Random Rants from a Space Nut

Billionaire Michael Dell doesn't like AOC's proposal to hike the highest marginal tax rate to 70%.  His reasons why not were mostly addressed and destroyed by an economist on the panel who pointed out that the United States had that rate for quite a while during a time when growth was quite strong(*). But one claim he made stuck out to me: He asserted that he donated more to his charitable foundation than the new tax rate would take from him. This... ran counter to my general understanding of human nature, so I looked it up .  I can't make a perfect comparison, since Forbes gives some fraction that it doesn't really explain.  I might, for example, be looking at lifetime earnings here, whereas income tax is (obviously) a fraction of yearly earnings.  But the number Forbes gives as a fraction of charitable giving is 5%. I don't think Dell gives as much as he thinks he does.  Or, rather, as much as he wants us to think that he does. He also says that he ...

I've read this series of tweets on conservative thought, and why it is currently the weird thing it is right now.  It's insightful, but I don't think I completely buy it, because:  * I don't think it's just intent vs. consequences.  That smacks of grace vs. works, and the current Evangelical take on that question was a response to the question of the morality of slavery, attempting to allow people to quiet and soothe their own consciences after doing one of the worst things it's possible to do to another human being (or group of human beings).  The consequences and the intent were both terrible -- so it can't be as simple as one versus the other. It seems more likely that intent vs. consequences is a result of some prior axiom of conservativism -- one I've often heard expressed as "If it ain't broke, don't fix it".  The problem liberals have is not the result of some compulsion to change the way we do everything; it's the...

One of Fox News' latest tactics is to claim that "toxic masculinity" is the notion that masculinity itself is dangerous and bad, rather than that there are notions of masculinity (or facets of the way that "masculinity" is portrayed and discussed) that are toxic.  Then they pretend that all who use the term want to see even the good parts of our cultural ideas about masculinity done away with, and cast themselves as proud and good defenders of the good stuff, so that they can be the heroes without ever engaging in discussion. In much the same way, Steve King is out and proud using "white nationalism" to refer to all nations founded by white people, and demanding that he be allowed to defend the virtues and accomplishments of Western civilization.  He doesn't see the problem with "white supremacy", either. "White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization—how did that language become offensive?" King asked the Ti...

After roughly a year of inactivity, it's time for me to try to resume posting.  I'll kick off by issuing a retraction.  I never thought I'd say so, Ken Ham kind of has a point here . It's okay to teach about religion in schools.  And as part of a class project involving this education, it's perfectly all right to show kids just how thoroughly detached from empirically-testable reality uncritical religion can become with a little trip to Ken Ham's park(*). Unfortunately, our country doesn't currently have multi-million-dollar parks dedicated to the unusual claims of fundamentalist Islam, or the odd claims of fundamentalist Hinduism, or the strange claims of any other fundamentalist world religion; they'd be nice to have, so that school curricula that want to do this don't have to be afraid of being accidentally biased.  I'm sure Ham will get right on that. Sarcasm aside, though, he accidentally nails the problem.  He wants to allow "c...