These articles have given me food for thought and a lot of information over the past few days.
- Courtesy of a link at The Roadkill Diaries, I came across an MIT article about 'Why Complex Systems Fail' (link is to an Adobe Acrobat document in .PDF format). Very interesting to engineers, nerds and geeks.
- Popular Mechanics offers 'Absolutely Everything You Need to Know About How Tires Work'. This is a really worthwhile read for all drivers, considering how we trust our lives to our tires every single day.
- In the light of President Obama's revised policy towards Cuba, Michael J. Totten's article about a visit to Havana makes for very interesting reading. I wonder how long it'll take before that old Communist bastion crumbles and falls?
- John Hayward looks at 'Collectivism and the presumption of guilt'. He examines many of the current controversies in our society, and points out:
What all of these stories, and so many others, have in common is the assumption of bad faith by liberals, who claim they can read the minds of everyone from dinner-party guests to society at large and detect the dark secret impulses seething beneath every word and deed. The worst bad motives are assumed for every action, including something as harmless as a short woman asking a taller department-store patron to grab a box of detergent off the top shelf for her. If events that cannot be construed as social-justice crimes are not ready to hand, the liberal will simply invent them, transforming lies into Deeper Truth with the magical power of leftist ideology. We’re even presumed guilty of crimes no one actually committed, most notably the horrible “anti-Muslim backlash” that never actually happens after Muslim terrorists commit atrocities.
This presumption of guilt is absolutely crucial to collectivism. The Left must teach its subjects to think of themselves as criminals. That’s the only way law-abiding people will endure levels of coercive power that would normally require specific accusations, a fair trial, and the possibility of appeals. Social-justice “crimes” can be prosecuted without any of those things. There is no appeal from the sentence, and no statute of limitations on the crimes, as any left-winger who thinks today’s American citizens need to suffer for the historical offense of slavery will be happy to explain to you. There’s no evidence you can present in your defense, for the Left has read your mind, and knows better than you what demons lurk in its recesses.
This is one reason the Left dislikes the trappings of constitutional law and order. The presumption of innocence is highly inconvenient for social crusades; it’s the antithesis of collective political “justice.”
Speaking of the left, progressives and collectivists, my fellow author, blogger and friend Larry Correia has put up three articles in recent weeks addressing the phenomenon in his own inimitable and very funny style.
- Why I don’t like Social Justice Warriors
- Fisking the Guardian again, this time for HP Lovecraft
- CHRISTMAS NOUN 7: Attack of the Social Justice Noun
Go read, and enjoy.
Peter
1 comment:
On your second point... no, that article doesn't cover nearly enough. Especially this time of the year, when freezing conditions are sort of culturally expected even where they don't actually happen much.
Doesn't say a thing about tread pattern, road conditions and temperature behaviour... there's a lot more to it than just wet/dry. (Some of the "M+S" tires are only any good on the M, really. From experience...)
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