All Christmases refer back to the Christmases of your early childhood. That’s your baseline, your definition. Mine were warm and happy, which is a blessing and a curse — you love the season, but now you have an unreasonable standard. Everything falls short. It takes a long time to unlearn Christmas and reassemble it for your own — although having kids of your own accelerates the process, makes it easier. Forget your own unrealistic half-remembered expectations; let’s implant the same in the next crop! And when your toddler hugs your leg and says Oh Daddee it’s the best Christmas EVER you know you’re back in the groove.
James Lileks
December 24, 2021
QotD: Christmas nostalgia
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November 2, 2021
Election day in Virginia
Mark Steyn writing about the Tuesday state elections being held in Virginia, which certainly seemed to become much more competitive as larger concerns about the school system energized a lot of parents, and a Republican-in-name-only group plays dirty tricks on the Republican candidate for governor:
“Republican” group trolls Republican candidate in the Virginia election campaign, October 2021.
Tuesday is what less evolved societies than Virginia still quaintly call “Election Day”. The Democrat candidate, the unlovely Clinton bagman Terry McAuliffe, claims that “we are substantially leading on the early vote”. In the fullness of time he will also be substantially leading on the late vote, if he isn’t already.
That leaves the votes on Voting Day up for grabs. The Republican candidate, Mr Youngkin, is a squish of no fixed beliefs who will govern as Mitt did in Massachusetts or Pataki did in New York. But he has been handed a winning issue that he would probably not have chosen save for public outrage — the state of Virginia schools in an age of “critical race theory” and trans-mania. It’s bigger even than an education issue: The left is so boundlessly ambitious that it is abolishing biological sex, and if it gets away with it will leave an awful mountain of human wreckage in its wake, bigger even than its other innovations.
Every Virginian should vote on Tuesday — because Youngkin’s campaign is a classic example of Milton Friedman’s dictum: in politics you don’t wait for the right people to do the right thing, you create the conditions whereby the wrong people are forced to do the right thing. That is what parents at school-board meetings have been doing, and they deserve to be rewarded for it.
Virginia is a state where a rapist gets transferred to another school because he/she belongs to a protected class, rapes again, and, when you protest the anal rape of your daughter by a known rapist, you’re the guy who gets thrown to the ground and arrested. Whether one finds the foregoing objectionable shouldn’t really be a Republican/Democrat thing, but such is the moral depravity of the cultural heights that Dems are all in on the convicted sodomizer and only squaresville low-status GOP candidates can muster even pro forma objections. So in 21st-century Virginia insouciance about schoolgirl anal rape is now a partisan thing.
Of course, it remains to be seen whether the state’s election system is sufficiently honest to reflect fairly that public outrage. If at, say, 10pm on Tuesday night Youngkin is narrowly ahead but you wake up on Wednesday morn to find McAuliffe has been the beneficiary of all the 3am votes, well, Republicans will be forgiven for suspecting that “fortifying” the “two-party system” into something rather more streamlined is here to stay.
I say that as an immigrant who never feels more foreign than on America’s hideously chaotic yet oddly purposeful election nights. But then in Northern Virginia a quarter of the population is now foreign-born, and half of those arrived in the last twenty years. That’s a remarkable statistic for a so-called “Old Dominion”. Demography is destiny, and in an ever more tightly circumscribed public discourse there are decreasing opportunities even to raise the topic.
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October 17, 2021
Just about the least likely 2021 issue … protesting a school principal for her musical taste
In Friday’s NP Platformed newsletter, Colby Cosh reports on some St. Catharines, Ontario parents who apparently just woke up from a 40-year long stasis pod:
Adrian Humphreys has a short item in today’s Post about an attempt to petition against a St. Catharines, Ont., public school principal because of her off-hours fondness for Britain’s ancient heavy-metal act Iron Maiden. NP Platformed can only applaud the success of what is clearly a disguised ploy for global publicity: Maiden, now 46 years into a busy life of recording and touring, released its first new studio LP in six years last month.
Then again, it is vaguely possible that the petition was started out of genuine concern by the “parents”, who claimed to have authored it, none of whom have stepped forward to own their objections to principal Sharon Burns. (She is, perhaps wisely, not giving interviews herself.)
