I almost never use them, though I occasionally will do a wizbang (?!).
Category Archives: Social Commentary
Thoughts On Southern Accents
I get no less than 3 comments a week regarding the way I talk, coming in the form of “you are not from here” or “where is that accent from” or “I like your accent”. In fact, the accent of native Hoosiers is so homogeneous that I can now hear my own accent, which is more annoying than I expected. I have never enjoyed hearing myself recorded and I really do not like hearing my own accent when I talk. It is strange.
The good news is that no one has called me a hick, redneck, hillbilly (not an insult, by the way), or moron, yet. Unfortunately, in northeastern and some mid-atlantic states (I shall not name names to protect the guilty) I have endured rather cutting and insulting comments about my accent. I was once told by a dude in a NYC diner that I “must be a bigot based solely on how I talk”. Needless to say, our conversation was cut very short. Even worse, a store clerk in a town 3 hours from my hometown once sneered at my accent and insisted that “it could not come from a place that close”. It is sad, but in some quarters of the country, a southern accent is considered dumb, ignorant, and/or backward. Luckily, NE Indiana and the Midwest so far is not part of that contingent. And, for that, I am very thankful because I plan on keeping this accent.
I hope you do, darlin’.
One thing you learn pretty quickly in the aerospace industry, because of Lyndon Johnson’s determination to use NASA as a Marshall Plan for the south (literally, in the case of Marshall Space Flight Center) is that just because someone speaks slow, doesn’t mean they are slow…
And I actually never learned growing up to be prejudiced against southern accents, in southeast Michigan. It might be because in an auto town like Flint, you grew up with a lot of people who migrated up from the south to work there. A lot of the people I went to school with were from a poorer east-side neighborhood, whose parents were from Kentucky and Tennessee, and worked in the shop. Some of them might could have had better home lives, but most were damned good people, and not afraid to work, or fix things, and would give you the shirt off their back. And I noticed that they got along with the blacks a lot better than many of the native-born. Because they knew how to.
The Problem With Big Cities
It isn’t about race:
Think of the path to successful middle class living as a ladder; the lower rungs on that ladder are not nice places to be, but if those rungs don’t exist, nobody can climb. When politicians talk about creating jobs, they always talk about creating “good” jobs. That is all very well, but unless there are bad jobs and lots of them, people in the inner cities will have a hard time getting on the ladder at all, much less climbing into the middle class.
Many sensitive and idealistic people in our society work very hard to keep from connecting these dots and admitting to themselves that bad jobs are something we need. Quacks abound promising us alternatives (“green jobs” is the latest fashionable delusion), but ugly problems rarely have pretty solutions. We need entry level jobs that will get people into the workforce, and we need ways that they can learn useful skills at affordable prices that will help them climb the ladder and move on.
To get these jobs, we have to change the way our cities work. Essentially, we have created urban environments in which the kind of enterprises that often hire the poor — low margin, poorly capitalized, noisy, smelly, dirty, informally managed without a long paper trail — can’t exist. The kind of metal bashing repair shops that fill the cities of the developing world are almost impossible to operate here. Plumbers, carpenters, electricians, pushcart vendors and day care operators need licenses; construction work has to comply with elaborate guidelines and city bureaucracies disgorge the required permits slowly and reluctantly.
The minimum wage is part and parcel of this problem.
The “Backfire Effect”
The opposite of confirmation bias? You see this a lot in space policy discussions.
“Non-Monogamous Marriage”?
Call me crazy, but isn’t that an oxymoron?
“That’s Racist!”
Jonah Goldberg has (I know, typical for him and me and other racists) a racist column today.
The leftists’ lament: “Oh, epithet, where is thy former sting?”
