Enjoying the Low Life?
10th April 2015
Nicholas Kristof at Voice of the Crust New York Times phones in another rewarming of The Narrative.
The United States is the most powerful colossus in the history of the world: Our nuclear warheads could wipe out the globe, our enemies tweet on iPhones, and kids worldwide bop to Beyoncé.
Yet let’s get real. All this hasn’t benefited all Americans. A newly released global index finds that America falls short, along with other powerful countries, on what matters most: assuring a high quality of life for ordinary citizens.
Unexamined is the fact that ‘ordinary Americans’ who have a job and support themselves are doing fine; it’s the slackers who live off of the labor of others who are doing most of the whining.
The Social Progress Index for 2015 ranks the United States 16th in the world.
At what? Being socialist? Be still my heart. This is like criticizing countries for being unlike the Soviet Union. ‘They may not be allowed to vote for more than one candidate, but at least they’ve got free day care!’
We also rank 32nd in preventing early marriage, 38th in the equality of our education system, 49th in high school enrollment rates and 87th in cellphone use.
Well, that’s pretty much horseshit. The government does a fine job of ‘prevent[ing] early marriage’ by offering every UnderCrust female an apartment, food stamps, and MedicAid simply for having a child without bothering to marry the father. The ‘equality of our education system’ is almost perfect, with every child being offered an equally-crappy public education at the hands of ‘teachers’ who are more concerned about their salaries and benefits than their formal jobs. Why have ‘high school enrollment’ when it subjects you to attacks by juvenile delinquents that won’t be disciplined by any kind of authority? And I fail to see how ‘cellphone use’ constitutes a measuring stick for civilization.
The fun part, though, is the accompanying list. Notice that, except for Japan, all of the countries above the U.S. are government by highly blue-eyed white people — and, judging from college admissions, the Japanese can be considered Honorary White People (at least for affirmative-action purposes).
Maybe the problem is that the U.S. doesn’t have enough white people. That seems to be the key to getting higher on the list.