Oct
16
2025

Snarking Will Continue Until Honesty Improves

Another cheap hit on my current CongressCritter (who's running for senator):

(Wish I had specified "Granite State taxpayers", but it's too late now.)

Also note his reminder that he's a fighting fighter who fights. Gotta throw some red meat to the base!

Also of note:

  • Some bad news from Katherine. You've probably been deemed a terrorist.

    Hope I get a cool roommate at Guantanamo.

  • [Amazon Link]
    (paid link)

    I'm willing to listen. And, as a matter of fact, I've purchased Charles Murray's recent book, and it's in my TBR system. (Amazon link at your right.) There's an excerpt at the Free Press, see what you think: I Thought I Didn’t Need God. I Was Wrong.

    The first unmistakable nudge involved the question, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” I first heard it put in those words by the late columnist and commentator Charles Krauthammer during a session of a chess club we started in the early 1990s. That I thought Charles had come up with it himself is proof of how unreflective I had been. Anyone who had taken any interest in theology would have encountered it long since. It’s one of the most famous questions in metaphysics.

    But I hadn’t heard it, and it caught me by surprise. When I had thought about the existence of the universe at all, I had taken it as a given. I am alive, I am surrounded by the world, the fact that I can ask the question presupposes that the universe exists. There’s nothing else to be said. It is a mystery with a lowercase m.

    Hearing the question stated so baldly and so eloquently made me start to take the issue seriously. Why is there anything? Surely things do not exist without having been created. What created all this? If you haven’t thought about it recently, this is a good time to stop and try to come up with your own answer.

    I don't have a good answer.

    One of my other webstops is Why Evolution Is True, run by strident atheist Jerry Coyne. He's always on the lookout for God-fearing people to rebut, and Murray's article is no exception. You can read his response here. And as one of my mottoes says: we link, you decide.

  • If you're looking for something new to be troubled by… At the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), Dylynn Lasky and Bobby Ramkissoon have one for you: The trouble with ‘dignity’.

    After the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, universities faced a dilemma that has become grimly familiar in the age of social media: what to do when a member of the campus community says something online that others find intolerable.

    Within days, institutions moved with visible urgency. Some suspended employees. Others terminated them outright. A few launched “investigations” whose conclusions seemed preordained. FIRE has condemned these actions (when taken by public institutions) as violations of the First Amendment and intervened in over a dozen cases.

    Yet the punishments themselves tell only half the story. Equally revealing were the justifications universities offered for them:

    • Clemson University declared that free speech “does not extend to speech that undermines the dignity of others.”
    • The University of Mississippi stated that a fired staff member’s comments about Kirk “run completely counter to our institutional values of civility, fairness, and respecting the dignity of each person.”
    • The president of Austin Peay State University said a faculty member’s social-media post “does not align with our commitment to mutual respect and human dignity” and was therefore grounds for termination.

    The message these colleges sent was unmistakable: offensive speech is not merely offensive, it is an assault on human dignity itself. And that, in the eyes of administrators, makes it punishable.

    It's the new "hate speech"!

    [If you missed it, here's my contribution to the debate from last month. I've always considered myself pretty absolute on free speech, but I totally understand the parents who don't want their kiddos being taught by an outright unhinged hater.]

  • Sshh, it's a secret. Rolling Stone commentators David Sirota and Jared Jacang Maher weigh in on some nightmarish scheme: The Right’s Secret Plan to Help Billionaires Buy Elections. J.D. Vance is involved! And oligarchs! (archive.today link)

    On the 20th anniversary of the creation of the Roberts Supreme Court, one point of consensus persists: Most Americans believe money corrupts the political process — and they want to overturn the Citizens United precedent that empowers oligarchs to buy elections.

    And yet, in two little-noticed cases — including one spearheaded by Vice President J.D. Vance — the high court could soon do the opposite, eliminating the last restrictions on campaign donations and obstructing law enforcement’s efforts to halt bribery.

    As we recount in our new book Master Plan, the Citizens United case was the culmination of conservatives’ 50-year master plan to deregulate the campaign finance system and legalize corruption. What started as an incendiary memo from soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell became one ruling equating money with constitutionally protected speech and another extending personhood rights to corporations.

    You can read the whole thing without getting the point of what Citizens United was actually about: the ability of government to ban a movie critical of Hillary Clinton. And (then) Solicitor General Elena Kagan also argued before SCOTUS that Your Federal Government could also use "campaign finance regulation" to ban political pamphlets and even books.

    Sirota and Maher don't seem to realize that restricting "money" in campaigns can be used simply to squelch free expression by whoever the government would prefer be silenced.

  • Muppet Newsflash. Jeff Maurer points out that AI Didn't Invent Dumb, False Bullshit. He is rebutting a thoughtless video from a site called Kurzegasagt", predicting AI doom.

    So, what, exactly, is the problem here? Is it that AI produces trite crap that’s full of misinformation? I agree that low-quality and misleading stuff is a problem — I personally consider TikTok to be Khufu’s Pyramid-sized monument to the stupidity of young people, and distortions and lies have made our politics less like a Socratic dialogue and more like two drunk guys trying to pants each other behind a Waffle House. The trite stuff does no good and the false stuff is actively bad, and I agree that society would be better off if there was less of that type of content.

    But we don't live in that universe.

Recently on the movie blog: