Category Archives: Social Commentary

What’s The Point?

Sarah Pullman is very unhappy with Facebook’s privacy policy.

OK, I got a Facebook account last fall, at the urging of several people, who told me that I simply had to have one (though they could never actually explain why). I’ve yet to figure it out myself. I’ve gotten no discernible benefit from it (of course, I haven’t invested much time in it, either). Can anyone explain to me what the big deal is, and what I’m missing out on if I don’t have an account, or don’t use the one I have?

[Update late morning]

While we’re on the subject, here’s an article on which is better for business: Facebook or LinkedIn?

What’s The Point?

Sarah Pullman is very unhappy with Facebook’s privacy policy.

OK, I got a Facebook account last fall, at the urging of several people, who told me that I simply had to have one (though they could never actually explain why). I’ve yet to figure it out myself. I’ve gotten no discernible benefit from it (of course, I haven’t invested much time in it, either). Can anyone explain to me what the big deal is, and what I’m missing out on if I don’t have an account, or don’t use the one I have?

[Update late morning]

While we’re on the subject, here’s an article on which is better for business: Facebook or LinkedIn?

Confused

Selena Zito writes that all of the remaining presidential candidates are Scots-Irish.

Really? This is the first I’d heard that Hillary! was of Scots-Irish descent. I’d always assumed that she was from Puritan stock. That’s the way she’s always acted. And Obama is obviously, at best, only half Scots-Irish.

Zito doesn’t seem to quite get the concept, either:

How can there be such scant understanding of a 30 million-strong ethnic group that has produced so many leaders and swung most elections?

Perhaps because political academics and pollsters parse the Scottish half off with the WASP vote and define the Irish-Catholic half as blue-collar Democrats. They are neither.

There is no “Irish-Catholic half” of the Scots-Irish. Scots-Irish aren’t Irish at all. Neither are they Scottish. They were mostly Anglo-Saxon, not Celtic. They were also a violent people with an honor culture, mercenaries from the border area between England and Scotland. As the article notes, they were sent by the English to colonize Ulster, to get them out of Britain after the war between England and Scotland was settled and they had no more need for them. The ones too violent for Ulster were shipped off to America, so they’re a double distillation of the most violent culture that the British Isles produced. After they fought (mostly for the South) in the Civil War, many of them headed out west.

People who think that America is too violent blame it on the proliferation of guns. But they confuse cause and effect. We have a lot of guns because we have a lot of Scots-Irish (aka rednecks). But it comes in pretty handy during war time.