The problem with millennials is...

...we (or, their parents; whatever generation raised them) were a little too zealous in teaching them to pursue their dreams and prioritize their values.

These aren't bad things in and of themselves.  I'm actually looking forward to some serious disruption in the business world when companies that hide bad management and abuse behind "old school/hard core" attitudes find their pre-millennial headcount has dropped below critical mass.  And I'm not just saying that because I currently work for a place that can't keep an engineer for more than a year because they've drunk so much of their own Kool-Aid that they think making people work six twelve-hour shifts is righteous and they're the victims of a shallow hiring pool and can't staff three eight hour shifts, and that they think that people quitting before their first paycheck is funny, and that this is just how you keep your head above water instead of really trying to permanently solve manufacturing problems instead of...again, making people work 32 extra hours a week just to make up for all the bad product that got produced and to make up for all the overtime that has to get paid now to the people who are working all those hours.

Partly that, but not just that, see.

The problem is that we taught them the good side, and we seemed to have taught them a thing or two about hard work because they will commit themselves to their favorite causes, as least if you can get past the "retweet, put up a bumper sticker, show up in the streets but stay home from the polls" contingent, but we didn't teach them that "adulting" is hard and unavoidable.

,...I forgot where else I want to go with this.

Wait, I remember.  A thread on Pinterest:

"Millennial hate is a thing rich folks started because they're pissed we have unpredictable consumer habits."

There is a lot here and I would only amend one thing:  not "rich folks" so much as "marketing departments"--or "older generations," because there has never been one that did not lament the poor character of the newer generation (which I suppose is fair; if each one is worse than the last, it's because the last one had better mentors).  That's where advertising dovetails with social engineering.  Since consumer habits do seem to be changing--and you can take "seem" however you want for me to make my point--it's not unreasonable to report on it.

And for all you propeller-heads out there, yes, I'm simplifying.  Think of the story I'm telling as an example rather than an overarching narrative.

It's interesting how nobody takes the long view.  Millennials are the way they are because they were raised that way, by parents who were trying to pass on the hard lessons they learned growing up while trusting schools that have been encroaching on in loco parentis in ways Orwell might have predicted if he had written Winston Smith as a teenager.  But these parents work at companies that have said marketing departments, they see changes, and maybe they don't or didn't realize it's a result of how they raised their kids, maybe they don't see the connection between what their children tell them and how all the children of that generation eat and buy and live.  That's a pretty abstract thing for parents to be analyzing in their children, enough that it's hard to recognize before it's too late, but I would think our social so-imagined masters would be a little smarter about it...if, like I said, these weren't the same people.

So we're far enough into the Long March that "critical theory studies" is mixed into nearly everything that gets taught whether or not a student majors in it.  The elites--the ones who are raised by the people who are telling us what to think, not the ones who are told what to tell us to think; the ones who are above and immune to the tides of contemporary philosophy, not the ones who think by acting woke with enough zeal they can win some real security--are taught to feed it to America, not to eat it.  The rest of America is taught to eat it.  But are they allowing enough engineers to graduate and tradesmen to get certified who retain enough of a sense of objective reality and empirical data to keep our planes flying and computers running?

"Keep in mind the subprime mortgage crisis was a shaping event in our generation's lives."

Yeah, fine, but you seem to have missed the historical lesson:  the government leaned on banks to offer nonviable loans.  I'm sure plenty of bankers were happy to get more payments than they would have otherwise, but I have heard firsthand that banks by and large didn't want to do it because they knew it would be bad for business--that people who hadn't been able to afford to buy homes previously were in that situation more often because they had money management problems, and less often because they had a streak of bad luck.  So don't think the government is on your side.  They'll tell you they're helping, but borrowers and lenders on the whole both ended up worse off than they were before.  We all felt it, and we all know what it's like to live through it.

"Boomers refuse to pay a living wage to anyone and then wonder why people don't buy anything."

Uh, no.  Boomers only refused to raise the minimum wage to what might be considered a living wage in some places before the rise in minimum wage increased the cost of living in ways no one could predict.  More money doesn't help you buy more if you still can't afford things.  And people were buying things on minimum wage long before you came into the picture, so how are you different on this point?

"Millennials value meaningful work over lucrative work."

That's great, and I'm not just saying that to be patronizing, but part of adulting is putting up with parts of your life--and that includes your work--that just aren't great.  Go ahead, blame your parents and teachers, but don't expect us to listen if you complain about it but never try to strike a reasonable balance.  Another part of adulting is taking on responsibility for things passed down to you even if they're not your fault; you're not being blamed or condemned for wearing cultural hand-me-downs, you're just getting all there is to give (and that is not a comment on how much more wealth your elders already have than you do; twenty years from now, you'll be twenty years down that path, too).

"Millennials do not deal well with their great ideas being shut down."

Okay, that's a partially valid point, whether or not it's really a pithy criticism of your attitude, but my experience has been the opposite:  throwing people barely old enough to drink into management positions and chasing whatever fad they were taught was the final key to permanent business success, until next year when they hire the next round of bright idea pimps.  But still, "we do it this way because we've always done it this way" is not always bad--someone came up with the term "standard practices" and the notion stuck for a reason--but it's not sufficient justification to refuse to consider change.  I have also literally heard this said as an argument against changing a workflow I'm part of where I work:  "But if we change things, then they'll be different."  Um, yeah?  They're supposed to be different because there are problems that are making us want to change what we do so the problems go away.

