This woman is my hero.

While most students at Columbia University will spend the first day of classes carrying backpacks and books, Emma Sulkowicz will start her semester on Tuesday with a far heavier burden. The senior plans on carrying an extra-long, twin-size mattress across the quad and through each New York City building – to every class, every day – until the man she says raped her moves off campus.

Society needs more people who do crazy brave ridiculous things. Go Emma. Too bad she would probably face legal penalties for releasing her rapist’s name. (Also it’s cool that her nail polish matches her shirt. (Yes I do notice things like that.))

Examining the minimum wage and the idea of raising it from a purely economic standpoint is insufficient and abhorrent.

Accommodations like the minimum wage and the 40-hour workweek are not economic concerns solely, but instead serve as a signal delineating and clarifying what sort of society we wish to have.

For the most part, I think the social justice habit of lecturing people on their privilege is counterproductive.

It mostly makes enemies and hurts the cause. No, no, it doesn’t matter if you’re right. Even if absolutely every word is 100% true.

It’s better and more useful to appeal to empathy, to justice and to fairness. Your harangue on how privilege allowed someone to get somewhere they otherwise would not have might sound in the swim to you, but all your unlucky listener will ever hear is: “Your life is a sham, you don’t deserve what you have, and you are personally evil.”

Warning, again: even if it is true.

Because this is what happens. Your natural allies say, “Well those people are mental and I am having nothing to do with them.”

It probably seems like I am more conservative than I am from writing these things. But I only attack my own side because I care about it. I am quite radical in most ways,  more so than most people would believe. I’ll spell that out sometime.

Other than in an academic setting – where it is useful and valid – for actually changing the world, all the “privilege” talk should be left in the privy where it belongs.

Mozilla has now completely screwed up the right-click context menu in Firefox 32. What is going on over there, did someone deliver meth instead of sugar for the tea and coffee?

Anyway, it now unfortunately looks like this.

I tried it in a VM and as expected it is terrible, and slower.

Most liberal causes are just and good. However, the sanctimony often found there is a problem as well as blindness to observable facts.

Liberals believe it is racism when it is observed that when people from a culture with vastly different values and standards for treatment of human beings and women immigrate, said members of that culture shockingly continue to mistreat and abuse women.

In the liberal mind, stating that a large influx of men who believe that women are little better than cattle is going to make life worse for the women there is akin to genocide.

I personally don’t care which side is wrong in a debate. I won’t be a part of it.

Yes, the “Eurabia” of the conservatives is 99% bullshit, but at the same time pretending immigrants have absolutely no effect on anything ever is pure blatherskite. It’s only something someone with an agenda other than knowing the truth could believe.

The simple fact is that if a bunch of people with values averse to yours show up — especially if your society is already pretty damn sexist — bad things are going to happen to women.

Just as we shouldn’t believe that everyone from North Africa, Pakistan and other Muslim countries are demons, we also shouldn’t take the liberal goo goo approach and pretend they are all angels.

That way lies madness — and rape.

If people want to continue living in California long-term, nuclear-powered or less feasibly solar-powered desalinization plants are probably the only answer.

Desalinization uses enormous amounts of energy. I am not sure it can ever be worth it with solar or wind. Fossil fuels aren’t the answer, obviously.

Nuclear it is, then. As for the rest of the desert Southwest, better start building some pipelines I guess.

(The best solution is for people not to live there at all in great numbers, but yeah, humans don’t work like that.)

This makes perfect sense.

A recent article in TheAtlantic.com pointed out that hedge funds run by women make three times as much money as hedge funds run by men, and that companies with female CEOs outperform companies with male CEOs by nearly 50%.

To succeed as a woman in business, you have to be two or three times as good as a man holding or aspiring to the same position. It only follows that these women would outperform their male competitors.

Most interesting comment I’ve read today, from here.

Recall that endeavors demanding cross-field expertise are low-status, presumably because they’re hard to credential.

The parent post is pretty interesting, too.

Another reason I am glad I didn’t go into science: all I am interested in is cross-field questions, really.

Sounds like Ta-Nehisi Coates had a childhood much like mine.

And if Michael Brown was not angelic, I was practically demonic. I had my first drink when I was 11. I once brawled in the cafeteria after getting hit in the head with a steel trash can.

It wasn’t because I got hit in the head with a steel trash can, but I once brawled in the cafeteria, too!

Got suspended. The bully got suspended for longer at least that time.

This is for those – especially the many engineeritis infectees – who persist in thinking that literature and the humanities don’t matter.

I found empirical support for the idea that the Harry Potter series influenced the political values and perspectives of the generation that came of age with these books. Reading the books correlated with greater levels of acceptance for out-groups, higher political tolerance, less predisposition to authoritarianism, greater support for equality, and greater opposition to the use of violence and torture. As Harry Potter  fans will have noted, these are major themes repeated throughout the series. These correlations remained significant even when applying more sophisticated statistical analyses – when controlling for, among other things, parental influence.

Other studies show similar things about other literature. This is not a fluke. It’s why I’ve long supported the idea that before anyone gets any STEM degree, they should be required to take two or three years of liberal arts/humanities courses only.

It might not make them love the humanities, and maybe it won’t even make them better people, but it can only help statistically speaking.

That is, assuming college were low-cost or free. In the current “fleece and extort everyone” model, this is untenable.