Read it.

As always, near the end of the course I cover foundational public-choice economics – including an introduction to Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem.  Summarizing the conclusions of this literature as succinctly as my meager writing skills permit, Arrow’s theorem – made famous by Nobel laureate economist Kenneth Arrow (and often explained using examples from the work of the Scotsman Duncan Black) – says that it is impossible for any collective decision-making mechanism or procedure to generate outcomes that reflect only the preferences of the choosers.  The outcomes of all collective decision-making mechanisms or procedures – including majoritarian voting – necessarily are determined in part by the manner in which those mechanisms or procedures are used to settle upon outcomes.  Put differently, Arrow proved that it is impossible to devise any collective decision-making mechanism or procedure that generates results free of the influence of arbitrary factors (that is, factors that reasonable people believe should not play a role in determining the outcome of decision-making procedures).

The short conclusion for majoritarian voting is this: the preferences of the voters are not the only factors that determine the outcomes of elections.  If the manner in which the vote in conducted is changed, the outcome of an election will change even if no voter’s preferences change.

Put even more succinctly: in almost all elections, there isn’t only one correct outcome.  There isn’t one outcome that reflects the individual-voters’ collective “preference” better or more accurately than some other possible outcomes.  Stated differently, in almost all collective-decision-making settings, there is no “will of the people.”  It’s a mistake to anthropomorphize a group of people.  Each individual has preferences; a collection of individuals has only a collection of individual preferences and not a separate and determinate group preference.

Democracy is a means, not an end, and sometimes not a very good one.

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Harris, the Golden State’s first black female attorney general, has been a supporter of Obama’s dating back to his first Senate campaign.

Black people are characterized by dark skin, wide nose and lips, and kinky black hair.

Find the black woman in this picture. I’ll wait.

Read it.

The technology driven global economy is brutally competitive and has put enormous stress on businesses to adapt or die.

…

Because Silicon Valley has largely gotten a pass from the rules and norms that apply to every other industry in America, they’ve been able to take this to the next level, so we see it in the purest form. The results in Silicon Valley speak for themselves.

…

Now consider that most of you reading me probably have an IQ of 115+.  And we are all still feeling the heat, although some of us surely thrive on it at some level.  Imagine what it’s like for people who have a below average IQ, which is by definition half the population.

If we proceed on with the superstar economy, where enormous value can be delivered with relatively small teams of ultra top players, what does that mean for the social environment?  It’s worth pondering what the future would look like if the Netflix/Amazon models of personnel became more standard.  The nature of technology and global competition seems to be pushing things in that direction.

Rollo Tomassi fisks a feminist.

About three weeks ago I was made aware of an article on the New Republic blog called Bros Before Homes and a few of my followers on Twitter asked me for my take on it then. I did feel it merited more than 140 characters so I figured I’d build a post on it.

…

The gist of Bovy’s fabricated angst is how offensively sexist it is for men to prioritize life experience, exploration, self-betterment, hobbies and the virtue signaling she sees inherent in men when they actually go their own way. Men cutting themselves free from the expectations of the Feminine Imperative and a feminine-primary social order always imply the threat of them coming to realize their own value.

…

It’s very easy to criticize men for being juvenile about foregoing what popular culture would have us believe is preparing ourselves for adulthood, but when this new idealism affects the men women hope will be well-positioned Betas when they’ve reached the end of their Party Years, then there’s cause for concern.

Lion of the Blogosphere reveals all.

If the speeches ended after Melania, then the news media would have shown a bunch of talking heads talking to each other for the rest of the evening. And what would they talk about? They hate Trump and would spin everything in a manner unfavorable to Trump.

So instead, they put Flynn on, and they know the media would have to cover his speech because they think Flynn is someone important because they know he was almost picked to be Vice President (which would have been a horrible mistake). Flynn’s actual purpose was to cockblock the media and prevent viewers at home from listening to their anti-Trump spin. Flynn’s job was to bore everyone and make them turn off their televisions.

