We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
The "photogenic," like aesthetics in general, is socio-culturally defined. We seem to have a few categories for photos: Nature scenes, kids at play, quaint scenes, people who look interesting or attractive, and images used to document moments or things. At this point, a lot of them are cliches (sunsets, waves, babies, old men on benches, etc).
Painting is a Cropsey, Hudson River. We're looking at a photogenic photo image of a picturesque painting of people looking at picturesque scenery.
... I've been reading Jonathan Haidt's "The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion," which posits 5 foundations of moral reasoning, one of which is sanctity/degradation. Haidt has studied how conservatives and liberals do moral reasoning, and liberals stick to only 2 of the 5 foundations — care/harm and fairness/cheating — which is why they have a terrible time understanding (and appealing to) conservatives, who use all 5. (The other 2 are loyalty/betrayal and authority/subversion.)
I have a problem with that term "moral reasoning." I don't think it exists to any extent in real life. Some people know right from wrong, some do not, and some know but don't care. Aside from the Ten Commandments, most peoples' moral rule of thumb is to avoid, or to feel uncomfortable, doing anything their Mom or Dad would be unhappy about or dismayed by. Morals are mostly cultural, tribal. Are you listening to me, Prof. Haidt?
Two smart guys, Peterson (a mostly-Libertarian, or at least anti-authoritarian sort) and Haidt (non-Leftist Liberal). Warning: Once you begin, you will not want to turn it off because these are thoughtful, knowledgeable guys.
Mental arithmetic is excellent brain exercise. Also, it is practically-handy. There are many strategies with which to approach it, but I think it's considered "too hard" for the kids of today.
... you should not bother to tell us how you feel about a topic. Tell us what you think about it. If you can’t think yet, that’s O.K.. Tell us what Aristotle thinks, or Hammurabi thinks, or H.L.A. Hart thinks. Borrow opinions from those whose opinions are worth considering. As Aristotle teaches us in the reading for today, men and women who are enslaved to the passions, who never rise above their animal natures by practicing the virtues, do not have worthwhile opinions. Only the person who exercises practical reason and attains practical wisdom knows how first to live his life, then to order his household, and finally, when he is sufficiently wise and mature, to venture opinions on how to bring order to the political community.
One of my goals for you this semester is that each of you will encounter at least one idea that you find disagreeable and that you will achieve genuine disagreement with that idea. I need to explain what I mean by that because many of you have never been taught how to disagree...
Great, if you assume that inside each little brat is a hidden Euclid or Archimedes or Newton just waiting for the chance to emerge. Since the odds are strongly against that, we have instituted the concept of "education," meaning learning what much smarter people have already figgered out.
The dominant strategy of the outsiders is to focus on the negative, exposing and denouncing the failures, imperfections, and corruption of the insiders. On the left, this means heaping blame on the institutions of capitalism and free markets. On the right, this means heaping blame on the institutions of government. Neither side will propose, much less implement, an effective reform agenda.
Socialist W. E. B. Du Bois—Harvard’s first black Ph.D., a founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and editor of its magazine, Crisis—wanted no part of American industrial capitalism. Redistribution, not production, was his focus. Let white America wallow in the world of grubby accumulation; “We black folks is got the spirit,” says a character in one of his novels. So while he valued education, like Washington, its goal was political power, not economic advancement, and he urged blacks not to let their education dilute their sense of a separate, special group culture.
That proved fatal advice, especially given Dattel’s interesting account of Du Bois’s cultural premonitions. However much he disdained bourgeois economics, Du Bois sensed the necessity of conventional morality for a people’s rise. He worried that, by his estimate, a quarter of black births in 1900 were out of wedlock, and only half of blacks observed “monogamic sex mores,” as opposed to whites’ 2 percent and 90 percent, respectively. He also worried that black preachers were too interested in making money to “adopt a new attitude toward rational amusement and sound moral habits.” He saw, in other words, that black cultural mores had a self-destructive streak, and that the one indigenous black institution that could preach a moral message was shirking its principal duty...
On a chilly evening in early March 1507, high in the Apennine Mountains of northern Italy, a group of cultivated gentlemen and ladies sit around the fire in the audience chamber of the Duchess of Urbino discussing the qualities of the perfect courtier.
Such is the setting of one of the most celebrated books of the Italian Renaissance, The Book of the Courtier (Il libro del cortegiano) by Baldassare Castiglione (1478-1529), which was an international best-seller for a century after its first publication in 1528. The author, a minor nobleman from Mantua, was a humanistically-educated diplomat who served at the courts of northern Italy for most of his life, ending his career in Spain as Pope Clement VII’s nuncio to the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V...
So sensitive to offended students, aren't they? As we keep trying to point out to the academic so-called grownups, these kids are manipulating you. And, as with 3 year-olds, the more you give in, the more they want.
Read shows that none of us knows enough to plan the creative actions and decisions of others.
We recall that American Indians had traded clam shells from Long Island (NY) for obsidian from the Dakotas. Free trade. I once saw that somebody tracked the pre-Columbian Indian trade routes across the Americas. I can't find it now.