"I'd love to buy a house but I can't be certain I'll have the same income levels for thirty years."

This is interesting.  Things really are different from how they were before in terms of how people hold jobs.  I've changed jobs half a dozen times in the last twenty years, and the only times a change didn't come with an increase in income was when I was in a transitional situation, which seemed normal but might not be any longer.  But people are changing jobs more often these days because they are choosing to.  Layoffs and furloughs and downsizing are not new concepts.

"Why can't I build a little house on a tiny lot?"

There are lots available.  They're cheaper outside the city, so you'd have to drive, but at least your property taxes would be low enough that maybe you could swing a car loan.  They're cheaper than most houses.

"What about sharing a house with my friends?  The zoning board won't allow that."

The zoning board doesn't know how many guests you have, or how long they're staying, or whether they have any mail directed to you because you have enough trust to watch out for each other like that, or if they're helping you with expenses.  Just like how if you buy a house capitalism doesn't force you to buy new furniture.

"My old fridge was older than I was, and when my new one broke, they said I should have bought the warranty."

Not getting the warranty was probably foolish.  Disagree?  Do the math.  At some point paying fifty bucks for five years isn't going to be worth the hassle of a fridge that won't keep cold, and I do agree that it's unfortunate that things are designed to be replaced rather than repaired--but don't forget a repairman's labor is more expensive than a new appliance; I sympathize with the Maytag repairman but that clock has been running forward since before your time and you will be lucky (possibly bad luck) to see the day when that clock turns back.  Oh, did you do the math while I was ranting?  No?  Let me give you a hint:  it's usually cheaper to insure than to rebuy.  That's how health care got into the problem it, frankly, is still in.  When you do the math you'll know where the tradeoff is.  Maybe in your case it wasn't foolish, but if you couldn't be bothered to make an educated guess, that's really where your problem is.

"New fridges have a $400 premium to get a convenient configuration."

Oh, grow the fuck up.  This is why old people tell "when I was your age" stories.  You can't get the shelves where you want?  Why is it so hard to reposition the shelves yourself?  Did your parents do that thorough a job of teaching you the way to succeed is to find meaningful work and asking anonymous collective other people to deal with your #firstworldproblems?

"Entry level positions require 3-5 years of experience."

Old problem, also all perception.  LinkedIn is just one resource that talks a lot about how job postings go for two things, the ideal candidate and the one with the same profile as the person who just left the job.  If you can't figure that out from people telling you, we can't solve it for you as a society, no matter how much of your own soap you make and how much of your own vegetables you grow.  Although those are good things too; capitalism's great, but fuck consumerism.

"Even trades have a $5k+ investment for training and equipment."

If you aren't going into teaching, work training is usually cheap because your employer wants you to be highly competent and skilled; and either way, there are tax write-offs for personally covering work expenses.  And if you really just want to work, and don't find trades to be too drudge to consider?  take some shop classes in college, befriend the neighborhood gearhead, find the college grease monkey club.  Learn some Spanish and go to a Home Depot at four in the morning and ask the guys out front what it's like.  Follow them where they go and you'll learn a few things.  They won't buy you hammers and tape measures, but they'll have something you can borrow to start out, and if you pick something up quick on your own because you're a self-starter or because some grizzled master welder took a cotton to you and gave you a salty version of "how can I help you succeed at your job?" you'll get to the point where you won't need a $5k class, you'll just need a certification test.  Or you'll have the $5k, if you're planning ahead.

I'm painting with a really broad brush here and I'm sure there are many specific situations where it really isn't as straightforward as I'm making it sound, but my point is just that you're not helpless victims in a new world, you're just normal.

"Ask not what your economy can do you for you, ask what you can do for your economy."

There are people in the economy, not just commodities.  I thought you wanted to help people in a  collective style.  The heart of capitalism is finding people with an unmet need, finding a way to meet it, and offering to exchange what they need for what you need.

You want to condemn people who criticize children? Then stop hiding behind children.

Some time ago Greta Thunberg, Asperger's diagnosee and child of high profile dramatists, issued a preciously narcissistic and well sculpted wake-up call to the UN about climate change.

Some people called her out for speaking out of turn:  what does a teenager know, when adults can't even agree on the meaningfulness of consensus?  Are her parents using her as a prop for virtue signaling?  Why is this particular event worth making Greta miss days of school?

Other people called out those people for being mean:  Don't you know it's not nice or fair to talk to children that way?  Why can't you just listen to her message and get with the program and shrink your carbon footprint?

My opinion?  We should be encouraging our children to learn about and participate in matters of the world, in a way and to a degree that is appropriate for their level of development.  When they do well, praise them, but be constructive rather than obsequious.  If they don't do well, still be constructive, but be charitable.

If you're going to thrust them out into the professional league, though...be prepared for the fallout.

