What I did not like about this article is that it equates autodidacts with always being woefully uninformed or delusionally incorrect.

While I have no illusions that I am a physicist (and thus I have no great theories to put forth), I don’t think much of my understanding of physics, biology, chemistry or neuroscience is wayward. Incomplete, sure. But no more incomplete (and probably less so) than many scientist/engineer types who believe they are experts in everything but really only know their one tiny field.

I have read the same textbooks they all have. Many of the same papers. I’m not a researcher in any field*. I don’t have the money or time to be that independent of a university.

Yes, many autodidacts are a bit nutty in their ideation. But not all of us are that way. I’d be willing to bet that I know more about most fields than most scientists who do not actually work in those fields (meaning that yes, an expert in, say, anthropology probably knows a hell of a lot more about anthro than I do, but I bet I could run circles around them in geology, cognitive neuroscience, economics, systems design, etc).

All autodidacts aren’t poorly self-educated loons, is what I am trying to say.

*While this is not quite true, no one cares about my economic history research.

I do agree that a burkini is a symbol of the enslavement of women, but don’t agree that men with guns telling those women to remove clothes or to leave the beach is the answer.

With this issue, though, the left wishes to pretend that symbols don’t matter while telling us that symbols matter. Can’t have it both ways, though. The burkini is a symbol and an endorsement of the oppression of women. That it is worn by women doesn’t matter either way, really.

The left as noted wishes to tell us that the burkini symbolizes nothing in and of itself, and wishes to reduce it to an individual and context-free decision of a person disconnected from any political or religious affiliation.

Obviously, this is intellectually untenable but for most of the left the tolerance of intolerance is now more important than the promotion and encouragement of liberal values and priorities. (And this will be its doom, ultimately.)

While I can’t condone harassing women on the beach for what they wear, I also can’t disregard that Islam is an actual existential threat to the values of many Western European countries and to the women who already live there.

I know to the left those women don’t matter because they aren’t the right color and aren’t a member of an officially-approved oppressed class, but they matter to me.