ReasonTV
Published on 20 Mar 2019When quality of life improved, doctors discover a new affliction.
Reason is the planet’s leading source of news, politics, and culture from a libertarian perspective. Go to reason.com for a point of view you won’t get from legacy media and old left-right opinion magazines.
A parody of the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Californication” written by Remy.
Music tracks, mastering, and background vocals by Ben Karlstrom
Video produced by Austin Bragg.LYRICS
There’s a non-foregone phenomenon in any prosperous nation
When primal fears all disappear the brain then gets a sensation
The medical name we gave this pain is affluenflammationOl’ Bill Tub is chugging a jug of cold bovine lactation
When his eyes then realize that carton side’s got information
And since his life contains no strife it’s affluenflammationFor the better part of history diseases all were raging
Measles, mumps up on your junk like they were Kevin Spacey
Then came Jonas Salk
Makes you wonder what all for…Cuz we’ve got affluenflammation
We’ve got affluenflammationOl’ Chip Black is cracking the back of twelve live-steamed crustaceans
For the perks and glee of living free he starts to lose appreciation
And if you probe his frontal lobe — yep — affluenflammationThrough the course of human history each day we faced starvation
Rats and pox and chamber pots, streets filled with defecation
Free markets changed the norm
Makes you wonder what all for…Cuz we’ve got affluenflammation
We’ve got affluenflammation
We’ve got affluenflammation
We’ve got affluenflammation
March 21, 2019
Remy: “Affluenflammation”
Tank Chats #44 T14 and A33 (Excelsior) Assault Tanks | The Tank Museum
The Tank Museum
Published on 13 Jan 2018The Second World War American T14 and British A33 (Excelsior) Assault tanks were made to the same specification as one another, neither ever went in to service and only one of each were made. They both survive at The Tank Museum.
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March 20, 2019
A Supreme Court case that created huge sales tax problems for online firms
Eric Boehm explains why an obscure US Supreme Court ruling is making life extremely complicated for thousands and thousands of online businesses:
… Until last year, that meant Heitman was responsible for collecting and paying sales taxes to exactly one place: the Wisconsin Department of Revenue. But thanks to an under-the-radar ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court in June, he’s now receiving letters, phone calls, and emails from revenue officials across the country, each wanting a piece of his business.
The source of Heitman’s frustrations is Wayfair v. South Dakota, which allowed states to collect sales taxes from online businesses located beyond their borders. Many states view the Wayfair ruling as a potential tax revenue windfall in which the taxes are paid by non-residents who can’t vote against them. That’s why businesses like Heitman’s are now facing the chilling prospect of owing taxes in dozens, and possibly hundreds, of different jurisdictions — while being hounded by out-of-state tax collectors.
Since the Supreme Court issued its ruling in June, Heitman has been scrambling to become compliant with tax commissions and revenue departments from coast to coast. He’s spent thousands of dollars on new software to help navigate the complexities of state sales tax law, but that’s only been so much help. “It almost seems like I have another full time job dumped on me with this sales tax thing,” he says. “It’s burning me out.”
As the 2019 tax season begins, states are ramping up efforts to squeeze extra revenue out of remote retailers like Heitman, putting an expensive new burden on businesses that have found broad customer bases online. The burden is particularly large in the five U.S. states that charge no sales tax, where entrepreneurs could now be charged with paying a tax they have never had to pay before, to a government over which they have no voice. And while Congress could clean up the Supreme Court’s mess, it’s far from certain that it will.
