I'd argue that yesterday, more than anything else, was a repudiation of the $100 Aldi bill.
As to wokeness, DEI, elitism, condescension, manufactured consent, left-identitarianism, et.al., these strike me as issues for those who spend a lot of time on the internet in all its myriad manifestations. Those who spend the preponderance of their days "IRL" just don't really encounter that kind of stuff, -I don't, and I work at a university. What I do see, daily in fact, are homeless people with substance abuse problems and mental health issues. Every morning when I go for a run in my small, Midwestern college town, I dodge two people sleeping under the train bridge. I do not encounter bearded ladies or men in skirts with anything approaching that kind of regularity. Nor did I hear any of the two candidates mention anything about mental illness, homelessness or the crisis of meaning that frequently precipitates the kind of drug use correlated with the former two. I did hear a lot of vague and pointless talk about "gender affirming" care that affects basically no one.
As to the world of arts and letters, undoubtedly those tiresome and absurd sociological formulations have "colonized the discourse" as they say, but lame identity art shows at the MCA or MFA probably have little if any sway over the electorate. My hope is that there is a realignment in art and society toward the beautiful. Prioritizing the beautiful is also a prioritizing of the true and the good. Its what you might call a "win/win". Beauty can, and in many historical cases, has, thrived in even the most oppressive of political regimes -feudal Europe or Japan both spring to mind. Beauty is the constant companion of those with eyes to see and ears to hear. Sadly, our culture is about as blind and deaf as they come.
"It's the economy, stupid" is an evergreen explanation for election outcomes, and hard to gainsay. An argument against it in this case is that when the Harris campaign finally coughed up some policy, after a month of running on vibes, it was concerning prices. Those policies were spectacularly bad (price gouging bans!), but not in ways that would turn off a typical progressive. She kept at it, too. Three weeks ago she promised a million forgivable loans for up to $20K each to black entrepreneurs. Not only would that have been illegal - SCOTUS already killed a subsidy program for black farmers that the Biden administration tried to stand up, and it's now apparent whose idea that was - it would have pumped upwards to $20B into an already inflated economy. But those proposals didn't stick, and I don't think it's because they were birdbrained. The fact that you heard about "gender-affirming care" and not homelessness tells me that culture was a bigger factor in this election than economics. Of course, by the time Harris is proposing forgivable loans to black entrepreneurs, absurd economics and absurd sociological formulations are indistinguishable, so it's hard to know.
Amen to a return to beauty, but I don't think we get there on policy unless Trump makes good on his promise to bring on Elon and Dr. Paul to cut a trillion dollars out of the economy, and the institutions responsible for the devaluation of beauty get cut out.
Culture as amplified and distorted by social media undoubtedly played a role, I won't deny it. I just think "woke gone wild" while funny and infuriating, has little real-world impact outside of the micro-controversies the most extreme and absurd examples cause. Peoples perceptions of the impact, especially as they are deformed by TikTok, are another matter. One may see homeless people all the time but never register substance abuse and mental illness as problems because their media feed is packed with trans-panic. And so despite them never seeing a man go into a women's toilet, they believe that men in women's bathrooms is a very real problem. Both major political parties play into their own versions of that, and use social media to amplify it.
At any rate, with the prevalence of generative AI and the subtle infiltration of AI content into every aspect of the internet, coupled with the amount of time people spend online, the very foundations of what constitutes reality, already eroding, are about to be completely dissolved. And of course, none those ridiculous candidates ever mentioned anything about AI or the massive AI-caused economic displacement that's just on the horizon.........
The trans stuff is mostly edge cases but the general woke misery is now ubiquitous thanks to HR departments throughout the country. My wife has had to endure multiple "diversity" trainings and each one is worse than the last. In 2021, a staggering 94% of corporate hiring went to people of color.
Tim Walz takes credit for introducing "liberated" ethnic studies into the Minnesota school system.
And I'm glad that your campus is okay, but what the country witnessed at Harvard, Yale, Penn, MIT, UCLA, and elsewhere regarding the normalization of intafada was revolting.
Again, all this is widely viewed as unfair and repulsive. Sure, its manifestation in the cultural institutions is marginal and in itself is not persuasive; that is just the sliver that I'm qualified to discuss. But it's a piece of something much larger and hits a lot of people.
