Meh, fighting 19th century problems with 20th century means. Fighting over wages isn't even the right fight. This is one area where the Left is so behind the times as to be functionally useless.
It's easy to reform the past; it costs us nothing. Better, it provokes people we want to provoke so it looks like we're fighting the good fight. Like most of what I've come to realize of 'the discourse' these are performances designed to salve the consciences of the status quo.
I had a similar thought... keeping copyright/ownership to maintain control over *not* publishing seems to run contrary to copyright intent.
Isn't there a use aspect to all these laws? Why wouldn't these be something like abandoned trademarks? Not on Day 1 necessarily... but when (if ever) does the timer start running?
Unless the plan is to make the announcement, put them in storage, then release Mulberry street with an updated properly westernized financier from Hong Kong carrying a fork to make a killing on pent-up Milennial demand?
Burnishing his "lack of standing" and "moot" positions for the difficult cases ahead where he needs an outcome, but has not a reasoned path to get there.
As best I can tell, 'only' $195B is earmarked for States... which at most keeps obligations from lagging further; it can't possibly address the (as of 2018) $1.24T funding gap.
Pre-covid this was a looming national issue... post-covid it is still a looming national issue.
Spending on Operational losses (which is the Covid plan) is likely the right course in the short term... but failing to address (or addressing inadequately by things like min wage) the the fundamental economic distribution and taxation issues (of which public pensions are a symptom) will keep these as looming National issues.
We registered my wife since she's teaching... the interesting thing about the experience was that it was literal translation by techies of all the 'essential' and 'at risk' groups from whatever document they were given. A 'select all that apply list' that strated in 1a... like, Emergency Room Doctor, Surgeon, Nurse, over 80, nursing home resident, nursing home worker... As if there was a theoretical possibility of someone who was all of those things ... which would trigger the immediate dispatch of a helicopter vaccine tech to that hero; then each page got less selective such that you could start to parse, I wonder how camera and sound-boom operators made it into the category with day-care workers... but well below Teachers and Media, mind you. [No politics, just facts].
While we both have 'an ID number' other than telling us we have an ID number, there has not been a single update or email or anything since we 'registered' on Feb 17th. Not even an email to confirm that, yes, you are in sub-section 4 of 1b.3 of the third roll-out of the second wave of vaccine, congratulations.
The rest I'll save for the politics thread on the vaccine roll-out :-)
This is the bureaucratic obverse of Our Phases go to 11.
It's my birthday weekend and we're contemplating going to the same local foodie place where we went for our anniversary 6-months ago... they have cabanas and various other precautions... and it made us realize, since my last birthday we've been out exactly once, 6-months ago on our Anniversary... at this place that has...
History is: nonsense people, then Boomers, then people who don’t understand their parents. I’ve been informed of this by Boomers.
Well, obviously. I learned it as distant parents who didn't understand their Children, Boomers, then distant children who didn't understand their Parents.
And somewhere we grew GenX in a vat and let them fill in some generational cracks.
Heh, live by the generational short-hand die by the generational short-hand.
I take your point of course... boomers were kids once too... but contrary to even the most boomery of boomery takes, they are part of continuum where their parents are part of the formation of Boomers and they are not simply sui generis. So the Seuss books are the books of their generation, approved by their parents, and among the ones they "locked on to" and brought forward. And that's my main point... Seuss is the love, peace, and harmony of the Boomer generation... it's the Manifesto that ends in the Modern Sentiments by which they are denounced. There's something Oedipal in taking on Seuss. It's not really about racisim.
And, ultimately the goal isn't to let kids read them and decide for themselves, it's to manage the cannon of what's acceptable for Parents to give their children to read... Which is what I mean by Children's books are written for adults.
Children's books are obviously not written for children... they are written for adults who select for children. Dr. Seuss was written for Boomers - the message, the aesthetic, everything - it's Boomers all the way down. As GenX I can say I had them foisted upon me ad nausem... but to me they represented the profound disorder of the Boomer ethos more than anything else. Dr. Seuss was 'whimsical' disorder fueled by psychedelics - and therefore a cautionary tale of things to avoid... like Parents who abandoned you to a Cat. Don't be those parents. Don't read Dr. Seuss because he's the disordered soul of the Boomer Generation.