The major difference, from a sheep’s point of view, between a shepherd and a wolf is that the wolf eats one of you right away but in the meantime leaves the rest of you alone, whereas the shepherd eventually eats all of you but over the course of a few years, and in the meantime steals your wool every year.

Kind of a metaphor for government.

Read it.

Complementarity acknowledges the importance of the inborn differences between the sexes that egalitarianism marginalizes or outright denies exist while recognizing and embracing the strengths and weaknesses those differences represent.

There are many well documented, peer reviewed, scientific studies on the neurological differences between men and women’s brain structure. The easiest evidence of these differences is the cyclic nature of women’s sexuality (versus men’s always-on sexuality) and the neurological/hormonal influences on beliefs, behaviors and the rationalizations for those behaviors prompted by the innate drive to optimize Hypergamy.

Women experience negative emotions differently from men. The male brain evolved to seek out sex before food. And while our feminine-centric social order insists that, in the name of equalism, boys should be forced to learn in the same modality as that of girls, the science shows that boys brains are rudimentarily wired to learn differently.

Read it.

“I see her winning, but it’s going to be a very exciting year,” he said. “I travel a lot around the world and Europe and I could tell you in Europe people are aghast at what’s happening in our presidential election. They’re, quite frankly, very worried about Donald Trump being elected.”

Bear in mind that ‘in Europe’, which means among the transnational ruling nomenklatura, nobody was ‘aghast’ at Barack Obama’s election, because he was one of them — with results as you see them.

Frankly, I’m looking forward to the prospect of an American President who makes ‘in Europe people’ somewhat aghast.

Read it.

Maybe what has inspired these thoughts is the news. It made a big impression on me earlier in the week, when I prowled through several pages of new e-mail, clicking open links for further reading as I went, and when I was done I had these browser tabs all the way across my screen…which is typical…what was out of the ordinary was that every single story had something to do with reality, and the avoidance of it. Every single one.

Read it.

Jean II le Meingre Boucicaut (c.1366-1421) was a French knight of high renown in his own day. Aside from his chivalrous comportment, he was famous for his mastery of the physical demands of fighting in full plate armor.

A description of Boucicaut’s physical conditioning program survives to this day. To test its effectiveness and the practicality of wearing full armor, Daniel Jacquet performed those exercises and more while wearing a 58-pound suit of armor. He jumped on a horse, ran, chopped wood, did cartwheels, and more. And although Boucicaut did not call for it, at the end of the video, Jacquet danced to Elvis Presley’s “Don’t Be Cruel” in the steel suit.

Reminds me of a number of amusing S.C.A. stories.

Check it out.

For people who like that sort of thing. (Yeah, Robin, I’m lookin’ at you.)

Read it.

Apparently being the first black President isn’t enough.

Tensions flared during a town hall discussion on race with President Barack Obama, with the daughter of an African-American man who died after being held in an apparent chokehold by police yelling at the program’s organizers because she was not called on to ask a question.

Poor special snowflake.

Erica Garner said she was told by the event’s host, ABC News, that she would have the opportunity to ask Mr. Obama a question.

Hey, they lied. Welcome to the wonderful world of the mainstream media.

“I was railroaded!” Ms. Garner yelled as a small group of White House reporters were in the room where the town hall was being held. “I was railroaded by ABC on the two-year anniversary of my father’s death!”

I don’t think that word means what you think it means, poor special snowflake.

She continued: “That’s what I have to do? A black person has to yell to be heard?”

Well, they do that anyway.

Read it.

Antione Cooper, 26, is on life support after being shot by a Waffle House customer in DeSoto.

According to the DeSoto Police Department, Cooper robbed several customers at the Waffle House on Thursday, July 7, 2016 at 2:30 a.m. in the morning.

According to the DeSoto Police Department, Antione Cooper, 26, entered the restaurant in the 1500 block of North Beckley Avenue at 2:30 a.m. Thursday. Patrons at the Waffle House told police Cooper robbed several customers before leaving the restaurant and entering the parking lot.