If you’re about Burns’s age, you can only marvel at the operations of Father Time. When we and Burns and Iron Maiden’s (mostly intact) classic lineup were all still young, the band was one whose symbols you might draw on a Duo-Tang to annoy and disquiet a prissy teacher. How the tables have turned, as tables will.
Burns’s Instagram account contained photos of her going to concerts and wearing Iron Maiden merchandise of the sort that has made the group incalculable fortunes. Her gear included some references to 1982’s The Number of the Beast, which critical consensus considers to still be the finest of the group’s studio albums.
This was seen by the anonymous petitioners as signalling an allegiance to Satanism, and perhaps it’s natural for a very sheltered parent to have become upset. (The school, as Humphreys explains, has a distant background as a Mennonite Bible school.) But getting angry at Iron Maiden in 2021 feels a little like getting angry at McDonald’s. Even on a surface level, Maiden, a “new wave” metal group that did its most innovative work in the 1970s and ’80s, has been succeeded by several generations of metal groups and entire subcultures that take the violence, noise, crudity and obscenity into realms we old farts never dreamt of.
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October 1, 2021
QotD: Raising your daughter to be “premium dating fodder”
Which is surprising, because for the last twenty years or so, American girls have been raised from birth to be premium dating fodder, primed from the first whiff of puberty to be Available for Sex on Saturday Night. So why are they being ghosted in droves? Abandoned and left to die alone, clutching their pets and Warren for President signs?
You’d think these girls would be experts at snagging a mate. Years of sex ed, birth control pills, and permission to date early and often with no judgement from the grownups should have guaranteed they’d have suitors dangling from their every finger, lines outside the door, dates every night, so many engagement rings shoved under their noses they’d be blinded by the shimmering sight of all those diamonds nestled against black velvet.
What happened?
Parenting: The New Sex Trafficking
Munchausen by proxy is a mental illness in which the mother (it’s almost always the mother) injures or sickens her own child on purpose for attention and sympathy. Grooming is a crime in which an adult nurtures a child over a long period of time to be open to receiving sexual advances.
American parenting is starting to resemble a terrifying combination of both.
How else to explain why girls are being turned out — groomed for extreme antisocial sexual behavior from a young age — not by pimps, but by their parents and teachers?
When it comes to sex ed, I believe in the screenwriting theory known as Chekhov’s gun: if you show a gun in the first act, it must be fired by the third. If you show kids the sex toys (and worse) in the first grade, the sex toys will be used by high school.
Recently, NPR published “What Your Teen Wishes You Knew About Sex Education”. In the article, we meet Electra McGrath-Skrzydlewski, who made a point of telling her fourth-grade daughter Lily, well, everything. “She was very open from the get-go, even before those were things that I needed to know about,” her daughter recounts.
Lily came out as pansexual at age 12.
At an institutional level, we are creating a cursed generation of females expert at every imaginable permutation of sex with an infinite number of partners, while largely shunning the other thing, the main thing, the only thing still emitting any heat in the cold, merciless hearth of contemporary life: the dream of forming a family.
Because the shocking truth is: No one wants to wife a sex expert.
Peachy Keenan, “Big Pimping: How American Parents Turn Their Daughters Out”, The American Mind, 2020-03-05.
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September 4, 2021
QotD: Modern childhood
So much for the roving pack of kids each block boasted during Mintz’s childhood, and my own. “The empty lot has disappeared,” he quips. “And we are so concerned with legal liability that if kids do find one, you’d better be sure you’ll get a call from the police.”
Beth Hawkins, “Safe Child Syndrome: Protecting kids to death”, City Pages, Volume 26 – Issue 1267 (posted to the old blog, 2005-03-31).
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August 19, 2021
How much formal school time can kids miss before it impacts their long-term prospects?