You're the parent/guardian.  It's on you if your prized, adorable shill comes home shamed and with emotional scars.  That's because you're the parent and are supposed to exercise some judgment in what your child is facing.  Stepping in front of the public eye isn't quite as foolhardy as dropping your kid over the wall into the pit at the reptile house for some good pics for social media, but everyone else except for tyrants and busybodies are going to assume that you're managing the situation appropriately for your child's maturity level and that you recognize that they do not answer to you.

So maybe in the past people were reluctant to criticize a teenager for her juvenile rhetoric out of a sense of fair play to her.  And maybe bystanders will rate that a win for you this time.  But next time they will remember that your arguments are childish and that you won't even defend them yourself.

And what about Greta?

President Trump tweeted at her thusly: Greta must work on her Anger Management problem, then go to a good old fashioned movie with a friend! Chill Greta, Chill!"

She replied by changing her Twitter status to "a teenager working on her anger management problem. Currently chilling and watching a good old fashioned movie with a friend."


I'm not sure about this "up against a wall" thing, but I think she's going to be just fine.

Not so recently I was turned on to the long novenas of St. Bridget.

There's a one-year one consisting of 15 Paternosters, 15 Aves, and 15 particular prayers every day for a year.  There's another that consists of 7 and 7 and 7 that runs daily for twelve years.  Both concern the wounds Christ suffered during His Passion, and various promises of graces that convey holiness in this life, happiness in the next, and a commendable Christian death in between are attached to each.  The prayers for the former (there is a warning about the verbiage but proceed with prudence) are here.  A description of the latter can be found here.

Such undertakings daunt me.  Or, at least, they did.  I recently started saying the rosary on a daily basis, after some promptings I could not ignore, and when I realized I just needed to accept the time commitment it became easy (in the past I had tried to muscle my way through the fifteen minutes of sitting still and reciting Hail Marys, but now it can take 30 minutes and I hardly notice).  And I have been saying a decade of the St. Gertrude prayer daily since grad school, which was about 15 years ago, so if I had started the Bridgetine prayers at the same time I'd be done by now.

One thinks sometimes it would have been nice to be back in Biblical times to experience things firsthand (not the dysentery so much as the miracles).  I have at times been jealous of the grace given to people who were there to be recipients of it; I'm not cut out to be a bishop, but if I'd been in Palestine a couple thousand years ago maybe I could have been chosen as an Apostle, you know?

Yeah, that's not how it works and that's the wrong attitude, but jealousy isn't rational.

But recently a thought occurred to me:  whatever advantages people back then had, they didn't get all the same ones that are available to us now.  Look at some of the promises associated with other devotions that arose in the Middle Ages or later:

• The Rosary:  destroy vice, decrease sin, defeat heresies
• The Divine Mercy: even hardened sinners who say it will die a happy death
• Brown Scapular: None who die wearing it (non-superstitiously!) will suffer eternal fire
• First Fridays: all graces necessary to one's state in life and great blessings to all one's undertakings
• First Saturdays: Mary herself promises to assist by bringing the graces needed for salvation

Maybe this day and age is lean on living saints we can go to beg for prayers or miracles face to face, but these devotions can sure make up the difference.

The First Fridays devotion, also known as the Sacred Heart, is of particular relevance here.  It was presaged in the 13th century during a mystical encounter between St. John and St. Gertrude, whom the evangelist invited to recline on Jesus' chest as he himself did at the Last Supper.  When she asked why he did not elaborate about the experience in his Gospel, St. John explained that such was reserved for a time in history when the Church's love for God would have grown cold.  Four centuries to the day later, Jesus revealed His Sacred Heart to St. Margaret Mary.

What devotions, what graces, will be made available to our distant descendants, who will be struggling to see Biblical history over the haufenmist of Modernism that looms in between, over our very heads today?

All right, I haven't seen this elsewhere yet and haven't had a chance to say it to anybody else...

...but why didn't they just refer to al-Baghdadi in his headline-eulogy as "someone who did something?"

It's close enough to accurate and rhetorically fitting.

A prayer after communion

Lord Jesus, I praise You and thank You for deigning to come to me in so lowly a manner, for allowing me to approach You and receive You in this way.  I pray that I receive You to my salvation and sanctification, and not my own condemnation; and may every grace You pour out on me beyond my ability to receive flow out to all of my prayer intentions.  

I pray also You never suffer me to be farther from You than I am right now.

Amen.

My goal when I started this blog was really not to devolve into some conservative curmudgeon...

...but maybe it's just that as I've moved through life, I've drifted away from places where badly formed unorthodox opinions are rampant, and toward places where underdeveloped political opinions are mixed at the deepest levels with other things I'm interested in.

I tire of it.  I don't have the power to change all the minds of everyone on the internet who thinks that Jesus wasn't real because some other yahoo on the internet made up lies that are easily disproven after five minutes spent in any grade school library's mythology section.  I have some hope when I see Copernicus mistaken for Leonardo in the debate about the two world views and someone else chimes in with "I looked into this, and that's not quite true."  I can still make my contributions but God will have to do the heavy lifting.

I tire of the same kind of crap as "astronomers calculated the positions of the stars and planets and discovered a missing day that proves Joshua 10:13."  Why people would lie about this, I don't know.  Maybe it's all false flag operations, but these things just...smell like well intentioned lies by people who don't have the foresight to ask "if they discover this isn't true, are they more likely to throw it all away in a fit of doubt than to forgive me for tricking them into getting saved/opening their eyes to scientific materialism?"

