January 2012

Dave Schuler has a couple of posts up, responding to a Charles Murray op-ed. I recommend reading both and the ensuing discussions (In fact, I recommend reading Schuler regularly – a good, independent voice on current events.)

The SuperZIPs one is interesting, but not exactly on the forefront of what we need to be talking about. Most Americans don’t need to know what it takes to get into the top 1% (they may be Catholic, but I suspect converting to Catholicism won’t help you or me). Rather, they need to know what to do in order to get into the “continually employed and making a good living wage” percent. As a good handmaiden of the superwealthy, I suppose, I think too much time and effort is spent looking at how well the other One Percent has it. In part, because I am not sure what all we can do about it. More selfishly, because I fear that the ways in which they may be targeted will actually boomarang onto families like mine. It’s not unlike the NCAA football joke, “The NCAA rules committee got so mad at the University of Miami that they gave Miami-Ohio the death penalty.” It might be fair to see what we can extract from the upper echelon, but in order to make real progress we are going to have to redefine wealthy down by a pretty significant degree. Even a lot of people on Wall Street (who caused the economic apocalypse, destroyed the economy, or whatever) aren’t actually in the 1%. But most importantly, I fear that attempts to prevent them from accumulating that wealth will result in laws that they will be able to accountant their way out of while my wife and I take the hit. I don’t see an easy way to do this, and I fear a lot of the simplistic language.

I take issue with, or have questions about, a couple of Schuler’s comments in his second piece. For instance:

“The Pill” gave women more control over their own reproduction. It rendered unwanted pregnancies less likely. The legalizing and subsequent acceptability of abortion was one of the factors that meant that when a man impregnated a woman marriage was not the inevitable outcome.

I could write a post on this, but on what metric should we make this determination? Comparing then and now, the number of children born to unsustainable families does not appear to be dramatically lower. Illegitimacy rates are not down (they may be down in the last twenty years, but we’re going back further than that). People are still having families that they cannot afford. I would argue that the the pill has been something of a mixed bag. People like my wife and I, who can use contraception effectively, afford to use it every time, and are conscientious about it, have benefited tremendously. Meanwhile, people that are error-prone, have difficulty with consistency, or cannot easily afford contraception, the pill has ushered in a sexual revolution that they are ill-equipped to deal protect themselves against the ramifications of.

The second area of disagreement is this:

Our educational system is geographically based. When you combine geographical isolation of people with differing backgrounds (something that has not always been the case), the increasing importance of formal education as agriculture and then manufacturing became less important, assortative mating is at least as good an explanation for what we’ve seen over the last couple of decades as Dr. Murray’s federal government policy social policy is.

Mickey Kaus touched on assortive mating in his book. It used to be that doctors married nurses but now doctors marry doctors (or engineers). I would submit, though, that the nurses that doctors used to marry were not randomly selected. Rather, they were more likely to be nurses from good families. I’m not saying that two incomes (which is more Kaus’s point than Schuler’s) or economic stratification haven’t made a difference, but rather that it’s probably less than meets the eye. My first serious girlfriend was a girl raised in a trailer until she was 14 or so. Things didn’t work out. I’m not saying that I dumped her due to her economic status, but that the different cultures we came from were a part of the overall equation. A reason why her family didn’t “get” me and my family didn’t “get” her family. These dynamics are in play, often subconsciously, regardless of proximity.

More to the point, I spent a lot of time in a social environment from when I was 16 to when I was 19 that was comparatively mixed between working class folks and white collar ones. Almost to a man, we ended up marrying into our own. Even the son of a waste-water worker who made more than his father ever did by his 30th birthday married a girl of a background similar to his. I’m not saying that there aren’t exceptions, but that there are a whole lot more signals in play than we often realize. A nurse is not a nurse is not a nurse. Then, or now.

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I wonder if this is indicative of anything.

A while back I used an app that scanned my friends and put them into political categories. I assume that if my friend said “Republican” or “conservative” or “righty” or “right-wing” (some people did put this!) it would put them in the same pot, and the same for the left. The final results were something to the effect of 57% Republican and 43% Democratic (There was another result that included independents and libertarians, but Republicans were the plurality at 40% on that one). This was not a surprise because of where I come from and the politics of that region.

And yet, going through my Facebook feed, of the political post, at least 80% and it seems like more than 90% are from a liberal or Democratic orientation. A good portion of that are coming from the same people, but there are at least 5 or 6 people* batting around liberalish stuff versus only two irregular conservative folks doing the same.

It’s possible that the feed’s selection process considers the liberal people “closer” to me and therefore they are more likely to appear. But a part of me wonders if there isn’t something rather profound here that I cannot quite articulate. Something involving the social acceptability of conservative viewpoints versus liberal ones in my SES social ecosphere. Something that bodes pretty ill for the GOP.

* – I am, compared to many, unloved. Only 110 friends or so.

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We are a culture that has been denied, or has passively given up, the linguistic and intellectual tools to cope with complexity, to separate illustion from reality. We have traded the printed word for the gleaming image. Public rhetoric is designed to be comprehensible to a ten-year-old child or an adult with a sixth-grade reading level. Most of us speak at this level, are entertained and think at this level. We have transformed our culture into a vast replica of Pinocchio’s Pleasure Island, where boys were lured with the promise of no school and endless fun. Theyw ere all, however, turned into donkeys — a symbol, in Italian culture, of ignorance and stupidity.

– Chris Hedges

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The porn industry is quick to raise the First Amendment as its primary argument against governmental intervention of any sort. And not without justification — governments from the Feds down to municipalities are notoriously hostile to pornography. Which is odd, because judging by the way the market behaves, it sure looks like pretty much everyone likes the stuff. When no one else is watching.

But the City of Los Angeles cannot help but be cognizant of the fact that a whole lot of porn gets made within its city limits and that this generates substantial tax revenue. At the same time, it has passed a municipal ordinance mandating that producers of porn require the performers to wear condoms while performing. And the idea seems to be spreading. [click to continue…]

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The Top 15 states, in the contiguous 48 states and excluding Washington DC, in order: California, New Jersey, New York, Washington, Nevada, Maryland, Massachusetts, Virginia, Illinois, Oregon, Minnesota, Connecticut, and Texas.

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Sins may be forgiven. Crimes require punishment.

- George R.R. Martin

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Who can explain just how he became the person he is? It does not happen this day or that one. It is a gradual evolution that happens largely unheralded.

- David Anthony Durham

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I don’t know how other people use the “Clippings” feature on their Kindles, or the equivalents on their e-readers. I do know that mine is getting on two years old, full of stuff that I haven’t used again later even though I really liked them when I read them. So I’m going to post them, one by one, every day, until they’re all gone.

Think of it as a daily meditation.

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Games are won and lost by kids aged 18-23 or so. Worse than that… National Signing Day. I’m keeping track of Southern Tech’s recruits. And as these 17 and 18 year olds change their mind, my day gets better or worse.

This is insane.

But this is college football.

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