Comments by "Jim Luebke" (@jimluebke3869) on "spiked" channel.

What's worse: hypocrisy, or secrecy and calculated blackmail?
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"Classical music is racist" May I present Jessye Norman, conducted by Herbert von Karajan (who had as interesting an employment history as any other German in the 1930s.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4n042id3FIM Please look for Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, if you would like more of the same. I wouldn't get too worked up about diversity in classical music. It will happen naturally -- already has. There is a component of heritage to it; I'm probably more interested in Grieg because I have family from Norway. And, other cultures are making it their own as well. The likes of Yimura, Lang Lang, and Wynton Marsalis are making classical music part of the heritage of other parts of the world as well. =)
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"The pill was never really reliable enough to genuinely sever the link between s** and reproduction" Just now realizing this, eh? There's also the strong evolutionary pressure to get around the effects of the pill. We are currently breeding a population of women who don't want to take the pill for one reason or other. Life finds a way, as they say.
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Re: taking "scientists" seriously who insist on global warming hysteria: It also doesn't help that in 1990, the BBC released a program (now available on YouTube) with the otherwise excellent James Burke, saying how global temperatures would have risen 10-25 degrees Fahrenheit by 2020. Despite the fact that our remediation strategy has been comically inadequate (at least, according to the "scientific consensus"), temperatures have done no such thing. Estimates of temperature rises have gone down by an order of magnitude. I'm less inclined to "trust the scientists" than I am inclined to think that if our current strategy continues, we ought to see similar drop in temperature estimates over the next 30 years as well.
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Peter, it's not that global warming skeptics don't trust academics necessarily (though we don't, mostly because they insist on things they can't know); it's probably more important that we don't trust computer models. There are limits to what a computer can model, among them being systems of nonlinear differential equations. This is why we can't predict the weather, or the behavior of even a single tiny convection cell. It is mathematically impossible to do so. It's called "chaos". The problem is that we're being asked to trust a computer model consisting of not just one convection cell, but hundreds or even thousands of convection cells. People claim that climate is simpler than the weather, but when we're talking about models like this, it's really not. Climate seen one way (determining average temperature) is simple enough*. But if you look at weather one way (determining average rainfall) it's simple too. Just because we can calculate average rainfall doesn't mean we can predict it. Just because we can calculate average temperature doesn't mean we can predict that, either. * It's actually not all that simple to calculate average temperatures. There are things like the urban heat island effect, and the fact that for most of the globe our temperature baseline is either quite rough or quite short (or both.)
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Woke hasn't won, any more than Germany had won in 1942.
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"Conservatives can win on identity politics playing to nationalism" If all you need to be part of the nation (the USA) is to like the USA, what's wrong with that? You can decide to be included whenever you want.
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"The teachers are being indoctrinated" It looks like there is a point of view held by a vanishingly small minority, that has captured all shocking percentage of platforms of influence in our culture and society. Teachers, teachers' colleges, news media, publishing, HR departments -- even down to science fiction franchises, even churches for heaven's sake -- have been captured by this tiny, tiny minority. On the one hand it feels paranoid to believe this is systematic; however it seems even less likely that this could happen without some level of coordination.
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Woke hasn't won. Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter is the end of the Blitz. The vast swath of Middle America isn't even in the war yet, but we are waking up, and are filling with terrible resolve. Disney's opposition to the Parental Rights in Education bill may be our Pearl Harbor, or maybe it will just be one of the "incidents" leading up to that.
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Give up the Democrats and the New York Times as lost. What has recently happened in Kabul has demonstrated that the Democrats really are not "the adults in the room", which was their entire brand. The best they could muster -- Joe Biden -- is shown to be feckless. His successor looks like she doesn't want to be there, like she knows she's in over her head, and she has come to realize what this position of responsibility really means. Afghanistan cost the Soviet Hardliners their power and influence, and the cost for the Democrats will be the same. Get yourself a copy of the entire NYT archive from when it was first published, to 2010 or so. Keep it safe. That is all the New York Times will ever be now, its glory days a memory.
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If the "far right" is the only group willing to stand up for girls, what does that say about your entire worldview?
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@mariaadams7339 Yeah, there can be more than one cause for the effects we see, human beings are complicated. Kind of like how there are over a dozen different viruses (including, interestingly, a coronavirus or two) that cause the syndrome known as "the common cold", or how what we call "autism" is probably a suite of symptoms that show up for a number of different reasons. It makes A/B testing extremely difficult, which would explain why science hasn't found a cure yet.
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@babysis6.059 Er, things are beginning to turn. There's a LOT of work ahead of us, and if it isn't done, we'll be worse off than before.
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"You do you" got us here. It's fascinating to watch the civil war of the depraved.
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The bounce-back won't be as much as anyone expects; pent-up demand will be counterbalanced by inflation, which erodes the value of saved money.
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"All of this anti-human thinking that's been going on for a long time" What do you guys think of James Lindsay's theory that, essentially, the Cathars are back?
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17-year-old Americans with "assault rifles" are the reason you're not speaking German.
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If the government is willing to subsidize the determination of calorie counts, I'm in favor of including those calorie counts on menus. Otherwise it's just another tax, one that restaurants would find burdensome.
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@asweproceed52 D*mned if we do, d*mned if we don't -- you're aware that people complain when we get involved in places around the world these days, right? You also realize that we got attacked in the Pacific, by the Japanese, but got involved in Europe anyway, right? But I'm sure the people of Holland would have picked themselves up and thrown the Jerries out, covering the van Aldens in glory. Any day now...
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