It is deeply, solidly ironic that at almost the very hour that US forces were bagging Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, fearless leader of the ISIL/ISIS-established caliphate in the Middle East, that the catastrophically-unfunny cast of Saturday Night Live had just finished ragging on President Trump for supposedly coddling ISIS by pulling out of Syria. There hasn’t been a case of timing this bad since 70ies Weatherman terrorist-turned-educator Bill Ayres launched his memoir of bomb-building and social mayhem the very week that Osama Bin Laden’s merry crew of jihadis murdered nearly 3,000 Americans and others in a single day, on September 11th, 2001.
Islam
Seth Barrett Tillman: The Tale of the Swedish Prosecutor, the Citizen, and the Human Being
See: The Case Against Deporting Immigrants Convicted of Crimes
Then see:
The prosecutor made a recommendation against deportation.
The prosecutor reasoned that the defendant was unlikely to be rehabilitated by confinement, and therefore, the defendant was likely to commit the same crime again. The prosecutor’s position was that whether the defendant goes on to rape a Swede (or a non-Swede in Sweden) or someone in the defendant’s own home country should not be considered because the health, safety, and lives of all potential future victims should be valued equally. And equality is a value upon which we all do or should agree.
Did the prosecutor act rightly or wrongly?
Po nan Jwèt la: Asymétri Kache nan Lavi Chak Jou
Taleb, Nassim N., Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life. New York City: Random House, 2018.
NB: precisely because I regard Taleb as a national treasure and have considerable respect for his work, I am not going to pull punches here. I get to do this because I have … skin in the game, and not only in Haiti[1] (where I wrote this post over the past ten days, thus the Kreyòl Ayisyen title), but in a couple-three moderately hair-raising situations back in KC, which I will relate when appropriate. Which might be never; see Matthew 6:1-4 (cited by Taleb on page 186).
Getting this out of the way—buy this book, read it, and recommend it to others. I say this very much irrespective of what might be called the Manifold-Taleb delta, which is not altogether trivial, as I will explain in some detail—again, as a sign of respect—below. Immediately below, in fact.
Worthwhile Reading
A law professor writes about undoing the dis-education of Millenials.
Small liberal arts colleges: self-destruction via runaway administration.
Ammo Grrrll doesn’t share the obsession about ‘people who look like me’.
Are we living in the dystopia that Young Adult fiction warns us about?
The Assistant Village Idiot has some thoughts about local aristocracy and the nationalization of culture.
Bolshevism and Militant Islam. Some thoughts about historical parallels from Niall Ferguson, with comments by Stuart Schneiderman.
The current Senate tax bill draft contains some very bad ideas about taxation of employee stock options and restricted stock grants.
Worthwhile Reading & Viewing
A photo essay about an old mill, by Gerard Van der Leun
From welder to welding robot programmer
Privilege hoarding: Harvard and granite countertops
A 2006 post by Dr Sanity on the Western Left and radical Islam
Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, 30 years later.
Cold Spring Shops writes about education, mating, fertility, and work.