Many years ago, when my son went to Kindergarten, I discovered that a lot of other parents were concerned that if their child missed much — if any — time in class, it would utterly destroy their chances of whatever hopes and dreams they may cherish for a fruitful and productive life in the working world. And by “concerned” I man “bat-shit insanely worried” that even a day or two would be enough to blight the child’s life forevermore. And remember, these were the parents of Kindergarten or Grade 1-3 children. In the time since then, I doubt very much that parents have become more relaxed in this regard, so the re-assurances from Scott Alexander are well-timed, but may still not reach the people who most need to hear them:
Illustration from Harvard Magazine via Twitter.
Back when the public schools were closed or online, someone I know burned themselves out working overtime to get the money to send their kid to a private school. They figured that all the other parents would do it, their kid would fall hopelessly behind, and then they’d be doomed to whatever sort of horrible fate awaits people who don’t get into the right colleges.
I hear this is happening again now, with more school closures, more frantic parents, and more people asking awful questions like “should I accept the risk of sending my immunocompromised kid to school, or should I accept him falling behind and never amounting to anything?”
(see also this story)
You can probably predict what side I’m on here. Like everyone else, I took a year of Spanish in middle school; like everyone else who did that, the sum total of what I remember is “no hablo Espanol” — and even there I’m pretty sure I forgot a curly thing over at least one of the letters. Like everyone else, I learned advanced math in high school; like everyone else, I can do up to basic algebra, the specific math I need for my job, and nothing else (my entire memory of Algebra II is that there is a thing called “Gaussian Elimination”, and even there, I’m not sure this wasn’t just the name of a video game). Like everyone else, I once knew the names and dates of many important Civil War battles; like everyone else — okay, fine, I remember all of these, but only because the Civil War is objectively fascinating.
And I think that’s the whole point. We learn lots of things in school. Then we forget everything except the things that our interests, jobs, and society give us constant exposure/practice to. If I lived in Spain, I would remember Spanish; if I worked in math, I would remember what Gaussian Elimination was. I think a lot of the stuff you’re exposed to and interested in, a sufficiently curious child would learn anyway; the stuff you’re not goes in one ear and out the other, hopefully spending just enough time in between to let you pass the standardized test.
Even beyond this, school is repetitive. I learned the same Civil War facts in fifth, eighth, and eleventh grade. I think I read The Giver in multiple English classes. And this is just the stuff it’s embarrassing to have repeated. The actually important skills — how to write essays, how to cite sources — get deliberately repeated year after year.
(I still have no idea how to cite a source properly, except a vague memory that something called “MLA Format” was very important, and that there might have been another thing called “Chicago Style” unless I am confusing it with pizza. When I actually need to cite something, I hit the “Cite” button on the top right of PubMed and do whatever it says.)
So my prediction is that an average student could miss a year or two of school without major long-term effects. Their standardized test score would be lower at the end of the two years they missed than some other student who had been in school the whole time. But after a short period they would equalize again. I don’t think you need to burn yourself out working overtime to send your kid to a private school, I don’t think you need to risk your immunocompromised kid’s health to send her to the classroom, I think you can just chill.
Parents who are concerned that the schools are spending too much time indoctrinating rather than teaching their students have a totally different set of concerns, which are outside the scope of this particular discussion.
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August 16, 2021
L. Neil Smith – “Take your children out of school!”
In the latest Libertarian Enterprise, L. Neil Smith offers a useful bit of advice to parents concerned about their children being indoctrinated in state-run schools:
“Abandoned Schoolhouse and Wheat Field 3443 B” by jim.choate59 is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
For quite a while now, the boob-tube has been filled with coverage of various Board of Education meetings around the country attended by parents murderously angry that their kids are being forcibly indoctrinated with utter claptrap like CRT, which apparently stands for Communist Racist Toxin, a new and poisonous religion where the color of your skin is an Original Sin for which you will be made to suffer no matter what you think, do, or say. My wife Cathy, passing by the TV set half a dozen times a day, invariably shouts, “Take your children out of school!” This essay is admiringly dedicated to her.
I suppose the Public Schools got started out of some sense of specialization. “You chip the flint, Og, Ogla cooks the mammoth, and we’ll teach the kids.” Evolution would have it the other way. The young have been learning from their parents for thousands of generations and it worked out pretty well until sinister figures like Horace Mann and John Dewey, equipped with the limitless power of the State, decided to use it to steal our children from us.
