1. Elida Almeida music video from Cape Verde.
2. Andrew Sullivan on neo-reaction:
Among many liberals, there is an understandable impulse to raise the drawbridge, to deny certain ideas access to respectable conversation, to prevent certain concepts from being “normalized.” But the normalization has already occurred — thanks, largely, to voters across the West — and willfully blinding ourselves to the most potent political movement of the moment will not make it go away.
Here is the longer piece, of interest throughout, here is good commentary from Rod Dreher. And here is Henry on Trump through the lens of Polanyi.
3. “Man pays tribute to friend by flushing remains down 17 MLB ballpark toilets…Tom McDonald says gesture is fitting for his friend, who was a plumber.” Link here.
4. School segregation is back.
5. Those new service sector jobs: “Facebook says it will hire another 3,000 people to review videos of crime and suicides following murders shown live.”
6. A Master’s degree for 7k? (NYT)
7. A new project from Russ Roberts: “My latest econ education project is It’s a Wonderful Loaf: http://wonderfulloaf.org. It’s about the emergent order that is the market for bread. It’s an animated and annotated poem plus resources to learn quite a bit about emergent order if you want to go deeper.”
This is not a comment. I’m starting a one month voluntary ban from commenting to pay off a bet to Msgkings.
Your erudite contributions will be missed by at least this poster!!
It was his choice to leave, I like his posts. He didn’t want to post a pic of himself and his fiancée who’s half his age. Mainly because she of course doesn’t exist, but why he didn’t just find a picture of some old dude with a 20-something Filipina is beyond me.
That said, he’s not going anywhere.
because surely someone would have done a reverse google image search and found the source of the image.
“why he didn’t just find a picture of some old dude with a 20-something Filipina is beyond me.”
@msgkings No mystery. An honest man would not do that.
I would rather see pictures of his family’s DC real estate.
An honest man would also not claim that his third world mistress is his “fiancée” or even “girlfriend”. But agree on the pics of the real estate, if it’s, ahem, real.
The holdings contain the Brooklyn bridge ive always assumed.
Later.
LOL he announces he isn’t commenting, with a comment. I knew he’d welch. He’s way too lonely to stop.
Come on, he’s got lots and lots of in-laws to talk to.
” I knew he’d welch”
Come on @msgkings. There is no place for ethnic slurs!
LOL….but, um, welch =/= Welsh
Ummm yes it does https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/welch
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/72806/are-the-terms-welsh-or-welch-as-in-reneging-on-a-bet-derogatory-toward-the
I stand corrected. Well, we all know those Welsh are scum anyway 🙂
Except 1990s Catherine Zeta-Jones….
Not as bad as Brazilians, but then who is?
I have already conceded the bet, surely it was foolish for me to even attempt this.
Welcome back, Ray! Did you miss us? Welcher.
” I knew he’d welch”
Come on @msgkings. There is no place for ethnic slurs!
LISTEN NOW! If you don’t stop with the ethnic slurs I will get the great Welsh (Welch) actor Anthony Hopkins to channel Dr. Hannibal Lecter on you.
Or I might have Prince Charles send The Royal Welch Fussiliers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Welch_Fusiliers
C’non. He’s hardly posting. He’s explaining his absence. And it’s more entertaining and interesting than being corrected by Prior.
“I have already conceded the bet, surely it was foolish for me to even attempt this.” – This was the fake Ray Lopez. I am breaking my ban just to point this out. I will now go back to lurking. I notice already btw the quality of comments has already gone down, except for AlanG’s.
*eyeroll emoji*
7. Interesting website from Roberts. However, if more people baked their own bread (as I do), they would double enjoy the magic and wonders of crafting a well made sourdough and marvelous smell of baking bread, As I write this comment, I’m baking a couple of loaves of Rustic Bread (our main go to for toast and sandwiches). I would offer some to posters, but cannot find an easy way to send it through the Internet!!!
“if more people baked their own bread (as I do), they would double enjoy the magic and wonders of crafting a well made sourdough”
I don’t doubt that one bit. It’s also true of so many other things than bread. However, there are only so many hours in a day. We have only so much time for a hobby. Perhaps I can bake my own bread in my retirement. But since we become more insulin resistant as we age, baking bread might not happen then either. 🙁
I cook at least three meals a day from scratch, so I have considerable experience in the kitchen. Baking bread is among the most difficult tasks to truly master. I would not recommend that to anyone considering beginning to cook. Start with the simple stuff, like pan-frying, deep-frying, and making soup. Move on to sauces and roasting meat. Save bread for last. Even cakes and pies are easier than bread.
To put it in economic terms, consider the opportunity cost. For the time and effort mastering bread, you could master brewing beer. Wouldn’t you rather have beer?
I cook my own bread because I like it better than what I buy, but one could back up from there, and say grow your own wheat and mill you own flour etc.
I had a bread machine that was super simple to make bread with. However, it eventually broke, and has not been replaced because of my fear of carbs.
Yes, carbs are the new trans-fats, just as trans-fats were the new cholesterol. If only you knew the Truth. It’s simple sugars — mono- and disaccharides.
