As a California resident (Bay Area) I get a close-up view of progressive/liberal rules and regulations. I find it ironical that the liberal ideology, more than any other, relies heavily on rules and regulations to enforce its value system, come hell or high water. Another irony: The San Francisco Bay Area, a liberal bastion if ever there was in the nation, has a monstrous homelessness problem, among the worst public schools, among the highest levels of inequality, sub-standard public housing, and on and on. The reason is that "progressives" are all about virtue-signaling and making more and more rules, but are far less interested in the results of those very rules and regulations.
"[T]he liberal ideology, more than any other, relies heavily on rules and regulations to enforce its value system, come hell or high water."
That's because they don't believe in democracy. Oh, they give it lip service, all right, but either have no clue what they are talking about, or are simply sophistic saboteurs.
If they believed in democracy, no rule/law would be instituted without a healthy (or a least with credible pains to justify modest) majority support. People would understand how this benefits "the greater good", and thus, believe in the system. Those who didn't take such pains would be driven from office.
I know, we're now so far removed from this that this seems pathetically naive. But I once lived in such a society, meaning, it was not all that long ago...
As did I. The conflagration that is coming after The Supremes release Notroevwade is going to make everything that went before, child's play.
Saw an interview today where an organizer claimed votes aren't fair, the country/nation is illegitimate. Ergo, anybody who is curious about when life begins is a threat. How long are normal people going to put up with this BS.
Full disclosure --- I don't know when "life" begins. I am willing to contemplate. Sonogram gonna sonogram.
"The conflagration that is coming after The Supremes release Notroevwade is going to make everything that went before, child's play."
Everybody says this but I have my doubts. Besides, assuming this gives the left's belligerence and public preening/hissy fits credibility as a force for intimidation. Every political setback for the left is now ominously shrouded by threats of George Floyd-like hysteria and the attendant rioting.
You're quite right. In fact, one element of the metamorphosis of liberalism in recent years, which spiked during Trump's presidency, is that they believe the end justifies the means -- that's the only rational explanation for why liberals are advocating censorship by tech multinationals, whether on Twitter, FB, YouTube and so on. They (weirdly enough, along with the ACLU!) want speech censored by these private companies even though it is not against the law (or else government itself can censor it).
The 60s hippies were just as obstinate, IMO. But back then, we actually *did* have "adults in the room", to moderate the process into something evolutionary, not revolutionary.
But that's also when the sociopaths went to work, to ensure nothing like the 60s could happen again. So today's mad wokesters are clueless that they are the foot soldiers of the totalitarian elite, not the glorious rebels they think they are.
I think it all started with the self-indulgent 60’s generation, who gave us “free” sex that has degraded women, a drug culture that devours our young to this day, and helicopter parenting that resulted in today’s naïve snowflakes that you call “mad wokesters”. It’s my generation, but I think history will judge the 60’s generation to be the scourge of current civilization.
The only reason that the 1950s isn't thought of as a "drug culture" is that our elders were so insensitive to their own bodies in that era that they didn't even recognize that alcohol and tobacco are heavy drugs, and addictive ones at that. They were regularly copping buzzes from mixing the alcohol with amphetamines, barbiturates, and benzos, but they didn't categorize it as "being high", because being high is for dope fiends. The two-martini lunch was definitely a thing for the corporate set in the 1950s and 1960s- there's no way to drink even one martini without being thrown for a loop, unless one has a tolerance aka being a heavy drinker aka "being able to hold ones liquor."
I'm not judging. This is the way novel cultural phenomena operate.They hit- sometimes like a tidal wave. And then there's a reaction- the harder the wave hits, the greater the reaction. And then everything settles into a condition of homeostasis, more or less. Unless the culture goes tilt in wholesale denial, trying to put the toothpaste back into the tube with a carceral inquisition policy like the War on Drugs. The War on Drugs was, incredibly enough, originally targeted at marijuana and psychedelic drugs. What it did was entrench a criminal marketplace with retail outlets from Fort Kent to San Diego. Then the Congress tightened up restrictions on pill amphetamines and barbiturates, which led to a bonanza in the cocaine and Quaalude markets. Then the Feds banned Quaaludes. As a result, benzodiazepines like Valium, formerly shunned as mundane 1950s housewife drugs, grew in popularity. Then Xanax- super-valium- showed up (FDA approved 1981). Then in 1990s the rise of Oxycontin began. Oxy caught on as the result of an Establishment pharma corporation's unethical hard-sell marketing campaign, further enabled by a Federal drug policy that left almost all of the accountability for scrip and quantity tracking of "DEA Schedule II controlled substances" in the hands of individual states. The laxity of some of the most conservative states in the Union permitted the diversion of wholesale quantities of those opioids. You can't blame that on the hippies.
We will get nowhere without honesty on these questions.
Those are unintended negative consequences that, IMO, are secondary to the positive ones. They certainly matter and must be dealt with -- on that at least I am in full agreement. But they are not at all universal effects.
In any case, I disagree that the 1960s were a net negative. They opened up society -- free speech (yes, it was previously widely suppressed), ending Jim Crow, questioning wars, rooting out corruption, in general, expanding personal freedoms. Where these things backtracked, it is not the fault of the 60s movements, it is our own failures to preserve those benefits listed.
It's because acting out the ideology is all that matters. Admitting the results aren't as desired would be to admit the religion is false.
As a California resident (Orange County) who's employed in the development-construction business I get a close-up view of what the progressive/liberal rules and regulations do to slow down progress and make it more expensive. That's one of the great ironies: "Progressive" rules make progress nearly impossible. Add to it the taxes and higher costs and it's just about too punishing to stay.
I'm not exactly sure how to describe my political orientation anymore. Like, I generally believe in something akin to Denmark -- a light regulatory touch that has relatively low corporate taxes but funds a general welfare state with broad-based taxes and tries to somewhat restrict the emergence of extreme inequality because that leads toward political instability. (Basically I don't want anyone to be allowed to fall into deep, immiserating poverty, because groups of people like that turn into mobs of pitchfork wielders. It's a matter of enlightened self-interest, or an insurance policy. I'd much rather just have a society that feels fairer, where every citizen feels like they have a stake and a fair shot at upward mobility -- and hence we don't tend toward riots and revolutions -- even if that lowers the trajectory of my personal wealth over time a bit.) In the past this probably would've been "progressive", but at this point the "progressive movement" has gotten seriously hung up on questions around "historical oppression" that don't actually address this. Antonio García Martínez has made a convincing argument that the movement has become a kind of re-skin of the Christian ethos, with the idolized victim, and the self-flagellating penitents engaging in performative allyship. And very much like medieval Christianity, you can buy indulgences by donating to the right causes, and the question of whether what you're doing _actually_ helps the poor and downtrodden is very much secondary to whether you're mouthing the right platitudes. Hence seeing "in this house we believe!" signs on the front lawns of a rich neighborhood's worst NIMBYs who would be appalled at the idea of building affordable apartments.
My own politics says that the best way to help the "historically oppressed" is just to _do stuff that helps poor people_. In general. Doesn't matter if their parents were rich and they're poor, or if they're poor white males, or whatever. Just help people who are actually suffering. You'll tend to disproportionately help the "historically oppressed" because that has a strong correlation with being poor. And if you don't give handouts to the children of Black billionaires (and there are a few!) then that's really not a problem. Maybe it misses the mark of some kind of absolute fairness test, if you think a debt is owed because some billionaire's great great grandparents were enslaved. But it's closer to fairness than the policy we get if people who want a fairer society insist on advocating for unpopular policies, and lose all the elections.
General welfare state doesn’t work. General welfare only works within a family or clan. If you have a nation that is essential populated by one clan then it seems to work. But in a modern nation state comprised of many clans it will never work.
I’m for a minimum of government coercion. It can’t end well.
On NIMBYism, it’s non-partisan. The only time Republicans want more regulation is to protect their own property. The only reason Democrats oppose more regulation is to protect their own property.
As I recall the Scandinavian countries use a Value Added Tax, which gets paid at intermediate steps in the value chain, not just by the end consumer, and so it actually functions partially as a corporate tax, on business to business sales. That's part of why they can have a lower corporate income/profit tax.
But it's definitely true that overall, the average citizen sees more of their income taxed into government services.
But, that's necessary. As a society, they've made a choice that they will engage in less personal consumption -- slightly smaller housing units, fewer meals out, fewer fancy tech toys -- but more consumption of quality public services, like affordable education all the way through university, healthcare, and so on. You can't just soak the rich to get this stuff, because it requires that people actually do the work in the public sector. Part of what's happening is that you're using the greater flow of tax money to _actually hire and train people_ to do things in the public sector, and that means less labor available to put in the personal services sector.
There's a fair amount of evidence that in the end this bargain leads to a more dynamic, creative society. e.g. Finland and Norway both produce more new businesses per capita per year than America does, and the businesses are started by a much broader cross-section of society than in the US. In the US, if you're like 35-40, and you have a kid, taking a flyer on a new idea that might not pay off is going to sound pretty scary. If you know that your family can't possibly end up struggling to get basics like shelter, food, and healthcare, it's a lot easier to take some risks.
A "regressive" sales tax is a tax that disproportionately punishes low income citizens. By definition a "very high regressive sales tax" can't economically affect "everyone" equally.
My next store neighbour is a young man who is the butcher and assistant manager of the local supermarket. Even in Canada we have deranged Trumpists.
The young man was telling me people don't want to work so I asked.
You own your own home, you take home a good salary how many years did you study to be a meat cutter.
He grew up on a local farm and his father is younger than I am and is a successful beef farmer. He has been a butcher for most of his 35 years and started 25 years ago.
I asked whether he thought that people without two years of college studying public health and safety in addition to meat cutting should be allowed in the back room.
He is a wonderful young man but I am still waiting for an answer. Our baggers are in their 50s.
We have lots and lots of regulations but WE are the Government and we are the regulators. We call that liberal democracy not corporate feudalism which is socialism for the rich and law of the jungle for the rest of us.
In Canada corporations have no rights. They have the same rights as toilet tissue. They feel no pain, and enjoy no pleasure. Our Supreme Court maybe unknown to most of us but they know corporations are pieces of paper not sentient life forms. Our chickens enjoy more rights than the farming co-operatives that own them and our farmers are thriving and they are a powerful lobby in Ottawa and Quebec City.
Whose bottom line benefits most from all the regulations? Who governs America? It ain't you the people. Gas is over 8 Canadian dollars a litre and our Premier declared no money for petroleum extraction and if we allow a pipeline to the Atlantic the cost of petroleum would be offset by the bribe we could get for allowing a pipeline.
We are GREEN and our economy is through the roof and we need new immigrants, and refugees to fill our schools and industries.
You know what Covid cost us?
One million new Quebecers the very thing that you say makes you poor makes us rich.
Don't worry about California our farmers are buying up all the agricultural land and they have understood sustainability for the last 400 years.
Our food is more and more local and global and the shelves are full and the food is as good as anywhere on this planet including NAPA Valley.
Our local inn is beyond even California prices and has a selection of wine and cheese as good as is to be found in this galaxy and our beef farmers are known world wide for their heritage breeds. You know California prices. Do you know the cost of a prize bull? You think Bezos is rich?
I hear the moans over the cost of living funny thing our prices are up and the government puts more money in our pockets and we are richer than ever. Life really is a ponzi scheme.
Have you looked at the World's Freedom Indices . Canada could do better but we are not a Flawed Democracy. I taught democracy was like virginity you were or you weren't.
Putin called our Deputy Prime Minister a Nazi. That is what Matt Taibbi is parroting. This can't be right I trust Matt. John Ralston Saul said cynicism is democracy's greatest threat.
right! that's my point. Its important or them to signal the intentions because the outcomes are catastrophic. The virtue signaling confers blamelessness. (is that a word?)
Interesting discussion. Two people saying the same thing arguing with each other.
Liberal means freedom to change beliefs and behaviours.
In French , Latin, Italian, Greek , Hebrew and in Quebecois liberal is a synonym for freedom and conservative means we are who we are.
Don't Americans study Darwin? What happens to species that can't adapt? Talk to our nations 13 year old's. They understand Darwin their hero is a truth teller named Greta Thunberg.
When writing legislation, liberals begin with the premise that 95% of people are evil and must be controlled by diktat, there is no such thing as an independent thought with altruistic intent...
Yes, but liberals hate supposed "stupidity", not so much "evil". Conservatives, OTOH, seem to be the prime haters of "evil". Well, OK, wokesters also believe they are combating "evil" -- it *is* a religion, after all.
Nobody seems to believe any more, the way they used to, that Left and Right are simply groups of people with different opinions on how the country should be governed. Now, it's eternal holy war.
They were turned into that. There is a foundation to L/R, however, that is legitimate -- see my profile blurb.
In any case, I don't see your point countering what I just said. The holy war against [ Stupid | Evil ] is certainly part of "shock troop" manipulation.
For those wondering where the (dominant) conservative view on abortion fits into a "freedom" framework, the short answer is that it doesn't. That's because a non-compromising stand that, say, "fertilized egg = legal person" is a tenet of a religion. Religion brooks no opposition, completely at odds with a government "by the people". Completely ditto for Wokeism. You can believe in (and faithfully exercise) democracy, OR you can believe in (and faithfully practice) a religion -- but you can't do both. No matter how hard the gun-toters thump their bibles. And that's why Libertarianism is the purer form for Rightism.
So how did these conflicting POVs end up on the same side? While the shock troops were being constructed by TPTB, they recognized that there were far more gun-toting bible-thumpers than (actual) libertarians, and duly cultivated the more useful group. After all, up until 2020, it was recognized that you needed to count votes.
What kind of word is ironical? Is it like kind of ironic or ironic style? Progressive is by definition liberal even if one can't be progressive and conservative it is an oxymoron. We still have a Progressive Conservative Party. It is not easy being a Progressive Conservative ask: Alberta and Ontario where they are having elections and many conservatives are anti progressive not just Canadians who try to get along.
"ironical that the liberal ideology, more than any other, relies heavily on rules and regulations to enforce its value system, come hell or high water."
Think about it. It isn't really ironical, it is inevitable because humans are social animals and have evolved natures that allow us to live within a group. This works very well with conservatism because what was will be and rights are simply privileges afforded you by birth and placement in the group: low status, few privileges, high status, many privileges. Read what Burke has to say about this:
Even in conservative societies, most of human history, certain privileges were codified as "rights", such as the right of the serf to protection from their lord. Now, if you consider the change from the conservative world pre-Enlightenment to the liberal world posited by the Enlightenment, you should see why liberalism requires controls on power, ranging from that of your stronger, more aggressive neighbor to government itself and in democracy, to the tyranny of the majority; People tend to oppose that which they don't agree with and so protections are required to protect individuals from the majority and from those that hold more power, whether physical, financial, or political power.
Yeah I don't see how you can get away from "rules" in some very broad sense. "Thou shalt not kill," is a rule. (Not exactly followed by most societies that have supposedly held it as an important one -- frequently they even considered it a rule that you _should_ kill infidels and heretics.)
The question is what _kind_ of rules will help a diverse group of people co-exist, go about their lives, and resolve disagreements without violence.
I'm definitely not a "conservative", but I do appreciate Burke and Chesterton. The "Chesterton's Fence" principle is one I always am pushing on my more liberal / progressive / radical friends. If you can't explain the history of the thing you want to change, and how either the purpose it served is no longer necessary or you're going to serve that purpose better, then go think about it some more and come back with a reform proposal when you've figured that out.
Interesting video from NYT no less, demonstrating orthodox liberal behavior at its finest. Still haven’t grasped the several centuries old proverb “actions speak louder than words”. They seem to have understood it to mean “blaming thine enemy is better than remedy”.
I am furious they don't teach you English or philosophy. You can't be liberal and orthodox they are antonyms. You cannot be orthodox and liberal anything.
We all use the expression the more things change the more they remain the same.
I use the French translation but it remains the same seemingly contradictory expression.
It is 2022 and science is just beginning to acknowledge that there may be no real beginning or no real end. This is what is and what was and will always be regardless of what we want to believe.
Star Trek was the Bible for a generation but science isn't about the stars it is about our dreams and we are just learning about our dreams and a cigar isn't just a cigar. It has chemistry, it has physics, it has biology, it has architecture and it has design. Human design.
Darwin was about a universe of natural selection as opposed to design.
We can see measure and analyze natural selection but faith may move mountains but the evidence is rather scant.
I live in a secular humanist liberal Quebec speaking democracy. It isn't the USA it is what I wish America would become but that is not what democracy is all about. I like this Quebec . It had a revolution there was a transfer of power from the church, business and finance to the citizens and unlike in America here the people assumed more and more power as they assumed more and more responsibility and now we must pay to educate everyone, give everyone healthcare and take responsibility for everyone's long and prosperous life.
It took my wife and myself to get me to 74 but you know I have a Department of Autistic Affairs making sure my doctor and healthcare providers know more about my needs than my wife and I are willing to admit.
It is not easy for a retard to scream you are all a bunch of idiots at the very people he needs most.
No need to be upset. Both English and philosophy were available to learn decades ago in my formative years and still are. You simply mistook my use of the word liberal for the meaning that does run counter to the word orthodoxy and not for what I intended, which was using it to identify a political ideology in it’s current iteration.
Today’s American liberals-in contrast to their beliefs only a few years ago-are comfortable with removing our freedoms as they see fit, and it is clearly a matter of politics. The examples are numerous. One only needs to look at how a former president was banned from Twitter and how social and mainstream media with the blessing of our current administration systematically banned and ruined the reputations of anyone who dared to question or refuse a vaccine and it’s accompanying restrictions. So much for our freedoms. As a secular humanist I’m sure you see the similarity to religious methodology. In the US one party believes in God, the other thinks it is God.
So in this case “liberal orthodoxy” is not oxymoronic.
The wealth of states like Cali and NY boggles the mind, and the homeless problem in both of the states' major metropolises is an evidentiary indictment on their values. I read that on any given day, there's an avg of 400 homeless children JUST in the city of New York.
For decades few York State has been shrinking. When John Kennedy was elected in 1960, NY had 45 electoral votes, while California had just 32, just like PA. Illinois had 27. Texas and Florida? 24 and 10.
Today? NY has gone from 45 to 28, loss of almost 40%. California? 54 and increase of almost 70%. PA went from 32 to 19, a loss,of more than 40%. Illinois went to 19, a loss of of 30%. Texas is now 40 - an increase of 67%. Florida is 30, an increase of 200%.
New York is the precursor of California. It only lost 1 vote in the last census, but craziness like what’s discussed in these articles will accelerate the loss.
Huge swatches of NY are now wastelands. Look at Buffalo. There was a time when the NYS legislature wanted to tax localities based upon wealth which translated to population. They’d create laws that applied to census districts that had more than 1 million people. Well, that only applied to the NYC and Buffalo regions. Guess what? Buffalo lost more than half its population since JFK was elected and that formula doesn’t work anymore…..
For years, at Statewide candidates campaigned upon reviving “upstate” (I.w., the part of NYS that’s not NYC). No luck. Even NYC population was stagnant. From 1960 to 2000 it hardly changed. Then the floodgates of the great Southern Migration drawn by loose welfare programs and illegal immigration exploded NYC population by a grand total of 11% over 1960 totals. But hidden in that is the demographic change - NYC went from 85% white to 34% white. And far more people became dependent, causing the city to go bankrupt. To this day, city services are far behind where they were before the major shirt.
But look at an important factor. If NYC had increased at just the average national rate, it’s population would now be north of 14 million as compared 8 million.
Why? People don’t want to live here. The welfare state has swallowed it. And the crazy taxes created to pay for it are nuts. Get this one. There’s a special tax for bodegas that want to sell fruit outside their shops on their own sidewalk. Newspapers too. As the city widens the streets, they cut back on sidewalks. But if your basement went under the pre widened sidewalk, they now have a “vault” tax that you pay to ensure the stability of the street they built over your basement.
Sales tax? A can of pineapple juice? None. A can of Hawaiian Punch? Almost 9%. If you can eat it? Mostly zero. If you need groceries to clean to make sure you get rid of Covid cooties like bleach, paper towels, handwipes and detergent? 9%. Wanna a bagel? No tax if it’s just a bagel. Ask the guy to put some butter on it? 9% tax. Now get this….if you buy the bagel and the butter separately? No tax.
Here’s a favorite of mine….and it applies nationally, but the welfare states that require more revenue raise tons more from this gimmick. Gasoline is subject to sales tax. There’s already Federal and State excise taxes on gasoline. There’s a 9 cent excise tax on gasoline in NYC.
But that’s not the fun part…..there’s a near 9 PERCENT sales tax on gasoline. Gas goes up by $2 a gallon? NY makes an extra 18 cents a gallon. NY consumers buy more than 2 billion gallons of gas a year - thats almost $200 million in extra sales tax alone on just gasoline inflation.
The freebies handed out by NYC and State have destroyed its business community. Sure, part of that is due to globalism and summer states thst are more business friendly.
But it doesn’t and shouldn’t take a genius to figure out that when you attract millions of dependents it will increase your costs and decrease the quality of life.
When I was a kid growing up in projects built for returning veterans in the 60s, it was safe and crime free to the point that people left their doors and windows open so we had “project air conditioning” during the summer. Now? They had to change the name of the project because of all the crime, drugs and murders. By 1973, I experienced an early morning find one Saturday AM when I went into the project playground - two dead junkies laid out on the benches.
When we got to the projects my mom said “don’t get comfortable”. Now? We left in 1973. But guess what? NYC passed a law that says that anyone living with a leaseholder is e titled to a lease renewal when the first lessor dies. So almost 50 years later? The same family lives in my old apartment.
Why do people move away? Because of rotten policies that create miserable living environment at high prices.
Look at the electoral map from. 1960-2020. And look at what California has become.They had the NY experience to look at and ignored it. Even though so many of them came from NY..
"...Even NYC population was stagnant. From 1960 to 2000 it hardly changed. Then the floodgates of the great Southern Migration drawn by loose welfare programs and illegal immigration exploded NYC population by a grand total of 11% over 1960 totals..."
The population of New York City is rarely, if ever, "stagnant." NYC is an anomaly among American cities. There is room for very little "growth" as demographers define it. It's been full, comparatively, numbers wise, for the last 60-70 years. Ain't no more room. Build-outs, reclaimed industrial space, gentrification, larger apartment building replacing smaller ones---generally this is how NYC is able to grow, however incrementally, its total population numbers.
