By Selwyn Duke
We discussed the proposal for a $50 minimum wage by Rep. Barbara Lee, who, rumor has it, will star in a remake of the film A Beautiful Mind.
(Uh, you may not want to take the last part there seriously.)
If you want to listen to just my segment, right click on the player, and then click "Open link in new tab" on the drop-down menu. Then forward to 18:15; that's when my appearance is introduced.
By Selwyn Duke
“Consensus is the business of politics,” said late author Michael Crichton in 2003. “Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right.” While true, being right and doing actual science may get you arrested under a bill that just passed in France’s National Assembly — if your activities are deemed contrary to “medical knowledge.”
The problem is that “medical knowledge” has a history of fallibility, with bloodletting and lobotomies once having been standard practice based on “medical knowledge.” More recently, we heard Dr. Anthony Fauci say that “attacks on me quite frankly are attacks on science” as he claimed final-authority status on medical knowledge. Yet some of his pronouncements were very, very wrong.
As for the bill, it might apply only to those pressuring a particular individual or individuals to act contrary to establishment medicine. Yet critics fear it could mean imprisonment for criticizing Covid mRNA injections. Moreover, those skeptical about the “transgender” agenda could be victimized as well, as the measure also reportedly targets those deemed to be harming “psychological health.”
By Selwyn Duke
It’s quite timely that after writing on article yesterday on media bias, the following headline popped up on my MSN homepage:
“Donald Trump’s cognitive decline worse than Joe Biden’s due to 2 signs, professor says.”
Notice what’s assumed (and what’s assumed is learned best) in the above headline:
We’re to take it as a given that Trump is declining cognitively. The only question is the severity. Of course, the message here is essentially, “Yeah, our guy Biden is senile. But the other guy is even more senile! Vote Incumbent Dementia!”
And that, citizens, is what you call gaslighting.
By Selwyn Duke
Much as our esteemed psychological profession defines “gender dysphoria,” there’s also a phenomenon known as “species dysphoria.” I do understand that among mental-health practitioners it’s known as “Species Identity Disorder” (or “clinical lycanthropy”), but give it time. “Gender dysphoria” used to be “Gender Identity Disorder” (and should be “Sexual Identity Disorder”) until that was deemed “stigmatizing” to the disordered.
By Selwyn Duke
For every Republican in newsrooms, there are 10 Democrats,” famed investigative journalist John Stossel recently pointed out. That this imbalance exists isn’t new — nor is it a groundbreaking revelation that it results in profound media bias. Nonetheless, the consequent propaganda is still effective; so much so that, related Professor Tim Groseclose in 2011, “media bias aids Democratic candidates by about 8 to 10 percentage points in a typical election.” But how is this sausage made?
By Selwyn Duke
It’s called “the narrative” — which is usually just a polite name for a fashionable lie. A black Ivy League academic has learned the price of contradicting cherished narratives, too: threat to life and limb.
In fact, after releasing a credible study finding “no evidence of racial bias” in police shootings, Harvard economics professor Roland Fryer said that not only did he become a pariah in many circles, but he actually needed police protection.
As striking as this is, however, there’s another big story within this story: Fryer’s study possibly did find a racial bias — against whites. Yet this is so accepted today that media don’t even notice.
By Selwyn Duke
Unlike the avowedly atheistic Soviets, the WWII-era Nazis didn’t bluntly try to suppress Christianity. Rather, they sought to reinvent it for their own purposes, conjuring up something called “Positive Christianity,” which held that Jesus was a Nordic character persecuted by a Jewish establishment.
Those National Socialists and their particular perversion of faith are gone. But the viewing of Christianity as an impediment to power, and the consequent desire to twist it for one’s own ends, lives on. Enter actor and filmmaker Rob Reiner.
By Selwyn Duke
When discussing shootings’ causes, conservatives will say it’s the people, not the guns; liberals will focus on the guns, not the people. And does it not accord with the latter theory when, in the Kansas City shooting’s wake, authorities are withholding the identities of the “people” responsible and are fixating on guns?
Why, a cynical person might almost think it’s contrived — a strategy.
By Selwyn Duke
It took man millennia to advance from superstition to the scientific method.
Now it might take the atavistic Biden administration only a moment to regress.
Some may thus conclude with the revelation that the “Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention could soon employ ‘Indigenous Knowledge’ in their research, a document obtained by the Washington Free Beacon shows,” the website reported Tuesday.
By Selwyn Duke
When arguing against a given minimum wage (e.g., $15/hour), late radio giant Rush Limbaugh would sometimes rhetorically ask: Why stop there? If that amount is good, wouldn’t a $50 minimum wage be even better? It’s unknown whether Limbaugh would’ve even suspected that a statist would make his “illustrating absurdity by being absurd” example a serious proposal within 10 years, but here we are:
Representative Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), who’s running for the Golden State’s open Senate seat, made this very proposal in a Monday night debate with her rivals. “Just do the math!” she exclaimed, alluding to the supposed self-evident legitimacy of her idea.
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