But my point was to touch on a couple semi political things and call it a night.  Today's topic:  common core.

I'm not going to go deep, just hit a couple factors.

Supporters dislike the idea of what they call "hyper localization," that is, the idea that communities even down to the county level should have a say in their own school's curriculum.  They blame that for the whitewashing of history, for such things as learning little or nothing about the history of slavery in America and the Civil Rights Movement.  They want it standardized across the nation.

Problem is, the non-academics in Washington or San Francisco who are really more interested in training compliant future high tech employees--they will admit this is their goal when they publicize their support of the program, if slightly less directly--are not in any way immune to propagating other swaths of ignorance when they develop curricula far away from classrooms.

There's no guarantee a nationwide curriculum will be any more truthful about Wilmington or Custer, because there's no reason to be.  It's easier to reinvent the past to explain away the historical artifacts you can't or haven't yet been able to destroy, than to erase it all at once and hope no one notices or remembers what came before Year One.

Typical:  see a potential problem, magnify it into a crisis, and demand federal intervention.  Sound familiar?

But all that assumes that the curriculum reinventors and textbook compilers have all the pertinent knowledge at their fingertips and are simply making different choices about what to include and what to leave out, what to emphasize and what to deemphasize, what fits into the themes they want to teach and what doesn't, what themes ought to be taught and what are too difficult or inappropriate for each grade level, how to define the words "difficult" and "appropriate" in this context.

You get enough scholars and writers together, you'll have enough people who know enough that they do collectively have this knowledge (or at least have a passing familiarity so they'll be more effective at going back to do research to clear up the ignorance they know they bear), but there's no guarantee that this happened, and there's no guarantee that there are enough participants wise and sincere enough to make the optimal choices.

I went to a pretty good school.  Mostly we had pretty good textbooks.  But the time my history book spent on the Trail of Tears was about the same as that spent on the Grange, and while I recognized that both were just specific instances of bigger things, it wasn't clear how either fit into where the publisher put those few paragraphs.  The Trail at least was connected to some things I already knew about Indian reservations that still exist, but what I remember most about the Grange is being a boy sitting with book open to that page on my desk and wondering what it had to do with anything else going on at that time.

I have digressed, but permit me to regress.  I was going to say something about the statues of Confederate Civil War officers getting torn down.  Not about that, so much.  What I see a lot of here is a push to simplify history to singular ideas and motivations.  I may have written about this long before--or maybe I have a draft I never got around to publishing; been a while now--about how people will impugn the sincerity of someone who is trying to do the right things for allegedly the right reasons because they can imagine some other good that might come of it that would personally benefit the person trying to do the right thing.  Maybe that person recognizes the benefit but didn't have it in mind, maybe the person really didn't ever think of it and was trying to be altruistic because that's what virtuous people do, but it doesn't matter: an ulterior motive can be surmised, therefore the ulterior motive must be the only true one, and thus the virtuous person is just a hypocrite.  Utter bullocks, and the last rationalization of an insecure but happy vice-enslaved person.

I recognize how it is distasteful, to put it tastefully, to continue proudly displaying things that we as a society have come to recognize were not all that great after all.  George Wallace and Orval Faubus weren't just taking a principled stand against social decay, they were just wrong.  But I'd prefer to have things like statues of Robert E. Lee and George Custer put in historical museums where their real legacies can be depicted with some context.

Claims like "It was all about ending slavery" or "it had nothing to do with slavery; that was tacked on later" are wildly oversimple.  People are complicated and life is complicated and so is history.  I'm not expecting students to go to any historical museum and come out thinking the guys on the wrong side were all vilified angels, but I do want them to come out with a sense of these complexities, and some enhanced skill at looking at a story from both sides and seeing the truth and propaganda that each side relies on.

(and I realize I appear to be foisting myself onto my own petard.  Indulge me a bit more; I am not a historian and do not want to bore you in a bog of footnotes and tangential analyses)

Not just for the sake of history, either.  Yeah, Sherman might have been a horrible person for his practice of total war and his lack of enthusiasm for abolition, but he's not a monster.  And by that I mean "a horrible person is not an inhuman monster no matter how horrible," not "he wasn't so bad."

And if we can teach our students not to write off the villains of history as monsters, but to recognize them as fellow humans with motivations that are complex and often conflicted even when not wholly erroneous, then we will be teaching the next generation real lessons in how to understand and love one another.

I was going to make this a separate post, but i think it will be more fitting to finish this one with the following.

"They asked me if I was going to let politics get in the way of my friendship.  You're damn right I will.  I will not tolerate the presence of racists and homophobes."  This in response to the criticism that certain political strains tend to make everything political, that there are people you can't have a normal human conversation with because they are always having just one conversation whether you're part of it or not.  Zeal for one's principles is nice, but there's a problem with being the kind of person Winston Churchill described as being folks who won't change the subject.  It's the same problem the Pharisees had when they criticized Jesus for supping with tax collectors and sinners.

I don't need to spell it out, do I?

"It is possible to be pro-gun and pro-gun-control. As a gun owner with a clean record and a sound mind, why would I oppose legislation that does not affect me but has the potential to keep guns out of the hands of those who pose a threat?"