I one hundred percent agree that many (most?, more that 60%?) of cultural and educational institutions have been captured by adherents to what I'll call progressivist ideology. And I can only speak to my experience at a rural, regional comprehensive university, which also involves annual "trainings" of one sort or another. They're annoying, absolutely, but their content and tone are more likely to become fodder for jokes amongst my colleagues and myself than they are issues to vote about.
The article you link to is genuinely horrifying. I take solace only in the fact that the vast majority of students, as a consequence of their smartphones, simply lack the intellectual capacity to address those (bogus and ideologically driven) "benchmarks" in any meaningful way.
Jokes aside, I am bothered about the increasing lack of venues for sane discussion about how we use language, what is political, ideological, theoretical, etc. In contrast to many in academia, for example, I do not disclose my "pronouns" in my email signature. Not out of any strong feelings about the subject (although I have them) but because to do so seems like a political position. To my mind, one that is analogous to including "I support party X" in my email signature, which I think one of my past "trainings" explicitly told me I could not do at work.
As far as "It's the economy, stupid"--I have never seen either mainstream political party acknowledge that NAFTA devastated America's working class, which has never recovered. The left nattered about 'globalism' as an unmitigated virtue, while ignoring the hemorrhage of well-paid manufacturing jobs overseas, to be replaced by underpaid gig work and service work without benefits. The right cut taxes for corporations which moved their factories overseas, and cheered when CEOS took seven and eight figure bonuses for cutting jobs and stagnating wages.
All the culture warfare is a convenient distraction. 'Wokeness' and trans rights aren't hurting anyone--for the people embroiled directly in those issues, they're a necessary and normal part of maturing as social individuals. For economic bad actors, they're scapegoats.
People with visibly improving economic prospects, healthy relationships and strong communities can afford to be emotionally generous--at least if they choose to be. People who are seeing their families disintegrate into chaos, addiction, mental illness, poverty and abuse don't have much bandwidth. They're not analyzing macroeconomic trends; they're identifying with grievance and punching at convenient targets.
We housed someone who was made homeless and jobless at the same time because he replied to a DEI trainer who insisted that he discuss his white privilege that he wasn't comfortable doing so with someone who made four times as much money as him. My wife was obliged to explain to her HR department that their DEI training was patently antisemitic, and this was in 2021. The stories are horrifying and I've seen a few of them up close. I am impatient with the claim that wokeness isn't hurting anyone and culture war is a distraction. That's right up there with Don Lemon telling people on the streets of New York that, actually, the Biden economy is doing great.
I'll go further than you on the economy: even in the hypothetical absence of the effects you cite, there would be no way to conduct credible resource allocation when federal spending is as high as it is. You may be relieved to know that Trump is proposing tariffs, precisely to protect American jobs. This too is a failure of Econ 101 but he's also talking about getting rid of income taxes. The combination would be akin to an arrangement proposed by some libertarians to replace income tax with a VAT. And it would drive up prices, so there goes doing something about inflation.
Progressives have moved on, Franklin. They're no longer Team Everyone Who Disagrees With Us Is Racist, but Team Everyone Who Disagrees With Us is Racist Fascist Nazi Garbage. Do try to keep up.
My God, this article. The argument - "There is an armed man outside the door who is going to escort you to jail if you attempt to leave the room without handing him one of my cards" - is why some libertarians refer to Federal Reserve Notes as "murder points," and are trying to move to other stores of value that aren't backed by violence. And the dollar wasn't unpegged from gold because it was causing depressions - it was unpegged from gold in 1972 because Nixon needed to finance the Vietnam War. I would refer you to Sowell's excellent Basic Economics.
Tariffs would also have to be paid in USD so income taxation is not legitmating the currency by itself.
A modest proposal to the likes of Brinton and Levine: if you can't be more convincing as female than a ludicrous eyesore of a man in drag, maybe you should identify as something you can pull off better.
I'd argue that yesterday, more than anything else, was a repudiation of the $100 Aldi bill.