NYC is dynamic. There is a constant churn of residents---there always has been---it's one of the defining characteristics of the place. Young adults from the rest of America flock to the city to experience its vibrancy and cosmopolitanism, and many of them move on after a few years. NYC has always been the chief port of entry for immigrants coming to the U.S., many of whom eventually fan-out to other regions and locales in the U.S. to make their homes.
Your cherry-picked statistics are misleading and obscure the unique demographic dynamics that define NYC. Everybody's heard about the bad old NYC of the 1970s. From 1970-1980 the NYC population decreased by 10.6%---a whopping 800,000 people left the city. Conversely, in the 30 years from 1990-2000, NYC's population grew by 23%---an additional 1.5 million residents---for a current population of 8.8 million.
Why do people move away you ask? These days the exodus in NYC is led mostly by those who simply can't afford it anymore, and can at least afford to move elsewhere---those who remain are the wealthy and those who can't afford, for the time being, to pick up and move elsewhere even if they wanted to. In this one respect NYC has something very much in common with the rest of America---a rapidly dwindling middle class, once the backbone of both NYC and the U.S.---and demographics that suggest a city comprised of haves and have-nots.
Why do you believe it was a southern migration when the migration has gone on for 70,000 or more years. Cities grow and collapse. Cartage, Athens, Vilnius was the Capital of the Enlightened until the Russian conquest. The greatest city in the world is one in which you can live you "best" life as you see fit.
New York is still the best city in the USA because your chances of finding an urban community is still higher in New York than let us say Dallas where if you don't fit in you are a pile of dog shit on the front lawn. In Dallas suburbs your dog shitting on their front lawn is a crime worthy of capital punishment.
I lived on Chicago's Southside, if I needed some discourse with stupid people I went to Hyde Park. Talk about walking encylopediae I often get a spelling mistake for encyclopedias of half truths and misinformation. Maybe there is only one standard encyclopedia and Scalia took off with it.
People are leaving NY for the same reason they left in the 70s and 80s. The place is becoming unlivable again because of lawlessness. And you should not lose sight of the change in demographics. It’s not that New Yorkers don’t want to live with different kind of people. They don’t want to live with criminals and classes of people who support and shelter them, especially when the police have been neutered.
There is plenty of places within NYC to expand outside of Manhattan. Lots of places in Queens and Brooklyn. Staten Island doubled its population somehow during the period of peace, quiet and safety.
The wealthy who stay? Again, don’t confuse the publicity about billionaires row and Central Park. Manhattan ‘s population isn’t what drives NYC population shifts. It’s the outer boroughs which are far less policed and far more dangerous.
New York City’s middle class is still there, but to the extent it’s been squeezed, it’s been squeezed by the crime ridden housing projects that breed the criminals that prey on them.
New York City is actually a microcosm not just for California, but for the rest of the country,
You can’t intentionally import poverty and stay healthy and vibrant. If they imploded the projects they built post world war 2 and replaced it with decent housing you’d see 10 plus million people in a decade, assuming a return to normal policing.
NYC was 90% white between 1950 and 1960. It’s 34% today. There are more people on public assistance in NYC than the population of most US cities.
Yes, there has always been poverty in NYC. But now? It’s part of the city’s master plan. Why do you think so many Fortune 500 companies moved away? They can’t find educated workers for their offices who want to work. They don’t want to be around the crime and the crud anymore than their former employees do.
You can’t take a city, state or country, bring in millions of poor people, many who don’t speak the language and avoid watering down the quality of life for those already here.
Back in the day, people came here for opportunity. Now they come here for the freebies.
If you are ready for an autistic response there is no Manhattan and there is no California only millions of people where California and Manhattan are myth not reality.
This kind of ad hominem isn’t helpful. Sure they are wrong. And their attitudes of division - is part and parcel of the Democratic/left wing strategy. They proudly proclaim that they practice identity politics. That requires a victim and a victimizer. They can’t just disagree - they have to smear those who disagree with them as evildoing boogeymen. People who want to starve babies, push granny off a cliff and worse.
They cater to their subgroups by undermining time honored norms, like bail for violent criminals, increasing the value of prosecutable shoplifting to $950 and condemning Law enforcement.
This division and stoked anger is what is at the root of these shootings. These are the people who own them.
The homeless problem is not an affordable housing policy problem. Bad housing policies increase housing prices, causing people to move to cheaper towns, more economically dynamic states, live in their parents' basement. It doesn't cause people to move to homeless camps and skid row hotels. I don't know what the answer is for the drug addicts and mentally unstable people that make up our homeless population, but the answer can't be some head-in-the-sand trope about fixing it by building affordable housing.
Exactly. I think we need to offer wrap around services and really try to save lives, but we have to get much less accepting of addiction, crime and drug trafficking. We wring our hands, but this is a solvable problem. Ask addicts what they think. Being “tough” today saves lives tomorrow. See what your grandfather says when you tell him that today we allow people to get high, provide them with pipes, needles, food and state of the art camping tents to live where they want, start fires, harass people and collect our money to perpetuate their dystopia. This is what we’ve made of what he fought for.
You DO realize that the people who "collect our money" are the dozens, perhaps hundreds, of organizations, agencies, departments, NGOs, activist groups, advocates and do-gooder orgs, all providing nice white-collar jobs to the poli-sci and sociology majors sane people used to make fun of. The homeless, for the most part, don't see it "trickle down" to them.
Land in a neighborhood costs the same, more or less. What would you prefer to do with the land. Build low profit affordable housing or luxury housing.
Keep in mind much of the costs of a sky is the same. The land, the foundation, the structural steel, the entire skeleton of the building comprises the highest costs. The finishes are far smaller percentage wise.
What fool builds affordable housing with that arithmetic.
You have to go where the land is dirt cheap. But Obama and his pals don’t want that. They don’t care if their people don’t get nice housing unless it’s in the middle of your luxury housing,
You know, if there was somewhere for crazy people to go other than an ER where they're handed a bottle of prozac and released, maybe the Buffalo shooting and, many others, wouldn't have happened.
I lived in Hawaii for 20 years and just before I left, I saw the "affordable housing problem" push thousands of working people into tent camps along the beach.
You def hit on a big part of helping the homeless. Mental health facilities are needed. America decided many years ago (disfunctionally as usual) that prescription drugs were the answer. The only problem is...they're mentally ill! The won't take their meds! duh!
So, ask you, what is so wrong with helping the "drug addicts and mentally unstable"?
It's possible Hawaii is a special case. I assure you, no meaningful number of NY's D.C.'s or SF's homeless population are the working poor. Out of curiosity, who were the working poor in Hawaii's surf-side tent encampments. Immigrants? Young people ambiguously camping? I'm having a hard time picturing it.
I think you have read a tone into my description of our homeless population that I don't intend. Nothing is wrong with helping them. It would be great if some idea, policy or plan helped them. I'm just not offering one.
It's amusing how pussies like you are always willing to insult others from the safety of your anonimity. If you said that to my face, you would be hauled away bloody and on a stretcher.
Thank you for clarifying your argument with that video. In your initial post you state "As a California resident (Bay Area) I get a close-up view of progressive/liberal rules and regulations" and support it with this video. However, this video exposes that it is not liberalism per se that is a problem, as liberalism essentially posits that rights are inherent, that people consent to governance, have a voice in their governance, equal treatment under the law, but the lack of progressivity in the liberalism of the voters who voted against affordable housing.
Understand that liberalism runs a range from the immediate left of the monarch, implying more control in the interest of liberal values all the way to anarchy that rejects all centralized control. Not all liberalisms are progressive and as Ayn Rand argued in her objectivism that selfishness is a virtue you cannot find fault with the lack of progressivism in libertarianism.
Therefore, unlike conservatism, which is actually negating rights wherever they hold control, such as in their rejection of voters, negating a woman's right to control her own life, banning books, etc, liberals are not. Your problems are due to liberals using the political process to further their own interests at the expense of others, such as in their refusal to deal with the housing crisis in California that has created your huge economic, social and environmental problems. I am guessing that these liberals are libertarians with zero progressive values and they have the political power to obstruct meaningful progressive experiments and they chose more libertarian candidates.
LOL! Nope. Welfare is necessary because of conservative objections to equal opportunity and libertarian refusal to fight for equal opportunity. Pelosi has not acted very progressive.
Let's assume you're right - that conservative objections and libertarian stubbornness explains why welfare is a necessity. Walk me through how the states and cities with the most income inequality, poverty, homelessness, and terrible schools are Democratic party strongholds. Help me understand how Chicago, a place dominated by the Democratic party, allows 4000 people to be shot in a year (2021 stat), with most of the victims being minorities.
"Walk me through how the states and cities with the most income inequality, poverty, homelessness, and terrible schools are Democratic party strongholds. "
Really? You make allegations like most posters here, without any evidence. So, here's a couple of pieces of evidence that I have to rebut your unsubstantiated allegations:
- Illinois' per capita GDP ($74,052) and California's ($85,546) are higher than Texas' ($67,235) or Florida's ($56,301)
- Illinois' average income ($105,406.38) and California's ($109,260.14) is higher than Texas' ($96,468.32) or Florida's ($80,986.36)
There are a lot of details to any of those allegations that you present. For example, the Southern States are lower productivity states than Northern States and Red states get more federal money than Blue states overall. As for murder, Chicago is listed as 28th with 18.26 murders per 100,000 while St. Louis MO is first with 64.54 murders per 100,000.
Understand that a big part of the gun crime problem is that the lax law gun states are the source of many murder weapons, such as Indiana's "don't ask, don't tell" transfer law. Conservatives have opposed proper background checks and registries that would have reduced trafficking that leads to high gun crimes, Chicago police show that 60% of guns come from lax law gun states.
Averages do provide an indication, cost of living is generally higher in more desirable, better employment places and so the incomes are higher. Lower performance states like Florida get more federal help (#34) than higher performers like Illinois (#45). So, you are getting our tax payments as aid, because our business environment is more productive.
You're not that intellectually curious if you're unable to operate the browser of your choice with a search engine of your choice and find data that is public. All the data I mentioned is publicly available. Try the Chicago Tribune. They track shootings in Chicago. Don't be lazy.
NO IDIOT! There was more equal opportunity during the Trump Administration. What causes inequity is importing cheap labor to bottom out wages. Biden is full steam ahead to legalize all 8,000,000 uneducated invaders to compete for even lower wages:
Labor Unions that were busted by CHEAP immigrant labor.
Construction in Los Angeles has shifted from a heavily unionized labor force that was two-thirds white to a largely non-union one that is 70% Latino and heavily immigrant. American construction workers today make $5 an hour less than they did 40 years ago after adjusting for inflation. (2014 stats)
As the immigrant-dominated firms grabbed more business, industry wages slipped from a peak of $6.58 an hour in 1983 to $5.63 an hour in 1985. The number of black janitors in L.A. plummeted from about 2,500 in the late 1970s to only 600 by 1985. Today, the city’s janitorial industry, like apparel manufacturing and hotel services, is almost entirely immigrant."
"Hispanics took affirmative-action slots and public-sector jobs from Blacks."
" Hispanic leaders in South L.A. launched an official complaint that blacks made up the overwhelming majority of the county hospital’s staff. A federal agency then forced the hospital to hire more Latinos, provoking bitterness among local blacks. "
CA is now only 4.5% Blacks they have also exited. More diversity is just a wedge issue.
Between 2000, - 2014 immigrants accounted for about 70% of the net job growth.
total change in employment was about 8.8 million. Of that, the number of
foreign-born workers grew about 6.2 million and for
Marketing to silicon valley and legally sponsored insider trading help to fund her $10/quart gelato, covid haircuts and all of the collagen lip injections and face tightening she's ever wanted.
I am the most indecisive of deciders. My Federal Department of health recommends cannabis for people my age. It ain't going to kill us prematurely and seems to slow or stop Alzheimer's. For people my age who've always held their sanity suspect, it is welcome advice.
I recommend LA Kush over Gelato but only by .2 on a ten point scale and at about $25 for 3.5 grams who needs millions of dollars to be content at our age?
Can I recommend my own comment? Is that at least kosher style?
Funny thing about the truth. For people my age keeping us at home so we can live long and prosper is the kind of investment only governments understand. Their job is to protect us from future disruptions in the supply chain. My government has done a superb job but for us our future is our great grandchildren. We are Darwinian and Darwin is about natural selection not design.
Moe is a moe-ron (see what I did there?) who mistakes randomness for creativity, and, much worse, worships the stylish fascism of Trudeau.
Pathetic, Moe. You live in paradise while your fellow citizens are lied about, attacked and abused by your hero. That isn't just wrong-headed, it's vile.
Is that all you have? Like most others on Matt's site, you just throw your feces around because you have little of substance to add to any given discussion. What does any of that post mean? The fact is that the US political system is setup to be corrupt because it allows money to flow to candidates whether as campaign contributions, honorarium for votes disguised as speaking payments, allowing ex-officials to become paid lobbyists, etc, and any move to control that legal corruption has been opposed by the GOP, including Mitch McConnell who has obstructed moving bills along in the process. Also, a big part of the problem is in a disengaged electorate that likes to whine and use ideology to choose their team that enables the least competent in the electorate to gain an office. And this is exacerbated by gerrymandering that should be outlawed at the federal level replacing humans with algorithms that create districts entirely on population, not party, race, or any other factor.
It's cute you believe that politicians operate in silos. That's very good to believe if you're in the tank for one of the sociopathic teams, which seems to be your domain. Call me when the shuttle lands.
Jeff I just entertained a scientist friend from Silicon Valley. He is a little over half my age but he is a brilliant scientist. He tells me the giants of silicon valley are as banal as they come. It is all a game, morality ethics and conscience play no part in who can piss highest up the wall.
My friend is a great scientist and I love playing games but he never plays games.
To attribute a moral or ethical or philosophical foundation to a pissing match is lunacy but your comments always seem to me to make sense.
It is possible to be ignorant and wise and brilliant and be a jackass.
Noam Chomsky is a libertarian. We are not talking linguistic philosopher libertarian we are talking sophistry and illogic.
How insane does one have to be to believe we need anarchy to take us through an information revolution. The only remedy to bullshit is truth and in America truth doesn't make it to the Big Brother's giant screen.
In the land of the blind the one eyed man is king.
I have one eye that works but I am sane and the last thing I want to be is king.
"How insane does one have to be to believe we need anarchy to take us through an information revolution. "
I don't know if you have ever read or heard what anarchists think would happen without institutional government, if you haven't try listening to Michael Malice on Lex Fridman's podcast:
I don't see how it would work beyond the traditional clan or tribe level, such as with the American Indians, but they apparently do. In a nutshell, it seems to me that they have a big problem with government's control of violence that has no balance with the individual. An example of theirs is the hypocrisy of the founding fathers claiming that rights were inherent and then claiming that blacks had none. Today's conservatives are again proving that they don't believe in rights, merely the tyranny of the majority in their rejection of Roe.
"Noam Chomsky is a libertarian. We are not talking linguistic philosopher libertarian we are talking sophistry and illogic."
I never said that it was. Libertarians are liberal, they posit that rights are inherent, they are not granted. So, as with liberalism as a whole, libertarianism runs a spectrum, not all subscribe to Ayn Rand's "selfishness" doctrine.
I think John Ralston Saul's Voltaire's Bastards (The Dictatorship of Reason in the West) belongs in the Western Philosophical Canon. As Saul might say Rand is a third rate philosopher at best.
In the 1990s Time magazine called Saul a prophet.
It is 2022 and Saul is still prophetizing.
Noam Chomsky is what I knew as a libertarian 60 years ago and he has a solid moral compass. When Goldwater read his convention speech the Libertarians almost expelled Karl Hess the Third who had written the speech from their membership. They knew the GOP was totalitarian.
They knew Reagan was a fascist and Goldwater was an ignoramous and a useful idiot.
The political divide in the GOP is not a polarized divide it is three extremes. It is Fascist, it is conservative and it is libertarian. Fascist is the opposite of libertarian and fascist and libertarian are different galaxies with different metaphysics.
When you understand the difference between libertarianism and conservatism we can talk about the meaning of fascism and maybe we can talk about real philosophers like Hannah Arendt.
I am neither a libertarian nor an American Conservative. I am a Quebec conservative. We have an impenetrable wall between church and state and peace order and good government.
We are a secular humanist liberal democracy and whatever else you are you are the mightiest Empire that ever was and have the power to destroy or help repair the world.
Your first post was insipid and you've flat-lined since.
But whatever. I sense that you are of a particular ilk that has, as it's greatest (among many) flaws, a complete lack of self-awareness. Award yourself another prize and go away. You win, and the commentary here is improved. Deal?
Pelosi is Pelosi she did what she understood to be the right thing.
The best book I ever read on the subject is titled Voltaire's Bastards (the Dictatorship of Reason in the West) It was written long before John Ralston Saul was chosen to head PEN International. Saul is still with us and talking Ukraine, Covid and the new world order from an Aboriginal perspective.
If only in 1992 Saul had called his book The Dictatorship of Reason in the West (An Ode to the Banality of Evil) it would be in the canon of Western thought. Nobody in America knows who Voltaire is.
Voltaire believed that those individuals who were capable of determining the correctness of their actions through their own powers of reasoning would find the proper course to take and would do so based on free will.= and Pelosi has... for herself. Hell with everyone, she's going to buy another house.
I am a great fan of Voltaire and highly recommend John Ralston Saul's Voltaire's Bastards (The Dictatorship of Reason in the West) 1992
My wife just read it on my recommendation and she said it belongs in the Western canon of philosophy and John Ralston Saul is alive and well and is a year older than I am.
Saul's CV indicates he is the world expert on press freedom and in the 1990s Time Magazine called him a prophet.
Saul is a Socratic and even as Socrates becomes as mythical and legendary as Jesus, truth remains a cardinal sin to power.
One question are you aspiring Voltairian Bastard ? My choice would be (An Ode to the Banality of Evil) as a subtitle.
My wife is acknowledged as an outstanding philosopher in her educational specialty and I failed kindergarten.
Some times professor Higgins is heroine and Liza Doolittle is the hero.
You really don't want to talk about credentialism with someone who failed kindergarten.
I love my wife she taught me how to write albeit I first started writing with my kindergarten keyboard at about 55. My wife is my hero so please forgive me.
As for pierce you have no understanding of the relationship. I cannot tell lies I am not so smart that I can cover them up.
Pierce's raison d'etre is to get me angry enough to call him vile epithets just as if I was was one of his self affirming Yahoos.
You know what a Yahoo is. Swift's bipedal creature with the brain of horse and the appearance of a man was quite the joke but he never met you.
At least pierce is smart enough to understand a person who spends his time criticizing credentialism is not a person to call a credentialist
pierce is credentialism's great touchstone and he loves quoting fools and madmen who write books. My wife was an academic and she understands the canon of educational philosophy.
When I questioned whether he could even read Habermas he started a debate he knew I wouldn't respond to.
He accused me of many things and I responded with an invitation to visit for a couple of weeks. I do live in a very popular tourist region here in Quebec I said the only thing my wife and I required was an occasional help with the dishes.
I would extend the same invitation to you but if I wish to talk to an idiot I always have myself to talk to.
My wife knew Bloom who wrote about standing on the shoulder of giants but of course even standing on the shoulders of giants an asshole is an asshole is an asshole.
We speak different languages. I speak the language I was taught at The Protestant School Board of Greater Montreal.
Liberal means free to respond to the existing conditions as they arise. We were Darwinian.
Conservative means trying to preserve the conditions as they were. Life was good for English Protestants in the Quebec where I was raised. The 85% Catholic major knew their place and the Protestants and the Church ruled, and we Jews kept our mouths shut. Liberals and conservatives ruled.
The government could padlock union halls, Kingdom Halls and Jewish meeting places until 1957.
It is oxymoronic in the extreme to be a radical conservative or status quo liberal in today's revolutionary times. We live in a small village and when you defecate on the path someone will step in it.
That is why John Ralston Saul Said: Cynicism is Democracies greatest threat.
America cannot be a democracy if it want to bring back what was and can never be again ; Your conservatives aren't conservative and your liberals are vilified as antiAmerican.
Who are America's liberals Noam Chomsky, Richard Wolfe, Bernie Sanders, Chris Hedges, Marianne Williamson, Tulsi Gabbard and Cornel West and even relative unknowns like Matt Taibbi.
Anyone who says this ain't working and something must change is a liberal you can be a liberal Trumpist or a liberal right wing Antifascist.
Gorbachev was a liberal, Kruschev and Putin are conservatives.
Putin is as Russian as the Romanovs when they claimed Crimea in the 1850s.
You remember 1853 the Russians lost Crimea, they had revolution they lost their Empire outside of Russia and they know they lost but won't admit it and it is hard to surrender Empire ask right wing America which is everything to the right of Barack Obama's left flank.
I am Reminded of The Holy Grail that is Russia's Quest
In the early 19th century the world's best selling author was Thomas Chandler Halihburton who gave us the Early Bird catches the worm, a stitch in time and "When a man is wrong and won't admit it he always gets angry."
Russia's only sane course is surrender and beg to join NATO especially if America is no longer in charge. Sweden and Finland the are freest wealthiest most stable democracies on the planet are my choice for world leadership.
Stephen Fry is one of my favourite, writers, actors, philosophers, scientists, humourists and celebrities his take on the Treaty of Westphalia says it all about white supremacy.
Kind of tells us all we need to know about Russia and Ukraine
Growing up Jewish in Montreal meant you had the same rights as black sharecroppers in Alabama but a lot more privileges. It wasn't that you weren't Black it was that you weren't a poor Catholic. They had neither rights nor privileges . They were the people that saved a wretch like me.
I live in a secular humanist liberal democracy where church and state exist behind separate walls. Gender, race and religion are not secular identities. Our abortion law is simple: only doctors and government facilities can perform this medical procedure everything else is between you and your religion.
We pay the highest taxes in North America and we are the richest, healthiest, freest and happiest nation on the planet.
We are a democracy and America is a flawed democracy. For me liberal democracy is like virginity you are or you aren't you can't mess with Mr Inbetween.
In Quebec corporations are not human they possess the same rights as other pieces of paper like ass wipe.
Your constitution was an "improvement" over what was; the landlords lived in America and ran it but it was more Putin's Russia than FDR's America. Before the consumer society most Americans lived in poverty. We are in the post consumer age and Quebec fossil fuels are a no no and we will eliminate them as quickly as possible beginning in about 2001 when the 21st century was said to begin.