A handgun-licensed customer, whose wife was on her way to meet him at the restaurant, followed Cooper to the parking lot, fearing for his wife’s safety, according to DeSoto police.

Police said the customer called to Cooper once they were outside. Cooper pointed the AK-47 in the customer’s direction, prompting the customer to shoot Cooper several times, according to police in the southern Dallas suburb.

Note that the race of the customer is not mentioned. This suggests that he is black, since if he were white they would have included it.

Cooper was then transported to a local hospital where he remained Wednesday on life support, police said.

The customer was not arrested. The investigation is ongoing.

DeSoto police were able to identify Cooper after circulating pictures of his tattoos. Cooper does not have an arrest photo yet as he is recovering in the hospital.

Tattoos are very handy for identifying criminals.

Read it.

He has wiped out Hillary Clinton’s lead in Florida; is on the upside of too-close to call races in Florida and Pennsylvania and is locked in a dead heat in Ohio,” said Peter A. Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Poll.

Not bad for somebody who hasn’t been spending any money on ads, in the face of Hillary spending millions.

With Green Party candidate Jill Stein and Libertarian Gary Johnson included in the new poll, Mr. Trump’s lead improves to 5 points in Florida and 6 points in Pennsylvania, and he jumps ahead by 1 point in Ohio.

Which models the actual election.

Read it.

Hey, it’s all about him.

Kathy Shaidle doesn’t like Justin Trudeau very much.

We rightly bitch about Obama’s two-term international “apology tour,” but what to call Canadian PM Justin Trudeau’s compulsive peregrinations? The “frivolity tour,” perhaps?

Sure, conservatives can lamely joke that as long as PM Zoolander’s not in Parliament, he can do less harm. (Just ask the female MP he elbowed in the tits.) But is even that true? Every time he attracts media attention abroad, Trudeau accidentally advertises Canada’s sheer stupidity for voting for him.

Not all of us, obviously, but it’s hard to explain to Americans how a dude who won less than 40 percent of the popular vote gets to form something call a “majority” government. And you guys aren’t helping, by the way: handing True-dope fake awards, inviting him to all the global one-percenter confabs, and going gaga every time he shows his stupid face.

Read it.

Not that you’d know that from listening to the Drive-By Media….

Read it.

“I’m one of those displaced old Democrats. I’m not an ideological Conservative at all, I see a decent role for government. But I think that what’s happened to the Democratic Party is that it’s become the Downton Abbey party – of the very rich and the very poor. You have these very powerful, very wealthy people who for whatever reason subscribe to a particular worldview. As the working class are deserting the Democrat Party, it becomes less responsive to them.”

What Kotkin identifies is a fastidiously politically-correct middle class – one that’s characterized by its bossiness and intolerance. This class lives in its own virtual reality, and lectures everyone else. This has historical roots, he writes. The rise of a middle class that was removed from everyday concerns was predicted by Daniel Bell in his 1976 book The Coming of Post-Industrial Society.

…

Kotkin borrowed an even older term for this new virtue-signalling elite. 180 years ago, the poet Samuel Coleridge described an educated middle class that sought for itself a priestly function in society, “serving as the key organs of enforced conformity, distilling truth for the masses, seeking to regulate speech and indoctrinate youth” as the “clerisy”. And that’s what we’ve now got: a New Clerisy .

Read it.

Late capitalism is like your love life: it looks a lot less bleak through an Instagram filter. The slow collapse of the social contract is the backdrop for a modern mania for clean eating, healthy living, personal productivity, and “radical self-love”—the insistence that, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, we can achieve a meaningful existence by maintaining a positive outlook, following our bliss, and doing a few hamstring stretches as the planet burns. The more frightening the economic outlook and the more floodwaters rise, the more the public conversation is turning toward individual fulfillment as if in a desperate attempt to make us feel like we still have some control over our lives.