Take your children out of school!
It was perhaps, the stupidest thing that a people have ever done, and I’m pretty sure that Thomas Jefferson would have recognized it as the stupid thing it was, so it had to wait until he and those like him were safely dead. It isn’t brain science. It isn’t rocket surgery. Hand your offspring over to the State, and they will be taught every self-destructive thing the State wants them to be taught — and by now it should be clear, as it surely was to Jefferson, that the State is the enemy of everything decent and productive. Public education was probably responsible for both world wars.
Take your children out of school!
And if it was such a self-evidently good idea, then why did it have to be compulsory? The rows of desks in public schools are populated by conscription — no matter how many pleasant memories we may have of our school days. Public schools are financed by extortion and theft, two of the reasons we fought a revolution in the first place.
Take your children out of school!
It might be cynically observed that public schools are cheaper than paying for baby-sitting, but, given property taxes and the damage it does to the most important people in our lives, is it really? Idiots have whimpered for the last year that having your kids at home is inconvenient.
Public Schools are convenient for the State. They give government two incomes to tax, instead of only one. Take your children out of school!
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August 14, 2021
QotD: Modern parenting
But we also fear their independence. We’re up there in the climber because we can’t afford to miss a minute of face time, you see. We believe our physical presence is the linchpin to the children’s emotional well-being and, although we never say so out loud, we want it that way — because it’s central to our well-being. We’re scared the kids will grow up to resent the fact that Mommy works, or — the biggest golem on the list — they just plain won’t like us. And in an age of high divorce rates and transient communities, kids who don’t like us suggest the possibility that we might really end up alone.
Beth Hawkins, “Safe Child Syndrome: Protecting kids to death”, City Pages, Volume 26 – Issue 1267 (posted to the old blog, 2005-04-01).
June 2, 2021
QotD: The evolution of theory-of-mind
All this seems so obvious to most people that it sounds like common sense rather than theory. It isn’t; it has to be learned. Very young children don’t start out with theory of mind. They can’t separate themselves from their emotions; it’s not natural for them to say “I’m really angry now, but that’s just a thing I’m feeling, I don’t actually hate you”. It’s not even clear to them that people’s minds contain different things; children are famously unable to figure out that a playmate who has different evidence than they do may draw different conclusions.
And the learning isn’t just a process of passively sitting back observing your own mind until you figure out how it works. You learn it from your parents. Parents are always telling their kids that “I think this” and “What do you think?” and “You look sad” and “It makes me feel sad when you do that”. Eventually it all sinks in. Kids learn their parent’s theory-of-mind the same way they learn their parents’ language or religion.
When in human history did theory-of-mind first arise? It couldn’t have been a single invention – more like a gradual process of refinement. “The unconscious” only really entered our theory-of-mind with Freud. Statements like “my abuse gave me a lot of baggage that I’m still working through” involves a theory-of-mind that would have been incomprehensible a few centuries ago. It’s like “I’m clicking on an icon with my mouse” – every individual word would have made sense, but the gestalt would be nonsensical.
Still, everyone always assumes that the absolute basics – mind as a metaphorical space containing beliefs and emotions, people having thoughts and making decisions – must go back so far that their origins are lost in the mists of time, attributable only to nameless ape-men.
Scott Alexander, “Book Review: Origin Of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind”, Slate Star Codex, 2020-06-01.
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May 28, 2021
The essential — and largely non-replenishable — trust in government
Last week, Tom posted a then-recent discussion he overheard at The Last Ditch:
[Click to see full-size flowchart]
Two svelte American ladies of a certain age were having coffee today at my West London health club. They were in the next “pod” to me outdoors as I had a post-swim coffee before heading home. Perhaps it’s those wide-open prairies but Americans, bless them, always speak a little more loudly than us so I didn’t really have a choice but to listen to their conversation.
The topic was their mothers. Both moms back in the States are apparently unsure of the wisdom of being vaccinated. One cost of parenthood no-one tells you about beforehand is that one day you will be judged and found wanting by humans you could not love more; your children for whom you would cheerfully die. I confess their mothers immediately had my sympathy, regardless of the correctness of their views.
