I’ve thrown in my lot with the pedants. Yes, language is a living tree, eternally sprouting new shoots as other branches wither . . . blah, blah, blah. But a poorly cultivated plant can readily gnarl from lush foliage to unsightly sticks. The internet has turbocharged lexical fads (such as “turbocharge”) and grammatical decay. Rather than infuse English with a new vitality, this degeneration spreads the blight of sheer ignorance. So this month we address a set of developments in the prevailing conventions of the English language whose only commonality is that they drive me crazy.
But once you move past those accents, you’ll find another social transformation mirrored in our voices: women today speak at a deeper pitch than their mothers or grandmothers would have done, thanks to the changing power dynamics between men and women.
I rather doubt that ‘changing power dynamics’ have an effect on the pitch of people’s voices. This sounds to me like proglodyte pseudo-science; the fact that it’s from the BBC makes that supposition almost a certainty.
Instead, the researchers speculated that the transformation reflects the rise of women to more prominent roles in society, leading them to adopt a deeper tone to project authority and dominance in the workplace.
So really it’s a voluntary change to increase dominance behavior, like wearing pants rather than a dress.
It would be interesting to run the same experiment on men to see whether the prevalence of the beta male has resulted in an average increase in the pitch of male voices.
Of all the problems facing America, littering might be most amenable to social engineering. The American Establishment put together a big anti-littering campaign in the 1950s and 1960s, hitting paydirt with the famous “Crying Indian” TV commercial in 1971 that racially shamed whites into not littering.
Now, though, there are a whole bunch of new people here from more littering-prone cultures like Mexico that haven’t been adequately shamed into not littering. But to even mention that fact is deemed unspeakable evil.
Leftists in general are a bunch of slobs. Take a look at any ‘after’ picture of a place where proglodytes have congregates, for a ‘protest’ or ‘demonstration’ or whatever, it looks like a landfill site.
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Today it’s an established fact that our skeletons are surprisingly malleable. The pure white remains displayed in museums may seem solid and inert, but the bones beneath our flesh are very much alive – they’re actually pink with blood vessels – and they’re constantly being broken down and rebuilt. So although each person’s skeleton develops according to a rough template set out in their DNA, it is then tailored to accommodate the unique stresses of their life.
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The Whole Woke World has gotten worked up during the last few weeks about the need to Crush Segregation: white children must be tracked down and bused to black schools to provide the locals with Integration. We must return to 1971 and do busing all over again!
Of course, this logic is incompatible with the other logic that: Hey, white people, this isn’t 1971 and you aren’t the huge majority anymore. Your days are numbered, baby!
But who care about logic?
Part of the Quest for Magic Dirt.
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If you have kids or attend school yourself, you might have noticed that cursive handwriting—that loopy, continuous written style popular in the 20th century and recently cast aside in favor of key-boards—is making a comeback. And just because we have more tools to communicate doesn’t mean that those who aren’t in school should abandon cursive writing, which provides an abundance of benefits.
Go beyond ‘cursive’ — teach calligraphy.
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The reason we study history is because certain patterns repeat themselves. And this is where our education system has been failing us so terribly for decades, in part because of “multiculturalism.” Circa 1990, it became fashionable to condemn the teaching of history in our society as too “Eurocentric” and this academic trend, along with a general contempt for “dead white males,” had the effect of demoting the study of the history of our own culture in favor of “inclusive” history about African, Asian and Latin American societies. But this involves a misunderstanding of why we study history at all. The peasant living under a hereditary monarchy, or a goat-herder in a nomadic tribal society, would have no use for the study of history. In a non-democratic polity, it is only the leadership caste which has need to study history, as a guide to statecraft. However, in a republic, where every citizen is eligible to participate in the decision-making process — at the very least, as a voter — the study of history as part of a general education becomes much more important. How are we to participate intelligently in politics if we don’t know history? And the reason we study ancient Greece and Rome, rather than the Mayans or the Chinese or some other culture, isn’t because of racism or “Eurocentrism.” It’s because Greco-Roman civilization produced the earliest models for representative government, and because these civilizations left behind a written record, including such valuable resources as Thucydides.