1. Red flag laws.
2. "First they came for the socialists ... then they came for the trade unionists...."
3. Has the "potential?"  Now we're supposed to pass laws based on what we hope they might accomplish?  Laws have been overturned for being ineffective--recreational marijuana will probably be the next obvious example to make the history books--but we don't even have to entertain bills that have a reasonable expectation of achieving their intent with minimal side effects?  Well, I guess not; so much political posturing in Washington and the media is so ridiculous I doubt one person in twenty would believe a word of it if they got past how it makes them feel....
4. (added August 2020--can't believe I didn't think to include this originally) Being pro-gun and pro-gun-control just puts you in the same boat as politicians and celebrities who talk about how we really don't need guns, in a rather "let them eat cake" tone, but surround themselves with walls and gated communities and armed bodyguards.  That canard has been beaten to death, so I'm just going to leave it at that for you to chew on.

"If owning a gun were an effective means of self defense, insurance rates would go down, but they don't because you're more likely to shoot yourself than an attacker."

Insurance companies aren't concerned about crime, they're concerned about paying out on life and health insurance policies; if they're involved in any social engineering, you can bet it's not going to be in support of any actuarial data that show personal gun ownership stops home invaders and other criminals from causing harm, which we know is true--it's just more newsworthy to report "Joe Blow was apprehended by authorities, full stop" than "Joe Blow was arrested fleeing the home of Benny Hanna; police caught him running out the back door after hearing Hanna, 42, rack his shotgun."

My chances of drowning at home are much higher because I have a bathtub, but since my bathtub poses no political threat to busybodies and tyrants, the fact that having a bathtub provides benefits that outweigh the risks is not controversial.

"Alabama, get your act together. No state that bans abortions but is in last place for education and has had four mass shootings alone in 2019 really cares about kids."

Yet another argument based on moving goalposts and insufficient purity of intent or zeal, which will get its own treatment.

What about next to last place?  40th instead of 50th?  Second place? First? At what point will you allow us to say, O arbiter and czar of decency and liberty, “our children might not score as high as some states’, but stop shaming us for this perfectly respectable ranking, because it is not the only metric?” Education is important, even for people who may not be college material, but in a day and age where there’s a lot of training to blame capitalism (or “the heads of capitalism,” who I take to be not George Soros or Bill Gates and formerly not the Donald) for every human failure in history and conditioning to divorce personal responsibility from lifestyle outcomes, I’d be chary of making comprehensive moral judgments on the basis of a testing statistic.

I mean, really:it’s not fair to prioritize one issue, even life, and refuse to acknowledge the value of others, but you’re literally saying “the children we don’t kill do better on standardized tests than yours.”  Wow, way to set the bar, there.  It’s not like any true Scotsman would criticize the rope he was getting hanged with for being new, after all.

As for the mass shootings thing...the New York Times as of May 9 reports eight school shootings in the US, one being in Alabama.  These have resulted in four deaths and seventeen injuries. Wikipedia has some more interesting statistics:  124 events total nationwide as of May 16, with 129 fatalities and 468 injured. Three of these were at a school at one was at a church.  For comparison, it shows three mass shootings in Alabama with a total of five dead; New York only had one with one fatality, California had twelve with eleven fatalities, Texas had twelve with 21 fatalities, but the city of Chicago alone had four deaths across five mass shootings.  All these include bar fights and domestic incidents with multiple casualties, not just schools.  I'm not going to quote low-fatality statistics at you, but this should be enough for you to practice on when someone says you're not comparing apples to demographic apples.

Another sign I'm on the right side

I mean, yeah, sometimes even on the Internet I find my echo chamber pierced like a bubble and find facts and logic and decent human beings that don't fit my paradigm, and I wonder if maybe I just have a few good intentions but am largely mistaken.

But then something else happens.

A number of something elses, actually, but I'll talk about how 90% of the violence is either physically on the other side or exists only as rhetoric and accusation and invention but still is on their side later.

It’s not that both sides don’t have solipsism and myopia. It's not that both sides don't have some facts and logic to support their positions (gun violence is never a good thing, even if you can justify its necessity; rationalizing its expansion despite any consequences is inhumane and as bad as the argument that is aesthetic rather than moral that "guns are bad so it doesn't matter if they reduce violence overall").  It’s that on the libertarian side, problems tend to be self limiting; large scale benefits perpetually promised by socialism might not be possible, but neither are tyrannies that keep said promises poorly and then bring more problems.  So when I see situations as I describe below, I find them to be evidence that such beliefs are more dangerous than my own, instead of less.

A coworker of mine--I'll tell you more about him later; he's fun--was lamenting that unemployment was as low as it has been lately.  He has nothing against people working, mind you, and he recognizes that some unemployment is natural as it accounts for people who are willingly between jobs and are not suffering in any way. But his contention was that as unemployment drops below this natural level, competition for workers goes up and that translates into higher wages meant to entice job seekers. And the money for higher wages has to come from somewhere, namely, the price of whatever goods and services are sold by companies that are raising their wages. Thus we end up with inflation hand in hand with wage increases. Okay, that’s not the best situation, although on some level that’s just a tautological opportunity cost—even if the money came from nowhere, prices would go up because the supply of money was higher.