That's GenX.
Millennials are at the opposite end of the disordered soul funnel... their notions of order come pre-deconstructed, so they reconstruct it around the new moralities... like Race/Sex/Gender. The impossible irony is that Dr. Seuss is the Boomer expression of the new moralities of Race/Sex/Gender. The uprising of Milennials against the Ur source of Milennial understandings of the new Morality is just Zeus killing Kronos. In the end, just another Titan sitting on the throne.
Turns out Emmy was an actual gal. And I'm firmly against awarding people as prizes.
I'm mildly curious in the "there's no such thing as a leak" kind of way why DEC-13-2020 marks the public claim against him for events that happened 2015-18 passim.
We were just talking about this over dinner... the next phase might be a deep-fake video emailed to G'ma... a gun pointed to the head with a phone in the kid's hand holding a message: DO NOT CALL ME.
Besides the confidence tricks plus personal data, it's about exploiting a generational technology understanding gap.
About a month ago my recently graduated daughter (23) got a call from folks telling her that they were on their way over to arrest her for money laundering -- not her money laundering, but money laundering that other bad guys had done in her name, so a sort of ID theft that she would be responsible for -- they had just enough personal info to make it sound almost plausible.
By pure coincidence we'd had a discussion on her last visit about talking to law enforcement and getting arrested; I'd seen a youtube thing with a public defender and a cop about how simply saying anything without a lawyer present is a terrible idea. (Said here at OT as well) Interestingly one of the things the Cop said was an effective technique was to let the target have the idea that they could negotiate their way out of an arrest... said they would often give up all sorts of info just in that hope. The cop also reiterated that if there's an arrest warrant... they are going to arrest you. So shut up and get arrested.
Coincidental and fortuitous that I'd had that conversation with her and used that exact phrase: If you're going to get arrested, it will ruin your day, but just shut up, get arrested and call your lawyer. So when the scammers called, she told them she wouldn't talk without a lawyer and if they were going to arrest her, then come on over.
She called me after hanging-up absolutely certain she was about to be arrested and wanted to know the number of the lawyer she should have ready. I told her she handled it perfectly, and good news... she wasn't going to be arrested. It took her a couple hours at work before she stopped looking over her shoulder for flashing lights.
It got me thinking that future scammers will probably trick me by combining a technology new technology I don't fully understand plus the old fashioned con-artist tricks. I'm mentally steeling myself to resist the IRS Holograms that my BostonRobotics Dog will beam to me evoking fading memories of R2D2 and the need to heed their call.
p.p.s. I also really liked the comments on Edward Ryder... I hadn't really considered the effects of depression and grief on his person.
If we're archetyping folks, I always saw Ryder the elder as the last Victorian... compared to Marchmain (who ought to be a near peer in age) as among the first "modern men" an Edwardian broken by WWI.
I thoroughly enjoyed the autobiographical contemplation of the Brideshead aesthetic... but then I would, wouldn't I?
A couple thoughts.
First, a pity you encountered such a Catholic in Chicago; by rule we're a credulous lot; but we go through periods where miracles seem an embracing burden we must explain away to make ourselves presentable. As if such a thing were possible with our outrageous Marian claims, the perambulations of decapitated saints, and, well, the daily claims of the Mass. Chicago in the 70's-90's was such a place.
I've always had a soft-spot for Lutheran's who at least thought to maintain two of the seven sacraments; I can give one cheer for Luther famously pounding the table with "HOC EST... HOC EST...Hoc est Corpus meum" against the nominalists looking to strip away even that sacrament. The apocryphal(?) origin of Hocus Pocus, so I'm told.
On the matter of Brideshead and aesthetics, I certainly take your point that a besetting sin of a certain sort of traditionalism might be nostalgia; but the line between nostalgia and inheritance can be blurry. Sometimes I think people on the outside (of anything) wrongly attribute nostalgia for a dead thing to people building anew on a living tradition... it's a natural error, I should think.
For example the Chapel you cite in Brideshead isn't Baroque... Charles isn't seduced into the Baroque... it is a "monument of art nouveau." The aesthetic of suffering in Brideshead *is* Arts and Crafts.
