People cheered when, in the 1990s, Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich advocated mandatory executions for drug dealers. But economists wondered why Gingrich wanted to decrease the penalty for murder. How does the death penalty for drug dealers decrease the penalty for murder? Think about it this way: Suppose that Gingrich’s bill becomes law and the police bust into an apartment where three drug dealers have hidden their stash. What happens? The drug dealers know that if they give up, they will be put to death. So why not try to kill the police? If the dealers are lucky, they get away. If the dealers are unlucky, they are no worse off than if they didn’t fight because when drug dealing is a capital offense, drug dealers face no additional penalty for murder.
Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok, Modern Principles: Microeconomics (3rd Edition), 2015.
July 2, 2018
QotD: Perverse incentives, death penalty edition
June 29, 2018
The Run For The Baku Oil Fields I THE GREAT WAR Week 205
The Great War
Published on 28 Jun 2018While the Ottoman Army of Islam is marching on Baku and the Caspian Sea, multiple other players are trying to stake their claim of the Baku oil fields.
Honduran refugees and the hellhole they’re fleeing
Justin Raimondo on the plight of Honduras, and how it got to be the hellhole it is:
Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador
Image via Google Maps.
As tens of thousands gather at our southern border, roiling US politics, the question arises: why are so many of the asylum-seekers and migrants crossing the border illegally from three Central American countries in particular: El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala?
To begin with, it’s no coincidence that these are the three “most invaded” countries south of the Rio Grande – that is, invaded by the United States and its proxies.
[…]
So what are these “refugees” fleeing? Is it so bad that parents are justified in paying smugglers to guide their underage children – traveling alone! – across the US-Mexican border?
Unlike the rest of the media, which has routinely ignored most of what goes on in Latin America since the end of the cold war, I’ve been covering the region regularly. […] As I wrote last year:
“Honduras has always been an American plaything, to be toyed with for the benefit of United Fruit (rebranded Chiquita) and the native landowning aristocracy, and disciplined when necessary: Washington sent in the Marines a total of seven times between 1903 and 1925. The Honduran peasants didn’t like their lands being confiscated by the government and turned over to foreign-owned producers, who were granted monopolistic franchises by corrupt public officials. Periodic rural revolts started spreading to the cities, despite harsh repression, and the country – ruled directly by the military since 1955 – returned to a civilian regime in 1981.”
That column was about the Hillary Clinton-endorsed coup against the democratically elected President, Manuel Zelaya. The popular conservative-turned-reformer had pushed through a number of measures designed to alleviate the peasantry’s hopeless poverty and shift power from the military to the presidency, which angered the Honduran elite. They were triggered, however, when Zelaya joined the ALBA alliance of Latin American countries allied with Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela. While ALBA never really amounted to much, either economically or militarily, the symbolism of this move was too much for the Honduran military, which was trained in the US and generously subsidized by Washington. The generals soon had Zelaya on a plane out of the country – while still in his pajamas. Washington issued a perfunctory scolding, but Hillary’s State Department had approved the coup in advance. It’s always been done that way, and this time was no exception.
[…]
So is the Honduran hegira to the Rio Grande a direct result of US foreign policy: is it “blowback,” to utilize CIA parlance for the unpleasant consequences of US actions abroad? It would be easy to say this is yet another example of how our foreign policy of global intervention comes back to haunt us, because that is partially true. Yet the old familiar story of the Ugly Americans backing the even uglier Local Despot doesn’t quite fit the most current facts: there has been an amazing drop in US military aid to Honduras. In 2017 it was over $19 million. This year it’s a mere $750,000!
The history of Honduras before the rise of American hegemony has done more to shape the country than any other single factor: the vital question of land ownership is the central issue here and in the entire South. Feudalism was never really abolished, and the feudalist remnants that persist to this day in the region delayed economic and technological development and kept the vast majority in penury. US foreign policy helped to sustain the life of this systemic repression: it didn’t create it. Whatever the “root causes,” the blowback from all this history has created something very close to a failed state.