Heinlein, Fascist
The LA Times interviews some young idiots in fandom:
As the literary and academic worlds open to science-fiction and genre writing, Heinlein lacks the cachet of J.G. Ballard, Ursula LeGuin, Octavia Butler, Neal Stephenson, cyberpunk pioneer William Gibson and others. Films based on Dick’s books, good and bad, keep coming. But Heinlein’s film adaptations, in the last half century, since 1950’s “Destination Moon,” culminated in 1997’s “Starship Troopers,” widely disliked by his fan base.
Non-SF writer William Burroughs probably has more influence inside the genre’s literary wing than Heinlein, who won four Hugos (the award voted by the fans), sold millions of copies, and was termed the field’s most significant writer since H.G. Wells.
“His rabid fan base is graying,” said Annalee Newitz, who writes about science fiction for Wired and Gawker. “To literary readers, the books look cheesy, sexist in a hairy-chest, gold-chain kind of way. His stuff hasn’t stood the test of time,” because of characters’ windy speechifying and their frontier optimism.
“Here at the store I actively resist promoting him, because he was a fascist,” said Charles Hauther, the science fiction buyer at Skylight Books. “People don’t seem to talk about him anymore. I haven’t had a conversation about Heinlein in a long time.
And you’ve obviously never had an intelligent one.
Lyndon Johnson’s Greatest Quaqmire
After the Medicare/Medicaid catastrophe the single greatest policy failure of modern America is urban policy. Since the Great Society era of Lyndon Johnson, the country has poured hundreds of billions of dollars into poor urban neighborhoods. The violence and crime generated in these neighborhoods costs hundreds of billions more. And after all this time, all this money and all this energy, the inner city populations are worse off than before. There is more drug addiction and more social and family breakdown among this population than when the Great Society was launched. Incarceration rates have risen to levels that shock the world (though they make for safer streets); the inner city abortion rate has reached levels that must surely appall even the most resolute pro-choicers not on the Planned Parenthood payroll. Forty percent of all pregnancies in New York end in abortion, with higher rates among Blacks; nationally, the rate among Blacks is three times the rate among white women. Put it all together and you have a holocaust of youth and hope on a scale hard to match.
This is not a lot to show for almost fifty years of fighting poverty — not a lot of bang for the buck.
It’s worse than that. It’s a lot of destruction of lives, at a cost to the productive of trillions over the past four decades.
Vanity, and Arrogance
So, the socialist scumbag spent time in jail because he thought he was too high and mighty to have to pay a hooker.
While I think the perp walk should be abolished, going as it does against the notion of the presumption of innocence, it’s hard for me to feel sorry for him. I just hope he doesn’t yet become president of France. I fear, though, that this incident may make it more likely, appealing as it does to some aspects of the aristocratic French culture.
[Update a while later]
The almost overnight transformation of D.S.K. — as Dominique Strauss-Kahn is widely known in France — from alleged sexual predator to seeming victim of an unscrupulous accuser has riveted and divided the country. The news that the Sofitel maid who had accused D.S.K. of rape had repeatedly lied to prosecutors has also spurred talk of a political comeback for the one-time French presidential contender that only weeks ago was deemed impossible.
Goody.
The Higher-Education Bubble
More thoughts on the overvaluation of a college degree:
Wolf’s position is firm. An increase in the quantity of graduates will neither create a dynamic, wealth-producing economy nor will it create the conditions for the emergence of lots of dynamic, wealth-producing individuals. Universities are not what they are currently being cracked up to be. But that leads to another problem. So deeply entrenched is the belief that, to use the words of the 1998 Dearing report, ‘Higher education has become central to the economic wellbeing of nations and individuals’, that it is becoming increasingly difficult to recall what the purpose of institutions of higher education might be. Their autonomy as academic bodies, in which one ought to be free to pursue an interest in a subject area to a higher level, has been effaced by their thoroughgoing instrumentalisation as drivers of economic growth and social mobility.
One of the biggest myths is that the subject matter doesn’t matter — that a degree in medieval French literature is just as good, and worth just as much money as one in chemical engineering. It’s not.