Warren Meyer points out that it’s not just the individual states who are taking advantage of this windfall opportunity to collect taxes from non-residents:
Like most writers, Mr. Boehm actually understates the problem. Because the potential exists not to have 50 new taxing authorities for every sales, but thousands. I have to deal with this every day. I wrote a while back:
Take Arizona, which seems from my experience to be roughly average. The sales tax rate table is 18 pages long in a small font. There are 29 separate rate categories which each have different rates in each of Arizona’s 15 counties. My business is in 6 counties and we have 3 rate categories that apply, or 4 if you consider items with no tax as another rate category. This is 24 different state/county sales tax rates we charge. But that is the easy part. Because then there are, in addition to county taxes, 92 different towns and cities that have their own rate tables with up to 29 different rate categories that add to the base state/county rate. Other states such as Washington (rule of thumb — if the state has no income tax then it has a LABYRINTHIAN sales and business tax systems) have additional overlay taxes such as for transit and stadium districts.
When my company opens a new location, we have to spend hours on the Internet and with maps trying to figure out what sales taxes to collect, and even with good due diligence we sometimes get it wrong and find in an audit we are actually just inside or outside some line where the rate changes (we once had a location 30 miles outside of Seattle on a long dirt road where we found we had to collect the Seattle Rapid Transit tax). Thatcher, AZ is a town of like 4000 people but has its own special sales tax rates — do you know where the town line is? Well neither do they, because last time I checked they did not have any sort of online lookup system to tell one automatically if the address is inside or outside the town and its sales tax district…
But even after registering in all 50 states, you are STILL not done, because many states don’t have a fully unified sales tax collection system. In Arizona, for example, the larger cities require their own registration and monthly reporting.
Meyer is operating a company that has physical assets and employees in each of the states and lesser jurisdictions to which taxes are due. Internet businesses generally only have physical assets in a single state, yet an expansive reading of the Wayfair ruling (the type of reading most jurisdictions will prefer) makes them liable for taxes almost everywhere.
QotD: The Progressive view of American history
The debunking mind is typical of the American Left, which feels itself compelled to rewrite every episode in history in such a way as to put black hats on the heads of any and all American heroes: Jefferson? Slave-owning rapist. Lincoln? Not really all that enlightened on race. Saving the world from the Nazis? Sure, but what about the internment of the Japanese? Etc. […]
In high school, I had a very left-wing American history teacher who was a teachers’-union activist (a very lonely position in Lubbock, Texas, where the existence of such unions was hardly acknowledged) for whom the entirety of the great American story was slavery, the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, the Great Depression, and the momentary heroism of the New Deal (we were not far from New Deal, Texas), with the great arc of American history concluding on the steps of Central High School in Little Rock on September 23, 1957. It was, for reasons that remain mysterious to me, very important to her — plainly urgent to her — that the American story be one of disappointment, betrayal, and falling short of our founding ideals.
Kevin D. Williamson, “Bitter Laughter: Humor and the politics of hate”, National Review, 2016-08-11.
March 16, 2019
QotD: Teaching critical thinking
Traditionally, the “critical” part of the term “critical thinking” has referred not to the act of criticizing, or finding fault, but rather to the ability to be objective. “Critical,” in this context, means “open-minded,” seeking out, evaluating and weighing all the available evidence. It means being “analytical,” breaking an issue down into its component parts and examining each in relation to the whole.
Above all, it means “dispassionate,” recognizing when and how emotions influence judgment and having the mental discipline to distinguish between subjective feelings and objective reason — then prioritizing the latter over the former.
I wrote about all this in a recent post on The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Vitae website, mostly as background for a larger point I was trying to make. I assumed that virtually all the readers would agree with this definition of critical thinking—the definition I was taught as a student in the 1980s and which I continue to use with my own students.
To my surprise, that turned out not to be the case. Several readers took me to task for being “cold” and “emotionless,” suggesting that my understanding of critical thinking, which I had always taken to be almost universal, was mistaken.
I found that puzzling, until one helpful reader clued me in: “I share your view of what critical thinking should mean,” he wrote. “But a quite different operative definition has a strong hold in academia. In this view, the key characteristic of critical thinking is opposition to the existing ‘system,’ encompassing political, economic, and social orders, deemed to privilege some and penalize others. In essence, critical thinking is equated with political, economic, and social critique.”
