Democrats aren’t the party of science: Jonah Goldberg – USA TODAY
Jonah Goldberg 9:38 a.m. ET April 8, 2017
Hillary Clinton at Georgetown University on March 31, 2017.(Photo: Susan Walsh, AP)
As fate would have it, Hillary Clinton spoke at the Hillary Rodham Clinton Awards for Advancing Women in Peace and Security, where she emphasized the importance of peace, of women and of women in peace. When women participate in peacekeeping peacemaking we are all safer and more secure and boasted of evidence-based research that backs up this claim.
And shes right. Including women in the peacemaking process is often a valuable way of securing peace in war torn countries.
But she also got in what was seen as a partisan shot at the Trump administration. At one point she began a sentence by saying, Studies show and then interrupted herself: here I go again talking about research, evidenceand facts."
The crowd laughed, cheered and loudly applauded for a while, proving that theres nothing like working out your best material with a friendly audience. Clinton laughed at her supposedly very funny joke, too.
She also said, "Before anybody jumps toany conclusions, I will state clearly: Women are not inherently more peaceful than men. That is a stereotype. That belongs in the alternative reality."
Again, if you dont get the joke, the reference to alternative reality is apparently a jab at Kellyanne Conway, who once said something silly about alternative facts.
But heres what I think is funny. Clintons wrong. Shes the one peddling an alternative reality.
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Yeah, theres a stereotype that women are inherently more peaceful than men but, as a generalization (which is what stereotypes are) its true.
This is an evidence-based conclusion backed by a great many studies.
In 2015, according to the FBI, 7,549 men were arrested for murder and non-negligent manslaughter. Only 984 women were. Men were four times more likely to be arrested for violent crimes and ten times more likely to be arrested for illegal possession of a weapon.
Its not just in America. Disproportionate male aggression is a human universal, appearing all over the world and across thousands of years. In almost every society men are the ones who are overwhelmingly involved in wars, in all kinds of intergroup aggressions and intragroup homicide, writes Dorian Fortuna at Psychology Today.Men mobilize themselves in armies of violent fans, incriminalgangs, in bands of thugs, etc. These observations are as old as the world and have allowed us to create a clear distinction between male and female sexes regarding their predisposition to violence.
Throughout history, reports The Economist magazine men have killed men roughly 97 times more often than women have killed women.
The male inclination for violence has a lot to do with testosterone, which is most plentiful in young men who, in their natural habitat, fought other males to impress women (you can head down to Fort Lauderdale during Spring Break to document this phenomenon yourself).
Steven Pinker writes in The Better Angels of Our Nature, his sweeping history of violence, that to the extent that the problem of violence is a problem of young, unmarried, lawless men competing for dominance, whether directly or on behalf of a leader, then violence really is a problem of there being too much testosterone in the world.
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Interestingly, one of the things that is most likely to make men less violent is getting married, proving thatClinton is right when she says that women have a pacifying effect. What public policies should flow from all this is a topic for another day.
Whats annoying aboutClintons cheap partisan preening isnt simply that shes wrong (and I suspect she knows it). Its that she is perpetuating an infuriating tendency of liberals today to claim science is always on their side.
Theres a decidedly undemocratic flavor to this kind of argument. Patrick Moynihan famously said that everyone is entitled to their own opinions but not to their own facts. Liberals want to turn that on its head and claim that their opinions are facts and anyone who disagrees isnt merely voicing a bad opinion but it somehow living in alternative reality or denying science. Its the secular version of claiming that God is on your side.
Clinton is peddling stale, corporate feminismas settled science in part because shes pandering to a friendly audience, but also because shes too lazy to shed her own alternate reality.
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Democrats aren't the party of science: Jonah Goldberg - USA TODAY
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