This is why the British University system as-it-was, which focused on ‘classics’ and mathematics, produced people who were competent to run significant portions of the world. The ‘classics’ curriculum dealt not only with the Greek and Latin languages — good training for the mind — but also with what was written in those languages and what was done by the people who spoke those languages — i.e. literature, poetry, history, biography, philosophy, and politics.
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A critical component in the rise of market-oriented democracy in the modern era has been the dispersion of property ownership among middle-income households—not just in the United States but also in countries like Holland, Canada, and Australia, where it was closely linked with greater civil and economic freedom. In its early days, this dispersion was largely rural, but after the Second World War, it took on a largely suburban emphasis in the U.S., including within the extended metro regions of traditional cities like New York and Los Angeles. American homeownership soared between 1940 and 1962, from 44 percent to 63 percent.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on In Defense of Houses
In northeast Oklahoma City, you can find plenty of stores that sell groceries, but only two are grocery stores. Some are convenience stores or gas stations, and the rest are dollar stores—now more common in the United States than both Walmart and McDonald’s combined. This influx of dollar stores, according to the Oklahoma City city council, is a major public-health problem.
“Better options are necessary for our community, beginning with policy to prevent small box discount stores from saturating these areas in particular,” Councilwoman Nikki Nice, whose ward is about 23 percent low income, tweeted.
In May, Nice helped pass a moratorium on constructing or issuing building permits to convenience stores located within one mile of another, working on the assumption that, once dollar stores are banned, grocery stores will come. The ban lasts for 180 days, or until November of 2019, when the council plans to introduce a zoning ordinance to bring stores with fresh meat and produce to the district, the Journal Record reports.
Every politician thinks that he or she has a better idea than the free market for how you ought to spend your money.
This sort of thinking is why California is a train wreck and likely will continue to get worse.
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Fly over a reconstruction of one of history’s greatest cities to experience Rome as the Romans knew it. This reconstruction is based on two decades of research and the input of dozens of specialists.
Smart cities make two fundamental promises: lots of data, and automated decision making based on that data. The ultimate smart city will require a raft of existing and to-be-invented technologies, from sensors to robots to artificial intelligence. For many this promises a more efficient, equitable city; for others, it raises questions about privacy and algorithmic bias.
But there is a more basic concern when it comes to smart cities: They will be exceedingly complex to manage, with all sorts of unpredictable vulnerabilities. There will always be a place for new technology in our urban infrastructure, but we may find that often, “dumb” cities will do better than smart ones.
Cities are only as smart as the Democrats who run them (think about it), and that’s not very.
Rich Lowry in the New York Post. Even a blind pig can find an acorn now and then.
Beto O’Rourke — the losing Texas candidate for the US Senate who bootstrapped his way into becoming a losing presidential candidate — had a message for refugees who had come to America: Your new country is a hellhole.
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We live, as the Indian essayist Saeed Akhter Mirza has put it, in “an age of amnesia.” Across the world, most notably in the West, we are discarding the knowledge and insights passed down over millennia and replacing it with politically correct bromides cooked up in the media and the academy. In some ways, this process recalls, albeit in digital form, the Middle Ages. Conscious shaping of thought—and the manipulation of the past to serve political purposes—is becoming commonplace and pervasive.
Do I think Trump is playing four-dimensional chess here? Did he carefully calculate the possible ramifications? No, I think this was his gut instinct, but those instincts are usually rather shrewd. Because he doesn’t think in the predictable terms of standard-issue politics, sometimes Trump wins by doing what would seem to be the wrong thing, but which turns out to be effective in the long run. If Hayward is correct in his estimation, what Trump has done here will have the effect of making radicals like AOC and the Somali immigrant Ilhan Omar the “face” of their party, and make it impossible for Pelosi (or Chuck Schumer, or whoever the Democrats nominate for president in 2020) to distance themselves from these unpopular radicals. At a press conference today, Trump doubled down, saying these Democrats “hate our country” and “many people agree with me.” (Analysis: True.)