#8 – Does Paul Ryan really believe that this new version of healthcare repeal will really solve the pre-existing condition problem. It’s woefully underfunded right now and at the rate of healthcare inflation and the introduction of new procedures and cures (which will cost more money) it can’t possibly work. Look at the new drug BioMarin developed for a rare genetic disorder. Price tag is $720K a year. We have the capability of solving a lot of similar genetic disorders and even though the patient population is small the price tag will be high. Some state Medicaid programs don’t want to treat Hep C with existing therapies because to do so will bust their budgets.
LOL at you thinking Paul Ryan cares one whit about the pre-existing condition problem. His family is covered for that.
Only is the bill reverts members of Congress back to socialist medicine ERISA benefits which prohibit rating or denial for preX including the universal preX that Republicans believe every buyer of insurance in the individual market must pay with automatic premium increases.
The number one preX is called aging, every year you are one year older and a bigger risk. No one is exempt from the preX. The only way to prevent it is death within the year, by suicide, presumably.
“Last week House Republicans took a PR hit when Vox reported that the portion of the American Health Care Act that revokes Obamacare’s guarantee of coverage for pre-existing conditions includes a section that requires insurers to continue guaranteeing pre-existing condition coverage to members of Congress. The representative who’d proposed that section of the bill, New Jersey’s Tom MacArthur, subsequently claimed that he planned to eliminate the Congress loophole. Now it’s a week later, and what would you know—a vote on the AHCA is scheduled for Thursday, but the congressional loophole is still in it.”
So, the answer is “Ryan cares a lot about PreX so he is ramming a bill through that exempts himself and his peers from the preX provisions they are forcing on voters, many who voted for Trump and Republicans.”
How much money have you given to people with pre-existing conditions. Money beats virtue signaling every time.
And how much money have you given to fund police and fire, or build roads?
Unfortunately, I donated all my money to buying missiles and aircraft carriers. Those things are *expensive*.
OMG. People who have pre-existing conditions, who let their coverage lapse for more than 63 days, will face higher premiums for A WHOLE YEAR!
The HORROR!
and have a smaller fund pool from which to draw
The real problem is buying into the notion that pre-existing conditions must be fully subsidized no matter what.
HepC cure is cheaper than years of dialysis. Private insurance companies realize that at their current WACC it’s cheaper to just cure it and be done.
I still think this brings us back to a point we can hopefully all agree on. I loathe to admit, I agree with the Jans, Nathans, etc. I want to live in a society in which the luck of the draw in terms of illness doesn’t leave people homeless. Note the words luck of the draw. Not obesity, not smoking, not riding a motorcycle, not doing drugs or -unprotected- “things”, especially the exponentially more dangerous kind, etc. People who choose to live dangerous lives should pay a premium for it. However, government funded catastrophic insurance and government mandated HSAs would be infinitely better than what we have.
I realize this is a pipe dream. Public choice economics and rational irrationality means we will choose stupid stuff literally every time. Which is why I hope for defunding everything. We’ll never get anything good, so just defund. Burn it down.
Cabo Verde is really amazing and its people is the second most fascinating people whose official language is Portuguese. Instead of sending people to Timor to teach Portuguese, we should have sent people to Cabo Verde to teach Portuguese (although their Creole is fascinating).
The production values on that video are amazing. especially with cape verdean GDP/inhabitant at roughly 3k/y.
Yep, but the Cape Verdean are resourceful.
#2 – Desperate for attention is my take.
#6. Masters are typically 6,000 euro pa fees in Ireland.
#2: I was hoping for something interesting, but no, just he usual libertarian fawning over authoritarianism and blaming liberals. Social liberalism is fine and getting stronger. It is libertarianism that is rapidly dying at the hand of the reactionaries, and doing nothing to defend itself.
Were you at ISFLC when Richard Spencer showed up? I think libertarianism is defending itself. If the reactionaries defect and stop calling themselves libertarians, we’ll be better off for it. It’s like a cleanse diet.
You thought that the Sullivan article on reaction was “[t]he usual libertarian fawning over authoritarianism and blaming liberals”? You read a different article. Sullivan is often labeled a conservative or a moderate, but this specific article read like a liberal painting reactionaries as authoritarian villains.
I’m worried about your reading skills, Adam. I see Sullivan as a very small c conservative, who typically leans liberal. Unless you see him as some kind of Straussian.
On 2, I don’t understand the amount of think-piecing going into this. Neo-reaction is simply the latest acknowledgement of the fact that most people are latent mini-fascists and do not understand the basis for modern prosperity. That has always been the case.
Now some elites (the neo-reactionary intellectuals) who have an aesthetic problem with some other elites and their imitators (the progressive/PC/ Wellesley crowd) have exaggerated that sense of aesthetic dislike and fanned this latent dislike of free exchange and the extent of existential threat. That does not constitute a great political movement, simply a temporary failure of the existing elite order due to complacency.
The elites have to re-figure out how to rule by stealth (as always) and get the good things out to the public that they wouldn’t understand if it bit them in the ass, within the confines of one-adult-one-vote. Now that would be a political movement worth talking about.
Pretty cynical but mostly correct.
No, it’s just the typical psuedo-intellectual internet comment:
1. The
goyimpeople are mini-fascists, which he imagines to be a revolutionary and original thought rather than the default elite attitude over the past 50 years.2. Use of the word “elite” in a ridiculously over-broad manner.