This is why tens of thousands are making the long trek to the US-Mexican border: the social and institutional basis of human civilization is breaking down, not only in Honduras but throughout Latin America. Yet this is neither new nor is it primarily attributable to the actions of the US. Yes, our “war on drugs” has created a criminal class that is rivaling the power of the local governments to keep order, but hard drugs are illegal everywhere, not just in North America.
June 28, 2018
US Supreme Court rules on the Janus case
Eric Boehm reported soon after the decision was announced on Wednesday morning:
More than four decades after the Supreme Court ruled that public sector workers could be required to pay dues to unions even if they do not join one, a 5–4 majority on the high court overturned that precedent in a closely watched case that could have major ramifications for the future of public sector unions.
“Under Illinois law, public employees are forced to subsidize a union, even if they choose not to join and strongly object to the positions the union takes in collective bargaining and related activities,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote in the majority opinion. “We conclude that this arrangement violates the free speech rights of nonmembers by compelling them to subsidize private speech on matters of substantial public concern.”
In the short-term, the ruling in Janus v. American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees means that plaintiff Mark Janus was successful in his decade-long fight to prevent the union from taking $50 out of his paycheck every two weeks. Over the years, Janus estimates, he’s contributed more than $6,000 to the union.
More broadly, Wednesday’s ruling could end the automatic deduction of union dues from millions of public employees’ paychecks, forcing unions like AFSCME to convince workers to voluntarily contribute dues — something workers would do, presumably, only if they have a reason to do so.
“So many of us have been forced to pay for political speech and policy positions with which we disagree, just so we can keep our jobs. This is a victory for all of us,” said Janus in a statement. “The right to say ‘no’ to a union is just as important as the right to say ‘yes.’ Finally our rights have been restored.”
The ruling is “a landmark victory for rights of public-sector employees,” said Mark Mix, president of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, which supported Janus’ lawsuit.
While today’s ruling certainly shifts the balance towards worker freedom, groups like the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, which represented Janus, say they are already prepared for additional rounds of litigation. In states that previously have embraced right-to-work policies, unions have often tried to make it as difficult as possible for workers to renounce their membership.
At Hot Air, Jazz Shaw highlights a few of the key points:
Justice Alito wrote the decision and it followed along with the expectations of those who watched the case play out before the court. Also as expected, this was a 5-4 decision, split along partisan lines. At the heart of Janus was the question of whether or not unions can forcibly extract dues from workers’ paychecks without the worker proactively volunteering to contribute. In parallel to that, the court had to determine whether or not those extracted fees, being put toward lobbying efforts, constituted involuntary political speech on the part of the worker. The ruling answers both questions definitively.
You can read the full decision here [PDF] but I’ve extracted a couple of the key points from the syllabus. First is the issue of whether the previous ruling in Abood (which went in the unions’ favor) erred in allowing the forcible extraction of dues. Alito leaves no room for doubt.
The State’s extraction of agency fees from nonconsenting public sector employees violates the First Amendment. Abood erred in concluding otherwise, and stare decisis cannot support it. Abood is therefore overruled.
The second question was the one about subsidizing the speech of others when it runs contrary to your personal beliefs. Again, Alito is definitive.
Forcing free and independent individuals to endorse ideas they find objectionable raises serious First Amendment concerns. E.g., West Virginia Bd. of Ed. v. Barnette, 319 U. S. 624, 633. That includes compelling a person to subsidize the speech of other private speakers.
A union official, Paul Shearon, the IFPTE Secretary-Treasurer, put out an immediate statement saying that this was based on, “a bogus free speech argument.” He went on to say that the justices voting in the majority “are little better than political hacks.” That was followed up by a threat to take it to the streets.
In the short run, the Janus decision may hurt some unions financially, but in the long run it will serve to make unions and their members more militant and force a stronger culture of internal organizing. The recent statewide teacher strikes demonstrate that when public sector workers face limitations on their bargaining rights they take their case to the streets.
This is going to send shockwaves through not just the unions, but the Democratic Party at large. The amount of money that the unions flush into Democratic coffers every year is likely more than most of you imagine.