" My family tree begins with what in fact is a tree, a cedar of straight grain that grows in Northern California and Oregon...."
I’ve been a journalist for a long time. Long enough to know that it wasn’t always like this. There was a time not so long ago when journalists were trusted and admired. We were generally seen as trying to report the news in a fair and straightforward manner. Today, all that has changed. For that, we can blame the 2016 election or, more accurately, how some news organizations chose to cover it. Among the many firsts, last year’s election gave us the gobsmacking revelation that most of the mainstream media puts both thumbs on the scale—that most of what you read, watch, and listen to is distorted by intentional bias and hostility. I have never seen anything like it. Not even close...
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During the years I spent teaching at the Columbia University School of Journalism, I often found myself telling my students that the job of the reporter was “to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” I’m not even sure where I first heard that line, but it still captures the way most journalists think about what they do. Translate the first part of that compassionate-sounding idea into the daily decisions about what makes news, and it is easy to fall into the habit of thinking that every person afflicted by something is entitled to help. Or, as liberals like to say, “Government is what we do together.” From there, it’s a short drive to the conclusion that every problem has a government solution.
The rest of that journalistic ethos—“afflict the comfortable”—leads to the knee-jerk support of endless taxation. Somebody has to pay for that government intervention the media loves to demand. In the same vein, and for the same reason, the average reporter will support every conceivable regulation as a way to equalize conditions for the poor. He will also give sympathetic coverage to groups like Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter.
I knew all of this about the media mindset going into the 2016 presidential campaign. But I was still shocked at what happened...
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The New York Times has not endorsed a Republican for president since Dwight Eisenhower in 1956, meaning it would back a dead raccoon if it had a “D” after its name. Think of it—George McGovern over Richard Nixon? Jimmy Carter over Ronald Reagan? Walter Mondale over Reagan? Any Democrat would do. And The Washington Post, which only started making editorial endorsements in the 1970s, has never once endorsed a Republican for president.
But again, I want to emphasize that 2016 had those predictable elements plus a whole new dimension.
Big Journalists: Because we're smart and you are stupid, we are idealists and you are not. When you think about it, it's tough on the ego to be a journalist, always watching others, never doing anything. But always imagining that you know better than the common folk or even the big people they write about. Egotism is for people who feel small. Well, that is not really fair to reporters. Most likely most reporters are humble folk who enjoy their reporter roles covering the Zoning Commission and the obits, but the ones in the big time want to be players not observers, moral leaders or some such grandiose BS. Baloney. Nobody anointed you. Just the facts, please. Thank God for the internet.
Michael Goodwin has always been one of the humble guys.
"I’m still trying to get my mind around the Vassar College campus reaction to my planned lecture on “hate speech” and free speech..."
You can listen to his speech and the Q&A here.Actually, nothing controversial at all from my view. Even the kids' questions were pretty good for a third-tier $60,000/year college. Some angry-sounding women of course, as usual.
Economists are vocal proponents of the simplistic scientific method. If they can’t present their work as experimental, they strive to label it “quasi-experimental.” But if you read an introductory economics text, virtually none of the content is based on experiments. Instead, good economics texts are packed with truisms based on calm observation of humanity: incentives change behavior, trade is mutually beneficial, supply slopes up, demand slopes down, excess supply leads to surpluses, excess demand leads to shortages, externalities lead to inefficiency. These lessons are as undeniable as “the heart pumps blood” and “the stomach digests food.” But they’re nevertheless supremely insightful and useful. Designing social institutions without considering incentives is as absurd trying to stuff food down people’s lungs.
Between 1830 and 1840 U.S. immigration quadrupled, and between 1840 and 1850, it tripled again. Particularly troubling to lawmakers at the time was the fact that many of these new immigrants were Irish Catholics who threatened the dominant Anglo-Saxon Protestant cultural and religious customs. "Those now pouring in upon us, in masses of thousands upon thousands, are wholly of another kind in morals and intellect," mourned the Massachusetts state legislature regarding the new Boston immigrants.
Universal, taxpayer-funded “common schools” became the mechanism to rein in these masses and “Americanize” them...
Derek Bok thinks so. I don't think so, but I am in favor of more rigorous secondary ed. Leef comments:
The real problem here is that a great many young Americans don’t really want an education. They want college fun and they want a degree as long as it doesn’t put much of a burden on them. And since other people are paying for their schooling, why put much effort into it? The education system is giving them what they want. If and to the extent that Americans start wanting education and having to pay for it, things will change from the bottom up.
A young person I know recently transferred from Colorado State to UConn. Business major. Says at Colorado there was too much weed, he never cracked a book and got straight As by listening in class. At UConn, has to study every night and can't keep up - and UConn is far from an elite institution. Mediocre at best but they love basketball.
To me, it's no longer clear what "college grad" means. Is it adolescent daycare?
My ideal citizen is the self-employed, homeschooling, IRA-owning guy with a concealed-carry permit. Because that person doesn't need the goddamn government for anything.