3. The “this is nothing compared to the Romans marching over the Rhine(look at me, Mr. Historical knowledge),” which he will have completely forgotten about when he logs back on tomorrow to beat to death his favorite political hobby horse.
I disagree. The neo-reaction is an organic populist movement in response to increasing diversity, high levels of immigration, terrorism in Europe, and liberal social movements that promote chaos. You overestimate the influence of elite opinion. The neo-reactionary “intellectuals” are part time bloggers very much outside the “elite”.
I don’t disagree – simply saying that the reason it feels like a “political movement” is because it has an intellectual front, otherwise we’d parse it simply as the inherent dislike the average person has for things that are unfamiliar (all the things you describe – immigration etc.).
p.s. Terror related deaths in Western Europe http://www.datagraver.com/case/people-killed-by-terrorism-per-year-in-western-europe-1970-2015
There is always *some* existential threat – most evidence is that it is lower these days than at almost anytime even within the lived memory of today’s adults. But that is clearly not the perception. That’s where the neo-reactionary intellectuals come in – the ones that’ll link to the latest piece of ‘liberal social chaos’ e.g. the fake mass-molestation story from New Year’s Eve in Cologne (pr was it Hamburg?) or link to yet another bunch of stupid kids on their latest no-platforming spree and claim that this is the end of all that is great about Western civilization as we know it (nevermind that most of Western civilization has consisted of armed men crossing the Rhine and ravaging each other and the hapless peasants who happened to be in the way).
The failure of the elite consensus due to complacency is what is new this time. The tribalism of the average should surprise none.
It’s not an inherent dislike. It’s a dislike of things that are making the country worse. Immigration of clannish low IQ third world trash makes the first world worse.
Even if we stop immigration today, the barbarians will have voting majorities with a generation or two, then its game over. Just look at the countries in which they currently have voting majorities. Trash countries.
It’s mass deportation to keep things white or game over. Just about any other problem you could say “we’ll solve it one day”, but the demographic problem is permanent game over that prevents solving any of the other problems.
LOL “game over”. Racists are a bunch of whiny pussies.
+1
The intellectual elite would be selling apples on the street corner but for the central banks ability to print trillions of dollars to bail them out.
These folks don’t recognize that democracy is about then keeping there heads attached to their necks. But the elites have for so long been immune to the consequences of their stupidity that we are doomed to experience them learning.
But not you, right? Your income would be unaffected if the central banks had let the Great Recession become Great Depression II.
Actually no, I’m fine. The people I worry about are the ones who have been lent more money than they can afford by banks who weren’t forced to learn the obvious lesson that 2008 gave.
We are going to see a serious problem here in Canada, already one mortgage lender forced to restructure with, get this, health care workers pension money. I suspect they are braiding ropes to hang someone in Ontario right now.
2008 was essentially a list of bad ideas come to fruition, and every one of those bad ideas survived a correction because they were bailed out in previous years. It was the market correcting a huge pile of bad ideas. They weren’t corrected. Oddly the market will continue to correct them until they are purged from practice. Best to take your medicine while you are strong enough to handle the side effects.
“The elites have to re-figure out how to rule by stealth”
Maybe that is your ideal for India or wherever, where admittedly conditions are different, but it strikes me as exactly the reason why some are attracted to reacting against the status quo. Ruling by stealth is exactly what the PC crowd has done, and exactly what oligarchs have done too. (Not too stealthily on campuses, but still.)
What about the idea of teaching people what they need to know, instead of keeping them in the dark and then insulting them for their ignorance?
#2. Sullivan vs. Dreher, progress vs. regress–what this reaffirms is that different groups have different interests, and not all of these can be harmonized or reconciled. The taboos that existed in the 1920s, for example, are the opposite ones that prevail today. What will always remain true regardless of time and place is that folks look out for their own interests and define the reality they encounter around them accordingly.
2. In my fast glances these pieces were unsurprising, but not wrong. Capitalism and democracy used to be embedded in a High School Civics social context. A middle class morality. Markets were disembedded from those social beliefs. Indeed, you all know in these pages that old-time middle class morality is now “virtue signalling” or “moral preening” or “ego posturing” and verboten.
Of course that produced, in what hopes is an end to the experiment, what Dreher calls “Our Big Reactionary President is an administrative incompetent of no particular political or philosophical conviction.”
The only way back is to embrace a social context and morality, and not to simply accept that we always were nothing but “mini-fascists” in our base nature.
So fix it.
“in what hopes is an end to the experiment”
Nope, the next one will be competent and hence worse. [Or better from another point of view.]
Removing the content of civics that existing in the TANSTAAFL 60s was required to support the conservative free lunch politic-economics agenda.
In the 60s, even in indiana, we understood that we had to pay for what we wanted, so if businesses wanted skilled workers and people wanted to be skilled workers, training and educating workers had to be paid for, and for those too young to work, that meant workers and businesses had to pay for educating people starting when they were too young to work. In other words, we were taught that taxes were the price of educating people to become skilled workers.
Since Reagan, the theory is “the market” creates skilled workers, apparently out of nothing, that skilled workers are not made by paying workers to teach thone too young to work how to be citizens who contributed to the political-economy by citizenship and work. This was to eliminate the need for taxes and paying teachers in any capacity, teaching reading and writing and math or how to cut wood or steel, or how to fasten two prices together, etc.