Steven Malanga in City Journal provides some rough figures on how much money was at stake for the unions and their political activities:
With the appointment of Justice Neil Gorsuch, unions feared the outcome of the Janus case. After all, many union members have stated that they would give up their memberships if the court ruled that compulsory fees were illegal. An officer of the Communications Workers of America, which represents government employees in New Jersey, told an AFL-CIO convention last fall that only 54 percent of its 60,000 members said that they would remain in the union if they could opt out of paying fees. The California Teachers Association, meanwhile, crafted a 2019 budget that anticipated that as many as 23,000 members would leave if the court overturned the Illinois law. The union will also suffer from the loss of revenues from 28,000 nonmembers who’ve been paying agency fees, and will presumably stop doing so now that they’re no longer compelled. The union, according to a published report, estimated it could suffer a loss of some $20 million annually as a result.
Even before the ruling, government unions were reeling. Their membership has declined from a peak of 7.9 million in 2009 to 7.2 million today — a drop of nearly 9 percent. The portion of government workers in unions, which peaked in the mid-1990s at 38.7 percent, is now down to 34.4 percent, according to unionstats.com. Some of the decline is due to a significant reduction in the number of government workers after the 2008 financial crisis; even today, nine years into a recovery, the total number of government workers remains 10 percent lower than before the recession — a loss of 233,000 positions. But unions have suffered an even bigger falloff, because when government employment began trending back upward in 2014, union membership stayed flat. Many of the gains in government jobs since then have been in nonunion positions.
Unions have suffered big losses in Wisconsin, which banned compulsory unionization in the public sector in 2011. Some 140,000 union positions have dried up as workers chose not to retain their memberships. But other states that continued to compel workers to join a union or pay agency fees have also seen major losses, including New York, where union membership has fallen by 150,000, Illinois (down 88,000), Pennsylvania (down 54,000), and New Jersey (down 50,000). Those declines are reflected in union numbers, too. The National Education Association, the largest teachers’ union, has lost nearly 250,000 members, or about 8 percent of its membership, since 2009. AFSCME’s national membership has shrunk by 200,000, or 13 percent.
QotD: Some positive aspects of the Great Depression
… one fascinating thread about the Depression era in American food is the hunger, the poverty, the disruption to American households. But even at the height of the Depression, when a quarter of the workforce was unemployed, most people were not on relief, and most were not suffering malnutrition. Those people were, however, seeing some pretty remarkable transformation in how they produced, purchased and consumed food.
- The tractor. Between 1930 and 1940, despite the fact that credit had dried up and farms were failing left and right, tractors became the majority of the horsepower available on American farms. Tractor technology itself improved during the decade, but the most remarkable advance was simply the number of draft animals who were replaced. This had far-reaching effects on American farms: It meant that more land could be put into cash crops or pasturage for food animals (because an enormous amount of available land had previously been needed simply to grow food to feed the draft animals). It increased the amount that a farmer could produce. It also meant that farmers were more exposed to market forces; you cannot grow diesel fuel on a spare field, and two amorous tractors do not make a new tractor every spring. And the capital required to buy a tractor favored larger farms, one of the first steps along the road to modern agribusiness.
- The supermarket. The grocery store as we now know it — with open shelves where the customers gather their own goods — is a relatively recent innovation. A&P, generally regarded as the first modern grocery chain, entered the 1930s well-positioned to benefit from the Depression, because it had financed expansion out of retained earnings rather than debt. Its ability to offer low prices through bulk purchasing, low labor costs and good logistics helped it to grow even as other stores were failing. Naturally this triggered a backlash, culminating in some rather exciting legislative battles in Congress, and a law, the Robinson-Patman Act, that is still on the books today.
- Commodity markets. Like stock exchanges, commodity markets — where things got a little hairy when farm prices collapsed — got a big new regulatory bill in the mid-1930s, the Commodity Futures Act. Even if you don’t care about commodity exchanges — and you should! — it’s worth knowing that there’s always something crazy going on when people are trading commodities.
- Farm policy. The New Deal programs designed to deal with the crisis in American agriculture had vast and enduring effects on the nation’s food supply, changing how people farmed, what they grew and how they got paid for it.