Coca-Cola encourages us to “choose happiness.” Politicians take time out from building careers in the debris of democracy to remind us of the importance of regular exercise. Lifestyle bloggers insist to hundreds of thousands of followers that freedom looks like a white woman practicing yoga alone on a beach. One such image (on the @selflovemantras Instagram) informs us that “the deeper the self love, the richer you are.” That’s a charming sentiment, but landlords are not currently collecting rent in self-love.

Can all this positive thinking be actively harmful? Carl Cederström and André Spicer, authors of The Wellness Syndrome, certainly think so, arguing that obsessive ritualization of self-care comes at the expense of collective engagement, collapsing every social problem into a personal quest for the good life. “Wellness,” they declare, “has become an ideology.”

I’m not sure whether this is a parody or not, but it’s certainly an entertaining read.

Read it.

Quit being fooled by the people behind the curtain and listen to reality.

Read it.

Well, then, obviously we need to ban ‘assault weapons’, especially the AR-15, because ignorance.

Read it.

The Atlantic is usually a reliable Voice of the Crust, so to have this kind of actual investigative journalism suggests that Hillary’s circled wagons might have a significant gap or two.

Read it.

If it were a left-wing group, of course, it would say ‘Watchdog group finds….’ It’s all about the Narrative.

Read the list.

Read it.

Markets work, even when some people don’t want them to, and even when some people try to stop them.

California, which in 1989 became the first state to ban so-called assault weapons, has expanded that category twice since then: in 1999, when the legislature added a generic definition to the original list of specifically proscribed models, and last week, when Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill aimed at a device that legally circumvented the ban. With the ink barely dry on the new law, another workaround is already available.

The 1999 law covered any semiautomatic centrefire rifle with a detachable magazine and any of six “military-style” features: 1) a flash suppressor, 2) a grenade launcher or flare launcher, 3) a thumbhole stock, 4) a folding or telescoping stock, 5) a forward pistol grip, or 6) a pistol grip that protrudes conspicuously beneath the action of the weapon. But regulations issued by the California Department of Justice defined “detachable magazine” as “any ammunition feeding device that can be removed readily from the firearm with neither disassembly of the firearm action nor use of a tool being required.” The regulations specifically said “a bullet or ammunition cartridge is considered a tool,” which left the door open to “bullet buttons” that release the magazine when you insert a cartridge into them. Since guns with bullet buttons did not technically have detachable magazines, they could legally include the features that offended the sensibilities of California legislators.

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The American house is growing. These days, the average new home encompasses 2,500 square feet, about 50 percent more area than the average house in the late 1970s, according to Census data. Compared to the typical house of 40 years ago, today’s likely has another bathroom and an extra bedroom, making it about the same size as the Brady Bunch house, which famously fit two families.

This expansion has come at a cost: the American lawn.

Read it.

The advent of electronic form for stories is no doubt helping this along. Ordinarily so short a story wouldn’t justify separate publishing, so would need some larger vehicle such as a magazine or an anthology. But in an era where bits are bits, they can economically be put up for sale by themselves.

David Cole ‘fesses up.

When the Paulists started making a stink during the 2012 GOP primary, I was called into action for my—how would Liam Neeson put it?—“very particular set of skills,” namely my research abilities and a steady hand with a poison pen. It’s funny looking back on that election year, when the GOP establishment’s worst problem was Ron Paul, and let’s be honest, he was at best a persistent but nonfatal tick on the fur of the big Republican dog. Truth is, we didn’t know how good we had it (you know, compared with how things are now). But back in 2012, the Ron Paul challenge was seen as a major headache that needed to disappear.

I’ve always thought of Paulists as more of a distraction than anything else, the libertarian equivalent of the Ralph Nader PIRG crowd, but I admit that I don’t pay that much attention to ‘politics’ in the sense of who-gets-what-office-this-election-cycle; my interest is at a higher level, logically speaking, more what-are-these-idiots-doing-now and that sort of thing.

Read it.

The Green Party’s likely presidential nominee said federal officials should prosecute Hillary Clinton for mishandling classified information and endangering national security.