By the way the Han are not at all homogenous they are as diverse as Americans but they were a European colony not a sovereign nation.
Stephen Fry on Westphalia is worth days of discussion and worth every second of the five minutes.
"Got a hot-rod chevy with the twin carburetor, and I know a gal that's a real sharp tomater...." Don't let e. pierce see this and no more Burl Ives.
"Uncle" Burl was that somewhat nebulous, creepy friend of your father's who you never got a handle on and who lived in another state and showed up at Thanksgiving every three or four years.
Cute. Burl Ives sounds familiar. I had an MG B convertible with duel SU Carburetors. I rebuilt those suckers, got my cylinders re borne and oversized pistons put in. She was a screamer.
I was driving to Maine one night and didn't see a car for and hour. Decided I would test her. Got of to 102 and wouldn't ya know...right behind me "WoopWoopWoop" the police pull me over. He comes up to the car and says, "Got a little lead foot there honey?"
I confessed! He giggled and said, "I didn't stop you for speeding. There's this big moose standing in the road up aways. If you catch him, your car doesn't stand a chance." He gave me a chance and that was nice.
If you don't behave yourself you will have to maintain your own defense.
Canada military spending/defense budget for 2019 was $22.20B, a 2.34% decline from 2018. The US Is DEFENDING you. Your army of 26,000 men is totally inadequate.
I eat local and local is US and Canada and the food is great and inexpensive. Our farmers are wealthy businessmen and we have about one million more jobs than people and the only country we need defending from is pissing distance from here. It ain't your fault your brainwashed but get a fucking passport before the world gets out those old Yanqui go home signs. Who are you defending the Saudi Princes, the Brazilian Trump, the Chinese Xi, the Philippines Duterte, the Eygptian el sisi. Who are you defending us from you are the only threat to our sovereignty. It was Mike Pompeo who disputed our sovereignty over our inland waterways and Russia came to our defense along with Norway Sweden and Demark and all the Arctic liberal democracies. Nobody wants to follow America down the Rabbit hole there are enough Mad Hatters here to drive us to distraction.
Now I know you're a BOT. The US has more dollars out side the country than in it. The US dollar is used as currency in most countries in the world. I have not seen a Canadian coin in the US in 50 years.
I'm not defending anyone. You are attempting to defend Canada an saying you are holier than the US when it comes to diversity, when you HAVE NONE.
We have 59,000,000 people on Welfare. Nearly 40% — of all recipients are black. Your whole population in 2020 was 37,742,154. When you have 23,600,000 Blacks, you will have the right to brag that you're DIVERSE.
Toronto is Canada's largest city it is majority minority. The leader of Quebec's official opposition grew up in Haiti. We don't recognize race as a thing in Quebec and we are one quarter of Canada's population. I think I read how to lie with statistics 50 years ago.
The only hyphenated Canadian is The Right Honourable Addrienne Clarkson who is a Canadian Canadian. You know know as much about Canada as you know about America. Less than nothing.
Guess what? We have racists in Canada probably as many as there are in America only we don't elect them to public office and if we do the political parties take care of it because we are a democracy and America is a flawed democracy.
To this Canadian democracy is like virginity, you are or you aren't
One Black man does not redeem your racism. The population stats are in your face.
"We have racists in Canada probably as many as there are in America only we don't elect them to public office and if we do the political parties take care of it because we are a democracy and America is a flawed democracy."
You have not near as much Diversity as the US. We are experiencing Replacement Theory only It's the CENNSUS REPLACEMENT PREDICTION that Democrats don't want you to know about.
You have no fear of replacement. No fear of becoming a Welfare State. We are going down under the Safety Trampoline. Only about 18% of the population is paying taxes now. Top 20% of tax payers pay 87% of the taxes.
Precisely. I litigated industrial torts cases over five decades. Many government appointed lawyers, insulated from all consequence and accountability, often perform as lawyers insulated from all consequence and accountability.
The definition of a broken regulatory state is one where defense lawyers, knowing all the relevant facts of a dispute, can't guess within several orders of magnitude where a case will settle until they hear the enforcement attorneys' first offer and the insincere tone of self righteousness with which it is delivered.
Great comment but if I may ask about the metaphysics? What is the fiduciary responsibility of the fiduciary state.
In Canada a lawyer is responsible to reveal all pertinent evidence he is aware of to the opposition. The purpose of law in Canada is to establish justice.
In America "winning is the only thing." Vince Lombardi.
For a good Catholic Lombardi was sure anti Christian.
I love Pope Francis. I still bare scars from the Crusades. Talk about miracles a Christian Pope. This Jew will not be around to ever see a Christian America but I live in a Christian Nation of 80% skeptics and an impenetrable wall between church and state. Our ACLU calls this antidemocratic The ACLU is not liberal it is theocratic. Your liberals aren't liberals they're theocrats.
Christianity isn't about faith. Faith and a nickel won't get you coffee at Dunkin Donuts but there is free coffee down the street the only price is listening to other's nonsense because you don't believe enough of your own nonsense. Christianity is about serving and caring for your fellow man. Faith is really beyond our pay grade we are stupid apes.
America's 21st century civil war is a holy war of competing theocracies neither resembling the teachings of someone many believe once existed.
Yeah. Back in the 90s a friend who worked at the same bank as me got a job at a San Francisco housing agency. A few months in, I asked her how it compared. She said she made more money for less than half the work. Later she invited me to one of their Friday afternoon "office meetings" at a local bowling alley. Didn't see any work occur, but it was fun. Nice gig if you can get it, sucks for everybody else.
"Institutions everywhere are filling up with employees bearing skills “orthogonal” to the bureaucratic mission, part of what’s been packaged as progress but feels more like a vast jobs program for otherwise unemployable pseudo-intellectuals."
This is the key passage for me. In CA, there is no will to solve problems, that would only eliminate your job. There is only incentive to create more "problems" that need to be [never] solved.
I remember when people used to joke about Bachelor of Arts students having no job prospects post-college. Well jokes on us, they invented an brand new industry for themselves that pays very well, and browbeat entire societies into going along with their jobs program.
BINGO!! Education equals indoctrination, more education, more indoctrination. If you don't believe that, look around at the product's of education. Even the German's wanna be financial engineers, not real engineers. Perverse incentives give perverse results.
Robert I hate to disagree. I have a high school diploma. I am educated beyond most academics. I failed school starting with kindergarten. Education happens outside of school don't confuse education with Pavlovian responses.
Educated people are lucky to survive the academy.
My wife is a Doctor of philosophy, she doesn't drink, smoke or do drugs. She is a space cadet and much admired by the academy because she is educated at the university of Chicago which is the model for University of Alberta. My wife loves both Uof Cs because she still believes in English classical education. My wife is wise far beyond her 84 years but damn her Michigan upbringing and her scientist father. Her father ran as a Eugene V Debs Democrat in deep dark crimson Michigdamn.
I love the people of Michigan they deserve something better than Princes Romneys, Snyders and DeVoses.
What is good for them isn't good for Detroit, Benton Harbour, Flint or Grouse Point.
What is wrong with teaching science, mathematics and Darwin?
There is no other designer than ourselves here on Earth and we are apes and design isn't our forte.
Reagan's nickname was Deutsche German not Dutch and he was an Irish American NAZI.
It is there in B+W ask Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall it is all there in video and print.
They don't teach Darwinism any more because he didn't believe in subsidizing the inept. He thought they should be weeded out for the ADVANCEMENT of the species. With the NEW PROGRESSIVE educational policy, if some students are gifted or advanced and stand out above the rest, cut their heads off in the name of "EQUITY" we need a more compliant, ignorant population.
Their whole educational and social policies are "orthogonal".
IMHO, the worst thing they've done is to have destroyed "childhood"; what they call Free range children, we called children. This is self perpetuating and I see no way back in the Western world. You only start to live at the edge of your comfort zone; fear now rules and few venture outside their comfort zone. Deskilling and dumbing down is in full warp speed and what passes for culture or food for that matter isn't fit for the mind or body and the descent into the mediocrity of every thing and every one seems to have no bottom. Look out, here comes the metaverse pretending to be life.
And not only ruined the wonderful, supremely educational experience of a "free range" childhood, but EXTENDED IT. Now people are considered, and consider themselves, to be pre-adults into their mid-20s!
What weak and anxious people they are becoming. I agree with their sad self-assessment that parenting is just impossible. For them, anyway.
Totally agree. Movie theaters are being replaced by Netflix as Prime. New released movies for $19, why mix with your neighbors at the CINIMA. You may be corrupted by a new thought.
I agree and support everything you say. Mark Twain said it better than me so I have no idea what you read of mine. Actually, my life experience is very similar to yours. Education equals indoctrination, more education equals more indoctrination to where you are so invested in the disinformation you received, had implanted in your vulnerable young formative mind you are incapable of empirical thought. Old saying.."one priest is better than 100 police or soldiers, cheaper and more effective "! Substitute teacher for priest and and multiply by at least 10X. Nullius in verba!
I have a large Twain collection from Sawyer to a Pen Warmed up in Hell. Nobody understood Hell like Mark Twain. His life was Hell but he wrote the plain unvarnished truth. He understood that the Christian Heaven was perpetual Hell.
He had a habit of telling the truth in an inimitable way. Of course he's fallen by the wayside in a society that needs his wisdom and humor more than ever.
The financialization and incentive structures come from the culture at large. The message people base their lives on is that education and credentialing will move you up ahead of others. And since it's physically impossible for everyone to get ahead, we have overproduction of people with expectations that don't align with the world.
The education system is indeed indoctination, but here it's only a tool used by some in that class to make jobs for themselves. (Most undergraduates are indoctrinated by their peers and the larger culture which they are heavily plugged into and aren't indoctrinated in the classroom any more than we all are "indoctrinated" in our workplaces.)
People see being in the managerial class as the way to the good life, so we created the massive higher education scheme, which has given us overproduction of people who expect to be in what is necessarily a small sliver of the population.
Many of them also have a distorted view of the social privileges they believe themselves to have earned. (higher ed. amplifies this, but it's an issue in the society at large)
We have a class of people akin to the "superfluous man" from the 19th Century, but our failed aristocrats moved up into the position, rather than falling into it.
And Biden wants to encourage these noneducation programs by paying off their loans because they were unable to prepare them for a job. He needs dependency on government to install a Welfare State a one world government - The New World Order run by the self appointed Elites. Nancy will make the whole US poop in the streets to keep her job.
So what's essentially happening is that there's no Cui Bono anymore. Some lawyers are getting rich, but that money is peanuts. This is bureaucracy and regulation for its own sake.
This ends poorly. I see CA as a late stages drug addiction. There's a bottom here somewhere but not until voters rebel. But if they do rebel, it's game over. If CALIFORNIA Hispanic voters start going even slightly pink or even much less blue, that means Democratic Party is effectively not a national party anymore. At some point making women's sports safe for men is not gonna cut it when gas in LA is $7.
I am a crazy Quebecer I want $200 a gallon gas and Nuclear and Hydro electric power and I want publicly owned transparent crown corporations like we have in Quebec and Ukraine. I may even vote for our conservative government after Legault promised no public funds for the oil industry, regardless of the cost of gasoline.
The most absurd rule I came across in LA was when I was trying to get a density bonus approved for a smallish (5 story) multifamily building somewhere in West LA. They denied the plans because the rent-controlled units were all in the same area overlooking the parking lot on the lowest levels. The rule was that the rent-controlled units needed to be distributed around the building, even on the top floor, and had to have the same layout and square footage as the market units.
I just shook my head in disbelief. Its fine to require the construction of more affordable housing in the most expensive parts of the city, but why would you force a developer to forego even *more* market income to subsidize a low-income renter who lives in an equivalent or even better unit? How is that fair or just?
Suffice to say that only the most corrupt actors do business in LA real estate as that is the only way to turn a profit.
I understand the rationale, still disagree with the outcome. I met many fortunate well-connected souls with excellent incomes who lived in rent-controlled units who would never dream of giving up their privileged slice of paradise no matter how long and arduous their commute became.
California is the land of unintended consequences of well-meaning but poorly thought out policy.
Streamline? How about government gets out of housing. Pass some building codes and let the market handle it. I know I can't afford to live on the beach in Hawaii and I don't think I have any "Right" to.
I mean that more or less is my view. Zoning to separate housing from heavy industry was a public health triumph. Beyond that, almost all of land use planning is harmful. A healthy city is one where people can put land to use to serve their families and communities in evolving ways over time. That's how literally every city in history was built up until the mid-twentieth century.
Approval of individual projects should be almost entirely ministerial. You submit a plan, show that it conforms to safety and environmental codes, and then you build that plan and inspectors make sure you're following it. That's it. Not paying off every neighbor who shows up with some imaginary complaint.
SF's "discretionary review" process is one of the worst in the nation, possibly THE worst. I know people in SF who've been shaken down by neighbors for five-figure sums, to allow them to proceed with re-models, under threat of filing for a DR.
Check out this news story. This developer has been trying to build a 160 home development for like 5 years now as a small town which the development isnt in somehow has a say in whether thr developer can build it. This is all very rural farm country with good expressway access.
Imagine how much this increases the cost of homes if developers have to make plans and then fight numerous city councils for years. Meanwhile we have 0 home inventory and people cant afford homes.
The Hock Principle: Simple, clear purpose and principles give rise to complex and intelligent behavior; complex rules and regulations give rise to simple and stupid behavior.
Actually, California went to the dogs a long time ago. The regulations, administrative overreach, and lawyer plagues did not cause the decline but are rather an ineffective attempt to arrest it. I place the blame on capitalist exuberance and the resultant propaganda, which convinced millions of poor, dumb and incompetent people to migrate there -- all it took was a bus ticket. The economy at first puffed up greatly as the newcomers were robbed and cheated as most newcomers are, and the aforesaid capitalists, lawyers, regulators, and b.s. artists puffed up themselves more mightily still. If they didn't have regulators and lawyers it would be something else.
'What "decline" was over-regulation an "attempt to arrest"?'
It's in my crank right above. Capitalist exuberance, also known as boosterism, produced great loads of propaganda which held out California to be utopia, which, in a way, it was as long as one didn't have to share it with a huge mob of largely rootless drifters of low talent and ambition. I think the process started in the 1920s. Something similar happened in Florida. I have witnessed the sad ends of both developments.
GROWTH grows into competing interests, many of which seem to be curiously unexpected. The competing interests seek management and regulation in order to preserve and increase whatever they perceive as valuable. For this purpose lawyers and bureaucrats are necessary. The ramshackle charm of mid-20th-century San Francisco will never come again, although some other ramshackle charm may ensue after the decline of the US as the world's hegemon. Read the comments here -- most of them are whining that things were nice in the past and are not nice any more. Precisely. And the not-niceness didn't fall from the heavens. If you want to see who created it, look around.
As for postmodernism, the loss of meaning is obviously a failure of will, because human being will meaning into existence. But that's a separate discussion.
I have lived in CA for 22 years. I have seen the state devolve from the place I admired and wanted to be part of, to a place run by people who roll up the windows when they fart. But the problem isn't just with incompetent politicians who lack the courage to do the job they were hired to do. The problem is with voters/citizens/residents who all too often buy into nonsensical groupthink virtue signaling, unwilling to throw out the incompetents lest they be branded Trump supporters/Republicans/racists/etc. The voters lack the courage to vote their conscience and admit when they've made mistakes, so they elect people that reflect those self defeating values.
My favorite visual of California’s dysfunction is watching people drive around in their cars wearing masks with their car windows up. Would that the few police who dare to patrol could write tickets for stupidity.
"A common complaint is things in the state take forever. California announced a high-speed train in 1996 and the current plan is for service on the L.A-San Francisco line to begin in 2033. One executive I spoke with described the state’s development as “frozen in aspic.”"
The "high-speed" train will never succeed. It is currently hoped to start operations when construction is completed from Bakersfield to Merced. How many passengers will want to pay high prices to travel between those cities? And part of the line is being constructed single-track. If it does run from LA to SF, the cost will be at least $300 each way, higher than the airlines charge for a faster trip, and way above the bus line tickets.
At the same time the line is causing problems for the areas in which it is being built. Farms are being split, making it difficult to work on the land.
This project is an example of how California is imposing irrational plans on the state, of which the endless regulations are a large part. They make sensible actions difficult and much more expensive than they should be. They end up causing more damage to the population and the environment than they could possibly save.
Actually, it did. The goal was to funnel enormous amounts of taxpayer money to political constituents and to shame anyone pointing this out as climate deniers. Worked wonderfully. What, you thought there was an actual usable train being built in this plan!? LOL!
Exactly Jennifer. The $35b train is now over $100b, won’t be a “speed train” after all, and no one will ever use it enough to make break even even a remote possibility.
"As one of his first acts in office in 2011, Gov. Rick Scott canceled a $2.4 billion federally funded and shovel-ready bullet train from Orlando to Tampa because it carried “an extremely high risk of overspending taxpayer dollars with no guarantee of economic growth.’’"
Don't forget who pushed this - Jerry Brown. He went begging for Chinese investment in the state's HSR project when he was governor because stateside investors saw the waste and fantastical ridership estimates and laughed him out the door. Chinese investors then laughed him out the door.
Blocked the reserviors but advocated for the twin tunnel solution which would have stolen water from the north. The only thing Brown did well was enrich himself.
Pat Brown, his dad, was a moderate along the lines of a Truman. He wouldn’t stand a chance with today’s Democrats. He contributed a lot to California’s infrastructure. As for his entitled son, besides dating Linda Ronstadt, he unionized California’s state employees, further ossifying Sacramento’s responsiveness to its minions. And “French Laundry” Newsom makes Jerry look like Barry Goldwater.
In a very short period of time, China developed 40,000 K of high speed rail including mag lev which the German's couldn't do and sold them the patent's which they obviously improved. USA has ZERO high speed trains, ZERO. CHINA build's a Destroyer for 1/7 of the US cost and on budget, on time. This cannot stand.
Can't tell if you're upset because China has fast choo choos and you want some or because they build things with tofu construction and you think we should. China has roughly 3 million human slaves, damns that aren't built correctly and lockdowns that go on for weeks. Do you want those too?
1/7 the cost is because they don't pay the people who build destroyers... If high speed rail was economically viable, someone would already be building it... Elon Musk is digging freaking tunnels for crying out loud! IF it's a thing it will get done sooner or later. Identify the technology that holds that up and when that gets solved, there will be high speed rail.
OKAY, of course it could be because they have industrial capitalism with socialism using whatever works best with the Government at the top of the pyramid, even over the banksters. We on the other hand have neoliberal economics with financial at the top of the pyramid. We actually used to competitively build physical wealth. We did real engineering and the income distribution was much more egalitarian. Now, there's been a major upward shift from worker's and industry to financial. In 2008 when finance crashed the economy, we threw trillions at finance to make it whole. China threw trillions at infrastructure. They've brought hundreds of millions out of poverty; we've put tens of millions into poverty. Did you know that China has a higher percentage of home ownership than the US? If your mind isn't closed by jingoism or indoctrination and you can move past the agitprop you can learn the facts about China, the current bright object..Ukraine and whatever else you want to know but first you have to dismiss almost everything you were indoctrinated in which is everything you know now.
"California is what happens when new money becomes old money. "
Meh. Too clever, not convincing.
Can't we just say that this is what liberals do? Every place where they have complete control for a while. Hypocrisy, virtue signaling, turning everything to shit.
No, I don't think they can. Not consensually anyway.
In any case, this isn't about biology. Yes, they are all people. But there are ordinary people, working people. And then there are liberal arts graduates who have never seen a single day of honest labor in their entire lives. They care -- that's what they do. Which is fine, unless they have power. Because then they destroy everything they touch.
I think it comes down to people who couldn't achieve riches on their own so they want to have a government job where they get to spend someone else's money.
A minor nitpick, if I may: in which way are they "neo-communist"?
Ethnic grievances is the last thing a communist would care about. Communism is all about economics, not 'identities'. Dividing people into endless categories based on their ancestry and/or their physical attributes, it sounds more like neo-hitlerian than neo-marxist to me...
I know that it's called "left", but in reality it's the opposite. The main concept of marxism is that class struggle is the locomotive of history. This "new left" carefully avoids even mentioning class struggle. It's splitting the working class into 'identities' that compete with each other, and even 'oppress' each other. For all intents and purposes it's a far-right ideology.
...by the way, fascism (Mussolini) is also different, as I understand it. Fascism is corporatism, where all socioeconomic classes happily working together under wise supervision of the state. It's somewhat similar to modern liberalism (heavy statism in both), but doesn't involve any clashes of 'identities'; quite the opposite.
" the New Left was a reaction, ON THE LEFT, to the failure of marxist international class revolution"
I understand what you're saying here, and I don't doubt that it's a valid angle. The only thing is, all this was happening in the context of the Cold War. So, it's not clear to me to what extent it was a natural, organic reaction, as opposed to arranged, manipulated gradual transformation.
It's been a while since I read it, and I don't remember details, but I believe it's describing a massive well-organized post-war effort to re-educate western intellectuals.
So, where you see a sincere wish to "destroy western civilization", in reality it could be a deliberate attempt, by the establishment, to channel revolutionary sentiment into meaningless harmless distraction. 'WTF - why are there so few female and non-white Senators and CEOs!!! Unacceptable!!! We must fight!!!' This sort of things...
Very interesting web site. I thought I was up on things, but I had no idea fat studies was a real thing (see links at bottom of the article). Also read the Fascism page. I need to read some more before making further comments as they write as obtusely as humanly possible in a kind of late 19th century academic writing style that borders on unreadable. I wonder how many corporations/governments actually hire these folks as consultants?
If David Mamet had written "Our Town" instead of Thornton Wilder, your comments would make great dialogue for the "stage manager" role in the play.
(stage manager enters from stage left, walks laconically to center stage, pauses and removes pocketwatch from pocket and checks time, looks up suddenly begins addressing audience)
"Folks, I don't think I have to tell you all that postmodern social conditions---your relativism, your PC, and all them wokesters, all came about from traditional values and economic production. The farms, factories, small towns...hell, even the big cities...well now they all gave up the ghost to postmodern relativism, a consumer economy and mass suburban sprawl....course scratch tickets and crack smokin' didn't help matters none neither, but..."