- Frozen food. Don’t sniff. Yes, frozen vegetables are not as good as vegetables picked at the peak of freshness and taken straight to your table from the garden or farmer’s market. This is the wrong comparison. What frozen vegetables and fish replaced was the usually inferior alternatives like canning, drying or salt-preserving, because most people could not afford to get fresh produce from a hothouse or a farm thousands of miles away. When General Foods debuted the Birds Eye line, it became possible for people to have tasty vegetables out of season or out of region at a reasonable price.
- The refrigerator. There were other technologies that made inroads during the decade thanks to falling prices, improving design and rural electrification. The waffle iron and the toaster, among others, probably deserve at least a glancing mention, as does the electric range. But indisputable pride of place goes to the refrigerator, which had penetrated 20 percent of American homes by 1932, and 50 percent by 1938. That bears a second look: In the depths of the Great Depression, people are purchasing a major expensive appliance, which suggests just how great refrigerators are. The early models were primitive, but still represented an order-of-magnitude improvement over the icebox, which couldn’t maintain an even temperature, couldn’t freeze anything, and had to have its drain periodically scrubbed with a wire brush to get rid of the disgusting accumulation of green slime. The refrigerator was complementary to other developments, like the supermarket and the frozen food case, allowing less frequent marketing and a wider variety of temperature-sensitive foods.
- Nutrition science. This almost always gets attention in histories of the era; most of that attention is not very nice. Yes, the concoctions that home economists came up with look awful to the modern eye. (I, for one, never want to find out what “cornstarch pudding” tastes like.) Yes, they got a bunch of stuff wrong. Yes, they were a little overintoxicated with idea of scientifically managing every aspect of human life, leaving no room for small matters such as, erm, flavor. But they were also coming out of an era when people frequently died of food-borne illness, or were permanently debilitated by vitamin deficiencies. And modern writers give far too little credit to the constraints that home economists were working under. Until the 1960s, just making sure you had enough calories on the table was a major part of the American household budget. Limited food supply chains did not offer the rich array of exotic ingredients we now take for granted, and cooking was something that every woman had to do a lot of, even if she had no interest or skill for the task. Providing calories with limited means (and limited cooks) took precedence over learning how to concoct the perfect pot-au-feu. The innovators who tackled these challenges did some harm, but they also did a fair amount of good, and they deserve better than the amused condescension they usually get.
- Convenience foods. Obviously, the development of convenience foods was not limited to the 1930s. We got powdered gelatin, which is to my mind the first major convenience food, in the late 19th century; cake mixes, invented in the 1930s, properly belong to the 1940s as a mass phenomenon. But the 1930s had some notable contributions: Jiffy Biscuit Mix and Bisquick, refrigerator rolls, dry soup mix, and of course, that notorious old standby, Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup. For good or for ill, these things transformed American cookery.
We often think of these developments narrowly: A tractor can plow a few more furrows, a refrigerator lets you keep food a little longer, a biscuit mix lets you have bread on the table 30 percent faster. But these sorts of changes are not just shifts in degree, but changes in kind. The tractor changed not just how fast a farmer could work, but the kinds of work he could do; the supermarket and the frozen pea and the refrigerator worked in concert to revolutionize what a housewife could do, how she could do it, and therefore, what other things she could do with the time and energy she had freed up.
And all of these things, working in concert, made radical alterations to the kind and amount of food that we put into our mouths. The Great Depression left a lot of lasting legacies on the American landscape. But the most ubiquitous, and perhaps least noticed, is the way we eat.
Megan McArdle, “The Depression Was Great for the American Kitchen”, Bloomberg View, 2016-09-23.
June 27, 2018
QotD: Male homosexuality in ancient and modern times
Most educated people in the U.S. and Europe have a default model or construction of homosexual behavior which I will call “romantic homosexuality”. Romantic homosexuality is homoeroticism between equals; men or women of roughly the same age and social position, with the relationship having affective elements similar to the emotional range in heterosexual relationships (from one-night stand through lifetime marriage).