"The whole interior had been gutted, elaborately refurnished and redecorated in the arts-and-crafts style of the last decade of the nineteenth century. Angels in printed cotton smocks, rambler-roses, flower-spangled meadows, frisking lambs, texts in Celtic script, saints in armour, covered the walls in an intricate patter of clear, bright colours. There was a triptych of pale oak, carved so as to give it the peculiar property of seeming to have been moulded in Plasticine. The sanctuary lamp and all the metal furniture were of bronze, hand-beaten to the patina of a pock-marked skin; the altar steps had a carpet of grass-green, strewn with white and gold daisies."
The Flytes, you see, are Moderns. They are we. Charles paints the old pile at Brideshead in his modern style. If there's a gothic sensibility it belongs to Anthony... who is bemused by Charles' "pictures" knowing them to be 'trendy'.
The flight of the Flytes is to modernity; and the entire 'tragedy' plays out before "a small red flame--a beaten-copper lamp of deplorable design" an artifact of the English Arts and Crafts artistic movement of the late 19th century.
I don't point this out specifically to gainsay your personal experience or underlying point... possibly the thoroughly modern (long suffering and insufferable) satirical author Waugh was more aligned with what you're suggesting?
Growing up I used to work in the field for the family business ... we were painting contractors of the industrial/professional sort: office buildings, commercial properties, warehouses, etc. (i.e. no houses) ... one thing that really impressed me was the genius (it can't really be described as anything else) of our long-time German foreman.
Everything back then had an ethnic component... most of the union guys were Poles, Germans, Greeks, Irish and in the later years, Hispanic... we had a run where a couple Romanian brothers joined from the local... and for a few years had an all Romanian team... and then there was Jimmy - he was an American from Tennessee, but he was the unusual one. I have more Jimmy stories than anyone else because he was fearless and painted the parts no-one thought was possible. One time, painting some facia on the peak of a sloped roof he slipped, slid down the roof - we all thought he was gonna die - and caught himself jamming his boots into the gutter; the slightest panic would have sent him over the edge, but fearless Jimmy figured he'd stick the gutter. Anyhow, back to the German Foreman.
Conrad, that was his name naturally, had an eye for estimating exactly how long it would take for any given job based on the talent on hand, like a coach selecting line match-ups in hockey. He managed to keep the family business solvent with little tricks like this: he'd know that the work he needed accomplished to keep the job on schedule would take about 9-10 hrs with the crew on site - going at the usual rate - BUT, if everyone focused, cut-out the ordinary time-wasters and each watched over the other we could get it done in about 7 hrs... or worst case 8... but 8 is what he needed. So he'd make the devil's bargain that we could all go home when this section/task was finished ... and darned if it didn't always work. Sometimes we won by finishing in 6.5 hrs ... sometimes he won with us needing 7.5 hrs... but always we got 'some' time back for free. If he tried to run the field that way everyday it would have led to mutiny, but used judiciously for the greater good of the project and with a fair bet for all involved? It made him a virtuoso leader of men.
On “Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act of 2021: Read It For Yourself”
Meh, fighting 19th century problems with 20th century means. Fighting over wages isn't even the right fight. This is one area where the Left is so behind the times as to be functionally useless.
On “They are Newton’s Laws of Motion”
It's easy to reform the past; it costs us nothing. Better, it provokes people we want to provoke so it looks like we're fighting the good fight. Like most of what I've come to realize of 'the discourse' these are performances designed to salve the consciences of the status quo.
"
What's all this about biscuits then?
On “Wednesday Writs: Chief Justice Roberts All By Himself”
[L6] Cracks me up. Of course he does.
On “What is the Goal of Vaccine Discourse?”
TBF Kazzy wasn't using the word, he was clinically trying to understand the word and the context. So, he won't be fired... just asked to resign.
And for the record, we don't like the word Hypertension, we prefer Sanguinely Restrained.
On “From Global News.ca: Six Dr. Seuss books will no longer be published due to racist content”
I had a similar thought... keeping copyright/ownership to maintain control over *not* publishing seems to run contrary to copyright intent.
Isn't there a use aspect to all these laws? Why wouldn't these be something like abandoned trademarks? Not on Day 1 necessarily... but when (if ever) does the timer start running?
