Political scribe: Trump, Journos Should Both Pipe Down
President Richard Nixon’s enemies lists contained more than a few “unfriendly” journalists, recalls Carl Cannon at the Orange County Register. Yet compared with President Trump’s press-hating populism, Nixon’s memos read “like the Magna Carta.” Thing came to boil last week when CNN’s Jim Acosta unsuccessfully demanded White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders disavow Trump’s “enemy of the people” tweets. She refused, saying both sides have “a role to play for the discourse in this country” and he stormed out of the briefing. Acosta was trying to tell Sanders that “words matter.” But “that works both ways, which is what she was trying to tell him.” Civility in both directions, in other words. Which “is what we need now.”
Conservative: New Evidence of Twitter Double Standard
Post racist things about white people “and Twitter won’t bat an eyelash,” complains Brandon Morse at RedState. In fact, he says, The New York Times will even defend you. Over the weekend, however, conservative commentator Candace Owens tweeted out the offensive words of Sarah Jeong, the Times’ new editorial-board member, but “replaced the word ‘white’ with ‘Jew,’ just to show that in any other context, Jeong would have looked an awful lot like a neo-Nazi.” Guess what? Twitter suspended her account for 12 hours. Jeong’s tweets, on the other hand, “survived long enough for the world to find them” years later. Only after a social media uproar did Twitter restore the account and apologize. But as Owens notes, we’ve gotten to a point in society where “horrifically racist” tweets against white people are OK “and that’s problematic.”
Physicist: Why Colonizing Mars Is a Bad Idea
Tesla founder Elon Musk has a vision for colonizing Mars, “based on a big rocket, nuclear explosions and an infrastructure to transport millions of people there,” says Andrew Coates at The Independent. But six months after launching a Tesla into orbit past Mars on his Falcon Heavy rocket, his plans “have started to look more like a fantasy.” Because while the discovery of a salt water lake beneath Mars’ surface may fuel dreams that “the water in the subsurface lake might be usable to sustain a human presence, the reality is very different.” For one thing, “the risk of contamination means we shouldn’t send humans there until we know for sure whether there is naturally evolved life,” which could take decades. And Musk’s notion of terraforming Mars to make it more Earth-like remains “firmly locked in the realm of science fiction.”
History prof: Colleges Are Biased Against Introverts
Whether or not Harvard and other elite universities discriminated against Asian-American applicants will be decided in court. But Jonathan Zimmerman at The Washington Post says “there’s another group of people who definitely face routine prejudice in college admissions.” They’re introverts — “the quiet types who keep to themselves, often preferring a relaxed evening at home to a rowdy night out. They like to study alone, not in groups. And they’re often the last ones to speak up in class.” Harvard’s “personality evaluation,” he says, “favors people who are outgoing, gregarious and comfortable in the spotlight: in a word, extroverts.” That might be defensible “if we knew that extroverts were more intelligent or successful.” But there’s “zero evidence for that.” And “ditto for the presumption that they make better leaders.”
Economist: One Way Racial Inequality Is Declining
Donald Trump may not be the president you’d expect to narrow disparities between black and white Americans. But Bloomberg’s Mark Whitehouse says that “under his watch, that’s just what is happening in the labor market.” Blacks in America “face a litany of barriers to gainful employment,” which is why their percentage of employed adults tends to be much lower than that of whites. Economic growth “can’t erase systemic ills and prejudices, but it can help offset them, at least temporarily.” And that seems to be occurring. Over the last three months, the employment-to-population ratio for blacks averaged 58.3 percent — just 2.3 percentage points lower than for whites. That, he notes, is the smallest gap ever since records were first kept in 1972.
— Compiled by Eric Fettmann
