laxam
1yr ago
I majored in American Sign Language to become an interpreter, and our curriculum drew heavily from Deaf Studies. Courses on cultural awareness emphasized the privileging of standard English as a major component of audism (oppression of Deaf people).
It can be astonishing just how deeply critical theory has penetrated into every nook and cranny of the educational establishment and academia.
laxam
1yr ago
Yes, this is the critical theory take on deafness, you don't have to explain it.
It's just amazing and a little depressing how the communists have penetrated right on down to ASL training.
laxam
1yr ago
The Ghaznavids built interesting and impressive structures at around the same time.
Afghanistan's problem today is that it's state is probably poorer now than it was then. Trade routes that made Medieval Afghanistan potentially wealthy have dried up. Also, monumental architecture has kind of gone out of fashion everywhere.
laxam
1yr ago
I think it's use by that subreddit has led to a lot of people on Reddit thinking that that is actually what neoliberal means.
For a big part of my life, the only person I had ever seen purposely identify as a neoliberal was Scott Sumner.
laxam
1yr ago
I suspect much of the people who claim to have high-minded reasons to root against Ukraine are more motivated by baser and petty reasons. As is the same with most political things, I would think.
I've suspected that many of the people who oppose support for Ukraine from the right are motivated by the same thing motivating people who oppose support for Ukraine from the left: anti-Americanism. But, now, they associate 'America' the state with what they call 'neoliberalism' and wokeness so they have begun to adopt the left's attitudes on foreign relations.
laxam
1yr ago
In the same way it was in the interest of the British during the Napoleonic Wars and the century of warfare prior to balance against any potential hegemon on the European continent, it is in the interest of any power in North America to balance against any possible hegemon in Eurasia. While China is the primary threat here, Russia represents smaller scale version of the same thing and, more generally, freezing borders in place to the greatest extent possible keeps Eurasia fragmented and unable to unite under a hegemon capable of threatening the US across the Atlantic or Pacific.
laxam
1yr ago
Something tells me that 1/4 Mexican, 1/4 German, 1/2 English Americans are going to have the same white guilt complex as ones that aren’t 1/4 Mexican
It ultimately doesn't make a dramatic difference, but, in most parts of the country, whites are much less than half English.
Outside of Utah, parts of the South, and Upper New England, I would be surprised if most whites in any given area were 1/3 English.
laxam
1yr ago
Right, it's not a problem, it's just kind of my personal crusade. People learn American history with a focus on the early history and think that English heritage and tradition means the US still has a very large component of English descent today when it really doesn't. Mass immigration in the 19th century already caused the majority portion of the white population to be non-English descended in many parts of the country. By the early 1920's, for example, most of the major East coast metropolises were 70%+ descendants of immigrants in the last three generations. These immigrant populations have since moved all over the country and diluted what remained of colonial populations. Even the populations of much of the plains states are often only a third to half descended from English settlers or immigrants -- it's just the immigrant populations that settled much of those areas were Northern European Protestants so they just kind of blend in as assimilated and invisible.
There's no real point to it, it's just a popular impression of the American population that is very wrong. Probably less than a third of the population (including black Americans) is descended from colonial settlers and, while the English did send a great many immigrants to the US in the 19th century, they tended to be overwhelmingly middle class and so were often less fecund than Catholic immigrants to start with and rapidly assimilated to native born birth rates.
laxam
1yr ago
While true to an extent, it's also worth remembering that inter-faith marriages were almost as no-no as inter-racial marriage for a long time in many places. It has probably only been since the Boomers that that has entirely disappeared. In places where the immigrants were Protestant, they would likely intermarry and quickly assimilate with the English descended population. Where they were not, English descent is going to be relatively much lower.
laxam
1yr ago
I, like many men, have a similar problem to transgender folks: I'm Dwayne Johnson in the body of a 40+ computer programmer. The solution is squats, deadlifts, bench press, road work and clean eating, not therapy and medication. Body transformation >> body acceptance, at least in this particular case where body transformation has so many other benefits. And it's pretty easy to reverse the transformation and go back to dad bod if desired.
That sounds like therapy.
Like, talk therapy involves lifestyle changes all the time. It can be an important component of treatment. This is still, 'what starts in psychology stays in psychology'.
laxam
1yr ago
Judges are perfectly able to second guess the judgment of Executive Officials. That's a big part of what judicial review is. If the Secretary made no serious effort to ensure beneficiaries of the program actually 'suffered direct economic hardship as a direct result of a war or other military operation or national emergency', the judiciary is perfectly empowered to say, "You acted unconstitutionally".
laxam
1yr ago
waive or modify any statutory or regulatory provision
This is where I've heard the main objection comes from: the balance of a student loan is not a statutory or regulatory provision. Since 'waive' means 'cross-out', if there isn't an actual provision in the text that can be crossed out to accomplish student loan forgiveness, it isn't authorized by the act.
laxam
1yr ago
He is without legitimate claim to being the native of any homeland.
I mean, the native homeland of American blacks is the American South. African Americans as an ethnicity literally came into existence there in the 18th century.
laxam
1yr ago
Three SCOTUS judges. Although they'll certainly rule mostly in ways favorable to the Cheney wing, things like Roe are also very much not what the Republican elite care about.
