Author: Crowhill Report

Brief review of the Republican debate

My ranking in terms of who won, in descending order.

Desantis. Too scripted. A little stiff and sour. Good on the issues. Didn’t get negative. Best of the bunch

Vivek. Too silly at first. Came across as young and not seasoned. Haley scored on him with “you have no foreign policy experience, and it shows,” and he never got a chance to reply. He was good on policy and scored his own zingers against most of the others.

Pence. Slow. Strange combination of boring and too aggressive / obnoxious. Came across as an establishment figure.

Haley. I don’t like her. She was mostly uninteresting and consistently obnoxious. She also made a flatly sexist comment. (Female privilege.) I’m putting her in this spot because she did stand out a bit.

Scott. Good, but not breaking out. He was polite and positive and had some good things to say.

Christie. Uninteresting, and his anti-Trump approach is going to kill whatever small chance he might have had.

Burgum. Surprisingly interesting at some points, but not smooth, and no chance.

Hutchinson. He’s delusional if he thinks he has any chance. He’s a lame candidate with nothing to recommend him.

My version of “word of the day”

Somehow I ended up getting a daily email with a “word of the day.” It’s somewhat interesting, but often the word is too show-offy for me.

For example, today’s word was Idée fix, which means “An idea or desire that dominates the mind; an obsession.”

My attitude is that you should know such words, but not use them. Use “obsession” instead. So my “word of the day” email would explain a difficult word and then give five ways to say the same thing with simpler language.

The balance of powers and federal courts

It’s crucial to have a balance between the three branches of government, and between the states and the federal government. Each branch of government should have some power to serve as a check on the others.

The federal judiciary consists of the district courts, which are the trial courts, the courts of appeals (circuit courts), and the Supreme Court.

It strikes me as odd that a district court judge should be able to stay or overturn a presidential policy or a state law. That seems to contradict the idea of a “balance” of powers. It would be analous, perhaps, to a county (at the state level) or an administrative agency (at the federal level) having some power over the Supreme Court.

It’s even worse when you consider that sometimes such a ruling comes from a single judge — not even a panel of judges.

Segregated spaces do make some sense

It seems that when you mix men and women, you get sexual tension.

Some people seem to think that we’re supposed to be sexless individuals who treat other people as “people” only and not as women and men with desires and interests. And then when people act like real people — who actually are men and women, with desires and interests — there’s this amazement, like “Gosh, who could have predicted that?”

This is not to excuse rude behavior, but simply to point out that if you walk through a bad neighborhood with $100 bills attached to your clothing, you will probably get robbed, and when you mix men and women, the men will probably try to pick up the women. That’s just the way it is, and it’s pretty stupid to think otherwise.

Unwanted romantic and sexual advances on LinkedIn discourage women from using the site

In the past there were separate spaces for men and women. There were downsides to that, but there was also at least some sense to it. It lessens some of these kinds of problems.

We’ve decided that it’s best to let men and women mix more freely. (Have we really? Who actually decided that?) Okay, but it’s going to take some time to figure out exactly how that will work (if it will work at all). It’s absurd to think there won’t be consequences and difficulties figuring out exactly what the rules should be.

For example, if we truly want everybody to be equal, and to lessen sexual tension, maybe we should eliminate profile pictures.