That kids are still taught reading and writing is more a byproduct of conservatives supporting daycare instead of jails for those who no one wants to pay to do work they don’t know how to do.
The economics embedded in all the civics was zero sum. Workers got paid for stuff they produced which workers paid for with the wages they were paid. Yeah, a special kind of worker, the business owner was carved out of the pool of workers, but he had to pay for what he consumed to pay the workers to produce it. And paying taxes was the way workers were paid to produce the stuff we didn’t need to pay to consume, like education and roads and sewer and police stopping thieves. Farmers had to put back into the soil everything they took out, and that meant crop rotation and grazing cattle. (Returning the sludge from sewer plants was too icky to talk about, but it had to go somewhere, often downstream in those days. But we learned in science that nature was zero sum, so everything harvested for profit us to eat obviously returned to nature to rebuild the soil somehow. Everything eaten becomes something that something else eats. Zero sum.)
When you reject zero sum and TANSTAAFL to promise free lunches, you must eliminate 90% of the old civics education that was created from from the earliest days in the schools of the Founders.
+1
#4 the whole good schools, bad schools seems to me to mostly be based on myth. My guess is that there are very few bad schools in the developed world just schools full of poorly performing students. Good students do well in what we call bad schools and bad students do well in what we call good schools. See:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_to_Opportunity
I went for one year to a school that at the time had a reputation for being one of the best Government schools in the country. I also went to school with a bad reputation. I think the teachers were slightly better in the latter.
Some schools might be unsafe but if we focused on just that we might be able to solve it on the cheap.
Also it seems like lately some people complain about blacks being persecuted by whites causing stress that holds them back and hurts their health so maybe there is good reason for them to avid majority white schools.
2. Wow, what a tour de force by Sullivan. He builds the neo-reactionary case, then demolishes it. Sullivan alone is reason to support immigration.
Perhaps. But he is a certain kind of immigrant, no? A highly intelligent Tory intellectual.
He is an argument for us adopting a Canadian style immigration system: you avoid the problems of a mass migration of the uneducated and impoverished by selectively skimming off the cream for admission. You do know that right?
Yes, but Sullivan has come a long way since his old Tory days. I’ve read Sullivan long enough to know that he has shown very poor judgment at times, such as when he supported the Iraq War (even suggesting those opposed were traitors). Sure, he is still a Tory at heart, and his Tory instincts often take him off in the wrong direction, but he eventually comes around. And the man can write a beautiful sentence and construct the perfect argument (as he does in the article linked by Cowen). Of course, we don’t give IQ tests to those seeking to immigrate to America. Maybe we should, rather than rely on credentials from foreign schools that may not reflect intelligence.
Is it correct to say “immigrate to” when viewed from the inside? “Emigrate to” when one is on the other side doesn’t make sense. I suppose the compromise would be “emigrate from” and leave it at that. For all those who wish to emigrate to America, more power to you, but understand when you arrive you will be immigrants and not emigrants.
It’s interesting that racial discrimination has been superseded, at least in the comments area of this blog, by a bias against those perceived as being less intelligent than Americans, all of whom are above average. Since, by some odd measure, whole groups and nationalities can possess a level of intelligence less than that of Marginal Revolution commenters, those people are lesser humans than the Yankees, who do not wish to live adjacent to, or even in the same part of the earth, as the foreign dullards. The root of this bias is, of course, excess melanin in the skin which everyone knows correlates with stupidity.
Of course, we don’t give IQ tests to those seeking to immigrate to America. Maybe we should, rather than rely on credentials from foreign schools that may not reflect intelligence.
Well, students form a sizeable cohort of potential immigrants, via the OPT-and-H1B route. And students are supposed to give the GRE/GMAT/TOEFL, etc. (or at least used to a couple of decades ago), which are sort of IQ tests.
The equivalent of the Canadian program for non-citizen visiting workers enables them to go home with a promise to be allowed to come back.
Considering that the USA is ten times larger, it’s the equivalent to about 5 million workers a year coming to do manual labour of various types.
The presence of a legal avenue which enables them to legally return the following year makes it easy to keep things orderly, instead of driving everything underground.
Yes what a tour de force Sullivan convinced a hard left, dull, unthinking person that the right is bad.
Maybe next he can convince you of the merits of excessively long, overly self interested shit posts.
#8) “The individual with the condition still submits bills to the insurance company, which then turns around and bills the state. But then the insurance company does not consider the cost of this care as part of its calculation for premiums to other individuals in the state.”
With high-risk pools, the cost of treating pre-existing conditions is paid by taxpayers instead of hidden in premiums. Under Democrats’ plans for “free” college, costs are paid by taxpayers instead of tuition. Why don’t Democrats love high-risk pools as a way to cover pre-existing conditions for “free”? Why burden those without pre-exisiting conditions that are already struggling to pay their own insurance premiums when we can cover pre-existing conditions for “free”? Many Democrats also want single-payer, government health care. A high-risk pool is a single-payer, government system for covering those with pre-existing conditions.
Unless someone is willing to explicitly call for higher taxes to provide more funding for high-risk pools, their complaints about “gutting” protections for pre-existing conditions are completely disingenuous. If one is truly concerned about pre-existing conditions, then one should be willing to say that one wants to raise taxes to pay for it.