Unless the plan is to make the announcement, put them in storage, then release Mulberry street with an updated properly westernized financier from Hong Kong carrying a fork to make a killing on pent-up Milennial demand?
On “Gwinnett College Supreme Court Ruling: Read It For Yourself”
Burnishing his "lack of standing" and "moot" positions for the difficult cases ahead where he needs an outcome, but has not a reasoned path to get there.
On “Senate Passes Amended Covid Relief Package, Back to the House”
Public Pension issues long pre-date Covid. In this sense, Covid simply accelerates the gap in funding - which was already widening.
As best I can tell, 'only' $195B is earmarked for States... which at most keeps obligations from lagging further; it can't possibly address the (as of 2018) $1.24T funding gap.
Pre-covid this was a looming national issue... post-covid it is still a looming national issue.
Spending on Operational losses (which is the Covid plan) is likely the right course in the short term... but failing to address (or addressing inadequately by things like min wage) the the fundamental economic distribution and taxation issues (of which public pensions are a symptom) will keep these as looming National issues.
On “Weekend Plans Post: The Home Stretch?”
We registered my wife since she's teaching... the interesting thing about the experience was that it was literal translation by techies of all the 'essential' and 'at risk' groups from whatever document they were given. A 'select all that apply list' that strated in 1a... like, Emergency Room Doctor, Surgeon, Nurse, over 80, nursing home resident, nursing home worker... As if there was a theoretical possibility of someone who was all of those things ... which would trigger the immediate dispatch of a helicopter vaccine tech to that hero; then each page got less selective such that you could start to parse, I wonder how camera and sound-boom operators made it into the category with day-care workers... but well below Teachers and Media, mind you. [No politics, just facts].
While we both have 'an ID number' other than telling us we have an ID number, there has not been a single update or email or anything since we 'registered' on Feb 17th. Not even an email to confirm that, yes, you are in sub-section 4 of 1b.3 of the third roll-out of the second wave of vaccine, congratulations.
The rest I'll save for the politics thread on the vaccine roll-out :-)
"
Phases 1A, Phase 1B.1, Phase 1B.2, Phase 1B.3, Phase 1B.4, and Phase 2.
This is the bureaucratic obverse of Our Phases go to 11.
It's my birthday weekend and we're contemplating going to the same local foodie place where we went for our anniversary 6-months ago... they have cabanas and various other precautions... and it made us realize, since my last birthday we've been out exactly once, 6-months ago on our Anniversary... at this place that has...
On “From Global News.ca: Six Dr. Seuss books will no longer be published due to racist content”
History is: nonsense people, then Boomers, then people who don’t understand their parents. I’ve been informed of this by Boomers.
Well, obviously. I learned it as distant parents who didn't understand their Children, Boomers, then distant children who didn't understand their Parents.
And somewhere we grew GenX in a vat and let them fill in some generational cracks.
"
Heh, live by the generational short-hand die by the generational short-hand.
I take your point of course... boomers were kids once too... but contrary to even the most boomery of boomery takes, they are part of continuum where their parents are part of the formation of Boomers and they are not simply sui generis. So the Seuss books are the books of their generation, approved by their parents, and among the ones they "locked on to" and brought forward. And that's my main point... Seuss is the love, peace, and harmony of the Boomer generation... it's the Manifesto that ends in the Modern Sentiments by which they are denounced. There's something Oedipal in taking on Seuss. It's not really about racisim.
And, ultimately the goal isn't to let kids read them and decide for themselves, it's to manage the cannon of what's acceptable for Parents to give their children to read... Which is what I mean by Children's books are written for adults.
"
Plausible alternate timeline... Titans all the way down.
"
Children's books are obviously not written for children... they are written for adults who select for children. Dr. Seuss was written for Boomers - the message, the aesthetic, everything - it's Boomers all the way down. As GenX I can say I had them foisted upon me ad nausem... but to me they represented the profound disorder of the Boomer ethos more than anything else. Dr. Seuss was 'whimsical' disorder fueled by psychedelics - and therefore a cautionary tale of things to avoid... like Parents who abandoned you to a Cat. Don't be those parents. Don't read Dr. Seuss because he's the disordered soul of the Boomer Generation.
