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With mermaid hair
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Taking a knee, and the decline of American Communication
Something I wrote on another email exchange
Communication enhancing technology seems to have the effect of reducing our natural ability to communicate with each other – I guess they’re substitutes, not compliments.andI do think Americans are largely losing the ability to have effective conversations with people even slightly different than them, as well as losing faith in their deeply held ideas.Quoting my own emails is the height of pretension, but I do find two of these ideas interesting, namely- Communication technology is a substitute for communication ability
- We are losing faith in out ideas – even though we cling to them more tightly.
It seems that we have no hope of convincing anyone else of our beliefs, either due a lack of faith in our abilities, or a lack of faith in the veracity of our beliefs.
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More thoughts on the Parkside Elementary redistricting
For those of you who haven’t talked to me in person the past week there was a large controversy over redistricting my daughter’s elementary school. The lines were drawn over neighborhood lines, which set forth all sorts of divisive talk and feelings, which should be expected with the root action being divisive in nature.
- It was announced late on a Saturday night
- The entire neighborhood was having outraged conversations on Sunday
- I had the website going Monday
- My neighbor (who has a printing company) had the yard signs ready on Tuesday
- Wednesday they announce that they were withdrawing the issue from consideration (after much angry talk by the potentially excluded people, both in person and on social media)
- Thursday we have a meeting where they explain how everything was overcrowded and how people could voluntarily transfer if they so desired.
Much as I knock social media – it really was a help to a just outcome in this case. Just to give Mark Zuckerberg his due…
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Quote of the day – Jim Webb Edition
From this episode of The Atlanta Podcast
Jail is for people you’re scared of, not people you’re mad at
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I finally see Steve Earle
After about 20 years of missing him for one reason or another. I saw him last night at the City Winery – which is a very, very impressive venue
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Trumps’s first year – told with a sharp pen
That 2017 has been a year of lost opportunities is an important failure for Republicans, who are likely to accomplish even less in 2018, when the prospect of congressional elections held in the shadow of Trump’s unpopularity will brighten the already visible yellow streak running down the back of Republican Washington. Perhaps things will go differently. But it may very well be the case that 2017 represents all that Republicans will really get out of the Trump phenomenon: a little bit of reform, a lot of noise, and a reputation that may never recover and may not deserve to.
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An excellent essay by Jonathan Haidt
Worth reading in it’s entirety – quotes
Intersectionality is like NATO for social-justice activists.
and
Today’s identity politics has another interesting feature: It teaches students to think in a way antithetical to what a liberal-arts education should do. When I was at Yale in the 1980s, I was given so many tools for understanding the world. By the time I graduated, I could think about things as a Utilitarian or a Kantian, as a Freudian or a behaviorist, as a computer scientist or a humanist. I was given many lenses to apply to any one situation. But nowadays, students who major in departments that prioritize social justice over the disinterested pursuit of truth are given just one lens — power — and told to apply it to all situations. Everything is about power. Every situation is to be analyzed in terms of the bad people acting to preserve their power and privilege over the good people. This is not an education. This is induction into a cult, a fundamentalist religion, a paranoid worldview that separates people from each other and sends them down the road to alienation, anxiety, and intellectual impotence.
I am of the opinion that anything that happens on a college campus is overly hyped – but he does make some good points about the Fox News effect (rewarding bombastic statements on the right) and the notion of identity politics as viewing everything through the lens of power.
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At the Fox
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Tis the season
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Maybe we’re so partisan because America is worse, or at least more difficult
Five not thought through theories on why people are flocking to Trump, Clinton, Moore, etc, and movements based on hashtags
- It is a natural reaction to either tribal identities getting more fun in the age of the internet/social media (we’re all performance artists now). The tribal identity is improving relative to the American identity
- The American identity is getting worse in the age of the internet, i.e. we’re closer to the bad parts, and we’re farther away from the good parts. The “cost” of being American first (in Hoffer’s use of the term, and sort of my grandfather’s) has increased
- The notion of an “American” identity has hidden requirements, namely dispersed income growth (among other economic factors) that are no longer as strong
- The notion of an “American” identity was a historical quirk caused by the world wars that is slowly washing away, leaving us with our regional differences
- Identity politics is easy, and we’re just way lazier and sedentary than before. Ideology requires work.
Just some thoughts after reading this essay by Kevin Williamson, specifically
The Republican party took the lead in seeing off both American slavery and worldwide Communism under the leadership of men including Abraham Lincoln, Dwight Eisenhower, and Ronald Reagan. The most today’s Republican party can say for itself is: “You can’t prove our guy was a serial molester of adolescent girls! That’s up to the people of Alabama to decide.”