Democrats did call for higher taxes to fund healthcare– it was called Obabacare.
Democrats did call for higher taxes to fund healthcare– it was called Obamacare.
Democrats actually hiked taxes to pay for part of the universal preX, but also mandated buying insurance which is considered a tax by conservatives levied by corporations. The price is means tested with taxpayer tax dodges tax cuts, with the tax dodges tax credit rising as the universal preX increases premiums. Ie, the 60 year old buying costly insurance due to advanced preX gets a bigger tax dodges than the 30 year old with less advanced preX.
Read the conservatives debating PPPs like toll bridges built by and run by corporations: they consider the tolls the same as taxes that government simply turns over to for profit corporations to collect. These conservatives want the bridges but neither no taxes or tolls, no property taxes, income taxes, gas taxes, use fee taxes, or tolls. They want free lunch bridges.
The problem is, there is no free lunch, so everyone must pay for the universal preX, one way or another. Unless death panels are used to cull those with advanced preX condition. Should the high cost of the universal preX kill people at age 30? Age 25? Maybe kill the poorest based on age? At age 25 you get to live even if homeless because the gig economy can’t pay for shelter, but at age 30, the homeless are euthanized. Age age 40, construction workers are euthanized because they aren’t physically able. Economists get to live until they need drugs to treat cancer, diabetes, heart disease.
Every one, including you, has a costly pre-existing condition, aging, and every year, that costly preX gets worse and the Republicans want the penalty for living a year longer to be higher. Obamacare went from socialized medicine of no charge fore preX to a 3 times higher premium for living year after year, but that was too low a penalty for Republicans who have compromised on 5 price bands instead of Obamacare 3 preX price bands, with a ratio of five times the premium between the early sufferers of the aging preX and the high cost of living for four decade.
Conservatives want to get rid of ERISA which prohibits any preX in premiums so that the 20 year old in the early stage of aging preX pays the same premium as the 60 year old coworker with the high costs of advanced aging preX.
The only solution is something like that in Logan’s Run, euthanasia at age 21 (novella) or 30 (movie). That rids society of the high cost of the aging preX that every person suffers from.
Republicans want the penalty for living a year longer to be higher
Why shouldn’t it be? We’re all going to die. What’s an extra year of life when you are 80 if it’s costing your grandkids their college fund?
At some people people have to make an explicit calculation between the value of the elderly living a little longer – at public expense, and all other the OTHER things the public could spend those expenses on.
Is it so immoral that that insurance premiums reflect a steeply increasing price to pay for spending other people’s money living a wee bit longer?
Well, how valuable is college these days?
It becomes immoral when some can have it and others can’t, thus the argument for a universal system with rationing. It’d be a lot cheaper, too.
It becomes immoral when people who can afford to pay for it aren’t allowed to, because some arbitrary bureaucratic official somewhere said so.
Why don’t Democrats love high-risk pools as a way to cover pre-existing conditions for “free”? Why burden those without pre-exisiting conditions that are already struggling to pay their own insurance premiums when we can cover pre-existing conditions for “free”?
It’s a stealth tax, obviously. Why spend government money when you can sneakily tax private citizens by forcing them to pay higher insurance premiums?
Why ensure that those with the most burden have it heaped upon them in double doses at the most inopportune time?
Ensuring a system which systematically kicks those who are down is not cool.
Risk pooling through public health insurance that is built into taxation may in fact be cheaper.
“Ensuring a system which systematically kicks those who are down is not cool.”
I’ll take food over fairness any day, just like anyone else. That is unless you think America and Canada aren’t unfair?
I do not understand the contradiction you propose of “fairness is as opposed to eating food”.
Most people consider eating food to be quite fair, especially when everyone gets to do it, and especially when there is a surplus about 1000 times larger than needed for survival.
#2 “deny certain ideas access to respectable conversation”
Has Andy ever found the real mother of Trig Palin? Talk about not being a subject of “respectable conversation”.
I don’t care to “normalize” a pathetic person like Sullivan by reading his drivel or giving clicks to any magazine which publishes him.
#2. Sullivan is such a finger in the wind.
The thing is that the neo-reactionary case has been demolished so many times in the past, that it is utterly tiresome to have to repeat the process over and over again.
Do we actually have to debate the merits of racism again? Really?
Also I’m unconvinced that the “movement” such as it is, is really much more than a bunch of virgins living in their mom’s basements, expressing their impotent rage on the internet. Trump lost the popular vote against a candidate, Clinton, who was widely disliked, who flagrantly broke the law with her unethical and illegal private email server and who never owned up to doing anything wrong. He pulled out a victory by swinging a few states with his pompous anti-trade rhetoric.
Let’s all not make a mountain out a molehill. I refuse to believe that the dominant social norms of tolerance, openness, and acceptance of all races which have prevailed for decades in the US are actually under serious challenge. The nativist impulse remains a minority in the US which has happened to gain recent influence due to being the swing demographic in the US electoral college system. The US is not Europe either, as we don’t have large terrorism producing Muslim minorities. The alt-right and it’s despicable adherents will sooner or later make themselves too obnoxious, like Steve Bannon already did, for the rest of society to not soon spit them out with revulsion. Conservatives already hate them. Liberals hate them. The only thing that remains is for rank-and-file Republicans to get fed up with the rage machine and alternative facts universe and the increasingly open racism and misogyny and reject that too.