That's GenX.
Millennials are at the opposite end of the disordered soul funnel... their notions of order come pre-deconstructed, so they reconstruct it around the new moralities... like Race/Sex/Gender. The impossible irony is that Dr. Seuss is the Boomer expression of the new moralities of Race/Sex/Gender. The uprising of Milennials against the Ur source of Milennial understandings of the new Morality is just Zeus killing Kronos. In the end, just another Titan sitting on the throne.
On “More Andrew Cuomo Allegations Bring New Questions”
Turns out Emmy was an actual gal. And I'm firmly against awarding people as prizes.
I'm mildly curious in the "there's no such thing as a leak" kind of way why DEC-13-2020 marks the public claim against him for events that happened 2015-18 passim.
I suppose everyone knew.
On “Original Ordinary Gentleman Erik Kain starts Substack, as does Freddie deBoer”
I think of corporate meetings as pod-casts...
Reading Substack? Corporate podcast!
On “The Real ScamDemic”
We were just talking about this over dinner... the next phase might be a deep-fake video emailed to G'ma... a gun pointed to the head with a phone in the kid's hand holding a message: DO NOT CALL ME.
Besides the confidence tricks plus personal data, it's about exploiting a generational technology understanding gap.
On “Aesthetics Revisited: A Lutheran, Catholic School, and Brideshead”
Fabian Socialists.
On “Original Ordinary Gentleman Erik Kain starts Substack, as does Freddie deBoer”
Holding out for "The Horseshoe Bundle"
On “The Real ScamDemic”
Sorry your MIL had to suffer that.
About a month ago my recently graduated daughter (23) got a call from folks telling her that they were on their way over to arrest her for money laundering -- not her money laundering, but money laundering that other bad guys had done in her name, so a sort of ID theft that she would be responsible for -- they had just enough personal info to make it sound almost plausible.
By pure coincidence we'd had a discussion on her last visit about talking to law enforcement and getting arrested; I'd seen a youtube thing with a public defender and a cop about how simply saying anything without a lawyer present is a terrible idea. (Said here at OT as well) Interestingly one of the things the Cop said was an effective technique was to let the target have the idea that they could negotiate their way out of an arrest... said they would often give up all sorts of info just in that hope. The cop also reiterated that if there's an arrest warrant... they are going to arrest you. So shut up and get arrested.
Coincidental and fortuitous that I'd had that conversation with her and used that exact phrase: If you're going to get arrested, it will ruin your day, but just shut up, get arrested and call your lawyer. So when the scammers called, she told them she wouldn't talk without a lawyer and if they were going to arrest her, then come on over.
She called me after hanging-up absolutely certain she was about to be arrested and wanted to know the number of the lawyer she should have ready. I told her she handled it perfectly, and good news... she wasn't going to be arrested. It took her a couple hours at work before she stopped looking over her shoulder for flashing lights.
It got me thinking that future scammers will probably trick me by combining a technology new technology I don't fully understand plus the old fashioned con-artist tricks. I'm mentally steeling myself to resist the IRS Holograms that my BostonRobotics Dog will beam to me evoking fading memories of R2D2 and the need to heed their call.
On “Aesthetics Revisited: A Lutheran, Catholic School, and Brideshead”
p.p.s. I also really liked the comments on Edward Ryder... I hadn't really considered the effects of depression and grief on his person.
If we're archetyping folks, I always saw Ryder the elder as the last Victorian... compared to Marchmain (who ought to be a near peer in age) as among the first "modern men" an Edwardian broken by WWI.
"
p.s. I feel obliged to point out that I may be contributing to the misspelling of Marchmain into Marchmaine.
In my defense, I added the 'e' for purely aesthetic reasons; and to distinguish my use from the use of those justly entitled to it.
"
I thoroughly enjoyed the autobiographical contemplation of the Brideshead aesthetic... but then I would, wouldn't I?
A couple thoughts.
First, a pity you encountered such a Catholic in Chicago; by rule we're a credulous lot; but we go through periods where miracles seem an embracing burden we must explain away to make ourselves presentable. As if such a thing were possible with our outrageous Marian claims, the perambulations of decapitated saints, and, well, the daily claims of the Mass. Chicago in the 70's-90's was such a place.
