2,017 karma · joined November 21, 2013
The bill ostensibly limits only misinformation concerning "public health emergencies." Last week, New York's Governor Cuomo declared gun violence a public health emergency. "Public health emergency" will be the new term of art for politicians seeking greater power than the "confines" of our Constitution allow.
This bill is trouble.
The change is that the IRS now holds the restaurant owner accountable for the taxes due on the tip. The result is that instead of the money going to the server directly, it first has to pass through the hands of the business owner. I don't know if this still goes on, but some years back I recall hearing that some restaurant owners would then "distribute" those tips to other members of the staff — the busboys, kitchen help, etc.
Traditionally, waiters always "tipped out" the busboys and bartenders they worked with, on any given shift, and better service (theoretically) promoted more generosity from the waiter. But now that the business owner has his hand in it, the business owner will operate according to his own interests. The waiter is cut out. The waiter has less control, and less direct incentive. The waiter has less of a payoff.
Rumor has it (or, if you will, common sense has it) that some owners abuse their role as middleman.
> We found that people like some features that are already present in social media, like the ability to delete inflammatory content, block users who derail conversations and use emoji to convey emotions in text.
I mentally inserted an Oxford comma before the last "and." Thus:
People like some features that are already present in social media, like the ability to:
* delete inflammatory content
* block users who derail conversations
* use emoji to convey emotions in textI agree Haidt's model is flawed, especially on the idea of sacredness being something liberals aren't concerned with. I think he's onto something, but he's painted with too broad a brush.
Lately, I've been reading a lot on the subject of religion: specifically, from an anthropological or sociological perspective. I'm interested in the idea of ersatz religions—filling the void left by modernity's secularism. My suspicion is that the great bulk of people cannot do without the things that religion affords; and so if they aren't "religious" in the traditional sense, they unwittingly find some substitute that does everything but revere Christ, YHWH, Allah, etc.
Behavior that fits that model I see again and again, on what we think of as the political left.
I'm only half-joking here, but if these Russians were able to undermine the 2016 election's integrity, spending that pittance, either Trump or Biden would have hired these political science geniuses for 2020.
My understand is that their efforts were mainly meant to sow political discord. If you ask me, what they learned is that we don't need their help with that.
Even language makes this difficult. Ask someone to explain natural selection to you, sometime.
So, what we have in many cases are various changes in our society, some of which are truly unintended consequences of some government policy or invention; then, throw in some group that benefits from this change, either unintentionally or because they were able to recognize and seize an opportunity, and that's all you really need for some people to think that "They" were behind the thing, all along.
I'm going to reach here a bit, but are we going to rope in the Westboro Baptist Church and pretend these people were the "conservative" response? Even if we do that, do you recall them—as odious as they are—being violent or advocating violence? And if we're not pointing to them, who are we pointing to?
I have a friend I haven't seen since high school, though I'm connected with him on Facebook. He will outright tell you himself that he's a communist—familiar with the writings of Marx, etc. We could not be more diametrically opposed. However, he's as clear-eyed as you seem to be.
I suspect that most people simply aren't all that intellectually curious. I don't remember if Haidt explicitly mentioned this, but I think somewhere either he or someone commenting on his study asserted that it is much easier to pick up the party line of liberals through osmosis, since those in education, the media, and so forth tend to be liberal. So, even conservatives are more readily exposed to the liberal take on things. Liberals on the other hand are not.
But the point I'm making by mentioning my friend and thanking you is that I suspect that people who are intellectually curious are more or less inoculated against mischaracterizing the side they disagree with, since they don't learn almost exclusively through osmosis.
I appreciate your contribution to this thread.
What he found was that conservatives had no trouble answering the way liberals do. However, liberals could not do likewise. Liberals frequently chose the red herrings on the multiple choice questions, the ones that exaggerated the conservative positions to the point of more or less demonizing conservatives.
That's why we're talking about Fox News, don't you see? CNN and MSNBC are just folks. Fox News is the Anti-Christ.
Even the article itself has this same smell of bias about it.
This is where the idea of a "Gentleman's C" comes from. You see, their lives were already pretty well set out. You made connections, graduated, and then went to work for your father or uncle, or your father or uncle's firm; or, married the daughter of a well-to-do family and went to work for your father-in-law.
But there has long been an egalitarian and meritocratic strain in the United States, and after WWII, as a way of saying thank you to those who had saved the world from Hitler, the GI Bill was started. This was a great success.