As to wokeness, DEI, elitism, condescension, manufactured consent, left-identitarianism, et.al., these strike me as issues for those who spend a lot of time on the internet in all its myriad manifestations. Those who spend the preponderance of their days "IRL" just don't really encounter that kind of stuff, -I don't, and I work at a university. What I do see, daily in fact, are homeless people with substance abuse problems and mental health issues. Every morning when I go for a run in my small, Midwestern college town, I dodge two people sleeping under the train bridge. I do not encounter bearded ladies or men in skirts with anything approaching that kind of regularity. Nor did I hear any of the two candidates mention anything about mental illness, homelessness or the crisis of meaning that frequently precipitates the kind of drug use correlated with the former two. I did hear a lot of vague and pointless talk about "gender affirming" care that affects basically no one.
As to the world of arts and letters, undoubtedly those tiresome and absurd sociological formulations have "colonized the discourse" as they say, but lame identity art shows at the MCA or MFA probably have little if any sway over the electorate. My hope is that there is a realignment in art and society toward the beautiful. Prioritizing the beautiful is also a prioritizing of the true and the good. Its what you might call a "win/win". Beauty can, and in many historical cases, has, thrived in even the most oppressive of political regimes -feudal Europe or Japan both spring to mind. Beauty is the constant companion of those with eyes to see and ears to hear. Sadly, our culture is about as blind and deaf as they come.
"It's the economy, stupid" is an evergreen explanation for election outcomes, and hard to gainsay. An argument against it in this case is that when the Harris campaign finally coughed up some policy, after a month of running on vibes, it was concerning prices. Those policies were spectacularly bad (price gouging bans!), but not in ways that would turn off a typical progressive. She kept at it, too. Three weeks ago she promised a million forgivable loans for up to $20K each to black entrepreneurs. Not only would that have been illegal - SCOTUS already killed a subsidy program for black farmers that the Biden administration tried to stand up, and it's now apparent whose idea that was - it would have pumped upwards to $20B into an already inflated economy. But those proposals didn't stick, and I don't think it's because they were birdbrained. The fact that you heard about "gender-affirming care" and not homelessness tells me that culture was a bigger factor in this election than economics. Of course, by the time Harris is proposing forgivable loans to black entrepreneurs, absurd economics and absurd sociological formulations are indistinguishable, so it's hard to know.
Amen to a return to beauty, but I don't think we get there on policy unless Trump makes good on his promise to bring on Elon and Dr. Paul to cut a trillion dollars out of the economy, and the institutions responsible for the devaluation of beauty get cut out.
Culture as amplified and distorted by social media undoubtedly played a role, I won't deny it. I just think "woke gone wild" while funny and infuriating, has little real-world impact outside of the micro-controversies the most extreme and absurd examples cause. Peoples perceptions of the impact, especially as they are deformed by TikTok, are another matter. One may see homeless people all the time but never register substance abuse and mental illness as problems because their media feed is packed with trans-panic. And so despite them never seeing a man go into a women's toilet, they believe that men in women's bathrooms is a very real problem. Both major political parties play into their own versions of that, and use social media to amplify it.
At any rate, with the prevalence of generative AI and the subtle infiltration of AI content into every aspect of the internet, coupled with the amount of time people spend online, the very foundations of what constitutes reality, already eroding, are about to be completely dissolved. And of course, none those ridiculous candidates ever mentioned anything about AI or the massive AI-caused economic displacement that's just on the horizon.........
The trans stuff is mostly edge cases but the general woke misery is now ubiquitous thanks to HR departments throughout the country. My wife has had to endure multiple "diversity" trainings and each one is worse than the last. In 2021, a staggering 94% of corporate hiring went to people of color.
Tim Walz takes credit for introducing "liberated" ethnic studies into the Minnesota school system.
https://www.americanexperiment.org/tim-walz-brings-liberated-ethnic-studies-to-minnesota/
And I'm glad that your campus is okay, but what the country witnessed at Harvard, Yale, Penn, MIT, UCLA, and elsewhere regarding the normalization of intafada was revolting.
Again, all this is widely viewed as unfair and repulsive. Sure, its manifestation in the cultural institutions is marginal and in itself is not persuasive; that is just the sliver that I'm qualified to discuss. But it's a piece of something much larger and hits a lot of people.
I one hundred percent agree that many (most?, more that 60%?) of cultural and educational institutions have been captured by adherents to what I'll call progressivist ideology. And I can only speak to my experience at a rural, regional comprehensive university, which also involves annual "trainings" of one sort or another. They're annoying, absolutely, but their content and tone are more likely to become fodder for jokes amongst my colleagues and myself than they are issues to vote about.