Suddenly, it occurred to me that the disconnect between the way most people (including employers) define critical thinking and the way many of today’s academics define it can be traced back to the post-structuralist critical theories that invaded our English departments about the time I was leaving grad school, in the late 1980s. I’m referring to deconstruction and its poorer cousin, reader response criticism.
Both theories hold that texts have no inherent meaning; rather, meaning, to the extent it exists at all, is entirely subjective, based on the experiences and mindset of the reader.
Rob Jenkins, “Why College Graduates Still Can’t Think”, The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, 2017-03-23.
March 14, 2019
How Hollywood Helped Hitler | Between 2 Wars | 1926 Part 2 of 2
TimeGhost History
Published on 13 Mar 2019The rise of the media superstar and the rise of Naziism had a lot to do with each other. The early death of one of the first media superstars, Rudolph Valentino in 1926 shows us exactly how and why.
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Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Directed by: Astrid Deinhard
Written by: Spartacus Olsson
Produced by: Astrid Deinhard
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Post Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Edited by: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Spartacus OlssonColorized Pictures by Olga Shirnina
https://klimbim2014.wordpress.comVideo Archive by Screenocean/Reuters http://www.screenocean.com
A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.
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Life in the modern academic paradise
At Rotten Chestnuts, Severian recounts his time in the idyllic Ivory Tower of modern academia:
Imagine you’re some kind of Gulliver-type explorer, and you reach an island of perfect bliss. Clear air, gentle breezes, balmy temperatures, and all the delicious food you can eat. And the natives! They live to serve you, completely unconstrained by anything so antiquated as Western sexual morality. Limitless 5G internet. Anything you want to eat, drink, watch, read, do, say, insert, or have inserted, it’s all yours at the snap of your fingers. Got it?
Now imagine that the rulers of this little slice of paradise do nothing but sit on the side of the road all day, smashing their own toes with ball-peen hammers.
That’s life in a college town. The Left run everything. They set the admissions requirements. They have unlimited budgets, and since they do, the entire commercial ecosystem exists only for them. All cuisine is “fusion,” you have to drive to the next burg over to find milk that comes from cows, and every single item of public culture — from sidewalk graffiti to public radio to experimental theater troupe — does nothing but flatter them. There is no fetish so outre, no practice so bizarre, that you can’t find at least one other enthusiastic participant. It’s intersectional genderfluid heaven….
…. and every single person in it is miserable. I’m serious — if it’s not too far out of your way, drive down to your nearest college town, and just watch the faces. You might glimpse a grinning undergrad or two — they’re too young and dumb to know better; they’ll be fully reeducated by junior year — but you can spot the tenured faculty solely by their scowls. The only thing that temporarily alleviates the existential horror of their lives is getting outraged by something, which — since, again, they control everything — means tilting at windmills is their only sport; they play it with a cutthroat intensity the football coach can only dream of.
How can you not be fascinated by that? To utterly refute the view of man as homo economicus, all you have to do is watch the facial expressions of people who are “the 1%” by any measure that makes sense. It’s one hell of a show…
March 13, 2019
Marie Kondo as a “Mr. Miyagi for the anxious, late-capitalist, consumerist age”
At Aeon, Amy Olberding is not impressed with the pseudo-philosophy of the Marie Kondo cult:
Inspired by an episode of Tidying Up with Marie Kondo on Netflix, I cleaned my dresser drawers this weekend. It was a generally satisfying way to shirk work duties (the reason I watched Netflix in the first place). Yet, despite my neater bureau, I find the popularity of Kondo’s ‘tidying’ unbearable. We are awash in stuff, and apparently so joyless that the promise of joy through house-cleaning appeals to us. The cultural fascination sparked by Kondo strikes me as deeply disordered.