The three SCOTUS judges were much more an accomplishment of McConnell and the FedSoc than of Trump. It's just that the only thing the Trumpist wing of the party hates more than Democrats is Mitch McConnell, so he's conveniently left out of that part of the narrative.
laxam
1yr ago
You've convinced me to give watching SATC through with my wife. She loves the movies and has never seen the show, it was on when my sisters were of exactly the right age for it so I've watched a lot of it in the background, and we're light on TV to watch through right now.
laxam
1yr ago
Then the infrastructure-as-code tools started to emerge. Within about 5 years, an old school SysAdmin was pretty much out of any job that wasn't working on legacy systems in a non-tech-primary organization (think banks, other big-and-heavy old industrials etc.)
https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/us-systems-administrator-salary-SRCH_IL.0,2_IN1_KO3,24.htm
?
SysAdmins still do fine. I'd say a good chunk less than half of all businesses have any modern automation at all in their infrastructure and a tiny fraction have serious, heavy-duty IaC deployments. You're not going to be making dreamy six figure salaries with guaranteed growth throughout your life-long career, but that was something no SysAdmin ever really got outside of the majors. $60-65,000 a year is a really good salary in most of the country.
laxam
1yr ago
In PA, the Dem vote dropped from 52% to 47.5% (4.5 pts), yet the R vote rose only 1.6 pts (46.6 to 48.2).
Also, for illustration, Trump underperformed state and Federal House Republican candidates in PA by 10,000 or 100,000 votes, respectively. To the extent you can talk about the 'generic Republican' candidate, it actually did outperform Trump.
While Toomey did underperform Trump in raw numbers, it was only a by 20,000 votes and 100,000 fewer votes were cast in the Senate race. Toomey actually beat his opponent by a larger percentage than Trump beat Clinton.
Probably any of the decent choices in 2016 would have beaten Clinton in PA and, thus, the race.
laxam
1yr ago
Carlson will be remembered as one of the most significant voices of the conservative revival of the mid-2010s and the presidency of Donald Trump.
Revival? Conservative politics was at its peak in the mid-2010's after the Tea Party wave and it has been all downhill since then.
laxam
1yr ago
The Republicans never even held the Federal House in the 1980's. While Reagan himself was immensely popular, his downballot effects were muted, especially after 1984.
The Republicans in 2016 held more state houses and more governors mansions than they had held simultaneously since the 1920's. In 2014, the Republicans had their largest Federal House majority since the end of WWII. Electorally -- barring event driven setbacks like 2008 -- the Republicans had managed to build a juggernaut by 2016 that rolled state government after state government into their column. There was a point in the 2010's when the Republicans had Democratic state legislative control on the cusp of going single digits. Then, after groaning halt and reversal in 2016 and 2017, the trend reversed hard in 2018 and, since, they have lost 8 governorships and the Democrats have gained unified control of state legislatures that used to either be Republican or split, net.
If you consider that Tucker got O'Reilly's slot in 2017, it seems less that he was a voice of a conservative revival and more that was a harbinger of the old one's doom.
laxam
1yr ago
So why is it bad for them to become the upstanding ideal of a different culture?
Because they mostly don't.
Children need real, living role models that they interact with every day to absorb enough of a functional culture to smoothly take it up themselves. Right now, society is absolutely full of fake role models, cardboard cutouts of fictional cultures that attempt to lure children into their clutches to be used in some way, whether somewhat banally as brand dedicated consumers or more maliciously.
Children are impressionable. They lack good judgment and, especially, have no real concept of the long term until they are already quite mature, ie., until they have already been raised within one culture. There is a reason we don't just leave cigarettes or alcohol or sexual activity to the good judgment and curious nature of children: They will make bad, often harmful mistakes much more often than they will learn valuable life lessons and become the wiser for it.
The worst part? The children themselves are the only ones with the right incentives to raise themselves right. Because their judgment is impaired, we are left with the second best choice, those whose incentives are aligned with the child's the second most: The parents. Society has no skin in the game for any particular child and anonymous or large scale social institutions most of all. No parent is perfect and always has all their child's best interests in mind at all times, everywhere, but they're going to be significantly better than a teacher who only has that child for one class for one year, where they are but one of dozens of others. They're certainly better than any bureaucrat for whom the child is one of a faceless multitude.
In the past, face-to-face local society provided an additional set of adults whose caring and long term exposure to the child offered a non-exclusive alternative to the child's parents, but that culture is dead and the modern replacements are not up to the job.
laxam
1yr ago
I have a memory of a news article from somewhere in the area of five to ten years ago about a Swedish couple raising their children with no reference to gender or preference for gender appropriate toys/clothes/etc. I remember everyone laughing about how ridiculous the Swedes are on this kind of thing, with the implicit understanding that no one would be that insane here.
laxam
11mo ago
America has never been an ethnostate. If anything it is the literal anti-ethnostate. As far back as 1776, Thomas Paine pointed out that less than a third of Pennsylvanians were of English descent and so any claims of being an English nation were already moot.
While it is true that Pennsylvania and the Southern upcountry weren't ethnically homogeneous by any means, the colonial and early US absolutely had an ethnic nation: Yankee New England. It was a ridiculously homogeneous area -- culturally and ethnically -- for North American subsequent experience. Their culture was also very influential on American culture generally for a long time, too. So, America has historically had at least sub-national ethno-states in the past.
Now, however, they have greatly subsumed into 'general American' culture, fully assimilating into the broader gestalt of the republic. When was the last time you ever saw someone called a 'WASP'? Even New England itself is plurality Catholic these days so, while Yankee heritage is still probably very widespread there, there is a new ethnicity living in New England that is descended from the Yankees and a whole lot of newcomers.
This is a cost of getting too deeply into the social construction worldview. If you see something as literally not having value separate from its role in maintaining social hierarchy, it's definitionally impossible for you to ask how valuable those things are in the first place. The role in in maintaining the hierarchy is axiomatic to the value judgment.
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