In a Wednesday statement, Jill Stein echoed Republican criticism of the Obama administration, saying that the FBI “is giving Clinton a pass” by declining to recommend criminal charges related to her use of a private email system while serving as secretary of State.

“All the elements necessary to prove a felony violation were found by the FBI investigation,” Stein said in a statement. “Her staff has said Secretary Clinton stated she used her private email system because she did not want her personal emails to become accessible under [Freedom of Information] laws,” she added. “This is damning on two counts — that she intended to disregard the protection of security information, and that she had personal business to conceal.”

‘Greens’ are crazy but evidently not stupid.

John Stossel gets back to basics.

A century ago in the U.S., government at all levels took up about 8 percent of the economy. Now it takes up about 40 percent. It regulates everything from the size of beverage containers to what questions must not be asked in job interviews.

How can people be expected to keep up with it all?

Government has two jobs:

1. Keep people safe.
2. Keep people honest.

Everything else is statist bullshit.

Read it.

Increasingly, we live in a world where shared, universal experiences are fewer and further between. Where once you could count on a few tens of millions of people watching a TV show with you—and often at precisely the same time—these days DVRs and streamed video means you can watch things literally years after they make their cultural splash, and even if you do watch them at the same time as just about everyone else, chances are a much smaller number of people are watching it with you.

Which leads to the most ridiculous of all ridiculous First World Problems: Trying to find a TV show everyone at a dinner or other gathering has watched completely in order to have something to discuss passionately. It’s a lot harder than it should be.

Jeff Somers is one of my Recommended Writers (see column to right).

Ross Douthat pulls the cork out.

Genuine cosmopolitanism is a rare thing. It requires comfort with real difference, with forms of life that are truly exotic relative to one’s own. It takes its cue from a Roman playwright’s line that “nothing human is alien to me,” and goes outward ready to be transformed by what it finds.

The people who consider themselves “cosmopolitan” in today’s West, by contrast, are part of a meritocratic order that transforms difference into similarity, by plucking the best and brightest from everywhere and homogenizing them into the peculiar species that we call “global citizens.”

This species is racially diverse (within limits) and eager to assimilate the fun-seeming bits of foreign cultures — food, a touch of exotic spirituality. But no less than Brexit-voting Cornish villagers, our global citizens think and act as members of a tribe.

They have their own distinctive worldview (basically liberal Christianity without Christ), their own common educational experience, their own shared values and assumptions (social psychologists call these WEIRD — for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic), and of course their own outgroups (evangelicals, Little Englanders) to fear, pity and despise. And like any tribal cohort they seek comfort and familiarity: From London to Paris to New York, each Western “global city” (like each “global university”) is increasingly interchangeable, so that wherever the citizen of the world travels he already feels at home.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the ‘elite’ colleges. Take any senior from Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Duke, or Berkeley, and no matter what country they originally came from, no matter what the color of their skin, no matter what their native language, they’re all as alike as peas in a pod. A very elegant pod, but a pod nevertheless.

Read it.

Hint: Surprisingly well.

Freeberg has been thinking.

I was making a bee line toward the checkout stands in a grocery store the other day, with a bottle of wine in hand. Just that. 1.5L of white wine, nothing else. And I found myself thinking about this scam we have going…supposedly we live under a system of just laws, because the laws are written and ratified by elected officials who are beholden to us. The reason I was thinking it was a scam, was because the self-checkout lanes were all empty and the human-monitored checkout lanes were all full. The lines were snaking backward, into the aisles.

You can’t buy alcohol in a self-checkout lane.

The problem is not that the law happened to be inconvenient to me, in the moment. There is a defense against that, that pretty much all laws are inconvenient now & then, that’s why they have to be laws. That much is reasonable. The problem is a question: Who the fuck wanted this? Whoever said “Without government, who’s going to stop me from buying alcohol in a self-checkout lane”? And while we’re pondering that one, we can think about another question that rises to confront us: With all the self-checkout lanes empty, and all the human-checkout lanes full, who does this law help?

Read it.