As a scholar of East Asian philosophies, one pattern in the Kondo mania is all too familiar: the susceptibility of Americans to plain good sense if it can but be infused with a quasi-mystical ‘oriental’ aura. Kondo is, in several ways, a Mr Miyagi for the anxious, late-capitalist, consumerist age. Unlike the Karate Kid, we are bedevilled by our own belongings rather than by bullies – but just as Mr Miyagi could make waxing cars a way to find one’s strength and mettle, so too Marie Kondo can magically render folding T-shirts into a path toward personal contentment or even joy. The process by which mundane activities transmute into improved wellbeing is mysterious, but the mystery is much of the allure, part of what makes pedestrian wisdom palatable. Folding clothes as an organisational strategy is boring. But folding clothes as a mystically infused plan of life is alluring. It’s not about the clothes. It’s about everything, all at once.
Popular uses of East Asian philosophies often tend this way: toward making the circumscribed expansive, toward making small wisdoms carry water for all the wisdom. This is how the ancient military theorist Sun Tzu might end up guiding your retirement savings, coaching your kid’s football team, improving your marriage, or even raising your kids. Sun Tzu’s Art of War has been leveraged into self-help advice on all of these subjects and more. Superficially, and also for trained scholars of early Chinese military history, it might seem that Sun Tzu is in fact only really interested in managing violent conflict well. But at a deeper level – which is to say, at the level of what might be marketed to gullible Western consumers – he is actually addressing all of life’s mysteries. What reads like straightforward instruction on wartime espionage might yet have something to teach us about our children. To access this deeper meaning, we need to assume that ‘oriental’ wisdom is never about this or that, but always about everything. And importantly, at root, it is reassuring.
H/T to Amy Alkon, who offers her own take on tidying:
March 10, 2019
Irish Potato Famine – The American Wake – Extra History – #4
Extra Credits
Published on 9 Mar 2019Not all of the 214,000 Irish immigrants in 1847 made it safely to their new homes — and of those who did, many faced classism and xenophobia and even bullying from the “Ulster Irish” or “Scots-Irish” folks who had previously established themselves. In New York City specifically, the Five Points neighborhood became an infamous center of conflict — while local Irish-American John Joseph Hughes became instrumental in restoring Irish Catholicism.
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March 8, 2019
Education schools and the bloat of university administration
Remember the old joke:
Those who can, do.
Those who can’t, teach.
Those who can’t teach, teach gym educational studies.
As far as higher education is concerned, the joke is on us:
Though I didn’t realize it at the time, those were my first encounters with an alternate curriculum that was being promoted on many campuses, a curriculum whose guiding principles seemed to be: 1) anything that could be construed as bigotry and hatred should be construed as bigotry and hatred; and 2) any such instance of bigotry and hatred should be considered part of an epidemic. These principles were being advanced primarily, though not exclusively, by college administrators, whose ranks had grown so remarkably since the early 1990s.
Everyone knows about the kudzu-like growth of the administrative bureaucracy in higher education over the past three decades. What most don’t know is that at many colleges, the majority of administrators directly involved in the lives of students — in dorms, conduct hearings, bias-response teams, freshmen “orientation” programs, and the like — got their graduate degrees from education schools.
Ed schools, such as Teachers College at Columbia, or Penn’s Graduate School of Education, have trained and certified most of the nation’s public-school teachers and administrators for the past half-century. But in the past 20 years especially, ed schools have been offering advanced degrees in things like “educational leadership,” “higher education management,” and just “higher education” to aspiring college administrators. And this influx of ed school trained bureaucrats has played a decisive role in pushing an already left-leaning academy so far in the direction of ideological fundamentalism that even liberal progressives are sounding the alarm.
