Category Archives: Reason

Cyril Wecht On Freddie Gray’s Likely Cause of Death

Criminal Injustice, Ethics, Race, Reason, Science

Forensic pathologist Cyril Wecht has been around the block a few times. Two minutes and 31 seconds into this typically tedious, CNN broadcast, Dr. Wecht ventures the following with conviction, about the Freddie Gray murder. I paraphrase:

Legs shackled and hands cuffed, placed in a prone position, face down—a position that has been banned for decades, claims Wecht—how, pray tell, did Freddie Gray run around, banging himself against the van’s interior?

The victim is yelling and screaming for help. His body is inert and the van is moving. Right there is the velocity needed to create the force for the injuries! Those injuries are not spontaneous pathological fractures; the injuries came as the body flapped back and forth, breaking the vertebrae in the neck and eventually severing the spinal cord.

Indubitably, the injuries were sustained by the police by their stopping Gray. Gray did not sustain those spontaneously. Also quite possible, says Wecht, and as I’ve hypothesized, the initial injuries were produced when police compressed and leaned into Gray’s back, to be aggravated by the flopping around in the van.

Rereading An Article In The Age Of The Idiot

Economy, Intelligence, Political Philosophy, Race, Racism, Reason

The concept of “racism” has been treated, over these pixelated pages, as a political construct in the postmodern tradition—a tradition that uses semantics, often unmoored from objective reality, to create a politically desired reality and achieve political ends. A mouthful, I know. But what has just been said is nothing compared to “Against ‘Racisms’: An Invidious Concept Under Fire” by my pal Jack Kerwick.

Jack uses the formal methods of (analytical and ethical?) philosophy to deconstruct the bogus construct that is racism. I will have to read the piece at least twice to better assimilate the argument and see how it sits with me. So far I like its impetus a LOT.

A word about rereading material, which I do a great deal. Readers complained about having to reread my “Libertarian Anarchism’s ‘Justice’ Problem,” to better understand it. Jack Kerwick joked with me, at the time, about the indignity and hostility expressed by today’s “readers” when required to grapple with challenging material by reading and rereading it.

I’ve always become apologetic when so accused, having never given thought to the point Jack was making: Don’t he and I reread things all the time? Don’t we look up words we don’t know in the (online) dictionary, as well? Don’t we enjoy learning new things; like a challenge? Are we threatened by a writer or a piece of writing that requires extra-concentration? Yes, yes, yes, and of course not.

So why should we expect anything else from our readers?

Go to it.

Leftists Are ILLIBERAL

Classical Liberalism, Ethics, Hillary Clinton, Journalism, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media, Reason

Hillary Clinton and the things she says should be properly dubbed illiberal. Clinton’s express “inspiration” as a future president is to “ensure that granddaughter Charlotte and her generation are provided equal opportunities to live up to their potential.”

How do you think that will be achieved, if not by the use of every illiberal power-tool in the leftist toolbox? Taking by force from some to give to others, creating new, unelected, oppressive agencies to carry out the new potentate’s plans, raising armies to march on uncompliant nations, on and on.

Clinton and the things she aspires to should be properly dubbed illiberal. Leftists, after all, stole the “liberal” label from us classical liberals.

CNN bimbos and beaus fawn over every irrational, idiotic utterance made by leftists. Why, one particular CNN tart called Poppy Harlow referred to Clinton’s putative inspiration for a presidential bid—her infant granddaughter—as a “rationale” for running.

To say you want to be president for the good of your granddaughter’s generations is of a peace with the standard statement made by the low IQ beauty queen: “I want to make the world a better place.” Except that a peaceful, pretty girl, with no ship-of-state to steer, is much more likely to make people happy than a power-hungry, illiberal, murderous statist like Hillary Clinton.

Poppy Harlow’s slobbering act and name reminded me, for some reason, of the wicked wit of Margot Asquith, “Scottish-born socialite and author, married to the British Prime Minister H. H. Asquith.” .

Mrs. Asquith corrected American actress Jean Harlow’s pronunciation of Margot, with this quick retort: “The t is silent, as in Harlow.”

Racism And The Millennial Brain Rot

Education, Intelligence, Pseudo-intellectualism, Race, Racism, Reason

Racism and the Millennial brain rot is the topic of the current column, “Millennials: A Menagerie of Morons,” currently on WND. An excerpt:

… Hysteria and heightened emotions are the hallmarks of the Millennial Mind. They can “whip up a false sense of mass outrage” with ease. The Spectator’s Brendan O’Neill calls these walking dead dodos “The Stepford Students.” They sit “stony-eyed in lecture halls or surreptitiously police beer-fueled banter in the uni bar. They look like students, dress like students, smell like students. But their student brains have been replaced by brains bereft of critical faculties and programmed to conform. To the untrained eye, they seem like your average book-devouring, ideas-discussing, H&M-adorned youth, but anyone who’s spent more than five minutes in their company will know that these students are far more interested in shutting debate down than opening it up.”

Black, liberal and bright—oops; I committed a “microaggression”—comedian Chris Rock recently confessed that he avoids doing his stand-up routine in front of millennial audiences. “You can’t say ‘the black kid over there.’ No, it’s ‘the guy with the red shoes.’ You can’t even be offensive on your way to being inoffensive.”

In the Orwellian universe in which your kids are suspended, words speak louder than actions. Drunken youths sang a nine-second ditty while white—they did not defraud, steal, vandalize, beat, rape or murder anyone; they merely mouthed ugly words.

Unkind cuts, however, called for an exorcism. On cue, a petrified Waspy man, OU President David Boren, proceeded to perform the rituals that would soothe his unhinged charges. While Boren failed to fumigate the fraternity, tear his clothes; rub earth and ashes on his noggin and dress in sackcloth—he did shutter the doors to the dorm and board up its windows. A vice president of diversity was appointed. Soviet-style investigations launched, and summary expulsions sans due process carried out.

Tyranny, as we know, strives for uniformity.

In synch with their pedagogic pied piper, University of Oklahoma students gathered for prayer vigils, marches, demonstrations and lamentation. Burly athletes wept. One Oklahoma football lineman “decommitted,” or was committed.

This menagerie of morons—this institutionalized stupidity—would be comical were it not so calamitous, as shown by the research commissioned by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. …

… Read the rest. “Millennials: A Menagerie of Morons” is currently on WND.