I only hope that the growing Hispanic population, that is becoming more and more conservative, will start to support common sense (I think of Bari every time I use that term anymore) leadership, and possibly start to reverse course.
It's going to be interesting to see how Democrats respond to the Hispanic vote flipping red. My guess is they'll suddenly have an epiphany that Trump's border wall wasn't such a terrible idea after all.
And that an ill-conceived strategy to increase their voter base by flooding the country with illegals was a risky gambit and a total misread of the ethos of an entire culture of people.
I had dinner with an “illegal immigrant “ last week who triages illegal aliens and makes six figures courtesy of your government. His opinion? “We really need to restrict immigration “.
Why would the Hispanics (illegals) become more conservative? They identify linguistically, culturally, and historically more with Baja California not (Alta) California. The corruption and gridlock of Mexico is second nature. California Dems have spent decades ensuring their continual influx. California's Hispanic politicians are the core of the progressive left and the illegals have swelled their constituencies and consequently their power. Why would they preserve gringo institutions?
There are several reasons for Hispanics to move to the right.
First, the Democrats endless pandering to the black vote is offensive. The whole "you Latinx are people of color, just like the Blacks, but you don't deserve the same kowtowing. BLM! Say their names!" Joe Biden only looks at Black women for appointments. Gavin Newsom says California needs to look into paying reparations for Slavery. The Dems want to use the tax dollars of people who didn't go to college to pay off the education loans of people who went to grad school. How do you think that plays to the average Latino?
Second, Hispanics are fundamentally conservative. They tend to be more self reliant, less trusting of government, more religious, etc. Successful second and third generation Hispanics in particular will move to the right.
Finally, it's become very clear that the Democrats are the party of educated, coastal, rich, white urban voters, with a white guilt complex to bring the Black vote along. Rural, working class, less educated, self reliant folks? They're all moving to the right.
In my experience they are also more patriotric and / or community-minded. However, I don't think they share the weird hatred of the poor manifested by Anglo conservatives. Their conservatism is _Catholic_ conservatism, and the poor they have with them always. The thing that kept them out of the Republican Party must have been racism, but that could change.
They aren’t “becoming” more conservative, they ARE more conservative. They believe in family, hard work, God, marriage and a good education for their kids. It’s only Republican incompetence that has held back their shift away from Democrats. It’s funny, Democrats expected a perpetual majority with blacks and Hispanics a “guaranteed” vote. They will not only lose Hispanics. Before 2050 a majority of African Americans will vote other than Democrat. Why? Self interest. A plantation by any other name is still a plantation.
Other reasons for the obvious decline of Cali include that it is a one-party state (so there is never an interval where another party gets into power and unravels the grandiose schemes and laws concocted by the prior party), that it is a golden goose so there is always mucho money for the state govt to spend on its army of parasites (whose main goal is to make sure the next gen of parasites gets its feeding time) and probably first and foremost that just about ALL of its leadership and ideas class holds the same rigid ideology aka religion that is orthogonal to REALITY, assuming it cares about reality at all.
The Social Justice religion, which is born and rooted in Cali as much as Catholicism is in Rome, has no interest in real-world results, empirical data, obvious policy failures etc (which it would probably denounce as White sumthin or other) because its entire purpose is to put a self-righteous glow into the hearts of its bearers, to make you feel better than those Other People because you know you're on "the right side of history" and "hate has no home here" (except for the enormous hatred for anyone who disagrees).
So the state is infested with bum camps and they only seem to grow in size, filth and disease? The one acceptable answer is that everyone sleeping on the street is a sacred victim of capitalism, that Society failed them, and the only acceptable solution is a $500k apartment for each of them, no strings attached, and if that maybe sounds like a great deal to bums and addicts from the rest of the country, well, 1) only a bigot would say that; and 2) good! we'll give out more free stuff because Love Wins!
Your state has an environmental crisis, housing crisis, literacy crisis, suffocating traffic, massive income inequality, well, then let's invite in a few more million Central American peasants (because No One is Illegal) and if they can't read or do math maybe they just need to do a few state-sanctioned Aztec chants to increase their self-esteem.
What we're witnessing is a state being run purely on the basis of feelings and the real true and holy religion of California: Self-Esteem. So we can expect more and more social collapse, but hey, at least we'll still feel good about ourselves!
"Other reasons for the obvious decline of Cali include that it is a one-party state (so there is never an interval where another party gets into power and unravels the grandiose schemes and laws concocted by the prior party)"
California had Republican governors (George Deukmeijian and Pete Wilson) from January 1983 to January 1999. That was the peak era of the War on Drugs, which led to a massive state prison construction program and a tripling of the prison population. The increased money for prison construction was matched practically 1:1 by a decrease in the budget for public colleges and universities.
No one has ever managed to undo that particular grandiose scheme. It's like a gift that keeps on giving! After around ten years, it developed its own momentum. Now the negative results will require decades to reverse. (Which is to say that I don't view instant "mass de-incarceration" as an effective solution to those problems.)
Note that I'm aware that the Democratic majority Assembly and Senate in those years signed off on those budget proposals. In the 1980s, no one questioned the hardline War on Drugs. There was a bipartisan consensus in the corridors of power that it would succeed. The only thing the War on Drugs succeeded in doing was enriching drug dealing gangs and spreading their reach and influence across the country, to the point of entrenching them as societal institutions and cultural role models. Along with conveying millions of Americans- mostly non-college educated males, across the entire range of ethnicities- into an antisocial milieu that ended up tagging many of them with felony prison records.
Oh, so all of California’s problems are because prior politicians of both parties tried to keep drugs out of our country? We had 108,000 drug deaths last year. Now all the people who used to be in prison are on the street. Highest energy prices, worst public education (a perpetual tie with Mississippi, which is pulling ahead). No Mascot, California’s hubristic policies have resulted in the degradation of life here. Blame to go around, but mostly it’s been Democrats here.
Speaking as someone who would be voting for Michael Shellenberger for Governor if I still lived in the state, I think you've inferred entirely too much from my comments.
But when I did live in California, I could see where things were heading early on. Back in about 1990, I remember driving a guy in from the airport to downtown Sac (he was with Raytheon, business trip) and we got to talking. I recall comparing the California prison system to a person who had already consumed so much alcohol that it was only a matter of time until they would need to ah regurgitate it...the problem just hadn't quite kicked in yet. He had no problem agreeing with my analogy.
Which is what eventually happened. But it took around ten years longer than it should have, and by then systemic toxemia had set in. The first steps to decrease the California prison population were the result of a ruling by a judge, who ruled that the well over-100% capacity was leading to inhumane conditions. (fwiw, California prisons never got as overcrowded as some other states, like Alabama.)
Understand, I really was a night shift cab driver. I have at least as much of a vested interest in locking up violent criminals as any other citizen. Especially in those days. But when a large fraction of prison inmates are sent inside for "gang-related" violent felonies ("violent" includes firearms possession) related to a multi-billion dollar wholesale retail multilevel marketing scheme that's always hiring and paying cash money daily, you'd think that at some point someone in power would have noticed that the Zero Tolerance criminalization of the drug trade had the result of creating and sustaining an Attractive Nuisance of unprecedented proportions, for non-affluent teenage males. And after that first felony, it's a lot easier to slide into the abyss than it is to climb out.
What I'm saying is that at this point we're dealing with the end results of a chain of events that extends decades into the past, to 30 years ago, when the CA prison population tripled, to nearly 300,000...for example, consider the children of the incarcerated. Step back to 1992. What's a healthier situation- for a young boy to grow up with a father in prison for years on end, or with a father who's just been released and is back putting in work selling drugs, in that fast, lucrative Life again? What sort of options does the kid have, realistically? Yes, I know that there are other, more positive outcomes possible. But it can't be denied that that one of those two situations is the case, for a lot of these kids. How's their school attendance, their social skills, their literacy skills? If they aren't learning those, what are they learning instead? What's their peer group influence? How much of "lock'em up" has played out as "write'em all off"?
I’m a native Californian who still lives here after periods abroad and out of state. Shellenberger is on my short list of 2-3. What I’m gleaning from your remarks is that incarceration effectively caused the problem. It requires a bit of rigor to remind oneself that across from many of those incarcerations are people whose lives were abruptly terminated, who were raped, who were violently assaulted, who were subjected to drugs or violence as children. I have no problem with their perpetrators being imprisoned. This is a country where we are allowed to pursue our dreams but are held accountable for our actions by our peers. You infer that it’s better to let “dad” out of prison so his kid has a role model who in your example continues to deal drugs. It doesn’t have to be a binary choice. Dad could clean up his act. Some do, but recidivism rates and my own experience suggest that is a small number. Sorry, but incarceration is not the #1 problem in inner city life.
You're misreading me, but it's understandable. My position requires a lot more surrounding context, and I don't have the space here. I really should begin writing on my own Substack in earnest, but I'm still trying to clear enough space to allow that project to swallow me whole for a while, and I'm not there yet.
But just by way of a brief outline: I don't think incarceration causes the problem. I think it was a mistake for the policymakers of the US government (the nation that really did lead the way on imposing its "drug policy" globally, via UN treaties) to take a dogmatic, uncompromising line against every mind-altering substance other than a handful of the ones that were most popular among the people making the rules in those days, and then turn it into a law enforcement crusade. They badly misread the social cues by criminalizing every user, legally forbidding medical addiction maintenance, and insisting that basically every Impure Substance required eradication, thereby funneling 100% of market demand into the hands of the criminal marketplace.
It's easy- all too easy- to moralize about Choices and Personal Responsibility in the abstract, while ignoring extant realities on the ground- realities that include Modernity, Mobility, Affluence, Adolescence, and the Return of the Repressed. To get specific about it, teenagers got automobiles and spending money in the postwar era, which conferred them- us- with a staggering amount of autonomy as an age cohort. There weren't any adults skulking around my high school enticing innocent teenagers into taking Dope; it was entirely a peer group thing. Teenager to teenager. To the extent that "adults" were involved, it was older brothers. Notably including that newly worldly contingent just returned from the wilds of Indochina. There were not enough police to bust us, even if they had the faintest inkling of what was going on; sometimes they did, but many of the new hires had just gotten back from Vietnam, too. If you know what I mean. The cultural idealism and informal universal brotherhood of the young that was promoted in the late 1960s lasted until about 1975, and then it got a lot more cynical; speaking personally, very often there's a cultural chasm separating me from people 3-5 years younger that does not exist with people 3-5 years older. It's hard to explain. But real. I think the crucial difference may be that by 1976, the clandestine drug scene had spread to many of the middle schools. The 11-13 year olds. Don't even think that I'm pumping up that reality as some great advance. It was, however, inevitable, in a criminalized marketplace. As for the parents and the school authorities, in most parts of American suburbia the entire scene was under the radar until around 1979.
Long story short, teenage dope retailers in my high school had glamor profession status and money- sometimes more money than any 16-year-old had ever thought of having only a couple of years before. The cultural consequences had about as much to do with anti-materialistic "1960s values" as today's cryptocurrency market does. And this was the early 1970s, before cocaine became a mass market item.
If it was that way in my mid-Atlantic suburban mixed working class/middle class/military families high school (90% "white" fwiw), think about what it was like when poor teenagers got a taste of those market opportunities. Think Pinocchio, "Pleasure Island." That's how They get you, hmm? Juvenile status provided- and provides- an extra illusion of impunity. Upshot: give male adolescents turnkey access to a multilevel marketing scheme that works faster, easier, and with a better chance of adult-money success than Amway ever delivered to most of its sellers, and they'll be all over it. But nearly all of the affluent middle class college bound kids will give up the game when they turn 18, because that's when it turns into Adult Crime. While the poor kids, with that foreshortened horizon of adolescent immaturity, they get a taste a taste of fast money, and that taste is enough to derail their lives.
Especially once crack entered the market.
I plan to have a lot more to say on that. With an abundance of factual support to back it up. Not just yet, but soon. In the interest of doing that in the near future, I'm going to lay out of Substack comments for a while.
In the meantime, you might consider checking this book out, even though the focus is on Mexico and not the US: Murder City, by Charles Bowden, from 2010. It's a nonfiction masterpiece. I'll never write as good as Bowden; he paid a lot more dues in his lifetime. Not that investigative journalism is a contest, but he blows away everyone else I've ever read, and that takes some doing.
State Senator Scott Weiner is one of the major problems in California, not an anti-regulation progressive. Weiner has said that single family residences are "immoral", and has led the effort in the state legislature to pass centralized zoning regulations which would essentially outlaw single family residences. Weiner's other legislation accomplishments include removing registered sex offender status from gay men found guilty of sexual activity with teenage boys.
feels more like a vast jobs program for otherwise unemployable pseudo-intellectuals. “Hire us, pay us, give us and our clients sinecures at your expense,” Kyeyune writes, “or we will make life difficult for you.” THIS SENTENCE EXPRESSES A LOT OF WHAT'S WRONG IN OUR SOCIETY AT THE MOMENT....ACROSS ALL SECTORS
I moved here from the East four years ago, before the serious exodus from California. Higher prices for housing, staying away from Interstate 35 and away from all communities that branch off. Our way of life is changing, and there are serious concerns; where is the water coming from, the grid updates, the education (and various arguments about what type of education) the last thing I want is the Californication of Texas. We just remind people we have snakes, scorpions, you can carry a gun legally, and it is CONSERVATIVE. We have statues of soldiers, there are a lot of CHURCHES, and a short drive is an hour and a half. Very different here in Texas. Don’t change Texas adapt to how we live. You left California because your rules and regulations killed your communities and livelihood. Don’t bring that crap down here.
Yup, and I don’t live, or buying anything in Austin. The defund the police means that the backend that helped police is gone. They (police) cant refer someone to services to help them because the services have been cut.
I didn’t know how much I loved Texas until recently. Never going back east again, HUsbeast got me down here for a vacation, and a look see. When we returned east we got our ducks in a row and left in a year. Never regretted it. You read Robert Malone too! Best wishes.
"Is it the state’s job to make sure companies embrace and promote employees who aren’t interested in their core products? Applied enough times in enough directions, won’t that idea get weird really fast?"
Yes, under the "equity" agenda, it is the state's job to equalize outcomes, regardless of what people may want. And yes, it will/is getting weird really fast.
The "equity" agenda must be named, confronted, and defeated.
This isn't that complicated. Wealth attracts parasites who are unable to earn anything on their own. They slowly infest the host. Smart parasites learn their limitations, so as not to kill the host. Unfortunately, human beings seem to eventually succumb to the super parasites, who, because of envy & desire for the unearned, wreck everything in their path. The State of California is overrun with super parasites and Atlas is Shrugging.
Outside of silicone valley and Hollywood, California is a farm state. A huge portion of our food is provided by California farmers, but actually by their slaves. Imported Hispanic workers are the foundation of California agriculture. Most crops of fruits, nuts, and vegetables must be picked by hand, unlike midwestern crops of corn, wheat, and soybeans which are planted, tended, and harvested by machines. Nobody in the US likes the term “slave”, so we use the term “guest worker”. These workers sign with a specific grower and when they get here, if a farmer up the road pays more, they cannot go up the road to work. They are “owned” by the one they signed with. This works well to keep food cheap in the US and enrich Claifornia farmers. Meanwhile, California taxpayers pay for workers education, healthcare, and transportation. No wonder California has the greatest disparity of wealth and the most “sanctuary cities”.
All American prisoners, all 2.3 million of them, are literally enslaved as per the 13th Amendment.
"Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."
Many of them work for UNICOR where they make war materiel. The prisoners at Angola prison, most of them black, are forced to work picking cotton.
"...except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted"
That clause explicitly refutes your claim.
I think that a lot of incarcerated people in the US have a strong case that their 8th Amendment rights have been violated, though:
"Amendment VIII: Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted."
Most of the recent efforts at reform have been aimed at the first clause- which is so easy to legislate, to the point of having become overly lenient in some cases. Including cases where the results are inexcusable.
The amount of reform efforts that effectively address the third clause is practically zero.
As a California resident (Bay Area) I get a close-up view of progressive/liberal rules and regulations. I find it ironical that the liberal ideology, more than any other, relies heavily on rules and regulations to enforce its value system, come hell or high water. Another irony: The San Francisco Bay Area, a liberal bastion if ever there was in the nation, has a monstrous homelessness problem, among the worst public schools, among the highest levels of inequality, sub-standard public housing, and on and on. The reason is that "progressives" are all about virtue-signaling and making more and more rules, but are far less interested in the results of those very rules and regulations.
Let's not forget Pelosi's high walled complex in San Francisco. I left the state in 2017 and haven't looked back.
At least she could get her hair done while the rest of us were locked down.
...and eat designer ice cream...
"[T]he liberal ideology, more than any other, relies heavily on rules and regulations to enforce its value system, come hell or high water."
That's because they don't believe in democracy. Oh, they give it lip service, all right, but either have no clue what they are talking about, or are simply sophistic saboteurs.
If they believed in democracy, no rule/law would be instituted without a healthy (or a least with credible pains to justify modest) majority support. People would understand how this benefits "the greater good", and thus, believe in the system. Those who didn't take such pains would be driven from office.
I know, we're now so far removed from this that this seems pathetically naive. But I once lived in such a society, meaning, it was not all that long ago...
As did I. The conflagration that is coming after The Supremes release Notroevwade is going to make everything that went before, child's play.
Saw an interview today where an organizer claimed votes aren't fair, the country/nation is illegitimate. Ergo, anybody who is curious about when life begins is a threat. How long are normal people going to put up with this BS.
Full disclosure --- I don't know when "life" begins. I am willing to contemplate. Sonogram gonna sonogram.
"The conflagration that is coming after The Supremes release Notroevwade is going to make everything that went before, child's play."
Everybody says this but I have my doubts. Besides, assuming this gives the left's belligerence and public preening/hissy fits credibility as a force for intimidation. Every political setback for the left is now ominously shrouded by threats of George Floyd-like hysteria and the attendant rioting.
You're quite right. In fact, one element of the metamorphosis of liberalism in recent years, which spiked during Trump's presidency, is that they believe the end justifies the means -- that's the only rational explanation for why liberals are advocating censorship by tech multinationals, whether on Twitter, FB, YouTube and so on. They (weirdly enough, along with the ACLU!) want speech censored by these private companies even though it is not against the law (or else government itself can censor it).
The 60s hippies were just as obstinate, IMO. But back then, we actually *did* have "adults in the room", to moderate the process into something evolutionary, not revolutionary.
But that's also when the sociopaths went to work, to ensure nothing like the 60s could happen again. So today's mad wokesters are clueless that they are the foot soldiers of the totalitarian elite, not the glorious rebels they think they are.
I think it all started with the self-indulgent 60’s generation, who gave us “free” sex that has degraded women, a drug culture that devours our young to this day, and helicopter parenting that resulted in today’s naïve snowflakes that you call “mad wokesters”. It’s my generation, but I think history will judge the 60’s generation to be the scourge of current civilization.
You're putting the cart before the horse. The impetus of the "sex and drug cultural revolution" was technological.
The 60s generation didn't "give us free sex", the birth control pill did. Approved by the FDA in 1960.
The parental generation of the 1940s and 1950s were already popping more uppers, downers, and tranqs than the kids did in the 1960s.
"In 1962 the FDA estimated that eight billion amphetamine pills were being produced every year in America..." https://www.sciencehistory.org/distillations/fast-times-the-life-death-and-rebirth-of-amphetamine
The only reason that the 1950s isn't thought of as a "drug culture" is that our elders were so insensitive to their own bodies in that era that they didn't even recognize that alcohol and tobacco are heavy drugs, and addictive ones at that. They were regularly copping buzzes from mixing the alcohol with amphetamines, barbiturates, and benzos, but they didn't categorize it as "being high", because being high is for dope fiends. The two-martini lunch was definitely a thing for the corporate set in the 1950s and 1960s- there's no way to drink even one martini without being thrown for a loop, unless one has a tolerance aka being a heavy drinker aka "being able to hold ones liquor."
I'm not judging. This is the way novel cultural phenomena operate.They hit- sometimes like a tidal wave. And then there's a reaction- the harder the wave hits, the greater the reaction. And then everything settles into a condition of homeostasis, more or less. Unless the culture goes tilt in wholesale denial, trying to put the toothpaste back into the tube with a carceral inquisition policy like the War on Drugs. The War on Drugs was, incredibly enough, originally targeted at marijuana and psychedelic drugs. What it did was entrench a criminal marketplace with retail outlets from Fort Kent to San Diego. Then the Congress tightened up restrictions on pill amphetamines and barbiturates, which led to a bonanza in the cocaine and Quaalude markets. Then the Feds banned Quaaludes. As a result, benzodiazepines like Valium, formerly shunned as mundane 1950s housewife drugs, grew in popularity. Then Xanax- super-valium- showed up (FDA approved 1981). Then in 1990s the rise of Oxycontin began. Oxy caught on as the result of an Establishment pharma corporation's unethical hard-sell marketing campaign, further enabled by a Federal drug policy that left almost all of the accountability for scrip and quantity tracking of "DEA Schedule II controlled substances" in the hands of individual states. The laxity of some of the most conservative states in the Union permitted the diversion of wholesale quantities of those opioids. You can't blame that on the hippies.
We will get nowhere without honesty on these questions.
Those are unintended negative consequences that, IMO, are secondary to the positive ones. They certainly matter and must be dealt with -- on that at least I am in full agreement. But they are not at all universal effects.
In any case, I disagree that the 1960s were a net negative. They opened up society -- free speech (yes, it was previously widely suppressed), ending Jim Crow, questioning wars, rooting out corruption, in general, expanding personal freedoms. Where these things backtracked, it is not the fault of the 60s movements, it is our own failures to preserve those benefits listed.
It's because acting out the ideology is all that matters. Admitting the results aren't as desired would be to admit the religion is false.
As a California resident (Orange County) who's employed in the development-construction business I get a close-up view of what the progressive/liberal rules and regulations do to slow down progress and make it more expensive. That's one of the great ironies: "Progressive" rules make progress nearly impossible. Add to it the taxes and higher costs and it's just about too punishing to stay.
