Hello from dissertation land. As the Moron Horde meme goes: #Twoweeks! (if all goes well at least). I wanted to write briefly about Verad Mehta’s mini tweet storm that starts here: In twenty years, the sociology of scientific knowledge/science studies folks are going to have a field day with the "I love science" crowd. — Varad Mehta…
Category: News and Commentary
Some Quick And Random Thoughts On “The Pile On.”
As I said, these thoughts will be quick and somewhat random. I got feedback from my dissertation readers, and while it’s not awful it’s not exactly great either. So my free time is more or less nil until I figure this out. But I felt like this was worth trying to put words to. So the…
Nothing So Permanent As a Goverment Program
The original Friedman quote said “temporary government program” but I think it works this way as well. And today’s events cementing ObamaCare seem to prove that point. So what happened? Much blame will be thrown around. Trump Fans will blame congress. Trump Haters will blame Trump and Democrats will try to take credit for what…
It’s not just India
Why is India so filthy? | The Ugly Indian | TEDxBangalore I’m back, despite popular demand. I just came across this video, and like this guy’s perspective, which could usefully be adopted here in our blighted areas. The question is how to promote these types of initiatives here? Thoughts?
(Re)Peeling An Onion: Obamacare Edition
Obamacare, like ogres and onions, stinks and has layers. Repealing it involves removing those layers and at the very least putting things back the way they were (ideally, making them better.) Given that congress never wants to: a) relinquish power or b) stop funneling money to their states/congressional districts, removing these layers was going to…
Political Football
Over the weekend, I engaged in a discussion with Friend of the Blog @tmi3rd. The topic of our discussion was what to think about shutting down a Shakespeare play over what Julius Caesar looks like. In part, going through my mind was this article by Popehat on free speech principles. A few points to get…
Apparently We Won’t Always Have Paris After All
The problem with “the Pen and the Phone” is that every president has a pen and any number of phones. What’s easily established is just as easily destroyed. Yesterday, Trump “Pulled out” of the Paris Accords, and I’m going to take a little different approach here and say: The arguments for leaving the Accord were…
Life Imitates Graduate School
So for people who aren’t aware, I’m finishing up a PhD in Health Care Ethics. (It’s bioethics, but the program predates the broad use of that term in the mid-90s so we use the older name.) I’m in the dissertation writing phase (which is why posts here have been so sporadic.) Honestly I’ve been in…
If I Really Wanted To Kill All the Sick People
This is the lefts current claim about AHCA: Republicans just want to kill all the sick people. Let’s skip, for the moment, my qualms about AHCA (which I’m not a fan of for tons of reasons.) Let’s also set aside that it’s unlikely to look anything like it does now when it comes out of…
Postmodernism’s House Of Cards
https://twitter.com/charlescwcooke/status/859750500304121857 So, let’s recap what’s going on here for a moment: Junior philosopher publishes paper suggesting that if you support the idea of transgender then transrace may be on the table more senior (postmodern) philosophers FREAK THE HELL OUT and launch an attack on her The attack hits many marks and may be successful in…