The GI Bill made it possible for older, generally more mature, and generally more motivated individuals to attend college. Interestingly, the "gentlemen" students, the anecdote goes, used to complain about these people as "DAB's": Damn Average Busters. Those on the GI Bill weren't satisfied with grades of C (whether real or given with a wink).
Now, here I break from the history to my own opinion. The former GI's were a special cohort. To identify them as merely middle and working class people benefiting from college, and from there to imagine that all (or nearly all) middle and working class young people could benefit from college just does not follow.
But, whether or not one follows from the other, it's a wonderful thing for a politician to promise, and just the kind of thing people want to believe. Promising to send the children of your constituents to trade school just doesn't have the same ring to it. So, it became college for everybody.
From here, I can pick up with what you're saying, and add that what you're saying jibes with what Allan Bloom said, way back in 1987, with his Closing of the American Mind. Bloom argued that middle class people are far more practical, economically — not having well-to-do fathers, uncles, and father-in-laws to fall back on; and because of that, colleges had to retool to become far more practical. In other words, many of the new degrees — at least at first — were closer to the aims of trade schools than traditional liberal arts curriculums. It seems like things were like that for a while.
Where I think it gets worse is that government money has created a bubble in higher education, a bubble that has created degrees which I term luxury degrees. These degrees are neither traditional college curriculums or glorified trade school syllabi. These are the so-called "navel gazing" or "basket weaving" courses. Maybe, if you were rich and lacked the ability to take over the family business, your rich parents might send you off to study one of these luxury majors, and that might make some kind of sense. Maybe you'd still meet a nice girl or boy, and then fall back on your trust fund. In any case, it would be their money and their business; and, in any case, how much of that sort of thing would there be? But spending taxpayer money to fund these courses of study and produce these degree holders is ludicrous. It is gross malinvestment, plain and simple.
It's simply monstrous that we would compare Amazon — whatever criticisms someone might have for the company's business practices — with Communist China, and something like that needs to be called out.
The article claims that savings by the rich is fueling both consumer debt and government debt, when in fact it's closer to the other way around. Government debt — monetary policies that inflate the money supply via government debt — is fueling profligate consumer spending with cheap consumer credit made available by easy-money policies.
The ignorance here is destructive.
The political science class I took back in college (over 20 years ago now) began with the Oresteia trilogy, by Aeschylus. The issue there is between "frontier justice" (actually, blood feuds) and civil justice (justice of the polis). The message there is that there can be no civilization unless the people of a society sublimate their (intrinsic?) passion for frontier justice towards civil justice.
The myth, as you call it, is there to bind us as a society — as any myth does.
I don't know what movie is being referred to above, but the idea from that passage doesn't originate with the movie.
That's ending any day, no?
Okay, that's just my opinion, right? Fine. Call me crazy for believing that prolonged isolation, idleness, and political repression leads to egregious economic dislocation and social unrest, but I'm going with that until I hear a better explanation.
But, let me come clean about my prejudices. I live in New York. When Governor Cuomo was on television every day, I saw — every day — comments to his feeds on Facebook and Twitter from people saying things like, "Thank you, Governor. Whenever I listen to you I feel calm and safe. I listen to you every day for my sanity."
I wish I were making this up! But, as I said months ago, I am astounded by the people who I imagine have no qualms going on about "patriarchy" bestowing what I see as sycophantic praise on a governor whose entire affect reminds me of the stereotype of an immigrant family's "papa."
This is, in part, why I say "neurotic." We can't have a free country when we have so many people — voters! — like these. The SARS-CoV-2 virus isn't the scariest thing about this pandemic.
I think that, by and large, mask mandates should have been effected privately: meaning, business owners should have been free to institute mask policies the same way the do shirts and shoes policies. Government should have publicly given such policies support.
Lockdowns should have been periodic and local: meaning, focused on time and place. The aim of lockdowns would not be to "save even a single life," but to try to keep hospitals from being overwhelmed, so that people who could pull through with supportive care would have an available bed to recover in. In the meantime, government should have endeavored to setup emergency hospitals to make more beds available, relocating them as necessary.
Every point I'm making stresses free choice and personal liberty; and every point I'm making stresses the idea that there are no easy answers and no one has the "master plan."
Instead, what I saw — what we all saw — was federal bureaucrats and state governors dictating what hundreds of millions of people should do, based on conjecture and even whim, and dare I say, even at times personal vanity.
But I'm the arrogant one?