That’s why modern first world countries have the richest citizens in human history and the truly (even the marginally) destitute are not proportionately large in number.

But the kicker? He’s down with a “living” minimum wage.

That’s right. It’s not good for labor prices to rise from natural market forces because it will push inflation, but artificially raising it and letting inflation happen for the very same reason is A-OK. Whether this parallel is unimagined or there is an implicit assumption that enough wisdom and economic controls can be made implemented quickly enough to stave off a crisis, I have no faith that the outcome would be better than not interfering.

"Don't slutshame. Sex isn't meant to have kids. Children are an occasional side effect of sex."

I could say a lot here--I don't want to go off on a tangent about how to discuss things that are inherently shameful, and how shame is not a social construct--but I will restrict myself to this:

If conception is an accident, a rare coincidence, then why is failure to use contraception in 100% of sexual encounters (y'know, just in case it's that one occasion) described as "not being responsible?"

A bit heavy-handed and transparent, no?

So two years ago Trump is elected president.

Like the mirror image of Obama being awarded the Nobel prize before taking office for the great humanitarian things it was presumed he would accomplish, the usual suspects and their useful idiots started crying for Trump's impeachment before taking office for the great humanitarian crises it was presumed he would create.

This didn't go far by itself because being uncivil, being a jerk, being disliked, having differences of opinion, and even using rhetoric that is inflammatory but would have been unremarkable two hundred or a hundred or twenty years ago are not impeachable offenses.  But the Russian collusion thing quickly picked up some steam and for two years eclipsed it--they could always impeach him for that, since the "but I didn't get what I wanted this time!" wasn't working on its own here or against the Electoral College.

Fast forward through two years of investigators spinning their wheels, finding little more than a past her prime porn actress, and reminders of smoking guns found in the hands of at the wrong targets, and finally a few weeks ago they decide to acknowledge that there's no "there" there.

Immediately cue up Amendment 25 rhetoric.

Really?  President not fit to execute his office?  Did everybody just not notice before?

Everybody was sure hopeful to throw everything at the wall during early talks of impeachment to see if they could get enough to stick (as if it were a matter of quantity of dirt thrown and not actual high crimes and misdemeanors; one would have through they learned that lesson, but then came along Brett Kavanaugh and all his accusers who waited until the last minute to stage a wave of protests and then claim that that meant something above than the theatrics they so patently were).  I'm honestly surprised, looking back, that they didn't try some "he colluded because he was incompetent, not just because he was evil and too unpopular to win an honest vote" double play.

Someday some trick like this will work against some president.  And then the other side will turn that trick against them, and everybody will be shocked when another obamassiah is kept from taking office by a conspiracy that has learned that double edged knives cut in both directions.  And then we will have the world's largest banana republic.

And maybe that's what they want.

I don't know what to call it.  It's not envy because they don't want to destroy something good someone else has because they resent not having it; they want to destroy it on behalf of people who don't, except for the little bit they think will still exist for them to keep for themselves.

If the government can just print more money whenever it wants some, has a budget shortfall, recognizes a contraction in the money supply...

…why are there still taxes?


I mean, not to lessen the pithiness of that question, but where do people think money goes when it’s taxed or spent?

You know what really gets me?

It's that all the protesting, all the rhetoric, all the drama when something is built up into a crisis....they all act like we're finally on the cusp of turning human society around, how with the next judicial appointment or the next presidential election or the next symbolic bill going to the floor for general voting, everything is going to turn around, and if life doesn't just suddenly start coming up daisies, at least all our social ills will just start dissolving like a sugar cube in hot tea: rape will drop off and alpha males will suddenly start crying tears of joy, black people will stop getting murdered and will start having cushy jobs drop into their laps as white people move into the back woods and inbreed themselves to extinction, people will come out as gay or trans by the millions, and other things less obviously in the fantasy genre.

One lady quoted by an NPR reporter after the Kavenaugh confirmation: "Are we going to be out here for another 30 years? I don't have 30 years left." Lady, what were you protesting that you thought 30 years of standing in streets with signs was going to change? The Civil Rights Era was over more than 30 years ago, and sorry to say but the last few years of what amounts to "This is the same thing so let us have it!" just doesn't close the argument.  Or was there something else? Abortion? Legal more than 40 years; it's the pro-lifers who are protesting that. Something else? Something more fundamental to the human species, like the propensity to be inconsiderate, invasive, rude, predatory? Sister, no amount of legislation is going to fix nature. Schools and parents have been trying to civilize children for a lot longer than 30 years, and considering we have to start over with every generation, I am surprised you ever thought you'd live to see the day when we finally succeeded once and for all.

Megan Kelly, NBC employee...

...was somehow unwoke enough to suggest that blackface or anything short of racist fawning wasn’t the worst thing in the world.

She apologized on her show, and it wasn’t good enough.

Trump is somehow more responsible than the media who go around constantly calling half the country racist and sexist and homophobic and Islamophobic, but somehow not being responsible for the outrage that sometimes spills out into physical violence that is positively condoned in many corners of the public sphere (corners, sphere...YKWIM).

 Maybe NBC needs to reconsider how it vets its long time employees. Good luck.

Oh look, they're doing it again.

