Long Movie Review of "Live. Die. Repeat: The Edge of Tomorrow"

It's the Ace of Spades patented long movie review.

Groundhog Day meets Aliens? Yeah, I'd go see that.

Some Thoughts on Hobby Lobby and Why Liberals Fail at America

Now that the long holiday weekend is over, it's back to work. That meant I had a full day today, so no time for blogging until now. I haven't blogged much here on the Hobby Lobby case.

If you go over to Brad's post on that case,I probably wrote more over there than I have over here. In any event, I've covered the legal aspects of the case over there, and I don't really care to rehash that aspect. What I've been mulling over the weekend was the absolute freakout that the left had over the decision. Frankly, it doesn't seem that earth-shattering to me. What really puzzled me was all the hair-pulling, wailing, and gnashing of teeth. I saw all that and thought....really? Um, ok.

It puzzled me that people are aghast to discover a law called the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) protects religious freedom. The whole reason you pass a law like this is to protect religious freedom and give them accommodations. That's the whole point. But then, this upcoming point was made on Ace's podcast, and it bears repeating here, on this much less frequented corner of the internet, because it clarifies the issue.

The whole point of RFRA is to make special provisions, and to make accommodations with different beliefs. Because normally, the majority of a group finds it annoying to have to make these accommodations.

Accordingly, we passed a law about it - the RFRA. For instance: If a guy at your job site is a Muslim, then he may have to take a break three times a day to pray to Mecca. Obviously, not everyone gets this break. The rest of you guys have to keep digging the ditch. But to get along with the Muslim guy and be tolerant, we've decided, with RFRA, that we are going to respect that this guy has a belief system that isn't what everyone else's belief system is. Therefore, we're going to cut him some slack from the general rule that you don't get three breaks a day to pray in the direction of Mecca.

And for the most part, liberals are seeming fine with some of these special exceptions. But as soon as you have just one special exception that goes against their belief system, they want to crush people and impose their will on them. And then when you point out that the law also protects this religious group, all the liberals start yelling: "What the hell!, Now we're making laws for EVERY SINGLE RELIGIOUS GROUP?? It's going to be like ANARCHY here!" Well....that's kind of what the law says. What did you think the law said?

And that goes into the main point: One of the things that most people think was a good quality in liberals is that they wanted to protect the minority from the tyranny of the majority. I did. I kind of thought that it was a good thing that liberals at least thought about that problem a lot. They always seemed worried about a small group getting steamrolled by the conventions of the larger group.

But...it turns out that liberals don't really think about that. They don't really care about small groups having their own little exceptions if it the small group isn't part of their voting coalition. It was never about principle for liberals. For them, it's purely a transactional process for members of their voting coalition. LIberals are not fighting about the principle of the minority, because when it gets extended to a Christian, they're aghast, and they want to overturn the RFRA. They don't believe in the principle of protecting this religious minority. This whole thing has been very revealing for me.

I've seen liberals basically say that they don't support pluralism of viewpoints in general. They support specific exceptions and accommodations for people in their voting coalition - and that's it. It's not that liberals are principled and good people, they've just decided to do favors for people who vote like them.

And I hear these liberals say, If only these trouble-making Hobby Lobby Christians could be could be forced, somehow coerced by the government, to behave properly, then we wouldn't have these problems!

They fail at America.

An Excellent Explanation of Why Common Core Won't Work

As always, Ace takes a topic and absolutely breaks it down wonderfully. Today, he did a great breakdown of Common Core, and why it's not a great way of teaching. I'm going to do a big block-quote here, but go read the whole thing.

Common Core needlessly complicates the simple. They complicate the simple, supposedly, to impart "number sense" to kids, to get them to understand not just that 9 +3 = 12, but why 9 + 3 =12.

That's a very ambitious goal.

I suppose we should ask this question, however: Given that teachers are currently failing in the less-ambitious goal of simply teaching that 9+3= 12, why do we believe they'll be better at the more-ambitious goal of teaching why 9+3 =12.