[…]
Over and over again, the pattern of male homosexual behavior in pre-modern sources is overwhelmingly one of pederasty and domination sex. And not just in pre-modern sources but in most of the present-day world as well. […] We may further note that there are, broadly speaking, two contending models of “normal” — acceptable or semi-acceptable male homosexual behavior — observable in human cultures. In one model, that of the modern West, romantic homosexuality is relatively tolerated, while pederasty and domination sex are considered far more deviant. I’ll call this the homophilic construction. It’s what most of my readers accept as normal.
But in the other, older model, pederasty and domination sex are considered more “normal” than romantic homosexuality. In cultures with this model, the “top” in an episode of pederasty or domination sex is not necessarily considered homosexual or deviant at all; any stigma attaches to the passive partner. Romantic homosexuality is considered far more perverse, because it feminizes both partners. I think of this as the “classical” construction of homosexuality, as it describes the attitudes of ancient Rome – but it persists in cultures as near to our own as South America and the Mediterranean littoral.
It’s the classical construction that is the rule in human cultures. The homophilic one is the exception; in fact, I am not able to identify any culture which held to it until after the Industrial Revolution in Europe. And not all of Europe has acquired it yet. Even in the English-speaking countries, where the homophilic construction is most entrenched, the connotations of sexual insults and threats in our language still reflect the older model.
To put it another way, the male homosexuals of the last two centuries in our culture have engaged in a massive reinvention of homosexuality that is still underway. Specifically the male homosexuals; lesbians began the game with romantic homosexuality as their dominant mode. I have not identified any culture in which it was considered more normal for lesbians to have sex with prepubescent girls or with dominated inferiors.
[…]
This analysis raises two interesting questions. The first one is about the past: what changed? That is, how did the homophilic construction replace the classical one, where it did? I’m only speculating here, but I think the proximate cause may have been the sentimentalization of family life around the turn of the 19th century in Europe, which in turn was enabled by a sharp fall in infant mortality rates. Both processes started earlier and moved faster in England and the Anglosphere than they did elsewhere.
The other interesting question is whether this reinvention is sustainable in the longer term. If my analysis is correct, modern homosexuals are bucking a pretty strong biological headwind. How strong can be judged by a chilling little statistic I picked up years ago from a how-to manual written by homosexual SM practitioners for newbies, er, learning the ropes; it noted that, adjusted for population size, male homosexuals murder each other at a rate 26 times that of the general population.
That suggests to me that a tendency for male homosexuals to drift into the darker corners of domination sex is still wired in beneath the modern homophilic construction. It might take actual genetic engineering, of a kind we don’t yet have, to fix that wiring. Until then, I wish them luck. Because (and here I make the first and only value claim in this essay) whatever one’s opinion of homophilic homosexuals might be, the behaviors associated with the pederastic/dominating classical style are entangled with abuse and degradation in a way that can only be described as evil. Modern homosexuals deserve praise for their attempt to get shut of them.
Eric S. Raymond, “Reinventing Homosexuality”, Armed and Dangerous, 2009-06-17.
June 26, 2018
Henry Johnson And The Harlem Hellfighters I WHO DID WHAT IN WW1?
The Great War
Published on 25 Jun 2018The 369th Infantry Regiment from Harlem, New York was an all-black unit that served on the Western Front. But not under American command, but loaned tot he French Army.
QotD: Writing essays in school
To find their way in American life, high-schoolers need to be able to speak English, to read, to listen to and respect other people’s opinions, to have a command of the basic elements of courtesy and, to a lesser extent, to write. (They do not need to know how to write a thesis sentence. More injury is done to high-school essays by the imposition of the thesis-sentence requirement than by any other means. The trick, kids are sometimes told, is to begin with a word like “although.” No.)
Nicholson Baker, “Fortress of Tedium: What I Learned as a Substitute Teacher”, New York Times Magazine, 2016-09-07.
June 25, 2018
Differences between the United States and the “idealized” United States of Europe
Tim Worstall, in the Continental Telegraph:
There are those who think – urge, wish for perhaps – the European Union is or should become the United States of Europe. Lots of central bureaucratic control, the nation states left as just the remnants of once independent countries like the US states are these days. In some ways the two systems are very much the same already. No US state has any control at all over trade across its own border. Nor does any EU one. Trade is an issue solely the competence of the central organisations, respectively Washington DC and Brussels. Equally, both systems use this central control of trade and trade only to expand that central control.