Still talking about Kavanaugh as if every accusation thrown at him is a conviction of guilt and any response on his part is an admission of same.  

I don't expect everyone against him to recant, even now, but yet again it's come down to a few people being more interested in changing what people think than they are in pursuing justice.

Which is really what's going on.  Improving the thought patterns of moral troglodytes sounds great, but in the end it's just thought policing.  

"Conservatives don't mind if Republicans lie about their sexual escapades.  It doesn't matter; they can always get away with it."  Yeah, because a couple high profile guys at Fox News lost their jobs, while Harvey Weinstein got arrested for accusations of sexual assault than any other three people I can think of, and Bill Clinton is still at large.  This isn't a partisan thing.  That's why when you hear about "rape culture" and "patriarchy" there's a lot of Marxist language but they tend to construct accusations that are barely short of universal.

Not to narrow this down to rape.  It's a narrative they're trying to maintain, using repetition and drama to crowd out uncontested facts.

When Al Gore lost to Dubya, he only demanded recounts in districts he expected better results from, and the results were more in Bush's favor every time, but now we're starting to hear that it was the other way around and Trump in 2016 just did what Bush pioneered, despite the reputation of only the other party getting extra votes from people and from dead people.  When Dubya played fast and loose with wiretaps (not to say that was okay), all you heard was "King George was shredding the Constitution."  When Obama was president, all you heard was "the Constitution is obsolete" and "there were no scandals."  Now that Trump is president, all you hear is "He's a tyrant" even though the closest thing they have to evidence is things completely within his power to do that they happen to find disagreeable; and even though they've been lambasting him since before he was elected, somehow it was his power as president he abused to cause the polarization that results in all the shootings that have been in the news this year, and not the media that have been stridently calling half the country bad names like it was going out of style.

Pro tip:  When you go to see a stage magician, don't look at his cards or his wand or what have you.  Watch his hands.

Do I have to explain this?

Women go on strike for a day and a country panics...

...men go on strike for...okay, probably for the most part men will founder on trying to cook and do laundry and manage kids a la "Mr. Mom" for a day more than anyone will suffer, with some possible exceptions, if men go on strike for a day.

But what if it's a week?

People who work outside the home and have no homemaking skills may panic immediately if they don't have someone to have their food and clothes ready--we clothe ourselves daily and eat every few hours, after all.  But these are skills than can be learned to subsistence levels quickly.

What about the stuff guys do that keeps them from being smarter about reading recipes or care tags on the back collars of shirts?

Over three quarters of professionals in transportation (something similar happened in Australia recently, so little need to speculate) and utilities, and five sixths of mineral extraction (including oil and gas, so that's almost all our electricity) are male.  That won't have much of an immediate effect in lower population density parts of the US, but in NYC where public transit is the norm, most people aren't going anywhere except on foot.  How long can you live on "I'll stay home today" when your electricity and water are in the same state as taxis, buses, and subways?

Sure, some of these jobs require certifications or formal training, so it might violate a business's insurance policy or accreditation or actually be illegal if women just stepped up to fill in the gaps..but considering almost 90% of the US police force is male, maybe there wouldn't be enough law enforcement around to stop women with pluck but no experience from flying 747s or doing thoracic surgery or taking to the streets as unregulated militia on top of juggling cooking, laundry, kids, and a day job.

But losing nine tenths of your law enforcement strength brings other problems, so good luck with that.

Stolen from a comment on YouTube:

"So I take it that the next time a black man who is wearing a uniform or flashing a badge follows me not just around the store, but OUT of the store and down the block, I should tell him 'You can't do this, because you have no institutional power over me.'"

This in response to the notion that racism is "racial prejudice" plus institutional power, therefore minorities can't be racist; that is, because a minority bigot doesn't have the collective social power to oppress anyone else, there's really nothing wrong with their attitude or the shitty way they might treat people on a personal level.

Except Kanye.  He crossed a line by agreeing with a different subset of white people, so the narrative would insist you believe, and now he enjoys not just the perquisites but all the collective guilt of white civilization.  So the narrative would insist you believe.

Of course, it also neatly obscures a double standard: whites are personally guilty of racism because of demographics and collective, historical racist stuff whether or not they personally wield or enjoy any advantage of a biased system, just like how minorities are not guilty of racism because they don't have the advantages of a large, widespread system invisibly codified to help only them, no matter how hostile they are in person to people of a different demographic or how coordinated they and others in the same demographic are in their efforts to make their encounters with a majority out-group difficult or dangerous.

And this is deliberate.

The point I'm going to make is worth its own post but I riff on it a lot these days.

Trump wants to regulate immigration, to stop people from illegally sneaking into the country and working for less than minimum wage and not paying taxes, and voting just because they live here most of the year, just like we've been talking about for decades.  These are all legitimate concerns: voting is a right and duty of citizens but not of foreign nationals who are only here for their jobs and not interested in becoming US citizens (and obviously this doesn't include the ones who do, but I shouldn't have to point that out), and other countries recognize that when Americans go abroad for work; people who work and get paid under the table make it harder for people on the IRS's radar like US citizens to get jobs, and that really sets a double standard for minimum wage arguments, and "lettuce will become expensive" is really not a compelling counterargument.  But what does everyone say about Trump?  That he just hates immigrants, and it's just because he's racist, and he's wrong because it's ironic since he's of European extraction.