You guys see Stand and Deliver, the story (IIRC) of Jamie Escalante, some kind of aerospace engineer (IIRC) who decided to try his hand at teaching math at a poor, underpeforming majority-Hispanic school?

Well, he has a class of higher-level students. He drills them to say "zero times six is zero, zero times seven is zero, zero times eight is zero," and so on, and then, in what the movie industry calls a "Button" (an exit-line designed to end a scene on a dangling, interesting question that either leads organically to the next scene or suggests unfilmed activity going on beyond the filmed scene), he says to the class:

"Good (that you understand that zero times any number is zero).

Now: Why?"

The "Why?" is an interesting question. But note the order in which he introduced it: First he drilled the basics. Then, with his higher-performing students only, he introduced the Why?, not as the foundationof mathematical exploration (the foundation being rote memorization and drilling), but as the apex of it.

The last step, not the first, and not even the fifth.

I have previously written of this, calling it Cargo Cult. Previously uncontacted aboriginal populations would see the great planes flying in the sky, and would see them land and discharge various cargoes, including, say, cans of Coca-Cola.

The aboriginals wanted their own Sky God Chariots, and wrongly believed that Coca-Cola had something to do with aerospace technology; they'd collect empty cans of Coca-Cola and arrange them in red-and-white shrines in the belief that mastery of the Coca-Cola would lead to mastery of the power of flight.

They confuse the end result of a highly technological civilization (standardized cans of mass-produced, globally-sold beverages) with the necessary prerequisites for that civilization.

Go read the whole thing.

The Economics of Sex and Downton Abbey

This is one of those  "Whiteboard Videos", where they show you graphs while delivering the point, and it's interesting. It looks at the issue of sex as an economic transaction, and looks at the exchange in economic terms - supply and demand.

I think there are some more complicated factors out there not addressed by looking at relationships in purely economic terms can be misleading, but there is some truth to most of the points in this video. The most insightful comment in the presentation is: Men tend to behave as well, or as poorly, as the women in their lives permit.

There is some truth in that.

In the past, the issue of sex resulting in a baby made pre-marital sex (or at least sex without a serious committed relationship) much more risky, and therefore it was not as casual as it is now. (See, Edith's pregnancy in the fourth season of Downton Abbey).

Sometimes you had to go to France if you got pregnant without a husband. Or was it Switzerland?

Anyway, watch the whole video. It's safe for viewing. There's no nudity or bad language. It's economics, so relax. I would be interested to see if men and women have different perspectives on the points asserted. As Instapundit is always noting, the benefits of marriage to men have been downgraded over time through various factors, not the least of which is divorce jurisprudence.

Shamelessly stolen from Ace's Place.

Actor Phillip Seymor Hoffman Found Dead of Apparent Heroin Overdose

Hoffman was found dead with a hypodermic needle still in his arm.

Ace has a good point about the debate over drug legalization. Basically, his point is that the choices are a binary set of two choices:

1. Drugs are bad, and therefore must be illegal; or,
2. Drugs are fine, and therefore should be legal, and it's ok to do drugs.

Ace notes that you don't really see a more (dare I say) "nuanced" argument for: Drugs can be legal, yet they're pretty dangerous, so maybe you shouldn't do them.

As usual, Ace is right.

In all of the argument for legalization of marijuana in Colorado, we aren't really seeing anyone say that maybe it's ok to have legalized pot, but maybe we shouldn't be such big cheerleaders for it without the counterbalancing argument of "Maybe we shouldn't smoke pot all the time".

As events like Hoffman's death remind us, drug use has some negative consequences. Yes, this was heroin, not pot, but still, with all this marijuana legalization talk, I'm not hearing about any negative consequences. That's not good.

Remember the line Bill Clinton had about abortion? He said it should be "Safe, legal, and rare"which is a kind of third way of approaching the abortion issue. It's not the cheerleading stance of "Yay abortion", and it's not the prohibitionist stance of "never". He took the path of let's keep it legal, but let's discourage it culturally and socially.

I think that's the right path for some drug legalization. The problem is that we aren't seeing anyone of the legalization side of the argument call for restraint, or rarity in drug use.