In the US there was a case that Federal control of trade meant that the Feds got to decide who could grow wheat where and when. The usual sort of planning idiocy led to the Feds telling farmers who could grow how much and when. One farmer claimed he was only growing for his own consumption and this shouldn’t be limited. The centre (the Supreme Court) disagreed, the crux being that if he didn’t grow for his own consumption he would buy, this affected inter-state commerce, he had to obey the Feds. The EU takes this a step further. The Single Market rules are nominally about trade. Anything legal to be buying and selling in one place is such in all is a reasonable explanation of the nub of the matter. Sure, exceptions and all that. But this then smuggles into all law that continental (Roman Law really) idea that what is legal to do is something that the legislation defines. Instead of that Common Law idea that legislation, the law even, defines what it is illegal to do all other things being legal.
Once this is accepted then of course the next step is that there must be regulation of all things so as to tell people what it is legal to do. In this manner all sorts of things get smuggled in. Vacuum cleaner motors must be limited to a certain size or power. Because those whose lives are unfortunate enough that they’ve time to spare to be concerned about legislation on such matters note that they can be and thus incorporate their trivialities into legislation. The extent of this reach is larger than you think. The underlying legal, not political, justification for recycling targets is that some countries – Holland, where digging a hole gains nothing but wet boots – don’t have space for landfill. This would put them at a disadvantage if other countries do have the space, therefore all must recycle.
Giving the centre power always, but always, means an extension of the centre’s power. The two systems aren’t so different then.
June 23, 2018
Word of the day – Kakistocracy
Ann Althouse does the etymological heavy lifting:
“Kakistocracy” — based on the Greek for “worst” + “rule” — means ” The government of a state by the worst citizens”(OED).
1829 T. L. Peacock Misfortunes Elphin vi. 93 Our agrestic kakistocracy now castigates the heinous sins which were then committed with impunity [“Agrestic” = rural, rough and uncouth.]
1876 J. R. Lowell Lett. II. vii. 179 Is ours a government of the people, by the people, for the people, or a Kakistocracy rather, for the benefit of knaves at the cost of fools?I see that Salon got to the OED and deployed that word and those quotes before Trump was even sworn in: “Degeneration nation: “It takes a village of idiots to raise a kakistocracy like Donald Trump’s/Donald Trump’s government will be ‘for the benefit of knaves at the cost of fools’” (December 17, 2016):
As Amro Ali explains in a piece calling for a revival of the term “kakistrocracy” [sic] “In a world where stupidity penetrates multiple levels of government, policies and personalities; it is strange that the term coined to best describe it has actually ended up in the endangered and forgotten words books.”…
Forbes contributor Michael Lewitt reminds us that “kakistocracy” should be used to describe a state or government run by the most unscrupulous or unsuitable people: “Corrupt, dishonest and incompetent politicians, regulators and bureaucrats were put in charge by self-absorbed, selfish and ignorant citizens.” He goes on to acknowledge that we are probably not the first society to consider our leaders as part of a kakistocracy….
The word kakistocracy comes to us from Greek. Kakistos means “worst,” which is superlative of kakos — “bad” — and if it sounds like shit, that’s because it is.
That link on “if it sounds like shit” goes to an etymology dictionary entry for “kakistocracy”:
…. from Greek kakistos “worst,” superlative of kakos “bad” (which perhaps is related to PIE root *kakka- “to defecate”) + –cracy.
In that view, the real “shithole country.” When will the U.N. give us credit for having the most nerve and confidence to criticize those we elect and continually threaten to oust?
June 22, 2018
What the well-dressed politician shouldn’t be wearing
Ann Althouse reacts to a New York Times article on what clothes “say” about the wearer:
I clicked on that title because I thought it was going to say that it’s a mistake for female candidates to wear pants (in any form) rather than a skirt/dress (of some kind). But the article lumped skirted suits and pantsuits together.
