bryan Caplan is a thinker who is famous for his introspection. When he asks a question – “Why do people go to college?”, or “Why are poor people poor?”, his instinct is to carefully examine his own pre-existing ideas on the topic. Turning his own beliefs over and over, he examines them from every possible angle, mining his brain for insights.

This sounds like I’m making fun of Bryan, but really, introspection is quite a good technique for understanding the world in many cases. It can tell us much about how consciousness and reason work, about what is right and wrong (because morals = opinions), and other interesting topics. And to the degree that we accumulate knowledge incidentally or accidentally, introspection is valuable because it samples the influences we’ve accidentally aggregated. But, that said, there are questions for which introspection tends not to…

In this clip from the University of Chicago’s continuing Institute of Politics (IOP) discussions, CNN commenter Van Jones gives one of the best and most stirring arguments for free speech on college campuses that I’ve seen. Really stirring, especially for an extemporaneous answer to a question.  My favorite bit is this:

“My parents, and Monica Elizabeth Peek’s parents, marched; they dealt with fire hoses; they dealt with dogs; they dealt with beatings. You can’t deal with a mean tweet?”

Here’s the IOP description:

Clip from an event at the Institute of Politics with CNN commentators S.E. Cupp and Van Jones in conversation with IOP Director David Axelrod on the current state of politics in America. This event was part of “America in the Trump Era,” the IOP’s look at the changes – cultural, policy, media and otherwise – coming under a Trump administration.

This should be…

I used to think that InsideHigher Ed (IHE) was a pretty objective forum for reporting news from academia. But now, it seems, they’re going the way of BuzzFeed, publishing what is essentially a hit piece on Steve Pinker that, starting with his trivial assistance to Alan Dershowitz in the first prosecution of Jeffrey Epstein for sex crimes (Pinker interpreted the language of a statute, for chrissake), goes on to dredge up all the other accusations of Pinker from the last several years: he’s white, male, old, a sexist, and his scholarship is deficient. In other words, it goes beyond the ambit of the news to once again thrust a sword into Pinker. You can read the piece by clicking on the screenshot below.  Yes, I know where the title of the piece comes from, but it makes absolutely no sense to me in this context.

Note the prominent use…