To anyone acquainted with the history and quality of American ed schools, this should come as no surprise. Education schools have long been notorious for two mutually reinforcing characteristics: ideological orthodoxy and low academic standards. As early as 1969, Theodore Sizer and Walter Powell hoped that “ruthless honesty” would do some good when they complained that at far too many ed schools, the prevailing climate was “hardly conducive to open inquiry.” “Study, reflection, debate, careful reading, even, yes, serious thinking, is often conspicuous by its absence,” they continued. “Un-intellectualism — not anti-intellectualism, as this assumes malice — is all too prevalent.” Sizer and Powell ought to have known: At the time they were dean and associate dean, respectively, of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
More than three decades later, a comprehensive, four-year study of ed schools headed by a former president of Teachers College, Arthur Levine, found that the majority of educational-administration programs “range from inadequate to appalling, even at some of the country’s leading universities.” Though there were notable exceptions, programs for teaching were described as being, in the main, weak and mediocre. Education researchers seemed unable to achieve even “minimum agreement” about “acceptable research practice,” with the result that there are “no base standards and no quality floor.” Even among ed school faculty members and deans, the study found a broad and despairing recognition that ed school training was frequently “subjective, obscure, faddish, … inbred, and politically correct.”
Stephen Fry on Political Correctness and Clear Thinking
The Rubin Report
Published on 4 Apr 2016Stephen Fry (actor and comedian) joins Dave Rubin for a quick discussion about political correctness, clear thinking, V for Vendetta, free speech, and his decision to quit Twitter.
This is a bonus edition of ‘The Sit Down’ on The Rubin Report, filmed on the set of Larry King Now.
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Stephen Fry
Actor, Author, and Comedian
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March 6, 2019
QotD: Teaching evolution in the “Bible Belt”
I teach college in a small city in Arkansas, deep in the American Bible Belt. I am a historian of Africa and in my department that means that I also teach a world history survey. I always start with the expansion of modern humans out of Africa and their encounter with other types of humans: Neanderthals, Homo erectus, Denesovians and what seems like an ever-growing list of newly discovered human-like creatures. It’s less the case now, but when I started twenty years ago this part of the course was initially met with polite but firm resistance, which gradually gave way to a sort of furtive curiosity. I eventually realized that even my cleverest students knew very little about human evolution except that it was false and that they were supposed to reject it. They came to the university having been taught that evolution was part of a larger attack on their faith and values, but they had never really been exposed to anything but a sort of parody version of it. A small number of them accepted evolutionary theory, but being a Darwinian in rural Arkansas was usually more about youthful rebellion and non-conformity than it was about informed, rational consideration of evidence.
Once we got past the denunciation or acceptance of evolutionary theory as a form of tribal affiliation, I found students to be deeply curious about it. It was such a taboo subject that their high school teachers had only skimmed over it and often with some careful personal distancing from the material. So the opportunity to delve into the details of this forbidden knowledge was intellectually thrilling for them. Despite the excitement engendered by the topic only a few changed their minds; most did not.
My students had grown up in communities where evolutionary theory was so wrong, so contrary to the accepted worldview of all decent people, that the only acceptable way to talk about it was to denounce it or reject it. The result was that most of my students rejected evolution, but getting a chance to learn about it was profoundly exciting, even if most of them were too conformist (these were Honors students after all) to change their positions.
Erik Gilbert, “Liberal Orthodoxy and the New Heresy”, Quillette, 2019-02-04.
March 5, 2019
QotD: Modern architecture
Now that I think about it, he said, spitballing for no particular reason, having a lot of art books of a certain sort is a political statement: if people suspects that your choice of subjects implies a rejection or at least a lack of interest in modernism or other cultures, they infer things.
My architecture books would be a rebuke to some, since they’re focused on particular eras and styles. I don’t have any books about other styles or cultures because I am not interested in them. At all. I know it’s a sign of a robust and well-rounded mind to be utterly fascinated by everything, but I’d rather spend the time knowing more about what I’m interested in. I mean, there’s no way I could begin to pretend I care as much about Japanese art as I do about Western art. I know it has its own complexities and meanings I don’t understand or recognize, but I simply don’t care.
