Archive for 2017

FAY WELDON: Feminism Has Left Two Thirds of Women Worse Off. Well, that’s not surprising. Feminism is about remaking society to suit the preferences of a minority of women.

Plus, heresy: “Not all women are good women. There are as many bad women as bad men.”

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: The Bar Exam: What’s The Right Number To Flunk? “Having given no thought whatsoever to how a ‘cut score’ was determined, I had always assumed that there was some empirical basis, some firm, rational measure, below which a bar exam taker was just too pathetically stupid to be allowed near clients. After all, if a couple of people hanging out in a bar somewhere, drinking some boilermakers, said to one another, ‘hey, let’s cut them off at 133,’ and they all laughed and nodded, that would seem kinda arbitrary. Would all those really smart law deans let that happen? . . . So the law examiners, the law school deans, the law professors, the American Bar Association, the courts, took some random number and used it as the cut rate for passing the bar exam? So we thought you folks weren’t blithering idiots were smart enough to figure out a pass rate that would establish minimal competency and protect the public from a guild of goofballs? And what you’re telling us is that there really was a grand conspiracy of dunces who shrugged and mumbled, ‘I dunno, 133 sounds about right. Okay with youse guys?'”

RUN IN 2020, HILLARY! 2016 WAS JUST A FLUKE! Here’s a list of everyone Hillary Clinton blamed this week for 2016 (she’s not on it).

She didn’t mention, for example, the fact that she didn’t set foot in Wisconsin once during the entire general election. She didn’t mention her team’s initial decision to frame the campaign in terms of how voters could help her (“I’m with her!”) and not vice versa. She didn’t mention her team’s mind-boggling decision to outsource part of its millennial outreach efforts to Al Gore, 69, and Dave Matthews, 50. She didn’t mention the campaign’s bizarre decision to send Lena Dunham to North Carolina. She didn’t mention the moment she claimed at a fundraiser in New York City that “half” of Trump’s supporters were “irredeemable” bigots.

Clinton also ignored all mentions of the fact her team actively ignored and took for granted disaffected white and working class voters whom Obama had won, even after Bill Clinton, who won the rust belt twice, implored them to reconsider their strategy.

The point of this isn’t to pile on or twist the knife, but Clinton and her campaign got a lot wrong. They need to own it instead of just blaming Putin and misogyny.

Oh, let’s twist the knife a little.

WELL, THAT’S ONE WAY TO PUT IT: “California’s gas tax hike shows governor’s political skill” reads an AP headline this weekend.

Just think of them as Democrats with bylines — who love any opportunity to see their readers punished with higher gas taxes, no matter what the shape of the economy locally or nationally — and it all makes sense.

(On the other hand, Jerry Brown won his last election with 60 percent of the vote. What did California residents expect would happen next?)

Related: “California doubles down on stupid – Court upholds cap and trade program, new fuel tax coming,” Anthony Watts wrote on Friday, adding, “Watch businesses fly out of California now…even faster than before.”

Update: Former SNL cast member Rob Schneider both congratulates and levels Brown in a single tweet.

WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: 3-D-Printed Sneakers, Tailored to Your Foot. “Throw out your custom insoles. Adidas is selling shoes with soles that will soon include bespoke shock absorbers.” Faster, please.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Colleges Try to Get Rid of Inconvenient Professors. “What these cases (and many similar ones) demonstrate is the weakness of oversight in higher education. College officials shouldn’t think they have free rein to pursue petty vendettas against faculty members or fire those who want to uphold standards, but often they do.”

NOSTALGIA FOR THE DAYS OF MASS MEDIA: Television’s Anniversary Frenzy — After the success of O.J. Simpson shows, TV producers comb history for material; L.A. riots, death of Princess Diana, Monica Lewinsky scandal set for big play.

No wonder TV is obsessed with nineties nostalgia; it was the last time America had anything approaching a unified culture, before the World Wide Web dramatically accelerated what Alvin Toffler dubbed the “demassification” of media in his 1980 book, The Third Wave. (And subsequently gave rise to social media, which quickly became a weaponized platform with the Two-Minute Hate of the day.)

It’s TV’s equivalent of the movie industry glomming onto mass media-era franchises such as Batman, Star Wars, Star Trek, and James Bond, to keep an otherwise splintered audience returning to theaters to reduce the crapshoot odds of movies that each costs hundreds of millions of dollars to make. (And why Sony’s alienating huge swatches of potential moviegoers by trolling them during the rollout of Lady Ghostbusters was so stupid.)

Of course, these days, it isn’t only the Web that’s fracturing American culture.

THE SCIENCE OF THE COREGASM.

HOW’S THAT FOR YOUR POSTWAR COMMIE CONSPIRACY, MANDRAKE? NBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell: What if Putin and Trump arranged the Syria bombing to distract from Russiagate?

Man, when I dubbed them “The John Birch Left” for seeing racism, sexism, homophobia, and the Koch Brothers everywhere in 2014, I had no idea Democrats would also be looking for Russians under every bed just two years later.

Related: MSNBC Host’s Fact-Free Conspiracy Theory about Who is Responsible for Chemical Attack.