The Crowhill Journal

Did they take public transportation?

Sending busloads of illegal immigrants to New York was bold and brilliant. It was too easy for liberals to sit in their safe enclaves, far from the border, and accuse anybody who wanted to control the border of racism. Now that the cost of caring for all these people is getting unmanageable up north, they’re changing their tune. NYC mayor Eric Adams is calling for action to address the migrant crisis.

It was fine when the border states had to handle all the costs, but when it gets close to his walled community, something has to be done.

Personally, I find Joe Biden’s border policy traitorous, and it steams me just to think about it.

Maryland leads the way. In the wrong direction.

Several Maryland cities have already lowered, or are considering lowering, the voting age (for local elections) to 16. This isn’t “insane,” as I saw one commentator claim. The difference between 18 and 16 is not a line between sanity and insanity. It’s just a marginal push to make the electorate more liberal — just as raising the voting age to 21 would be a marginal push to make the electorate more conservative. (“Show me a young man who’s not a liberal ….”)

Liberals want their still-indoctrinated drones to get involved politically to push things further to the left. I.e., before they’re old enough to wise up, like Paul Simon, and realize most of what they learned in high school was crap.

18-year-olds are too young to vote, in my opinion. They haven’t done anything yet. They haven’t had a real job. They haven’t lived on their own, paid taxes, or raised a family, or done any of the things associated with responsible adulthood.

But there’s nothing magic about 16, 18, or 21. It’s a question of when a person has become a responsible adult. And by that standard, we probably shouldn’t let people vote until they’re 30.

The Shroud is more complicated than you think. Nobody has time to investigate all the things there are to investigate in this world. You have to take shortcuts. So, for example, when I see people pointing to anomalies about 9/11, I take the shortcut that if the conspiracy theories were right, some responsible journalist would have pointed it out.

I take that shortcut knowing full well that journalists are generally lazy, intellectually incurious, and have demonstrated their willingness to go along with “the narrative” against the facts.

Consequently, I can’t blame someone who quickly concludes the Shroud is a medieval forgery since the carbon 14 tests came back with a date in the 14th century, plus or minus. It seems like a reasonable shortcut to check that one off and move on to other things.

The trouble is, it’s way, way more complicated than that. (As are many things.) If you’re curious, check out the recent episode on the “Pints with Aquinas” podcast.

Hunter had access to them. As much as I dislike Hillary Clinton, and as much as I would like Donald Trump to go away, I don’t believe either of them had any intention of sharing America’s secrets with foreign powers. That doesn’t excuse them for mishandling classified documents, but … it’s something.

I do expect a crack-head like Hunter Biden to do almost anything, and for Joe to put classified documents in a place where Hunter had access is incredibly damning.

“Hey Dad, can I borrow the corvette that’s out in the garage? (wink wink). I have a hot date with this Chinese woman.”

You can’t use ChatGPT in person. College kids will soon be writing term papers using ChatGPT, which raises some interesting challenges for professors. How do they know if the student knows the subject or is simply using artificial intelligence to fulfill a requirement?

How about this? Talk to the students!

Pictures of documents on the carpet. Remember how the FBI released photos of the classified documents seized from Mar-a-Lago? I wonder why they haven’t done that with the Biden documents? (Actually, I don’t.)

As I discussed in the post about bossy women, the problem with saying “if ___ had done this it would be different” is that no two situations are identical. If you compare the Clinton, Trump, and Biden stories about the mishandling of classified documents, each case has its own peculiarities, so it’s not quite fair to say “they did this with A, they should do it with B.” It doesn’t work that way.

On the other hand, when you have steady, persistent examples of bias, and they all seem to go in one direction, it’s hard not to make conclusions.

On the benefit of discussing literature. With at least two books that we’ve read for “shortcut to the classics” (on the “Beer and Conversation Podcast”), I changed my initial judgment of the book after discussing it with Pigweed and Longinus. The two that come to mind are Metamorphosis and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.

I was underwhelmed with both of them, but after reviewing them I realized there was more to the stories than I had perceived at first.

But when a man does it … There’s no shortage of content on LinkedIn about how unfair the world is to women. A typical complaint is the “bossy” thing. E.g., “When men do it, it’s leadership. When women do it, it’s bossy.”

There may be some truth to some of these claims, but from my perspective, it sounds more like a combination of self-justification and being a martyr.

Consider this. I used to live in a house with a guy who spoke Arabic. I asked him to teach me a few things, and sometimes he would say a word, and then I’d say it, and he’d say I had it wrong, and he’d say the word again. I was (then) a good musician, and had a good ear, but I couldn’t hear the difference between what he said and what I said.

It would have been childish of me to say, “I’m saying it exactly like you! You’re only saying I have it wrong because I’m an American.” The truth was that my ear wasn’t trained to hear what he was hearing. There are subtleties in language that non-native speakers don’t get.

When a woman is called bossy when she does (she thinks) “exactly what a man would do,” I have no reason to accept the premise that she did “exactly what a man would do.”

Actually, maybe she did. Maybe she did exactly what a bossy man would do! (Men can also be bossy.)

If a man were to say, “But I did exactly what Frank did, and you don’t call him bossy”? the response would be on the order of “you’re not as good as Frank.”

There are a lot of things to consider when you distinguish “leader” from “bossy” — like experience, knowledge, tone, style, and body language. It’s not some binary “men are leaders, women are bossy.” There isn’t any reason to assume that when a woman’s attempt is judged “bossy” it’s only because she’s a woman. Maybe she just doesn’t have the right style for delivering that sort of message.

Boys and girls grow up in different worlds, and they learn different skills. Maybe boys are more likely to learn the nuances of leadership than girls, just as girls are more likely to learn the nuances of some social settings than boys. Or maybe women who are called bossy really are bossy, and they’re grasping at a cheap excuse.

Bottom line: the “bossy women are leaders” meme is not very persuasive.