Then again, my books are rebuke to my own culture, since the architecture and art they contain are better than the tiresome products of the contemporary art establishment. This remarkable article in Forbes – not recent, but recently discovered – contains some gas-inducing quotes about the function and purpose of modern architecture, and it’s basically this: the brightest minds of the profession believe it is the duty of the architect to startle, confront, unnerve, dissolve, destroy, and also whip out the willie to irrigate the fusty bourgeoisie notions like beauty and tradition.
The article discusses a piece that took modern architecture to the woodshed, where it said “look at this woodshed. It’s more humane than anything you design.” Someone wrote a defense, but had to be honest with himself:
Yet Betsky then admitted, “All those critiques might be true.” They are irrelevant, he claims, since architecture must be about experimentation and the shock of the new. (Why this should be the case he does not say.) And sometimes designers must stretch technology to the breaking (or leaking) point: “The fact that buildings look strange to some people, and that roofs sometimes leak, is part and parcel of the research and development aspect of the design discipline.” Ever brave, he is willing to let others suffer for his art.
[…]
The ongoing project to unmoor Western Civ from its roots can only be enabled by people who believe the world has to be remade with its core memory wiped. I don’t share their hatred; why do I have to be forced to experience it, over and over again?
James Lileks, The Bleat, 2019-01-30.
March 3, 2019
Fake News in the Radio Age | Between 2 Wars | 1926 Part 1 of 2
TimeGhost History
Published on 28 Feb 2019Modernization caused a communication revolution in the 1920’s with the mass adaptation of the radio, with all sorts consequences for the entertainment industry as well as the political game.
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1919 Between Two Wars Episodes on post war technology: https://www.youtube.com/edit?o=U&vide…
Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Directed by: Spartacus Olsson
Written by: Spartacus Olsson
Produced by: Astrid Deinhard
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Edited by: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Spartacus OlssonCredits for this episode: Bundesarchive | Old Time Radio Researchers Group | Library of Congress
Colorized Pictures by Olga Shirnina and Norman Stewart
Thumbnail by Klimbim/Olga Shirnina: https://klimbim2014.wordpress.com
Norman’s pictures https://oldtimesincolor.blogspot.com/Video Archive by Screenocean/Reuters http://www.screenocean.com
A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH
March 2, 2019
Liberal democracy and the ungovernable voters
In Quillette, Ross Stitt discusses the apparent weakness of western liberal democracies and the rise of the ungovernables:
2019 marks the thirtieth anniversary of Francis Fukuyama’s seminal essay for the National Interest “The End of History?” Its central hypothesis was that we were witnessing “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” That looked plausible in 1989, particularly when the Berlin Wall fell just months after the essay’s release. Thirty years later — not so much.
To be fair to Fukuyama, he never suggested that the world had seen the end of geopolitical conflict or that democracies would experience no more of Macmillan’s “events.” Today, he continues to view liberal democracy as the best form of government, but he is less optimistic about its robustness. It’s hard to disagree with him. The Brexit chaos, the Trump presidency, the collapse of support for centrist parties across Europe, and the pervasive rise of populism and nationalism, all point to the growing fragility of liberal democracy.
Why is this happening now? The usual response is to blame it all on the politicians. Leaders like Orban and Trump are subverting the institutions at the heart of liberal democracy. Political parties like Alternative für Deutschland and the National Rally are promoting illiberal and xenophobic policies. If only we had better leaders, democracy would flourish — so goes the argument.
But bad politicians are hardly a novelty. Two thousand years ago, Cicero declared that “Politicians are not born: they are excreted.” Shakespeare’s Hamlet described a politician as “one who would circumvent God.” If we’ve always had bad politicians, then there must be other explanations for the current downward trajectory of liberal democracy. The four explanations most commonly proffered are greater competition from alternative political models, the increased complexity of modern democratic politics in a post-material world, the constraints on democratic states imposed by globalisation, and the emergence of a range of international threats like climate change and terrorism.
But there is another explanation for liberal democracy’s troubles that is much less talked about and, in my view, more powerful — the fact that voters have become more difficult to govern.