I'm not exactly sure how to describe my political orientation anymore. Like, I generally believe in something akin to Denmark -- a light regulatory touch that has relatively low corporate taxes but funds a general welfare state with broad-based taxes and tries to somewhat restrict the emergence of extreme inequality because that leads toward political instability. (Basically I don't want anyone to be allowed to fall into deep, immiserating poverty, because groups of people like that turn into mobs of pitchfork wielders. It's a matter of enlightened self-interest, or an insurance policy. I'd much rather just have a society that feels fairer, where every citizen feels like they have a stake and a fair shot at upward mobility -- and hence we don't tend toward riots and revolutions -- even if that lowers the trajectory of my personal wealth over time a bit.) In the past this probably would've been "progressive", but at this point the "progressive movement" has gotten seriously hung up on questions around "historical oppression" that don't actually address this. Antonio García Martínez has made a convincing argument that the movement has become a kind of re-skin of the Christian ethos, with the idolized victim, and the self-flagellating penitents engaging in performative allyship. And very much like medieval Christianity, you can buy indulgences by donating to the right causes, and the question of whether what you're doing _actually_ helps the poor and downtrodden is very much secondary to whether you're mouthing the right platitudes. Hence seeing "in this house we believe!" signs on the front lawns of a rich neighborhood's worst NIMBYs who would be appalled at the idea of building affordable apartments.
https://www.thepullrequest.com/p/the-lamb-of-god-who-takes-away-the-524?s=r
https://www.thepullrequest.com/p/christ-and-his-endless-resurrections?s=r
My own politics says that the best way to help the "historically oppressed" is just to _do stuff that helps poor people_. In general. Doesn't matter if their parents were rich and they're poor, or if they're poor white males, or whatever. Just help people who are actually suffering. You'll tend to disproportionately help the "historically oppressed" because that has a strong correlation with being poor. And if you don't give handouts to the children of Black billionaires (and there are a few!) then that's really not a problem. Maybe it misses the mark of some kind of absolute fairness test, if you think a debt is owed because some billionaire's great great grandparents were enslaved. But it's closer to fairness than the policy we get if people who want a fairer society insist on advocating for unpopular policies, and lose all the elections.
General welfare state doesn’t work. General welfare only works within a family or clan. If you have a nation that is essential populated by one clan then it seems to work. But in a modern nation state comprised of many clans it will never work.
I’m for a minimum of government coercion. It can’t end well.
On NIMBYism, it’s non-partisan. The only time Republicans want more regulation is to protect their own property. The only reason Democrats oppose more regulation is to protect their own property.
As I recall the Scandinavian countries use a Value Added Tax, which gets paid at intermediate steps in the value chain, not just by the end consumer, and so it actually functions partially as a corporate tax, on business to business sales. That's part of why they can have a lower corporate income/profit tax.
But it's definitely true that overall, the average citizen sees more of their income taxed into government services.
But, that's necessary. As a society, they've made a choice that they will engage in less personal consumption -- slightly smaller housing units, fewer meals out, fewer fancy tech toys -- but more consumption of quality public services, like affordable education all the way through university, healthcare, and so on. You can't just soak the rich to get this stuff, because it requires that people actually do the work in the public sector. Part of what's happening is that you're using the greater flow of tax money to _actually hire and train people_ to do things in the public sector, and that means less labor available to put in the personal services sector.
There's a fair amount of evidence that in the end this bargain leads to a more dynamic, creative society. e.g. Finland and Norway both produce more new businesses per capita per year than America does, and the businesses are started by a much broader cross-section of society than in the US. In the US, if you're like 35-40, and you have a kid, taking a flyer on a new idea that might not pay off is going to sound pretty scary. If you know that your family can't possibly end up struggling to get basics like shelter, food, and healthcare, it's a lot easier to take some risks.
A "regressive" sales tax is a tax that disproportionately punishes low income citizens. By definition a "very high regressive sales tax" can't economically affect "everyone" equally.
My next store neighbour is a young man who is the butcher and assistant manager of the local supermarket. Even in Canada we have deranged Trumpists.
The young man was telling me people don't want to work so I asked.
You own your own home, you take home a good salary how many years did you study to be a meat cutter.
He grew up on a local farm and his father is younger than I am and is a successful beef farmer. He has been a butcher for most of his 35 years and started 25 years ago.
I asked whether he thought that people without two years of college studying public health and safety in addition to meat cutting should be allowed in the back room.
He is a wonderful young man but I am still waiting for an answer. Our baggers are in their 50s.
We have lots and lots of regulations but WE are the Government and we are the regulators. We call that liberal democracy not corporate feudalism which is socialism for the rich and law of the jungle for the rest of us.
In Canada corporations have no rights. They have the same rights as toilet tissue. They feel no pain, and enjoy no pleasure. Our Supreme Court maybe unknown to most of us but they know corporations are pieces of paper not sentient life forms. Our chickens enjoy more rights than the farming co-operatives that own them and our farmers are thriving and they are a powerful lobby in Ottawa and Quebec City.
Whose bottom line benefits most from all the regulations? Who governs America? It ain't you the people. Gas is over 8 Canadian dollars a litre and our Premier declared no money for petroleum extraction and if we allow a pipeline to the Atlantic the cost of petroleum would be offset by the bribe we could get for allowing a pipeline.
We are GREEN and our economy is through the roof and we need new immigrants, and refugees to fill our schools and industries.
You know what Covid cost us?
One million new Quebecers the very thing that you say makes you poor makes us rich.
Don't worry about California our farmers are buying up all the agricultural land and they have understood sustainability for the last 400 years.
Our food is more and more local and global and the shelves are full and the food is as good as anywhere on this planet including NAPA Valley.
Our local inn is beyond even California prices and has a selection of wine and cheese as good as is to be found in this galaxy and our beef farmers are known world wide for their heritage breeds. You know California prices. Do you know the cost of a prize bull? You think Bezos is rich?
I hear the moans over the cost of living funny thing our prices are up and the government puts more money in our pockets and we are richer than ever. Life really is a ponzi scheme.
Right. That’s why you have to jail people for saying things you don’t like.
DUH?????
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/11/canada-saudi-arabia-support-us
What are you talking about?
Have you looked at the World's Freedom Indices . Canada could do better but we are not a Flawed Democracy. I taught democracy was like virginity you were or you weren't.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/freedom-index-by-country
From here you look like a dictatorship. You’re free as long as you don’t think independently. You can have it.
Gentlemen Gentlemen
Who shall we bring in to translate?
I suggest Stephen Fry
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-WO73Dh7rY&t=81s
DUH????
Putin called our Deputy Prime Minister a Nazi. That is what Matt Taibbi is parroting. This can't be right I trust Matt. John Ralston Saul said cynicism is democracy's greatest threat.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxFM5hfLHF8
In California, progressive means bigoted.
the failure of the policies makes virtue signaling a great priority.....If not a necessity
The same people virtue signaling are the people who supported failed policies.
right! that's my point. Its important or them to signal the intentions because the outcomes are catastrophic. The virtue signaling confers blamelessness. (is that a word?)
Ah, got it. I misunderstood.
Interesting discussion. Two people saying the same thing arguing with each other.
Liberal means freedom to change beliefs and behaviours.
In French , Latin, Italian, Greek , Hebrew and in Quebecois liberal is a synonym for freedom and conservative means we are who we are.
Don't Americans study Darwin? What happens to species that can't adapt? Talk to our nations 13 year old's. They understand Darwin their hero is a truth teller named Greta Thunberg.
Lol, Greta. The poster child of woke causes. Nonsensical marketing bs (which is what Greta is) is much easier than doing the work.
When writing legislation, liberals begin with the premise that 95% of people are evil and must be controlled by diktat, there is no such thing as an independent thought with altruistic intent...
Yes, but liberals hate supposed "stupidity", not so much "evil". Conservatives, OTOH, seem to be the prime haters of "evil". Well, OK, wokesters also believe they are combating "evil" -- it *is* a religion, after all.
Nobody seems to believe any more, the way they used to, that Left and Right are simply groups of people with different opinions on how the country should be governed. Now, it's eternal holy war.
They were turned into that. There is a foundation to L/R, however, that is legitimate -- see my profile blurb.
In any case, I don't see your point countering what I just said. The holy war against [ Stupid | Evil ] is certainly part of "shock troop" manipulation.
For those wondering where the (dominant) conservative view on abortion fits into a "freedom" framework, the short answer is that it doesn't. That's because a non-compromising stand that, say, "fertilized egg = legal person" is a tenet of a religion. Religion brooks no opposition, completely at odds with a government "by the people". Completely ditto for Wokeism. You can believe in (and faithfully exercise) democracy, OR you can believe in (and faithfully practice) a religion -- but you can't do both. No matter how hard the gun-toters thump their bibles. And that's why Libertarianism is the purer form for Rightism.
So how did these conflicting POVs end up on the same side? While the shock troops were being constructed by TPTB, they recognized that there were far more gun-toting bible-thumpers than (actual) libertarians, and duly cultivated the more useful group. After all, up until 2020, it was recognized that you needed to count votes.
What kind of word is ironical? Is it like kind of ironic or ironic style? Progressive is by definition liberal even if one can't be progressive and conservative it is an oxymoron. We still have a Progressive Conservative Party. It is not easy being a Progressive Conservative ask: Alberta and Ontario where they are having elections and many conservatives are anti progressive not just Canadians who try to get along.
There definitely are folks pushing back: https://www.thebulwark.com/in-san-francisco-revenge-of-the-obama-democrats/
"ironical that the liberal ideology, more than any other, relies heavily on rules and regulations to enforce its value system, come hell or high water."
Think about it. It isn't really ironical, it is inevitable because humans are social animals and have evolved natures that allow us to live within a group. This works very well with conservatism because what was will be and rights are simply privileges afforded you by birth and placement in the group: low status, few privileges, high status, many privileges. Read what Burke has to say about this:
https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2020/06/edmund-burke-rights-inherited-owen-edwards.html
Even in conservative societies, most of human history, certain privileges were codified as "rights", such as the right of the serf to protection from their lord. Now, if you consider the change from the conservative world pre-Enlightenment to the liberal world posited by the Enlightenment, you should see why liberalism requires controls on power, ranging from that of your stronger, more aggressive neighbor to government itself and in democracy, to the tyranny of the majority; People tend to oppose that which they don't agree with and so protections are required to protect individuals from the majority and from those that hold more power, whether physical, financial, or political power.
Yeah I don't see how you can get away from "rules" in some very broad sense. "Thou shalt not kill," is a rule. (Not exactly followed by most societies that have supposedly held it as an important one -- frequently they even considered it a rule that you _should_ kill infidels and heretics.)
The question is what _kind_ of rules will help a diverse group of people co-exist, go about their lives, and resolve disagreements without violence.
I'm definitely not a "conservative", but I do appreciate Burke and Chesterton. The "Chesterton's Fence" principle is one I always am pushing on my more liberal / progressive / radical friends. If you can't explain the history of the thing you want to change, and how either the purpose it served is no longer necessary or you're going to serve that purpose better, then go think about it some more and come back with a reform proposal when you've figured that out.
Yep. Spot on.
This video is worth watching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNDgcjVGHIw&t=686s
Interesting video from NYT no less, demonstrating orthodox liberal behavior at its finest. Still haven’t grasped the several centuries old proverb “actions speak louder than words”. They seem to have understood it to mean “blaming thine enemy is better than remedy”.
I am furious they don't teach you English or philosophy. You can't be liberal and orthodox they are antonyms. You cannot be orthodox and liberal anything.
We all use the expression the more things change the more they remain the same.
I use the French translation but it remains the same seemingly contradictory expression.
It is 2022 and science is just beginning to acknowledge that there may be no real beginning or no real end. This is what is and what was and will always be regardless of what we want to believe.
Star Trek was the Bible for a generation but science isn't about the stars it is about our dreams and we are just learning about our dreams and a cigar isn't just a cigar. It has chemistry, it has physics, it has biology, it has architecture and it has design. Human design.
Darwin was about a universe of natural selection as opposed to design.
We can see measure and analyze natural selection but faith may move mountains but the evidence is rather scant.
I live in a secular humanist liberal Quebec speaking democracy. It isn't the USA it is what I wish America would become but that is not what democracy is all about. I like this Quebec . It had a revolution there was a transfer of power from the church, business and finance to the citizens and unlike in America here the people assumed more and more power as they assumed more and more responsibility and now we must pay to educate everyone, give everyone healthcare and take responsibility for everyone's long and prosperous life.
It took my wife and myself to get me to 74 but you know I have a Department of Autistic Affairs making sure my doctor and healthcare providers know more about my needs than my wife and I are willing to admit.
It is not easy for a retard to scream you are all a bunch of idiots at the very people he needs most.
No need to be upset. Both English and philosophy were available to learn decades ago in my formative years and still are. You simply mistook my use of the word liberal for the meaning that does run counter to the word orthodoxy and not for what I intended, which was using it to identify a political ideology in it’s current iteration.
Today’s American liberals-in contrast to their beliefs only a few years ago-are comfortable with removing our freedoms as they see fit, and it is clearly a matter of politics. The examples are numerous. One only needs to look at how a former president was banned from Twitter and how social and mainstream media with the blessing of our current administration systematically banned and ruined the reputations of anyone who dared to question or refuse a vaccine and it’s accompanying restrictions. So much for our freedoms. As a secular humanist I’m sure you see the similarity to religious methodology. In the US one party believes in God, the other thinks it is God.
So in this case “liberal orthodoxy” is not oxymoronic.
Thank you Thank you thank you.
I know there are many like you who understand.
Diogenes could speak his truth because he chose to live the life of a dog.
If I may quote Firesign Theatre "Your dog is smarter than you are."
I miss my dog he taught me more about being human than I ever learned in school.
Orwell understood but he didn't do comedy.
The wealth of states like Cali and NY boggles the mind, and the homeless problem in both of the states' major metropolises is an evidentiary indictment on their values. I read that on any given day, there's an avg of 400 homeless children JUST in the city of New York.
People mistake Manhattan for New York.
For decades few York State has been shrinking. When John Kennedy was elected in 1960, NY had 45 electoral votes, while California had just 32, just like PA. Illinois had 27. Texas and Florida? 24 and 10.
Today? NY has gone from 45 to 28, loss of almost 40%. California? 54 and increase of almost 70%. PA went from 32 to 19, a loss,of more than 40%. Illinois went to 19, a loss of of 30%. Texas is now 40 - an increase of 67%. Florida is 30, an increase of 200%.
New York is the precursor of California. It only lost 1 vote in the last census, but craziness like what’s discussed in these articles will accelerate the loss.
Huge swatches of NY are now wastelands. Look at Buffalo. There was a time when the NYS legislature wanted to tax localities based upon wealth which translated to population. They’d create laws that applied to census districts that had more than 1 million people. Well, that only applied to the NYC and Buffalo regions. Guess what? Buffalo lost more than half its population since JFK was elected and that formula doesn’t work anymore…..
For years, at Statewide candidates campaigned upon reviving “upstate” (I.w., the part of NYS that’s not NYC). No luck. Even NYC population was stagnant. From 1960 to 2000 it hardly changed. Then the floodgates of the great Southern Migration drawn by loose welfare programs and illegal immigration exploded NYC population by a grand total of 11% over 1960 totals. But hidden in that is the demographic change - NYC went from 85% white to 34% white. And far more people became dependent, causing the city to go bankrupt. To this day, city services are far behind where they were before the major shirt.
But look at an important factor. If NYC had increased at just the average national rate, it’s population would now be north of 14 million as compared 8 million.
Why? People don’t want to live here. The welfare state has swallowed it. And the crazy taxes created to pay for it are nuts. Get this one. There’s a special tax for bodegas that want to sell fruit outside their shops on their own sidewalk. Newspapers too. As the city widens the streets, they cut back on sidewalks. But if your basement went under the pre widened sidewalk, they now have a “vault” tax that you pay to ensure the stability of the street they built over your basement.
Sales tax? A can of pineapple juice? None. A can of Hawaiian Punch? Almost 9%. If you can eat it? Mostly zero. If you need groceries to clean to make sure you get rid of Covid cooties like bleach, paper towels, handwipes and detergent? 9%. Wanna a bagel? No tax if it’s just a bagel. Ask the guy to put some butter on it? 9% tax. Now get this….if you buy the bagel and the butter separately? No tax.
Here’s a favorite of mine….and it applies nationally, but the welfare states that require more revenue raise tons more from this gimmick. Gasoline is subject to sales tax. There’s already Federal and State excise taxes on gasoline. There’s a 9 cent excise tax on gasoline in NYC.
But that’s not the fun part…..there’s a near 9 PERCENT sales tax on gasoline. Gas goes up by $2 a gallon? NY makes an extra 18 cents a gallon. NY consumers buy more than 2 billion gallons of gas a year - thats almost $200 million in extra sales tax alone on just gasoline inflation.
The freebies handed out by NYC and State have destroyed its business community. Sure, part of that is due to globalism and summer states thst are more business friendly.
But it doesn’t and shouldn’t take a genius to figure out that when you attract millions of dependents it will increase your costs and decrease the quality of life.
When I was a kid growing up in projects built for returning veterans in the 60s, it was safe and crime free to the point that people left their doors and windows open so we had “project air conditioning” during the summer. Now? They had to change the name of the project because of all the crime, drugs and murders. By 1973, I experienced an early morning find one Saturday AM when I went into the project playground - two dead junkies laid out on the benches.
When we got to the projects my mom said “don’t get comfortable”. Now? We left in 1973. But guess what? NYC passed a law that says that anyone living with a leaseholder is e titled to a lease renewal when the first lessor dies. So almost 50 years later? The same family lives in my old apartment.
Why do people move away? Because of rotten policies that create miserable living environment at high prices.
Look at the electoral map from. 1960-2020. And look at what California has become.They had the NY experience to look at and ignored it. Even though so many of them came from NY..
"...Even NYC population was stagnant. From 1960 to 2000 it hardly changed. Then the floodgates of the great Southern Migration drawn by loose welfare programs and illegal immigration exploded NYC population by a grand total of 11% over 1960 totals..."
The population of New York City is rarely, if ever, "stagnant." NYC is an anomaly among American cities. There is room for very little "growth" as demographers define it. It's been full, comparatively, numbers wise, for the last 60-70 years. Ain't no more room. Build-outs, reclaimed industrial space, gentrification, larger apartment building replacing smaller ones---generally this is how NYC is able to grow, however incrementally, its total population numbers.
NYC is dynamic. There is a constant churn of residents---there always has been---it's one of the defining characteristics of the place. Young adults from the rest of America flock to the city to experience its vibrancy and cosmopolitanism, and many of them move on after a few years. NYC has always been the chief port of entry for immigrants coming to the U.S., many of whom eventually fan-out to other regions and locales in the U.S. to make their homes.
Your cherry-picked statistics are misleading and obscure the unique demographic dynamics that define NYC. Everybody's heard about the bad old NYC of the 1970s. From 1970-1980 the NYC population decreased by 10.6%---a whopping 800,000 people left the city. Conversely, in the 30 years from 1990-2000, NYC's population grew by 23%---an additional 1.5 million residents---for a current population of 8.8 million.
Why do people move away you ask? These days the exodus in NYC is led mostly by those who simply can't afford it anymore, and can at least afford to move elsewhere---those who remain are the wealthy and those who can't afford, for the time being, to pick up and move elsewhere even if they wanted to. In this one respect NYC has something very much in common with the rest of America---a rapidly dwindling middle class, once the backbone of both NYC and the U.S.---and demographics that suggest a city comprised of haves and have-nots.
Why do you believe it was a southern migration when the migration has gone on for 70,000 or more years. Cities grow and collapse. Cartage, Athens, Vilnius was the Capital of the Enlightened until the Russian conquest. The greatest city in the world is one in which you can live you "best" life as you see fit.
New York is still the best city in the USA because your chances of finding an urban community is still higher in New York than let us say Dallas where if you don't fit in you are a pile of dog shit on the front lawn. In Dallas suburbs your dog shitting on their front lawn is a crime worthy of capital punishment.
I lived on Chicago's Southside, if I needed some discourse with stupid people I went to Hyde Park. Talk about walking encylopediae I often get a spelling mistake for encyclopedias of half truths and misinformation. Maybe there is only one standard encyclopedia and Scalia took off with it.
https://nypost.com/2022/05/22/family-of-slain-straphanger-slams-city-hall-for-transit-crime/
People are leaving NY for the same reason they left in the 70s and 80s. The place is becoming unlivable again because of lawlessness. And you should not lose sight of the change in demographics. It’s not that New Yorkers don’t want to live with different kind of people. They don’t want to live with criminals and classes of people who support and shelter them, especially when the police have been neutered.
There is plenty of places within NYC to expand outside of Manhattan. Lots of places in Queens and Brooklyn. Staten Island doubled its population somehow during the period of peace, quiet and safety.
The wealthy who stay? Again, don’t confuse the publicity about billionaires row and Central Park. Manhattan ‘s population isn’t what drives NYC population shifts. It’s the outer boroughs which are far less policed and far more dangerous.
New York City’s middle class is still there, but to the extent it’s been squeezed, it’s been squeezed by the crime ridden housing projects that breed the criminals that prey on them.
New York City is actually a microcosm not just for California, but for the rest of the country,
You can’t intentionally import poverty and stay healthy and vibrant. If they imploded the projects they built post world war 2 and replaced it with decent housing you’d see 10 plus million people in a decade, assuming a return to normal policing.
NYC was 90% white between 1950 and 1960. It’s 34% today. There are more people on public assistance in NYC than the population of most US cities.
Yes, there has always been poverty in NYC. But now? It’s part of the city’s master plan. Why do you think so many Fortune 500 companies moved away? They can’t find educated workers for their offices who want to work. They don’t want to be around the crime and the crud anymore than their former employees do.
You can’t take a city, state or country, bring in millions of poor people, many who don’t speak the language and avoid watering down the quality of life for those already here.
Back in the day, people came here for opportunity. Now they come here for the freebies.
Speaking of Staten Island....
If you are ready for an autistic response there is no Manhattan and there is no California only millions of people where California and Manhattan are myth not reality.
This kind of ad hominem isn’t helpful. Sure they are wrong. And their attitudes of division - is part and parcel of the Democratic/left wing strategy. They proudly proclaim that they practice identity politics. That requires a victim and a victimizer. They can’t just disagree - they have to smear those who disagree with them as evildoing boogeymen. People who want to starve babies, push granny off a cliff and worse.
They cater to their subgroups by undermining time honored norms, like bail for violent criminals, increasing the value of prosecutable shoplifting to $950 and condemning Law enforcement.
This division and stoked anger is what is at the root of these shootings. These are the people who own them.
