Picture: Snowflakes

If it's warm enough above for big snowflakes, but not too warm, and cold enough that the snowflakes don't melt when they hit....

Comment Elsewhere: Fighting Fire with Laughter

In response to concern about whether Alan Grayson's tone versus Sarah Palin was too caustic to be helpful, I said:

I’m ambivalent about this, honestly. There are times when a bully has to be stopped, and stopped hard. Palin’s been rude, borderline racist, divisive, evasive and manipulative; she got lucky in her career, but she’s abused her position at every opportunity. She should never have been a national political figure, and she’s neither newsworthy nor noteworthy, but the press has no idea how to report on issues, so her attacks get transmitted through the media, repeated endlessly, forcing Democrats to finally respond or look feckless. It’s classic abuser behavior: pushing and pushing, then whining about ‘fairness’ when someone stands up to them.

The only way to get the press to stop taking her seriously, to defang her politically, is for Democrats to stop taking her seriously, and to make the press look foolish for bothering to follow, quote and enable her. Grayson’s rhetoric has a hard edge on it, to be sure, but it’s pretty mild compared to Santorum or Steve King, or Issa, or McConnell, or a half dozen other Republican Congressional flamethrowers I could name. And, unlike most of their incendiary allegations, Grayson’s comments are based on verifiable facts and reasonable inferences.

Picture: Hostile Squirrel

In fairness, the squirrel probably doesn't actually have any hostile intent. But he's not friendly, either.

Picture: February Frost

Picture: Standing Slush

Comment Elsewhere: Freedom and its Discontents

In response to a fascinating discussion of recent news and law in the privacy and free speech field, I said:

Part of the problem is a failure to think things through: people want freedom to do or say anything, but they also want something done if someone else does something harmful or hateful. And our tolerance for risk is nil, so we're more inclined to over-react (if it's public).

Freedom is a balance, and there are risks. Otherwise, it's not freedom.

Picture of Perseverence: December Dandelion

Picture: First Bunny of Spring

Comment Elsewhere: Academic Psychology an oxymoron?

In a discussion of one of the least impressive bits of well-publicized psychology "research" I've seen in years, I avered:

Cherry picking and confirmation bias! Without them, psychology would hardly exist as an academic discipline. I understand the inclination to give these people databases and statistics packages as a corrective, but you have to fix the, if you'll pardon the reference, underlying psychology first.

Comment Elsewhere: Google Creep

In a discussion of the failure of Buzz, I remarked

Frankly, the more services Google tries to bundle, the less I like them. Maybe it's just because I appear on the internet in both pseudonymous and epynomous forms, but the ability to keep political, family, shopping and professional issues separate is actually quite important to me. There have been about a half dozen cases in the last few years where online service mergers made my online life more difficult, not more convenient.