To my eye, women in pants look less dressed up than a man in a standard business suit, and I don’t think women should put themselves at that disadvantage, especially since pantsuits look sloppier on a woman’s body than a business suit on a man’s body.
I don’t mean to insult women by saying that, but women’s bodies are (generally) shaped differently than men’s and women’s pants are (generally) fitted differently from men’s suit pants. Men’s suit pants do not hug the legs or crotch, so they completely deflect attention away from the lower body. Men’s suits bring us right up to the shoulders — the idealized shoulders — and and then, via shirt and tie, aim us straight at the face.
Women’s pantsuits are more fitted in the leg and use color in a way that draws the eye downward, and they often do things with the jacket — such as making it very long — to cover up what’s happening down there in the legs. But then the jacket is distracting.
In the 2016 campaign, Hillary Clinton’s jackets were flat-out weird, with perplexing patch pockets. In fact, I don’t like Vanessa Friedman’s reference to the “Elizabeth Warren/Hillary Clinton/Kirsten Gillibrand mold,” because Warren and Gillibrand wear very low-key things and Hillary Clinton launched into clothes that we struggled to understand, that got compared to loungewear or sci-fi costumery.
I don’t really know what the best answer is. It depends on the individual. But you’re asking to be trusted with responsibility, not to be enjoyed as a pop star or fashion maven. You don’t want to look as though you’re seeking power for purpose of expressing your individuality.
A Brief History of the Jeep
KnowledgeHub
Published on 30 May 2018Jeeps are the original military vehicle that everybody loved so much, it became a civilian. So whats the history of these? Do you care? I mean you clicked on this video bub.
June 20, 2018
QotD: Changing cultural views
The way to deal with institutionalized discrimination is to disprove it. THAT is the way to change things, too. Over time, if people of x group who are assumed to be lazy and stupid prove they are excellent and high achievers, the culture changes to [accommodate] the new fact.
Is it fair to have to work against expectation? Well, there you have me cupcake. It certainly ISN’T fair. You know what else isn’t fair? Being born mortal, in a body that starts falling apart at around 40. If you were expecting fair, you were born in the wrong world. In this world we don’t have fair or ideal. We have what works, and what doesn’t.
Working really hard to show prejudice is wrong WORKS. It takes a few generations and is unfair as hell to the people who do it, but overtime the culture changes. At least if it’s a healthy culture that doesn’t kill you just for being different.
What doesn’t work is whining about how men don’t get out of your way when you’re walking (what are you? The Roman emperor? I’m sure if you play chicken they WILL get out of the way, unless they too are in a novel-writing funk. Which is when I’ve walked into people, male and female both.)
And if you go around saying bullshit like we live in a white supremacist society, you’re just going to cause me to laugh till my head falls off. Because I’ve been in one white supremacist society and guess what they didn’t have: lawsuits for discrimination; set asides for minorities; etc. In fact their laws de facto discriminated against people based on their skin color.
Running into the occasional asshole (look, I tan, and younger son tans much more than I. If you think we don’t run into assholes on a regular basis you’re nuts) who thinks you’re inferior, or tells you to go back to Mexico/Africa/the desert, is not a supremacist society. It’s a DIVERSE society, where people are allowed to think any damn crazy thing they want to. Some people in a diverse society WILL be assholes. It’s not a crime, as such. And some assholes obsess on race, or sex, or sexual orientation. Don’t make no difference which or how. They’re just ASSHOLES.
The thing to do with assholes is not to embrace them to your chest as a precious that proves you can’t get ahead because everyone is against you. It’s to go “oh, asshole” and move on.
That is ultimately the point. Sure there are micro and macro aggressions in society. They exist for everyone, yes, including white males (because some are ugly, and some are poor, and some are overweight and none of them is perfect and someone will find a reason to pick on them too.) It’s part of living in the world and not in paradise.
The diversity you claim to love comes with the ability to be many different varieties of asshole.
Sarah Hoyt, “A Very Diverse Cake”, According to Hoyt, 2016-08-31.
June 19, 2018
Flying Aircraft Carriers – Reversed Bullets I OUT OF THE TRENCHES
The Great War
Published on 18 Jun 2018