The homeless problem is not an affordable housing policy problem. Bad housing policies increase housing prices, causing people to move to cheaper towns, more economically dynamic states, live in their parents' basement. It doesn't cause people to move to homeless camps and skid row hotels. I don't know what the answer is for the drug addicts and mentally unstable people that make up our homeless population, but the answer can't be some head-in-the-sand trope about fixing it by building affordable housing.
Exactly. I think we need to offer wrap around services and really try to save lives, but we have to get much less accepting of addiction, crime and drug trafficking. We wring our hands, but this is a solvable problem. Ask addicts what they think. Being “tough” today saves lives tomorrow. See what your grandfather says when you tell him that today we allow people to get high, provide them with pipes, needles, food and state of the art camping tents to live where they want, start fires, harass people and collect our money to perpetuate their dystopia. This is what we’ve made of what he fought for.
You DO realize that the people who "collect our money" are the dozens, perhaps hundreds, of organizations, agencies, departments, NGOs, activist groups, advocates and do-gooder orgs, all providing nice white-collar jobs to the poli-sci and sociology majors sane people used to make fun of. The homeless, for the most part, don't see it "trickle down" to them.
You're absolutely right. Homelessness has become an industry with its own political base. Will they "solve" homelessness? Not a chance.
Land in a neighborhood costs the same, more or less. What would you prefer to do with the land. Build low profit affordable housing or luxury housing.
Keep in mind much of the costs of a sky is the same. The land, the foundation, the structural steel, the entire skeleton of the building comprises the highest costs. The finishes are far smaller percentage wise.
What fool builds affordable housing with that arithmetic.
You have to go where the land is dirt cheap. But Obama and his pals don’t want that. They don’t care if their people don’t get nice housing unless it’s in the middle of your luxury housing,
An excellent and often overlooked point. But the people making these decisions have never swung a hammer.
One "swings" a bat and "wields" a hammer. I suspect a majority of the commenters here have "swung" many a hammer, but rarely have "wielded" one.
You know, if there was somewhere for crazy people to go other than an ER where they're handed a bottle of prozac and released, maybe the Buffalo shooting and, many others, wouldn't have happened.
I lived in Hawaii for 20 years and just before I left, I saw the "affordable housing problem" push thousands of working people into tent camps along the beach.
You def hit on a big part of helping the homeless. Mental health facilities are needed. America decided many years ago (disfunctionally as usual) that prescription drugs were the answer. The only problem is...they're mentally ill! The won't take their meds! duh!
So, ask you, what is so wrong with helping the "drug addicts and mentally unstable"?
I have a simple solution for helping drug addicts. Legalize all drugs except one - nalaxone. If they want to take drugs and overdose, let them.
It's possible Hawaii is a special case. I assure you, no meaningful number of NY's D.C.'s or SF's homeless population are the working poor. Out of curiosity, who were the working poor in Hawaii's surf-side tent encampments. Immigrants? Young people ambiguously camping? I'm having a hard time picturing it.
I think you have read a tone into my description of our homeless population that I don't intend. Nothing is wrong with helping them. It would be great if some idea, policy or plan helped them. I'm just not offering one.
It's amusing how pussies like you are always willing to insult others from the safety of your anonimity. If you said that to my face, you would be hauled away bloody and on a stretcher.
Thank you for clarifying your argument with that video. In your initial post you state "As a California resident (Bay Area) I get a close-up view of progressive/liberal rules and regulations" and support it with this video. However, this video exposes that it is not liberalism per se that is a problem, as liberalism essentially posits that rights are inherent, that people consent to governance, have a voice in their governance, equal treatment under the law, but the lack of progressivity in the liberalism of the voters who voted against affordable housing.
Understand that liberalism runs a range from the immediate left of the monarch, implying more control in the interest of liberal values all the way to anarchy that rejects all centralized control. Not all liberalisms are progressive and as Ayn Rand argued in her objectivism that selfishness is a virtue you cannot find fault with the lack of progressivism in libertarianism.
Therefore, unlike conservatism, which is actually negating rights wherever they hold control, such as in their rejection of voters, negating a woman's right to control her own life, banning books, etc, liberals are not. Your problems are due to liberals using the political process to further their own interests at the expense of others, such as in their refusal to deal with the housing crisis in California that has created your huge economic, social and environmental problems. I am guessing that these liberals are libertarians with zero progressive values and they have the political power to obstruct meaningful progressive experiments and they chose more libertarian candidates.
Your characterization of what "conservatives" believe is so lazy and projected it's hard to take you seriously.
It's spot on.
Pelosi became a multimillionaire representing progressive poverty. They are the Welfare State.
LOL! Nope. Welfare is necessary because of conservative objections to equal opportunity and libertarian refusal to fight for equal opportunity. Pelosi has not acted very progressive.
Let's assume you're right - that conservative objections and libertarian stubbornness explains why welfare is a necessity. Walk me through how the states and cities with the most income inequality, poverty, homelessness, and terrible schools are Democratic party strongholds. Help me understand how Chicago, a place dominated by the Democratic party, allows 4000 people to be shot in a year (2021 stat), with most of the victims being minorities.
"Walk me through how the states and cities with the most income inequality, poverty, homelessness, and terrible schools are Democratic party strongholds. "
Really? You make allegations like most posters here, without any evidence. So, here's a couple of pieces of evidence that I have to rebut your unsubstantiated allegations:
- Illinois' per capita GDP ($74,052) and California's ($85,546) are higher than Texas' ($67,235) or Florida's ($56,301)
- Illinois' average income ($105,406.38) and California's ($109,260.14) is higher than Texas' ($96,468.32) or Florida's ($80,986.36)
There are a lot of details to any of those allegations that you present. For example, the Southern States are lower productivity states than Northern States and Red states get more federal money than Blue states overall. As for murder, Chicago is listed as 28th with 18.26 murders per 100,000 while St. Louis MO is first with 64.54 murders per 100,000.
Understand that a big part of the gun crime problem is that the lax law gun states are the source of many murder weapons, such as Indiana's "don't ask, don't tell" transfer law. Conservatives have opposed proper background checks and registries that would have reduced trafficking that leads to high gun crimes, Chicago police show that 60% of guns come from lax law gun states.
Average income comparisons per state are useless, because the relative costs in each state differ amd employers have to bake that into pay levels.
States like NY, Illinois and California have sky high tax rates that come off the top. And the cost of living in those states are crazy.
I live in Florida and summer in NY. I bought a cut up fresh fruit salad in Publix last week for $5.25. In NY? $12.05. Crazy.
As an indicator, Florida's GDP/capita is: $56,301, so it's a lower performing state than Illinois.
Averages do provide an indication, cost of living is generally higher in more desirable, better employment places and so the incomes are higher. Lower performance states like Florida get more federal help (#34) than higher performers like Illinois (#45). So, you are getting our tax payments as aid, because our business environment is more productive.
You're not that intellectually curious if you're unable to operate the browser of your choice with a search engine of your choice and find data that is public. All the data I mentioned is publicly available. Try the Chicago Tribune. They track shootings in Chicago. Don't be lazy.
LOL! My post is spot on.
NO IDIOT! There was more equal opportunity during the Trump Administration. What causes inequity is importing cheap labor to bottom out wages. Biden is full steam ahead to legalize all 8,000,000 uneducated invaders to compete for even lower wages:
Labor Unions that were busted by CHEAP immigrant labor.
Construction in Los Angeles has shifted from a heavily unionized labor force that was two-thirds white to a largely non-union one that is 70% Latino and heavily immigrant. American construction workers today make $5 an hour less than they did 40 years ago after adjusting for inflation. (2014 stats)
https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-fi-construction-trump/
As the immigrant-dominated firms grabbed more business, industry wages slipped from a peak of $6.58 an hour in 1983 to $5.63 an hour in 1985. The number of black janitors in L.A. plummeted from about 2,500 in the late 1970s to only 600 by 1985. Today, the city’s janitorial industry, like apparel manufacturing and hotel services, is almost entirely immigrant."
"Hispanics took affirmative-action slots and public-sector jobs from Blacks."
" Hispanic leaders in South L.A. launched an official complaint that blacks made up the overwhelming majority of the county hospital’s staff. A federal agency then forced the hospital to hire more Latinos, provoking bitterness among local blacks. "
CA is now only 4.5% Blacks they have also exited. More diversity is just a wedge issue.
Between 2000, - 2014 immigrants accounted for about 70% of the net job growth.
total change in employment was about 8.8 million. Of that, the number of
foreign-born workers grew about 6.2 million and for
native-born, the number was 2.6 million.
"There was more equal opportunity during the Trump Administration."
No, there wasn't.
Bra-VO, good sir! Then again "𝑄𝑢𝑜𝑑 𝑔𝑟𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑠 𝑎𝑠𝑠𝑒𝑟𝑖𝑡𝑢𝑟, 𝑔𝑟𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑠 𝑛𝑒𝑔𝑎𝑡𝑢𝑟".
So fuck you, and yes, there was.
Fuck you!
Marketing to silicon valley and legally sponsored insider trading help to fund her $10/quart gelato, covid haircuts and all of the collagen lip injections and face tightening she's ever wanted.
I am the most indecisive of deciders. My Federal Department of health recommends cannabis for people my age. It ain't going to kill us prematurely and seems to slow or stop Alzheimer's. For people my age who've always held their sanity suspect, it is welcome advice.
I recommend LA Kush over Gelato but only by .2 on a ten point scale and at about $25 for 3.5 grams who needs millions of dollars to be content at our age?
Can I recommend my own comment? Is that at least kosher style?
Funny thing about the truth. For people my age keeping us at home so we can live long and prosper is the kind of investment only governments understand. Their job is to protect us from future disruptions in the supply chain. My government has done a superb job but for us our future is our great grandchildren. We are Darwinian and Darwin is about natural selection not design.
Since e.pierce is off the job, I'll take my turn.
Moe is a moe-ron (see what I did there?) who mistakes randomness for creativity, and, much worse, worships the stylish fascism of Trudeau.
Pathetic, Moe. You live in paradise while your fellow citizens are lied about, attacked and abused by your hero. That isn't just wrong-headed, it's vile.
Silicon Valley is a libertarian stronghold, not progressive by any measure.
Doesn't matter. She does their biding. Poverty, crime, terrible schools and corruption keep the money flowing. That's all that counts.
Is that all you have? Like most others on Matt's site, you just throw your feces around because you have little of substance to add to any given discussion. What does any of that post mean? The fact is that the US political system is setup to be corrupt because it allows money to flow to candidates whether as campaign contributions, honorarium for votes disguised as speaking payments, allowing ex-officials to become paid lobbyists, etc, and any move to control that legal corruption has been opposed by the GOP, including Mitch McConnell who has obstructed moving bills along in the process. Also, a big part of the problem is in a disengaged electorate that likes to whine and use ideology to choose their team that enables the least competent in the electorate to gain an office. And this is exacerbated by gerrymandering that should be outlawed at the federal level replacing humans with algorithms that create districts entirely on population, not party, race, or any other factor.
Poverty and crime are both affected by education, controlled at the local and state levels, so Pelosi has nothing to do with them (https://www.ppic.org/publication/financing-californias-public-schools/). Poverty and crime are complex subjects that are directly affected by education as it affects competency, the less competent one is, the greater the risk of poverty and crime. Another factor is opportunity as discussed in this piece: https://www.ibtimes.com/why-more-black-engineers-arent-being-hired-silicon-valley-2178221.
It's cute you believe that politicians operate in silos. That's very good to believe if you're in the tank for one of the sociopathic teams, which seems to be your domain. Call me when the shuttle lands.
Jeff I just entertained a scientist friend from Silicon Valley. He is a little over half my age but he is a brilliant scientist. He tells me the giants of silicon valley are as banal as they come. It is all a game, morality ethics and conscience play no part in who can piss highest up the wall.
My friend is a great scientist and I love playing games but he never plays games.
To attribute a moral or ethical or philosophical foundation to a pissing match is lunacy but your comments always seem to me to make sense.
It is possible to be ignorant and wise and brilliant and be a jackass.
Noam Chomsky is a libertarian. We are not talking linguistic philosopher libertarian we are talking sophistry and illogic.
How insane does one have to be to believe we need anarchy to take us through an information revolution. The only remedy to bullshit is truth and in America truth doesn't make it to the Big Brother's giant screen.
In the land of the blind the one eyed man is king.
I have one eye that works but I am sane and the last thing I want to be is king.
"How insane does one have to be to believe we need anarchy to take us through an information revolution. "
I don't know if you have ever read or heard what anarchists think would happen without institutional government, if you haven't try listening to Michael Malice on Lex Fridman's podcast:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2tXN7ZnSfU&list=PLrAXtmErZgOdP_8GztsuKi9nrraNbKKp4&index=32
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5rNoV1Qy_Q&list=PLrAXtmErZgOdP_8GztsuKi9nrraNbKKp4&index=85&t=216s
I don't see how it would work beyond the traditional clan or tribe level, such as with the American Indians, but they apparently do. In a nutshell, it seems to me that they have a big problem with government's control of violence that has no balance with the individual. An example of theirs is the hypocrisy of the founding fathers claiming that rights were inherent and then claiming that blacks had none. Today's conservatives are again proving that they don't believe in rights, merely the tyranny of the majority in their rejection of Roe.
"Noam Chomsky is a libertarian. We are not talking linguistic philosopher libertarian we are talking sophistry and illogic."
I never said that it was. Libertarians are liberal, they posit that rights are inherent, they are not granted. So, as with liberalism as a whole, libertarianism runs a spectrum, not all subscribe to Ayn Rand's "selfishness" doctrine.
"To attribute a moral or ethical or philosophical foundation to a pissing match is lunacy but your comments always seem to me to make sense."
But it is that libertarianism doesn't require them to have any more ethical or philosophical foundation than concern about themselves, about their wealth: https://aynrand.org/novels/the-virtue-of-selfishness/
I think John Ralston Saul's Voltaire's Bastards (The Dictatorship of Reason in the West) belongs in the Western Philosophical Canon. As Saul might say Rand is a third rate philosopher at best.
In the 1990s Time magazine called Saul a prophet.
It is 2022 and Saul is still prophetizing.
Noam Chomsky is what I knew as a libertarian 60 years ago and he has a solid moral compass. When Goldwater read his convention speech the Libertarians almost expelled Karl Hess the Third who had written the speech from their membership. They knew the GOP was totalitarian.
They knew Reagan was a fascist and Goldwater was an ignoramous and a useful idiot.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akYYm47pCP4
The political divide in the GOP is not a polarized divide it is three extremes. It is Fascist, it is conservative and it is libertarian. Fascist is the opposite of libertarian and fascist and libertarian are different galaxies with different metaphysics.
When you understand the difference between libertarianism and conservatism we can talk about the meaning of fascism and maybe we can talk about real philosophers like Hannah Arendt.
I am neither a libertarian nor an American Conservative. I am a Quebec conservative. We have an impenetrable wall between church and state and peace order and good government.
We are a secular humanist liberal democracy and whatever else you are you are the mightiest Empire that ever was and have the power to destroy or help repair the world.
Tikkun Olam
Did you write this?
"LOL! You're an idiot Trump supporter. Go to hell."
It's in my E-mail but not in the discussion.
You are an A$$ hole for sucking Biden!
Yeah, I did. I deleted it thinking that I'd have something better, but no. Go to hell you Trump supporter, stupid freak.
Your first post was insipid and you've flat-lined since.
But whatever. I sense that you are of a particular ilk that has, as it's greatest (among many) flaws, a complete lack of self-awareness. Award yourself another prize and go away. You win, and the commentary here is improved. Deal?
May I respond with a more autistic point of view.
Pelosi is Pelosi she did what she understood to be the right thing.
The best book I ever read on the subject is titled Voltaire's Bastards (the Dictatorship of Reason in the West) It was written long before John Ralston Saul was chosen to head PEN International. Saul is still with us and talking Ukraine, Covid and the new world order from an Aboriginal perspective.
If only in 1992 Saul had called his book The Dictatorship of Reason in the West (An Ode to the Banality of Evil) it would be in the canon of Western thought. Nobody in America knows who Voltaire is.
"Pelosi is Pelosi she did what she understood to be the right thing." Lol, she should hire you to write this nonsense for her.
Voltaire believed that those individuals who were capable of determining the correctness of their actions through their own powers of reasoning would find the proper course to take and would do so based on free will.= and Pelosi has... for herself. Hell with everyone, she's going to buy another house.
I am a great fan of Voltaire and highly recommend John Ralston Saul's Voltaire's Bastards (The Dictatorship of Reason in the West) 1992
My wife just read it on my recommendation and she said it belongs in the Western canon of philosophy and John Ralston Saul is alive and well and is a year older than I am.
Saul's CV indicates he is the world expert on press freedom and in the 1990s Time Magazine called him a prophet.
Saul is a Socratic and even as Socrates becomes as mythical and legendary as Jesus, truth remains a cardinal sin to power.
One question are you aspiring Voltairian Bastard ? My choice would be (An Ode to the Banality of Evil) as a subtitle.
My wife is acknowledged as an outstanding philosopher in her educational specialty and I failed kindergarten.
Some times professor Higgins is heroine and Liza Doolittle is the hero.
Are you familiar with the term "credentialism"? It's related to 𝑎𝑟𝑔𝑢𝑚𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑢𝑚 𝑎𝑑 𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑖𝑐𝑢𝑛𝑑𝑖𝑎𝑚, and you are chock full of it.
You really don't want to talk about credentialism with someone who failed kindergarten.
I love my wife she taught me how to write albeit I first started writing with my kindergarten keyboard at about 55. My wife is my hero so please forgive me.
As for pierce you have no understanding of the relationship. I cannot tell lies I am not so smart that I can cover them up.
Pierce's raison d'etre is to get me angry enough to call him vile epithets just as if I was was one of his self affirming Yahoos.
You know what a Yahoo is. Swift's bipedal creature with the brain of horse and the appearance of a man was quite the joke but he never met you.
At least pierce is smart enough to understand a person who spends his time criticizing credentialism is not a person to call a credentialist
pierce is credentialism's great touchstone and he loves quoting fools and madmen who write books. My wife was an academic and she understands the canon of educational philosophy.
When I questioned whether he could even read Habermas he started a debate he knew I wouldn't respond to.
He accused me of many things and I responded with an invitation to visit for a couple of weeks. I do live in a very popular tourist region here in Quebec I said the only thing my wife and I required was an occasional help with the dishes.
I would extend the same invitation to you but if I wish to talk to an idiot I always have myself to talk to.
My wife knew Bloom who wrote about standing on the shoulder of giants but of course even standing on the shoulders of giants an asshole is an asshole is an asshole.
Also didn’t y’all basically ship your Blacks to the East Bay?
We speak different languages. I speak the language I was taught at The Protestant School Board of Greater Montreal.
Liberal means free to respond to the existing conditions as they arise. We were Darwinian.
Conservative means trying to preserve the conditions as they were. Life was good for English Protestants in the Quebec where I was raised. The 85% Catholic major knew their place and the Protestants and the Church ruled, and we Jews kept our mouths shut. Liberals and conservatives ruled.
The government could padlock union halls, Kingdom Halls and Jewish meeting places until 1957.
It is oxymoronic in the extreme to be a radical conservative or status quo liberal in today's revolutionary times. We live in a small village and when you defecate on the path someone will step in it.
That is why John Ralston Saul Said: Cynicism is Democracies greatest threat.
America cannot be a democracy if it want to bring back what was and can never be again ; Your conservatives aren't conservative and your liberals are vilified as antiAmerican.
Who are America's liberals Noam Chomsky, Richard Wolfe, Bernie Sanders, Chris Hedges, Marianne Williamson, Tulsi Gabbard and Cornel West and even relative unknowns like Matt Taibbi.
Anyone who says this ain't working and something must change is a liberal you can be a liberal Trumpist or a liberal right wing Antifascist.
Gorbachev was a liberal, Kruschev and Putin are conservatives.
Putin is as Russian as the Romanovs when they claimed Crimea in the 1850s.
You remember 1853 the Russians lost Crimea, they had revolution they lost their Empire outside of Russia and they know they lost but won't admit it and it is hard to surrender Empire ask right wing America which is everything to the right of Barack Obama's left flank.
I am Reminded of The Holy Grail that is Russia's Quest
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmInkxbvlCs
In the early 19th century the world's best selling author was Thomas Chandler Halihburton who gave us the Early Bird catches the worm, a stitch in time and "When a man is wrong and won't admit it he always gets angry."
Russia's only sane course is surrender and beg to join NATO especially if America is no longer in charge. Sweden and Finland the are freest wealthiest most stable democracies on the planet are my choice for world leadership.
Stephen Fry is one of my favourite, writers, actors, philosophers, scientists, humourists and celebrities his take on the Treaty of Westphalia says it all about white supremacy.
Kind of tells us all we need to know about Russia and Ukraine
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-WO73Dh7rY
Growing up Jewish in Montreal meant you had the same rights as black sharecroppers in Alabama but a lot more privileges. It wasn't that you weren't Black it was that you weren't a poor Catholic. They had neither rights nor privileges . They were the people that saved a wretch like me.
Scandinavia has no diversity and why they are successful:
Switzerland – 90% European.
French 80%, French
Italian - 83% European
Sweden - 82% are Swedish.
Finland - 90% are Finnish
Norway - 86.2% are ethnic Norwegians.
Denmark, 86.9% are Danis
US, 57% European
Chinese, 91.6% Han
Conservative means to Conserve. Like
Not throwing out the SCOTUS and the Constitution.
Not spending and taxing foolishly.
Not expanding the bureaucracy to the point of redundant inefficiency.
You should go play with your NewMaxer Powerful Rotation Male Electric Automatic Multi-Function Silicone machine. You seem stressed.
https://www.amazon.com/NewMaxer-Automatic-Multi-Function-Masturbator-Masturbation/dp/B00S8AWSZ4
I live in a secular humanist liberal democracy where church and state exist behind separate walls. Gender, race and religion are not secular identities. Our abortion law is simple: only doctors and government facilities can perform this medical procedure everything else is between you and your religion.
We pay the highest taxes in North America and we are the richest, healthiest, freest and happiest nation on the planet.
We are a democracy and America is a flawed democracy. For me liberal democracy is like virginity you are or you aren't you can't mess with Mr Inbetween.
In Quebec corporations are not human they possess the same rights as other pieces of paper like ass wipe.