There was a good deal of sneering about conspiracy theories circulating on the internet. I found it surprising that both errant moms believed 5G was involved, but having listened quietly for another few minutes discovered that neither had ever said so. Their daughters were simply assuming that if they doubted government advice on vaccines, they believed all the other stuff too. One of the mothers is apparently a 9/11 “truther” and her daughter’s observation that no government is capable of keeping such a dark secret struck me as fair.
[…]
There are available facts and facts that will only become available in the future. People must make their choices based on their own risk assessment today. That useless truism is not the point of this post. The truly significant thing I overheard was this. Having sneered at her mother’s belief that “we can’t trust government”, one of the ladies said;
I thought to myself – Mom, I don’t want to believe what you believe because if it’s true I can’t have any of the things I believe in.
There, I thought, was a moment of insight; a moment (almost) of self-awareness. If government can’t be trusted, then the societal change she wants isn’t possible. Therefore, whatever the evidence, government must be trusted. That pretty much sums up the statist mindset.
I don’t know whether these mothers or daughters are right about this issue. I do know that one of the daughters (and her companion seemed to agree) is allowing her desires to displace her reason. In consequence, sadly, her mind will only ever be changed by a catastrophe I would never wish upon her.
I suspect many such earnest, well-meaning souls as Goneril and Regan (as I christened them) felt they needed to believe the state could be trusted at key points in the deadly history of the 20th Century. If the brave new world of Communism was to happen, for example, government had to be trusted with enormous power to make immense change.
Many Gonerils and Regans must have ruefully reflected on that in the Gulag.
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April 24, 2021
QotD: Marxism and the teenage mind
That’s why the worst thing a teenager can think of is “unfair.” It’s wrong because it feels wrong, and anything that’s wrong must be somebody’s fault — again, how could it be otherwise? Parents can’t afford to let their kids learn big lessons the hard way. Literally can’t afford it, in that teenagers can’t see why, for example, you can’t take that turn at 85 mph on an icy road. You can explain it to them until you’re blue in the face, but as anyone who has spent any time around teenagers knows, there’s a large subset of them that will simply refuse to get it. Alas, those tend to be the brighter ones, and so a large part of the subtle art of teenager management is setting up smaller, less catastrophic situations for them to fuck up, such that they hopefully learn by analogy. Which is still, of course, the grownups’ fault …
A big part of growing up, then, is: realizing that not everything is someone’s fault. Every effect has a cause, that’s a simple truth of logic, but not every event has a cause. The real world, grownups know, is what Buddha said it is, a nexus of causes and conditions. Even the simplest event has innumerable proximate causes, necessary-but-not-sufficient conditions, and so on. If you want to argue, in terms of pure logic, that every event is an intersection of a long series of causal chains that are all, in theory, perfectly discoverable, go nuts, but for all practical purposes, shit just happens. Accepting that is one of the foundation stones of adulthood.
From that perspective, one’s youthful Marxism seems silly, and nothing seems sillier than Marx’s endless ranting against the perfidy of “the capitalists.” Just as your parents aren’t really the capricious tyrants you thought they were when they wouldn’t let you use the car on Friday night, so even the biggest of businessmen are just people. Marx paints them as cartoonishly evil, but though a guy like Andrew Carnegie was a real bastard in his youth, no doubt about that, he too grew up, becoming a staunch philanthropist and anti-imperialist. So, too, with the labor theory of value, which is the closest thing to the quintessence of the teenage mind ever put to paper — those Air Jordans are “overpriced,” no one denies that, but it’s simply not true that selling $5 shoes for $200 is “exploitation.” There’s this thing called “demand,” and … well, you get it.
Severian, “Marx Was Right After All (on ongoing series”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-01-12.
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December 2, 2020
QotD: Old Sam Clemens, he understood
Shouting at my parents about how unfair it was that they insist I be home for tea, home again to go to bed, brush my teeth, turn my lights out and go to sleep, get up for school, do my homework and blah blah blah.
Their list of stupid pointless rules was bloody endless – it became perfectly obvious to me around the age of fourteen that no intelligent person should be forced to endure this draconian regime, and I let the intellectual homunculi know so in no uncertain terms.