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Canadian Medicare, our northern neighbor’s universal health care system, generally receives rave reviews from proponents of nationalized or socialized health care, but the Fraser Institute found that more than 63,000 Canadians left their country to have surgery in 2016.
As Americans contemplate overturning our health system in favor of one similar to Canada’s, we must ask why so many leave.
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It is a real city with people living in it. I was reminded of this as I made my way through residential neighborhoods to the Ritz-Carlton, where the conference is being held. As is true of all ruling class areas now, Washington is gentrifying, which is a polite way of saying ethnic-cleansing. Slowly, block by block, the underclass blacks are being shipped out to surrounding areas so they can be replaced with hipsters working for government and the array of think tanks that support the government.
I am curious as to how these changes will be reflected in city government and services.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Travelogue: The Imperial Capital
According to a new rule published in the Federal Register, asylum seekers who pass through another country first will be ineligible for asylum at the U.S. southern border.
The rule, expected to go into effect Tuesday, also applies to children who have crossed the border alone.
When I visited Singapore a few years ago, I kept noticing novel bits of social technology that managed to solve problems that I didn’t even realize I had. One favorite example was parking: all parking garages were equipped with an RFID reader, and everyone had an EZ-Tag type device in their car. Instead of picking up a ticket when you go in and waiting to hand it to an attendant on the way out, you just drive in, park, and drive out, and they automatically deduct the payment from your account.
But what made the biggest impression on me was the maid system in Singapore. Singapore’s policy on guest workers would make for an interesting essay in its own right. Briefly, though, the government makes it easy for guest workers to come if they can find work in various industries, including domestic service. Once in, you get a visa for a couple years, which does not come with voting rights or many of the perks of citizenship. But because this system is so rigorous in ensuring that would-be guest workers are net economic positives, it’s politically feasible for Singapore to take in a lot of guest workers. Proportionally, Singapore’s guest worker population is equivalent to the US taking in about two-thirds the population of Mexico – with huge net benefits to them and their families.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Servants Without Masters
The most popular article I have ever written, in terms of views, has been, by far, “10 Places that Should Join the U.S.,” a short piece at RealClearHistory pining for an enlarged geographic area under the American constitution.
He makes a good case for some of them, a very poor case for others.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Introducing: the Federation of Free States, an Ongoing Thought Experiment
There is an odd hysteria among the chattering classes about the rise of AI and robotics. Personally I WANT rote, repetitive work done by automated machines…they don’t get bored and they don’t get tired, so why not use them whenever possible.
I do not fear the Robot Apocalypse, since I am sufficiently above the mean in intelligence that I do not fear for my livelihood, and I have no children for whom to feel anxious. In that respect I am the perfect libertarian.
So be of good cheer. If a robot hasn’t replaced you yet, the chances are that it won’t before you’re too old to care.
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Bottom-lining it, liberals have a real problem with learning from experience. They can’t grasp that a symbol of something might be different from the actual thing. “Education,” to a liberal, is exactly that and it can’t mean anything different…”ANTIFA” must be anti-fascist, they’re entirely unswayed by the accumulated evidence that the group is, in fact, fascist. And it’s not just because they sympathize with them ideologically, although there is that. The big problem is that the name says anti-fascist. That it might actually mean something different from that, doesn’t register.
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It turns out it’s not just gratitude that makes rain smell so appealing after a long period of dry weather.
There’s actually some chemistry involved too.
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I justifiably criticize and reprehend, but you hate. I have well-thought-out, rational opinions, but you have mere prejudices.
I hate hatred. I hate those who hate, especially those who hate the wrong things, that is to say the things that I do not hate. Such people are hateful. It is a pleasure as well as a duty to hate them. If you do not hate something or somebody, after all, do you really believe in anything?
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on The Great Hate Debate
Neither of Kamala Harris’s parents are Americans. Her mother is from India and her father is from Jamaica. Harris spent most of her childhood in Canada. She thus has little in common with most black people in the United States whose ancestors were slaves here. Before this fact became controversial, it was referenced by such “far-right” personalities as . . . CNN’s Don Lemon.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on The Media Smear Machine (and Why Kamala Harris’s Ancestry Is Relevant)