Burl Ives
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6iNbigm3X4
Your constitution was an "improvement" over what was; the landlords lived in America and ran it but it was more Putin's Russia than FDR's America. Before the consumer society most Americans lived in poverty. We are in the post consumer age and Quebec fossil fuels are a no no and we will eliminate them as quickly as possible beginning in about 2001 when the 21st century was said to begin.
By the way the Han are not at all homogenous they are as diverse as Americans but they were a European colony not a sovereign nation.
Stephen Fry on Westphalia is worth days of discussion and worth every second of the five minutes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-WO73Dh7rY&t=47s
"Got a hot-rod chevy with the twin carburetor, and I know a gal that's a real sharp tomater...." Don't let e. pierce see this and no more Burl Ives.
"Uncle" Burl was that somewhat nebulous, creepy friend of your father's who you never got a handle on and who lived in another state and showed up at Thanksgiving every three or four years.
Cute. Burl Ives sounds familiar. I had an MG B convertible with duel SU Carburetors. I rebuilt those suckers, got my cylinders re borne and oversized pistons put in. She was a screamer.
I was driving to Maine one night and didn't see a car for and hour. Decided I would test her. Got of to 102 and wouldn't ya know...right behind me "WoopWoopWoop" the police pull me over. He comes up to the car and says, "Got a little lead foot there honey?"
I confessed! He giggled and said, "I didn't stop you for speeding. There's this big moose standing in the road up aways. If you catch him, your car doesn't stand a chance." He gave me a chance and that was nice.
I miss that car. It was so much fun.
The reason? NO DIVERSITY in Canada!
You are WHITE racists.
CANADA Black Population 3.5%.
Canada is home to 500,000 people who speak Spanish as their mother tongue.
That's why you have money.
"Canadians are among the world's worst carbon emitters. Here's what we can do about it"
Canada is trailing behind other wealthy countries when it comes to cutting carbon emissions
https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/how-canadians-can-cut-carbon-footprints-1.6202194
If you don't behave yourself you will have to maintain your own defense.
Canada military spending/defense budget for 2019 was $22.20B, a 2.34% decline from 2018. The US Is DEFENDING you. Your army of 26,000 men is totally inadequate.
https://www.wearethemighty.com/mighty-history/us-defend-these-67-countries/
If you were forced to spend $800,000,000,000 on defense you wouldn't have enough for food.
You should be reported as a "BOT" because you know NOTHING about Canada.
I eat local and local is US and Canada and the food is great and inexpensive. Our farmers are wealthy businessmen and we have about one million more jobs than people and the only country we need defending from is pissing distance from here. It ain't your fault your brainwashed but get a fucking passport before the world gets out those old Yanqui go home signs. Who are you defending the Saudi Princes, the Brazilian Trump, the Chinese Xi, the Philippines Duterte, the Eygptian el sisi. Who are you defending us from you are the only threat to our sovereignty. It was Mike Pompeo who disputed our sovereignty over our inland waterways and Russia came to our defense along with Norway Sweden and Demark and all the Arctic liberal democracies. Nobody wants to follow America down the Rabbit hole there are enough Mad Hatters here to drive us to distraction.
In case you missed it when I first said it.
George Carlin on diversity
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pc0ZHsoHAlE
Now I know you're a BOT. The US has more dollars out side the country than in it. The US dollar is used as currency in most countries in the world. I have not seen a Canadian coin in the US in 50 years.
I'm not defending anyone. You are attempting to defend Canada an saying you are holier than the US when it comes to diversity, when you HAVE NONE.
We have 59,000,000 people on Welfare. Nearly 40% — of all recipients are black. Your whole population in 2020 was 37,742,154. When you have 23,600,000 Blacks, you will have the right to brag that you're DIVERSE.
Toronto is Canada's largest city it is majority minority. The leader of Quebec's official opposition grew up in Haiti. We don't recognize race as a thing in Quebec and we are one quarter of Canada's population. I think I read how to lie with statistics 50 years ago.
The only hyphenated Canadian is The Right Honourable Addrienne Clarkson who is a Canadian Canadian. You know know as much about Canada as you know about America. Less than nothing.
Guess what? We have racists in Canada probably as many as there are in America only we don't elect them to public office and if we do the political parties take care of it because we are a democracy and America is a flawed democracy.
To this Canadian democracy is like virginity, you are or you aren't
One Black man does not redeem your racism. The population stats are in your face.
"We have racists in Canada probably as many as there are in America only we don't elect them to public office and if we do the political parties take care of it because we are a democracy and America is a flawed democracy."
You have not near as much Diversity as the US. We are experiencing Replacement Theory only It's the CENNSUS REPLACEMENT PREDICTION that Democrats don't want you to know about.
https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/newsroom/releases/2015/cb15-tps16_graphic.pdf
You have no fear of replacement. No fear of becoming a Welfare State. We are going down under the Safety Trampoline. Only about 18% of the population is paying taxes now. Top 20% of tax payers pay 87% of the taxes.
63% of NON citizen Households Access Welfare
https://cis.org/Report/63-NonCitizen-Households-Access-Welfare-Programs
36% of Latinos on welfare (TBL. 7-3)
https://www.nap.edu/read/9719/chapter/8
Are you getting the picture. What do you think of Diversity?
Thank You!
Totally agree he needs this:
NewMaxer Powerful Rotation Male Electric Automatic Multi-Function Silicone machine.
https://www.amazon.com/NewMaxer-Automatic-Multi-Function-Masturbator-Masturbation/dp/B00S8AWSZ4
(Stolen from a another Substack member)
Precisely. I litigated industrial torts cases over five decades. Many government appointed lawyers, insulated from all consequence and accountability, often perform as lawyers insulated from all consequence and accountability.
The definition of a broken regulatory state is one where defense lawyers, knowing all the relevant facts of a dispute, can't guess within several orders of magnitude where a case will settle until they hear the enforcement attorneys' first offer and the insincere tone of self righteousness with which it is delivered.
Great comment but if I may ask about the metaphysics? What is the fiduciary responsibility of the fiduciary state.
In Canada a lawyer is responsible to reveal all pertinent evidence he is aware of to the opposition. The purpose of law in Canada is to establish justice.
In America "winning is the only thing." Vince Lombardi.
For a good Catholic Lombardi was sure anti Christian.
I love Pope Francis. I still bare scars from the Crusades. Talk about miracles a Christian Pope. This Jew will not be around to ever see a Christian America but I live in a Christian Nation of 80% skeptics and an impenetrable wall between church and state. Our ACLU calls this antidemocratic The ACLU is not liberal it is theocratic. Your liberals aren't liberals they're theocrats.
Christianity isn't about faith. Faith and a nickel won't get you coffee at Dunkin Donuts but there is free coffee down the street the only price is listening to other's nonsense because you don't believe enough of your own nonsense. Christianity is about serving and caring for your fellow man. Faith is really beyond our pay grade we are stupid apes.
America's 21st century civil war is a holy war of competing theocracies neither resembling the teachings of someone many believe once existed.
Yeah. Back in the 90s a friend who worked at the same bank as me got a job at a San Francisco housing agency. A few months in, I asked her how it compared. She said she made more money for less than half the work. Later she invited me to one of their Friday afternoon "office meetings" at a local bowling alley. Didn't see any work occur, but it was fun. Nice gig if you can get it, sucks for everybody else.
"Institutions everywhere are filling up with employees bearing skills “orthogonal” to the bureaucratic mission, part of what’s been packaged as progress but feels more like a vast jobs program for otherwise unemployable pseudo-intellectuals."
This is the key passage for me. In CA, there is no will to solve problems, that would only eliminate your job. There is only incentive to create more "problems" that need to be [never] solved.
I remember when people used to joke about Bachelor of Arts students having no job prospects post-college. Well jokes on us, they invented an brand new industry for themselves that pays very well, and browbeat entire societies into going along with their jobs program.
BINGO!! Education equals indoctrination, more education, more indoctrination. If you don't believe that, look around at the product's of education. Even the German's wanna be financial engineers, not real engineers. Perverse incentives give perverse results.
Robert I hate to disagree. I have a high school diploma. I am educated beyond most academics. I failed school starting with kindergarten. Education happens outside of school don't confuse education with Pavlovian responses.
Educated people are lucky to survive the academy.
My wife is a Doctor of philosophy, she doesn't drink, smoke or do drugs. She is a space cadet and much admired by the academy because she is educated at the university of Chicago which is the model for University of Alberta. My wife loves both Uof Cs because she still believes in English classical education. My wife is wise far beyond her 84 years but damn her Michigan upbringing and her scientist father. Her father ran as a Eugene V Debs Democrat in deep dark crimson Michigdamn.
I love the people of Michigan they deserve something better than Princes Romneys, Snyders and DeVoses.
What is good for them isn't good for Detroit, Benton Harbour, Flint or Grouse Point.
What is wrong with teaching science, mathematics and Darwin?
There is no other designer than ourselves here on Earth and we are apes and design isn't our forte.
Reagan's nickname was Deutsche German not Dutch and he was an Irish American NAZI.
It is there in B+W ask Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall it is all there in video and print.
They don't teach Darwinism any more because he didn't believe in subsidizing the inept. He thought they should be weeded out for the ADVANCEMENT of the species. With the NEW PROGRESSIVE educational policy, if some students are gifted or advanced and stand out above the rest, cut their heads off in the name of "EQUITY" we need a more compliant, ignorant population.
Their whole educational and social policies are "orthogonal".
IMHO, the worst thing they've done is to have destroyed "childhood"; what they call Free range children, we called children. This is self perpetuating and I see no way back in the Western world. You only start to live at the edge of your comfort zone; fear now rules and few venture outside their comfort zone. Deskilling and dumbing down is in full warp speed and what passes for culture or food for that matter isn't fit for the mind or body and the descent into the mediocrity of every thing and every one seems to have no bottom. Look out, here comes the metaverse pretending to be life.
And not only ruined the wonderful, supremely educational experience of a "free range" childhood, but EXTENDED IT. Now people are considered, and consider themselves, to be pre-adults into their mid-20s!
What weak and anxious people they are becoming. I agree with their sad self-assessment that parenting is just impossible. For them, anyway.
Totally agree. Movie theaters are being replaced by Netflix as Prime. New released movies for $19, why mix with your neighbors at the CINIMA. You may be corrupted by a new thought.
I agree and support everything you say. Mark Twain said it better than me so I have no idea what you read of mine. Actually, my life experience is very similar to yours. Education equals indoctrination, more education equals more indoctrination to where you are so invested in the disinformation you received, had implanted in your vulnerable young formative mind you are incapable of empirical thought. Old saying.."one priest is better than 100 police or soldiers, cheaper and more effective "! Substitute teacher for priest and and multiply by at least 10X. Nullius in verba!
I have a large Twain collection from Sawyer to a Pen Warmed up in Hell. Nobody understood Hell like Mark Twain. His life was Hell but he wrote the plain unvarnished truth. He understood that the Christian Heaven was perpetual Hell.
He had a habit of telling the truth in an inimitable way. Of course he's fallen by the wayside in a society that needs his wisdom and humor more than ever.
The financialization and incentive structures come from the culture at large. The message people base their lives on is that education and credentialing will move you up ahead of others. And since it's physically impossible for everyone to get ahead, we have overproduction of people with expectations that don't align with the world.
The education system is indeed indoctination, but here it's only a tool used by some in that class to make jobs for themselves. (Most undergraduates are indoctrinated by their peers and the larger culture which they are heavily plugged into and aren't indoctrinated in the classroom any more than we all are "indoctrinated" in our workplaces.)
Flames cough up 6 goals, but still win going away.
Got goaltending?
Oilers have goaltending except for when we don't
Oscar Wilde nailed it: "The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy."
People see being in the managerial class as the way to the good life, so we created the massive higher education scheme, which has given us overproduction of people who expect to be in what is necessarily a small sliver of the population.
Many of them also have a distorted view of the social privileges they believe themselves to have earned. (higher ed. amplifies this, but it's an issue in the society at large)
We have a class of people akin to the "superfluous man" from the 19th Century, but our failed aristocrats moved up into the position, rather than falling into it.
And Biden wants to encourage these noneducation programs by paying off their loans because they were unable to prepare them for a job. He needs dependency on government to install a Welfare State a one world government - The New World Order run by the self appointed Elites. Nancy will make the whole US poop in the streets to keep her job.
So what's essentially happening is that there's no Cui Bono anymore. Some lawyers are getting rich, but that money is peanuts. This is bureaucracy and regulation for its own sake.
This ends poorly. I see CA as a late stages drug addiction. There's a bottom here somewhere but not until voters rebel. But if they do rebel, it's game over. If CALIFORNIA Hispanic voters start going even slightly pink or even much less blue, that means Democratic Party is effectively not a national party anymore. At some point making women's sports safe for men is not gonna cut it when gas in LA is $7.
I am a crazy Quebecer I want $200 a gallon gas and Nuclear and Hydro electric power and I want publicly owned transparent crown corporations like we have in Quebec and Ukraine. I may even vote for our conservative government after Legault promised no public funds for the oil industry, regardless of the cost of gasoline.
The most absurd rule I came across in LA was when I was trying to get a density bonus approved for a smallish (5 story) multifamily building somewhere in West LA. They denied the plans because the rent-controlled units were all in the same area overlooking the parking lot on the lowest levels. The rule was that the rent-controlled units needed to be distributed around the building, even on the top floor, and had to have the same layout and square footage as the market units.
I just shook my head in disbelief. Its fine to require the construction of more affordable housing in the most expensive parts of the city, but why would you force a developer to forego even *more* market income to subsidize a low-income renter who lives in an equivalent or even better unit? How is that fair or just?
Suffice to say that only the most corrupt actors do business in LA real estate as that is the only way to turn a profit.
They call your dilemma ‘equity’
I understand the rationale, still disagree with the outcome. I met many fortunate well-connected souls with excellent incomes who lived in rent-controlled units who would never dream of giving up their privileged slice of paradise no matter how long and arduous their commute became.
California is the land of unintended consequences of well-meaning but poorly thought out policy.
The path to hell is paved with good intentions.
They're not good intentions. They're corrupt.
Turns out hell was west this entire time. Who knew!
It's also the land of no apologies, no regrets and no accountability. It's like Vegas without any of the benefits.
You might be interested in the campaign of Kate Pynoos, who is running for LA Council on a platform that includes trying to streamline housing.
Streamline? How about government gets out of housing. Pass some building codes and let the market handle it. I know I can't afford to live on the beach in Hawaii and I don't think I have any "Right" to.
I mean that more or less is my view. Zoning to separate housing from heavy industry was a public health triumph. Beyond that, almost all of land use planning is harmful. A healthy city is one where people can put land to use to serve their families and communities in evolving ways over time. That's how literally every city in history was built up until the mid-twentieth century.
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/7/3/making-normal-neighborhoods-legal-again
Approval of individual projects should be almost entirely ministerial. You submit a plan, show that it conforms to safety and environmental codes, and then you build that plan and inspectors make sure you're following it. That's it. Not paying off every neighbor who shows up with some imaginary complaint.
SF's "discretionary review" process is one of the worst in the nation, possibly THE worst. I know people in SF who've been shaken down by neighbors for five-figure sums, to allow them to proceed with re-models, under threat of filing for a DR.
Love Strong Towns!
Check out this news story. This developer has been trying to build a 160 home development for like 5 years now as a small town which the development isnt in somehow has a say in whether thr developer can build it. This is all very rural farm country with good expressway access.
Imagine how much this increases the cost of homes if developers have to make plans and then fight numerous city councils for years. Meanwhile we have 0 home inventory and people cant afford homes.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.mlive.com/news/ann-arbor/2022/06/developers-forge-ahead-with-172-unit-project-with-homes-medical-offices-outside-chelsea.html%3foutputType=amp
The Hock Principle: Simple, clear purpose and principles give rise to complex and intelligent behavior; complex rules and regulations give rise to simple and stupid behavior.
Actually, California went to the dogs a long time ago. The regulations, administrative overreach, and lawyer plagues did not cause the decline but are rather an ineffective attempt to arrest it. I place the blame on capitalist exuberance and the resultant propaganda, which convinced millions of poor, dumb and incompetent people to migrate there -- all it took was a bus ticket. The economy at first puffed up greatly as the newcomers were robbed and cheated as most newcomers are, and the aforesaid capitalists, lawyers, regulators, and b.s. artists puffed up themselves more mightily still. If they didn't have regulators and lawyers it would be something else.
'What "decline" was over-regulation an "attempt to arrest"?'
It's in my crank right above. Capitalist exuberance, also known as boosterism, produced great loads of propaganda which held out California to be utopia, which, in a way, it was as long as one didn't have to share it with a huge mob of largely rootless drifters of low talent and ambition. I think the process started in the 1920s. Something similar happened in Florida. I have witnessed the sad ends of both developments.
GROWTH grows into competing interests, many of which seem to be curiously unexpected. The competing interests seek management and regulation in order to preserve and increase whatever they perceive as valuable. For this purpose lawyers and bureaucrats are necessary. The ramshackle charm of mid-20th-century San Francisco will never come again, although some other ramshackle charm may ensue after the decline of the US as the world's hegemon. Read the comments here -- most of them are whining that things were nice in the past and are not nice any more. Precisely. And the not-niceness didn't fall from the heavens. If you want to see who created it, look around.
As for postmodernism, the loss of meaning is obviously a failure of will, because human being will meaning into existence. But that's a separate discussion.
I have lived in CA for 22 years. I have seen the state devolve from the place I admired and wanted to be part of, to a place run by people who roll up the windows when they fart. But the problem isn't just with incompetent politicians who lack the courage to do the job they were hired to do. The problem is with voters/citizens/residents who all too often buy into nonsensical groupthink virtue signaling, unwilling to throw out the incompetents lest they be branded Trump supporters/Republicans/racists/etc. The voters lack the courage to vote their conscience and admit when they've made mistakes, so they elect people that reflect those self defeating values.
My favorite visual of California’s dysfunction is watching people drive around in their cars wearing masks with their car windows up. Would that the few police who dare to patrol could write tickets for stupidity.
The masks help cover the smell of their own farts.
Totally stealing that fart joke. Haha.
"A common complaint is things in the state take forever. California announced a high-speed train in 1996 and the current plan is for service on the L.A-San Francisco line to begin in 2033. One executive I spoke with described the state’s development as “frozen in aspic.”"
The "high-speed" train will never succeed. It is currently hoped to start operations when construction is completed from Bakersfield to Merced. How many passengers will want to pay high prices to travel between those cities? And part of the line is being constructed single-track. If it does run from LA to SF, the cost will be at least $300 each way, higher than the airlines charge for a faster trip, and way above the bus line tickets.
At the same time the line is causing problems for the areas in which it is being built. Farms are being split, making it difficult to work on the land.
This project is an example of how California is imposing irrational plans on the state, of which the endless regulations are a large part. They make sensible actions difficult and much more expensive than they should be. They end up causing more damage to the population and the environment than they could possibly save.
"The "high-speed" train will never succeed."
Actually, it did. The goal was to funnel enormous amounts of taxpayer money to political constituents and to shame anyone pointing this out as climate deniers. Worked wonderfully. What, you thought there was an actual usable train being built in this plan!? LOL!
Excellent point. Victor Davis Hanson calls it "California's Stonehenge".
Stonehenge actually got built and in record time, comparatively. How’s it a good comparison?
The environmental impact study only took one lunar month.
The residue of the "rail line" will be lots of columns sticking up out of the ground and in various shapes when someone visits 100 years from now.
Actually, the 12-inch Stonehenge from 'This Is Spinal Tap'.
It’s California’s Loch Ness Monster. Now all they need are some grainy photos claiming it exists.
Exactly Jennifer. The $35b train is now over $100b, won’t be a “speed train” after all, and no one will ever use it enough to make break even even a remote possibility.
Looks like the Simpsons predicted the future once again. (Monorail Town Hall & Song)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taJ4MFCxiuo
“What I say? What’s it called?”
"As one of his first acts in office in 2011, Gov. Rick Scott canceled a $2.4 billion federally funded and shovel-ready bullet train from Orlando to Tampa because it carried “an extremely high risk of overspending taxpayer dollars with no guarantee of economic growth.’’"
Don't forget who pushed this - Jerry Brown. He went begging for Chinese investment in the state's HSR project when he was governor because stateside investors saw the waste and fantastical ridership estimates and laughed him out the door. Chinese investors then laughed him out the door.
If it's Brown, flush it down.
Actually, since he blocked completion of the reservoirs needed for the added 10 million residents in the state, it's hard to "flush it down".
Blocked the reserviors but advocated for the twin tunnel solution which would have stolen water from the north. The only thing Brown did well was enrich himself.
Pat Brown, his dad, was a moderate along the lines of a Truman. He wouldn’t stand a chance with today’s Democrats. He contributed a lot to California’s infrastructure. As for his entitled son, besides dating Linda Ronstadt, he unionized California’s state employees, further ossifying Sacramento’s responsiveness to its minions. And “French Laundry” Newsom makes Jerry look like Barry Goldwater.
But if it's yellow, let it mellow
In a very short period of time, China developed 40,000 K of high speed rail including mag lev which the German's couldn't do and sold them the patent's which they obviously improved. USA has ZERO high speed trains, ZERO. CHINA build's a Destroyer for 1/7 of the US cost and on budget, on time. This cannot stand.
Ever bought steel or wire from China? They can't make stranded wire correctly, I wouldn't trust that high speed train they have.
Can't tell if you're upset because China has fast choo choos and you want some or because they build things with tofu construction and you think we should. China has roughly 3 million human slaves, damns that aren't built correctly and lockdowns that go on for weeks. Do you want those too?
That has nothing to do with it. China is not beholden to frivolous litigation, and many of their politicians have Masters and PhD’s in STEM fields.
You gotta quit drinking the Kool aid.
okie dokie, artichokie.
1/7 the cost is because they don't pay the people who build destroyers... If high speed rail was economically viable, someone would already be building it... Elon Musk is digging freaking tunnels for crying out loud! IF it's a thing it will get done sooner or later. Identify the technology that holds that up and when that gets solved, there will be high speed rail.