We believe job loss won’t be catastrophic but there will be some on the margins, and it’s a nasty experience for the people who do lose their jobs. They tend to lose them for the rest of their lives. But the fear is overstated. Computers don’t tend to replace whole jobs; they replace specific tasks. Also, it’s a relatively slow process to eliminate jobs. There are just as many bank tellers now as there were in 1980. It’s not a profession that’s growing and no one would recommend it for their child, but it takes quite a while to replace jobs.

Read it.

Bear in mind that Nate Silver has been wrong on every one of his Trump predictions so far.

Read it.

Switzerland has rejected citizenship requests from two Muslim girls for refusing to take part in swimming lessons with boys at school.

The 12- and 14-year-old will no longer be considered for naturalised citizenship because they have not complied with the school curriculum, authorities in Basel said.

The girls are understood to have refused to take part in school swimming lessons because boys were present and their religion forbade that form of interaction, according to USA Today. Their applications for Swiss passports have now been overturned.

Meanwhile, the father of two other girls who refused to let his daughters swim with boys was fined $4,000 swiss francs (around £2,900) by a district court in another part of the country.

Stefan Wehrle, president of the country’s naturalisation committee, told TV station SRF that “whoever doesn’t fulfil these conditions, violates the law and therefore cannot be naturalised.”

There has never been a Muslim terrorism incident in Switzerland. Maybe they know something that we don’t know.

Read it.

What headache? When are Democrats ever held accountable, especially by other Democrats?

It’s not as if any Democrat A.G. knows the meaning of the phrase ‘appearance of impropriety’ anyway.

Read it.

School has nothing to do with freedom. First, there are state laws mandating that you have either attended school or have learned the very specific kinds of things you’d learn in school. That form of education is not a choice: it is legally compulsory.

But schooling is culturally compulsory as well. That’s what Austrian philosopher and Roman Catholic priest Ivan Illich said.

Illich was a critic of state education systems who, in 1970, wrote a now celebrated book called Deschooling Society, in which he boldly argued that, like the separation of church and state, we need a corresponding right protecting people from state establishment of education.

…

How have we succumbed to such a narrow understanding of education? Simply put, when anything is legally mandatory, it becomes universal, and when anything is universal for long enough, the culture forgets that there were ever any alternatives.

David Cole is having a great time.

Sadly, the one type of American voter who grates on me like a nursery full of shrieking, colicky newborns is the infernal species I’m doomed to live among here in L.A.—the leftist hipster. Leftist hipsters have neither the Trumpkins’ aw-shucks humility nor the anti-Semites’ worshipful admission of the Jews’ place as overlords in the human pecking order. Leftist hipsters are defined by their smugness, their pseudo-certainty, and their unyielding belief that their views are based on science and rationalism, whereas everyone else’s are based on ignorance, superstition, and fear.

There is nothing that is not foul about leftist hipsters. They traffic in the very fear, ignorance, and superstition that they accuse others of employing. Leftist hipsters will be the first ones to accuse conservatives of being “racist,” yet almost every political move the leftist hipster makes is in some way rooted in a pathological hatred of white people, a hatred that leftist hipsters—most of whom are themselves white—view as the ultimate self-critical virtue-signaling: “Look how evolved, enlightened, and noble I am—I’m willing to hate my own skin color.”

…

But sadly, as deluded as leftist hipsters are, they can still read the writing on the PBR can. Sanders is on his way out, and with Trump on track for the GOP nod, it’s going to be Hillary versus “like, literally Hitler.” So of course the hipster crowd needs to find a way to support a warmongering drone-loving Wall Street-backed unremittingly corrupt rapist-defending Democrat.

My younger brother would be a hipster if he could afford it — unfortunately, he picked the wrong parents — but he still talks the talk.

Check it out.

When I published Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think in February 2012, I included about 80 charts in the back of the book showing very strong evidence that the world is getting better.

Over the last five years, this trend has continued and accelerated.

This blog includes additional “Evidence for Abundance” that you can share with friends and family to change their mindset.

