Challenging Opinions >>

Bill Scher is a contributing editor at Politico magazine and a contributor at Real  Clear Politics. We talked about his article Deficits Don’t Matter. So Why Are Democrats Complaining About Them?

 

Ilya Shapiro is a senior fellow in constitutional studies at the Cato Institute, and editor in chief of Cato Supreme Court Review.

We discussed his article about Arlene’s Flowers, a flower shop in Richland, Washington and Masterpiece Cakeshop, a Colorado bakery, both of which refused service to same-sex couples planning a marriage, and were sued as a result.

Neither the website of Arlene’s Flowers nor Masterpiece Cakeshop (which specifically advertises wedding cakes) give any indication that same-sex couples will be refused service, presumably to avoid losing the business of hetrosexual couples who would not patronise them if they were aware of their policy.

Ilya also mentioned UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh who he has sometimes agreed with, and sometimes disagreed with.

Dr Warren Farrell, along with co-author Dr John Gray, wrote The Boy Crisis: Why Our Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do About It published by BenBella Books in March 2018. You can find him on Twitter or Facebook.

There’s an uncomfortable parallel out there that some campaigners don’t like to acknowledge.

You’ve probably seen one side or other of the parallel on Facebook or other social media, depending on what type of self-confirming political views the algorithms think will keep you clicking on ads for as long as possible.

One side is a variation on the theme that armed toddlers, or lawnmowers, or insert other ridiculous cause of death of your choice, that all of these kill more Americans than Islamic terrorists posing as refugees. And it’s true. You are literally more likely to be killed by a toddler who gets hold of a gun. Murders by Islamic terrorists in the US have been vanishingly rare in recent years; that depends somewhat on definitions, but Donald Trump Junior’s Skittles bowl tweet was a good example of a misperception.

He compared accepting refugees from the Syrian war to eating from a bowl skittles, one of which is poisoned. In fact, as was pointed out, to represent the stats accurately, you would need a bowl of skittles far bigger than an Olympic-sized swimming pool. You would be certain to be dead of diabetes long before you found the poisoned skittle.

A rebuttal from the other side of the aisle is strikingly similar. The March for Our Lives was in Washington on Saturday, following the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, among others;  gun-rights advocates make the same point that advocates for refugees make whether they’re talking about school shootings or the shooting of black men by white police.

Despite the attention that these incidents get, statistically speaking, they’re irrelevant. It’s

Yaron Brook is an entrepreneur, podcaster and writer, and the current chairman of the board at the Ayn Rand Institute. You can watch his video that I raised here.

Despite the NHS providing universal healthcare for everyone in the UK, the British government spends a lower percentage of UK GDP, and a far lower dollar amount on healthcare than the US government does; and the US government spending on healthcare is only about half of the total spend, while most people in the UK don’t bother with any further health insurance. 

The UK is considerably poorer than the US, and would rank last or close to last if it were a state of the US, depending on the exchange rate used and other technical measurements.

While life expectancy largely tracks health spending in OECD countries, the US is stark exception to this trend; despite vastly higher health spending, average life expectancy at birth in the USA is 78.8, compared with 81.4 in the UK. Yaron suggested that this was because of confounding racial factors, however the US population group most closely matching the UK, non-Hispanic whites, have a life expectancy of 78.9, still well below the UK figure.

A very adequate cellphone plan in Germany can cost €8 (less than US$10) per month. Equivalent plans in the us are r...

Brad Friedman is a blogger and the presenter of the daily Bradcast show – find him on Twitter and Facebook.

Heather Jones appeared last year on the podcast to represent the Black Pigeon Speaks website. Since then, she has changed her views, particularly in relation to the Alt Right.

The current editor of Black Pigeon Speaks has been in touch to clarify that Heather does not speak for the site and is no longer associated with it. I’m happy to make that clear.

H Sterling Burnett Senior fellow in energy and the environment at Heartland Institute  and managing editor of environment and climate news there. He has a PhD environmental ethics.

Sterling said that he didn’t remember disputing the existence of climate change. He is quoted in 2009 by his then-employer the NCPA as saying:

Contrary to what all the climate models have predicted, over the past decade the global average temperature has fallen to its lowest levels in 30 years.

Since that was written, almost every single year has been has been in the top 10 hottest years since 1880, as reported by NOAA.

RANK

PERIOD OF RECORD: 1880–2017

YEAR

ANOMALY °C

ANOMALY °F

1

2016

0.94

1.69

2

2015

0.90

1.62

3

2017

0.84

1.51

4

2014

0.74

1.33

5

2010

0.70

1.26

6

2013

0.67

1.21

7

2005

0.66

1.19

8

2009

0.64

1.15

9

1998

0.63

1.13

10

2012

0.62

1.12

In 2012, before Sterling joined the Heartland Institute, they ran a billboard campaign likening anyone who ‘believed’ in global warming to the unabomber, Ted Kaczynski.

Sterling also questioned me when I mentioned the danger of vehicle fumes to humans.

Linda Bellos is a businesswoman, radical feminist and gay-rights activist. She was a member of the collective that produced Spare Rib, a British feminist magazine, and was a member of Lambeth Borough Council in London and was the leader of the council from 1986 to 1988.

The term ‘TERF‘ is widely used as a term of abuse by third wave feminists for second-wave feminists, often with extreme hostility and even threats of violence. Linda was invited, and then un-invited to speak to the Beards Society in Cambridge University, as part of a bitter dispute between factions within feminism.

Anthony Davies is associate professor of economics at the Palumbo Donahue School of Business at Duquesne University, and presents the podcast Words and Numbers, and has written many research papers including this one which I mentioned in the podcast.

I’ve checked the sources, and it is clear that while real wages have risen slightly, they have risen sharply for the top 10 per cent of earners, and declined for the bottom 10 per cent.

In addition, the link between productivity and wages was broken in the mid-1970s and has not been restored since – as workers get more and more productive, producing more and more for their employers, their wages remain largely flat in real terms.

The Gini coefficient is mathematical a measurement of the the level of inequality of income inequality in a country, city, or any other unit.  It has risen sharply in the United States since about 1990. As I said in the podcast, there is a correlation between the level of inequality in a society and the level of violence as noted here, here and here.

Liz Posner is a managing editor at AlterNet. We talked about the #MeToo phenomenon, and her article on Aziz Ansari, following the anonymous article about an encounter with him published on the Babe website.

Liz also mentioned the Guardian columnist Jessica Valenti, and an article on Study Soup about perceptions on what constitutes consent in a sexual context. This is the chart that she was referring to: