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.
Dying towns are indeed due to labor needs and labor markets, but I do not see any positive role for government in that. Negative role? Certainly. It's easy to tax businesses away. Some towns have to shrink into villages and hamlets, while other places far away become boom towns. It was forever thus.
When a town loses its tax base, it is done as a place. Ghost town, EBT-land, tattooland, boarded-up-land, meth and heroin-land. It does come to that. I have seen those towns, and so has Charles Murray. Eventually, the only decent jobs are government jobs, and then they go away too. Feudalism was good for villages and the serfs always had work.
Major urban centers, worldwide, continue to be the places with economic opportunity and cultural vitality. Rural life isn't the romantic fantasy that some imagine, unless it's a rustic second home getaway.
How ya gonna keep them down on the farm, after they've seen Paree?
Formal and informal apprenticeships have survived in the US in many of the trades. As I have said before, legal training is basically apprenticeship too, since you do not learn how to be a lawyer in law school. Similarly, doctors learn how to be doctors in their paid residencies.
Donald J. Trump won the U.S. Presidency despite perpetuating sexism, white supremacy, xenophobia, nationalism, nativism, and imperialism," the course description reads.
What does that course cost the beleaguered parents? Parents who likely voted for Trump.
Surely, though, those must have been the reasons I voted for the guy. On the other hand, maybe I voted for him to be a sledgehammer.
I am, as it happens, evicting my mother’s fourth husband’s fifth wife from a modest house (much more modest than the condition I left it in) in which she resided rent-free for a decade or so. I inherited the house from my mother when she died, and her husband inherited a “life estate” in it, meaning a legal right to reside there so long as he kept current on the taxes and such. He remarried (these are marrying people) and lived there with his new wife until his life estate ended the way life estates end, and I came around to take possession of the house and sell the damned thing. They’d had years and years to prepare for this moment, and, of course, they hadn’t.
These are, in fact, like some of the people Murray describes as residents of Fishtown. They are full of excuses for their disappointing and feckless lives. In my experience, the passive voice reveals that these are people who lack the inner resources to act affirmatively or planfully, to adapt to change or bad luck, adjust, or to learn from experience. It is sad to see, and there is no cure for it. Lots of boats, and lives, end up on the rocks.
In another era, they might have done fine on the family farm with the support, resources, and teamwork of an extended family and a small, healthy community. The post-agricultural, post-industrial world today is far more demanding of us all. It's tough out there.
Once academia lost the agreed-upon, universally held notion of what classical learning was and why it was important, a steady unraveling process removed not just the mission but the mystery—and indeed, the beauty—from the American university. How ironic that the struggling university, in its efforts to meet changing political, technological, and cultural tastes and fads, willingly forfeited the only commodity that made it irreplaceable and that it alone could do well. And how sad, since once the university broke apart the liberal arts, all the religious schools, self-help courses, and CDs couldn’t quite put them together again.
Outside the venerable halls of Columbia, the University of Chicago, and a couple of others, Hanson's ideal version of higher ed for the free citizen is not so easy to find. In fact, it never was easy to find, but was reserved for the elites or for the self-educated. Self-education is difficult, though. It's always best to have a guide who has the big picture in mind. That's why we all love CDs from The Teaching Company, now Great Courses.
To be human, interacting with other humans, is to enter a world in which as Object being perceived, we emit an infinite series of unconscious cues (how we walk, how we talk, how we look, our tone of voice, our gaze, our height, our weight, what we say, what we do, how we say & do these things, etc.). These cues are then received by the Other who, in turn, as Subject, subconsciously filters & interprets them according to an infinite set of paradigmatic beliefs, stereotypes, experiences, and insights.
They say we form first impressions within approximately seven seconds.
So who were we if not the boomers? How would you name us? You could call us the Generation of 1968, because that was when we made our most enduring mark, when the “whole world was watching” as the chant went from the Chicago Democratic National Convention of that year. It seemingly never stopped. But a better title for us would be the Least Great Generation, because that’s what we were. Maybe the Ungrateful Generation. We may have contributed significant amounts to the lifestyle—music, films, fashion, food—but as the years rolled on and centuries turned, it became ever clearer that we were callow, even selfish, inside. All our neo-Marxist declarations, recycled through hippiedom or not, were meaningless. We were just Eliot’s “Hollow Men” in hipster attire. Worse than that, we had—consciously or unconsciously or both—worked to unwind everything our parents had built. And it had its result, although not all of us desired it—or were later surprised by what we had wrought. These days the robust American exceptionalism that defeated the Germans and the Japanese and then rebuilt those despotic societies as still-functioning democracies in a virtually unprecedented manner is a distant, almost forgotten, memory.
He goes on to discuss Moral Narcissism, which is a good topic. However, describing a generation or much less a Zeitgeist based on the kids who made it into Newsweek Magazine is highly misleading. It would be as erroneous as describing today as the Black Lives Matter, or the Antifa, generation.
It is filled with excruciating solecisms (“Though this institution as well as many others including this entire country, have been founded upon the oppression and degradation of marginalized bodies, it has a liability to protect the students that it serves”); garbled regurgitations of High Theory (“The notion of discourse, when it comes to discussions about experiences and identities, deters the ‘Columbusing’ of established realities and truths [coded as ‘intellectual inquiry’] that the institution promotes”); and sheer head-scratchers of incomprehensibility (“To conclude our statement, we invite you to respond to this email by Tuesday, April 18, 2017 at 4:07 PM [since we have more energy to expend on the frivolity of this institution and not Black lives].)” (Gnawing question: Why not a 4:08 PM deadline?)
Where are the faculty? American college students are increasingly resorting to brute force, and sometimes criminal violence, to shut down ideas they don’t like. Yet when such travesties occur, the faculty are, with few exceptions, missing in action, though they have themselves been given the extraordinary privilege of tenure to protect their own liberty of thought and speech. It is time for them to take their heads out of the sand.
Arnold Kling mentioned it here.It seems to be about how people adapt to change, or fail to. Rules of the game change. Life can be like Calvinball. Winners adapt, losers fail to adapt. One must be quick on one's feet in life, like a hunter.
Every citizen should do what I do: write quarterly payment checks for Social Security, Federal and state taxes, Medicare tax, etc.
It makes it real. People who get regular paychecks never get all of their earned wages. That is not right. Does the government not trust citizens to pay their taxes themselves?