This is not an argument.  This is an obfuscation.

It's also why they say Trump is "literally Hitler" even though Hitler died before he was born and Bush was Hitler before him just because he was moderately conservative by the standards of the day.  It's why they try so hard to show how there's no difference between the National Socialist German Workers' Party and moderns who either consistently vote conservative or actually are racists who just don't happen to be patronizing about it (depends on whom you ask), to the point where if Hitler were alive they'd be telling you he's secretly on the lecture circuit in Mississippi and Indiana--and the only reason alleged modern Nazis of today (not official neo-Nazis, but the ones who just get called Nazi online) get away with their attempts to distance themselves from the German political movement of the mid-20th century is Nuremberg made sure there wasn't anybody left to say today "Yeah, he's one of us."  It's why they have someone volunteer to show up at an NRA function wearing a rifle with a plastic stock and black backpack with the Stars and Bars draped over it to give the impression that the KKK was a branch of the NRA, rather than the NRA being formed partly in opposition to the KKK--you can tell it's someone doing a false flag operation because in his attempt to make a recognizable caricature of conservatives, he's the only one openly armed and is obviously trying too hard to fit in.

When they say "literally Nazis," they aren't just exaggerating.  They want you to believe that's actually true, and maybe they believe it themselves.

Even this post is going to end up used as an example of being insufficiently opposed to Nazi practices (i.e. that not being zealously opposed enough makes me one of them, like in the dying throes of every totalitarian regime of the 20th century would have it--which should tell you something about the nature and danger of their political motivations), by focusing on the argument that Trump and his voters are not all wrong, and skipping over the part where I argue that they're not literally Nazis.  They'll show a picture of Hitler saluting next to a picture of some Republican waving to a crowd and think they've made an airtight argument, and then either use that as evidence for "literally a Nazi" or use "I've proven you're literally a Nazi by ignoring all facts and logic to the contrary" as evidence that the aforementioned juxtaposition is, in whatever sense they put stock in such a thing, the truth.

The most annoying—and I mean merely annoying, but it’s high on the list—about the early 21st century is that everything is labeled as terror.
Unless it’s racism or sexism or some such, but I think terror sums it up best. 
Bully defends himself by saying it’s a joke, and you say “if the mark didn’t agree to it, it’s not a joke, it’s terror?”  No it’s not. What planet do you live on where people have to get informed consent before engaging in any interaction? How could they if attempting to request consent is unsolicited contact in the first place? It’s also not funny if you explain the joke first. Human beings know this.
But this is a bully so we don’t have to give him the benefit of the doubt. Fine; He’s not on trial. But it’s bullying; it might be abuse, it might be harassment, but it’s not terror. He’s not trying to intimidate you to get something else he wants. Or maybe he is, but he’s also treating you like shit because that in itself is what he does to enjoy himself. He’s not trying to oppress you, he just wants your lunch money. Your human dignity is so far down his list of concerns it never occurs to him that you might have any to violate
A guy shoots up a crowd?  It might be terorism, but “what else do you’d call it?” Is a dumb question. Maybe he just wants 26 people dead. Maybe he wants those 26 people dead. Maybe he’s mentally ill and his shooting up a crowd has nothing to do in his mind with 26 people dying.  Whatever his intentions, it's a mass shooting.  Calling everything an act of terrorism, domestic or otherwise, doesn't open people's eyes.  It just makes it easier for real terrorists to hide in plain sight because they don't stand out in a crowd of random people who all are stuck with that label.
Of course, that could be the point.  Try to make everything sound like the problem that everyone wants to solve and then get broad laws passed to address a now-nebulous and omnibus crisis, and profit over the disintegration of society.

If a double standard for you is a double standard for me....

So I'm watching TV and start seeing commercials for some new injustice called the pink tax.

Sure.  Make it sound like it's some institutionalized/systemic/patriarchal policy that the ever-male-dominated Congress has signed into law under Trump or some such rot.

As it goes, the notion is that women spend $1351 a year, typically, more than men do on personal stuff like bath products and underwear.

They complain that it's not fair, insulting.  Sounds unjust, doesn't it?

Funny.  A few months ago, I was hearing all about how the fragile male ego forced me to buy deodorant that didn't have pink teddy bears on them.  Now I'm hearing that, while we're all buying the exact same thing, the stuff with pink teddy bears is more expensive.

Maybe we're just being frugal.

I've seen women's bathrooms and you've seen men's bathrooms, so we both know "we buy the same stuff" is a lie.  I see cream rinse in some showers, none used solely by men, and I have no idea what it's for because I choose not to buy it and don't need to.

Are the pink teddy bears exactly the same as the blue ones?  Then buy the blue ones.  You can choose to.  No one is putting a gun to your head, or threatening jail time as if this were a real tax.

I mean, how do you think you're going to "repeal" it when it's not actually a tax on just the stuff you want?  It's just you buying more, and more expensive, stuff. How do you think you can fix that without destroying everything else? You’re talking changing prices by force of law, interfering with buying patterns, controlling what bathroom products are made and sold.

That’s going to cost society more than $1351 a head.  And I don't mean just in the pocketbook.