NZPundit Outrage Day

So I visit NZPundit as part of my daily blogroll, and while there's usually one or two posts a day that make my inner Frenchman twitch, it's generally pretty entertaining and of course it's good to read opinions that differ from one's own, and to keep up with what the right blog hemisphere is talking about.

But even though I normally don't like to post politics here, today I read no less than three things there that I just had to comment on:

First up, the Larry Summers debate. (He's the president of Harvard who got in trouble a few weeks ago for suggesting that women are naturally not as good as men at maths and sciences.) NZP links to this article, which refers to Summers' comments as "a scientific hypothesis". Anyone with some degree of scientific background knows better than to mistake some clown spouting off stupid crap for the sake of being provocative, with no logic or empirical evidence to back it up, for scientific evidence. It also suggests that because decades of gender equity policies haven't balanced out the gender ratios in science departments then maybe Summers is right. I'm a bit boggled by this argument actually, you don't need to believe that the sciences are full of overtly sexist men to understand that the mere fact that there aren't many women in that line of work, coupled with it's geeky reputation, is enough to discourage women from pursuing maths and sciences. Chad Orzel had a good post on this subject a few weeks back.

Outrage number 2: Canada pulls out of the US missile defence program. Despite the fact that the program has been stunningly expensive and produced no results, this apparently makes the Canadians effeminate free-loaders. I'll let Paul Musgrave field this one. Money quote: "when Canada doesn't take you seriously, it's time to get some new policies."

Outrage number 3: Paraphrasing: 'Who says Jeff Gannon was a white house plant? There's no hard evidence that his credentials were fake, and the hoopla is all just liberals being mean to him because he's a conservative and a gay prostitute.' Turns out he's right about the 'no hard evidence' (at least for now), but there's plenty of soft evidence, like the fact that the news agency he works for doesn't seem to be a real agency, and that he got access to the white house press briefings under an assumed name and that he quit as soon as all this came to light, among other things. (It's all here at The Daily Kos, and here's the Salon article about it.) Plus it's pretty funny that he turned out to be on all those gay porn sites!

There may not be any evidence that he was planted by the white house, but there's definitely something very dodgy going on when this guy gets let into these press conferences with no journalism credentials.