#4 – school segregation is back.
Also, white neighbors are still more expensive.
The label of racism conflates too many different beliefs.
It is one thing to be open and welcoming to people of different backgrounds. It is another thing to believe that all groups are equal in every dimension in spite of any evidence to the contrary. It is quite another to enforce that nobody else notices or acts on group differences, at the pain of economic and social harm.
Neo-reactionaries are cosmopolitan, but realistic. They persist for the reason that all underground movements do: they contain a seed of truth which the mainstream is incapable of integrating. Racism, whatever that means, is the thing that the mainstream most fears. Close behind is the failures of democracy (really just repackaged public choice, plus more ancient critiques).
Monty Python did a skit about apartment blocks put up by a magician. They stay up as long as everyone believes in them.
Democracy fails the same way, as a choice.
> Racism, whatever that means, is the thing that the mainstream most fears.
I disagree. This is fundamentally wrong and misguided. Accusations of racism or bigotry have been convenient social signals for deciding who is “in” and who is “out” but it isn’t even close to the thing the mainstream fears the most. The object of their most extreme fear is now, and always has been, class consciousness.
It is quite another to enforce that nobody else notices or acts on group differences, at the pain of economic and social harm.
So you think it should be normal and socially acceptable for white people to systematically discriminate against blacks in employment, housing, and other areas of life?
That’s what you’re arguing isn’t it? That it’s okay for people to “notice group differences” and “act on them”.
And whose economic and social harm are we talking about? I don’t think black people are “harmed” by having people treat them as individuals instead of as “average black person”. You’re talking about white people being somehow mysteriously economically and socially harmed by NOT discriminating against blacks. How exactly? How are white people harmed by not being assholes to black people?
His reply, if he chooses to make one, will be that white people are harmed by not being able to exclude non-whites from their lives/neighborhoods/offices/country. It’s ever so much fun.
So only the harms that white people have to endure matter. Only white lives matter.
The thing is that ultimately, yes, trying not to be racist imposes costs on white people. But there is a reason we started this social project all those years ago.
And that is that the systematic social exclusion of blacks is not long-term viable. You can’t take an ethnic subgroup of the population and subject them to permanent pariah status and expect them to take it quietly. And it fundamentally conflicts with America’s founding vision of a society where all people are social equals. We’ve all got a moral duty to help black people integrate into a unified American society.
I wouldn’t support forcing white people to put their kids in majority black schools (which won’t work because people will go to extreme lengths to protect their children). But, I think putting up with awkward situations like being nice to the black neighbor and the Hispanic maid, at least trying to treat your black co-workers as equals, is a small price to pay compared to the costs that would be created in a society where people think it’s ok to refuse to hire blacks or rent them homes.
” But, I think putting up with awkward situations like being nice to the black neighbor and the Hispanic maid, at least trying to treat your black co-workers as equals, is a small price to pay compared to the costs that would be created in a society where people think it’s ok to refuse to hire blacks or rent them homes.”
This is one of those moments where i wonder if you and your ilk are really just projecting your own flaws onto others. none of this stuff has been a problem for me or anyone i know for quite some time.
I’m sort of imagining what it must feel like to be the sort of person who thinks that it’s harmful to be forced to associate with black people.
“I’m sort of imagining what it must feel like to be the sort of person who thinks that it’s harmful to be forced to associate with black people.”
Why? That’s like 85% of the population. Have you heard of the concept of “revealed preference” in economics?
I’m sort of imagining what it must feel like to be the sort of person who thinks that it’s harmful to be forced to associate with black people.
The revealed preference, nationwide, is for majority-white neighborhoods. The revealed preference, globally, is for majority-white countries. So there’s a lot of people you could ask.
I guess it’s also revealed preference that so many white folks are choosing to become addicted to and die from alcohol/meth/opioids. Yay revealed preference!
msgkings, are you becoming addicted to alcohol/meth/opioids?
That’s the difference.
“America’s founding vision of a society where all people are social equals.”
Indeed, the concept of a natural aristocracy was anathema to the likes of Jefferson.
Expert trolling. Hat tip.
@Hazel Meade
I don’t think that it is just, but I do think that “systemic social exclusion of blacks” is long term viable. Just think of the hundreds of years that it has been going on. So it isn’t unreasonable for anyone to assume that it will continue indefinitely.
Of course, since we are not literally clones, therefore I am superior to you.
As I said, we’re not clones. And what else could that mean other than ME > YOU?
Lots of words to call Trump supporters “deplorable”. At least Clinton kept it to a sentence.
Many Trump supporters are deplorable, and many aren’t. Obviously.
Well I think I was pretty clear that I think the deplorables are a relative minority whose influence has been vastly overblown. Do you think Trump won because of the alt-right, or did he win because of his also stupid, but not particularly right wing, stance on foreign trade? Are white union guys in Michigan the same as the alt-right? It’s possible, but I’m willing to postulate that working class whites in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin are not ALL nativist neo-reactionaries.
” I’m willing to postulate that working class whites in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin are not ALL nativist neo-reactionaries.”
