URLs du Jour

2018-05-13

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  • After a series of clinkers, Proverbs 13:20 actually provides good advice:

    20 Walk with the wise and become wise,
        for a companion of fools suffers harm.

    Corollary: if you can't tell whether your companions are wise or foolish, maybe you're the fool.


  • "Incels"—the lazy person's way to say "involuntary celibates"—have been in the news, mainly because a self-described Canadian incel killed 10 people with a van. At NR (possibly paywalled), Kevin D. Williamson has Advice for Incels.

    There has been some pretty elevated stuff written on that subject, and if you want to take that particular high road, then Professor Robert George of Princeton is your guy. But consider the low road, too. There’s another conclusion, maybe a little bit cynical, that could be drawn from this: If you are a sexually frustrated young man, the smart play would be to join a church.

    Seriously. Join a church.

    That advice won’t do much good for the guys toggling between anime porn and Reddit all night while concocting elaborate revenge fantasies. It probably is not the case that those guys are maladjusted fruitcakes because they can’t get a girl; more likely, they can’t get a girl because they’re maladjusted fruitcakes. But you more or less normal, nonpsychotic, workaday types having trouble meeting a girl: Join a church. Today. Or Sunday. If you don’t know which one to go to, pick whichever one your parents or grandparents went to, unless they were hippies or atheists, in which case go Catholic.

    RTWT, and if you can't get it because of the paywall, just pay the money. It's the best advice you'll get this year.

    Bonus: in his closing paragraph, refers to an alleged Billy Graham quote of which I was unaware, but shows the guy could be drily amusing:

    If you find a perfect church don’t join it: You’d spoil it.


  • Viking Pundit comments on the recent stupid embarrassment at the University Near Here, where student activists attempted to shut down and (failing that) disrupt the appearance of Dave Rubin, sponsored by the UNH chapter of Turning Point USA: Shut up and die in New Hampshire.

    These people are trapped in a collective form of insanity. All Rubin is trying to say is that hate speech exists, and it sucks, but there's nothing the government can do about it. It just never occurs to them (well, maybe that rambling girl got it) that subjective laws designed to constrain speech you don't like can be turned around to constrain speech you do.

    "That rambling girl" can probably be seen and heard in the video which VP included:

    It's over an hour, and (disclaimer) I haven't watched it myself.


  • At Reason, Baylen Linnekin notes some different insanity: Vegetarians and Meat Eaters Are Trying to Stifle Interstate Commerce.

    Nearly a decade ago, vegetarian and vegan activists in California scored a policy victory that raised the stakes for meat consumers across the country. Assembly Bill No. 1437, signed by then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, prohibited California poultry farmers from housing their hens in subjectively small cages. This was a huge policy change in and of itself, but the law contained an even more far-reaching provision: an eventual ban on the sale of all eggs laid in such a cage, even if the chickens were raised in another state.

    These types of laws can cut the opposite way as well. In Missouri, legislators are currently considering a ban on labelling products as "meat" if they come from plant matter or were grown in a lab, regardless of how closely they resemble actual animal meat.

    In both cases, state legislators are attempting to regulate interstate commerce, but that's not their job.

    Also see: the Live Free Or Die state's gangster tactics in attempting to block direct-to-consumer wine shipments from out of state.


  • And Daniel J. Mitchell provides Two Sentences that Capture the Essential Difference Between Libertarians and Statists. Which he captured in a tweet from Jacob Leddy:


Last Modified 2024-01-25 9:50 AM EDT