When ideologies confront confounding evidence, they tend to fare poorly.

Echidne’s take on the recent sexual assaults in Germany isn’t that deluded, but just look at the comments.

Liberalism in many places in the Western world is now or will soon be reaching a crisis point, and like conservatives when their Weltanschauung was confronted with reality liberals will also retreat ever more deeply into deranged and fantastical thinking and will not emerge for decades.

Women in the much of the Western — especially European — world are about to be sacrificed both to neo-liberal fantasies, to the idols of multiculturalism, to the eidolon of inclusivity, and as they are being sexually assaulted and raped in the streets will be told it has nothing at all to do with the desire to lower wages or with multiculturalism, depending on which ideological idiot is doing the dismissing.

I don’t hate refugees. I don’t care what color their skin is. I don’t care that they come from North Africa or China.

What I care about is that if they come with Enlightenment-hostile values and are unsuited to the society they wish to join. And that it is not that society’s duty to change to accommodate their medieval thinking — which is the standard liberal line, either stated outright or implicit in their thought.

As I’ve said before, letting young women-hating men into your country en masse will lead to nothing good.

If I were a woman in many Western European countries, especially the smaller ones, I’d be considering immigration. It will not be a friendly place to you in a decade or two.

There have been several “weight loss is impossible” or similar articles in the New York Times lately. And yeah, I know the stats. Most people who “try” to lose weight don’t succeed. Of course, most people who try to lose weight do that like I try to fly to space by flapping my arms really hard, but there you go.

But that doesn’t excuse shoddy science and disgraceful reporting like this.

Never trust anyone trying to shill a book, or hawking a weight loss program. Notice this cat is trying to do both. His main concern is your wallet and relieving you of its weight. I don’t feel like wasting my life by linking to papers and studies and results, but suffice it to say that though calories in, calories out is not the only story in weight loss — the body is more complex than that — most of what Ludwig is saying is either refuted by science (the FA favorite misdefined “starvation mode” doesn’t really exist), used misleadingly, or the effect is so small that it doesn’t matter for most people.

There’s no easier sale than something someone is yearning to buy anyway. That’s what this guy is peddling. Always be wary of that, even if there is some valid science behind it (in this case, there is little to none).