That the swing voters have no ideology is not in dispute. They never did. I’m sure a few of them cycle between ideologies, they might be social conservatives in 2004, hopey-changers in 2008, alt-Right in 2016, but most are not. They are merely “moderate.” But that does not imply that social conservativism or hopey-changism were unimportant to Bush or Obama’s victories. For activism and propaganda, swing voters aren’t going to that. You need a committed base. For Trump, that was the alt-Right.
Or was it? Anti-immigration sentiment has been a right-wing thing for a long time, completely independent of the “alt-right”. It’s just that the “alt-right” is providing a moral justification for it on the basis of ethnic solidarity (aka racism), rather than protecting American workers. But a pretty big percentage of Trumps vote was probably more motivated by protection of working class jobs than by ethnic solidarity. I think the alt-right is more riding Trumps coattails than he thiers.
I think that Hazel Meade may be correct. I believe that exit polls showed that 20% of black male voters voted for Trump, which makes me think that Trump’s rhetoric of protecting Americans and American jobs from foreigners was key to his appeal and resonated with working class men. The racism wasn’t the main dish, but instead the most effective way to convince voters that he wasn’t bullshitting about trade and immigration (although he was, just like every other so called “cuckservative”). That is to say he is just Jeb Bush with an Eastern European wife instead of a Mexican one.
Clinton called one half of Trump’s supporters deplorable. Since half of all adults did not vote and only half of those remaining voted for Trump, she characterized about one-eighth of the adult population as “deplorable.” Do you have an argument to make or are you just being a snowflake?
Who knows? You make an excellent case for misogyny.
And you make an excellent case for post-birth abortion.
Not a good idea to insult women when msgkings is in the house!
I guess it’s a good idea to insult women when I’m not around?
Anyway, just giving a zing to ol’ ladderff who’s a world-class doosh.
MSG tends to get a bit salty when that happens.
I’m actually quite sympathetic to Peter Singer’s position on neonaticide. It *should* be legal to euthanize a mentally retarded or severely disabled baby, within about the first month.
But isn’t the first month another arbitrary line?
And yet, you are doing exactly what Sullivan is warning against, raising the drawbridge and hurling lame insults instead of engaging in anything like intellectualism.
Because as stated it’s fucking tiresome, not to mention degrading, to debate racist retards.
Sure, ok, then you should vote them out of office. Oh wait, you are losing elections right and left. Maybe you should try convincing someone of what you believe in rather than just calling everyone who disagrees with you a “racist retard”.
Also, retard is a pejorative against the mentally handicapped, you bigoted fuck.
I refuse to go along with the retarded belief that the word retarded is verboten.
If you’ve deluded yourself into thinking you care about those people, please continue on with that.
But in this instance, you’re just the guy who got triggered by someone saying something about racists. Racist.
Who are the racist retards? I look at the hellholes with extraordinary rates of incarceration and constant racial violence or unrest and they are almost all run by people who accuse anybody but themselves of racism.
It is a disgusting easy trope. I would even suggest it is a nice tidy box for overeducated but not very bright minds use to try to make sense of what they can’t figure out.
Hazel wouldn’t know anything about “overeducated but not very bright minds”
Not that she’s personally unfamiliar, she just doesn’t know anything.
” Do we actually have to debate the merits of racism again? Really?”
Yes, Hazel, we do.
Hilarious that a libertarian is taking about virginity.
This phrase of yours “I refuse to believe” seems to pretty much sum up your entire comment. I guess it’s a step forward from I refuse to listen, but a small one.
8. If millions are hurt by AHCA, that’s just collateral damage in the more important war to cut taxes paid by wealthy folks and to cut the size of government. It may come as a big surprise to supporters of the war on taxes and government that AHCA has provisions that will adversely affect many of those in a preferred group, those with group insurance through their employers. I’m sure they won’t object as they are perfectly willing to be collateral damage in the more important war on taxes and government.
Facebook says it will hire another 3,000 people.
In what country or is there some new H1B hoax?
#1 I also like Mayra Andrade for Cape Verdean music.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOqRYJ9oDZI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DIi-TfQ4II
2. As expected, the article was pure drivel.(I admit I didn’t read it all.) This in particular stands out as a great example of Sullivan’s missing the point:
“They(neoreactionaries) believe that the profound shifts in the global economy reward highly educated, multicultural enclaves and punish more racially and culturally homogeneous working-class populations. ”
In fact, that is the opposite of what we believe. Instead, what we see rewarded by the economy are the more homogeneously rich and white enclaves, the 90% White, 5% Asian enclaves that the “cultural elite” runs away to after castigating the White working class a bunch of deplorables. The truly “multicultural” neighborhoods of America, they aren’t highly educated, nor are they rewarded much by the global economy. But Sullivan wouldn’t say that, he must flatter his audience, not point out their hypocrisy and delusion.
While I think I understand what you are saying, I understood Sullivan to be referring to metro areas like NYC, Boston, Seattle, SF Bay, LA, DC, and smaller metros dominated by universities and state government employment. To call some of these areas enclaves seems a bit misleading due to their size, but I took his point to be that these areas are in many senses walled off from the rest of the country, culture and economy, and equally important, the rest of the country walled out from their opportunities and prosperity.
