Please enjoy these notes from the past few days:
Apr. 23
If society encourages people to be true to their own feelings and inner dispositions, the [relational] divide between men and women is likely to increase. If people are not even trying to get along, fewer will.
Reply:
I’m quite proud of being a product of the University of Florida. May not have given me a leg up at the beginning but I can’t imagine having gone to a far more expensive college I’d be paying for until I was 50. I wondered at the time if the decision was right and long term it proved to be. Also, there’s not much diff in earning power between state school grads and private school grads I’d suspect, on average, but not sure. The elites def get a leg up on the highest paying professions right out of school, which is rather unjust bc it’s based solely on branding of your college.
My Reply to Anuradha:
The market can take a few years to react to those kinds of sorting mechanisms but if I had to guess I would say that employers of most kinds have become much more reluctant to hire students from these elite private colleges and that trend will continue. Not only does Critical Theory erode scholarship and promote the dismantling of hierarchy… it eventually destroys the institution. These colleges would do well to remember that the source of ALL of their wealth is essentially as incubators for the professionals of tomorrow-if they’re not producing good employees for the market they die. Then hierarchy will REALLY be dismantled.
[L]ike most organizations, [Wikipedia] expanded its scope from running and building this great resource into being yet another organization whose aims is to undermine society as we know it.
Trump holds rallies that are attended by thousands of genuinely adoring fans, and these crowds of people who love the man boo him when he brags about his amazing Covid-19 vaccines, which are absolutely brilliant and amazing. That’s an opening to an effective political attack, but you have to live in reality to notice it.
And so the brutally stupid architect of the appalling regime change in Libya, an undeclared war waged without congressional approval for poorly defined ends and with the result of producing a failed state, warns that Donald Trump wants to “rule without any check or balance.” It’s a performance of such sociopathic obtuseness and repellent falsehood that only a few political figures could ever even hope to attempt it. But the extreme is now the regular, and we’re somehow headed toward the normalization of this kind of bizarre non-attack attack, a politics in which opposition research is conducted in the presence of a hookah-smoking caterpillar. Reminder: this is their response to all rising opposition figures, not simply their response to Trump. It’s their only remaining vocabulary. No end is in sight.
“[A]n irrepressible drive for justice is what powers West Hollywood, which is why I was curious to see how things would play out at a city council hearing earlier this year, at which residents fought to overturn the approval of a new affordable housing development…
…[I]t was jarring to watch some of my supposedly progressive neighbors attempt to keep poor people out of our community, citing everything from the potential for traffic to the concern that the building’s 300-square-foot “microunits” would be beneath the dignity of any potential resident. Meanwhile, low-income workers in attendance tried to explain that it would be nice to live within commuting distance of where they work.
Nearly to a person, the NIMBYs insisted they were ardent supporters of affordable housing. Just ‘not at the expense,’ as one man advised, ‘of the quality of the people living in the neighborhood.’
He may have intended to say ‘quality of life.’ But I suspect he said exactly what he meant.”
@Oliver Wiseman, The Free Press
Suicide Rates Are Now Higher Among Young Adults Than the Middle-Aged
“[A]ll along, we have taken it for granted that the highest rates of suicide are found in middle-aged men because that has been true for so long. But as Jean shows in this new essay: That is no longer true. The rise in suicide among Gen Z in the U.S. is so big that it is now Gen Z males, ages 20-24, who have the highest rates of suicide.”
“The vast majority of people who “trust the science” are moral cowards who bolt from controversy like mice.”
Our young people have become more abstract, less productive, and more spoiled than even those ridiculous young New Leftists. I really do feel embarrassed for them when 12 hours without food is a 'hunger strike in solidarity' worth writing to the media about.
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/a-feast-of-impotent-vanity?r=1neg52
How about we each have our own utopian revolutions, toDAY? Yours will be going to class (unless you're at CU), mine will be going to an AA meeting. Some guy can go to the gym as a revolutionary act of rage. We might as well... the events and plans and conditions are that pedestrian and uninspiring. I'm going to go eat dinner in solidarity with the global proletariat. Peace
It doesn’t matter how entirely our life is transformed or how unrecognisable man becomes, the mere continuation of the species seed is paramount. If it takes religion to bring this about, then sobeit.
It’s reminiscent of the recent practice of fitting factory farmed cattle with VR headsets that simulate a grassy field, which reduces the animal’s anxiety and yields higher quality milk. The human animal, in his artificial enclosure, will not yield what he does in his natural setting, so we must fit him with some simulation of it.
Sauron was 54,000 years old when he waged his war on Middle Earth. It’s never too late.
The Gaza Health Ministry is run by Hamas.
Someday we will have true figures from this war and the decades of historical attacks that preceded it.
We don’t yet.