OKAY, of course it could be because they have industrial capitalism with socialism using whatever works best with the Government at the top of the pyramid, even over the banksters. We on the other hand have neoliberal economics with financial at the top of the pyramid. We actually used to competitively build physical wealth. We did real engineering and the income distribution was much more egalitarian. Now, there's been a major upward shift from worker's and industry to financial. In 2008 when finance crashed the economy, we threw trillions at finance to make it whole. China threw trillions at infrastructure. They've brought hundreds of millions out of poverty; we've put tens of millions into poverty. Did you know that China has a higher percentage of home ownership than the US? If your mind isn't closed by jingoism or indoctrination and you can move past the agitprop you can learn the facts about China, the current bright object..Ukraine and whatever else you want to know but first you have to dismiss almost everything you were indoctrinated in which is everything you know now.
"California is what happens when new money becomes old money. "
Meh. Too clever, not convincing.
Can't we just say that this is what liberals do? Every place where they have complete control for a while. Hypocrisy, virtue signaling, turning everything to shit.
No it's what PEOPLE do.
Liberals are just like you 99.99999%
Meh. I don't feel I need to appear virtuous. Never have.
People are people. They can even breed together. Amazing.
No, I don't think they can. Not consensually anyway.
In any case, this isn't about biology. Yes, they are all people. But there are ordinary people, working people. And then there are liberal arts graduates who have never seen a single day of honest labor in their entire lives. They care -- that's what they do. Which is fine, unless they have power. Because then they destroy everything they touch.
Sounds like they will need to be sent to camps for orderly disposal.
No it doesn't. It sounds like they shouldn't be allowed to have power over ordinary working people.
I think it comes down to people who couldn't achieve riches on their own so they want to have a government job where they get to spend someone else's money.
A minor nitpick, if I may: in which way are they "neo-communist"?
Ethnic grievances is the last thing a communist would care about. Communism is all about economics, not 'identities'. Dividing people into endless categories based on their ancestry and/or their physical attributes, it sounds more like neo-hitlerian than neo-marxist to me...
I know that it's called "left", but in reality it's the opposite. The main concept of marxism is that class struggle is the locomotive of history. This "new left" carefully avoids even mentioning class struggle. It's splitting the working class into 'identities' that compete with each other, and even 'oppress' each other. For all intents and purposes it's a far-right ideology.
...by the way, fascism (Mussolini) is also different, as I understand it. Fascism is corporatism, where all socioeconomic classes happily working together under wise supervision of the state. It's somewhat similar to modern liberalism (heavy statism in both), but doesn't involve any clashes of 'identities'; quite the opposite.
" the New Left was a reaction, ON THE LEFT, to the failure of marxist international class revolution"
I understand what you're saying here, and I don't doubt that it's a valid angle. The only thing is, all this was happening in the context of the Cold War. So, it's not clear to me to what extent it was a natural, organic reaction, as opposed to arranged, manipulated gradual transformation.
There's this book by Frances Stonor Saunders: The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (here: https://www.redstarpublishers.org/CulturalColdWar.pdf )
It's been a while since I read it, and I don't remember details, but I believe it's describing a massive well-organized post-war effort to re-educate western intellectuals.
So, where you see a sincere wish to "destroy western civilization", in reality it could be a deliberate attempt, by the establishment, to channel revolutionary sentiment into meaningless harmless distraction. 'WTF - why are there so few female and non-white Senators and CEOs!!! Unacceptable!!! We must fight!!!' This sort of things...
Very interesting web site. I thought I was up on things, but I had no idea fat studies was a real thing (see links at bottom of the article). Also read the Fascism page. I need to read some more before making further comments as they write as obtusely as humanly possible in a kind of late 19th century academic writing style that borders on unreadable. I wonder how many corporations/governments actually hire these folks as consultants?
If David Mamet had written "Our Town" instead of Thornton Wilder, your comments would make great dialogue for the "stage manager" role in the play.
(stage manager enters from stage left, walks laconically to center stage, pauses and removes pocketwatch from pocket and checks time, looks up suddenly begins addressing audience)
"Folks, I don't think I have to tell you all that postmodern social conditions---your relativism, your PC, and all them wokesters, all came about from traditional values and economic production. The farms, factories, small towns...hell, even the big cities...well now they all gave up the ghost to postmodern relativism, a consumer economy and mass suburban sprawl....course scratch tickets and crack smokin' didn't help matters none neither, but..."
I only hope that the growing Hispanic population, that is becoming more and more conservative, will start to support common sense (I think of Bari every time I use that term anymore) leadership, and possibly start to reverse course.
It's going to be interesting to see how Democrats respond to the Hispanic vote flipping red. My guess is they'll suddenly have an epiphany that Trump's border wall wasn't such a terrible idea after all.
Or watch their definition of "white" shift, and along with it, a marked increase of white supremacists among the Hispanic vote.
Like the soviets, sorry russians saying that the next candidate for de-nazification is Poland... WTF!
I, for one, welcome our new allies in whatever crime we’ve been accused of now!
This was in the back of my mind when I made that joke. I live in South Florida, and the politics of what’s white or not are alive and well.
And that an ill-conceived strategy to increase their voter base by flooding the country with illegals was a risky gambit and a total misread of the ethos of an entire culture of people.
They’ll condescendingly and without an ounce of self-awareness inform them that if they vote Republican then they ain’t Latinx.
Ha! And they'll do it seamlessly and without an ounce of shame.
I had dinner with an “illegal immigrant “ last week who triages illegal aliens and makes six figures courtesy of your government. His opinion? “We really need to restrict immigration “.
My government? You know I'm Canadian, right?
Whoops, I forgot. My bust. Pardones-moi, mon copain.
Bill Clinton a "leader" who "cared about working class citizens?" When was this? When he was bangin' one of them inside a trailer park?
Why would the Hispanics (illegals) become more conservative? They identify linguistically, culturally, and historically more with Baja California not (Alta) California. The corruption and gridlock of Mexico is second nature. California Dems have spent decades ensuring their continual influx. California's Hispanic politicians are the core of the progressive left and the illegals have swelled their constituencies and consequently their power. Why would they preserve gringo institutions?
There are several reasons for Hispanics to move to the right.
First, the Democrats endless pandering to the black vote is offensive. The whole "you Latinx are people of color, just like the Blacks, but you don't deserve the same kowtowing. BLM! Say their names!" Joe Biden only looks at Black women for appointments. Gavin Newsom says California needs to look into paying reparations for Slavery. The Dems want to use the tax dollars of people who didn't go to college to pay off the education loans of people who went to grad school. How do you think that plays to the average Latino?
Second, Hispanics are fundamentally conservative. They tend to be more self reliant, less trusting of government, more religious, etc. Successful second and third generation Hispanics in particular will move to the right.
Finally, it's become very clear that the Democrats are the party of educated, coastal, rich, white urban voters, with a white guilt complex to bring the Black vote along. Rural, working class, less educated, self reliant folks? They're all moving to the right.
Latino people are real old school Catholics. Pre-vatican council, Catholics. They are fundamentally, culturally, conservative.
In my experience they are also more patriotric and / or community-minded. However, I don't think they share the weird hatred of the poor manifested by Anglo conservatives. Their conservatism is _Catholic_ conservatism, and the poor they have with them always. The thing that kept them out of the Republican Party must have been racism, but that could change.
They aren’t “becoming” more conservative, they ARE more conservative. They believe in family, hard work, God, marriage and a good education for their kids. It’s only Republican incompetence that has held back their shift away from Democrats. It’s funny, Democrats expected a perpetual majority with blacks and Hispanics a “guaranteed” vote. They will not only lose Hispanics. Before 2050 a majority of African Americans will vote other than Democrat. Why? Self interest. A plantation by any other name is still a plantation.
Catholic remember, family ties, stuff like that might push them right, but don't worry most of them build their retirement homes in Mexico.
Other reasons for the obvious decline of Cali include that it is a one-party state (so there is never an interval where another party gets into power and unravels the grandiose schemes and laws concocted by the prior party), that it is a golden goose so there is always mucho money for the state govt to spend on its army of parasites (whose main goal is to make sure the next gen of parasites gets its feeding time) and probably first and foremost that just about ALL of its leadership and ideas class holds the same rigid ideology aka religion that is orthogonal to REALITY, assuming it cares about reality at all.
The Social Justice religion, which is born and rooted in Cali as much as Catholicism is in Rome, has no interest in real-world results, empirical data, obvious policy failures etc (which it would probably denounce as White sumthin or other) because its entire purpose is to put a self-righteous glow into the hearts of its bearers, to make you feel better than those Other People because you know you're on "the right side of history" and "hate has no home here" (except for the enormous hatred for anyone who disagrees).
So the state is infested with bum camps and they only seem to grow in size, filth and disease? The one acceptable answer is that everyone sleeping on the street is a sacred victim of capitalism, that Society failed them, and the only acceptable solution is a $500k apartment for each of them, no strings attached, and if that maybe sounds like a great deal to bums and addicts from the rest of the country, well, 1) only a bigot would say that; and 2) good! we'll give out more free stuff because Love Wins!
Your state has an environmental crisis, housing crisis, literacy crisis, suffocating traffic, massive income inequality, well, then let's invite in a few more million Central American peasants (because No One is Illegal) and if they can't read or do math maybe they just need to do a few state-sanctioned Aztec chants to increase their self-esteem.
What we're witnessing is a state being run purely on the basis of feelings and the real true and holy religion of California: Self-Esteem. So we can expect more and more social collapse, but hey, at least we'll still feel good about ourselves!
"Other reasons for the obvious decline of Cali include that it is a one-party state (so there is never an interval where another party gets into power and unravels the grandiose schemes and laws concocted by the prior party)"
California had Republican governors (George Deukmeijian and Pete Wilson) from January 1983 to January 1999. That was the peak era of the War on Drugs, which led to a massive state prison construction program and a tripling of the prison population. The increased money for prison construction was matched practically 1:1 by a decrease in the budget for public colleges and universities.
No one has ever managed to undo that particular grandiose scheme. It's like a gift that keeps on giving! After around ten years, it developed its own momentum. Now the negative results will require decades to reverse. (Which is to say that I don't view instant "mass de-incarceration" as an effective solution to those problems.)
Note that I'm aware that the Democratic majority Assembly and Senate in those years signed off on those budget proposals. In the 1980s, no one questioned the hardline War on Drugs. There was a bipartisan consensus in the corridors of power that it would succeed. The only thing the War on Drugs succeeded in doing was enriching drug dealing gangs and spreading their reach and influence across the country, to the point of entrenching them as societal institutions and cultural role models. Along with conveying millions of Americans- mostly non-college educated males, across the entire range of ethnicities- into an antisocial milieu that ended up tagging many of them with felony prison records.
Oh, so all of California’s problems are because prior politicians of both parties tried to keep drugs out of our country? We had 108,000 drug deaths last year. Now all the people who used to be in prison are on the street. Highest energy prices, worst public education (a perpetual tie with Mississippi, which is pulling ahead). No Mascot, California’s hubristic policies have resulted in the degradation of life here. Blame to go around, but mostly it’s been Democrats here.
Speaking as someone who would be voting for Michael Shellenberger for Governor if I still lived in the state, I think you've inferred entirely too much from my comments.
But when I did live in California, I could see where things were heading early on. Back in about 1990, I remember driving a guy in from the airport to downtown Sac (he was with Raytheon, business trip) and we got to talking. I recall comparing the California prison system to a person who had already consumed so much alcohol that it was only a matter of time until they would need to ah regurgitate it...the problem just hadn't quite kicked in yet. He had no problem agreeing with my analogy.
Which is what eventually happened. But it took around ten years longer than it should have, and by then systemic toxemia had set in. The first steps to decrease the California prison population were the result of a ruling by a judge, who ruled that the well over-100% capacity was leading to inhumane conditions. (fwiw, California prisons never got as overcrowded as some other states, like Alabama.)
Understand, I really was a night shift cab driver. I have at least as much of a vested interest in locking up violent criminals as any other citizen. Especially in those days. But when a large fraction of prison inmates are sent inside for "gang-related" violent felonies ("violent" includes firearms possession) related to a multi-billion dollar wholesale retail multilevel marketing scheme that's always hiring and paying cash money daily, you'd think that at some point someone in power would have noticed that the Zero Tolerance criminalization of the drug trade had the result of creating and sustaining an Attractive Nuisance of unprecedented proportions, for non-affluent teenage males. And after that first felony, it's a lot easier to slide into the abyss than it is to climb out.
What I'm saying is that at this point we're dealing with the end results of a chain of events that extends decades into the past, to 30 years ago, when the CA prison population tripled, to nearly 300,000...for example, consider the children of the incarcerated. Step back to 1992. What's a healthier situation- for a young boy to grow up with a father in prison for years on end, or with a father who's just been released and is back putting in work selling drugs, in that fast, lucrative Life again? What sort of options does the kid have, realistically? Yes, I know that there are other, more positive outcomes possible. But it can't be denied that that one of those two situations is the case, for a lot of these kids. How's their school attendance, their social skills, their literacy skills? If they aren't learning those, what are they learning instead? What's their peer group influence? How much of "lock'em up" has played out as "write'em all off"?
I’m a native Californian who still lives here after periods abroad and out of state. Shellenberger is on my short list of 2-3. What I’m gleaning from your remarks is that incarceration effectively caused the problem. It requires a bit of rigor to remind oneself that across from many of those incarcerations are people whose lives were abruptly terminated, who were raped, who were violently assaulted, who were subjected to drugs or violence as children. I have no problem with their perpetrators being imprisoned. This is a country where we are allowed to pursue our dreams but are held accountable for our actions by our peers. You infer that it’s better to let “dad” out of prison so his kid has a role model who in your example continues to deal drugs. It doesn’t have to be a binary choice. Dad could clean up his act. Some do, but recidivism rates and my own experience suggest that is a small number. Sorry, but incarceration is not the #1 problem in inner city life.
You're misreading me, but it's understandable. My position requires a lot more surrounding context, and I don't have the space here. I really should begin writing on my own Substack in earnest, but I'm still trying to clear enough space to allow that project to swallow me whole for a while, and I'm not there yet.
But just by way of a brief outline: I don't think incarceration causes the problem. I think it was a mistake for the policymakers of the US government (the nation that really did lead the way on imposing its "drug policy" globally, via UN treaties) to take a dogmatic, uncompromising line against every mind-altering substance other than a handful of the ones that were most popular among the people making the rules in those days, and then turn it into a law enforcement crusade. They badly misread the social cues by criminalizing every user, legally forbidding medical addiction maintenance, and insisting that basically every Impure Substance required eradication, thereby funneling 100% of market demand into the hands of the criminal marketplace.
It's easy- all too easy- to moralize about Choices and Personal Responsibility in the abstract, while ignoring extant realities on the ground- realities that include Modernity, Mobility, Affluence, Adolescence, and the Return of the Repressed. To get specific about it, teenagers got automobiles and spending money in the postwar era, which conferred them- us- with a staggering amount of autonomy as an age cohort. There weren't any adults skulking around my high school enticing innocent teenagers into taking Dope; it was entirely a peer group thing. Teenager to teenager. To the extent that "adults" were involved, it was older brothers. Notably including that newly worldly contingent just returned from the wilds of Indochina. There were not enough police to bust us, even if they had the faintest inkling of what was going on; sometimes they did, but many of the new hires had just gotten back from Vietnam, too. If you know what I mean. The cultural idealism and informal universal brotherhood of the young that was promoted in the late 1960s lasted until about 1975, and then it got a lot more cynical; speaking personally, very often there's a cultural chasm separating me from people 3-5 years younger that does not exist with people 3-5 years older. It's hard to explain. But real. I think the crucial difference may be that by 1976, the clandestine drug scene had spread to many of the middle schools. The 11-13 year olds. Don't even think that I'm pumping up that reality as some great advance. It was, however, inevitable, in a criminalized marketplace. As for the parents and the school authorities, in most parts of American suburbia the entire scene was under the radar until around 1979.
Long story short, teenage dope retailers in my high school had glamor profession status and money- sometimes more money than any 16-year-old had ever thought of having only a couple of years before. The cultural consequences had about as much to do with anti-materialistic "1960s values" as today's cryptocurrency market does. And this was the early 1970s, before cocaine became a mass market item.
If it was that way in my mid-Atlantic suburban mixed working class/middle class/military families high school (90% "white" fwiw), think about what it was like when poor teenagers got a taste of those market opportunities. Think Pinocchio, "Pleasure Island." That's how They get you, hmm? Juvenile status provided- and provides- an extra illusion of impunity. Upshot: give male adolescents turnkey access to a multilevel marketing scheme that works faster, easier, and with a better chance of adult-money success than Amway ever delivered to most of its sellers, and they'll be all over it. But nearly all of the affluent middle class college bound kids will give up the game when they turn 18, because that's when it turns into Adult Crime. While the poor kids, with that foreshortened horizon of adolescent immaturity, they get a taste a taste of fast money, and that taste is enough to derail their lives.
Especially once crack entered the market.
I plan to have a lot more to say on that. With an abundance of factual support to back it up. Not just yet, but soon. In the interest of doing that in the near future, I'm going to lay out of Substack comments for a while.
In the meantime, you might consider checking this book out, even though the focus is on Mexico and not the US: Murder City, by Charles Bowden, from 2010. It's a nonfiction masterpiece. I'll never write as good as Bowden; he paid a lot more dues in his lifetime. Not that investigative journalism is a contest, but he blows away everyone else I've ever read, and that takes some doing.
https://archive.org/details/murdercityciudad0005bowd_hyl723/page/n359/mode/2up
Free to borrow for up to 14 days, space permitting, although I really recommend the hard copy. For one thing, the artwork is compelling. https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=murder+city+charles+bowden&atb=v320-1&ia=web
How many pay cheques are you away from living in a "bum camp"?
Two. But I'll be in hospital, thanks to T1.
Zero, because I can find another job! Wild concept. In terms of if I for some reason was barred from working, maybe 800?
Thanks for talking out of your asshole.
sorry i know we're not allowed to say "bum" anymore...
Correct, it is now the 'soap challenged"
Where can homeless people wash?
So say two pay cheques then?
You can use any words you like it's all good.
Word choice says for more about the person who chooses those words then it usually does about the person being labeled.
Anyone, anyone at all can become a 'bum'.
When I was a kid where I was there were no homeless people where I lived. No bums around then. What happened I wonder?
Remember to properly extinguish your campfire at Yosemite?
Roundup is glyphosate and glyphosate is Roundup.
CA water rights are wacky too. Look up the Rezniks, who own Pom Wonderful and Fiji water.
Not to mention a self-inflicted energy crisis.
State Senator Scott Weiner is one of the major problems in California, not an anti-regulation progressive. Weiner has said that single family residences are "immoral", and has led the effort in the state legislature to pass centralized zoning regulations which would essentially outlaw single family residences. Weiner's other legislation accomplishments include removing registered sex offender status from gay men found guilty of sexual activity with teenage boys.
feels more like a vast jobs program for otherwise unemployable pseudo-intellectuals. “Hire us, pay us, give us and our clients sinecures at your expense,” Kyeyune writes, “or we will make life difficult for you.” THIS SENTENCE EXPRESSES A LOT OF WHAT'S WRONG IN OUR SOCIETY AT THE MOMENT....ACROSS ALL SECTORS
I have no idea what that means...
Nor does he.
I moved here from the East four years ago, before the serious exodus from California. Higher prices for housing, staying away from Interstate 35 and away from all communities that branch off. Our way of life is changing, and there are serious concerns; where is the water coming from, the grid updates, the education (and various arguments about what type of education) the last thing I want is the Californication of Texas. We just remind people we have snakes, scorpions, you can carry a gun legally, and it is CONSERVATIVE. We have statues of soldiers, there are a lot of CHURCHES, and a short drive is an hour and a half. Very different here in Texas. Don’t change Texas adapt to how we live. You left California because your rules and regulations killed your communities and livelihood. Don’t bring that crap down here.
Didn't Austin vote to Defund the Police?
Yup, and I don’t live, or buying anything in Austin. The defund the police means that the backend that helped police is gone. They (police) cant refer someone to services to help them because the services have been cut.
You sound like Rogan & Maconneghy on his show! Frankly, I agree...some version of 'When in Rome...'
I didn’t know how much I loved Texas until recently. Never going back east again, HUsbeast got me down here for a vacation, and a look see. When we returned east we got our ducks in a row and left in a year. Never regretted it. You read Robert Malone too! Best wishes.
Considering it's America, not really.
"Is it the state’s job to make sure companies embrace and promote employees who aren’t interested in their core products? Applied enough times in enough directions, won’t that idea get weird really fast?"
Yes, under the "equity" agenda, it is the state's job to equalize outcomes, regardless of what people may want. And yes, it will/is getting weird really fast.
The "equity" agenda must be named, confronted, and defeated.
This isn't that complicated. Wealth attracts parasites who are unable to earn anything on their own. They slowly infest the host. Smart parasites learn their limitations, so as not to kill the host. Unfortunately, human beings seem to eventually succumb to the super parasites, who, because of envy & desire for the unearned, wreck everything in their path. The State of California is overrun with super parasites and Atlas is Shrugging.
Outside of silicone valley and Hollywood, California is a farm state. A huge portion of our food is provided by California farmers, but actually by their slaves. Imported Hispanic workers are the foundation of California agriculture. Most crops of fruits, nuts, and vegetables must be picked by hand, unlike midwestern crops of corn, wheat, and soybeans which are planted, tended, and harvested by machines. Nobody in the US likes the term “slave”, so we use the term “guest worker”. These workers sign with a specific grower and when they get here, if a farmer up the road pays more, they cannot go up the road to work. They are “owned” by the one they signed with. This works well to keep food cheap in the US and enrich Claifornia farmers. Meanwhile, California taxpayers pay for workers education, healthcare, and transportation. No wonder California has the greatest disparity of wealth and the most “sanctuary cities”.
All American prisoners, all 2.3 million of them, are literally enslaved as per the 13th Amendment.
"Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."
Many of them work for UNICOR where they make war materiel. The prisoners at Angola prison, most of them black, are forced to work picking cotton.
https://innocenceproject.org/13th-amendment-slavery-prison-labor-angola-louisiana/
"...except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted"
That clause explicitly refutes your claim.
I think that a lot of incarcerated people in the US have a strong case that their 8th Amendment rights have been violated, though:
"Amendment VIII: Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted."
Most of the recent efforts at reform have been aimed at the first clause- which is so easy to legislate, to the point of having become overly lenient in some cases. Including cases where the results are inexcusable.
The amount of reform efforts that effectively address the third clause is practically zero.