The Ease of Tyranny

The most frightening aspect of tyranny is how easily and quickly it can be established. Consider a small-scale tyranny, a hostage situation. Two or three guys with guns can easily hold hundred people hostage. In a similar way, most dictatorships only need to imprison or execute a small percentage of the population in order to wipe out all opposition. North Korea has about 200,000 political prisoners, which works out to less than 1% of the population. That figure is similar for the USSR under Stalin and Germany under Hitler. Most people who live in dictatorships face little hardship as long as they obey.

“The evils of tyranny are rarely seen but by him who resists it”

John Ray

Karen Straughan weighs in on Amanda Marcotte

Karen Straughan is the creator of many great antifeminist videos on YouTube. I sent her an email informing her of Amanda Marcotte's open challenge and was pleased to get a response. Here is the exchange. Click the pictures to enlarge.

I asked if I could put pics of these emails on my blog. Here is her response:

Anthony Weiner's website is still up

And can be viewed in all its glory here.

In case it gets taken down soon, here is a screen grab:

The thing that stood out to me were his 125 ideas. Successful politicians generally only push 3 or 4 main goals and are lucky if they accomplish even one of them.

To be fair, not all of the ideas are bad. But taken as a whole, they look preposterous. Here are some examples:

#29- Create a single-payer healthcare system for NYC
#68- Combat mold in public housing

Those two ideas appear on the same page. If the city government can't keep public housing free of mold, what chance is there that it could run a decent healthcare system? It's like a kid with a lemonade stand fantasizing about being a billionaire. Here's an idea- don't start a new project until you complete or close one you already started.

#65- Modernize the Dept. of Health's gender policies

Trans people are complaining that the gender on their ID does not match the gender they self-identify with. Currently, a sex change is required to change the gender on the ID. Is this really one of the most serious problems in NYC?

#67- Create an asthma map

I wonder if some of the asthma is from all that moldy public housing?

#85- Add financial literacy classes for high school students

Considering NYC's debt, the folks in city hall should take some too.

Here is about the only bit of sense I found on the whole site:

"Starting a business anywhere is hard. Launching one in New York City can be extra difficult because of the myriad of forms, regulations, and applications. Once launched, life doesn’t get easier in the face of ticketing, surprise inspections, and a relentless bureaucracy."

And does Weiner propose doing anything to reduce those bureaucratic obstacles? Nope!

None of the people running for office in NYC appear to understand what made the city prosperous in the first place. NYC in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was like Hong Kong today- a free market paradise which attracted hardworking entrepreneurs from all over the world.

And it was a safer city in the past as well. In 1943, NYC had only 44 murders, despite having a population of more than 7.4 million. NYC has 8.3 million people now and had over 414 homicides last year- and that was heralded as an improvement!

It is endlessly depressing to see how this once great city has been run into the ground.

There have never been identical groups of people

It's simple statement, but it has profound implications. One of the articles of faith among the left is that if a group such as women or blacks are smaller percentage of another group such as doctors, it can only be the result of discrimination.

This is false because there have never been proportional representation in any occupation or other group. Whether you compare races, genders, or nationalities, you will never find a situation where both groups are represented in a third group equal to their representation in the population. This has been the case throughout history.

"What's amazing to me is this notion, that people would be evenly represented, except for these institutional policies. That notion has such momentum behind it without a speck of evidence being asked or presented."

-Thomas Sowell

Take it away, Mr. Sowell

Great quotes on the difficulty of changing minds

"It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into."

-Jonathan Swift

"The driving dream of the idealist is that if he could only explain things to enough people, carefully enough, thoroughly enough, thoughtfully enough—why, eventually everyone would see, and then everything would be fixed."

-Michael Kelly

"Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don’t mean to do harm– but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves."

-T S Elliot

 "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

- Upton Sinclair 

No answer from Amanda Marcotte yet

And it appears I'm not the only one who's been ignored.

Feminists don't seem to like honest debate very much.

I have found some decent debates on feminism.

Did Obama get into Harvard because he was a legacy?

Obama's father graduated from Harvard, thus making his son a legacy. About half of legacies who apply to Harvard get admitted. Obama admits to being a poor student at Occidental, which begs the question of how he got into Colombia.

Obama's other main claim to fame is that he was the first black editor of the Harvard Law Review. On Harvard Law's website, I found this:

"Membership in the Harvard Law Review is limited to second- and third-year law students who are selected on the basis of their performance on an annual writing competition."

It also says that a total of 46 students become editors each year. Interesting, because every time I read about Obama at Harvard, they make a big deal about him being an editor.  

Furthermore:

"Fourteen editors (two from each 1L section) are selected based on a combination of their first-year grades and their competition scores. Twenty editors are selected based solely on their competition scores. The remaining editors are selected on a discretionary basis. Some of these discretionary slots may be used to implement the Review's affirmative action policy." 

Emphasis mine.  That's from this year. I don't know what it was years ago, but if anything, there were probably more discretionary slots. But suppose it was the same. 46 - (14+20) = 12. If Obama was one of those 12, it would appear that this achievement is not all it's cracked up to be. 

I would like to emphasize at this point that the only thing dumber than affirmative action is legacy admission. Obama may have benefited from both. I am much more impressed by achievements that have objective/measurable criteria, because that means the activity was not a suck-up/popularity contest. Getting into Harvard and becoming an editor look a lot like suck-up/popularity contests to me.  And for things like that, all it proves is that you are good at getting a person or a small group to like you. That's a useful skill but hardly extraordinary. I know because I've done it and so has everyone else who's ever gotten a job. 

I am tired of hearing about how Obama is brilliant because he went to Harvard and was an editor and graduated with honors. Why? Because anytime someone asks about his grades the immediate answer is that it was a long time ago and so doesn't matter. 

Let me show you how easy it would be to resolve this issue. My college GPA has come up a few times during job interviews and I never hesitate to reveal it. It's 3.78. See? Piece of cake. And I feel no need to hide it because it's pretty good. Ask anyone who majored in engineering and they'll tell you it's hard to keep a good GPA. If Obama is really proud of his academic achievements and earned them fairly, he has no reason to keep his grades secret.

I'm going to rip-off Bill Maher and make a new rule. New Rule: if boast about your Ivy League background, you must reveal how you got in and what grades you got.