But yes, my experience has been that most all cities in the US are racially segregated.
“Between 2000 and 2014, the number of schools the report deemed H/PBH—that is, “high poverty and comprised of mostly Black or Hispanic students”—more than doubled, from 7,009 to 15,089.”
Surely the solution to this conundrum is more Hispanic immigration
How much of that was simple demographic shift, anyway, as the birth cohort gets ever poorer and Hispanic/black?
Sullivan, summarizing Anton’s critique of the Economist and the Davos crowd of globalizers: “It routinely shoots down any critiques of globalization, sees few problems with mass immigration, and is still busy celebrating an ever-more-powerful European Union and ever-more-expansive free-trade agreements among ever-more countries.”
I had been considering cancelling my subscription of the Economist, for precisely this reason. I might be a centrist but I am in favour of asking hard questions of mass immigration, etc. The Economist does not do that. It has become an apologist.
Andrew Sullivan’s piece is the best thing I’ve read this year.
Re #4:
The article managed to avoid ever mentioning any reason why parents don’t want their kids’ schools integrated. (The implication was clearly that this was because of racism.). The article would have been a lot stronger if the writer had honestly tried to answer that question–the closest he got was talking briefly to his old friend, who had been non-racist enough to endure taunts in school for it, but who wasn’t comfortable with sending his own kids to a majority-black school. But he never bothered asking why.
I wouldn’t send my kids to a majority black school either. Sorry. There might be gang violence. I don’t think any majority black school is above the national median in terms of student outcomes. I don’t care about whether a K12 school is “elite” versus at the 70th percentile, but I would not send my kids to a school below 50th percentile.
I think that more progress would be made in integrating schools if people would widely acknowledge that it is entirely reasonable to want one’s children to go to schools where they will not be part of a small racial or ethnic minority, and will be surrounded by kids from good homes (i.e. Hardworking, honest, polite, married parents). Due to demographics in the US, it is impossible to achieve the outcome that all kids go to a good school, where a good school is defined as one in which most of its kids come from a good home. I think that many white people over react to the presence of black or Hispanic kids in their local schools, but I do think the response is directionally correct in terms of inferring what increasing numbers of black and Hispanic students mean for the number of good families. Note that this also applies to working class whites. Additionally, I think that this is just. Already it is the case that people in the US who have the self discipline to follow a straight forward life script of school/training, then marriage, then kids have the ability
To send their children to schools with other children from good homes. It is immoral, sinful, and disgraceful when people do not do this, and that is part of why the college educated almost never have children out of wedlock. We are just too considerate of others to say much of anything about it, but it should not be forgotten that the working class seems to believe that the professional/ managerial class holds them in contempt.
This is actually a pretty good illustration of the way that respectable media sources are often deceptive. They generally won’t lie outright, but they will omit relevant details and questions, when those details or questions would undermine the story they want to tell. This is really common–I notice it in probably 10% of NPR stories dealing with any politically or socially sensitive topic.
An honest reporting on a story like this would involve asking those questions, and then genuinely trying to answer them. That urban school district they’re trying to separate from, how is it doing at getting kids ready for college, or even graduating them? Why do parents who actively oppose racism still not want to send their kids to majority-black schools? Maybe even link to relevant statistics.
#5 and probably too illiberal for this site
Like News outlets blindly amplifying every terrorist threat thus creating new terrorists with each air time minute the terrorists get – Facebook too has a responsibility for each of the murders happening on “FB live”. Lest for creating the playground for the murders in the first place.
As if “becoming content” weren’t already an unnessary reason to die and almost always resulting in a new low for the way of getting murdered Social Media’s complicit role in engagement becomes Even more disgusting considering those 3000 added workers are considered a tiny collateral for continuing a Venture which is presumably unprofitable and unuseful and only there so that no competitor can take its position.
#2. “The tragedy of our time, of course, is that President Obama tried to follow Lincoln’s advice. He reached out to those who voted against him as often as he could. His policies, like Obamacare, were aimed at helping the very working poor who gave Trump the White House. He pledged to transcend the red-blue divide.”
This seems outrageous.
Obama did pledge to transcend the red-blue divide but he did the opposite in office. This is broad consensus, across the political spectrum, even his supporters agree that as president, he and the Democratic party moved hard left, and focused more on firing up their base than appealing to moderates.
Obamacare was widely disliked, even by people who voted for Obama. Republicans won elections on the basis of Obamacare opposition. To consider Obamacare the ultimate symbol of reaching across the aisle seems quite silly. This is the “tragedy of our time” that Obamacare wasn’t received as a truly bipartisan effort? Come on!
Also, Lincoln ultimately mass murdered Americans who disagreed with him and burned down their cities.
The article is interesting to see an outside view of neo-reaction, and the talk of Michael Anton was interesting, but Sullivan clearly doesn’t get it.
He talks about raising the drawbridge and then presumes that side is ‘open minded.’
It may be a little pedantic but it is Cabo Verde not Cape Verde. Unless you translate both words and call it Green Cape. Translating the noun but not the adjective is absurd.
#6: That CS Masters looks awesome! Thanks for the link.
$500 for a 3-credit class? I currently pay ~$2500 for a 3-credit class and I would much prefer the online format.
I think I will enroll!
Comments on this entry are closed.