We truly are living in the most exciting time to be alive.

It won’t last. ‘Progressives’ will screw it up with their constant compulsion to change.

Read it.

It’s sugar, not fat, that causes heart attacks.

Steve Sailer looks at Brexit.

The near universal response of the punditry to a majority of Brits voting to leave the E.U. has been so enraged that the average voter must have begun by now to notice that their furious elites just plain don’t like them. As a Bizarro World Sally Field might have exclaimed in wonder, “You hate us, you really hate us!”

The past week has been the mirror image of the Stale Pale Male taunting and touchdown dances that followed Obama’s reelection. Then, it was Democracy Rules (because we’ve imported millions of ringers). Now, it’s Democracy Sucks (because voters are stupid).

Read it.

Liberals believe in the rule of law; in individual rights to speech, worship, assembly, and private property; in an independent judiciary and civilian control of the military; in representative institutions founded on the consent of the governed; in democratic elections, not as ends in themselves but as checks on the power of government and as a means of gauging and forging popular support for policies pursued by public officials in the name of the common good.

Progressives believe in all of that, too, but they add something else: a quasi-eschatological faith in historical progress that gives the movement its name. This belief has many sources, and it takes many forms. One stream flows from liberal Protestant theology on down through Woodrow Wilson’s hopes for moral advances at home and an end to armed conflict abroad — with both of them realized by an elite class of public-spirited experts. The same theologically infused faith informs Barack Obama’s frequent invocation of an “arc of history” that “bends toward justice.”

As I have often said.

Politics in this expansive sense will come to an end in the imagined progressive future because there will be nothing left to debate. The big questions of politics will already be answered, the big disputes settled once and for all. Everyone will understand that all particular forms of solidarity are morally indefensible (just various forms of racism) and that all strong political stands against humanitarian universalism in the political realm are politically unacceptable (just various forms of fascism).

This is erroneous, because Progressivism demands constant change, because change produces Progress and one can never have enough Progress.

It would be one thing if progressives understood their universalistic moral and political convictions to constitute one legitimate partisan position among many. But they don’t understand them in this way. They believe not only that their views deserve to prevail in the fullness of time, but also that they are bound to prevail.

And this is also right on. This guy is so close to understanding the dialectic….

Read it.

It ain’t gonna happen. But it’s fun to talk about.

Jim Goad explains it all to you.

As a graduate of journalism school, it took me many years of tireless research to conclude that most journalists are so full of shit, it’s a wonder they don’t explode. I’ve learned to be especially wary of anyone who makes a point of referring to themselves as a “journalist”—more often than not, you aren’t dealing with an objective fact-digger but rather a robotic ideologue who will mercilessly mangle facts to fit his narrative while swiftly discarding any fact that even slightly subverts it.

The most depressing thing about trying to deal exclusively in facts is the fact that most people don’t care about facts. Fact is, they believe what they want to believe.

Read it.

In a reversal of stereotypes, “Democrats have become a party of the wealthy” admits Fredrik deBoer in the Washington Post. Meanwhile, Republicans–much to the chagrin of some Republican “elites”–have become a party of the working class.

The Antiplanner was reminded of this when I saw a report saying that 29.4 percent of Americans were now “upper middle class,” which the report defines as having incomes of $100,000 or more for a family of three (or roughly $82,000 for a family of two, $115,000 for a family of four, etc.–see page 3 of the report). This highlights something the Antiplanner has said several times before: the real social divide in America is not between the 1 percent and the 99 percent, but between the 30 percent and the 70 percent. Specifically, about 30 percent of working-age Americans are “knowledge workers,” and generally have college degrees, while 70 percent do physical labor, and generally don’t have college degrees.

…

Thus, when you read articles or listen to stories about the “hollowing of America’s middle class,” they don’t mean something is happening to the college-educated middle class. They mean that middle-income families are declining in importance as incomes are bifurcating into those with college educations having upper-middle incomes (or better) and those without having lower-middle incomes (or worse), with fewer having middle-middle incomes.