I've always had a soft-spot for Lutheran's who at least thought to maintain two of the seven sacraments; I can give one cheer for Luther famously pounding the table with "HOC EST... HOC EST...Hoc est Corpus meum" against the nominalists looking to strip away even that sacrament. The apocryphal(?) origin of Hocus Pocus, so I'm told.
On the matter of Brideshead and aesthetics, I certainly take your point that a besetting sin of a certain sort of traditionalism might be nostalgia; but the line between nostalgia and inheritance can be blurry. Sometimes I think people on the outside (of anything) wrongly attribute nostalgia for a dead thing to people building anew on a living tradition... it's a natural error, I should think.
For example the Chapel you cite in Brideshead isn't Baroque... Charles isn't seduced into the Baroque... it is a "monument of art nouveau." The aesthetic of suffering in Brideshead *is* Arts and Crafts.
"The whole interior had been gutted, elaborately refurnished and redecorated in the arts-and-crafts style of the last decade of the nineteenth century. Angels in printed cotton smocks, rambler-roses, flower-spangled meadows, frisking lambs, texts in Celtic script, saints in armour, covered the walls in an intricate patter of clear, bright colours. There was a triptych of pale oak, carved so as to give it the peculiar property of seeming to have been moulded in Plasticine. The sanctuary lamp and all the metal furniture were of bronze, hand-beaten to the patina of a pock-marked skin; the altar steps had a carpet of grass-green, strewn with white and gold daisies."
Oh dear. Or, as Charles said, "Golly"
Here's a picture of the possible inspiration for the Chapel.
The Flytes, you see, are Moderns. They are we. Charles paints the old pile at Brideshead in his modern style. If there's a gothic sensibility it belongs to Anthony... who is bemused by Charles' "pictures" knowing them to be 'trendy'.
The flight of the Flytes is to modernity; and the entire 'tragedy' plays out before "a small red flame--a beaten-copper lamp of deplorable design" an artifact of the English Arts and Crafts artistic movement of the late 19th century.
I don't point this out specifically to gainsay your personal experience or underlying point... possibly the thoroughly modern (long suffering and insufferable) satirical author Waugh was more aligned with what you're suggesting?
On “Once You Finish, You Can Take The Rest of The Day Off”
Growing up I used to work in the field for the family business ... we were painting contractors of the industrial/professional sort: office buildings, commercial properties, warehouses, etc. (i.e. no houses) ... one thing that really impressed me was the genius (it can't really be described as anything else) of our long-time German foreman.
Everything back then had an ethnic component... most of the union guys were Poles, Germans, Greeks, Irish and in the later years, Hispanic... we had a run where a couple Romanian brothers joined from the local... and for a few years had an all Romanian team... and then there was Jimmy - he was an American from Tennessee, but he was the unusual one. I have more Jimmy stories than anyone else because he was fearless and painted the parts no-one thought was possible. One time, painting some facia on the peak of a sloped roof he slipped, slid down the roof - we all thought he was gonna die - and caught himself jamming his boots into the gutter; the slightest panic would have sent him over the edge, but fearless Jimmy figured he'd stick the gutter. Anyhow, back to the German Foreman.
Conrad, that was his name naturally, had an eye for estimating exactly how long it would take for any given job based on the talent on hand, like a coach selecting line match-ups in hockey. He managed to keep the family business solvent with little tricks like this: he'd know that the work he needed accomplished to keep the job on schedule would take about 9-10 hrs with the crew on site - going at the usual rate - BUT, if everyone focused, cut-out the ordinary time-wasters and each watched over the other we could get it done in about 7 hrs... or worst case 8... but 8 is what he needed. So he'd make the devil's bargain that we could all go home when this section/task was finished ... and darned if it didn't always work. Sometimes we won by finishing in 6.5 hrs ... sometimes he won with us needing 7.5 hrs... but always we got 'some' time back for free. If he tried to run the field that way everyday it would have led to mutiny, but used judiciously for the greater good of the project and with a fair bet for all involved? It made him a virtuoso leader of men.
On “Ordinary World: Missing President’s Day Edition”
Well put. The Solidarity Trap.