The article you link to is genuinely horrifying. I take solace only in the fact that the vast majority of students, as a consequence of their smartphones, simply lack the intellectual capacity to address those (bogus and ideologically driven) "benchmarks" in any meaningful way.
Jokes aside, I am bothered about the increasing lack of venues for sane discussion about how we use language, what is political, ideological, theoretical, etc. In contrast to many in academia, for example, I do not disclose my "pronouns" in my email signature. Not out of any strong feelings about the subject (although I have them) but because to do so seems like a political position. To my mind, one that is analogous to including "I support party X" in my email signature, which I think one of my past "trainings" explicitly told me I could not do at work.
What Alan said.
As far as "It's the economy, stupid"--I have never seen either mainstream political party acknowledge that NAFTA devastated America's working class, which has never recovered. The left nattered about 'globalism' as an unmitigated virtue, while ignoring the hemorrhage of well-paid manufacturing jobs overseas, to be replaced by underpaid gig work and service work without benefits. The right cut taxes for corporations which moved their factories overseas, and cheered when CEOS took seven and eight figure bonuses for cutting jobs and stagnating wages.
All the culture warfare is a convenient distraction. 'Wokeness' and trans rights aren't hurting anyone--for the people embroiled directly in those issues, they're a necessary and normal part of maturing as social individuals. For economic bad actors, they're scapegoats.
People with visibly improving economic prospects, healthy relationships and strong communities can afford to be emotionally generous--at least if they choose to be. People who are seeing their families disintegrate into chaos, addiction, mental illness, poverty and abuse don't have much bandwidth. They're not analyzing macroeconomic trends; they're identifying with grievance and punching at convenient targets.
We housed someone who was made homeless and jobless at the same time because he replied to a DEI trainer who insisted that he discuss his white privilege that he wasn't comfortable doing so with someone who made four times as much money as him. My wife was obliged to explain to her HR department that their DEI training was patently antisemitic, and this was in 2021. The stories are horrifying and I've seen a few of them up close. I am impatient with the claim that wokeness isn't hurting anyone and culture war is a distraction. That's right up there with Don Lemon telling people on the streets of New York that, actually, the Biden economy is doing great.
https://freeblackthought.substack.com/cp/151378093
I'll go further than you on the economy: even in the hypothetical absence of the effects you cite, there would be no way to conduct credible resource allocation when federal spending is as high as it is. You may be relieved to know that Trump is proposing tariffs, precisely to protect American jobs. This too is a failure of Econ 101 but he's also talking about getting rid of income taxes. The combination would be akin to an arrangement proposed by some libertarians to replace income tax with a VAT. And it would drive up prices, so there goes doing something about inflation.
As a normal sensible American I’m going to enjoy fewer articles about what’s wrong with the other side
Based on past performance, they may be coming like an avalanche. But let's hope for reform.
I’d rather watch an airplane crash video
I think we just did
Progressives have moved on, Franklin. They're no longer Team Everyone Who Disagrees With Us Is Racist, but Team Everyone Who Disagrees With Us is Racist Fascist Nazi Garbage. Do try to keep up.
Getting rid of income taxes would invalidate the dollar as a currency. Federally issued currency is in demand precisely because we have to use it to pay taxes: https://u.osu.edu/extensioncd/2018/01/04/why-money-has-value-and-the-national-debt/
My God, this article. The argument - "There is an armed man outside the door who is going to escort you to jail if you attempt to leave the room without handing him one of my cards" - is why some libertarians refer to Federal Reserve Notes as "murder points," and are trying to move to other stores of value that aren't backed by violence. And the dollar wasn't unpegged from gold because it was causing depressions - it was unpegged from gold in 1972 because Nixon needed to finance the Vietnam War. I would refer you to Sowell's excellent Basic Economics.
Tariffs would also have to be paid in USD so income taxation is not legitmating the currency by itself.
A modest proposal to the likes of Brinton and Levine: if you can't be more convincing as female than a ludicrous eyesore of a man in drag, maybe you should identify as something you can pull off better.
I think Brinton actually does identify as something else.
He's something else, alright, including an exhibitionist. Not a good look.