Posts

Showing posts from 2015

"White Privilege" Is a Racial Slur

Sorry. But it is. Thi s is obvious if we think of how other racial/ethnic slurs are used A definition of White Privilege/Entitlement (n): [W]hite men [...] carry the absent mark which grants us the invisible power of white privilege. Everyone else gets discrimination. [...] White privilege is the right of whites, and only whites, to be judged as individuals, to be treated as a unique self, possessed of all the rights and protections of citizenship. I am not a race, I am the unmarked subject. I am simply, whereas you might be a black man, an asian woman, a disabled Native [American] man, a homosexual Latina, and on and on the qualifiers of identification go.  ~Michael Mark Cohen  The Internet has proven again to be a nearly perfectly efficient rendering engine. That is, it outputs whatever you look for before you know you want to look for it. If you think of a snarky comment or the most outlandish point of view, the odds are that someone has already posted it --seriously or not--

Femme Fatal

One of the film/pop culture commentary podcasts I listen to regularly is Fighting In the War Room . I'm about to be contrarian about their last episode , but you shouldn't take that as general disparagement of the show. I like it. I'm subscribed to it. If you like this sort of podcast, you should be subscribed to it too. One horse corpse that this group regularly thrashes is the terrible, awful plight and dearth of female directors. It's not enough that there are lots of female directors working on critically acclaimed films (they whinge). We need lots of female directors working on big, franchise, spectacle blockbusters. Poor Colin Treverrow. The well of contempt for this guy for being hired to direct Jurassic World after only directing the critically and popularly embraced Time-travel movie, "Safety Not Guaranteed", has no bottom. I guess he should have died or at least got a sex-reassignment when he accepted the job. And the nerve of the guy for no

The IRS Fetish

I thought of this upon hearing comedienne Sarah Silverman talking on NPR's Fresh Air show. "My dad raised us to respect taxes and know that its an honor to pay taxes. And it goes to people who need it, and highways, and schools, and that's what makes our country great, and the more successful you are the more you can put into the ante..into the middle..to help make our local communities and our bigger communities great." This is a new thing among Democrats, this tender soft-spot for taxes--taxes for their own sake, ignoring any specific program--because we're suppose to accept that the programs receiving the dollars are worthwhile without consideration. I've recently heard Chris Hardwick, Jon Stewart, and David Letterman apologize for making jokes at expense of the IRS. The IRS! To be frank, there's something unAmerican about that, and I don't use that word lightly as does Harry, Reid , Nancy Pelosi , Dick Durban , and Barack Obama . The sh

Price is No Obstacle

From... Self-driving cars, opportunity costs and idle gold You'll have to register to read it. "We argued...that the economics of self-driving taxis don’t necessarily make sense.Which is to say, we’re not entirely convinced (at this stage) that self-driving taxis will be any more or less affordable than those driven by humans. " That is irrelevant. The economic value of self-driving cars is that people who are currently driving taxis will do something else productive that can't be automated right now... Likely something that is either not being done now or is under-served based on the desire of the public. We should hope that self-driving taxis WILL (without general inflation or legal mandates) become increasingly expensive because that means that the value (productivity) of those hired trips is increasing. People freely pay for things only if they think the money they have is less valuable than the thing they want. I think the misconception is this: The writ