Worthwhile Reading & Viewing

Some great spiderweb pictures

Glacier National Park pictures from D L Sly, who writes at Villainous Company

High school principal bans Chik-fil-A at Booster Club events.  She justifies her decision on grounds of “inclusivity and diversity.”  Well, I guess that could be one translation of the German term Gleichschaltung.

SWAT team raid on barbershop rebuked by appeals court

Wishful science:  “if there’s little incentive to publish negative results, whatever reigning paradigm is operating in a given field will be very resistant to change”

Years ago, Arthur Koestler asserted that human beings are basically crazy and that maybe it would be possible to develop a sanity-improving drug and put it in everyone’s drinking water.  I was reminded of Koestler’s suggestion by this:  Should we all take a bit of lithium?

Avoiding managerial groupthink with the right kind of diversity

People succeed where systems fail

Arguing with Leftists:  How narratives trump everything

Making subway cars in Yonkers:  a photo essay

6 thoughts on “Worthwhile Reading & Viewing”

  1. Arguing with the left is a recipe for frustration and I try to avoid it. I was discussing this with my younger son yesterday at his son’s baseball game. Three of my children are leftists and two are conservative. He is one of the latter. The reasons why are not easily deciphered. The two oldest are lawyers and one is a government employee. One is highly educated but in soft subjects. None is in science, a situation I regret.

    It’s best to concentrate on baseball, I guess.

  2. MK…arguing with Leftists is indeed usually quite frustrating, but I think it’s necessary if we are to have any hope of saving this country. I also think it’s necessary to segment the market, so to speak—there are various degrees and types of Leftists, some of them more approachable than others.

    I think many of the Outer Circle of American “progressives” have political views & thought process similar to the character Lammchen in Hans Fallada’s novel Little Man, What Now?, which was set in late-Weimar Germany. (I reviewed the book here)

    She had a few simple ideas: that most people are only bad because they have been made bad, that you shouldn’t judge anybody because you never know what you would do yourself, that the rich and powerful think ordinary people don’t have the same feelings as they do–that’s what Lammchen instinctively believed, though she hadn’t thought it out.

  3. I have two kinds of leftists in my own children. Two are lawyers and are convinced that they know far more than I do. They are impermeable and, for family peace, I leave them alone. The other is another daughter who is the one who refused to read “The Blank Slate” a few years ago when I suggested it. She said she wouldn’t read it until I read “The Mismeasure of Man” by Stephen Jay Gould. When I told her I had read it and had it in my library, she still wouldn’t read “The Blank Slate.”

    Now, she is about ten years older and more willing to listen to discussion although she still has the leftist mindset. I might get her to reconsider after more time. Life has been teaching her that some of her ideas are not working.

    I deal with medical students all the time but I find that they are far less interested in single payer than they were ten years ago. At that time, a group of them asked me to be advisor to their group on single payer. They didn’t realize I was opposed and all they knew was that I was pretty knowledgeable about it. Now, I see no interest in single payer among medical students.

    My social circles are other wise pretty limited. I do read and comment on other blogs and find the leftist ones have closed their minds. Two that I used to read and comment on will no longer permit comments that disagree. It’s too bad. Huffington Post is one I still read a bit and it is interesting to see what they post as an index of what the left is thinking about. The Kardashians are more prominent than physics, for example.

  4. I should add that one source of frustration is the discussion of evolution on conservative blogs. I have stirred up considerable anger and opposition at Ricochet and at Ann Althouse’s blog. My offense was posting a comment that I would not write a letter of recommendation to medical school for a student who did not believe in evolution. From the responses, you would think I was the czar of medical school admissions.

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