CapitalistImperialistPig

Colin Kaepernick, the quarterback of the San Francisco 49ers, has attracted a lot of hostility for refusing to stand during the National Anthem. He is, he says, protesting police brutality against blacks. Kareem Abdul Jabbar, the great former UCLA and Lakers center, has defended his right to protest in an editorial. Of course Kareem is right. There are no laws, so far as I know, dictating homage to the flag or National anthem. This isn't like North Korea, where a deputy premier can be shot (with an anti-aircraft gun) for falling asleep while the Dear Leader is talking. I'm interested in why this makes people so mad, and, being the opinionated character that I am, I have a theory. Football is a highly tribal activity. The flag and anthem are tribal totems - that's why they play the anthem at sporting events. By disrespecting the tribal totems, Kaepernick is disrespecting the tribe, and the members of the tribe feel betrayed. So I agree that Kaepernick has a right ...

Ever since C P Snow pondered the question of how the scientific and liberal arts cultures came to separate, various people have fussed about it, regretted it, and tried to devise cures - like forcing Caltech students to take a potful of "Hum" courses. After reading a dozen or so reviews of Tom Wolfe's new book, The Kingdom of Speech, all of them apparently by literary types, and only one of which displayed any grasp of the subject, the following crude explanation bubbled up from my subconscious: the literary types are just too fucking dumb to be worth talking to. Bad pig! That was unworthy of me. But really, if a famous literary and journalistic figure decides to write on the history and content of the theory of evolution, couldn't Time, Kirkus, NPR, the NYT and numerous others find somebody who knows something about the subject to write about it? Apparently not. One such idiot wrote that the book was "sure to provoke a lively debate." Maybe among t...

An excerpt from Wolfe's book appears in the Daily Beast . His starting point is a paper by a few students of Speech (including Chomsky). My take is that he both misunderstands and sensationalizes the paper. Also, he has no clue as to how science works. One bright night in the year 2016, my face aglow with godknows how many MilliGAUSS of x-radiation from the computer screen in front of me, I was surfing the net when I moused upon a web node reading: THE MYSTERY OF LANGUAGE EVOLUTION.1 It seems that eight heavyweight Evolutionists2—linguists, biologists, anthropologists, and computer scientists—had published an article announcing they were giving up, throwing in the towel, folding, crapping out when it came to the question of where speech—language—comes from and how it works. “The most fundamental questions about the origins and evolution of our linguistic capacity remain as mysterious as ever,” they concluded. Not only that, they sounded ready to abandon all hope of ever find...

If they live long enough. Tom Wolfe is 85, and has just published a book attacking Darwin and Chomsky. Darwin is the ultimate hard target, and Chomsky is more than a bit softer, but if this NYT review is a guide, Wolfe is equally off base against him. Secondarily [besides dissing Chuck D], this book is a rebuke of the work of the linguist Noam Chomsky, whom Mr. Wolfe refers to as “Noam Charisma.” Rebuke is actually too frivolous a word for the contumely Mr. Wolfe looses in his direction. More precisely, he tars and feathers Mr. Chomsky before sticking a clown nose on his face and rolling him in a baby stroller off a cliff. Mr. Wolfe does not complain about evolution on religious grounds; in fact, he is an atheist. He begins by declaring the notion of the big bang to be vaguely ridiculous, and likens it to a mythopoetic bedtime story. Everything came from nothing? Most essentially, Mr. Wolfe employs new research from the controversial anthropologist Daniel Everett to argue that the...

The National Labor Relations Board has ruled that graduate teaching assistants may unionize. About time. College athletes should be next. Here is what the College Athletes Players Association wants: Guaranteed coverage for sports-related medical expenses for current and former players. Minimizing the risk of sports-related traumatic brain injury. Reduce contact in practices like the NFL and Pop Warner have done, place independent concussion experts on the sidelines, and establish uniform return to play protocols. Improving graduation rates. Establish an educational trust fund to help former players complete their degree and reward those who graduate on time. Consistent with evolving NCAA regulations or future legal mandates, increasing athletic scholarships and allowing players to receive compensation for commercial sponsorships. Securing due process rights. Players should not be punished simply because they are accused of a rule violation, and any punishments levied should be...

Spouse - I could hear the band practicing this morning. Theorist - That's probably because the morning inversion caused the sound waves to refract downwards. Spouse - I think it's because I drove by the high school practice field with my window open.

Ronald Radosh, writing in the Daily Beast: Why has the Trump campaign taken as its new head a self-described Leninist? I met Steve Bannon—the executive director of Breitbart.com who’s now become the chief executive of the Trump campaign, replacing the newly resigned Paul Manafort—at a book party held in his Capitol Hill townhouse in early 2014. We were standing next to a picture of his daughter, a West Point graduate, who at the time was a lieutenant in the 101 Airborne Division serving in Iraq. The picture was notable because she was sitting on what was once Saddam Hussein’s gold throne with a machine gun on her lap. “I’m very proud of her,” Bannon said. Then we had a long talk about his approach to politics. He never called himself a “populist” or an “American nationalist,” as so many think of him today. “I’m a Leninist,” Bannon proudly proclaimed. The Trump saga gets odder and odder.