And the lofty and pompous arrogance with which these dreary praetorians informed me, ME!, that “while I lived under their roof, I would have to live by their rules“!
I seemingly had no rights at all. I was not free.
The horror.
I resolved then and there to move out as soon as I could.
Which turned out to be about five years later, but still …
My word, how I despised them and their byzantine rules. I yearned to breathe free air and not remain beleaguered in their stale and oppressive Gulag of The Mind. I was an adult dammit, and not some little kid, to be told what I can and cannot do.
Ahem.
Funnily enough, when I returned home many years later, I was amazed to discover how much more reasonable they had become in my absence – I felt like they had really grown … spiritually (h/t Samuel Clemens)
Alex Noble, “Progressive Millennials. While We Live Under Their Roof, We Should Abide By Their Rules.”, Continental Telegraph, 2020-09-01.
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September 8, 2020
QotD: Creative hand-work
But for the younger generation it is different. They were born into the state of affairs where entertainment, like everything else, was made easy. And some of our Youth Leaders are now finding it difficult to get boys really doing things — boys in their teens with no particular hobbies, no particular interests, who simply want to be entertained, and that at a time when a boy should be so full of interests that no day is long enough to cram them all in. “I do not complain of growing old,” says John Buchan, “but I like to keep my faith that at one stage in our mortal existence nothing is impossible.” We feel that that should be so in youth, and yet here is the problem in our midst. “It gives you absolutely nothing to work on,” said one of their Leaders to me recently, a man who numbers photography, book-binding, carpentry and music among his own hobbies, and does them all extremely well. “They’ve no conception of taking the initiative themselves or doing a spot of work for the pleasure of it.”
What are we going to do about it? The gospel of “work for the pleasure of it” isn’t an easy gospel to preach to the young. You have got somehow to kindle the spark of enthusiasm in their minds first, that enthusiasm which can make everything seem well worth doing, even the hard bits, for the sake of the end in view. And it is the enthusiasm of the Youth Leaders from which the boys have got to catch their own tiny spark which, once alight, may well kindle into a flame. And it will be worth it. For they can learn more from intelligently working at a hobby than from almost anything else. It develops patience, ingenuity, alertness, self-mastery, helps them to discover their own hidden powers, teaches them the satisfaction of a good job done, widens their knowledge in a thoroughly practical way.
But we have no business to leave it all to the Youth Leaders. There is no easy time ahead for the boys of this generation and it is every man’s job to lend a hand where he can. The best place is in the home. If you are a keen woodworker, then try to interest your boy as well. Don’t just hustle him out of the way because you are in the middle of a job and don’t want to be interrupted, or are afraid he will meddle with your tools. Teach him how to use them; help him with some little constructive job of his own, if it is only to make a “safe” — as a small boy of my acquaintance did recently — to keep his secrets in! Small boys are usually keen enough. It is the older ones who grow apathetic. And who knows if the blame can be put entirely on the pictures? Mayn’t it be that we have hustled them out of our way rather too often? Dared them to touch our tools when they were simply longing to try them? The impulse to do and to make things is there right enough. But these are days when it needs to be fostered.
Charles H. Hayward, “Work and Pleasure”, The Woodworker, 1942.
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July 19, 2020
QotD: How to raise a God-Emperor son
Jordan Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, 2018.
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July 15, 2020
QotD: State and private charity
Similarly with US aid to poorer countries. The United States is regularly berated for being very low on the list of aid givers, but this only applies to government-to-government aid. Once the private contributions made by Americans to people in poorer countries are counted in, the US rises to the top. In fact US private help is better spent, usually going to people to spend in towns and villages in the local economy, rather than on gold palaces and white elephant steel mills in the desert.
Part of this mismatch arises from the fact that these analysts seem to wear spectacles that admit only light of a political wavelength and ignore private generosity. The latest victim of this myopia is the “bank of mom and dad.” It is assumed to be a bad thing that young people should turn to mom and dad to help out with deposits and mortgages.
“Richard”, “Is Private Help a Bad Thing? – Political Spectacles of the Left”, Continental Telegraph, 2018-04-02.
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